The key word here is "disgraceful"

In the wake of the attacks on the U.S. missions in Libya and Egypt and the Obama administration response, Mitt Romney released this statement:

"I'm outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It's disgraceful that the Obama Administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks."

Leave aside the merits of the measured administration statement or the in-the-heat  responses from the U.S. embassy in Cairo, which were not "administration" response. You do not have to be expert in anything to assess the merit of Romney's reaction -- or his fitness for the presidency. You need only be a social mammal of the human species.

Obama freezes out extremists and hysterics

In the last year, it seems Obama has learned when not to negotiate, and how to back adversaries into a corner when he has public (or world) opinion on his side. Two apparent instances struck my eye within 30 seconds a few minutes ago.

First, this:

House Republicans have dropped their demands to cut spending on domestic programs, for the time being, and instead unveiled bipartisan legislation to keep the government funded through the end of the year at previously-agreed-upon levels.

'Ware Nemesis, Obama

Courtesy of the Dish, a tweet from Jeffrey Goldberg in immediate reaction to Joe Biden's Convention paeaen to Barack Obama, Osama-killer:

@JeffreyGoldberg I've been told I'm a bloodthirsty warmongering neoconservative, but for whatever reason, I just don't like all this bragging about killing. 6:51 PM - 6 Sep 12

For the record, I was on the same page. Below, excerpts from that section of Biden's speech, and my immediate reactions on Twitter.

Mitt's standing prescription for America: Go (hardware) shopping

As Romney, in his nomination acceptance speech, hit Obama first for his Medicare cuts and then for the defense cuts triggered by the Budget Control Act, I tweeted that he was attacking Obama for cutting $1.2 trillion in spending - pretty funny for someone supporting a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution.

Paul Krugman made the same point last week -- "OK, so deficit spending hurts the economy — unless it’s spending on the military (or on the medical-industrial complex), in which case cutting spending destroys jobs." Today, he elaborates:

We may be on the brink of a democratic miracle

Jonathan Chait recently framed a conundrum facing Democrats who are convinced that the Romney campaign is playing the race card: you don't have to be racist to subscribe to conservative positions on spending for the poor, but such positions are attractive to those who envision the "undeserving poor" primarily as minorities. His conclusion: while Romney attack ads alleging that Obama is gutting the work requirements for welfare might not be racist if the charge had any basis in truth, the fact that it was concocted out of thin air points conclusively to a race-based appeal. 

Chait is wary of Democrats overplaying the race card, and so asserts at the end that "the best counterattack against Romney’s welfare gambit is simply to point out that Romney is shamelessly lying." But he's threading a needle here, much like people who acknowledge that while a given hurricane can't be chalked up to global warming, an overall increase in hurricane intensity probably can. His personal conviction is delivered in the conditional:

Obama maintains hope, but not in comity

Much of Obama's speech was the same as always: I ran because the American Dream, the "basic bargain," is slipping away; we need to renew our commitment to shared prosperity, opportunity for all; to build sustainable broad-based prosperity by investing in green energy, education, infrastructure; to secure our budgetary future by controlling healthcare costs without denying care. And of course, the other side is about trickle-down, the failed policies of the Bush years, the toxic post-Reagan conviction that government is the problem.

What struck me as different was a subtle bid to tie his opponents to the wholesale corruption of our politics threatened by the unleashing of the Super PACs and the 501(c)(4)s post-Citizens United and Speechnow.org. Democrats have always suggested that Republican policies serve the wealthy.  Obama cast Romney and co. as pretty much owned and bound.

It began at the beginning, with a suggestion of corrupted process that's encompassed him too:

When Clinton edits Clinton

Wow. The Atlantic has a transcript of Bill Clinton's nominating speech that overlays the speech he actually gave atop the prepared remarks. At first, the differences are relatively restrained elaborations and intensifiers. When he gets into the heart of the attack on Republican positions -- themselves an attack on his entire legacy -- the green-shaded ad-libs swamp the prepared text.

When I first eyeballed those later sections, I thought, "My God, he ad-libbed all that detailed policy contrast -- the analysis of their Medicare and Medicaid proposals, the debunking of their welfare attacks." That isn't true, though.  The factual nuggets are almost all in the prepared texts. What's chiefly added is incredulity, outrage, judgments, summations, and personal interjections.

As I noted in my immediate response to the speech, the dominant chord to my ear was listen to me -- repeated as a phrase at least four times, and as a subtext in almost every sentence; essentially, all his additions said listen to me.  Below, I've classified six types of ad-lib that served this mission. In quoted passages, all italics denote Clinton's oral additions. Boldface is my emphasis.

In GOP heaven, St. Ronnie is lonely

Most GOP presidents in this century have helped advance American prosperity and security in enduring ways. Teddy Roosevelt busted the trusts. Eisenhower kept the peace while keeping the military-industrial complex under control and building our modern transportation infrastructure.  Nixon opened China to the US, helping to sap Soviet strength and provide an engine for global growth that's still chugging. Reagan helped feather down the Soviet Union peacefully, as did Bush Sr., while turning back Saddam's aggression and helping to lay the foundation for the balanced budgets of the 1990s.

Lots of twitterers, including James Fallows and Ezra Klein, have noted that while Bill Clinton mentioned George W. Bush three times in his speech last night, mostly positively, none of the GOP speakers in Tampa mentioned him by name. That's not surprising. Bush was a disastrous president on all fronts -- busting the budget, getting tens of thousands of US soldiers and Iraqi and Afghan civilians killed and maimed in two botched wars, permanently compromising U.S. civil liberties, massively eroding the nation's soft power. Not even Republicans can defend that record of faillure.

Defending Medicaid is personal for Clinton

Ezra Klein reminds us that the core of Bill Clinton's extended policy rebuke to the GOP last night was an attack on their proposed cuts to Medicaid, not their Medicare plans. Medicaid is the locus, Klein says, of

arguably the most important and concrete policy difference between the two campaigns. The Medicare changes get more attention on both sides, but Romney and Ryan don’t intend to touch Medicare for 10 years, they swear they’ll honor the Medicare guarantee, and at least in Ryan’s most recent budget, he envisions the exact same long-term spending path as Obama does. By contrast, Romney and Ryan intend to begin cutting Medicaid immediately, and independent analyses suggest that their cuts could throw as many as 30 million people off the program. If you want to see the difference between Obama and Romney’s vision for American policy, it’s probably the single starkest example.

Democrats generally give talk of Medicaid short shrift because it's perceived as a program for the poor, and it's a sad fact of American political life that being perceived as channeling government resources to the poor is about as toxic as being perceived as showering largess on the rich.  Clinton took care of that by emphasizing Medicaid's middle-class constituencies (as well as children, also politically tonic):

Bill Clinton gets personal

Well, it took Bill Clinton a long time to get to the heart of his speech. But what a mighty heart it proved to be. What a giant enterprise. He set himself singlehandedly to counter a billion dollars in attack ads, to break through the core Republican lies and obfuscations.  The big ones, the ones about high-stakes policy: Obama is gutting Medicare. Obama is gutting welfare reform.   Huge cuts to Medicaid won't devastate the poor, the nursing home population, the disabled.  Obama is exploding the debt.  Romney will cut taxes by $5 trillion and reduce the debt.

Listen to me, he said repeatedly in the epic debunk session. He said it secure in the authority conferred by eight years of successful budget combat. Unlike other speakers (who else could take/command the time?) he drilled down in (sometimes fudged) detail. Republicans quadrupled the debt in the 12 years before I took office and doubled it in the eight years after I left office. Listen to me. Obama's state waivers for welfare work requirements are to enable initiatives to increase job placements, not diminish them. This is personal for me -- to claim the opposite is just not true. Obamacare's Medicare cuts are to insurer and provider reimbursements, not coverage for seniors.  I want you to listen -- by erasing the ACA's Medicare cuts, the Republicans will bid fair to end Medicare by 2016.

