Monthly Archives: August 2012

Too bad on such a fine professor…

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The two best speeches so far on the Republican convention have been given by women, Mitt Romney’s wife, Ann, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

It was hard not to like about Ann Romney and her speech about the love for the man she has been married to for over 40 years, without revealing anything really new about her husband.

It was Ann Romney’s day, that first convention day. She outshone New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Yes, she outshone her husband, who has never given a speech like that. It remains to see how Mitt Romney succeeds tonight in his big opportunity to explain to the American people why they should vote for him in November.

Condoleezza Rice’s speech was also very good. But it made me sad, that after many times having heard her lecture as professor of foreign policy during my years at Stanford University, my image of her, a prominent academic, has now changed into a Republican standard-bearer, a Republican spokeswoman. Yes, she was national security adviser and secretary of state, but, in my view, she never seemed to be hardline partisan, though she has never hid her Republican sympathies.

But now? To me, she finally made the move from academia to partisan politics, and although she denies it, it is quite possible that she has now also launched a political career with 2016 in view.

When I say that her speech was very good, that does not mean that I didn’t have big problems with her uncritical history of recent foreign policy, of her description of the years during George W. Bush, and of the current foreign policy situation and on U.S. standing in the world. Not a positive word about President Obama, not one.

The excellent foreign policy commentator in Slate Magazine, Fred Kaplan, was deeply upset in a piece today, “Condoleezza Rice Has a Lot of Nerve.”

One can only gasp at the magnitude of “chutzpah” in one woman. Condi Rice, a top adviser in the most disastrous, reputation-crippling foreign policy management in decades, has no business lecturing anybody on this score.

The New York Times’ former editor Bill Keller describes in “Condi’s World” the foreign policy dilemma in the Republican Party and the fact that Rice now, as with George W. Bush before that, “endorsed another would-be president unschooled in world affairs – conspicuously, embarrassingly so – and this one is Already seemingly in thrall to the hard-liners. “

Too bad on such a fine professor.

Here is her speech:

Massive criticism of Ryan’s “dishonest” speech

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As I suspected after Paul Ryan’s speech last night, many commentators have not been kind to him. I am not talking about his performance. It was powerful and the speech was well written speech, and although Ryan in the beginning looked a bit like a nervous young kid, he clearly managed to establish a very good contact with convention delegates.

So the Republican base is now not only secure but clearly enthusiastic about Romney’s choice as vice president. Thus, the goal of the speech was accomplished.

But did Ryan manage to reach the broader American voter groups, especially the independents? We do not know yet. Probably not. It was somehow too partisan, the picture of President Obama’s years in the White House somehow too dark, with no nuances.

A few examples: “Mr. Ryan’s misleading speech,” the Washington Post wrote in its main editorial today, while one of the paper’s blogs, The Plum Line, talked about Ryan’s “staggering, staggering lie”.

Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic has a good compilation under the headline “The Most Dishonest Convention Speech … Ever”? And Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine called the speech “Paul Ryan’s Large Lies and One Big Truth”.

Here’s a bit of what they are talking about:

  • The GM plant in Ryan’s hometown of Janesville closed before Obama became president.
  • Ryan, just like Obama, wants to cut more than $ 700 billion from the Medicare, but he was silent about this.
  • The downgrading of U.S. credit rating was not a result of Obama’s policies but of Republican’s refusal to agree to raising the debt ceiling.
  • Obama has not contributed more than anyone else to the increase of the national debt. It is rather the result of the policies that George W. Bush pursued and which Ryan as congressman fully supported: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the two huge tax cuts.
  • Ryan’s pledge to support the weak and the poor do not rhyme with his budget proposal, where 62 percent of his cuts affect the low-income earners, including Medicaid.
  • Bowles/Simpson Commission: Ryan attacked Obama for not having adopted his own commission’s proposal. But he neglected to say that Ryan himself, as a member of that Commission, refused to sign the proposal because it contained tax increases.

The Democrats have a lot of new ammunition for the remaining days of this election campaign, but Ryan, unlike Sarah Palin, is no fool, so it will be a tough debate! Who will the American voters believe in the end? Mitt Romney has a big task tonight.

