Say What?

I thought the problem with Romney was that he does not do well without a script. That is not the case. By his latest famous quote about being “severely conservative,” he demonstrated that he does not do well when he ad libs. If you watch you will see that his body language is out of sync with his words. When the question is whether or not we want a President who can deliver lines with conviction, the name Ronald Reagan has got to come to mind. The Gipper was one of the best either on or off script and was the last great rhetorician to occupy the White House. It helps to have great writers, which is something Mitt Romney does not have and desperately needs.

Here is a little trivia about the Presidents’ age (birth year) and their writers. Reagan (1911), a trained actor, had Peggy Noonan. Richard Nixon (1913) worked hard at delivering lines and even used 3 X 5 index cards to practice small talk. William Safire scripted Nixon. A towering and passionate rhetorician, Lyndon Johnson (1908) relied on Richard Goodwin, who named LBJ’s political agenda “The Great Society”. Jack Kennedy (1917), the first television president relied on Arthur Schlesinger and Theodore Sorenson to craft his speeches.

Here is the point of the trivia. When Reagan, Nixon, Johnson, and Kennedy were young men, radio was the dominant medium of mass communication, masterfully utilized by President Franklin Roosevelt with his famous fire-side chats. World War II intensified the importance of radio. The spoken word, the rhetoric used in public speaking, and the crucial importants of written words characterizes the manner in which those men formulated their thoughts. It also influenced their choices of writers who they regarded as critical to their political success. That became more important as the dominant medium became television by 1960.

Mitt Romney (1947) is a baby-boomer for whom the dominant medium became television with the assassination of President Kennedy. Words formulating Romney’s thoughts are sound-bites, not the paragraphs of the radio era. It is bumper-sticker rhetoric, ideal for Twitter. To complicate Romney’s predicament further, he is a spreadsheet man. His speeches could well be written in Excel for a PowerPoint presentation. It would also appear that Romney does some of his own editing.

That is proving to be a mistake. In our media environment, words are like toothpaste. Once they are out, it’s tough to get them back in the tube. Do you think someone really wrote the lines “corporations are people,” “not concerned about the very poor,” or “severely conservative?” Could it be a cynical plot to discredit Romney in the eyes of various constituent groups? Can such thoughtless remarks be purposeful?

The only thing inevitable about Mitt Romney is that he will respond to the pressure of this campaign by trying to outdo his opponents and saying things he will have to redact. If he is wins its nomination, the Republican Party had better hire some great writers to load his lips. He could also use an acting coach to synchronize his body language with his lines. Since no one in the GOP seems to like him, Romney should study Nixon. The party did not like him either, but Nixon won. Otherwise, Romney is in over his head in a rhetorical duel with President Obama.

 

Article first published as Say What? on Blogcritics.

The Not-So Great Society

Mitt Romney revealed a lot about himself when he told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety-net there.” Weeks before he had asserted that those safety-net programs have “massive overhead” and that because of the cost of such bureaucracy “very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.” His claim is false. The fact is that more than 90% of the money allocated to safety-net programs reaches its beneficiaries. Romney’s statements demonstrate that he is oblivious to such socio-economic realities, but at least he brought up poverty and made it an issue. That is something that has not happened up since 1964.

Romney touts his business background and pontificates that he knows how to create jobs. That may sound good to the Republican base, but Presidents of the United States have nothing to do with job creation. It is not in their Constitutional authority. Presidents do not legislate. They sign legislation into law or veto it. Furthermore, the United States is not a corporation. The last U.S. President who came to office from business was Herbert Hoover, whose administration ushered in the Great Depression, incredible job loss, and excruciating poverty.

Presidents do propose legislation to the Congress, as LBJ did with the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. That Act established the Office of Economic Opportunity to administer the local application of federal funds targeted against poverty. Modified over the years, the Act’s remaining programs include Head Start and the Job Corps. Johnson proposed that legislation in January of 1964, coerced and cajoled members of Congress to pass it, and signed it into law on August 20, 1964. It created jobs.