MIchelle brings Obama's story home

In his bid to move the political center back to the left in the wake of the Reagan revolution, Obama has always relied on an idealized abstract of American history, casting it as a story of ever-expanding commitment to shared prosperity -- prosperity shared ever more widely.  It's an oral slideshow, a series of historical tableaus delivered with incantatory parallel phrasing and refrain. In his speech on election night 2008, for example, he invoked a 106 year-old African American voter as a witness to the panorama:

She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "We Shall Overcome." Yes we can.

A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.

Toward the end of her speech tonight, Michelle Obama deployed the same kind of narrative, with the same political message:

One gift of age

Some time in my teens, I set myself against fashion, both as an industry and a concept. The notion that after being pleased by fat ties I could be induced to get enthusiastic about thin ones seemed absurd on its face. What's more, I've always been put off by the sullen mouths and vacant stares that models put on.

Those prejudices have persisted, but live and learn. While I was walking to my office this morning, a few thoughts crystallized -- triggered, I think, by an oddly-flapping frilly blouse passing by. First, kind of obviously: fashion shaped my initial prejudices: there is no Archimedean fashion-free point at which our tastes are forged.  There were lots of things that as a pre-teen I unquestionably considered dowdy, ugly, laughable that were no such things -- and of course others, such as long hair for males and bell-bottoms, that I learned to embrace while coming to see their opposites as square.

The Wall Street Journal editorialists rush in where Romney fears to tread

The true believers in supply-side economics on the Wall Street Journal editorial board long for a policy debate that Romney is determined to avoid:

the one thing [Romney's speech] didn't do constitutes a major political gamble. Neither he nor the entire GOP convention made a case for his economic policy agenda. He and Paul Ryan promised to help the middle class, but they never explained other than in passing how they would do it.

In his acceptance speech, Mr. Romney tossed out his five policy ideas almost as an afterthought. Energy got one sentence, education scored big with two. Neil Armstrong received almost as much speech time as what Mr. Romney would do specifically to spur faster growth and raise middle-class incomes.

Romney launches an apology tour

Romney first charged that Obama kicked off his presidency with an apology tour on June 1, 2009, and he has never stopped repeating that lie. What he meant was that Obama, in his addresses to various allies and sometime adversaries, often acknowledged some fault in past American conduct as prelude to acknowledging fault on the other side and defending overall American conduct, interests and values (see Politifact link below).  For example, in his address to the Arab world in Cairo on June 4, 2009 Obama cited legitimate causes for resentment of the U.S. and the west in Islamic countries:

More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.

Obama's message is jelling

We often hear that Romney has a challenger's advantage in a down economy. He can stick to a simple message: the economy is broken and Obama can't fix it -- I can.  And the Romney campaign has indicated that he regards offering detail as a disadvantage and distraction. Don't say what you'd cut; don't say what tax loopholes you'd close or what "simple, effective" regulation would look like; just offer yourself as a problem solver who "knows how jobs come and how they go."

Such a strategy could work if the economic news is bad enough. But there's a flip side. Obama, unlike Romney, has a record to run on -- a record of engagement with national problems that he doesn't have to run away from, as Romney does from his signature achievement as governor of Massachusetts. And now, Obama is running on that record. Here he is at UVA on Aug. 29, combating the notion that he failed to bring hope and change:

What Romney means when he says Obama "attacks success"

I've always thought that Romney's claim that Obama "denigrates" (blackens) small business owners and "denigrates" success was just one more calculated lie, of a class with "apologizes for America" or "threw Israel under the bus." Tonight, during Romney's nomination speech, I understood it's personal.  After a roll call of allegedly flourishing Bain investments came this:

These are American success stories. And yet the centerpiece of the President’s entire re-election campaign is attacking success. Is it any wonder that someone who attacks success has led the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression? In America, we celebrate success, we don't apologize for it.

We weren’t always successful at Bain. But no one ever is in the real world of business.

That’s what this President doesn’t seem to understand. Business and growing jobs is about taking risk, sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding, but always striving.

 Yes, the risk-taking small businessman Obama is guilty of blackening is Romney:

Obama corrects an expired talking point

As Republicans have doubled and trebled down on their post-truth campaign -- asserting falsely that Obama is gutting welfare reform, gutting Medicare benefits, denigrating business owners, etc. -- Obama has persisted in one misleading talking point: that Paul Ryan proposes a Medicare voucher system that, according to a CBO estimate, could raise seniors' healthcare costs by an average of over $6000 by 2030.

Some quick politicized thoughts at the checkout counter

At a Duane Reade checkout counter this morning, the young Asian woman behind the register asked me in halting English if I'd like to donate a dollar for cancer, gesturing with her eyes to a flier. I saw a familiar blaze of pink, then the Komen Foundation logo, and said "no." As my receipt ticked out, I thought of saying something about abortion and quickly nixed that, thinking that my co-transactor might very well be against abortion herself. What came out was, "that group defunded Planned Parenthood." The woman made a vague noise of probably-feigned comprehension, and that was that.

The keynote in Charlotte

The entire Republican convention was built around the lie that Obama asserted that business owners didn't build their own businesses.

Maybe the Democrats should double down and focus their convention on Obama's actual message in that maladroit riff.

Elizabeth Warren, who created the prototype "you didn't build it alone" speechlet, sent an email to supporters late last night that could be the keynote in Charlotte.  Subject line:  We built it together:

A plea to Warren Buffett and his ilk

There's nothing new here, but it kills me to read comments like this* from Obamaite billionaires:

Warren Buffett, America’s second-richest man, is one of Obama’s most high-profile supporters, but he has declared that he will not support Super PACs, saying, “I don’t want to see democracy go in that direction.”

In which Romney confuses two strongmen

Mitt Romney, the man who can't speak his own name without misrepresentation, now seems a bit confused about his chosen personal avatar:

Mitt Romney conceded President Barack Obama has succeeded in making him a less likable person, but he offered a defiant retort to those hoping he will open up this week: “I am who I am.”

Romney quoted that Popeye line three times in a 30-minute interview with POLITICO about his leadership style and philosophy... (Politico interview, 8/27).

That ain't Popeye, Mitt. It's the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 
 
What marketing genius has decided that Romney should implant the notion of his absolute, intrinsic authority in the body politic?  Will we soon see "I am who I am" ads?  Will Mitt promise to smite the Persians? Or bring prosperity to the land that accepts his authority and turneth not to false Democratic gods?
 
----
P.S. Popeye's variant  is "I yam what I yam and tha's all what I yam."  I will spare myself  any deep rumination on why this semiverbal superman was made to echo the master of the universe.

What the battle for the undecideds boils down to

Canvassing for Obama on the suburban fringe of Allentown, PA today, I had two unusually long conversations with undecideds. Both were mistrustful of Romney. Both, however, felt that Obama had ballooned the debt and showered too much largess on the poor -- food stamps, Medicaid, welfare.

Just now, starting out for a walk, I had a thought that stopped me in my tracks and sent me back to the computer. It's really simple. Many undecideds are caught between a feeling that Romney will feed their lunch to the rich -- and that Obama will feed it to the poor. They're not sure which is worse.

Update, 8/30: Ron Fournier at National Journal probes the evidence that Romney is playing the race card and that it's working among working class whites.

