A Feeble Attempt To Demean A President


"If Barack Obama opens up," Donald Trump promised yesterday on YouTube (video below), "and gives his college records and applications and if he gives his passport applications and records, I will give to a charity of his choice — inner city children in Chicago, American Cancer Society, AIDS research, anything he wants — a check, immediately, for five million dollars.”  He will be "happy," the Humble One claims "when he does that to my satisfaction, if it's complete..."   As befits a stunt intended to humiliate the President of the United States, Obama would have to comply by October 31 (Halloween).






Of course, little Barack Obama can do would satisfy Donald Trump and anything he turns over likely would be deemed incomplete.  But no matter.  When asked (video, below) by Jay Leno about Trump's obsession with him, the President smartly quipped "This all dates back to when we were growing up together  in Kenya."






Great line, excellent delivery. Like the late Arlen Specter, he could have a great career in stand-up (or as in this case, sit-down) when his political career ends, probably in four years.

But good humor (not this Good Humor) can go only so far.   Better yet would have been a counter-offer from the President: "I'll be glad to release my college records and passport applications and records" simultaneously with Mitt Romney releasing ten years of his tax returns.

Barack Obama was no more likely to make that offer than Mitt Romney wa sto accept it.    In three debates, the President mentioned "tax returns" as often as he did "Bain":  never.   Explaining (apparently approvingly) today on Hardball the endorsement by Colin Powell of Barack Obama, Thomas Ricks noted "Colin Powell is an Eisenhower Republican.  But guess what? So is Barack Obama."



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Extreme Partisanship



Richard Mourdock (I first typed "Todd Akin" for some reason) has come under a lot of criticism for remarking "I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And, I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen."

Arguing that God wants a rape to result in pregnancy is clearly outrageous.  But Mourdock responded to a question, in a debate with Democratic challenger Joe Donnelly, about his view of abortion in the case of rape or incest.   In May, Mourdock made another outrageous statement, and that not in a debate or under pressure to pander to a Fox News audience, but to a liberal audience.    Asked by Chuck Todd on the at least nominally liberal (or at least pro-Obama), Todd happily admitted "I certainly think bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view. … If we [win the House, Senate, and White House], bipartisanship means they have to come our way, and if we’re successful in getting the numbers, we’ll work towards that."

That not only says more about the GOP Senate nominee in Indiana, but quite a bit more about today's GOP than a callous, radical remark about abortion or rape.

In April, Huffington Post's Sam Stein recounted the description by Robert Draper in the newly published "Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives" about a meeting hours after President Obama's inauguration in which

the guest list that night (which was just over 15 people in total) included Republican Reps. Eric Cantor (Va.), Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Paul Ryan (Wis.), Pete Sessions (Texas), Jeb Hensarling (Texas), Pete Hoekstra (Mich.) and Dan Lungren (Calif.), along with Republican Sens. Jim DeMint (S.C.), Jon Kyl (Ariz.), Tom Coburn (Okla.), John Ensign (Nev.) and Bob Corker (Tenn.). The non-lawmakers present included Newt Gingrich, several years removed from his presidential campaign, and Frank Luntz, the long-time Republican wordsmith. Notably absent were Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) -- who, Draper writes, had an acrimonious relationship with Luntz.

For several hours in the Caucus Room (a high-end D.C. establishment), the book says they plotted out ways to not just win back political power, but to also put the brakes on Obama's legislative platform.

"If you act like you're the minority, you're going to stay in the minority," Draper quotes McCarthy as saying. "We've gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign."

Senate Majority Leader McConnell was not left out, however, declaring two years ago "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

This has been reflected in the near-unilateral opposition of the GOP to President Obama's initiatives, as displayed in the graph (from Jon Perr) below:

Additionally, the graph, from political science professors Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal (via ThinkProgress), demonstrates how the U.S. Congress has become increasingly conservative as Senate (second graph) Republicans have moved rightward and House (first graph) Republicans sharply rightward while congressional Democrats have not changed Republicans have lurched rightward and Democrats (contrary to elite media opinion) have been ideologically stable:

The Senate has followed suit, with filibusters far more common since Barack Obama became President than ever before, as revealed by the graph (from McClatchy) below:

Over the year, the Repub Party has become increasingly radical.  But under this President, as Jonathan Bernstein has argued, it's not about "conservative vs. liberal, conservative vs. moderate, or extreme conservative vs. conservative" but about "radicalism and irresponsible behavior, not ideological extremism."




