Misunderstanding Mittens
I wanted to elaborate on what I think is the biggest error being made by Greenwald and Taibbi — namely, the idea that Mitt Romney is a “centrist.”
It’s worth noting here that the original Gush-Bore argument was made by a variety of people across the ideological spectrum, with a presumably wide variety of evaluations of the Clinton/Gore record. Not just Naderites but prominent centrists and Manhattan liberals advanced the argument that the 2000 election was a boring affair with nothing much at stake, helping lead us on the road to Iraq, Sam Alito, massive upper-class tax cuts, and many other terrible and highly consequential things that wouldn’t have happened with Al Gore in the White House. That people are making the same transparently foolish error with a Democratic candidate who has governed to the left of Clinton/Gore and a Republican running to the right of George W. Bush is mind-boggling. But the key error, like last time, seems being inexplicably suckered by the fake “moderation” of the Republican candidate.
To start with the trivial and unknowable question first, I have no idea why so many people are convinced that the Romney who was governor of Massachusetts is the “real” Romney. If I had to guess, I would speculate that instinctively Romney is substantially more conservative on social issues than Reagan or either Bush and no better on economic issues. But, anyway, even if I’m wrong about that it’s completely irrelevant. He’ll govern as the head of a very right-wing Republican coalition and will be working with a Republican Congress that will send him plenty of terrible legislation. He’ll be working with the Republican foreign policy apparatus that will be urging him to attack Iran and will probably succeed. We don’t even want to think about what will happen to the federal courts. What Romney really thinks about this stuff is beside the point. John Tyler isn’t a successful leadership model for someone who wants to run for re-election.
And for that matter, it’s not correct to say that Romney’s record as governor as Massachusetts is meaningfully “moderate.” Sure, it was moderate for a national Republican…but for a Republican who wanted statewide office in Massachusetts it was about as wingnutty as he could get away with. As a commenter astutely noted, Ronald Reagan had by national standards a relatively moderate record as governor of California. Who cares? If you think Romney will govern as a moderate because of his record as governor, your number must be very valuable to people who sell lists to telemarketers.
There’s nothing “centrist” about Mitt Romney, 2012 Republican presidential candidate. He’s be worse-to-far worse than the Obama administration on most issues and better on absolutely none. If you’re bored by the 2012 elections that’s your privilege (in more ways than one), but if you think the stakes are trivial you’re out of your mind.
…By the way, I should mention Rob found a Matt Stoller classic where he pledges his life savings and house to Bernie Maddoff: “Trying to figure out whether I think [Romney winning] would be modestly good or modestly bad. Romney’s more liberal than ppl think.” Jeez, at least Bush had to make some vague gestures towards moderation to convince the rubes. Anyway, if you think that 1896 was a huge win for progressive politics, you will indeed love the Romney administration.
Has Romney even bothered to fake moderation? It seems to me that it is entirely imaginary moderation. I haven’t paid too much attention since the charade of a competitive primary ended. Did he shake the etch-a-sketch yet?
No — apparently he doesn’t even have to pretend to convince people that he’s really a “calculating centrist.”
The only reason people mistake him for a centrist is because he has a record of supporting both sides of any given issue at any given time.
Rather than pin him down to figuring out what his views are on a given subject, its safer to just assume he is full of shit.
Mistah Charlie Pierce found something full of win.
No, it’s because a bunch of people who lived through 8 years of Bush with no worries say so. In the end, those people are simply liars.
For some reason they confuse “totally unprincipled” for centrist.
Well, Obama says yes:
Trying to have it both ways is not the same as faking moderation. Romney’s argument is that Romney is responsible for the auto industry recovery (because Obama went for a managed bankruptcy), but Romney also baldly asserts that things would have been a lot better if the financing were left entirely up to private capital.
Trying to have it both ways is not the same as faking moderation.
No, but in the right light it can be taken that way. Bush made a deliberate effort to blur the policy differences between him and Gore, and lots of commentators let him do that. It was a major component of the Gush-Bure narrative.
Has Romney even bothered to fake moderation?
He didn’t have to. Not being Newt Gingrich or Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry or Rick Santorum was all he needed.
True, when you are, by far, the least rightwing batshit crazy extremist in the room, you almost look like a liberal.
because i think any argument that there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between them is deranged, i haven’t stirred myself to read the arguments themselves.
but scott, surely you are kidding: surely it isn’t possible that any part of the argument is that romney is a centrist?
in 2012 people are making this argument?
you are kidding, right, or at least exaggerating, or something?
Direct quote from Taibbi, directly quoted with approval by Glenn. Amazing, but true.
As long as the economy doesn’t take a nose-dive between now and then, we probably are ok. But I confess between Jamie Dimon and the Euro-banksters, I worry.
Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got
I’m still, I’m still Jenny from the block
Used to have a little, now I have a lot
No matter where I go, I know where I came from (South-Side Bronx!)
Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got
I’m still, I’m still Jenny from the block
Used to have a little, now I have a lot
No matter where I go, I know where I came from (South-Side Bronx!)
If you assume a Democratic Congress, Mitt Romney almost certainly would govern as a centrist, but that would be a highly-implausible assumption, especially during his first two years – and the first two years of a presidency are usually the most active legislatively.
On domestic policy, presidents in times of divided government don’t really have any choice. But he could still do plenty of non-centrist damage elsewhere.
Right you are. He could very well pull a Nixon, and sign whatever Congress puts in front of him, in exchange for a free hand on foreign policy.
The problem here is that there’s virtually no evidence Romney has any ideas about or interest in foreign policy.
That’s even worse. Nixon was at least engaged.
Romney’s foreign policy will be made by people who think Michael Ledeen is a bit to soft for their liking.
Nixon was a paranoid, petty, rat bastard, but he was neither stupid nor ignorant nor uninformed. Compared to Shrub2 and Romney, Tricky was the Einstein of GOBP preznits.
There is a group of American commentators, some actually quite intelligent, whose basic subconscious posture is that they WANT things to get much worse, because it makes them feel better somehow. It’s victimhood syndrome masked with cynicism.
Heighten the contradictions!
Well, it gives them something to write about.
Even granting arguendo that Romney is a super-secret decoder ring centrist – why would he give in to those dark urges in his first term, or ever? If he were elected it would not be for centrism. If he betrayed the hard right they would eat his fucking heart.
I just don’t get how Glenn or any other “pox on both their houses” commentator thinks political incentives work.
If he betrayed the hard right they would eat his fucking heart.
