Politics Romney - Is he ready?

Baraka_Guru · Oct 16, 2012

Finally!

For all the details on Mitt Romney's 5 trillion dollar tax plan visit ROMNEYTAXPLAN.COM

rogue49 · Oct 16, 2012

Baraka_Guru said: ↑

Finally!

For all the details on Mitt Romney's 5 trillion dollar tax plan visit ROMNEYTAXPLAN.COM
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Now THAT is right on target and easy to comprehend.

roachboy · Oct 16, 2012

Charlatan · Oct 16, 2012

That Colbert piece was excellent.

rogue49 · Oct 19, 2012

Romney better be careful...Obama's team has started with a little known zinger.
Romnesia...and the plague is gaining ground...the GOP better find a cure for its spread fast.

Barack Obama: Mitt Romney has ‘Romnesia’
By: Jennifer Epstein - October 19, 2012

President Barack Obama on Friday accused his Republican opponent of having a bad case of “Romnesia” — changing positions when politically expedient.

The Obama campaign has long tried to find a powerful way to encapsulate its sense of Mitt Romney’s shifting positions, especially as some say he’s tacked to the center this fall to attract moderate voters, away from the self-described “severely conservative” candidate who appealed to the tea party during the Republican primaries.

“I mean, he’s changing up so much and backtracking and sidestepping, we’ve got to name this condition that he’s going through. I think it’s called Romnesia,” Obama said to laughter and cheers at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., where he spoke to a midday rally of 8,000. “That’s what it’s called. I think that’s what he’s going through.”

Clearly enjoying himself, nearly giggling as he spoke, Obama continued: “Now, I’m not a medical doctor, but I do want to go over some of the symptoms with you — because I want to make sure nobody else catches it.”

Like an announcer in a prescription drug ad or comedian Jeff Foxworthy, the president listed some symptoms, all having to do with women’s issues, the topic of his stump speech. “If you say you’re for equal pay for equal work, but you keep refusing to say whether or not you’d sign a bill that protects equal pay for equal work — you might have Romnesia.”

“If you say women should have access to contraceptive care, but you support legislation that would let your employer deny you contraceptive care — you might have a case of Romnesia,” he said.

“If you say you’ll protect a woman’s right to choose, but you stand up at a primary debate and said that you’d be delighted to sign a law … outlawing that right to choose in all cases — man, you’ve definitely got Romnesia.”

But Romnesia reaches beyond women’s issues, Obama said. “If you say earlier in the year, I’m going to give a tax cut to the top 1 percent and then in a debate you say, I don’t know anything about giving tax cuts to rich folks — you need to get a thermometer, take your temperature, because you’ve probably got Romnesia,” he said.

“If you say that you’re a champion of the coal industry when, while you were governor you stood in front of a coal plant and said, this plant will kill you, that’s some Romnesia,” he continued, the crowd shouting the punch line along with him.

“You’re beginning to be able to identify these symptoms. And if you come down with a case of Romnesia, and you can’t seem to remember the policies that are still on your website, or the promises you’ve made over the six years you’ve been running for president, here’s the good news: Obamacare covers preexisting conditions,” Obama said, smiling. “We can fix you up. We’ve got a cure. We can make you well, Virginia. This is a curable disease.”

By Friday afternoon, Romnesia was catching on quickly.

Within an hour of Obama’s remarks, Romnesia — the campaign’s preferred spelling, an aide acknowledged — was trending internationally on Twitter and had hit the top of the U.S. trending list.

John Weaver, a top adviser to Jon Huntsman during his Republican primary bid, voiced his appreciation for the term. “Dang. #Romnesia is pretty funny,” he wrote on Twitter. “How come our team didn’t come up with that last [f]all?”

Later, Vice President Joe Biden joined in from the stump in Florida.

“I hope you all don’t get Romnesia!” Biden said in Fort Pierce. “It’s a bad disease, it’s a bad disease. And it’s contagious, because all of a sudden, Paul Ryan, the budget hawk — the guy who introduced a whole budget plan that actually already … passed the House of Representatives … all of a sudden, he doesn’t remember it.”