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Crowley Retreats Into Safety

Perhaps you remember this moment from primary campaign 2012:

King asked Gingrich to respond to allegations by his ex-wife that in 1999, Gingrich asked her to have an open marriage with him.

"Would you like to take some time to respond to that?" asked King.

"No, but I will," responded Gingrich, receiving loud, sustained applause from the audience.

"I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office. And I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that," he said.

The audience gave Gingrich a standing ovation.

Months earlier, in a debate in Nevada, Mitt Romney tried to goad Rick Perry into a fight by putting his left hand onto the Texan's right shoulder during a heated discussion (at :33 in the video below).If Perry had responded as most of us would have, brushing Romney's hand off his shoulder or taking a swing at him, voters would be casting their ballots in two weeks for Barack Obama or Newt Gingrich.

In the first general election debate, the GOP nominee successfully bullied Jim Lehrer.  Martha Raddatz of ABC was chosen as moderator of the vice presidential debate by the Commission on Debates, which received approval from both presidential campaigns.   Barack Obama had attended Raddatz's wedding to a friend of his whom he later appointed to the FCC.   The wedding took place in 1991, the divorce in 1997, but conservatives charged bias.   Really. 

In the second presidential debate, Romney imperiously told the President by "you'll get your turn" and frequently cut off moderator Candy Crowley.  And then there was the signature exchange of the debate:

CROWLEY: Governor, if you want to...

ROMNEY: Yes, I -- I...

CROWLEY: ... quickly to this please.

ROMNEY: I -- I think interesting the president just said something which -- which is that on the day after the attack he went into the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror.

OBAMA: That's what I said.

ROMNEY: You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack, it was an act of terror.

It was not a spontaneous demonstration, is that what you're saying?

OBAMA: Please proceed governor.

ROMNEY: I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.

OBAMA: Get the transcript.

CROWLEY: It -- it -- it -- he did in fact, sir. So let me -- let me call it an act of terror...

OBAMA: Can you say that a little louder, Candy?

CROWLEY: He -- he did call it an act of terror. It did as well take -- it did as well take two weeks or so for the whole idea there being a riot out there about this tape to come out. You are correct about that.

Not being stupid or naive Crowley, presumably, imagined the firestorm that would be coming after she pointed out merely that the President had called the Benghazi attack "an act of terror."Following the debate, and anxious to head off inevitable , outrage from Republicans from fact-challenged Republicans, Crowley chatted (video, below) with Anderson Cooper and rationalized "I did turn around and say "But you're totally correct that they did spend two weeks telling us this was about a tape, and that there was this riot outside the Benghazi consulate, which there wasn't."  So he was right in the main, I just think he picked the wrong word."

Crowley apparently didn't say whom she turned around to talk to, nor why she would turn around in the middle of a debate.  Nor did she say what the 'wrong word' was.   Was it terror, act, spontaneous, or demonstration which a guy reportedly worth a quarter of a billion dollars who wants to be the leader or the Free World doesn't understand?

Words matter.   An attack occurs.  The next day, the President declares "No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.  Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America."  Later, his opponent claims "it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghzi an actof terror."   Now, Candy Crowley is reading Mitt Romney's mind.  She just knows he must have meant something other than what he said, that he merely "picked the wrong word."   

This mirrors Romney's entire campaign, wherein he routinely denies saying something for which he is on record.  Teachers? I don't want them fired; "I love teachers."  China: we need to keep flooding the market with Chinese tires but "on day one I'll label them a currency manipulator.    Auto industry? "I like American cars. And I would do nothing to hurt the U.S. auto industry."   That wasn't me who wrote "Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course..." 