Wait, Mitt Romney has a heart? Is it a transplant like Cheney’s?
If he betrayed the hard right they would eat his fucking heart.
I thought zombies ate brains.
Wow, shots at “Mahattan liberals” and Greenwald’s “privilege.” What are you, a factory worker?
This is something of a semantic disagreement. GG calls the difference trivial in order to underscore the fact that we have a moderate conservative candidate (friendly to Wall Street, militaristic, hostile to (many) civil liberties, supportive of cuts in Social Security and Medicare, and a very conservative candidate, worse on all those issues. Whether those difference look trivial or huge depends on how far back you stand. Taking into consideration the giant space to Obama’s left, you can reasonably call these differences small. What you can’t reasonably do is discount the significance of those differences, and Greenwald doesn’t. As he said below:
Give it a rest David. Glenn hardly needs you to run interference for him, or to provide spin for his ludicrous statements.
What are you, a factory worker?
I’m not; I’m in a relatively privileged position. I just try not to say things are trivial because they don’t affect me personally. My point is simply that it’s a hell of a lot easier for Frank Rich to say that an election doesn’t matter than it is for someone of less status. Literally 0% of African American women voted for Nader in 2000 — heighten-the-contradictions arguments rarely persuade the people upon whom the contradictions will actually be heightened.
And, again, whatever you would like American political culture to be, based on the actually existing one Obama isn’t a conservative. There isn’t any kind of majority coalition that could be put together significantly to Obama’s left.
“And, again, whatever you would like American political culture to be, based on the actually existing one Obama isn’t a conservative.’
The wisdom of a noted Italian philosopher might illustrate this tendency:
Mark it zero!
I don’t understand the connection between these two sentences. The fact that there isn’t any kind of majority coalition that could be put together significantly to Obama’s left (which is both true and sad) has no bearing whatsoever on how liberal or conservative Obama is.
The fact that American politics have been moving steadily rightward for the last thirty years doesn’t mean that someone who is conservative suddenly gets to be a liberal just because they now represent the leftmost edge of feasible policymaking.
Having said that, I myself believe Obama falls on the liberal side of the ledger and is largely constrained by Congress in what he can get done. But my broader point remains.
Liberal and conservative are at least in part relative terms. Obama is on the left of the actually existing American political spectrum.
That’s… true, I guess, but I only really use them as relative terms when I’m doing a direct comparison. This might be pedantic hair-splitting, but I think the distinction is important; I think “Obama is to the left of his party” carries a much different set of baggage, implications, and implicit assumptions than “Obama is a leftist.”
If I’m not doing a straight-up comparison, I like to be a lot more absolute about this.
This may be because I don’t want to see the positions of the current Democratic party enshrined as “leftist” with anything further out derided as “radical.” I suspect that battle has already been lost, but…
Obama is, by American standards, a moderate liberal. He’s obviously not a “leftist.” So I think we essentially agree.
One of Scott’s pet projects for the last three years has been to deny even the possibility of any political activity to Obama’s left and to anathematize anyone advocating it. All this straw-manning of Taibbi and Greenwald about whether or not they think Romney is a secret centrist conceals Scott’s essential objection to them. They would like a more radical critique of our “actually existing” political culture, and Scott is uninterested in anything like that and finds it distasteful. So when Murc says that the two sentences are unconnected, he’s completely right. The first is a truism, while the second is Scott’s preference masquerading as a statement of fact.
One of Scott’s pet projects for the last three years has been to deny even the possibility of any political activity to Obama’s left and to anathematize anyone advocating it.
Yeah, no. Not all politics is electoral politics.
But ideology isn’t relative, or not all relative. Even if 100 percent of pols support a conservative position, it’s still a conservative position. If your point is that Obama is more or less in the middle of his party, I would agree, and therein lies the problem. The center is moving steadily right.
The problem isn’t even that Obama is in the MIDDLE of his party on a lot of things. He’s to the LEFT of his party.
That sentence is an indictment of the Democratic Party, by the way. Not praise for Obama.
Frank Rich did not represent Manhattan liberals. He was one of the those establishment media types who waged “the war on Gore”, as Bob Somerby puts it, ably abetted by the rest of the hallowed New York Times, WaPo and MSNBC crew. They were in part taking out their anger aginst Clinton on Gore.
I’m not saying all, or even many, Manhattan liberals were Gush-Bore people. I’m saying Bush-Gorism came in many flavors.
I’m not attacking your perception. My point is that the political media deliberately ignored real policy differences to make it a “who do you want to have a beer with?” election and trash Gore personally.
Also, you took a swipe at Greenwald’s alleged privilege. I have no idea what his bank account looks like, but I do know he spends the bulk of his time writing about abuses that impact some of the most vulnerable and marginalized people on earth. As a matter of fact, Obama does fabulously well among Frank Rich liberals, who aren’t directly affected by those abuses. That said, there’s no good reason to assume that their political positions — or Greenwald’s — flow from their privilege.
It wasn’t Greenwald who said that this election will be boring. At any rate, I maintain that thinking that elections don’t really matter — especially the Joe Klein idea that elections should be sources of entertainment, which Taibbi seems to embrace, at least in part — is an ornament of frippery.
Actually, in Tiabbi’s last book, he laments the degeneration of the presidential campaign in the direction of a cable news inspired reality show. He is not celebrating it; he lamenting the silliness.
If you consider the policies BHO actually has control of (hiring Wall Street insiders as advisors, prosecuting torturers, investigating financial fraud, expansion of drone attacks, clamping down on whistleblowers, prosecuting marijuana dispensers, etc.), he is most certainly a moderate Republican.
That the Dems have become a party of corporate cronies/whores over the past thirty years is the sad state of our politics, but not a reason to revel in the president’s mastery of that ever-rightward moving climate – which in any case produces Republican-lite legislation that won’t solve the problems that need addressing (but for which Dems will receive the blame.)
Panglossian hacks can herald these bills as situational triumphs all they want, but I’d prefer a legislative stalemate with vigorous law enforcement rather than what we have now. In fact, ignoring the law-breaking of members of one’s own political class or economic status because they’re particularly savvy or have been well-advised seems the very definition of a republican.
I will freely admit that if I had to pick between the legislative accomplishments of the last three/four years, and the Obama Administration doing its damn job with regard to ethical law enforcement, I’d have to think really hard about it.
I’d probably come down narrowly on the side of the legislation (the stimulus, inadequate as it was, probably, in conjunction with the auto bailout, stopped us from Great Depression 2.0) because of the large amount of human suffering involved, but it would be wrenching.