The Romney campaign didn’t directly hit back at Obama’s use of the term — and the Republican candidate doesn’t have a public event until an early evening rally in Florida — but it did release a statement from Virginia Delegate Barbara Comstock, who focused on the president’s message on women’s issues. “Women haven’t forgotten how we’ve suffered over the last four years in the Obama economy with higher taxes, higher unemployment, and record levels of poverty,” she said. “President Obama has failed to put forward a second-term agenda — and when you don’t have a plan to run on, you stoop to scare tactics.”

The Republican National Committee pointed to remarks Obama made in 2008 about civility in the presidential race.

“Let me tell you what you don’t deserve. You don’t deserve a bunch of name-calling. You don’t deserve a bunch of mud-slinging. You don’t deserve a bunch of Internet rumors and scandal-mongering. We don’t need John McCain and I to be demonizing each other. You won’t get that from my campaign,” he said in Bristow, Va., in June 2008.

Though Romnesia was new to Obama’s stump speech on Friday, the term has been around for months.

A Twitter user with the handle @BreakingNuts used it in a tweet to Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of liberal magazine The Nation, defining it as “a severe form of amnesia that strikes dishonest politicians.”

It’s also been on Urban Dictionary since July, when a user called it: “The act of forgetting a statement or belief that you had previously expressed the opposite point of view with regards to.”

And, in June, POLITICO quoted a Daily Kos blogger who said Romnesia is the “public unremembrance the governor loves to apply when what he has done and said in the past is an inconvenient reminder of his political fickleness.”

© 2012 POLITICO LLC
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rogue49 · Oct 22, 2012

The upcoming debate topic of Foreign Policy goes directly in the line of thought for this thread's title.
Is Romney ready for it?

This will be a challenge for him...I hope he's able to answer the task.

Mitt Romney’s toughest debate
By: Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen - October 21, 2012

Mitt Romney has a clear-eyed and self-aware view of his chances in the final debate Monday, according to top advisers: It will be almost impossible to win, since the debate is focused exclusively on foreign policy, a strength for President Barack Obama.

This view isn’t merely about expectations-setting. Romney’s top advisers authentically worry that the swing voters they need to woo care little about foreign affairs right now. And, even if they did, the differences between the two men on many of the highest-profile issues — ending the Afghan war and the bloodshed in Syria — are too slight to draw sharp distinctions.

Even if Romney does bring his A game, Obama joked last week about his debate strategy for winning the showdown in Florida: “Spoiler alert: We got bin Laden.” It’s not a joke that he said it, or that he uses that conquest to maximum political advantage in debates and speeches to show strength and achievement.

The Romney campaign sees this debate – to be moderated by Bob Schieffer on Monday night in Boca Raton, Fla. — as the last chance to move the needle in any significant way in the swing states that will decide the election. Aides head into it more confident about winning the race than they did before the first presidential debate, but believing Obama is slightly better positioned in the states that will dictate the outcome. The hope inside the campaign is that Romney will emerge in no worse position, advisers said.

“The debates have not so much fundamentally changed the race as they have returned it to where it was before the Democratic convention,” said Vin Weber, the Romney campaign’s special adviser on policy. “The candidates are close, and the economy is the Number One issue. Foreign policy is really important, but it is not driving this election.”

A top Republican official put it more bluntly: “I don’t think there are a lot of soft voters who are waiting to hear a position on the Eurozone.”

This could be a problem for Romney because another strong debate performance could be the difference-maker for him. Interestingly, in private conversations, the two campaigns agree on the state of the race as of this weekend: Obama has the edge right now because it appears he’s up, albeit narrowly, throughout the Midwest: Iowa, Wisconsin and, most importantly, Ohio. A Midwest swing-state sweep makes it almost impossible to chart a Romney win.

At the same time, Romney is doing better than ever in Florida, is a slight favorite in Colorado and is back to near-even in Virginia, giving substantially more hope than on the eve of the first debate, which he won decisively.