Here is Ryan’s speech:

Success in Tampa crucial to Romney’s chances in the fall

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Leading up to the Republican convention in Tampa this week, it’s not just the weather that’s put a spoke in the wheel of the Romney/Ryan strategy to focus the campaign on the economy and unemployment, and that they are better suited than Obama to lead the U.S. in these difficult times.

There has also been an abortion debate after Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin’s stupid statement about “legitimate rape,” which produced lots of attention on the fact that the Republican Party platform prohibits abortion in all cases, even rape and incest. Then we had Romney’s equally stupid statement that he has never been asked to show his birth certificate — a bad joke to some, to others a calculated political signal to the despicable “birther” movement.   And we had Medicare, Medicare, Medicare.

So it hasn’t been a smooth ride, which raises the stakes for the Republican ticket this week in Tampa. Although conventions are no longer what they used to be, an estimated TV audience of about 35 million is nothing to sneeze at. In fact, it is a golden opportunity for Romney/Ryan to re-focus their campaign, show who they are and where they want to take the United States in the years to come. Romney, it is said, must reveal more for himself and of who he really is. It will be difficult. Does he really have something to offer beyond what we already know about him?

Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his vice presidential candidate has not resulted in any major swings in the polls, except that Obama’s lead in Ryan’s home state Wisconsin has shrunk a bit. On point after point, voters still prefer Obama over Romney, according to the latest Gallup Poll. Obama is more “likable” with 54 percent against 31. Obama is a stronger leader, he is more honest and generates more confidence, and he cares about people like you (the respondents). He is ahead on foreign policy, taxes, energy, healthcare. Only on the economy did Romney beat Obama, 52 percent to 43.

The economy is the most important issue for November, so the fact that those asked in the Gallup Poll thought that Romney is better suited to reverse the present dismal picture – something that could be re-enforced with successful convention – is of great importance looking ahead to November. But the economy alone will not decide the election. There will be Medicare and taxes and abortion, but, most of all, there will be the fundamental question of whether an ever more conservative Republican Party, increasingly hostile to the government, dominated by whites with only five percent Hispanics and two percent African-Americans, and with ever fewer moderate Republicans in the ranks, can appeal to a broader American electorate.

One of those moderates, Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, has chosen to retire and walk away for a certain re-election this fall after 18 years in the Senate. In Sunday’s Washington Post, she pleaded almost in despair for deep changes in her party now so hostile to America’s women.

“Today, the Republican Party faces a clear challenge: will we rebuild our relationship with women, thereby placing us on the road to success in November, or will we continue to isolate them and certainly lose this election?”

This will be no easy task for Romney/Ryan. Another Gallup Poll recently showed that Obama leads among women voters by 50 percent to 42. Romney, once a moderate Republican governor of Massachusetts, has since then a moved righton a number of issues, disavowing his record as governor, and taking far more conservative positions.

With his choice of Ryan, Romney’s conservative conversion is complete. He has now joined the ranks of Ryan and the Tea Party sympathizers in the House of Representatives and a party about which Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein recently wrote in their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks:”

“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges. “

This is where Mitt Romney now stands. The Republican Party’s conservative base is certainly happy about this. The question is what the broader American electorate, those outside the Republican Party, will say about this in November. Without them, Romney cannot win.

U.S. should aim at raising not lowering voter turnout

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For an observer from Europe, where voter turnout is over 80, even 90 percent, while turnout in American mid-term elections around a measly 50 percent and around lowly 60 percent in presidential election years, it would seem that all efforts should be concentrated on raising voter participation by simplifying and coordinating voting laws.

Instead, “voter suppression” has become a major issue in the current election campaign with the Republican Party seemingly intent to further complicate voting procedures and stifle voter participation. Foremost here is the introduction in over 30 states, all but one of them with Republican majorities in the state legislatures, of requiring government issued photo-IDs in order to vote.