If you consider the policies BHO actually has control of
I know — civil rights lawsuits, new EPA regulations, Sonia Sotomayor on the Supreme Court, requiring contraception be included on medical plans, refusing to defend DOMA; it’s like a third term of George W. Bush.
Of course, jeer9 doesn’t actually give a shit about policy; he’s said (after months of pretending to care that Obama didn’t use the BULLY PULPIT) that by definition any health care bill that can pass is not worth passing, and the uninsured can go fuck themselves. He cares about criticizing Obama, so every issue that Obama is bad on is a top priority and nothing else counts.
Of course, jeer9 doesn’t actually give a shit about policy; he’s said (after months of pretending to care that Obama didn’t use the BULLY PULPIT) that by definition any health care bill that can pass is not worth passing, and the uninsured can go fuck themselves.
Nice re-phrasing of my views, professor. Citations, please.
HeLemieux cares aboutcriticizingpraising Obama, so every issue that Obama isbadgood on is a top priority and nothing else counts.Cite here. You have never had any substantive argument against it, but you do cite the fact that conservative Dems vote for it. And since you can’t pass legislation without conservative Dems, you’re saying it’s just better to have increasing numbers of uninsured until a social democrat becomes the median vote in the Senate.
Anyway, I’m sure you can point to lots of comments where you said that issuing executive orders about contractor policies was the most important LBGT issue before last month..
I have argued several times that the ACA was an industry-written bill (and there is quite a bit of evidence pointing in that direction) and that its actual implementation down the road places enormous power in the hands of insurance companies who will certainly abuse it (which is why it won’t go fully on-line until 2014). I don’t believe I ever said “the uninsured can go fuck themselves” but apparently opposition to the bill implies that. You also seem to believe it’s the greatest bill since the passage of civil rights legislation. Only time will tell, though I don’t think the odds favor the trimmers and paper-pushers.
What I am saying is that I’d prefer a legislative stalemate with vigorous law enforcement to what we have now. That’s pretty clear language.
I wish I had the power to predict every controversy to appear each week, but I don’t. I do think, however, that I can figure out the proper ethical response. You, on the other hand, were certain that the ACA would never be challenged in the SC so getting on the record in the prognostication game is probably a custom you should shy away from.
Ohhh, and by the way, Big Fish is an incredibly great film about the search for truth, almost Melvillian in its understanding of language, personal anecdote, and history, which the alienated journalist son, who rigidly adheres to facts and logic, can’t comprehend about life or his yarn-spinning father. But then given your temperament, you were predisposed to dislike it.
1)That’s not actually an argument that it’s not substantially better than the status quo (as opposed to a “great piece of legislation,” which nobody is claiming.) Which specific parts of the legislation do you oppose? How is the status quo better? Was the New Deal all worthless because it made lots of awful substantive concessions to segregationists? And waiting until the first time in history in which there’s a liberal median vote to pass legislation means that you are, in fact, telling the uninsured to go fuck themselves.
2)It’s not a question of “predicting controversies.” If the issue was important, it should have been on your radar. You didn’t care about it until last month for the same reason you don’t care about the many LBGT issues Obama has been excellent on — you don’t give a shit about the policy; you care about attacking Obama.
3)”What I am saying is that I’d prefer a legislative stalemate with vigorous law enforcement to what we have now.” I don’t agree, but anyway under Romney you’d get the same lack of enforcement and terrible legislation and terrible executive branch actions in the areas where Obama is better so they arbitrarily don’t count. Since this is a false choice, it’s really dumb to leave the stuff where Obama is good out of the discussion…unless your primary interest is attacking Obama.
4)”You, on the other hand, were certain that the ACA would never be challenged in the SC.” I absolutely never said that it wouldn’t be challenged, and I never even said that I was “certain” that it would be upheld (although it certainly more likely than I would have thought.) But, anyway, if you actually cared about policy this would be an excellent example of the importance of presidential elections and the idiocy of Gush-Borism, but you don’t, so…
Single payer can be achieved by other means. The Germans and Swiss have done this. People like jeer do not judge policy on its merits but come to conclusions first and then pick out evidence to support their thesis. Their is nothing inherent in single payer that precludes it from corruption. You cant get universal health care through without buying out the stakeholders and their senators (including progressive ones).
1.) Your certainty that it is an improvement over the status quo is, as ever, awe-inspiring. Regulating the law, however, will be a bureaucratic nightmare. Even in friendly states, establishing insurance exchanges will be a complicated job involving multiple state agencies. Monitoring insurance companies will be even harder. The prohibitions against abuses can almost certainly be skirted, and insurers have a strong incentive to do so.
As state exchanges falter, individuals and businesses could be faced with prohibitively high premiums or punishing fines. The most vulnerable Americans will be those in their 50s and early 60s, who will have to pay the highest premiums and are most likely to have chronic illnesses.
2.)Sort of laughable. In one of your spats with Greenwald, you protested that you were unaware of the particular iniquity that had been perpetrated by the administration which he’d pointed out but that you certainly would have condemned it (in a terse one-line post, no doubt) if you’d been aware. Apparently, I as an occasional commenter at this site should be held to a similarly high standard and feel obliged to compliment every wonderful thing the president does (rare though they might be.)I will work on my clapping, if not louder, then occasionally. (The bailout was very good.)
3.) My primary interest is in moving the Dems left which again is not likely to ever occur under any circumstances during my lifetime – unless a coalition of organic farmers, co-opt food stores, and LGBT activists someday match the operational and electoral pressure that corporate billionaires exert over our politicians. Romney will certainly be much worse (though I still believe, his incompetence/venality notwithstanding, BHO wins). If the president should, by some horrific twist of fate, lose, I do look forward to the left, and not his poor decisions, being blamed.
4.) I believe you admitted as much in an earlier thread, though I could be mistaken.
While the analogy of an East European dissident in 1985 and an American progressive in 2012 may seem at first glance quite a stretch (their loss of privacy, suffering in prison, and sense of powerlessness within the system were far greater), the condition of ineffectuality which strives to be more than a witness was once remarked upon by an interesting thinker.