Romney knows foreign policy is not his strength, aides said. Throughout the race — starting with his proclamation that Russia is the biggest strategic threat to the U.S., through his bumpy Europe trip, and ending with his politicized statement moments after the Libya killings and clumsy exchange about that terrorist attack in the last debate — Romney has not been at his best when trying to add a global dimension to his campaign.

“So far, Romney is batting zero when it comes to landing a punch on foreign policy or national security,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a Democratic-leaning think tank that advocates “a tough and centrist security strategy.”

“He has whiffed in every single at-bat, and there’s no evidence he can do any better when he’s doing it for 90 minutes,” Bennett added. “It’s just more opportunity for him to get boxed in like he did in the second debate, or sound out of touch like he did in the post-Libya press conference, or make a gaffe like he did on his foreign trip.”

Romney has spent scores of hours in private briefings with his national security team, studying the issues and thinking out his positions. But his campaign was designed for a war over the economy. He has little foreign policy experience and his running mate Paul Ryan has even less. Making matters worse, many of the foreign policy giants in the GOP – Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush — carry the PR burden of having started two unpopular wars.

Obama, by comparison, was no better prepared on foreign policy coming into office than Bush. But four years in, he has ended the Iraq war, killed a number of leading terrorists and detailed a plan for getting out of Afghanistan. It would be easy to make a sharp argument that Obama has been too aggressive in using drones to kill terrorists, and sometimes innocent civilians, or too slow or too fast to stake a 2014 end in Afghanistan. But Romney essentially agrees with Obama on these two major issues.

Therein lies the big challenge for Romney: His vision isn’t dramatically different than Obama’s on foreign policy. They both want to continue aggressive terrorist-killing policies, prevent a nuclear Iran, stop the atrocities in Syria without committing U.S. troops and essentially maintain the status quo in Iraq.

Both candidates want to distort the reality that on the big issues of the day, there is a lot of commonality: Obama over four years has shifted to what amounts to the Bush view of aggressive anti-terrorism policies, while Romney and Republicans have shifted the Democrats’ way on getting out of the two biggest wars of this young century. Both candidates are uncertain — and less specific about — how to handle the new spike in Middle East turmoil.

The vice presidential debate provided a glimpse into the challenge of arguing distinctions without big differences. Taking on the Iraq question, Ryan said, “[W]e had the same position before the withdrawal [of U.S. troops], which was we agreed with the Obama administration,” before blaming the White House for not cementing a status-of-forces agreement.

Moments later, Ryan turned to Afghanistan, saying: “With respect to Afghanistan and the 2014 deadline, we agree with a 2014 transition,” the date set by the White House.

When the topic turned to Iran, Ryan hammered Vice President Joe Biden for not slapping tougher sanctions on the regime earlier, but offered scant detail on how a Republican White House would do things differently going forward to prevent a nuclear Iran.

Biden shot back: “How are they going to prevent war if they say there’s nothing more we … should do than we have already done?”

Romney’s plan will be to highlight Obama’s equivocal support for Israel’s right to act as bellicose as it sees fit to prevent nuclear weapons next door. But again, the debate will be over where – not whether — to draw a red line for green-lighting attacks to take out nuclear capabilities.

In September, Romney told ABC News that his red line was the same as Obama’s. But he has since suggested, vaguely, that it might be different. Regardless, this is hardly a war-versus-peace debate.

Obama, no doubt, is vulnerable on many issues overseas, including the shifting explanations for what caused the killings of the American diplomats in Libya. Initially, the White House blamed a crude copy of an anti-Muslim video, before ultimately faulting organized terrorists exploiting softer-than-we-should-have-had security at the embassy there.

Romney has botched two opportunities to turn the knife on this issue: First, by rushing out a statement before details of the Libyan carnage were known, drawing fire to the Republican ticket and away from the White House. Then at the second debate, the president got another pass because of Romney’s unsure grasp of what the president had said about a possible terrorist connection.

The president’s taunt, “Please proceed, Governor” (as Romney stepped into the trap over exactly was Obama had said in the aftermath of the attack), followed by, “Get the transcript,” are two of the most memorable lines of the campaign.