These new laws, which got their start in Indiana in 2006, primarily affect the elderly, minorities — American Indians, African-Americans, Hispanics, and low-income groups, who traditionally support the Democrats. They are among the 11 percent, or 21 million U.S. voters, who do not have government issued photo ID cards, according to New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. To obtain ID cards cannot only be difficult but also cost money, a kind of tax, critics say, like the “poll tax” used against Blacks in the Old South to prevent them from voting, as U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has described it.

The Republicans have called for the photo-ID laws to prevent voter fraud. But there is no widespread fraud in American elections. According to News21, quoted in an excellent overview of this whole issue on the website ProPublica, there have been only ten cases of voter impersonation since 2000 – that is one in 15 million voters. However, according to the same study, there have been almost 500 cases of alleged absentee ballot fraud and 400 cases of alleged registration fraud. But the new voter-ID laws would do nothing to avoid such fraud, as veteran reporter Lou Cannon points out on RealClearPolitics.

The blog FiveThirtyEight in the New York Times has claimed that the new ID laws may cause the turnout to decrease by between 0.8 and 2.4 percent in November. Since these voters, who now might stay home, are mostly democratic voters, it is difficult not to conclude that these efforts by a Republican party steadily marching ever further to the right are politically motivated.

A lower voter turnout could be crucial for the outcome on November 6. So much is at stake, also for the American democracy.

Oh, how I wish I had gone to The Last Book Sale

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I was thinking of going, but, somehow, it didn’t work out, and now, reading Larry McMurtry’s own account in the New York Review of Books of The Last Book Sale at his store Booked Up Inc. in his home town Archer City, Texas, out there northwest of Dallas/Fort Worth and south of Wichita Falls, I realize how much I would have loved to have gone.

300,000 out of McMurtry’s 400,000 books were on sale on that hot recent August weekend. The 200 bidders came from the all over the country, from Oregon, Wisconsin, Tampa, San Francisco, Natchez, Austin, and Magnolia, Arkansas. Most of the books sold, except the fiction, McMurtry, eminent author but also eminent book dealer, writes.

Readers of this blog know how much I like the old book stores, and that I have found many wonderful such stores all around America. But I have never been to Booked Up in Archer City, Texas, and this was the time to go. Or maybe there is a next time?

Is Romney’s risky bet on Ryan about to fail?

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Lots of stuff about Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate.

John Cassidy in The New Yorker writes about “desperation:”

Until Romney picked Ryan, the principal rationale for his candidacy had been that he was a practical businessman who could appeal to independents and get the economy moving. Now Romney has tethered himself to a conservative ideologue who serves in an institution, the House of Representatives, that, according to the latest Gallup poll, has an approval rating of ten per cent. Such an abrupt reversal smacks of desperation.

Nate Silver on his blog FiveThirtyEight calls the Ryan selection “dubious” and compares it to John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin in 2008. Silver thinks Romney’s chances of winning in November have been reduced.

My first take on the selection was that Mr. Romney had looked at the polls, concluded that he was losing, and deliberately made a high-risk choice that could shake up the campaign — somewhat as Mr. McCain did with Ms. Palin four years ago. Reporting since then, however, has suggested that Mr. Romney made the pick despite reluctance from his pollsters and others on his political team. So it looks increasingly as though he made a different sort of gamble — more of a true all-in move.

Paul Ryan has been called a ”deficit hawk” and we know he wants to cut the taxes, especially on high income earners, but also cut sharply in the government’s role when it comes to pensions, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, etc. Leading economic commentators are punching holes in Ryan’s reputation as a responsible economist and write that it’s impossible to reach a balance in the economy with the Ryan plan.

Paul Krugman in the New York Times calls Ryan an ”unserious” man. His plan would increase, not decrease, the deficit:

If this sounds like a joke, that’s because it is…Mr. Ryan isn’t a serious man — he just plays one on TV.

And the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf is equally critical, calling Ryan’s plan ”incredible.”

Is the Ryan bubble about to burst? Is Romney’s bet on this right-wing ideologue about to fail? It is still a bit too early to tell for sure. But the signs are ominous. We will know more after next week’s convention.

The Obama campaign — no more “swift boating”

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There is a lot of grumbling in the media about the negative tone in the presidential election campaign and even Mitt Romney has complained, although after all he did to trash his Republican rivals during the primary campaign, that seems a bit hypocritical:

Mr. President, take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago and let us get about rebuilding and reuniting America.