A dissident runs the risk of becoming ridiculous only when he transgresses the limits of his natural existence and enters into the hypothetical realm of real power, that is, in effect, into the realm of sheer speculation. For only then does he risk becoming a utopian. Here he accepts the perspective of real power without having any genuine power whatever; he enters the world of tactics incapable of tactical maneuver and without being either licensed or compelled to do so by real power; he leaves the world of service to truth and attempts to smuggle his truth into the world of service to power without being able or even willing to serve it himself. He attempts to go on speaking the truth outside the world of truth; standing outside the world of power, he attempts to speculate about power or to organize it. He trades the respectable role of a champion for the somewhat grotesque role of a self-appointed adviser to the mighty. In the role of a dreamer, he was not ludicrous, just as a tactician is not ludicrous in a tactician’s role. He becomes ludicrous only when he becomes a dreamer playing at tactics. A dreamer playing at tactics is a minister without a ministry, a general without an army, a president without a republic. Alienated from his role as a witness of history, yet unwelcome in the role of its organizer, he finds himself in a strange vacuum – outside the credibility of power and outside the credibility of truth. Vaclav Havel
The Anatomy of a Reticence
1) Yeah, I’d say Scott nailed you here. If that’s the best you can do in discussing the policy ramifications of the ACA, it’s pretty clear that you don’t give a shit about it one way or the other.
2) If a brief filed in a SCOTUS case in which Scott condemned the decision is really the best you can do, I once again you just go away and find something more productive to do, like holding a green party rally or something.
3) No, no it’s not. Your primary concern is complaining that everyone else doesn’t agree with you 100% of the time and lamenting that, as a result, the Democratic Party will never let you write their platform, as you pretty much say here. You aren’t any more interested in actually pushing the Democrats to the left than you are in becoming conversant in the actual policy of the PPACA.
4) I think the most recent edition added a chapter on the pathetic soul who voices his dissent by trolling internet comment sections.
1. Yes, he nailed me. The ACA is a vast improvement over the status quo and in 2017 or 2018 after it’s been fully implemented for three or four years this fact will be made clear. DADT worked out exactly the way Clinton intended, too. But then don’t let the indeterminacy retard your cheerleading.
2.)Thanks for letting me know who should be allowed to voice their opinion on the intertubes. Lemieux’s point is similar to the one he often ridicules from commenters: why doesn’t X write more about subjects I’m interested in; why doesn’t commenter A examine issues that I believe are relevant?
3.) Thanks for sharing with me what my main concerns are. You would know the irritation experienced by by someone who isn’t agreed with 100% of the time. I am familiar with your disputes on this site and they rival jfL’s.
4.) Havel’s a bit above your reading level. Sorry about that.
1.) Your certainty that it is an improvement over the status quo is, as ever, awe-inspiring. Regulating the law, however, will be a bureaucratic nightmare. Even in friendly states, establishing insurance exchanges will be a complicated job involving multiple state agencies. Monitoring insurance companies will be even harder. The prohibitions against abuses can almost certainly be skirted, and insurers have a strong incentive to do so.
As state exchanges falter, individuals and businesses could be faced with prohibitively high premiums or punishing fines. The most vulnerable Americans will be those in their 50s and early 60s, who will have to pay the highest premiums and are most likely to have chronic illnesses.
And the status quo is better than the PPACA in this respect how? Are you seriously arguing that fewer people will be covered under the PPACA although no expert believes this to be true?
I’d ask you why you’re indifferent about an extremely important Medicaid expansion, the extension of children on insurance to the age of 26, the ban on denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions — but we all know you don’t give a shit.
And you don’t give a shit about all of the people who will most certainly get screwed in much greater numbers down the road. But that’s a problem to be rectified later, like the Bush tax cuts. I am pleased at the greater coverage, but at what cost? As I said, if this bill turns out to be an unmitigated triumph in five years, I will eat some humble pie.
And you don’t give a shit about all of the people who will most certainly get screwed in much greater numbers down the road.
This doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. How will anybody be better off under the status quo? Why does this trump the certain gains achieved by the Medicare expansion? You seem to be comparing the PPACA to the French health care system rather than our actually existing system, although since you don’t seem to know anything about the PPACA it’s of course hard to say.
The legislation has some good things in it, but it remains a deeply flawed industry-written bill that will ultimately serve to maximize profits of insurance companies and corporations while pushing high-risk patients into poorer forms of care.
There are a series of interlocking provisions in PPACA that make it possible for employers to “dump” high-risk employees onto the state-run exchanges scheduled to commence operations in 2014. Employers thus encourage high-risk employees to enroll in the exchanges, while keeping low-risk employees in EBC[employer-based coverage]. The result of such adverse selection will be cheaper EBC and more expensive exchange-based coverage than would otherwise be the case.
As a consequence, there is a substantial prospect that PPACA will lead some, and perhaps many, employers to implement a targeted dumping strategy designed to induce low-risk employees to retain [EBC] but incentivize high-risk employees to voluntarily opt out of ESI [employer sponsored insurance] and instead purchase insurance through the exchanges that PPACA establishes to organize individual insurance markets. Although PPACA and other federal laws prohibit employers from excluding high-risk employees from EBC, these laws do little to prevent employers from designing their plans and benefits to incentivize high-risk employees to voluntarily seek coverage elsewhere. If successful, such a targeted dumping strategy would allow employers and low-risk employees to avoid the costs associated with providing coverage to high-risk employees, thereby lowering (perhaps substantially) the costs of coverage under the employer’s group plan.
And PPACA does indeed create a sizeable incentive for employers to engage in RCBD [risk classification by design] on a more comprehensive and aggressive basis. RCBD only “works” if the targeted high-risk employees prefer the exchanges to EBC. While there is a the statutory promise to deliver comprehensive coverage and a range of providers (and assumptions that this promise will be delivered on), Medicaid makes similar promises, and everyone knows how that has worked out. If you think having Medicaid gives you access to health care services, call a dozen physicians’ offices, tell them you have Medicaid, and see how soon they will give you an appointment, if at all. Similar difficulties are starting to emerge for Medicare.
Health reform is unsustainable if it dramatically increases costs [whether on-budget or off-budget], regardless of whether those increased costs result from the enrollment of disproportionately high-risk workers in the exchanges or because many more low- and moderate-income workers receive more expensive subsidies to purchase coverage.
PPACA has multiple objectives, but creating entirely separate risk pools was not one of them. As such, one could readily view the simultaneous parallel pathway problem identified here as a feature and not a bug.
Self-insured employers will respond to the political gaming that gave us PPACA with some gaming of their own — making them and their employees better off and the taxpayers worse off, while also destabilizing health reform and undermining the willingness of the American public to continue underwriting progressive endeavors of this sort.