At the coming debate, Obama can be expected to pull back the camera and point to a record that will be appealing to the majority of viewers. “Not everybody agrees with some of the decisions I’ve made,” he said in the second debate with Romney. “But when it comes to our national security, I mean what I say. I said I’d end the war in … in Iraq, and I did. I said that we’d go after al-Qaeda and bin Laden; we have. I said we’d transition out of Afghanistan, and start making sure that Afghans are responsible for their own security; that’s what I’m doing.”

Romney, according to his campaign’s internal “message points” for the debate, plans to “present an optimistic vision of America’s role in the world,” and argue that “we can’t afford four more years of President Obama leading from behind.”

Romney’s campaign did not seize on Saturday’s night’s New York Times article reporting an agreement between the U.S. and Iran for one-on-one nuclear talks. The White House denied talks are set, but administration officials made clear to POLITICO that they see a diplomatic opening.

Democrats were worried about the politics of the revelation, but Romney surrogates on Sunday’s shows said little when pressed on the news. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), appearing behalf of the Romney campaign on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” said: “[T]he White House has denied it, and so I don’t think there’s much more to talk about.” On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” he punted in almost identical language: “Well, the White House has denied that. And so I don’t think there’s anything further to comment on that story.”

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Romney’s sparring partner in mock debates, followed the same line: “I don’t know if it will be a big story, because both the White House and the Iranians have said it’s not true. It sounds to me … that it’s another example of a national security leak from the White House, you know, and they’ve done a lot of that.”

In fact, the White House was unhappy about the leak, which apparently originated with Iranian sources, then was bolstered by officials in the U.S. administration.

Obama and his aides have worked out a response that shows why Romney will have a difficult time scoring resounding points in Boca Raton. According to a senior administration official, Obama is likely to say when asked about Iran: “I have put in place crippling sanctions. Just in the last month, you’ve seen their oil revenues collapse, their currency collapse. I’ve said I’d do everything I have to, to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”

The president will also argue: “Governor Romney has been unable to articulate any policy ideas that I’m not already doing, except go to war. The [New York Times] story itself isn’t true. But if Iran is pressured to come back to the table, that’s an opportunity. And we should have a conversation. It would be irresponsible, frankly, to reject it. Because your only other option is military.”

© 2012 POLITICO LLC
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Joniemack · Oct 22, 2012

redux said: ↑

I dont agree with it, but until Congress repeals the AUMF, Bush set the legal precedent for any future president to use the same justification.
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I remember Democrats at the time, making this very point to Republicans as both sides cast their aye votes.

Baraka_Guru · Oct 22, 2012

I saw this floating around Facebook. I believe Krugman said this a short while back on The Colbert Report.

roachboy · Oct 22, 2012

http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/DS/MP3s/Steinski_-_Mitt_vs._the_truth.mp3

a seasonal mix from steinski.
enjoy.

rogue49 · Oct 29, 2012

I'm sorry...the whole "States power" thing...as in "should go back to the States", "give States more power", etc and so on...
It's all code for minimizing if not reducing the Federal government.
Same thing the GOP is saying.
Same thing the Confederates said.
Same thing Jefferson said.
etc...

Listen, it's a global world now...more Nation oriented...not States oriented.
States are good for some things, Federal is good for others.
Some States are ass-backwards...along with their politics, competence and preparedness. (you know those which CONSTANTLY pop up)

This is the SAME bunch of smoke-screen.
Come-on man...if you want it, say it...don't bullshit me.
I'll give you a fair-shake...but don't whitewash it.

BTW...the same states with the same old-school politics are the SAME ones that get themselves in a mess and ask for Federal help.
Like a friggin' teen-ager that says don't tell me what to do...then needs funds to pay for their bail....or even just food for the week.

Personally, I'd rather have it budgeted ahead of time...rather than another friggin' "emergency" appropriation. (like the Iraq War???)
Take it from me, it's better to know it ahead of time...any "winging it" on bills always costs more.

