Spiritual wickedness in high places

In 1776 John Adams was concerned that the deeply divided and fragile colonial union would fracture over its petty differences and fail to fulfill the destiny that lay before it.  He wrote of his fears that the Continental Congress’ decisions would be dictated ‘by noise, not sense; by meanness, not greatness; by ignorance, not learning; by contracted hearts, not large souls.’”

Adams wrote, “There must be decency and respect and veneration introduced for persons of authority of every rank or we are undone. In popular government, this is our only way.”

Many say that this is an important moment for our democracy.  Just like 1776, we appear to be vulnerable to the same small thinking.

Here’s a quick fact-check on the past week in politics

Let’s start with the convention.

South Dakota Sen. John Thune said the Obama administration “proposed banning farm kids from doing basic chores!”  That’s a “pants on fire” lie.  What he was referring to were new safety rules proposed by the Labor Department for minors working on farms.  The only chores it would prohibit were those that were dangerous and should be done by adults.

Rob Portman, a U.S. senator from Ohio said President Obama “never even worked in business.”  That’s also false.  He did work as a research assistant for a New York company in the 80’s and was a partner in a Chicago law firm.

Paul Ryan claimed that Obama broke a promise to keep a Wisconsin GM plant from closing.  In fact Obama never made that promise and the GM plant was closed before he took office and could have intervened.  Another lie.

Ryan misrepresented Romney’s record in Massachusetts saying, “unemployment went down, household incomes went up,” and the state “saw its credit rating upgraded.”  The truth is that household incomes, when you include inflation, went down.  While unemployment went down, there is little evidence that it was the direct result of any particular Romney policy.  The state’s credit rating did go up, but it was the result of a tax increase passed before Romney took office.  His office did lobby for the credit rating improvement, but was not responsible for the policies that improved the state’s financial condition.

Ryan repeated the claim that the Obama administration “funneled” $716 billion out of the program “at the expense of the elderly” to pay for his health care law.  In fact this number came from the CBO, not the White House.  It reflects projected savings from a reduction in the GROWTH of Medicare costs.  Those savings come from a deal that the administration struck with primarily Hospitals who agreed to a reduction in Medicare re-imbursements in return for getting a higher percentage of insured non-Medicare patients under the ACA.  It took no money from existing Medicare programs.  Big lie.

Ryan claimed that “The stimulus was a case of political patronage, corporate welfare and cronyism at their worst. You, the working men and women of this country, were cut out of the deal.”  If that’s true, Ryan was in on the deal.  Ryan’s pleas to federal agencies for stimulus funds included letters to Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis seeking stimulus grant money for two Wisconsin energy conservation companies.  He ended up securing over $20M for Wisconsin companies.

Ryan claimed that “Obama “created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way and then did exactly nothing.”  What he neglected to say was that he was part of that commission and voted against the final report.

Gov. Christie said, “Mitt Romney will tell us the hard truths we need to hear to end the torrent of debt that is compromising our future and burying our economy. … Tonight, our duty is to tell the American people the truth. Our problems are big and the solutions will not be painless. We all must share in the sacrifice. Any leader that tells us differently is simply not telling the truth.”

The reality is that Romney has promised to cut $500 billion per year from the federal budget by 2016 to bring spending below 20 percent of the U.S. economy, and to balance it entirely by 2020, but the math on what he has proposed so far doesn’t add up.  There are none of the “hard truths” Christie referenced.  Instead there has been a lot of political pandering.  The promised repeal of the Affordable Care Act will add $100B to the deficit according to the CBO.  He will decline to implement that Hospital Medicare cost reduction deal worth $716B.  He has also proposed increased military spending and decreased taxes without any specific plan to pay for either.  Since he has also pledged not to touch Social Security or Medicare, there just isn’t enough money left in the rest of the budget to fulfill his promises.