Previous:
Obama flashes his debate strategy
Fallows builds up Romney the debater
GOP Demonization Index soars again 

Obama flashes his debate strategy

Early this year, when the media aired a strategic debate as to whether the Obama team should paint Romney as a flip-flopper or as a conservative extremist, I suggested that the two charges are complementary -- he is a flip-flopper who's flipped his last flop:

There is opportunist Romney, who will say anything and adopt any position to get elected, and there is committed Romney, whose current policy positions have been set in concrete by his extremist party. He is not an Etch-A-Sketch, who can shake himself at will, but a Ouija Board, to be played by the GOP base. itself.  He has no core, but he's been cast in a mold that won't be broken until the GOP transforms itself.. That is, until hell freezes over.

That's pretty much the approach that Obama takes in a lengthy interview with the AP:

Fallows builds up Romney the debater

Positing that in an election this close, debates are likely to be decisive, James Fallows has done the Obama team the service of seeking to spark in them a salutary fear of Romney's debate prowess -- while also highlighting the structural hurdles that any sitting president faces in debate, especially when defending a poor economy.

Going to the tape from 1994, 2002, and 2011-12, Fallows builds a well-supported portrait of Romney's strengths and weaknesses: he is intensely prepared, on message, willing to attack, and generally comfortable on stage -- but also weak on policy substance and often vulnerable when caught by surprise and forced to go off-script, at which moments he can be either weasely or tonally off-key (I"ll bet you ten thousand dollars"...).

I think Fallows missed an aspect of Romney's debating, however, in which I (as an Obama partisan) place great trust: his untrustworthiness, which I think is apparent to viewers of all political persuasions.  I therefore disagree somewhat with the overall assessment of Romney's 2011-12 primary debate performance that Fallows presents as both his own and that of experts:

GOP Demonization Index soars again

Speaking at a New York fundraiser heavy with basketball stars on Wednesday, Obama ventured a snapshot of how far the GOP has moved to the right during his presidency:

This is probably the most consequential election of my lifetime, and in a lot of ways, it’s more consequential than the one in 2008.... back in 2008, we were running against a Republican candidate who believed in some basic things that I believe in -- believed that money shouldn’t dominate politics; believed in immigration reform, that we should give every young person who’s here a chance to become an American and contribute to this country; somebody who believed in climate change and believed in science.

The Waiver President

Hey, Republicans, I've got a new attack ad for you. Obama wants to gut educational standards. He said so, in a Las Vegas high school this week:

we’ve worked with Democrats and Republicans to fix No Child Left Behind.

So here in Nevada, a waiver has been granted because we want high standards but we don’t want teachers teaching to the test.  (Applause.)  We told governors and their states that if you’re willing to set higher, more honest standards for our kids, we’re going to give you more flexibility to meet them -- because what works best in New York might not work as well in Nevada, and vice versa.

Yah, fix it like his HHS secretary "fixed" welfare:

HHS is encouraging states to consider new, more effective ways to meet the goals of TANF, particularly helping parents successfully prepare for, find, and retain employment.  Therefore, HHS is issuing this information memorandum to notify states of the Secretary’s willingness to exercise her waiver authority under section 1115 of the Social Security Act to allow states to test alternative and innovative strategies, policies, and procedures that are designed to improve employment outcomes for needy families.

Paul Ryan's Medicare/Medicaid shell game

Harold Pollack points out that Paul Ryan's plan to restructure Medicare can't be considered in isolation from his plans to block-grant and gut spending on Medicaid, which seniors also rely on. I would add that Ryan's Medicare plan places new burdens on Medicaid.

Pollack explains how Medicare and Medicaid tag-team to cover seniors' healthcare needs today:

And you shall teach them to your children

Of the assault by a mob of Israeli teenagers in Jerusalem of several Arab teens, one of whom was beaten unconscious, one Israeli educator had this to say onIsraeli TV (as reported by the Times' Isabel Kershner):

Nimrod Aloni, the head of the Institute for Educational Thought at a Tel Aviv teachers college, said, “this cannot just be an expression of something he has heard at home.”

“This is directly tied to national fundamentalism that is the same as the rhetoric of neo-Nazis, Taliban and K.K.K.,” Mr. Aloni said. “This comes from an entire culture that has been escalating toward an open and blunt language based on us being the chosen people who are allowed to do whatever we like.”

That sweeping indictment recalls this March 2010 news from the sociological front:

From Palin to Ryan: a short history of demonizing IPAB

The battle between the parties over Medicare reform is a battle about how best to control costs.  Ryan and Romney rely exclusively on the Competition Fairy, -- the notion that if private insurers are induced to compete for Medicare policyholders, they will find ways to hold down costs.  If that fails, Ryan/Romney would most likely shift costs to seniors, with some ostensible protections for low-income beneficiaries.  The Obama administration, via the Affordable Care Act, seeks to use the government's market clout to change the rules of the payment game for providers, creating new incentives to reduce unnecessary care and new rewards and penalties focused on patient outcomes.

Can the Competition Fairy control healthcare costs?

As I've explored in the last three posts, the Medicare reform plan in Ryan's 2013 budget blurs Democratic attack lines because it looks very much like an Affordable Care Act for seniors (who, er, already have affordable care) while staking an at least ostensibly credible claim to preserve the Medicare guarantee.

The simplest counterargument was just voiced by a Florida voter to Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The counterargument is that Medicare is broken insofar as its cost to taxpayers has wildly outrun inflation and threatens to bankrupt the federal government.  The debate boils down to the best means to control costs while preserving the Medicare guarantee.

One big happy future family: Romneycare, Obamacare, Ryancare

On a second read of the Medicare reform plan outlined in Paul Ryan's 2013 budget, I was whipsawed by crosscurrents of irony.

I was going to lambaste the plan for its touching faith in the Competition Fairy, believed to shower her low cost/high quality beneficence on private insurance plans competing in a government-run and -financed marketplace. Then it occurred to me that the ode I was reading was virtually identical to the praises sung by Democrats for the prospective healthcare exchanges to be established by the Affordable Care Act. Indeed, the ode may have been composed in large part by a Democrat -- Ron Wyden, who coauthored a proposal with Ryan in December 2011 that Ryan's more recent plan resembles more than it departs from (notwithstanding important differences).  Here's part of the opening movement  of Ryan's Song -- emphasis (and repetition) in the original:

How Ryan duped Wyden, cont.

In my last post, I noted that

1. Senator Ron Wyden, by partnering with Paul Ryan last December in a proposal to convert Medicare to a premium-support program, seriously blurred Democrats' line of attack on Ryan/Romney Medicare reform proposals.
2. Wyden himself is having difficulty articulating the differences between that joint proposal and the Medicare reform plan included in Ryan's 2013 budget ("Ryan 2013").
3. Those differences are real, pertaining to the ways in which costs are controlled and the degree to which increased costs are passed on to seniors.

The key differences are that 1) Wyden-Ryan caps overall Medicare cost growth at GDP +1%, vs. GDP +.5% under Ryan 2013; 2) Wyden-Ryan does not abolish the ACA's Independent Payment Advisory Board, which is mandated to furnish Congress with proposals to keep costs under the cap, mainly by reducing payments to providers in various ways; and 3) Wyden-Ryan caps seniors' yearly  out-of-pocket costs while Ryan 2013 does not.