There is a reason Mitt Romney used "the wrong word."  If he had said that after the President had declared it an "act of terror," Obama emphasized the spontaneous nature of the event, voters would have heard Romney acknowledge that Obama  had immediately labeled it as terror.  If he had argued that while Obama recognized it immediately as terrorism but the State Department emphasized an alleged spontaneity, voters might recognize that the President and (U.N. Ambassador) Susan Rice are not identical.  And in neither case would the charge have the emotional, gob-smacking quality of "it took the president 14 days" before he blamed Arab terrorists.   It would have had the advantage of not being a lie but, hey, this is a campaign, and this is the Republican nominee for President.

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Massachusetts


It is what Jews refer to as "chutzpah."   Unfortunately, it might work.  In a race against a president whose entire administration has been characterized by an effort to promote bipartisanship and who has embraced compromise at every opportunity, Mitt Romney included in his closing statement last night

America's going to come back. And for that to happen, we're going to have to have a president who can work across the aisle. I was in a state where my legislature was 87 percent Democrat. I learned how to get along on the other side of the aisle. We've got to do that in Washington. Washington is broken. I know what it takes to get this country back. And we'll work with good Democrats and good Republicans to do that.

Romney had the last word last night, Obama's closing statement having preceded it.   But the President had opportunities earlier to counter Romney's pretensions to bipartisanship, and whiffed.

The former governor tried it last night on education:

MR. ROMNEY: The first — the first — and we kept our schools number one in the nation. They're still number one today. And the principles that we've put in place — we also gave kids not just a graduation exam that — that determined whether they were up to the skills needed to — to be able to compete, but also, if they graduated in the top quarter of their class, they got a four-year tuition-free ride at any Massachusetts public institution of higher learning.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: That happened — that happened before you came into office.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Governor —

MR. ROMNEY: That was actually mine, actually, Mr. President. You got that fact wrong.

The details of the program to which Romney referred appear are more complicated than he let on and the public school system in Massachusetts excelled well before Mitt became governor.  But those are mere details relevant to the argument, and this is an election campaign.   Obama got caught up in details when he should have said something akin to what Massachusetts Senator, former Democratic presidential nominee, and Obama debate prepper (you got a better word for it?) John Kerry noted on this morning's Daily Rundown with Chuck Todd.   "In Massachusetts," the candidate who dominated George W. Bush in the debates of 2004 said, "people know him well.  He's 20-25 points behind in his home state... People who know him the best like him the least."

Democrats were so fond of their state's governor, so impressed at his ability to reach across the partisan aisle, that Romney (facing near-certain defeat) decided not to run for re-election and instead focused on running for president.  Obama might have mentioned that his opponent is not even contesting his home state and, as Kerry pointed out, it has been decades (56 years, to be precise) since a sitting or former governor lost the state he served as governor.

Massachusetts is a liberal and Democratic state.  But the former governor is running behind the sitting president also in all its bordering states, Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire.  Barack Obama should have told Mitt Romney that all the states which best knew Mitt Romney are the most eager to vote against him.




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A Throwback


History.com summarizes

"McCarthyism," as the hunt for communists in the United States came to be known during the 1950s, did untold damage to many people's lives and careers, had a muzzling effect on domestic debate on Cold War issues, and managed to scare millions of Americans. McCarthy, however, located no communists and his personal power collapsed in 1954 when he accused the Army of coddling known communists. Televised hearings of his investigation into the U.S. Army let the American people see his bullying tactics and lack of credibility in full view for the first time, and he quickly lost support. The U.S. Senate censured him shortly thereafter and he died in 1957.

So what does this have in common with Monday's showdown in Boca Raton (or, as the "in crowd" or "cool" ones have it, "Boca") or the 2012 presidential campaign generally?

There is one thing.  The website explains also

During a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator Joseph McCarthy (Republican-Wisconsin) claims that he has a list with the names of over 200 members of the Department of State that are "known communists." The speech vaulted McCarthy to national prominence and sparked a nationwide hysteria about subversives in the American government.