Senator Rob Portman leaned on his foreign policy expertise in criticizing Obama on his China policy.  “China manipulates its currency, giving it an unfair trade advantage. So why doesn’t the president do something about it? I’ll tell you one reason. President Obama could not run up his record trillion-dollar deficits if the Chinese didn’t buy our bonds to finance them. Folks, we are as beholden to China for bonds as we are to the Middle East for oil. This will end under Mitt Romney.”

What he didn’t say is that he was the ambassador to China in the Obama administration during a time when imports increased 25%.  During the same time the deficit increased only 10%.  He also failed to mention that both Bush and Obama have opened unfair trade practice cases against China with the World Trade Organization.  Finally he didn’t say what Romney would do that is any different than what Bush or Obama have done in their attempts to rebalance the relationship with China.

Former Senator Rick Santorum dragged out Romney’s welfare claim saying “This summer (Obama) showed us once again he believes in government handouts and dependency by waiving the work requirement for welfare. Now, I helped write the welfare reform bill. We made a lot crystal clear. No president can waive the work requirement, but as with his refusal to enforce our immigration laws, President Obama rules like he is above the law.”

The facts are that the administration did not waive a work requirement. Instead, it invited governors to apply on behalf of their states for waivers of administrative requirements in the 1996 law. Some states have complained those rules tie up caseworkers who could be helping clients directly.

In a July 18 letter to congressional leaders, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said that to be eligible for a waiver, governors must commit that their plans will move at least 20 percent more people from welfare to work. Moreover, states must show clear progress toward the goal within a year, or lose the waiver.  Big Lie.

Up next fact checking the movies.

Among other things I was a wrestler in school.  One of the things that you learn in wrestling is that there is a counter for virtually every move.  So wrestling ends up being much more about desire, conditioning, and who makes the fewest mistakes rather than who is the strongest.

There was an example of this on the campaign trail this week.

The Romney campaign successfully turned the conversation from tax returns to Medicare by selecting Paul Ryan as their VP candidate.  The Obama campaign immediately pounced on that selection by pointing out that Ryan had proposed turning Medicare into a voucher program.  This produced a whole set of back and forth about Medicare which I will cover in another post.  Whether or not this was working for Romney, he clearly appeared to have regained some footing and was at least engaging the Obama campaign in a substantive debate about the future of Medicare.

Then out of the blue Romney finally responded to Senator Harry Reid’s claim that he hadn’t paid taxes in ten years.  Romney’s response was that he has paid at least 13% in taxes for the past ten years.  This response came six weeks after Reid’s original claim on the floor of the Senate.

During the past six weeks, the Romney campaign called Reid a liar.  They said they weren’t going to release additional returns because those returns would only result in the Democrats asking for more returns and the whole campaign would become a discussion about personal taxes rather than the economy which is what Romney REALLY wants to talk about.

So why say anything more, particularly after this long delay?  The delay in itself further re-enforces the claim, whether true or not, that Romney has something to hide because virtually every taxpayer remembers at least in general numbers how much they paid in taxes.  So why did it take him six weeks to confirm that he didn’t have a year where his taxes dipped below the 13% threshold?  Is he really that disconnected from the process of paying his taxes?

The Obama campaign, just like a good wrestler, responded quickly with their counter.  They offered Romney a deal.  Just release three more years of tax returns which, in addition to the two years of returns that Romney has already promised to release, would comprise five years.  In return the Obama campaign said they would not request any further information and they would step criticizing the Romney campaign on this issue.

The Romney campaign rejected that offer almost immediately.  That rejection allowed the Obama campaign to ask all of the same questions again that they had been asking the past six weeks.  In addition the rejection of what many would regard as a reasonable compromise reinforces another claim the Obama campaign has been making that Obama has tried to compromise but these Republicans at least are so ideological that they can’t make a deal.  This plays into one of the major issues that I posted about with swing voters – the desire for both parties to figure out how to work together.