Those are all good and worthy policy goals Obama deserves credit for, Scott, but they’re very much low-hanging fruit, and, speaking for myself, and not to denigrate the impact of those policies (especially Sotomayor) I consider nearly all of them to pale in importance to jailing the war criminals and banksters who continue to walk free amongst us, and to rolling back the civil liberties abuses that continue to be entrenched as standard operating procedure.
I dunno, I know my priorities aren’t the same as other peoples priorities. But I genuinely do feel that the Obama Administration is either gun-shy or has legitimately bad viewpoints when it comes to what I consider the huge, pressing issues the Executive Branch has primary control over.
Whether they’re “low-hanging fruit” or not, they’re not the policies of any Republican. Of course, the insulation of banking elites and torturers is a genuinely bipartisan issue, although on the first issue part of the bipartsian problem was awful Clinton administration legislation that makes successful prosecutions much more difficult. I also don’t think the fact that Obama has actually stopped the torture is a trivial issue.
Breaking news! Torture is not occurring at Bagram!
From Mr. Pierce today:
If the BBC’s reporting this week is correct, then the U.S. military — and, by extension, the U.S. government — has been caught lying once again as to what is being done to other human beings in the name of the people of the United States. And it’s becoming very plain that we have no real objection not only to the lying, but to the various exercises in inhumanity that the lying is meant to protect.
The president of the United States has demonstrated very little real interest in revealing what his predecessors were about, and even less interest in punishing them for their crimes, and he has suffered no perceivable political damage as a result. We are told now, by him, and by his underlings, that the United States no longer tortures, but there is no real reason any more to trust the United States government on this score, no matter who may be temporarily in charge of it. We are a constitutional, self-governing republic that has decided to torture. Period. It would be good if we could look ourselves in the face and admit it to ourselves. At the very least, we could give ourselves a break from our own tattered sanctimony.
I am trying to find this article . The only one I found was from 2 years. Can you provide a link?
I too would like a link, jeer. I love me some Charles Pierce and that reads like an excerpt from a piece I’d very much like to read more of, especially since it would reflect him breaking a story that hasn’t appeared anywhere else today.
Is he regularly writing some place other than his blog?
Sorry. You are correct. That was from two years ago. It is no longer breaking news.
…and no comparable reports since then, which most people would interpret as an indication of a changed situation.
FWIW, I’d be more inclined to consider the “put the war criminals on trial” point in much more depth if it seemed that its proponents a) were more inclined to acknowledge that this would be a basically unprecedented act for an American administration to take and b) had a more coherent idea as to how the government would go about getting convictions. Otherwise, at first blush it seems like the administration would have wasted their political capital on a quixotic legal quest in lieu of getting healthcare reform and the lot.
So, people can break the law and get away with it, because a new administration took over?
That’s just weird
Well, people can break the law and get away with it because a) the state as a whole has never really shown any interest in punishing them for it, for whatever reason you may wish to imagine and b) it certainly isn’t clear that you could possibly win a conviction of the Bushies even if the DOJ made it their singular focus from day one of the administration.
Which isn’t to say that those are rock solid reasons against pursuing it anyway, but I find the apparent assumption that the two facts simply don’t actually exist to be, well, weird.
It’s not even the slightest bit weird. Name a President who was prosecuted by his successor.
I acknowledge it freely. What’s your point? I expect American administrations to do their jobs and become angry or outraged at their failure to do so in proportion to the degree of the failure.
Er… you put them in front of a jury and make your case?
I mean, maybe the jury nullifies. That’s always a possibility. But you don’t NOT put people who you have a preponderance of evidence against on trial because you’re afraid of the outcome.
One of the most important jobs of the executive branch is law enforcement. Sometimes the juries they get fall down on the job, but that doesn’t mean they should fall down on theirs.
Huh? That happens many times a day. Police and prosecutors decide not to go forward with a case because they don’t think they can win, many times a day, at every level of law enforcement.
That’s true, joe, but do they refuse to even arrest and investigate people who they have slam-dunk cases against, people who hold press conferences during which they proudly admit their crimes?
I mean, yes, sometimes prosecutors decline to press charges if they don’t think the evidence warrants it, or if they don’t think they can secure a conviction. This personally upsets me (I think if you have enough evidence, and are convinced, with your judgment as a prosecutor, that you’ve got the guilty party, you have an obligation to try and put a criminal behind bars even if the jury might acquit) but I do accept it as the cost of doing business.
And its important to note that when they actually CARE about something, prosecutors often don’t give a fuck about the possibility of acquittal or nullification. There are a number of locales in this country where juries regularly nullify people busted on drug charges (some parts of backcountry Kentucky are famous for it) and prosecutors go crazy with the trials anyway.
I would think that we should treat war criminals with, if anything, MORE severity than people growing pot.
Yes, frequently, when the case is disputed not because of a question of fact, but of whether the facts of the case meet the definition of a crime. Note that the word “disputed” here refers not to whether you, or the prosecutors, think the case meets the definition, but whether they think they can convince a jury to think that. The notion that United States vs. Cheney would be a “slam dunk” is, sadly, a reach.
And here, the “cost” would be not just the resources spent on the prosecution (the cost of pursuing a questionable case that ends in an acquittal on an ordinary charge), but the damage down to the political agenda, which is a bfd. 30,000+ people a year were dying because they didn’t have health care coverage in 2008, for instance. There are important things to get done in Washington.
The local cops and prosecutors don’t suffer any damage to their agenda or objectives when they lose a drug case. This is quite different from what we’re talking about here.
So, would it have been worth it to endanger the legislative and administration agenda to a certain unknown extent, in exchange for an unknown chance of convicting? I ultimately come down on the side that argues that it would have been, but it’s a close enough call that I don’t feel like calling down the wrath of the gods on those who came to the other conclusion.
Murc, You cannot treat an ex president as a common citizen: noblesse oblige.
no·blesse o·blige [noh-bles oh-bleezh; Fr. naw-bles aw-bleezh]
noun
the moral obligation of those of high birth, powerful social position, etc., to act with honor, kindliness, generosity, etc.
Appointments to agencies like the NLRB. . . .
Two other major problems with your point:
First, there is no such thing as “a moderate Republican” (at least, if we’re talking about national politicians elected to the House or the Senate, much less a Republican capable of winning the Republican presidential nomination). It’s true that Bush I was arguably a moderate Republican on a lot of things, but the days of Bush I are over.