That comparison was based on a report by Kaiser Family Foundation.  I have since compared the texts of the Wyden-Ryan proposal and the Medicare reform section of Ryan's 2013 budget.  The latter comparison shows that while the differences inferred by Kaiser are real, the earlier report -- surely at Ryan's impetus -- fudges the key distinction, which is whether cost increases in excess of yearly targets can be passed on to seniors. In fact, while Wyden-Ryan emphasizes controls on payments to providers as a means to keep costs below its GDP +1% cap, it leaves the door open to increases in premiums for higher income seniors as a way to cover cost increases in excess of the cap.  Moreover, while Wyden-Ryan does not demonize the Independent Payment Advisory Board (as Ryan 2013 does at length), it does not mention IPAB at all -- and dances around IPAB's function when laying out the means of keeping costs under the cap. Wyden-Ryan also takes one Ryanesque slap at IPAB-in-absence, listing as one the authors' principles,  "Build a strengthened program around the needs of patients, not bureaucrats" (p.8 )

How Wyden muddled the Democrats' attack on RyanCare

Senator Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, is upset that people are casting the Medicare reform plan he put forward with Paul Ryan last December with the Medicare reform plan incorporated in Ryan's 2013 budget:

Flashing an anger and a willingness to counterpunch that’s rarely seen, Sen. Ron Wyden on Monday denounced suggestions that his ideas for reforming Medicare mirror those of Republican Mitt Romney and his new running mate Rep. Paul Ryan.

His protestation below strikes me, however, as a self-cancelling statement:

Misrepresentation of the ACA in the Supreme Court: a postscript

In April and May,  during the countdown to the Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, I did everything I could to highlight the material misrepresentation of the individual mandate in oral argument by Michael Carvin, counsel to the law's opponents.  To serve his argument that the ACA forces young and healthy individuals to buy insurance far in excess of their needs, Carvin  asserted, "Congress prohibits anyone over 30 from buying any kind of catastrophic health insurance" (p. 105). That was wrong on two counts: 1) the ACA allows not only adults under 30, but older adults who can show financial hardship, to buy bare-bones catastrophic coverage offered outside the ACA's insurance exchanges; and 2) the cheapest plans on offer in the exchanges provide coverage of an actuarial value low enough to be considered "catastrophic coverage" by most experts, including the Kaiser Family Foundation.


Via Don Taylor, I learned just last week that the plaintiffs' broader claim that the ACA forced people to buy insurance in excess of their needs was misleading on yet another count. The ACA contains a little-known option for states that want to provide affordable to those ineligible for Medicaid yet poor enough that the cheapest option within the insurance exchanges may prove a financial hardship. States may opt to establish a federally-funded Basic Health Plan (BHP). A March 2011 McKinsey report summarizes:

Two feelings about Slaughterhouse-Five

As I've mentioned before, as a teenager I was a serial reader of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.  When I read this little frame-up from a long essay on Vonnegut on the Dish, it was an absolute eureka:

William Deresiewicz argues Slaughterhouse-Five is "not about time travel and flying saucers, it’s about PTSD":

The novel is framed by Vonnegut’s account of trying to write about Dresden—of trying to remember Dresden. But a different kind of memory became the novel’s very fabric. "He tried to remember how old he was, couldn’t." This is Billy the optometrist. "He tried to remember what year it was. He couldn’t remember that, either." For the traumatized soldier, the war is always present, and the present is always the war.

He is unstuck in time in the sense that he is stuck in time. His life is not linear, but radiates instead from a single event like the spokes of a wheel. Everything feels like a dream: a very bad dream. The novel is framed the way it is because Vonnegut, too, was traveling in time. He needed to make himself a part of the story because he already was a part of the story.

Romney Rule #14: You are responsible for your side's Super PAC; I'm not for mine

No one could improve on Greg Sargent's exposure of the fathomless hypocrisy behind this demand by Mitt Romney that Obama repudiate the Priorities USA ad blaming Bain for an uninsured woman's death from cancer:

“You know, in the past, when people pointed out that something was inaccurate, why, campaigns pulled the ad,” Romney said on the radio. “They were embarrassed. Today, they just blast ahead. You know, the various fact checkers look at some of these charges in the Obama ads and they say that they’re wrong, and inaccurate, and yet he just keeps on running them.”

As Sargent points out, "fact checkers have called out his ads as wrong, inaccurate, misleading or false again and again and again and again and again and again and again. If Romney pulled any of those ads, I’m not aware of it."

I would just add a supplement: Romney has been very specific about the extent of a candidate's responsibility for Super PAC ads that support his candidacy.

On January 16 of this year, Fox's Juan Williams, posing questions in a GOP primary debate, invited Santorum to follow up on a prior attack on Mitt's mendacity:

Hey, I caught a pattern in Oct. 2008

Via Dave Weigel, I came across this political science data relayed by Richard Johnston and Emily Thorson regarding Sarah Palin's apparent effect on John McCain's campaign:

John McCain’s August 29 announcement of Palin as his running mate surprised the Republican establishment, the media, and especially voters. She made a strong first impression: she enjoyed high approval ratings after her acceptance speech, and the percentage of voters saying that they intended to vote Republican skyrocketed. But within days of the speech, her ratings began a precipitous slide from which she—and the McCain campaign—never recovered. Throughout the rest of the campaign, vote intentions were closely tied to Palin’s approval ratings: each major Palin approval drop was followed, within a day or two, by a drop in McCain vote intention. No other factor moved McCain support with such precision. Comparison of the correlation between running mate approval ratings and vote intentions from 2000 and 2004 confirms Palin’s peculiar importance in 2008.

 I hold that truth to have been self-evident -- per xpostfactoid, Oct. 24, 2008:

In which Kristof plays me like a fiddle

When I saw the headline, Obama AWOL in Syria, I thought, "there goes Kristof again" -- the ultimate advocate for humanitarian intervention often carefully defined not to include military intervention per se). Darfur, South Sudan, Egypt, Libya, and now Syria...

I read his case for the U.S. helping to topple Assad, and I won't presume to judge its merits, but it crossed that two-minute op-ed-reading threshold where you're following an argument and have not tipped into spending most of your mental energy pushing back.

Then, this caveat near the end got my attention, first because it struck me as a tad narcissistic, then because I realized it wasn't, because my own first response to the headline demonstrated how necessary it was:

Mitt Romney, taxer of muni bonds?

Oh, the distortions, sleights of hand and outright falsehoods in the Wall Street Journal editorial board's ridiculous attempt to take down the Brookings/Urban League Tax Policy Center finding that the Romney tax plan would cut taxes for the wealthiest 5% and raise them for everyone else.  The falsehoods are macro, micro and legion.

Let's start with the premises on which the TPC analysis of Romney's purposefully vague tax plan (p. 38 ff) are based. Because Romney does not specify what tax deductions he would reduce or eliminate, or for whom, TPC extrapolates from broad principles he's laid out:

A boring white guy will (counter)balance Romney's ticket

Jonathan Chait points out today that Romney's veep pick will tell us whether he's decided his campaign needs a game-changer (ethnic! female! ideologue!) or whether he remains confident that hammering Obama for a limping economy will be enough, in which case the pick will be the "boring white guy" the campaign hinted at in May.

I am of the James Fallows school of Romney campaign advisers.  Romney, Fallows suggests, should stick to one message:

• The economy is broken;
• Obama can't fix it;
• I can.

Of course, Romney's formula has also required hiding the fixin' prescription. And that's where the veep choice will represent a crossroads. "Boring white guy" would not mean a neutral, neither-help-nor-hinder placemarker. He (not she) would help Romney continue to hide the ball.

A data point on the conservative side

The Wall Street Journal's David Wessel has a useful primer on basic U.S. tax facts today. While highlighting the top one percent's increased share of nation wealth, Wessel also notes:

From Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, the tax code has been tweaked and the economy has had its ups and downs, and the share of federal taxes paid by the top 5% and the top 1% has risen faster than their share of income:

In the 1980s, the top 5% averaged 22.6% of income and paid 28.5% of taxes.
In the 1990s, the top 5% averaged 25.3% of income and paid 34.3% of taxes
In the 2000s, the top 5% averaged 28.4% of the income and paid 40.3% of the taxes.