Romney would give more power to states, would not abolish FEMA
By: Andrew Restuccia - October 29, 2012

The Romney campaign stressed Monday that states should take the lead in responding to emergencies like hurricanes. But the campaign said Romney would not abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“Gov. Romney believes that states should be in charge of emergency management in responding to storms and other natural disasters in their jurisdictions,” Romney spokesman Ryan Williams said in a statement. “As the first responders, states are in the best position to aid affected individuals and communities, and to direct resources and assistance to where they are needed most. This includes help from the federal government and FEMA.”

A campaign official added that Romney would not abolish FEMA.

The statement came after The Huffington Post highlighted Romney’s comments from a June 2011 CNN primary debate in which Romney said states should take on a bigger role in responding to disasters. “Mitt Romney In GOP Debate: Shut Down Federal Disaster Agency, Send Responsibility To The States,” read the Huffington Post’s headline.

“FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say, ‘Do it on a case-by-case basis.’ And there are some people who say, ‘You know what, maybe we’re learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role.’ How do you deal with something like that?” debate moderator John King asked Romney during the debate, pointing to the May 2011 tornado that killed more than 150 people in Joplin, Mo.

“Absolutely. And every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better,” Romney responded.

“Instead of thinking in the federal budget, ‘What we should cut?’ we should ask ourselves the opposite question, ‘What should we keep?’ We should take all of what we’re doing at the federal level and say, ‘What are the things we’re doing that we don’t have to do?’ And those things we’ve got to stop doing,” Romney continued.

© 2012 POLITICO LLC
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Joniemack · Oct 29, 2012

“Gov. Romney believes that states should be in charge of emergency management in responding to storms and other natural disasters in their jurisdictions,” Romney spokesman Ryan Williams said in a statement. “As the first responders, states are in the best position to aid affected individuals and communities, and to direct resources and assistance to where they are needed most. This includes help from the federal government and FEMA.”
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I can't see this happening. I can't see a governor like Scott Walker embracing the creation of a new state agency or welcoming the hiring of public workers to man it. Besides, most state and local governments have had first responder programs in effect since 9/11 - most of it paid for out of their own tax coffers.

“Absolutely. And every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better,” Romney responded.
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How would this work in the case of disaster response, I wonder? Would state governments contract the work out to a company(s) willing to hire and keep staff on call for an emergency that may or may not occur? How does a private company survive in years where there are no disasters? Where's the profit incentive? Would state taxpayers be obliged to pay these companies a contracted sum of money regardless of whether or not their services were needed? I could see a handful of companies equipped to take disasters on board nation-wide but not state-by-state. How they would get paid and by whom is another question. And where would FEMA come in?

It's not really about sending anything back to the states and Romney's admitted it - Doing away with state and federal agencies and public workers, collecting taxes and paying them out to private companies is the goal, regardless of whether it makes sense to do so, financially or otherwise.

rogue49 · Oct 30, 2012

I've got a question...does Romney get dizzy?
Because I would throw-up faster than a roller-coaster ride.

Mitt flips on FEMA, now would keep it
By Alex Seitz-Wald - Tuesday, Oct 30, 2012

Romney said he wanted to eliminate the government agency, but now he's having second thoughts

Yesterday, we noted that even as a massive super storm was bearing down on the East Coast, Mitt Romney’s campaign was standing by his suggestion in a GOP debate last year that he would end FEMA and make the states handle disaster relief on their own. But how much has changed in 24 hours. As we wake up to see the disaster Hurricane Sandy had wrought, we also find a new position for Romney, who now says he wants to keep FEMA.

In a GOP primary debate in June of last year, moderator John King asked Romney if he would let states take on the responsibilities of FEMA, which was “about to run out of money.” “Absolutely,” Romney replied. “And every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better… We cannot — we cannot afford to do those things,” he added.

After the Huffington Post highlighted the quote Sunday under the headline, “Mitt Romney In GOP Debate: Shut Down Federal Disaster Agency, Send Responsibility To The States,” a spokesperson for the Romney campaign followed up with editor Ryan Grim. Did the spokesperson say Grim’s characterization of Romney’s comments was wrong? Nope. “Gov. Romney wants to ensure states, who are the first responders and are in the best position to aid impacted individuals and communities, have the resources and assistance they need to cope with natural disasters,” was all the unnamed Romney official said.