Speaking before the Ohio County Women's Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator McCarthy waved before his audience a piece of paper. According to the only published newspaper account of the speech, McCarthy said that, "I have here in my hand a list of 205 [State Department employees] that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department." In the next few weeks, the number fluctuated wildly, with McCarthy stating at various times that there were 57, or 81, or 10 communists in the Department of State. In fact, McCarthy never produced any solid evidence that there was even one communist in the State Department.

There are only two politicians, one of them Newt Gingrich, who with a national profile effectively combine the charisma and demagoguery of the late Senator from Wisconsin.  The other is the former part-term governor of Alaska, who responded to the third presidential debate in part by declaring

I think President Obama certainly showed his desperation tonight with not only his mannerisms, with all of his interruptions and seemingly angered responses, but his false charges," she said. "And he is trying to make up for lost ground, of course, because the president’s lies are catching up with him. It’s unfortunate that Gov. Romney didn’t have time to answer all the false charges. I made a couple of pages of a list of the false charges.

Palin made it easy for us, even saying "I made a couple of pages a list" rather than "I recorded two pages of false charges."    It was worth noticing also that though she carved out for herself an extremely conservative persona, Palin was effusive in her praise of a candidate who last night sounded more like the late George McGovern (minus the integrity, decency, knowledge, or war record) than Ronald(6) Wilson(6) Reagan(6), Bob Dole, or even George Herbert Walker Bush.

Unfortunately, McCarthyism "did untold damage to many people's lives and careers, had a muzzling effect on domestic debate on Cold War issues, and managed to scare millions of Americans" before the Wisconsin Senator made the cardinal sin of (unjustly) attacking a branch of the United States military.   But the analogy breaks down here.   Sarah Palin has little impact because she has virtually no credibility.  Were she more than a curiosity with a cult-like following, she would have herself run for her party's nomination instead of selling out for a huge payday writing books, giving speeches, and gabbing in front of the Fox News cameras.



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China And The Candidates- Perfect Together


That would be Osama, Mr. Schieffer.   When Bob Schieffer asked President Obama and Mitt Romney at the third presidential debate (transcript here) about Pakistan, he got a little (to be generous) tongue-tied (emphasis mine):

All right. Let me go to Governor Romney because you talked about Pakistan and what needs to be done there. General Allen, our commander in Afghanistan, says that Americans continue to die at the hands of groups who are supported by Pakistan. We know that Pakistan has arrested the doctor who helped us catch Obama's — bin Laden. It still provides safe haven for terrorists, yet we continue to give Pakistan billions of dollars. Is it time for us to divorce Pakistan?

The question provided Mitt Romney yet another opportunity to reverse course on a position he previously held, as well as an additional chance to agree with the President.   His response included "And I — I don't blame the administration for the fact that the relationship with Pakistan is strained. We had to go into Pakistan; we had to go in there to get Osama bin Laden. That was the right thing to do."

Although Barack Obama rarely agreed with his opponent (and had little reason to do so), he concurred in one notable instance.  After Romney responded to a query about his pledge to declare mainland China a currency manipulator, the President began by stating "Well, Governor Romney's right. You are familiar with jobs being shipped overseas, because you invested in companies that were shipping jobs overseas. And, you know, that's your right. I mean, that's how our free market works."

Mentioning "you invested in companies that were shipping jobs overseas" is weak, obviously reluctant, criticism, especially when your opponent has been financially immersed with the Communist Chinese (oops, sorry, Chinese).   The motive for suspension of use of Bain Capital by the Obama campaign is becoming clearer.     Barack Obama simply does not agree with the line of attack.  Shipping jobs overseas may be a part of the free market, but the Democratic candidate- the Democratic candidate- does not have to applaud Mitt Romney's decision to make tens of millions of dollars by sending American jobs abroad.   And that is precisely what the President argued:  "And, you know, that's your right.  I mean, that's how our free market works."  Hooray for the free market and the loss of middle-class jobs.