The Romney campaign is particularly upset about this ad:

The Washington Post’s Dan Balz has called it a “a most poisonous campaign,” and Michael Gerson wrote about “Obama’s betrayal”.

Ah, how short memories they have!

Have they already forgotten Sarah Palin’s accusations in the 2008 campaign against the then candidate Obama for “palling around with terrorists??” Or the years of lies about the President’s birth certificate? Or the TV-campaign in the summer of 2004, financed by Texas millionaires supporting George W. Bush’s reelection, which trashed John Kerry’s war record in Vietnam. Those deceitful attacks from a group calling “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” against Kerry’s years as a decorated soldier led to the verb “to swift boat” – that is, to destroy a person’s reputation by false statements.

Here is one of those TV-spots:

The Obama campaign is clearly not going to let happen what took place with Kerry. There is not going to be another “swift boating.”  As Dana Milbank, also of the Washington Post, recently wrote:

What’s different this time is that the Democrats are employing the same harsh tactics that have been used against them for so long, with so much success. They have ceased their traditional response of assuming the fetal position when attacked, and Obama’s campaign is giving as good as it gets — and then some.

So, what’s new in the current election campaign is not that it is tougher or more negative than any previous, but that Obama is not going to let any false Republican charges stand unchallenged. Yes, the campaign is negative and both sides have been guilty of excesses and falsehoods. Of course, that is a shame. We all wish that the candidates instead debate the big issues and America’s future. But that’s not going to happen.

Uphill for Ryan — only 39 percent are happy with him

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The first opinion poll is in and the verdict is not encouraging for Paul Ryan, the new Republican vice presidential candidate.

According to USA Today/Gallup, only 39 percent of Americans are satisfied with Romney’s choice while 42 percent are dissatisfied. It is the most negative numbers since George H.W. Bush in 1988 chose Dan Quayle as his running mate. Support for Ryan is even lower than for Sarah Palin four years ago, when 46 percent felt that her appointment was “excellent/very good,” while 37 percent deemed it “weak/bad.”

Now, Bush/Quayle won anyway, so there is still hope for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, especially since 39 percent of Republicans in the poll called the appointment “excellent” and 29 percent “pretty good,” which is promising for the Republican voter turnout in November.

Romney’s choice of Ryan has stirred up the campaignpot plenty, and just in a couple of days the previous debate on the weak economy, high unemployment and Obama’s handling of the economy, has become a whole new debate about how America’s future should look like and how the American society should meet and resolve the major economic issues.

In this debate, Obama’s/Biden’s vision of justice — “fairness,” where the rich help to share the burden through higher taxes and where the government and the government plays an important role in protecting the elderly and the poor stands in stark contrast with Romney’s/Ryan’s vision where the rich get more tax cuts and where the social security program is radically cut down as the role of the government is gradually reduced.

Paul Ryan is the Republican Party’s chief spokesman for the anti-government, super capitalistic America, and Mitt Romney, now with Ryan as his number two, is closely tied to that vision. With Ryan, Romney has been transformed from a moderate Republican, a man of the Republican establishment, to a member of the radical Republican right wing, where the born-again Christians and the Tea Party supporters feel so at home. And the Obama campaign will not let Romney and the American electorate forget that.

So, have President Obama’s chances of being reelected increased with Paul Ryan’s appointment? Yes, is the short answer. Ryan does not broaden the support for the Republican ticket — the independents find him too far right, the seniors want to keep Medicare, the poor need their Medicaid, and the women are largely pro-choice.

But let me add that vice presidential candidates do not directly decide elections, and two thirds of respondents in the Gallup poll said that who is that person does not affect how they will vote. Thus, the election in November will be a choice between Obama and Romney, although in a close race, Ryan can be a decisive handicap.

Ryan’s budget will haunt the Republican ticket

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They look happy, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, but it’s hard for me to see how Romney’s choice of Ryan as his running mate will strengthen the Republican ticket, increase its chances for victory, and bring joy for the party in November.