As we noted yesterday, eliminating the federal component of disaster relief is a terrible idea. And after Hurricane Sandy left millions suffering, the Romney campaign seems to have come around. “Gov. Romney believes that states should be in charge of emergency management in responding to storms and other natural disasters in their jurisdictions. As the first responders, states are in the best position to aid affected individuals and communities, and to direct resources and assistance to where they are needed most. This includes help from the federal government and FEMA,” Romney spokesman Ryan Williams said in a statement to Politico’s Andrew Restuccia.

It’s worth noting that what Williams describes is basically exactly the way emergency management functions now, though he curiously left out any mention of local and municipal responders, who are really in the best position to affect aid. When locals get overwhelmed, they bring in state resources. When state resources get overwhelmed, they bring in federal resources. As FEMA explains about the National Incident Management System (NIMS), the national standardized process that various tiers of government used to work together in emergencies: “NIMS does not take command away from state and local authorities… The intention of the federal government in these situations is not to command the response but, rather, to support the affected local, tribal, and/or state governments.”

There is a valid, though wonky, critique to be made of the current system of cost allocation between states and Washington. When the president declares a federal disaster area, the federal government commits to paying for 75 percent of the recovery effort. A report from the Government Accountability Office this year found that the formula used to determine whether states can handle the financial burdens of disasters on their own has not adequately kept up with inflation and increases in household incomes. So the federal government ends up taking on financial obligation that states could and should afford on their own.

Changing the way the threshold is calculated would save the federal government lots of money, but that’s not at all what Mitt Romney was talking about. He was making an ideological argument, not an accounting one. And by coming back around to support basically the status quo, it’s hard to see his position on FEMA as anything but another flip flop.
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rogue49 · Oct 31, 2012

Now...this seems to be the question of the year.
It was true in the primaries, it's true now. (Hell, even other conservatives were saying they were not quite comfortable or firm back then)
How do you get a sense of someone?

Personally, I think I've gotten to the point of not worrying about Romney himself and his stances,
but who he would bring in with him...as a part of his administration.
(Bill Maher makes a good point of this for his final New Rule for Realtime Esp. 264 -
View: http://youtu.be/k07o5w-j2Hg
)
Just like I didn't really have an issue with GWB as much as with all the neo-cons that came in his train.

Which Mitt Romney will go down in history?
By: Robert S. McElvaine - October 31, 2012

Surely the biggest mystery of the 2012 presidential campaign — even greater than that of what was wrong with President Barack Obama in the first debate — is this: Who is Mitt Romney? The conundrum deepened at the final debate, when the Republican candidate took different positions on almost every foreign policy issue from those he has stated in the past. It was reminiscent of Richard Nixon in the first presidential debate in 1960, when the vice president repeatedly said such things as, “The things Sen. Kennedy has said many of us can agree with,” and “I agree with Sen. Kennedy’s appraisal generally in this respect.”

The mystery has now been solved, but before we get to the answer, let us have a look at why it has been such a mystery.

Among the most recent examples of the ever-changing Romney prior to his foreign policy somersaults in the third presidential debate was that he shifted again — and again — on abortion. In the week between the first two presidential debates, he first told the Des Moines Register that there was no legislation on restricting abortion that would be part of his agenda. The next day in Ohio, he declared, “I’m a pro-life candidate and I’ll be a pro-life president.” So, he was for choice before he was against it, before he was for it, before he was against it. … Where will he be on it tomorrow — or next January?

During the first debate, Romney suddenly became someone radically different from the candidate he had been in the preceding couple of years. At least he didn’t change that persona for the second debate. The erstwhile champion of tax cuts for the rich declared that he is “not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people.” When he was standing among very wealthy donors in May, he expressed disdain for nearly half of all Americans, saying that they are people “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them.” Standing onstage with Obama, though, Romney professed his undying love for the middle class.