In declaring the War on Poverty, President Johnson sought “to help that one-fifth of all American families with incomes too small to even meet their basic needs.” LBJ called for “better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls where other citizens help to carry them.”

The poverty rate is the percentage of Americans whose income is lower than the federally determined poverty line. It was 17.3% in 1965.

As LBJ put it to Congress, “Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.” The safety-net programs that Mr. Romney does not comprehend came from President Johnson’s Great Society initiative.

Romney, the other GOP candidates, and the Republican Congress gripe about and seek to change one of President Johnson’s greatest legislative achievements, Medicare. It helped to lower poverty rates for the elderly. So did President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Social Security program, which LBJ enhanced by advocating, pushing for, and signing legislation in 1965 and 1967. But the GOP seeks to repeal LBJ’s Great Society by claiming that its programs are bankrupting the country.

Romney ineloquently brought up poverty with his “very poor” statement, for which he drew massive criticism. He said he misspoke. That may be true, but it reveals an ignorance of the fact that more than 20 million Americans live in a household with income of less than half the federal poverty rate. According to census data for 2010, those “very poor” had an annual income below $11,057 for a family of four. That portion of the US population in the very poor category has almost doubled since 1975 and is the highest it has been in 35 years. Business people rely on data. At the least Romney could have read Business Week and appeared less clueless.

In addition to those one in five Americans that Romney does not care about, the ones who had trouble putting food on the table last year, the unpleasant reality is that nearly half of all U.S. households are struggling to cover basic expenses like electricity and medical care. Children are the least fortunate victims. As in LBJ’s time in the late ‘20s when he was a Texas school teacher, childhood poverty can have a lifelong effect on a person's earning potential. The Brookings Institute and First Focus found that by the time children who fell into poverty during a recession grow up to be financially independent adults, their median income is about 30 percent less than that of adults who never experienced poverty as children. That is certainly bad for business.

The poverty issue is not who gets blamed. The issue is what choices do policy makers make to help expand economic activity. Romney and his cohorts are all about austerity, like defunding the safety-net programs for the very poor, the disabled, and seniors. The problem is that austerity in a recession makes things worse, not better. In Europe, which the GOP does not understand, harsh austerity policies have made unemployment soar. Cuts in government spending have failed to reduce budget deficits because tax receipts fell. Economic activity and employment levels collapsed. Poverty increased as spending decreased.

President John F. Kennedy said, “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” As one of those few, Romney demonstrates a profound paucity of the economic and social understanding that is requisite of Presidents. Despite the Republican pabulum to the contrary, this is still a country of great abundance that is slowly emerging from the Great Recession. However, the nation suffers from a rise of poverty that the nation can ill afford. All of the talk about the middle class ignores the plight of the “many who are poor.”

Poverty is bad for business and Romney should know it. His comments deserve derision because they are false, not because they are gaffes. He raised the poverty issue but has articulated no plan for addressing it, without which the country becomes the Not-So Great Society.

 Originally published as The Not-So Great Society on Blogcritics.

Asking Not

Fifty-one years ago President John F. Kennedy delivered his inaugural address containing the thought provoking line, “And so, my fellow Americans - ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” That short speech contains several other rhetorical gems such as, “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” Kennedy declared, “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” Today, the few who are rich seek to benefit from fear and a lack of negotiation as they seek what their country can do for them.

Foremost among those rich few is the Republican nominee apparent Mitt Romney. In his speech after the marginal New Hampshire primary, Romney castigated President Obama. “He wants to turn America into a European-style entitlement society,” the candidate said.  The GOP echo chamber reverberates with variations on the "European-style socialism" theme from television to Twitter. But just because Republicans repeat it does not make it so. The veracity of such rhetoric suffers the problematic flaws of ignorance and inaccuracy.