If taxes for the wealthy have been radically cut (which they have), and the share of national wealth captured by the top 1% has radically grown (which it has), how can the share of federal taxes paid by the wealthy have shrunk?

Buffalo Gardens 2012: A propensity for density

Here comes the annual paean to the Buffalo Garden Walk, showcase of unlikely pockets of urban paradise in a city gone mad with gardening.  The event is free-form: No prizes, no entry barriers, no commercialization; just open entry and a map to spotlight where people are opening their front, side, and/or back gardens to the public. 

In prior years I've noted the gardens' eclecticism and their often dramatic backdrops of tightly packed pastel gables, urban forest, skyscraper or 19th-century ruin. This year, a more fundamental, and more obvious, feature struck me: their density. Buffalo goes in big for profusion. In some of the maybe 30' x 40' back yards to the cottages on Little Summer Street, the narrowest of paths wind through a near-complete overhead canopy. Borders are multi-layered. In mostly small yards, Buffalonians tend to pack every inch -- back, front, and/or side.

Why is Bowles-Simpson more progressive than Romney's "very similar" plan?

Yesterday, the New York Times' Jackie Calmes provided a bracing model of how to reality-check a politician's ridiculous claim:

Mr. Romney said “my plan is very similar to the Simpson-Bowles plan.” The Romney proposal, however, has little in common with that bipartisan deficit-reduction proposal from a majority on the fiscal commission that Mr. Obama created in 2010. The Simpson-Bowles plan called for reduced income tax rates, but it would have raised about $2 trillion more in tax revenues over 10 years, mostly from high-income taxpayers, and cut spending to reduce the federal debt.

This discrepancy raises a more fundamental question.  Because Bowles-Simpson raises new revenue and Romney's plan doesn't, it should be easier, not harder, for Romney to make his cut-rates-and-reduce-loopholes plan more progressive than Bowles-Simpson. According to the Brookings/Urban Institute Tax Policy Center, the opposite is true. Why?

You didn't gild that: TPC hands Obama a sword of unvarnished truth to wield against Romney's tax plans

As we await the next jobs day bomb this morning, my anxious and superstitious nature can't help but fear that the Obama campaign is like the Confederate army approaching Gettysburg -- at its high water mark in the wake of a raft of good polls, Romney twisting in the tax return wind, and the Tax Policy Center dissection of his gap-ridden and fraudulent "tax reform" plans.

But with that gesture to ward off nemesis, I can't help but delight, like (I assume) all who have been waiting for team Obama to pivot from Bain attacks to spotlighting tax cut/spending cut plans so extreme Americans don't believe Romney would actually propose them, in the way Obama has taken up the Tax Policy Center's analysis of Romney's tax plans and used it to tear into said plans.  As reported by the Times' Jackie Calmes, this Obama riff in Florida yesterday is scarlet sweetmeat to me:

My land, how Romney whined when caught lying in 2002

By now the story is well known: when Massachusetts Democrats challenged Romney's residency in Massachusetts as he geared up to run for governor in early 2002, Romney first said that he had maintained at least part-time Massachusetts residency during his years in Utah running the Olympics. He retroactively altered his tax returns to reflect that claim. When it came to light that he had gained a $54,000 tax break by claiming his Utah home as his primary residence, he said that that filing was the result of a clerical error. When reporters questioned whether he'd also profited on his income taxes by declaring Utah residency, Romney first said that he would respond to questions posed in writing. When those questions were submitted, 

Romney's spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, said that Romney would not be responding because "he values his privacy and his wife's privacy." A few minutes later, pressed on whether he benefited financially in Utah by filing as a resident there and a nonresident in Massachusetts, he said: "That's as far as I'm telling you, that's it. That's the answer I'm going to give you, and that's all I got" (Boston Globe, 6/8/02, "Tax Benefit Unclear and Candidate Mum").

 Of course that pattern of behavior now looks very familiar. Also according to now-familiar type: Romney's response to being subject to scrutiny. During his testimony before the Massachusetts Ballot Commission, his attorney drew the waterworks. The Boston Globe's Stephanie Ebbert reported on June 19, 2002 ("Romney Taxes Show No 'Domicile')":

Where Gore Vidal's ice melted

I knew next to nothing about Gore Vidal's personal life or public persona before I read his Times obit today. One passage in the obit jumped out at me, though, because I'd like to believe it wasn't true -- or at least, was true only in some senses. Here it is:

Television was a natural medium for Mr. Vidal, who in person was often as cool and detached as he was in his prose. “Gore is a man without an unconscious,” his friend the Italian writer Italo Calvino once said. Mr. Vidal said of himself: “I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.”

Quote of the day

“It is not mathematically possible to design a revenue-neutral plan that preserves current incentives for savings and investment and that does not result in a net tax cut for high-income taxpayers and a net tax increase for lower- and/or middle-income taxpayers.” 

-  Brookings/Tax Policy Center study of Mitt Romney's tax reform proposal.

The study, which according to the Washington Post's Lori Montgomery, "seem[s] to bend over backward to be fair to the Republican presidential candidate," finds that Romney's

rate-cutting plan for individuals would reduce tax collections by about $360 billion in 2015, the study says. To avoid increasing deficits — as Romney has pledged — the plan would have to generate an equivalent amount of revenue by slashing tax breaks for mortgage interest, employer-provided health care, education, medical expenses, state and local taxes, and child care — all breaks that benefit the middle class.

Romney's pandering fools no one

Is the post-truth campaign engendering the post-belief vote?

Political scientists Larry Bartels and Lynn Vavrek have put together a fascinating portrait of the small and elusive segment of the electorate that remains undecided.  The majority of them are not independents. Those with party affiliations obviously are not pleased with their party's nominee, and the Democrats among them provide some troubling feedback for Obama, along with some apparent opportunity.  The survey, however, reveals something astonishing about Republican attitudes toward Romney:

GOP leaders: GOP is unfit to govern

Let's step back and let the obvious sink in. Think about this internecine GOP spat for a moment:

BRIAN KILMEADE: Now, Sen. McCain, I want you to hear a sound bite from one of the Sunday shows. Dick Cheney sits down, talks about your selection of vice presidential candidate Governor Palin. Listen.

DICK CHENEY: I like Governor Palin. I’ve met her. I know her. She – attractive candidate. But based on her background, she’d only been governor for, what, two years? I don’t think she passed that test…of being ready to take over. And I think that was a mistake.

BRIAN KILMEADE: You agree? Disagree?

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Well, I’m always glad to get comments four years later. Look, I respect the vice president. He and I had strong disagreements as to whether we should torture people or not. I don’t think we should have. But the fact is I’m proud of Sarah Palin. I’m proud of the job she did. I’m proud of the job she continues to do. Everybody has their own views and I respect those views. But I’m proud of what we did.

Aspiring Pander in Chief offers Israel carte blanche

Jerusalem, July 29, 2012 -- In a speech near the Old City today, U.S. presidential hopeful Mitt Romney harked back to an historic concept of Israel as a besieged, beleaguered outpost rather than a regional hyperpower and promised the U.S. would stop at nothing to advance Israel's perceived interests. 

Without diverting his stream of unqualified praise and unconditional support for the host country, Romney widened his scope at select moments to advance two extraordinary historical principles:

"There are a lot of smart people out there": Frum gets past Obama's loose pronoun

Kudos to David Frum for taking a dispassionate look at the subtext of Obama's "you didn't build that" riff. To contrast its emotional resonance with the Elizabeth Warren ur-text on which it's based is brilliant. Warren, Frum notes, offset her reminder to business owners that no one succeeds alone with all the usually-obligatory gestures of respect and thanks.  Obama, in an unscripted response to the reflexive deification of "job creators" in our political discourse, momentarily dispensed with those gestures.