Rather than a self-made man, he is a self-made-up man.

When Romney shared the debate stage with Ted Kennedy in 1994, he mutated into a candidate with positions almost identical to those of the legendary liberal lion. When he shared the stage with a group of right-wing Republicans during the innumerable primary debates, he took on the views, characteristics and policies of the people surrounding him. Viewers could be forgiven for mistaking Romney for Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich or Herman Cain.

But at the general election debates this month, the person with whom he shared the stage was a moderate Democrat, and Romney took on the trappings and positions of a moderate candidate; indeed, he almost became Barack Obama. Now he was a believer in government regulation — “You can’t have a free market work if you don’t have regulation. … You have to have regulations so that you can have an economy work.” Suddenly, Social Security, Medicare and people with pre-existing conditions had no greater friend than Mitt Romney.

Then in the third debate, the Republican nominee mutated from someone ready to go to war with just about anyone into a peace lover whose positions were almost identical to those of the president he had been, almost until the moment he stepped onstage with him, viciously attacking for those same positions.

In March, Romney spokesperson Eric Fehrnstrom used the Etch A Sketch toy to describe his candidate’s remarkable adaptability. Two weeks ago, Obama said his opponent is suffering from “Romnesia.”

Isn’t this a plot we’ve seen somewhere before?

A case could be made that Romney is Lon Chaney, the “man with a thousand faces.” But that doesn’t seem to quite hit the mark.

Consider this description: a man who “seemed clearly to be an aristocrat and extolled the very rich as he chatted with socialites. He spoke adoringly of … the Republican Party, all in an upper-class Boston accent. An hour later, … I was stunned to see the same man speaking with the kitchen help. Now he claimed to be a Democrat, and his accent seemed coarse, as if he were one of the crowd.”

This depiction fits Mitt Romney’s changing personas as well as one of his custom-made shirts fits his torso, but it is a fictional account of F. Scott Fitzgerald writing in his notebook about a curious man he saw at a party in the 1920s at the Long Island home of a wealthy couple.

The man in question is the title character in Woody Allen’s 1983 film, “Zelig.” As a result of his overwhelming desire for approval, Leonard Zelig develops the capacity to transform his appearance and take on the characteristics of those around him.

Zelig looks like a gangster when he is with gangsters, and a baseball player when he is with Babe Ruth. He turns black when he is with African-American jazz musicians. In a Chinese restaurant, he takes on the appearance of an Asian and speaks in Chinese. With Hasidic Jews, he sprouts a long, bushy beard. With fat people, he becomes obese.

Bruno Bettelheim, playing himself in the film, says of Zelig: “I, myself, felt that one could really think of him as the ultimate conformist.”

“It certainly is a very bizarre story,” opines Saul Bellow in the film.

Leonard Zelig became famous as a “human chameleon.” If there is a better way to describe Mitt Romney, it is hard to imagine what it would be.

Whatever appearance and positions he has taken on to adapt to his current electoral environment, if he were to win the election there can be little doubt about what coloration this Mitt Zelig would take on when surrounded by the right-wing ideologues who dominate his party in Washington.

Historian Robert S. McElvaine is the Chisholm Distinguished Professor of Arts & Letters at Millsaps College. His most recent book is a 25th-anniversary edition of “The Great Depression.” He is currently completing a book manuscript, “Oh, Freedom! – The Young Sixties.”

© 2012 POLITICO LLC
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rogue49 · Nov 3, 2012

BANZAI !!!

Mitt Romney’s Kamikaze strategy
By Greg Sargent

There's been quite a bit of consternation among reporters lately about Mitt Romney’s refusal to answer their questions. And rightly so. But let’s be clear on why Romney is refusing to engage reporters. If he did, he’d face questions about the mounting instances of dishonesty his campaign has resorted to in the final stretch — potentially tripping him up and placing all the dissembling into even sharper relief.

In the race’s final days, Romney has adopted what you might call a Kamikaze strategy. His campaign is cranking out a startling number of falsehoods and sleazy attacks, drawing widespread condemnation in the media that could ultimately crash his campaign, because that condemnation dovetails with Obama’s closing character argument against him.