This is hardly a mere oversight.   Obama's support for the transfer of jobs to other nations, primarily to Asia and especially to mainland China, appears to be the reason he went through 90 minutes in the third presidential debate without once mentioning the word Bain or the phrase offshore accounts.   And 90 minutes in the second presidential debate.  And 90 minutes in the first presidential debate.  It may be, further, why he did not call Romney out on the likelihood that, if his record is any guide, the former private equity manager will not declare China a currency manipulator on Day 1, Day 100, or Day 1461.





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In Principle



There were a couple of curious elements in one of the responses of Republican Marco Rubio on Sunday's This Week with George Stephanopoulos.   Defending his party's presidential nominee on his stance on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the Florida Senator remarked "I think anyone who is working out there and making a living -- if you're the most qualified person for the job, you should be able to get paid, you should get paid as much as your male counterpart.  Everyone agrees with that principle."

It might be nitpicking to point out that Rubio recognized agreement with "with that principle," rather than "with that,"  and that he couldn't quite say "Mitt Romney (and I)," grudgingly employing the generic "everyone."

Clearly, though, Rubio (who voted against the LLA) and, more importantly, nominee Romney, oppose the legislation.   Presumably, Mitt Romney has no objection to an employer choosing to pay women equally to men.  But if the employer is able to keep the pay inequity hidden long enough, he (or, less likely, she) is in the clear, with the employee unable to file an action alleging wage discrimination.

Further, there is question whether Romney even agrees with the "principle" that a woman should get paid as much as her male counterpart.   Asked at the second presidential debate specifically about "pay equity," Romney remarked (in full)

Thank you. And (sic) important topic, and one which I learned a great deal about, particularly as I was serving as governor of my state, because I had the chance to pull together a cabinet and all the applicants seemed to be men.

And I -- and I went to my staff, and I said, "How come all the people for these jobs are -- are all men." They said, "Well, these are the people that have the qualifications." And I said, "Well, gosh, can't we -- can't we find some -- some women that are also qualified?"

And -- and so we -- we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.
I went to a number of women's groups and said, "Can you help us find folks," and they brought us whole binders full of women.

I was proud of the fact that after I staffed my Cabinet and my senior staff, that the University of New York in Albany did a survey of all 50 states, and concluded that mine had more women in senior leadership positions than any other state in America.

Now one of the reasons I was able to get so many good women to be part of that team was because of our recruiting effort. But number two, because I recognized that if you're going to have women in the workforce that sometimes you need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school.

She said, I can't be here until 7 or 8 o'clock at night. I need to be able to get home at 5 o'clock so I can be there for making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said fine. Let's have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you.

We're going to have to have employers in the new economy, in the economy I'm going to bring to play, that are going to be so anxious to get good workers they're going to be anxious to hire women. In the -- in the last women have lost 580,000 jobs. That's the net of what's happened in the last four years. We're still down 580,000 jobs. I mentioned 31/2 million women, more now in poverty than four years ago.

What we can do to help young women and women of all ages is to have a strong economy, so strong that employers that are looking to find good employees and bringing them into their workforce and adapting to a flexible work schedule that gives women opportunities that they would otherwise not be able to afford.

This is what I have done. It's what I look forward to doing and I know what it takes to make an economy work, and I know what a working economy looks like. And an economy with 7.8 percent unemployment is not a real strong economy. An economy that has 23 million people looking for work is not a strong economy.

An economy with 50 percent of kids graduating from college that can't finds a job, or a college level job, that's not what we have to have.

Whatever Marco Rubio is trying to sell us, there is nothing in there about equal pay.  Quite the contrary- Romney applauds employers who grant women job flexibility, which might result in lower pay.   On follow-up, the former governor stated "I'm going to help women in America get good work by getting a stronger economy and by supporting women in the workforce."

No one knows what "supporting women in the workforce" means, though apparently it does not mean requiring employers to pay women on an equal basis to men.   No doubt as President, however, Romney would be in favor of "a stronger economy," particularly compared to the current crop of GOP members of Congress, who have sabotaged President Obama's every effort to strengthen the economy.



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