AI
Sunday, May 20, 2012 8:03:34 PM
Michael Tomasky on Mitt Romney’s Character Assassination Game
Romney in St. Petersburg, Fla., on May 16
(Edward Linsmier / Getty images)
Republicans specialize in accusing opponents of the dirty tricks they themselves are doing—or planning to do. Exhibit A: Romney accusing Obama of “character assassination.”
by Michael Tomasky
May 19, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
The secret of Republican political success since the rise of the right is not, as many liberals believe, that they play no-rules hardball. Instead, it’s their skill at projection—at accusing Democrats of doing what they are doing themselves, or are planning to do, or have done. That’s the real Rosetta stone. And that’s what Mitt Romney [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/17/michael-tomasky-on-mitt-romney-s-tea-party-masters.html ] did this week when he called [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/05/mitt-romney-says-bain-attacks-are-part-of-obamas-character-assassination ] Barack Obama’s tough, but hardly extraordinary, ads about Bain Capital [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/14/the-return-of-bain-capital.html (the ads 6th and 7th items at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75583191 )] “character assassination.” He’s trying to make it so that Bain as a subject becomes off limits, and he’s laying the groundwork for later, when the real character assassination starts—and I hope your memory isn’t so short that you forget that he knows a thing or two about the topic himself.
Republicans have perfected many a dark campaign art over the years, from racial nudging and winking to suggesting that we’ll all be killed by terrorists if voters elect Democrats. But projection is the darkest art of all. And it’s so simple! When Republicans are acting like a mob—down in Dade County, for example—they accuse the Democrats of having a mob mentality. When they’re planning on blowing holes in the budget deficit bigger than the one the iceberg laid on the Titanic, via Paul Ryan’s budget and tax cuts for the rich, they stand up and accuse the Democrats of blowing holes in the budget. It works pretty well, too. All the conservative blogs pick up on it, and Fox and so on. And then, when the mainstream media sit down to write about the subject at hand, stories will note that “The GOP has been saying for months…”
This is what is happening here. Romney is trying to do two things. First, he’s trying to make any criticism of his Bain record out of bounds. Aware of course that he’s been forced by reality to revise downward from “more than 100,000” to “thousands” the number of jobs he helped create at Bain, he knows that he can’t use Bain as a plus to the extent that he wanted to. Think about it—the cornerstone of his career, the thing he spent 15 years of his life doing, the business he built (with Mr. Bain’s blessing and seed money)—pretty much out the window now. So that being the case, he needs to eliminate it as a minus. See if the referee will toss it out, if the judge (the media) will rule it inadmissible.
The obvious way to do that is to call any mention of it character assassination. Are those ads really character assassination? Do they say, for example: “Mitt Romney must be a really terrible and malevolent human being to have thrown those poor steel workers out on the street”? Because that would be an attack on Romney’s character. But no, they do not. They say Mitt Romney did us dirt. They’re emotional, sure. And if you want to say emotionally manipulative, all right by me. And yes, Joe Biden took it all a step or two further with his Ohio speech, saying Romney doesn’t understand the rest of us and so on.
But come on. That’s politics. Those aren’t character attacks. They’re salvos in a debate about what kinds of capitalism are good for regular people and what kinds aren’t. Campaigns Democratic or Republican don’t exactly elevate debates, Lord knows; but if we’re going to have arguments about how our society works, that’s a pretty useful one to have.
But the character-assassination label will come in handy—and this is Romney’s second purpose—when the Republican attacks on Obama really start. Maybe Romney is telling the truth, and his campaign will be all about how Obama promised nice things and seems like a nice young man but failed to deliver on them. His polling tells him he has to campaign like that for now, because Obama is far more likable to more people than he.
Something tells me, though, that the Romney campaign will eventually lower the boom. One might argue that it has already. What’s “apologizing for America,” after all? Aside from being a cheap and contemptible lie, is it not a kind of assault on the character of the president of the United States to accuse him of doing something that he hasn’t done, especially when the accusation is obviously meant to carry treasonous connotations? Romney’s “apologizing for America” line has always told us a great deal about character—Romney’s, not the president’s.
Don’t forget, finally, that Romney is pretty adept at character assassination himself. What do you call it when in those crucial primaries that he barely won against Rick Santorum—Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin—he was outspending Santorum six and nine and 12 to one with incredibly negative ads? Or the “tsunami of sleaze,” as my colleague John Avlon put it at the time [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/01/31/romney-ramps-up-attack-ads-against-gingrich-to-unprecedented-levels.html ] that the Romney campaign dumped on Newt Gingrich in Florida, where 92 percent of the aired TV ads were negative? Those gutter attacks, aired over and over and over, are, it is worth remembering, the main reason the guy is the nominee. He was tied or behind in all those states until he emptied the trash. He wasn’t winning them over with his wit.