The ignorance is that most Americans do not know much about Europe other than its economic situation is in far worse shape than our own. "Associating Obama with Europe links him to the current malaise in Europe, and Americans know it's a basket case," according to Rosemary Hollis of London's City University. "It plays to the stereotypical notion that the USA has about Europe, that they [Europeans] are freeloaders, with no defense capability, and live on welfare [state] benefits." She also said that Romney is "relying on a history of socialism being viewed as the enemy." Socialism is the new Communism.

The inaccuracy is that Europe has increased its privatization which has led to a decline of the welfare state, a post WWII idea crafted by the British economist and social reformer William Beveridge. He saw poverty, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness as the five "giants on the road to reconstruction." Beveridge proposed setting up a welfare state with social security, a National Health Service, free education, public housing projects, and full employment as its objectives. The welfare state adopted the ideas of economist John Maynard Keynes, specifically that a government could keep its economy vigorous by increasing public spending. The British Labour government used its U.S. Marshall Plan aid money to get industry going. Then it nationalized the trucking, railways and coal industries in 1947 and the steel industry in 1951.

The accusation that President Barack Obama is leading the country into any kind of socialist state is as erroneous as making the same accusation about his predecessor, President George W. Bush. Republicans conveniently ignore the fact that under Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson the government nationalized major banks. The TARP bailout also contained what can be called socialist elements. If Obama deserves a hit, it should be for hiring Republican appointees Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, whose deregulatory policies of the ‘90s helped create the crisis that required such a government rescue.

Romney has been wrong before. He opposed the automobile industry bailout. “IF (sic) General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed,” he wrote in a 2008 New York Times opinion article. “Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses.” That is not what happened.

The President is not leading the country into a European-style entitlement society, as Mitt Romney pontificates. If anything, President Obama is presiding over an inherited American-style entitlement society that has its origins in FDR’s New Deal, with the Social Security Act, extending through the JFK’s New Frontier and LBJ’s Great Society, with the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid. The Republican elites who opposed Democratic Presidents Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson decried them as socialists too.

Anti-European, anti-socialism, anti-Obama rhetoric aside, let’s think about what JFK said, as his niece did last year in the Atlantic. “I almost never hear anything like that call to sacrifice for the good of our country from our leaders today,” Kathleen Kennedy Townsend wrote. “When President Kennedy asked what we could do for our country, he didn't pretend it would be easy, or painless, or even fair.” John F. Kennedy’s death for his country affirms that.

“So let us begin anew,” said the 35^th President, “remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof.” So far, that too is being lost on the wealthy Republican candidates seeking the Presidency. As they sink more deeply into incivility, their sincerity leaves much to be proved.

 Originally published as Asking Not on Blogcritics.

Tea Party: A Koch Industry

Let’s call a spade a spade. Let’s call the Tea Party the Koch Party. The Koch Party is the tail that is wagging the GOP’s lead dog, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

The billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch bankrolled Tea Party groups from their beginning in addition to funding FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, and Citizens for a Sound Economy. The Kochs have been referred to as “the financial engine of the Tea Party.” Their agenda opposes the extension of unemployment benefits, opposes a federal deficit, and calls for a freeze on federal regulations regarding oil, mining, and financial concerns. 

As the New Yorker reported, “In Washington, [David] Koch is best known as part of a family that has repeatedly funded stealth attacks on the federal government and on the Obama Administration in particular.” 

Just before Christmas Boehner’s song was that the Keystone XL pipeline was the keystone of the payroll tax cut bill. “We will make changes,” Speaker Boehner said. “I will guarantee you the Keystone pipeline will be in the bill when it goes back to the Senate.” Increasing Canadian oil imports benefits Koch Industries, which is responsible for close to a quarter of the oil sands crude that is imported into the United States. Pipeline approval would be a windfall for Koch, with its deep involvement in the Canadian petroleum industry.

