Levees Not War

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“His legendary flip-flops aren’t the lies of a bumbling opportunist—they’re the confident prevarications of a man untroubled by misleading the nonbeliever in pursuit of a single, all-consuming goal. Romney has a vision, and he’s trying for something big: We’ve just been too slow to sort out what it is, just as we’ve been slow to grasp the roots of the radical economic changes that have swept the country in the last generation.” —Matt Taibbi, “Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital”

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Shape-Shifting as a Business Strategy

To paraphrase what Mary McCarthy once said about Lillian Hellman, every word out of Mitt Romney’s mouth is a lie, “including and and the.”

We’ve been meaning for some time to draw attention to Matt Taibbi’s excellent piece on the audacity of Romney’s mendacity for Rolling Stone titled “Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital.” Soon we will go into the business practices side of the article, and the seriously horrifying implications for American workers and the U.S. economy—at least for the 99%. But for now we want to point to Taibbi’s remarks on Romney’s casual readiness to say whatever it takes to whomever he’s addressing, regardless of previous statements, promises, or policies. Read the article and pass it on to anyone and everyone who might be considering voting for Romney, or who wants to make sure Romney gets not one more vote than can be avoided.

Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street’s greed revolution. . . . He’s Gordon Gekko, but a new and improved version, with better PR—and a bigger goal. A takeover artist all his life, Romney is now trying to take over America itself. And if his own history is any guide, we’ll all end up paying for the acquisition. . . . 

[Romney’s] infamous changes of stance are not little wispy ideological alterations of a few degrees here or there—they are perfect and absolute mathematical reversals, as in “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country” and “I am firmly pro-life.” Yet unlike other politicians, who at least recognize that saying completely contradictory things presents a political problem, Romney seems genuinely puzzled by the public’s insistence that he be consistent. “I’m not going to apologize for having changed my mind,” he likes to say.

A member of Romney’s campaign famously remarked—at an RNC breakfast sponsored by ABC News and Yahoo News, no less—“We’re not going let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” Romney’s first debate performance, in which he surprised the president by pretending to be a sunny moderate, after a year of insisting he was “extremely conservative,” was cheerfully free of facts or regard for his previous utterances. How could he possibly remember all the positions he has held on any given topic? Steve Benen’s “Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity” is up to volume XXXVII as of Oct. 5.

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Is President Overconfident? (He Shouldn’t Be.)

We want to put down a few first impressions about last night’s first presidential debate before we look at what anyone else has said.

Mitt Romney performed with more energy and desire to win than did President Obama. Romney dissembled, evaded, distorted, and denied truths, as we would expect, but he showed admirable aggressiveness—fire in the belly. He cavalierly blew through the time limits like a rich glutton who feels entitled to eat all the food in a restaurant just because he can afford it all, and to hell with the other customers. But he was there to win, and, setting aside accuracy, honesty, and specificity, maybe he deserved to (last night—not on November 6!).

Skipping many opportunities to attack Romney, the president acted as though he’s above going on the offensive. He failed to point out Romney’s dismal job-creation record as governor of Massachusetts and his impressive job-destruction record at Bain Capital. Unbelievably, Obama neglected to charge that a candidate who has written off 47 percent of the American public cannot care too much about creating jobs and improving opportunities for the American people. The president was far too slow to bring up the name Paul Ryan, who embodies the harshness of G.O.P. budget priorities—a huge missed opportunity. He never once mentioned the 100% obstruction of the Republicans in Congress, not even when Romney faulted him for pushing through a health care reform bill that had no G.O.P. support. How could Obama not say this? When they talked about the budget and taxes, he was too courteous to mention that super-rich Romney has hidden his own tax payments from the public (and possibly from the U.S. Treasury) like no candidate in recent memory.

We sure hope President Obama doesn’t think he’s got this election in the bag, after seeing all the favorable polls in recent weeks.

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Obama Bitch-Slaps G.O.P. Deficit Hardliners, Hell-Bent Extremists

“Before we ask our seniors to pay more for health care, before we cut our children’s education, before we sacrifice our commitment to the research and innovation that will help create more jobs in the economy, I think it’s only fair to ask an oil company or a corporate jet owner that has done so well to give up a tax break that no other business enjoys. I don’t think that’s real radical. I think the majority of Americans agree with that.”