Second, Obama hasn’t been a Republican on foreign policy in terms of war. He hasn’t started a bunch of new wars, and he actually managed to kill Bin Laden. Based on Bush II’s performance and the stated positions of McCain and most Republicans, it seems very likely that any Republican would have gotten us into a number of additional wars (boots on the ground in Libya, who knows what else in the Middle East, Iran, etc.). Moreover, everything about the Republican’s statements and priorities makes it very likely that they would never have devoted the resources to killing Bin Laden.
Personally, I care about civil liberties issues, but I care even more about Peace. Republicans are the pro-war, anti-peace party. Democrats are generally inclined not to go to war. Yes, drone attacks are bad, but all-out invasion and occupation are worse, in my view.
Hell, McCain was saber-rattling over GEORGIA
“I just try not to say things are trivial because they don’t affect me personally.”
Bingo.
I understand that on many of the civil liberty issues that Greenwald cares about (to the exclusion of all other considerations) there is less difference than say “funding for the poor”… but that’s still a ludicrous position. Yes, hopefully we all acknowledge that there will not be a massive rollback of the national security state if either one is elected. However isn’t it similarly obvious that some foreign adventurism is much more likely under a President Romney? I mean hes’s getting the band back together! Did 2001-2008 not happen?
And do judicial nominations matter at all from this civil liberty exclusive prospective? Is it really the case that I am supposed to believe Sotomayor is functionally equivalent to Alito?
As I mentioned in another thread, the fact that Obama has refused to nominate Noam Chomsky or Ramsey Clark (twice!) is proof of his conservatism. Shifting the Court to the left is meaningless in the face of all the useful point-making that he could have done.
He shifted the court to the right by failing to replace Stevens with someone more radical than Kagan.
I would have preferred someone better than Kagan, but precisely how “radical” the leftmost vote on the court is makes pretty much no difference to actual outcomes.
Nobody wants to address this, possibly because
Glenn Greenwald, Matt Stoller, Jane Hamsher and their lot are some kind of “progressive” blogging peers. Or perhaps they were really nice on the Townhouse list, or maybe they bought us all a drink at Netroots Nation or something.
But the bottom line is this: the reason Greenwald, Stoller, Hamsher and their acolytes say shit like this is that they LOATHE Barack Obama. They hate his guts. They despise him with the white hot fire of 1000 suns.
This isn’t really speculation anymore. This is years and years of obsessive and unwarranted anger, false stories, willful misinterpretations, refusals to correct errors, and alliances with and fluffing of republicans.
+1
So let me get this straight: Mitt Romney has Bush’s old foreign policy team and his old economic team but I’m suppose to believe he’s not going to govern that way?
Wasn’t the pure AWFULNESS of the Bush administration enough for us to fight this happening again tooth and claw? Who doesn’t remember this? Who would want a Bush third term? Are we having some sort of crazy party and I didn’t get an invite?
Look, y’all
There is one claim that Taibbi makes that can be refuted with empirical social science: that Mittens has only a slim to nil chance of winning the election. Obviously that’s not true, it’s harmful to say it’s true, and Taibbi should know better because he’s smart and honest enough to know better. I encourage criticism of him for that, up to and including making fun of him for not having the courage to let his baldness be shown in his byline picture if that’s what it takes for him to stop making that argument. Crucify him, whatever. Just get him to stop. Complete agreement there.
But all this stuff you’re slinging on him for saying “Romney is really a centrist” and that “Romney will govern as a centrist” and calling for his blood when he talks about ““how trivial are most of the differences between the two candidates” just fundamentally misunderstands what he’s arguing.
He’s saying the media coverage of this election, and the public stances and records of Obama and Romney which are most prominent in the media during this campaign, are not offering the kind of public debate about issues that was present in the media in recent presidential campaigns.
The media coverage of Bush vs Kerry let even the stupidest most unengaged person know that the election featured two candidates one of who thought “Iraq was/is fucking awful” and the other “Iraq is and will continue to be a shining beacon of hope”. Obama vs McCain featured candidates with diametrically opposed stances on most everything except Afghanistan – Iraq was great/100 more years/Barbara Iran vs No it wasn’t, it’s a disaster/let’s get out as soon as we responsibly can/what are you insane, let’s fundamentally alter healthcare it’s awful vs no it’s amazing, etc – diametrically opposed stances that the same ig’nant-ass person from 2004 knew about.
Taibbi’s point is that today’s average media consumer isn’t being presented with that same kind of clarity. Let’s keep rocking the imperial war machine vs yeah, only, more rockier, let’s focus on the deficit a little vs no a lot, let’s close tax loopholes vs let’s close those loopholes and lower rates, etc. There are important differences to these stances, but you have to be informed and engaged enough to understand and give a shit about them, which I don’t think I’m telling tales out of school when I say does not describe the majority of the public. And the media isn’t presenting these differences as having the huge implications that they actually do. The end result of all this is a campaign that bucks the recent trend of clear differences between the candidates that have momentous importance.
Taibbi tries to explain why he thinks this is, and part of that explanation is that the Republicans nominated a dude who is the worst possible guy to make the kinds of strong distinctions that were present in previous campaigns. “They used my health care plan as a model for their health care plan, but their health care plan sucks”. Of course there will likely be drastic differences in the health care system based on which way the elections go, but for some reason the media isn’t covering those drastic differences they way they did in 2008, and Taibbi thinks Romney’s nomination might have something to do with that.
Absolutely no where – let me repeat for emphasis absolutely no where – does he make a claim about what kind of policies Romney favors in his dark little heart, or what policy under his administration would likely look like. Taibbi’s conclusion even suggests that there are lots of important policies with drastic effects that are being fought over, but that those things don’t get highlighted in media coverage of a presidential race.
Long story short: Taibbi’s making an argument about media coverage of the presidential race, not about Romney’s policy preferences or likely administration policies. Don’t crucify him for things he’s not doing. He does make a stupid argument about Romney not being able to win. Crucify him for that.
Ding-ding-ding! We have the sole winner of the reading comprehension prize, and he is Ben at 4:40 pm, who did Scott and the rest of us the service of summarizing the main points of Taibbi rather than the straw-man version of those points.
That’s Taibbi describing his own views (unless you think that the MSM gives a shit about imperialism.”)
Taibbi, as a privileged straight white male, doesn’t give a shit about what a Romney Administration would do to people who don’t fit that description. As another privileged straight white male, I think that makes him an asshole.