The Senate gave the Speaker the song he wanted to sing, a payroll tax extension with the Pipeline project rider. It then adjourned and left Washington. But the Koch Party House members rebelled and the Speakers’ tune changed to another piece of brinkmanship, for which the 112^th Congress has become renowned. At stake this time were 2 million Americans losing their long-term unemployment benefits and 160 million workers seeing their taxes rise by 2-percentage points.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) slammed the GOP. “The public has to be concerned and wondering why on Earth are we not getting a payroll tax cut when everybody says they're for it?" The answer to her question is the Koch Party, led by Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), who opposed the Senate bill and urged his caucus to reject it.

Job creation is just the lip service that Speaker Boehner gave to the Keystone XL pipeline project. Blocking the middle class tax cut could cost between 400,000 and 1 million American jobs. Jobs are not on the Koch Party agenda. Its Tea Party surrogates do not understand who creates jobs or how a tax increase would impact consumer spending. Koch Industries is big business concerned about regulations and corporate tax loop-holes.  

Big business does not create jobs: it eliminates jobs. Small business creates jobs, but it can only create jobs when consumer spending goes up.

Well-funded Republicans do not grasp the concept that taking $40 a month away from the average US households is hardly a way to increase consumer spending. The non-partisan National Federation of Independent Business says, “It is going to take a rebound in consumer spending, particularly in the service sector to make a significant dent in the number of unemployed. The manufacturing sector is doing very well, but it does not create many jobs.”  

The Koch Party has had a strategy for the 2012 election. In order to thwart the re-election of President Barack Obama, it has exercised considerable effort to keep unemployment high and to restrain economic growth. The effect has been for the House of Representatives to abdicate its legislative responsibilities to the Senate and to foment a split between the two chambers.

However, the Koch Party strategy is flawed. Its usual Rupert Murdoch ally, the Wall Street Journal, critiqued, “After a year of the tea party House, Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats have had to make no major policy concessions beyond extending the Bush tax rates for two years. Mr. Obama is in a stronger re-election position today than he was a year ago.”

The Republican Party has not necessarily sold out to big business such as Koch Industries. The GOP has been traditionally regarded as the party of business. But it is difficult and expensive to be elected to congress, let alone to the presidency. So Mitt Romney, who has been courting a Koch endorsement, took no sides on the payroll tax standoff. Nor has the Koch Party endorsed his candidacy. They do not trust him.

Koch money funded and organized its surrogate Tea Party wing of the GOP. However, the Koch Party has yet to produce anything other than obstruction of the legislative process, record low congressional approval ratings, and a downgrade of the US credit rating. The Koch Party assertion that such an achievement record is what voters sent them to do in 2010 is dubious. The Speaker and his party are going to take a hit. A big hit.

Originally published as Tea Party: A Koch Industry on Blogcritics.

Wishful Thinking

The Newt Gingrich candidacy for President is a cynical practical joke. He is not a serious presidential candidate. He is a recognizable figure promoting himself for personal gain, to sell his books and indulge in some fantasy about a future Republican presidential administration, just not anytime soon. His only viability is to make Mitt Romney seem a more reasonable and safer candidate. Gingrich is the spice in an otherwise bland stew. The only expectation of him is for self-destruction within the next eleven months. It is not for him to become the President of the United States in 2012 and it never has been. It is for him to make more money.

But the Gingrich candidacy has shed light on other things about the post-Bush weaknesses of the Republican Party. There is no credible expectation for the GOP to win the national election against the incumbent Democratic president than there was when the Republican standard bearer was Senator John McCain. Media attention always follows shiny objects that move quickly in and out of headlines be it Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich or Michele Bachmann. Fame seekers are just fame seekers. There is no substance to them. Attracting attention does not count.

The 112^th Congress has done so much to discredit the Republican Party that Gallup reports, “About three-quarters of registered voters (76%) say most members of Congress do not deserve re-election, the highest such percentage Gallup has measured in its 19-year history of asking this question.” How that GOP majority expects to run on its record of obstruction and be returned for another term as the majority party is wishful thinking. There is no record of accomplishment. There is only a documented record of opposition to a single person, President Barack Obama.