So it’s a bit rich to hear him saying now that he’s sad to see Obama in the gutter and he’s going to keep it on the up and up. But at some point, he’ll attack. And when he does, he’ll sigh sadly and say that he was forced into this position by that mean Obama, and he’ll count on everyone to forget the primary season, the foulest one by far in the modern history of American politics, for which the man who neither drinks nor swears bears the vast majority of the blame. That, come to think of it, is a “character” issue too.
© 2012 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/19/michael-tomasky-on-mitt-romney-s-character-assassination-game.html [with comments]
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Magnate Steps Into 2012 Fray on Wild Pitch
Wrigley Field, the home of the Chicago Cubs, which is owned by the family of Joe Ricketts.
Jose More/Chicago News Cooperative
A storyboard for a proposed ad linking President Obama to the incendiary statements of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
Graphic
Ricketts Family Ventures
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/18/us/ricketts-family-ventures.html
Interactive Feature
[complete] Storyboard: ‘Next’
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/17/us/politics/super-pac-storyboard.html [at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75672695 ]
Graphic
Character Matters PAC: Key Players
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/17/us/politics/20120517-founders.html [at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75672695 ]
Document
‘Super PAC’ Plan to Link Obama to Rev. Wright
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/17/us/politics/17donate-document.html
By JIM RUTENBERG and JEFF ZELENY
Published: May 17, 2012
Joe Ricketts, an up-by-the-bootstraps billionaire whose varied holdings include a name-brand brokerage firm in Omaha, a baseball team in Chicago, herds of bison in Wyoming and a start-up news Web site in New York, wanted to be a player in the 2012 election. On Thursday he was, though not in the way he had intended.
Word that Mr. Ricketts had considered bankrolling a $10 million advertising campaign linking President Obama to the incendiary race-infused statements of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., brought waves of denunciation from Mitt Romney, the Obama campaign and much of the rest of the political world.
Highlighting the perils of mixing partisan politics and corporate citizenship, the reverberations also swept through the Ricketts family’s business empire.
Liberal groups encouraged like-minded investors to drop their accounts with TD Ameritrade, the brokerage firm Mr. Ricketts founded. His family’s plan to seek public financing for improvements to Wrigley Field, home of their baseball team, the Chicago Cubs, ran into new political opposition. And he was forced to write a letter to reporters at his New York news organization, DNAinfo.com [ http://dnainfo.com/ ], assuring them he believed that “my personal politics should have absolutely no impact on your work.”
By early afternoon, Mr. Ricketts had announced that he had rejected the ad campaign as out of keeping with his own political style, a day after his aides indicated that it was still under consideration.
The episode all but ensured that Republicans would remain under intense pressure not to invoke Mr. Wright’s provocative statements so directly for the balance of the campaign. And, in a year when the loosened system of campaign finance regulations is encouraging wealthy individuals to weigh in on behalf of candidates and causes, Mr. Ricketts became a case study in the risks of political neophytes with big checkbooks seeking to play at the highest and roughest levels of politics.
After a storied career, Mr. Ricketts, 70, set out to break into the exclusive but growing new fraternity of megarich, conservative “super PAC [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/campaign_finance/index.html ]” donors, people willing — and permitted as never before — to pour millions of dollars into influencing an election. He has seemed motivated primarily by his belief that government spending is out of control and that Mr. Obama cannot be trusted to rein in the deficit and reduce the national debt.
But associates acknowledged that his experience on Thursday, when a confidential proposal for the Wright campaign became public in The New York Times, helped hammer home the high stakes of his decision to initiate discussions with some of the most seasoned and aggressive strategists in Republican politics about going after Mr. Obama in a high-profile way.
The proposal was drafted under the leadership of Fred Davis, a veteran political advertising strategist who worked for the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush, John McCain and, most recently, former Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah.
In a statement on Thursday, a spokesman for Mr. Ricketts said the plan Mr. Davis’s team submitted was “merely a proposal” and “reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects and it was never a plan to be accepted but only a suggestion for a direction to take.”
The president and general counsel of the Ending Spending Political Action Fund, Brian Baker, said through a spokesman that the plan was submitted to a group that included him and two of Mr. Ricketts’s sons at a meeting in Chicago last week. “I was surprised and troubled by what I saw,” he said. “It was not what we asked for.”
But on Wednesday, when Mr. Baker was asked in an interview whether Mr. Ricketts had rejected the advertising proposal, he said only that no decisions had been made.
A page in the proposal about potential staff members for the effort says, “With your preliminary approval at the New York meeting, we have discussed this plan in highly confidential terms with the following proposed team members,” who, it says, are “ready to jump into action upon plan approval.”