In my own post about the speech, which focused on the Romney campaign's explicit embrace of the principle that no degree of distortion of an opponent's words is out of bounds, I drafted a paragraph suggesting that Obama's "you didn't build that" passage did constitute a pander to those of us who don't build businesses or wealth.  I cut that paragraph after I looked again at Obama's words:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me --  because they want to give something back.  They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.  You didn’t get there on your own.  I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.  There are a lot of smart people out there.  It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.  Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.  There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.  Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.  Somebody invested in roads and bridges.  If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen.  The Internet didn’t get invented on its own.  Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.  There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own.

I cut my "pander" paragraph because I decided that Obama was reacting to the obscenely over-the-top deification of an undifferentiated class of "job creators" -- a conceptual frame that enables and reflects the massive redistribution of wealth to the very top over the past thirty years. That frame lumps together the genuinely productive with rent-seekers and game-riggers (and those whose success stems from a combination of those sources) and supports the claim that any correction to the massive tax cuts the wealthiest have enjoyed over the last thirty years will kill the golden goose of economic growth. Obama's riff was more debunk than pander.

Frum is often a credible critic of Obama because he can hear both sides of an argument.  He picks up this debunk impulse:

In this particular election cycle, the argument that the successful are almost by definition deserving and that the unsuccessful are correspondingly undeserving has exploded into noisy public controversy. 

The president appears to have heard that argument, and it irks him. And when it came time to reprise Elizabeth Warren, he allowed pieces of his rebuttal to the claim to drift into a speech that was probably meant to adhere to the safer ground that she had previously staked out. 

Yet I think Frum reads his own inferences into Obama's meta-economics:

President Obama's stray sentences however point to a bolder conclusion. If it's not brains or work that account for success, what is it? The answer must be … luck. Not maybe entirely luck, but luck to a great degree. By definition, however, luck is amoral. Nobody can deserve luck, otherwise he wouldn't be lucky. To the extent success is due to luck, success is undeserved—and to the extend that success is undeserved, the successful have no very strong claim to the proceeds of their success. Whereas Warren suggests that the wealthy should be taxed to repay tangible benefits they have personally received, Obama is indicating a possibility that the wealthy should be taxed … because their wealth is to a great extent an accident of fate.

This argument is not developed by the president. Indeed, he quickly drops it. Nor does he build any very radical policy conclusions upon his argument: he's proposing only the restoration of the Clinton tax rates—the tax rates that prevailed during the greatest period of private fortune-building since the 1920s. Yet people who believe in the morality of the market are not wrong to hear in those few stray sentences of the president a more radical critique of their core belief than is usually heard from American politicians.

Who said that the answer to why some succeed and some don't "must be" luck?  Not Obama. It's true that he points out that a lot of smart and hardworking people don't build businesses, and so the question of what causes success is free-floating in this passage ("not developed," as Frum acknowledges). Can our body politic really not handle a brief allusion to the mysteries and complexities of causation in human affairs? Are we so wedded to the Horatio Alger myth that we can't complicate it a bit?

Perhaps Obama's subtext is even more unsettling to the sensitive super-rich than Frum allows. A keynote of Obama's stump speech is that for many millions the American dream is "slipping away." Conditions are ever less conducive to achieving economic security and increased opportunity for one's children. The benefits of economic growth are flowing to the very top.  The playing field is ever less level. Here's how he put it in the "you didn't build that" speech:

Now, the reason that I think so many of us came together in 2008 was because we saw that for a decade that dream was fraying, that it was slipping away; that there were too many people who were working hard but not seeing their incomes or wages go up; that we had taken a surplus and turned it into a deficit -- we were running two wars on a credit card; that job growth was the most sluggish it had been in 50 years.  There was a sense that those who were in charge didn’t feel responsible...

Our goal isn’t just to put people back to work -- although that’s priority number one -- it is to build an economy where that work pays off.  An economy where everyone, whether you are starting a business or punching a clock, can see your hard work and responsibility rewarded.  That’s what this campaign’s about, Roanoke.  And that’s why I’m running for a second term as President of the United States of America.

An economy in which "hard work and responsibility" don't pay off, at its extreme, is one in which luck and privilege and rapacity are the only determinates of success. Obama's talk of an American dream slipping away suggests that the U.S.is trending that way.

But then, that's been his message since 2007 at the latest. Whether the country will again prove receptive to it is itself largely a matter of economic luck.

A little distance on the post-truth campaign

I've been on vacation with my wife in the Finger Lakes and fell off the grid for reasons I won't bore you with -- off completely for one day, near-completely for three. When we get away, usually, I'm eager to dive back into the political/policy news when I can, but this time, my brief forays have felt like dropping into a coal mine.  A bit of distance defamiliarizes our degraded politics and brings home what a high-stakes, dangerous and disgusting contest it is.

Reconnecting for a bit last night, I caught up with this elevated argument from the Romney campaign:

A glimpse of the post-ownership society?

The Wall Street Journal's Jeanette Neumann reports that real estate investment companies that are buying up foreclosed homes and renting them out are seeking to securitize their rental income stream. Perhaps that's more evidence, not only that more Americans are likely to live in rentals, but that our relationship to "home," our concepts of rental and ownership, may take new forms.

If investor-owners can think long-term about rental income, perhaps renters can also take a long-term stance, and enter into contracts more like those of commercial tenants -- say, five or ten-year leases that lock in current prices, or leases that in some way exchange various levels of commitment for price breaks, or ring new variations of rent-to-own or share any increase in home value.

When the Romney campaign perjured Romney (retroactively)

Maybe I buried my lede on July 13, so forgive a restatement:

In her email to the Boston Globe demanding a correction of its report on Romney's tenure at Bain from 1999-2002, Romney's communications director Gail Gitcho either confirmed that Romney perjured himself in his Massachusetts residency hearing in June 2002 or endorsed a false statement by Bain about that tenure.

The Romney campaign's 2011 statement that "Since February 11, 1999, Mr. Romney has not had any active role with any Bain Capital entity and has not been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way" does not contradict Romney's assertion, while striving to prove establish his Massachusetts for his gubernatorial run in 2002, that he returned to Massachusetts periodically during his Olympic tenure to attend board meetings for past and present Bain portfolio companies. Those companies are not "Bain Capital entities."

A Bain statement issued on July 12, however, does contradict that assertion: Romney, it says,“has had absolutely no involvement with the management or investment activities of the firm or with any of its portfolio companies since the day of his departure” in 1999" (my emphasis).

Gitcho's email to Globe cites the Bain statement:

A line of attack with legs?

It's a cliche that political attacks work only when they have some demonstrable relationship to reality -- when they touch a chord of genuine perception about a candidate.

By that standard, Obama campaign attack theme spotlighted today by Reuters would seem to have long-term potential:

"Feeding the Democrats' storyline: Romney's refusal to release more than a year or two of his tax returns, questions about whether he is being honest about when he left his job at Bain Capital, and the reams of records that have been kept secret from his years as Massachusetts governor and chief of the Salt Lake City Olympics."

Shucks, is that all? Methinks Reuters' Jeff Mason writes with a keen sense of the reality gap between this gambit and 2008's "who is Barack Obama?":

Romney Rule #13: Any attack on me negates all rules of engagement

 To our past compilation of the Romney Rules of political engagement, the implicit credo of the post-truth campaign, add Romney Rule #13:

Any attack on me frees me from any standard of truth or relevance whatsoever in counterattack. 

Buzzfeed's McKay Coppins gets the formal declaration* of this one from an unnamed Romney campaign adviser:

An overwrought rap on Bain from the Boston Phoenix?