Have you been reading Taibbi on the administration’s handling of Wall Street’s crimes? Tell me, what’s the difference between how Obama/Holder’s DOJ is failing to pursue financial crime and what Romney’s gang is proposing?
From time to time, one finds that there are large and significant areas where there is little to no difference. In the area that Taibbi has been working for the past few years, the current administration has been determined to be as Republican as possible.
Taibbi may or may not overlook quite a bit, but he got that one on the nose.
Well, shit. That changes everything.
To listen to people, one would think that American politics consists entirely of one issue – the one that you happen to care about.
What about abortion, contraception, taxes, unemployment insurance, health insurance, student loans, Medicare, Social Security, gay rights, minority rights, women’s rights, labor rights, the courts, and immigration? Obamney, right?
And for the record, on financial regulation, Romney supports repeal of Dodd-Frank, the Volcker Rule, and Sarbanes-Oxley.
I’m tired of hipster bullshit from people who can’t even be bothered to educate themselves on the “large and significant areas where there is little to no difference.” (sic)
And I’m tired of people who alibi the worst excesses of Democrats because they’re our guys. That’s as tribal as the Republicans. To ignore serious and substantive issues as as stupid as focussing on them to the exclusion of all else.
Defeat the Republicans, by all means, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that you won’t also have to round on the Dems to prevent large-scale destruction, as well. “On opponent at a time” is not the same as “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, and neither is “the opponent of the bad guy is the good guy”.
Except that nobody here is excusing the bad things the Democrats are doing because they’re our team. The fact that the Obama administration hasn’t prosecuted enough bankers doesn’t make Mitt Romney a centrist. Even on this issue Romney is far worse.
I am going to try and forgo personally insulting snark, which is hard to do since you used a misreading of a paragraph to demean the character and output of one of the few honest national reporters. But I will try nonetheless.
Your interpretation just doesn’t make any sense. The entire rest of the post is talking about how the media portrays presidential campaigns, and then he just decides to insert what he himself thinks about the campaigns without telling us he’s doing so? No I say No! sir, as Danny Dalton would say.
The only way to read that paragraph you quoted, both on its own and as a smaller part of a larger essay, is to read it thusly:
The “demented imperial logic” line means the same thing as “the continued functioning of the mutually beneficial cooperation between large economic interests and the national security state which uses opaque policy measures and secret legal justification to pursue largely the same goals in the name of largely the same interests and which has been a continuous thread running through the past three administrations.” That’s fairly banal and uncontroversial. Filtered through Taibbi-speak it sounds more provocative.
My bolded additions clarify what the paragraph means on its own terms. If you think Taibbi is expressing his own views, then you have to think that Taibbi is stating that he thinks the institutional power of the presidency is nigh unstoppable when he thinks about the Bush administration and as a fairly constrained and ineffectual captain of a bureaucratic supertanker when he thinks about the Obama presidency.
Reading the paragraph like this is insane. Someone who has more ability than a 9th grader to manipulate abstract thought would not say “I think the institutional power of the presidency is inherently unstoppable, because Bush; I think the institutional power of the presidency is inherently very weak, because Obama.”
Especially Taibbi, since we know he knows there are huge differences b/t the policies of Obama and Romney: because he’s not a tosser; because he’s written about those differences; and because he says there are major consequences to those differences at the end of this very post.
And, as previously stated, reading the paragraph your way makes no sense in the context of the rest of the article.
So! Sorry for the long comments, but lots of misunderstanding going on here.
WTF?
I guess you can “prove” all sorts of things if you pretend people said things they did not.
I’m making explicit the arguments Taibbi makes in that paragraph, since you were unable to parse them with the language he actually used.
I’da just summarized it in my own words, but that’s what I did in my first comment, and you didn’t seem to get it.
Gah
Two points to add:
1. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, peace be upon her, is a 79-year old cancer survivor.
2. Follow the apparatchiks. All the out-of-power Bushies are now signed up with the Romney campaign, and they’re all on the short lists to go back into power and go back to giving the federal government patronage back to ExxonMobil and Regents University.
I admire Greenwald’s constant attention to civil liberties, but saying that getting Romney in there is batsh-t. If he and Taibbi feel the need to “heighten the contradictions,” I would kindly ask that they go do it in another country.
“constant attention to civil liberties”
Unless he changed in the last few months, he has focused on certain civil liberties. His selective love of Ron Paul underlines the point.
At 66 I should be hard for Obama because he is merely driving the family van down a steep slope heading for the rocks below rather than Romney who is determined to drive it right over the cliff.
In other words with any luck, I’ll be dead before the democrats are able to destroy what is left, where it is much more likely that I will probably still be around if the republicans get get power and end us up in the same place. Hard choices.
God, Matt Stoller really is the worst, isn’t he?
Jerry Lieber was the real genius
While I agree with your point overall I am not sure the 1896 analogy does much to support it. Grover Cleveland was one of the most reactionary presidents in our history and to my mind there was pretty much no downside in primarying him. Handed the election to a Republican? Boo hoo. I don’t see how McKinley was to Cleveland’s right.
Not that this has anything to do with 2012.
But he suggests that this was a good deal for progressives in the medium term, when in fact it lead to three decades of mostly very conservative Republicans along with a Democrat who was almost as bad as Cleveland.
I know that it’s all very hip these days to bash Wilson, based mostly on his (admittedly horrednous) civil rights and liberties record. But do you really think Cleveland would have passed an 8 hour workday, a child labor ban, an antitrust act?
I said “almost as bad.” Wilson was better on economic issues.
My bad.
“…a Democratic candidate who has governed to the left of Clinton/Gore…”
I’ll still read the LGM site, but doubt I’ll be paying much attention to the posts of Scott Lemieux in the future.
Well that settles that then. Thank you for this particularly enlightening and informative take on the question. To be sure, you can always tell that someone is correct based on the degree to which they find their claims to be so self-evident as to require no actual argument to their effect, and this comment pretty much takes that to the maximum point.
“To be sure, you can always tell that someone is correct based on the degree to which they find their claims to be so self-evident as to require no actual argument to their effect, and this comment pretty much takes that to the maximum point.”
I’ve been looking over some of your old posts on other threads, and what you’ve accused me of doing seems to be your SOP. An example is from the one discussing Obama’s cave on the 15-year-olds working with power machinery.