Associates of Mr. Ricketts acknowledged that upon seeing a commercial Mr. Davis produced in 2008 for Mr. McCain featuring Mr. Wright, which Mr. McCain rejected, Mr. Ricketts said. “If the nation had seen that ad, they’d never have elected Barack Obama.” The quote was highlighted in the proposal.
Mr. Ricketts was shown the commercial at an initial meeting at Mr. Davis’s offices in California, which Mr. Ricketts requested as he sought to build a team of top Republican strategists to lead his foray into the presidential campaign. (Aides acknowledge that a second meeting followed in New York, where, they say, he gave Mr. Davis general directions to move ahead with a proposal that would create maximum impact for $10 million but did not specifically approve one based on Mr. Wright.)
After retiring from Ameritrade’s board in 2011, Mr. Ricketts began putting more energy into philanthropy and politics, initially with a nonpartisan group Taxpayers Against Earmarks. After Congress banned earmarks, the group shifted into a debt-focused organization, Ending Spending. The effort Mr. Davis was working on would have been undertaken by the group’s political arm, the Ending Spending Action Fund.
Though newer to presidential politics, Mr. Ricketts has long been politically active in Nebraska. He was defeated in a local race for Republican Party chairman because he was seen as too moderate. He was a prolific donor to state candidates, investing money for ads that helped influence a United States Senate race this week.
Mr. Ricketts is described by friends as difficult to characterize politically.
He is not registered in either party in Wyoming, where he spends much of his time. He is a fiscal conservative who has grown increasingly frustrated at the economic and tax policies of the Obama administration. He also has supported Democrats who he perceives have a good record on spending restraint. “Half the time he’s a Libertarian and half the time he’s Rush Limbaugh,” said one associate, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The Ricketts family is close, friends say, but politically divided. Two of his sons, Pete and Todd, attended the meeting in Chicago last week to review the advertising proposal, which was titled, “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama.” His daughter, Laura, is one of the top contributors to Mr. Obama’s re-election bid and is a member of the campaign’s national finance committee. His other son, Tom, is the general chairman of the Chicago Cubs and said he was not politically active.
Laura Ricketts, who is gay and is a proponent of same-sex marriage, embraced her family on Thursday and said her father and brothers were “passionate about doing what is right for the country.” In a statement, she added, “Though we may have diverse political views, above all we love and respect each other.”
Tom Ricketts, whose baseball team is pursuing city and state assistance for a $300 million stadium renovation, said in another statement, “I repudiate any return to racially divisive issues in this year’s presidential campaign or in any setting — like my father has. My focus is on one of the great American pastimes, baseball.”
But perhaps no comment received more attention on Thursday than that of Mr. Romney, who said at a press briefing in Jacksonville, Fla., “I repudiate that effort.”
“I think it’s the wrong course for a PAC or a campaign,” he said.
Mr. Romney also said that he had been a victim of “character assassination” from the Obama campaign, referring specifically to a new campaign commercial that suggested his work in the private equity firm Bain Capital was meant to imply that, “I’m not a good person or a good guy.”
Mr. Romney’s statement was a clear signal to outside groups that he and his strategists have no desire to wade into the commentary of Mr. Wright, preferring to remain focused on Mr. Obama’s economic record.
Mr. Baker said Thursday that whatever messages Mr. Ricketts backs during the rest of the campaign would “be focused entirely on questions of fiscal policy, not attacks that seek to divide us socially or culturally.”
Kitty Bennett and Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.
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Related
G.O.P. ‘Super PAC’ Weighs Hard-Line Attack on Obama (May 17, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/politics/gop-super-pac-weighs-hard-line-attack-on-obama.html [at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75672695 ]
The Caucus: Romney Raises $40.1 Million in April, Nearly Matching Obama (May 17, 2012)
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/romney-raises-40-1-million-in-april-nearly-matching-obama/
The Caucus: Billionaire Rejects Proposal to Revive Jeremiah Wright Controversy (May 17, 2012)
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/ricketts-disavows-super-pac-proposal/
Related in Opinion
Editorial: Racial Politics, 2012-Style (May 18, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/opinion/racial-politics-2012-style.html
Taking Note: How to Energize the Liberal Base (May 17, 2012)
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/how-to-energize-the-liberal-base/
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© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/us/politics/magnate-steps-into-2012-fray-on-wild-pitch.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/us/politics/magnate-steps-into-2012-fray-on-wild-pitch.html?pagewanted=all ]
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Race and Religion Rear Their Heads
The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose words nearly derailed the Obama presidential bid in 2008, was back in the news.
Brendan Smialowski/Bloomberg News
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
Published: May 18, 2012
WASHINGTON — Perhaps the uglier side of politics is always close to the surface.
President Obama and his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, have said for months that the 2012 election will be about the economy. But on Thursday, it became — at least for a brief moment — about the always touchy issues of race and religion.