The Boston Phoenix has apparent new grist for the Bain-the-vampire mill: a tale in which Bain portfolio company CRC Health  tries to get a methadone clinic opened in a small town in Maine (Warren, pop. 5000).  Reporter Sydney Leonard lays a prologue for a stark morality tale:

Bain Capital is showing its stripes in a battle in Warren, Maine, that has lasted the past two years, and counting.

Rather than demonstrating Bain building businesses, communities, and society, the story of that battle reveals the strategies, techniques, and tactics Bain uses to force its goals upon unwilling, and sometimes unsuspecting, regular people. And results from similar assaults on other communities demonstrate the profit-at-any-cost mentality that has laid waste to lives and communities — a far cry from Romney's campaign-trail tales of success.

The company's unyielding efforts to open a methadone clinic in Warren have turned the town into a costly battleground, making enemies of friends and neighbors, racking up legal fees, and marking a local businessman as public enemy number one in the community he has always called home.

Leonard's own reporting, however, provides ample grounds to question this editorializing.  He makes it clear, first, that the need for a new methadone clinic in the area was very real:

In which I agree with a Dish reader

I more or less agree with this Dish reader, sloppy writer though he be:

I am a wimp and Romney tries to have everything both ways, and he should have proudly owned the full spectrum of Bain's investments at any given time, including '99-02. But still, the Obama attack path makes me queasy, for two reasons 1) there's nothing really wrong with offshoring (though there is something wrong with loading companies with debt and driving them into the ground while you clean up), and 2) while I could be proved wrong sometime soon, I think the basic Romney/Bain narrative for '99-02 holds together.

The last time Romney stonewalled on taxes

You may wonder why Romney thinks he can shut off demands to release several years' worth of tax returns, as other presidential candidates have done in recent years, like this:

JIM ACOSTA, CNN: When are you going to release more of your taxes and how many years?

ROMNEY: I've indicated that -- well, first of all, we've complied with the law. The law requires us to put out a full financial disclosure. That I've done. And then, in addition to that, I've already put out one year of tax returns. We'll put out the next year of tax returns as soon as the accountants have that ready. And that's what we're going to put out.

I know there will always be calls for more. People always want to get more. And, you know, we're putting out what is required plus more that is not required. And those are the two years that people are going to have. And that's -- that's all that's necessary for people to understand something about my finances. And, look, if people believe this should be a campaign about attacking one another on a personal basis and go back to the kinds of attacks that were suggested in some campaigns in the past, I don't want to go there.

The thing is, he's gotten away with it before. When he came home to Massachusetts swathed in Olympic glory to run for governor in spring 2002, Democrats challenged his residency status.*  They wouldn't have been able to if he had maintained dual residency.  But there was a tax break to be had by declaring his Utah house his primary residence, and Have-it-Both-Ways Romney went for it. The New York Times reported on 6/6/02:

Romney campaign contradicts Romney testimony

Romney is very good at splitting hairs to avoid literally lying, or to hold two almost-contradictory positions at once (Romneycare good! Obamacare bad!  Bailouts bad! Rescue of financial system in crisis good! Managed bankruptcy good! Obama's managed bankruptcies of GM/Chrysler bad!). 

Therefore, I am a little surprised to note that the Romney campaign has slipped up in its characterizations of Romney's leave of absence from Bain when he was running the Olympics in 1999-2002. Yesterday, the campaign contradicted testimony that Romney provided to the Massachusetts Ballot Commission in June 2002 in a way that they had previously avoided.

As I noted yesterday, the Romney campaign's 2011 statement that "Since February 11, 1999, Mr. Romney has not had any active role with any Bain Capital entity and has not been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way" does not contradict Romney's assertion, while striving to prove establish his Massachusetts for his gubernatorial run in 2002, that he returned to Massachusetts periodically during his Olympic tenure to attend board meetings for past and present Bain portfolio companies. Those companies are not "Bain Capital entities." 

Some wispy hints that Romney was not 100% hands-off at Bain, 1999-2002

Personally, I think that the charge that Romney as CEO and owner of Bain Capital "shipped jobs overseas" is meaningless, except insofar as it offsets Romney's hypocritical and bogus charge that Obama is substantially responsible for further loss of manufacturing jobs to China and elsewhere. Offshoring is inevitable: to cope, the U.S. must improve its education system and upgrade jobs currently considered low-end, which means strengthening workers' hands relative to management.

Further, Factcheck.org and other truth-squaders have a point in calling out the Obama campaign for claiming that Romney "shipped jobs overseas" when alluding to the activities of Bain portfolio companies that occurred after Romney took over the Winter Olympics in early 1999.  Today's Globe story documenting Romney's maintenance of formal or nominal control during his Olympic years really doesn't affect the argument between the Obama campaign and Factcheck, as Stephanie Cutter's letter to Factcheck, like the Globe article, alluded to numerous Bain SEC filings listing Romney as CEO, President, and owner of various Bain entities, including the parent company. Factcheck retorts that there is no positive evidence that Romney ever took an active role in any Bain decision or action during his Olympic gig. And Fortune's Dan Primack has been supplied with offering documents for funds that Bain started after Romney went to Utah that don't list Romney as a fund manager.

The only adult in the (Heritage Foundation) room

Perhaps Donald Verrilli did not have the smoothest delivery in the Court on March 27, when he defended the constitutionality of the individual mandate.  But in this Heritage Foundation panel discussion, as reported by Josh Gerstein, he seems on a different moral plane entirely from plaintiff's attorney Michael Carvin and libertarian U. of Chicago Professor Richard Epstein:

Romney to pick an UnPalin for Veep

Asked in a Colorado town hall whether he would pick his running mate before the GOP convention, Romney responded:

I can’t give you the timeline for that..that is a decision that we’ll make down the road. Nor can I give you the individual. I can tell you that the person I choose you will look at and say, ‘Well, that’s a person who could be president, if that were necessary, and that, for me, is the most important single criteria.”

Hmm. I guess that rules out all the clowns he ran against for the nomination, with the possible exception of the first dropout, Tim Pawlenty. Sounds like an attempt, too, to undo the Palinization of the GOP.  Too bad he had to Palinize himself to get the nomination -- demonizing a clone of his own healthcare creation, embracing insane tax and spending cuts, criminalizing abortion -- and lying nonstop about his opponent.

Plain sense, and a touch of nonsense, from Obama on taxes

Evoking the harm apparently done to the economy by last year's debt ceiling debacle, Ezra Klein frames Obama's call today for a one-year extension of the Bush tax cuts for the lower 98% -- but not for the top 2% of earners -- as a political gamble.  The looming fiscal cliff, Klein suggests, threatens to damage confidence this fall as the debt cliff did last summer; Republicans in Congress certainly won't accede to Obama's proposal before the election; and any drag on growth right now could un-elect Obama.

I don't really think there's any risk. Or rather, the risk of hurting the economy through continued deadlock on the tax question is the lesser of two risks. The alternative Klein holds out is capitulation -- extending all  the tax cuts for a year. That would not only infuriate the base, reprising the trauma of late 2010; it would reinforce what I believe is the chief rap against Obama among independents or undecideds: weakness and ineffectuality, being unable to put his preferred policies across.  

The method behind Mitt's mendacious madness

A blog is a perennial work in progress. Ideally, its inevitable repetitions embody ongoing development of a working hypothesis or analysis.  I'd like to think that's the case with my close reading of Romney's methodical disinformation campaign -- that is, my attempt to spotlight the method to Mitt's mendacity. A few milestones below.

Romney deems Obama a liar ex post facto (7/7/12)

 The method is to convert hairline distinctions, usually illusory, into Manichean contrasts.