The Obama campaign is right back where they want to be questioning what Romney has to hide and the Romney campaign is right back in the same place they were before they announced Paul Ryan as their VP pick.  They are defending their candidate’s decision to withhold information that a majority of the American people say they are interested in.

The Romney campaign in their rejection said, “It is clear that President Obama wants nothing more than to talk about Governor Romney’s tax returns instead of the issues that matter to voters, like putting Americans back to work, fixing the economy and reining in spending.”  This is the same thing that they have been saying for the past six weeks, but now they are the ones responsible, at least in the mind of some voters, for the campaign being stuck on this issue.

The Romney campaign is correct about the Obama campaign, but wrong about what voters want.  Obama continues to push this issue because it is working for him, particularly with swing voters in battleground states.  It cuts to the core of whether or not this guy can be trusted, and Obama is winning this argument.

Romney said, “As long as I continue to speak about the economy, I’m going to win.”  This week, he failed to talk only about the economy and he lost.

The Romney campaign is losing the narration battle. He has allowed himself to be painted as a corporate raider, a tax dodger, a flip flopper on healthcare, and a rich guy out of touch with the working man.

He is aloof on the campaign trail. He doesn’t mix well with people or the press. The people he does mix well with appear to be self-described VIP’s. He is willing to wildly distort the facts about the Obama administration but whines and asks for apologies when his Obama does the same thing to him.

The sum is a portrait of an insincere privileged wimpy rich guy who can dish it out, but can’t take it.

While I’m not a Romney fan, I have the sense that there is more to this guy than that.

Unfortunately his campaign has failed numerous times to take advantage of every opening they have had so far to control the conversation. Less than a week after the most recent disappointing job numbers, the press is talking about Bain and Romney’s tax returns. When the Supreme Court announced their decision, Romney is caught flat footed talking about tax versus penalty. He should have been prepared to release the details of HIS healthcare plan regardless of the Supreme Court decision was. Before that Romney had a little good news in poll gains and fundraising success. Obama quickly issued an executive order benefiting illegal immigrants, and again Romney stumbles in response.

Romney’s only effective line of attack is on the economy and he seems unable to move off that one note. Even Obama admitted that if he were in Romney’s shoes he would do the same thing.

Here’s the campaign, however, I wish Romney was running.

He should be conducting a full-throated defense of the creative destruction inherent in the free market including outsourcing, buyouts, globalization, and reorganizations. He should be pointing to examples of how these “natural corrections” force companies to shed old ways of doing things, reinvent themselves,  or die. The new companies which replace the old not only recover lost jobs and profits from the transition but ultimately create net new jobs and produce new profits that would not have been possible with the old model. He should be jumping on his soapbox to defend his op-ed piece on domestic auto manufacturing and the sclerosis that was strangling the big three before the financial collapse. Rather than suggest that a managed bankruptcy was his idea, he should trump Obama’s claim of saving the auto industry with the question of how many other industries can the government afford to save. Then point out that the growth in the domestic auto manufacturing wasn’t because the government participated. It was because the auto industries were able to restructure themselves, and that’s the process that must be allowed to continue.

He should be using the forest analogy. The forest service used to prevent all fires, but over the years discovered that this policy resulted in an unhealthy forest that was MORE susceptible to disease which created really big fires. The forests where smaller fires were allowed to burn on a more regular basis were healthier and less prone to big fires. He could make the claim that government intervention is doing the same thing to our economy by needless interference into natural processes. The result is big contractions like the most recent one rather than small manageable recessions like those we’ve experienced during the Reagan and Bush years.

In this sort of campaign his Bain experience makes sense.

In order to get elected, however, he would also have to promise workers some protections during these periods when their industries “caught fire”. Otherwise he is asking workers to take all of the risk while investors get all the rewards. An expanded safety net would do the trick. Short term support, funded through some end-of-life insurance that companies would be required to carry, would provide workers the confidence to support a new financial model that would replace dead-end jobs in dead-end industries with new high paying jobs in new high growth industries.