Of course, the Kamikaze analogy only goes so far. If Romney’s calculation proves correct — and all the ad spending overwhelms whatever criticism his falsehoods and distortions draw in the media — his quest for the presidency would obviously come to fruition, rather than perish.

Today the Romney camp released a new ad hitting Obama for his proposal to appoint a “secretary of business.” The ad intones: “His solution to everything is to add another bureaucrat.” But the relevant Obama proposal wasn’t to “add” any bureaucrats. It was to consolidate a range of government agencies that minister to the needs of businesses.

The Romney camp is also running a new Spanish language TV ad in Florida that ties Obama to Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. The pettiness and irrelevance of attacks like these risk generating more media questions about whether Romney has run out of arguments and believes he’s losing the race.

Meanwhile, the Ohio press continues to pound Romney for the centerpiece of this Kamikaze strategy: His false claims about the auto-bailout and Jeep supposedly moving American jobs to China. Dems are circulating this scorching editorial in the Youngstown Vindicator that hits Romney’s Jeep lie as an “insult to Ohioans” and bluntly states that Romney is “no friend of the auto industry, on which Ohio relies for one of every eight jobs.” Another hard-hitting editorial in the Toledo Blade blasts Romney for an “exercise in deception about auto-industry issues that is remarkable even by the standards of his campaign.”

All of this feeds directly into the final argument Obama is making about Romney’s character, integrity, and authenticity: He’ll shamelessly say anything to win and as a result you can’t trust him on anything, let alone to look out for your interests. Romney is banking that he can surf past all the media and Obama camp criticism on a wave of last minute ad spending. Refusing to answer questions from the press is central to pulling that off. If Romney were to take questions from reporters, he’d be asked to answer for all of this stuff.

After all, when reporters do press him on his dishonesty and/or evasions, the results aren’t pretty. Romney faced harsh criticism for his refusal to answer questions about whether he still agreed with his previous suggestion that he favors transferring FEMA responsibilities to the states. And as Steve Benen notes, the statement he finally did release on FEMA didn’t put to bed lingering questions about his position.

None of this is to say Romney’s closing strategy can’t work. But it’s a pretty massive and audacious gamble on his part.
Click to expand...

rogue49 · Nov 8, 2012

Romney's Transition Website...in case he had won.
Last Look

Baraka_Guru · Nov 8, 2012

White People Mourning Romney

This is kind of funny.

In its defense, Romney did get 60% of the white vote.

Tully Mars · Nov 8, 2012

Baraka_Guru said: ↑

White People Mourning Romney

This is kind of funny.

In its defense, Romney did get 60% of the white vote.
Click to expand...

The fact he got as close as he did is not funny to me at all.

Baraka_Guru · Nov 8, 2012

Tully Mars said: ↑

The fact he got as close as he did is not funny to me at all.
Click to expand...

I'm not American, so I know it's different, but that doesn't mean we Canadians are unaffected by American politics. Hardly. In many ways American politics is just as important to us as our own.

That said, I do find this whole situation funny, albeit in a gallows, black, grotesque humour kind of way.

Laughter doesn't always come when things are peachy keen. We also laugh as a response to grief and anxiety, as a kind of release.

Ha, ha! I say.

rogue49 · Nov 8, 2012

Baraka_Guru said: ↑

White People Mourning Romney

This is kind of funny.

In its defense, Romney did get 60% of the white vote.
Click to expand...

Not this white guy...
Oh also straight middle-aged upper middle-class IT working independent family man....

Is it because I'm technically Jewish...even though I'm not big-time Jewish??
Or is it because I grew up in the Northeast...even though I was born in OKC??
Or is it because I've got black friends? Gay-friends? despite being semi-conservative??

When are we going to get out of these categories?

Baraka_Guru · Nov 8, 2012

rogue49 said: ↑

When are we going to get out of these categories?
Click to expand...

Never.

It would be like asking when we are truly free from governmentality.

It's asking the wrong question.

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