“I’ve said to some of the Republican leaders, you go talk to your constituents, the Republican constituents, and ask them are they willing to compromise their kids’ safety so that some corporate jet owner continues to get a tax break. And I’m pretty sure what the answer would be.”

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Wednesday’s presidential press conference—the first since March—showed a combative President Obama chopping at the Republicans for a lack of fiscal seriousness and a slack work ethic. “They need to do their job” is right. And he’s doing his: defending social contract programs like Medicare and Social Security against the ideology-driven slasher nightmare of a “fiscally conservative” party that enabled a doubling of the deficit under George W. Bush (remember Dick Cheney’s “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter”?). From 2001 to 2009 the current G.O.P. leaders voted 19 times to increase the debt limit by $4 trillion. When Bush took office after Bill Clinton the budget was in the black and the Congressional Budget Office projected a $5.6 trillion surplus over 10 years. Then came the cuts.

Anyway, this Barack Obama is the man we campaigned for long ago, the fighter we feared had evaporated forever in a sweet dream of (illusory) bipartisanship. We just wish Barack had bared his knuckles like this last year when the “fiscal conservatives” were pushing like hell for the Bush tax cut extension, and had fought hard before that in the unnecessarily protracted struggle for the health care reform act, and before that for the helpful but insufficient Stimulus (ARRA) of 2009.

(Obama must have been doing something right to prompt Time writer and MSNBC political analyst Mark Halperin to remark Thursday on Morning Joe, with some prompting from Joe Scarborough, “I think he was kind of a dick yesterday.”)

Last year when Obama and congressional Democrats allowed themselves—and thus the nation—to be extorted into an extension of the Bush Tax Cuts for Millionaires, the president seemed not to grasp the terrible truth that the job-killing extremists controlling the G.O.P. are fully willing to drive the U.S. economy into severe crisis in order to inflict maximum damage on this president and his party.

The President now shows signs of understanding that the Republicans really are willing to destroy the United States’s credit and economic functionality in order to inflict pain severe enough to intensify voters’ rejection of the president and his party next November.

The same so-called conservatives who cracked the whip for extension of the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires—which will add some $700 billion more to the deficit over the next 10 years—now scream that the deficit is strangling America and killing jobs. (The chart at left illustrates the Bush tax cuts’ contribution to the deficit.) They nearly forced a government shut-down in April (how disappointed they were that the crisis was averted by Democrats’ concessions) and now are forcing another crisis. Many of them actually want a shutdown, as is happening at this moment in the stalemated state of Minnesota. (Minnesota-based G.O.P. candidates Pawlenty and Bachmann approve.)

If the U.S. were to crash through the debt ceiling after August 2, would John Boehner and Mitch McConnell’s publicly funded security detail be laid off?

Paul Krugman writes in today’s New York Times (“To the Limit”) that a failure by Congress to raise the debt ceiling is not at all unthinkable:

Failure to raise the debt limit—which would, among other things, disrupt payments on existing debt—could convince investors that the United States is no longer a serious, responsible country, with nasty consequences. Furthermore, nobody knows what a U.S. default would do to the world financial system, which is built on the presumption that U.S. government debt is the ultimate safe asset.

But wait, it gets worse:

Failure to raise the debt limit would also force the U.S. government to make drastic, immediate spending cuts, on a scale that would dwarf the austerity currently being imposed on Greece. . . . slashing spending at a time when the economy is deeply depressed would destroy hundreds of thousands and quite possibly millions of jobs.

Krugman adds, ominously:

G.O.P. leaders don’t actually care about the level of debt. Instead, they’re using the threat of a debt crisis to impose an ideological agenda. . . . what’s really going on is extortion pure and simple. As Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute puts it, the G.O.P. has, in effect, come around with baseball bats and declared, “Nice economy you have here. A real shame if something happened to it.” . . . [Republicans] believe that they have the upper hand, because the public will blame the president for the economic crisis they’re threatening to create. In fact, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that G.O.P. leaders actually want the economy to perform badly.”

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY)—a careful politician who is not prone to exaggeration—made the same point this week when he said Republicans’ “slash-and-burn approach” may be part of a plan “to slow down the recovery for political gain in 2012.” Schumer cited Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s surprisingly candid remark to a reporter before the 2010 midterm elections—“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” The senior New York senator asserted, “Republicans aren’t just opposing the president any more, they are opposing the economic recovery itself . . .”

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