Yes, the choice will energize the far right in the party — the born-again Christians and the Tea party, who will now feel more motivated to actually turn out and vote. That’s not bad, of course, but beyond that? Not much.

Ryan is not broadly known and has no strong geographic base. It is unlikely that he will succeed in helping Romney carry his home state of Wisconsin in the fall. And his view of America, based on his budget proposal that he persuaded his fellow Republicans in the House of Representatives to support, is too radical and too controversial for the broader electorate. But the former Governor of Massachusetts, seen by many as a moderate voice in the Republican party, is now closely associated with that budget, and he will not be spared in the coming months.

Here is what the The New Yorker’s economic commentator James Surowiecki wrote about Ryan’s budget last spring:

But the simple truth is that his plan is not an evenhanded attempt to solve America’s long-term budget problems. It’s a profoundly radical document, its proposals skewed by ideological biases. Raising taxes, of course, is out of bounds. The same goes for using federal power to hold down Medicare costs, which will be the key driver of future budget deficits. Instead, House Republicans would cut spending on almost everything else the government does.

This budget will be a big negative for Romney/Ryan during the rest of the election campaign. The Obama team will see to that and their attacks will be relentless. Here is what Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager said today, and this is just the start:

In naming Congressman Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney has chosen a leader of the House Republicans who shares his commitment to the flawed theory that new budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthy, while placing greater burdens on the middle class and seniors, will somehow deliver a stronger economy. The architect of the radical Republican House budget, Ryan, like Romney, proposed an additional $250,000 tax cut for millionaires, and deep cuts in education from Head Start to college aid. His plan also would end Medicare as we know it by turning it into a voucher system, shifting thousands of dollars in health care costs to seniors. As a member of Congress, Ryan rubber-stamped the reckless Bush economic policies that exploded our deficit and crashed our economy. Now the Romney-Ryan ticket would take us back by repeating the same, catastrophic mistakes.

Here is what Paul Ryan said himself today, in his first speech as the Republican Vice Presidential candidate:

Paul Ryan: a sign of a campaign in trouble

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Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan, congressman from Wisconsin, as his running mate was surprising, but no bolt out of the blue like when John McCain nominated Sarah Palin as his vice presidential candidate. But Romney is taking a big chance with Ryan, just like McCain did. Ryan is untested, like Palin, largely unknown to the general American public, like Palin, and Romney’s choice gives the impression of desperation, as McCain’s did.

Romney’s campaign is in trouble, if not in a crisis. He needed to do something drastic to. In three recent major polls, President Obama’s lead over Romney has increased, and according to Fox News, it is now 9 per cent. Romney needed to do something drastic to wake up the slumbering conservative Republican base.

The choice of Ryan means that Romney has succumbed to the harsh pressures from the party’s right wing and leading press voices like The Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard, which demanded that Ryan, seen by them as a leading conservative intellectual, be nominated. These voices opposed candidates such as Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty and Ohio’s Rob Portman, too plain, too much like Romney himself and without any chance to inspire the conservative Republican voter base.

Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the Republican Party’s chief economic and budget spokesman, is a controversial figure, best known for the heavy-handed, radical cuts, in the country’s entitlement programs, particularly Medicare, while lowering the taxes for higher income groups and increasing them for the middle class. Ryan as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee means that the campaign will now completely be about pensions, health care for the elderly and a fair tax system. That debate will be favorable to President Obama.

Conservative columnist David Frum describes the problems in his comments on the Daily Beast today. The election will not be at about jobs and the economy but about security, about pensions and Medicare.

Economic conditions are so tough – the Obama re-election proposition is so weak – that Romney may win anyway. But wow, the job just got harder.

The choice of Ryan, according to Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog in the Washington Post, means that “both the Democrats and the Conservatives have the exact debate they wanted. I’m not so sure about Republicans. “

To learn more about Paul Ryan, 42 years old, Catholic, father of three children, born in Janesville, Wisconsin, which he has represented in the House of Representatives since 1998, you must not miss Ryan Lizza’s recent stellar profile of the Republican Vice Presidential candidate in The New Yorker.