“Brien Jackson says:
April 27, 2012 at 7:16 am
Meh, like I said in the other thread, this was basically throwing whatever they could think of at a non-problem (15 year olds working in agribusiness) while doing pretty much nothing about the real problem (making sure that elevators and other agribusiness entities are routinely observing proper safety rules). A 30 year old leg can get caught in an exposed auger shaft every bit as easily as a 16 year old one.”
Therefore it was better for everybody to be at risk of death or dismemberment than to have a subset of young workers excluded. That it was all a “non-problem” was so blindlingly obvious no ‘evidence’ was necessary.
While going through all those old posts I never ever saw one where you said Obama had done something which was flat-out horrible. I’ll grant that I examined only a few dozen, but even with such a small sample it struck me as odd.
So a simple query: Has Obama done anything up till now which you find to be unforgivable? Or the same question from another angle, if the election were held tomorrow would you be casting your vote for him?
BTW, I’d appreciate a staight reply rather than one of the ‘cute’ ones I’ve been seeing.
I’ll still look at our comments sections, but I’ll ignore the comments of anyone who thinks that the administration partially responsible for reactionary welfare reform, the gutting of habeas corpus, disastrous financial deregulation, DOMA, etc. etc. is more progressive that the current one.
He’s be worse-to-far worse than the Obama administration on most issues and better on absolutely none.
Hmmmm…..real brainiac there, college guy.
Romney is, of course, a massive creep, but it’s important to note that this argument only works if you look at some sort of overall progressiveness.
Narrow it to the issues that Glen Greenwald is clearly the most focused on, i.e. civil liberties and their relationship to the war on terror, and you can actually make a fairly persuasive case that Obama has governed to the right of Bush.
So you’re left with the argument, “Well, whoever we get is going to be the kind of guy who will ignore the fifth amendment. A president who doesn’t secretly assassinate his own citizens just isn’t an option right now.”
Some people react to that by deciding to focus on the things that will be affected by the election, and some respond by deciding that if this election is between two people who share an inexcusably odious position on an important issue, than it’s a little hard to get excited about it.
Why the two sides have so much trouble understanding each other is utterly beyond me. I’m more in the Greenwald camp; assassinating Al-Awlaki was such an inexcusably tyrannical thing to do that I’m not going to get excited about how wonderfully progressive things will be if/when Obama wins.
Surely that’s not so hard to understand? Surely there’s some issue that works as a litmus test for you? What if both candidates vowed to push for a constitutional amendment banning abortion in all cases? What if they both ran on a platform of exterminating the world’s Jews?
Surely there’s some hypothetical threshold at which you’d give up on the lesser of two evils schtick?
I don’t see why it’s so hard to understand why Barrack Obama has passed that threshold for some people, even if he hasn’t for you personally.
Your personal ranking of the world’s evils is not the objectively correct ranking of the world’s evils, and neither is Greenwald’s or anybody else’s.
What if both candidates vowed to push for a constitutional amendment banning abortion in all cases? What if they both ran on a platform of exterminating the world’s Jews?
If we’re going to discuss hypotheticals that won’t happen, could they both promise my daughter a pony? Because that discussion is exactly as relevant as the one you are proposing.
and you can actually make a fairly persuasive case that Obama has governed to the right of Bush.
No you can’t.
No you can’t.
Well… Just off the top of my head, there was that time Obama started a war, which to my thinking was even more clearly illegal than Iraq, and then there was that time where he killed some Americans based on secret evidence, which as far as we know Gee Dub never did, and then there was that time he signed the indefinite detention law, and that time where he prosecuted more people under the espionage act than all the previous Presidents combined (Which, as I recall, is a list that includes both George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan).
So… yeah. I’m not super informed but I do have my little laundry list of issues where Obama has been worse than Dubya, so… yeah.
If we’re going to discuss hypotheticals that won’t happen, could they both promise my daughter a pony? Because that discussion is exactly as relevant as the one you are proposing.
Was what I was saying really so hard to understand? My point has nothing to do with whether the candidates are actually likely to start murdering Jews.
I didn’t say that the candidates were both as evil as Hitler, I said that surely, you understand that there is some theoretical point at which a “lesser of two evils” strategy is no longer acceptable. The point is not “we have definitely reached that point”, it was “such a point exists”.
The question of whether we’re likely to get to that point is completely irrelevant, given that my entire argument is that people are going to locate the point at different places, depending on their own personal sense of morality.
I think that when the President starts ignoring the fifth amendment, that’s evil enough not to support.
[...] Party will be committed to, but at the Obama campaigns messaging. I guess this is how you end up arguing something as transparently foolish as “Romney is more liberal than people think.) Sadly, I [...]
[...] contrarianism that compels writers prominent enough to write for Salon to farcically assert that Romney might be more liberal than Obama or that Romney’s judicial appointments might be similar to Dwight Eisenhower’s. There is [...]
Refrigerator Poetry Magnets™ has a Reactionary Edition™?
Who’d a thought it?
A bunch of hardcore Marxoid Leftists?
Oh, Davis, don’t feed the trolls! Luckily, at this point, it seems as though “The Media” have decided that Mitt is really not a nice person, and that President Obama has done a pretty good job over the last few years. My only fear is that there is some crisis in Europe (or elsewhere) shortly before November. However, I am pretty confident that the more people see of the “Romneybot” the less they will like him. GOTV this year like it was 2008, all over again.
Kenyananticolonialalinskyitecommiefascistdidigetallofthem
Does Marxoid mean “not actually Marxist,” in the vein of “humanoid” and “factoid?”
This comment is unfair to hardcore Marxoid Leftists (seriously).
A robot with a robust beard.
Listen, I’m a partisan, liberal Democrat, so I wasn’t going to vote for Mitt even if he was a super-nice guy. I also care a lot more about a person’s likely policies as discerned from their prior career in government and public statements. Nonetheless, . . .
It’s increasingly clear that he’s an inconsiderate, cruel, arrogant jerk. It’s kind of astounding what a jerk he is, and all these personal stories add up to super-jerk. I mean, I can’t think of anyone that I still socialize with that did something like forcibly cutting an effeminate guy’s hair or strapping a dog to the roof. It is (and should be) a strike against him.
I don’t like “media” narratives, but we can’t be shocked that they’re focusing on these stories, and as far as I can tell, the stories are at least true and reveal significant conduct as opposed to untrue, faux-gaffes (which makes this different than the War on Gore).
Where is Romney’s GOTV ground game? I think he outsourced it to India. I agree with you I think, in that I hear you saying it would take a serious financial crises for Romney to unseat Obama.
weird, I intended to reply to Epicurus