The country is not “Choking on Obamacare.” The country has not had time to taste, eat, or digest it because most of its 10 provisions will not go into effect until after 2014. Just because conservatives recite those three words does not make the comment so.

The 111^th Congress passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). That the PPACA is remarkably similar to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health care legislation has been hashed and rehashed so much so that it has become a liability to Romney, especially in the “flip-flop” category.

I do not single out columnist George Will as an ardent wishful thinker, either. The conservative pundits have their own problems with which Will is not alone. They tend to nod with favor towards Gingrich as a man of great intellect and of big ideas. To borrow a Richard Nixon quote, "That's just plain poppycock." It isn’t true. Gingrich may come across as smart compared with Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Michele Bachmann. Compared with people of true intellect, however, Gingrich is a pretender.

What are those big GOP ideas for government? They seem limited. Repealing a law that has not been completely implemented, abolishing abortion, repealing the Great Society, and replacing President Obama are less than noble ideas.

The wealthy professor and the wealthy businessman are tribunes of a cause that is limited for a nation in the midst of a turn-around. The only reason for a Gingrich candidacy is a Romney candidacy. The only reason for a Romney candidacy is that the GOP has to run someone. Romney winning is wishful thinking.

Article originally published as “So Much Wishful Thinking” on Blogcritics.

The Something Missing

You have doubtless had the experience that something is missing and you don’t know what that something is. You would know instantly if you came across the missing something and I am not referring to Governor Rick Perry’s much discussed television lapse, although I could. Because it was the surplus of televised debates that had been on my mind and something about them was missing. Then it occurred to me out of the thin television air. It was as if someone had snuck up behind me and popped a paper bag full of air. Ohio’s Republican Governor John Kasich used the words “public servant” -- the missing concept revealed.

"My view is when people speak like this in a campaign referendum," Mr. Kasich said, “you have to listen if you're a public servant.” Ohio overwhelmingly rejected a law that restricted the collective-bargaining power of some 350-thousand government workers. Now, that law that Kasich championed will never take effect

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But it is the idea of public service that has been missing in the Republican debates because it is all about them and not about us.

In the last decade US television audiences began their affair with so-called reality TV shows. Suspending the notion that such shows have production requisites -- like cameras, lights, audio, make-up, direction, catering, transportation and lots of folks behind the scenes – reality is just an abstraction. The sponsored GOP debates are also such an abstraction in addition to being a relatively cheap shoot. They are to professional politics what wrestling is to professional sports.

It’s like watching a reality version of Gilligan’s Island as an elimination game show. Just look at the cast. Seven contestants are or have been elected public officials and one has never held an elected public office. Three candidates are from the House of Representatives and one is from the Senate. Two are former governors and one is a sitting governor. There is a white woman, a black man, two white seniors and four middle-aged white men. Republicans call this diversity.

100% divided by 8 equals 12.5%. Polls only make the television event dubious.

Here is what is apparent. Gallup shows that Huntsman, Santorum and Paul do not register among likely Republican voters. What that means is that the money is not there. Gallup also reports that Romney, who has been running for president for five years, is the most likely to make it to the finals of the contest to win the Republican nomination. He is dull. So is the contest. There is no debating. Except for Perry’s lapse, debate moderator John Harwood said on PBS Washington Week, the television show would have only been about people reciting lines. The Perry gaffe made it interesting

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Only interesting.

The Tea Party stains Bachmann and Cain: Bachmann, who thinks US default on its debt is good and Cain, who thinks sexual harassment is an acceptable management style. Age dims Paul and Gingrich: the Libertarian and the former Speaker could be a formidable tag-team for one presidential term, as US comic relief in a troubled world. Texas dung sticks to Perry’s pointed-toe boots, by his admission, and it stinks.

By the way, Romney and Perry may have the campaign money, but their support of US military intervention in Iran lacks money. They have not said how they would have the US pay for yet another war. Neither did George W. Bush, the former Republican president, who paid for two wars by deficit spending.