Romney rules, cont. 6/11/12

Rule #11: I may simultaneously level mutually exclusive charges against my opponent. 

Romney Rules (6/7/12)

Rule #1 : Context doesn't matter. Anything you say I may use against you, e.g., by making it sound like you said the opposite.

An upright man who lies nonstop (5/19/12)

What is unfathomable to me is the level of doublethink that will allows an extremely able, intelligent, in many ways generous man who believes that God is watching over him to go out and lie every day, in general concept and in detail,,

Proud owners of the post-truth campaign (3/21/12)

I can think of four occasions since October when Romney or his surrogates admitted more or less outright that Romney's words or deeds are either willfully misleading or purely for show.

The presidential campaign in story and song

Of a certain worthy KNYGHT, the first of Chaucer's pilgrims to get a bio in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, we are told

At mortal batailles hadde he been fiftene,
And foughten for oure feith at Traniyssene
In lystes thries, and ay slayn his foe. 

In 2007-08, Barack Obama did the knyght a few better, debating Hillary Clinton et al twenty six times, and most definitely slaying McCain thrice in their general election contests.  No wonder he's nostalgic today, with the armies of the unemployed looming on the election horizon, for those mortal batailles of old.

Romney deems Obama a liar ex post facto

I have long marveled at the verbal contortions Romney must go through to a) justify current GOP nonsense positions and b) align his own prior pronouncements and actions with current nonsense.  Often this Operation Twist further involves c) differentiating his past and even sometimes his present position from a functionally similar position of Obama's, with whom the dear departed centrist pragmatist Massachusetts Mitt has often been aligned.

Hence Romney must regularly wax paradoxical, continually compiling new verses to this lover's rune:

I gave my love a cherry that had no stone,
I gave my love a chicken that had no bone,
I gave my love a story that had no end,
I gave my love a baby with no cryin'.

But Romney outdid himself this week when reversing the position taken by his aide Erich Fehrnstrom and his own long-held position that the individual mandate is a penalty, not a tax. Listen carefully:

“While I agreed with the dissent, that’s overtaken by the fact that the majority of the Court said it’s a tax and therefore it is a tax. They have spoken. There’s no way around that,” Romney said. “The American people know that President Obama has broken the pledge he made — said he wouldn’t raise taxes on middle-income Americans.”

Not only does Romney here assert that his own reasoning is negated in some existential sense by the Court's 5-4 ruling, along with the reasoning of the four conservative justices with whom he agreed. He is claiming that Obama's long-held position, which matches his own, retroactively became a lie the moment Roberts read the crux of his decision from the bench.  An ex post facto lie.

Pitch me, Priorities USA

I read with deep distress Robert Draper's Times Mag chronicle of how the Democrats, taking their cue mainly from Obama, unilaterally disarmed in the Super PAC battles in this election cycle and are now staring down the barrel of a billion dollar GOP juggernaut while Priorities USA struggles to raise $100 million tops.

Draper's look back at the relative potency of Democrat-supporting 527s in 2004 and 2006 carried me back to the 2004 campaign, the first in which I used online phone tools for voter outreach. Obama's innovation in 2008 was to center those tools in his own campaign organization; in 2004 I relied on MoveOn and I think ACT, Americans Coming Together, or possibly other outside groups, to set me up. I got their emails and sent them money, sometimes in response to requests to fund a particular ad -- including one of a not-yet-famous Cindy Sheehan weeping into the camera as she made a "Bush-lied-my-son-died" accusation. That one was created by a tiny outside group, but MoveOn briefly took it up and did ad buys for it. 

Thanks, Sarah! Americans believe the ACA has death panels

The Kaiser Family Foundation  has a 10-question online quiz about the ACA. Here are the questions that a majority of respondents answered wrongly:

• Will the health reform law allow a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare?  - 45% correct
• Will the health reform law cut benefits that were previously provided to all people on Medicare? - 40% correct
• Will the health reform law require all businesses, even the smallest ones, to provide health insurance for their employees?- 25% correct
• Will the health reform law create a new government run insurance plan to be offered along with private plans? - 27% correct [added in update -- see note at bottom]
• Will the health reform law allow undocumented immigrants to receive financial help from the government to buy health insurance? - 42% correct [also added in update]

A quick question of law

How many of Chief Justice Roberts' brethren signed onto his finding that "the individual mandate is not a valid exercise of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause"?  None.

Justice Ginsburg, writing for the four liberal justices with regard to the mandate, concurred with Roberts' finding that the mandate was a constitutional exercise of Congress's taxing power, but dissented strongly on the Commerce Clause question. Justices Alito, Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas officially concurred with no part of Roberts' decision, though their reasoning with regard to the Commerce Clause mirrored his.  And of course, the Chief Justice's own finding that the mandate is constitutional rendered his Commerce Clause judgment moot with respect to the fate of the individual mandate.

A question, then, for legal scholars: does the finding that Congress cannot regulate inactivity have any force of law for future cases?

The presidential campaign in story and song

Of a certain worthy KNYGHT, the first of Chaucer's pilgrims to get a bio in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, we are told

At mortal batailles hadde he been fiftene,
And foughten for oure feith at Traniyssene
In lystes thries, and ay slayn his foe. 

In 2007-08, Barack Obama did the knyght a few better, debating Hillary Clinton et al twenty six times, and most definitely slaying McCain thrice in their general election contests.  No wonder he's nostalgic today, with the armies of the unemployed looming on the election horizon, for those mortal batailles of old.

A pair of July 4 warnings, and one eulogy

If I ever picked up the phone to a pollster, I guess I'd have to say I don't like the country's direction. To celebrate the Fourth, then, I'd like to highlight a trio of warnings/diagnoses published today.

The first is by Kurt Andersen, writing in the Times about The Downside of Liberty. He is not the first to link the sixties mantra "if it feels good, do it," with the '80s' "greed is good," but he does so cogently:

Justice Roberts spares the country's pound of flesh

I had deja vu as I read John Roberts' decision deeming the individual mandate both an impermissible exercise of Congress's Commerce Clause power and a constitutional exercise of its taxing power.  I was taken back to Shakespeare's court of Venice:

PORTIA
A pound of that same merchant's flesh is thine:
The court awards it, and the law doth give it.

SHYLOCK
Most rightful judge!

PORTIA
And you must cut this flesh from off his breast:
The law allows it, and the court awards it.

SHYLOCK
Most learned judge! A sentence! Come, prepare!

PORTIA
Tarry a little; there is something else.
This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood;
The words expressly are 'a pound of flesh:'
Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh;
But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods
Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate
Unto the state of Venice.

GRATIANO
O upright judge! (Merchant of Venice IV. 1. 298-312).

Broccoli-robbed! The Wall Street Journal's beef with John Roberts

In the wake of Chief Justice John Roberts' division of the mandate baby, the Wall Street Journal editorial board laments:

From now on, Congress can simply regulate interstate commerce by imposing "taxes" whenever someone does or does not do something contrary to its desires.

That's true!  Also on target is the editorialists' complaint against Roberts' sleight-of-hand (which I noted myself on Saturday):

[Roberts] also temporizes that "taxes that seek to influence conduct are nothing new."

True enough, but the punishments in the tax code for inactivity come in the form of not being able to claim benefits that Congress in its graces bestows. Such as: If you don't borrow to buy a home, you don't get a mortgage interest deduction.

Congress has never passed a tax on a lack of gasoline or a tax on a failure to buy gasoline, any more than Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause by telling people to buy gasoline or else pay a penalty.

 This reality-based analysis, however, serves a fantasy:

The reality is that Washington would love to regulate the ordinary economic choices that used to be beyond its purview, and now it will be able to abuse the ad hoc "tax" permit that the Chief Justice has given it.