Ironically, this would also play to Romney’s strength. He could use his use his unique Massachusetts Healthcare experience as a plus. After all, he was the first governor of either party to implement robust healthcare reform that provided a wider safety net for Massachusetts workers. He should be claiming that he wants to bring that same common sense approach to giving every worker the protection they need to make the same sort of individual transitions from “old” economy jobs to “new” economy jobs that we want our industries to make.

If he ran this sort of campaign, I think he would be leading in the polls today.

Instead in order to win the Republican nomination he had to run from both his healthcare success and his career at Bain. This left him as just another one-note Republican and doomed this race to a partisan wrangle over who got the last good shot in at whom.

I still wouldn’t have voted for him if he ran the campaign that I suggest, BUT I think it would have sparked a very healthy debate about whether the “let it burn” philosophy DOES indeed produce better results. More than that, people would have had a real choice between individualism and collectivism with a clear understanding of the consequences of each approach.

It would also have been a MUCH more interesting campaign that this one is turning out to be.

The Obama campaign has had some success characterizing Romney as a corporate raider, an outsourcer in chief, and generally someone who is out of touch with the working man and has something to hide.

The Romney campaign has had some success in blaming the current sluggish economy on Obama.

Let’s look at how both of these play out.

Romney’s fundamental claim is that he would do a better job in the White House because he has had success in the private sector. The Obama campaign narrative directly questions the wisdom of having a businessman as President. They don’t dispute his success. They question whether voters should trust someone who made money closing companies, firing people, and creating jobs overseas. The campaign has recently expanded their attempts to paint a picture of Romney as untrustworthy by calling for more complete financial disclosures than the Romney campaign has so far provided. There is evidence that Romney has accounts in countries used as tax havens.

The response by the Romney campaign has so far been slow footed.

They point to a factcheck.org analysis of the Obama campaign ads which absolves Romney of much of the responsibility for the incidents cited in the ads because he had an alibi. When the incidents occurred, he was spending much of his time helping turn around the Salt Lake City Olympics. While Romney did benefit financially, they claim he wasn’t directly involved in the decisions that led to closed companies, laid off employees, and overseas jobs. They also attempted to clarify a difference between creating overseas jobs to address overseas markets and creating overseas jobs to service domestic markets.

On the issue of taxes, Romney has responded that all of his investments are in a blind trust over which he has no control and that all of the taxes due on those investments have been paid. He does not dispute that some of those accounts are held in foreign accounts.

While all of this is true, it rings hollow with voters. They don’t want to hear a technical answer that absolves him of responsibility. If these things happened, which no one disputes; and he made money from them, which no one disputes; what does he plan to do as President which will prevent companies from failing, preserve US jobs, and encourage more investment in this country versus overseas? His campaign so far has failed to connect the dots.

They also want to know why he has ANY accounts in countries that are tax havens if he isn’t in fact taking advantage of their legal tax free status.

Bottom line – advantage Obama.

Obama’s fundamental claim on the economy is that he has done as well as could be expected with the size of the problem that he inherited and the intransigence of the Republicans. He has had some success, but there is more work to be done than could be reasonably expected in four years.

The Romney campaign’s message is simple. You voted for this guy who promised to make things better and things aren’t better. Punish him and those that supported him by voting for Romney.

There is no disputing the fact that the economy continues to struggle even though there have been some bright spots. There is also no disputing the fact that Obama chose to fulfill the campaign promise of healthcare reform after passing the stimulus bills rather than continue to focus on economic recovery and job growth.

Bottom line – Advantage Romney

The rest of the story, according to the Washington Post, is that many voters at this point have already made up their minds and there is precious little that could happen between now and November to change their votes.

On a national basis, that means a very close election. On a swing state basis, right now that means Obama wins fairly easily because he has a lead in the states that he needs to get 270 electoral votes. Here’s an electoral map awarding the states to each candidate based on who is ahead in the polls.