So, what about public service? There isn’t any. Romney knows what it is but won’t admit it. Huntsman and Santorum know what it is but lack the money to demonstrate it. Bachmann and Cain do not comprehend what it is. Paul and Gingrich are just there for the show. And none of them mention public service – that something missing in their television show.

Originally published as That Something Missing on Blogcritics.

Weep No More

I’ve loved cars since my grandmother traded in her 1949 Buick Roadmaster for the ‘54 model. I wept. The magazines Hot Rod, Car and Driver, Car Craft, and Motor Trend consumed much of my teenager spending money and reading time. They reported that California emission controls of the late 60’s threatened the “heavy Chevy’s.” I wept. In 1978 GM quit using the venerable Fischer C-body for its big cars -- Cadillac, Buick, Olds and Pontiac. I wept. I confess my envy of people who own more than one Corvette.

I came to forgive the Big Three for the junk they built in the 80s – duds like the Chevy Citation, Ford’s tin can of a Mustang and Chrysler’s Dodge Aspin. The down sized luxury cars made anyone of sense weep. I ignored the fact that automobile companies disappear. AMC, which had given us the AMX and Javelin, cranked out the Pacer and the Gremlin. No tear came to eye as AMC was swallowed by the python Chrysler. It deserved to be consumed.

Men like Harley Earl, George Romney and Lee Iacocca are legends who will be studied for ever, from business to design schools, for their contributions to the American automobile industry. Earl gave us the ‘Vette. Romney rescued American Motors and made it thrive. Iacocca gave us the Mustang and went on to persuade congress to bail out Chrysler almost single-handedly.

The United States was not founded upon a marketing plan of “let’s get bigger.” Neither was Chrysler, Ford, or General Motors. Unions came along later. However, the oxymoron “poor CEOs” applies to those (formerly) corporate aircraft fitted heads-of-state, which would be Michigan, who appeared before congress this week and increased their bail-out bid from $25 billion to $34 billion dollars. Well, at least they had a plan.

Codswallop. A plan is not an objective. Their plan is to remain afloat. Their plan must say what they think is politically correct. In Oz one does not look behind the curtain. So, their plan is to pretend that US citizens are ready to turn against fifty years of advertising and a post WWII love of horsepower. If they had a plan it would be to show us a 300 HP electric Corvette.

The proverbial Ace they have up their sleeve is that the Big 3 are too Big for the country and for the congress to allow to go broke. Therein lays the Trump. They are too big to allow failure. Congress knows how to committee, not how to captain. No “green” Vette? -- I weep.

Things That Could Happen

The NY Times Blog, Opinionator, ponders the use of the word “yet” in the most recent John McCain campaign ads. Here is the voice over line in question. “The fact is Barack Obama’s not ready … yet.” Columnist Tobin Harshaw goes on to quotes the New Republic’s Jason Zengerle. “Maybe McCain’s final Hail Mary is to pledge to serve one term … and then to pledge his support to Obama in 2012.”

That is not likely, but McCain could pledge to serve one term to be elected. It is just that the pledge business has not proven to be his long suit and the electorate knows it. That makes me wonder just what else could the aged former jet-jockey do to create an October surprise and “fool the pundits”?

He could dump the current running mate, for the ‘good of Alaska in its troubled time’, and replace her with Joe Lieberman so that they could both serve one term. That team would have been plausible had he gone with his esteemed colleague before his convention surprise, when he one-upped the Times’ Kristol and Post’s Gerson in their adoration of the divine Sarah. Of course such a move would allow her to replace Ted Stevens with herself, but that’s a separate matter.

McCain could himself withdraw and recommend Mitt Romney to replace him as the party’s standard bearer. There is nothing as sweet as the tinkling of a bell, unless it is made of lead (atomic number: 82). However, Romney would never agree to wearing sack cloth and ashes. Since McCain is in her way anyway, Palin would not blink at trying to finish the run by herself.

Actually, that’s not accurate. She would still have Kristol and Gerson.