There is still plenty of risk out there for the Obama campaign because of the shaky international situation. But there is risk for the Romney campaign too.

That’s because they have not followed up their claims that it is time for change with much detail on what their changes will look like. That is their choice and it may prove a wise one because the economy itself could win the election for them. But if we remain in more or less the same position in November that we are in now, the Obama campaign may be able to create enough doubt in the minds of independent voters that they will support the policies that have been explained to them in detail versus the promises that Romney can do better.

The Obama campaign also has the advantage that at least some of the voters understand that the United States is more than just a business. It has a responsibility to its citizens that goes beyond profits. It has an obligation to protect its citizens and promote the general welfare.

That means that the government takes actions that individuals wouldn’t take. This collective commitment to good will is at the very heart of our social contract – but it is this social contract that Republicans are calling into question.

That means investments in things like education, healthcare, infrastructure, protection, and innovation. Willingness to make those investments is what has set us apart as a country. The country is hungry for a vision of what we can achieve. So far neither candidate has been successful in capturing the imagination of the country because neither has a compelling vision. Hopefully this election campaign can draw that vision out for voters and give them a real choice rather than the narrations that seem to dominate the current landscape.

While things continue to sluggish across the country, the election will actually be decided based on the outcome in maybe ten states or less.  In some of those states the economy is actually recovering quite well.  This is making it very difficult from Romney to get traction with his national message that Obama’s policies are leading the nation down the wrong path.  Worse than that, in those key battleground states, Romney’s message is being contradicted by Republican governors who are eager to take credit for the recovery.  It has gotten so bad, that the Romney campaign had to ask embattled Florida governor Rick Scott to tone down his re-election message that Florida is on the rebound.

As predicted, economic improvement in Florida has not only improved the position of Republican Governor Rick Scott, but also President Obama.   According to the latest Quinnipiac University Poll, a six point May deficit in Florida for Obama has become a four point June lead.

Florida is crucial to the Romney election strategy.  For example, if Obama wins Florida, he only needs Pennsylvania where he has a big lead and Wisconsin which hasn’t been won by a Republican President since 1984 to get to 271.

In Ohio, Governor John Kasich is publicly touting the state’s falling unemployment rate and 75,700 jobs added during the past year.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder on June 19 called Michigan “the comeback state of the United States,” noting its jobless rate dropped to 8.5 percent in May from 14.2 percent in August 2009.

In Virginia, Governor Robert McDonnell’s Opportunity Virginia political action committee aired an ad in April that touts gains in the economy since he took office in 2010.  “Virginia is growing strong again, and so is our future,” gushed the narrator, adding that Virginians were now enjoying “the lowest unemployment rate in over three years.”

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker said economic progress was a key component of his successful defense against a June 5 recall election. Walker pointed to the state’s unemployment rate, which was 6.8 percent in May, down from 7.7 percent when he took office in January 2011.

This is really the crux of the issue.

Republicans have blocked Obama’s Job’s bill which would have put 2M more people back to work.

They have also bottled up the Transportation Bill which has a lot of jobs associated with it too.

They pushed the country to the brink of default and now are poised to roll back the defense budget cuts agreed to as part of the debt ceiling bill.

In spite of a rapidly contracting public sector, and slowing exports to Europe and China, the private sector continues to expand.

In many ways, the economy of the last two years is as much the result of Republican obstructionism as it is Democratic policy.

Finally the latest Bloomberg poll suggests that the voters are starting to take notice.  They are blaming the Republicans and their candidate for the failure of the Republican House to act and the failure of Romney to outline a credible jobs plan.  As a result they view Romney as out of touch with the needs and concerns of the working man.

Bloomberg polls also directly contradict Romney’s fundamental question, “are you better off now that you were four years ago”.  58% of those polled said, “Yes”.