The continuing economic struggles in the country will almost certainly dominate the debate in the next six months. The unemployment rate remains above 8 percent, the housing slump continues, debt is rising rapidly and overseas economies are flailing.
But the events Thursday suggest that it does not take much to divert the presidential campaign conversation back into the sensitive and politically dangerous questions of Mr. Obama’s race, his religion and the place of his birth.
A report [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/politics/gop-super-pac-weighs-hard-line-attack-on-obama.html (at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75672695 )] in The New York Times on Thursday exposed a secret plan by Republican strategists and financiers to rekindle questions about the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Mr. Obama’s onetime pastor, and his angry black-power sermons.
Mr. Romney repudiated the plan to use Mr. Wright’s words as a racially tinged cudgel against Mr. Obama. But the report served to once again steer the campaign away from the economy and onto the tricky terrain of racial politics.
Reporters brought up Mr. Romney’s comment in February suggesting that Mr. Obama wanted to make America into “a less Christian nation.” Asked if he stood by that comment, Mr. Romney said that he did.
“I’m not familiar, precisely, with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was,” Mr. Romney said.
Aides to Mr. Obama said that they were not surprised by the day’s events and that they remained prepared to respond even more forcefully — with television ads, if necessary — if the religion- or race-based attacks return later in the year.
“To the extent that this ever raises its head, we will certainly be ready with a forceful response,” said one adviser to Mr. Obama’s campaign, who requested anonymity to discuss strategy.
Mr. Obama’s campaign advisers said the American people had largely dismissed the questions about his birth and about links to his former pastor. They pointed to polls that show that the president remains personally likable.
“The American people know who he is,” the adviser said.
But the issues of race and religion never go completely away, at least in some extreme quarters of the American electorate.
On Thursday, the Drudge Report posted a link on its Web site to a report [ http://www.wnd.com/2012/05/shocker-obama-was-still-kenyan-born-in-2003/ ] that sought to revive the long-discredited assertion that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States. And as election season heats up, so does publication of books promoting various conspiracies and theories, including a new one seeking to focus new attention on Mr. Obama’s dealings with Mr. Wright.
The Romney campaign has kept a considerable distance from the anti-Obama fringe. It only turns off moderate and independent voters, while stirring up Mr. Obama’s base.
And Mr. Romney has his own experience with the staying power of personal attacks. During the Republican primary campaign, ugly questions about his Mormon faith were revived by a few conservative pastors who called it a “cult.”
Mr. Romney’s advisers have rejected the idea of a religion speech like the one he gave in 2007, saying members of the public know Mr. Romney and his personal history in a way they did not back then. But it is interesting to wonder what the campaign might do if a “super PAC” raised his religion in an attack ad.
On Thursday, Mr. Romney sought to go on the offensive by accusing Mr. Obama of conducting a campaign of “character assassination” over the past several months. He said Mr. Obama’s attacks on his record at Bain Capital were intended to suggest that he was not “a good person.”
But in truth, as the final six months of campaigning begin, both the campaigns and the candidates have shied away from the charged issues of race and religion. Both men have powerful incentives to keep the campaign from becoming a nasty dissection of their personal backgrounds. Both want to avoid a focus on what might strike some voters as exotic backgrounds that set them apart from middle-class Americans.
Their actions suggest that — at least for now — there remains a line that neither side is willing to cross. The question is: will the superrich backers of super PACs play by the same rules?
Politicians, consultants and voters are all bracing for the answer.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/us/politics/race-and-religion-rear-their-heads.html
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Romney: "I stand by what I said, whatever it was"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WVH-H9BVnk
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Santorum: Romney Will Say Anything to Win
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D8MGFFfPa8
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Mitt Romney tells Jay Leno he'd be happy to have Rick Santorum as vice president
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIeZHRJbZNQ
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Mitt Romney: "I stand by what I said, whatever it was."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ6wF7PTyEY
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RNC Chairman Says Republican Proposal For $10 Million Of Race-Baiting Anti-Obama Attack Ads Is Obama’s Fault
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus
[(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=74108261 ]
By Josh Israel on May 20, 2012 at 11:47 am
In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley this morning, host Crowley asked RNC Chairman Reince Priebus about a widely-denounced proposal for a pro-Mitt Romney outside group to run millions of dollars in race-baiting attack ads highlighting controversial statement’s by President Obama’s former pastor.
Rather than denounce the proposal or the dangers of having a small group of rich outside donors and corporations free to spend as much as they want to influence elections, Priebus blamed Obama.
After lamenting that Romney and his party had to spend a day and a half dealing with the fallout from the Super PAC proposal, Priebus told Crowley:
I know how it works. It’s the Democrats and Barack Obama that want the story out there. He wants the story to play out in the media, because for every day that [Obama adviser] David Axelrod and this President don’t have to talk about their broken promises when it comes to jobs, the debt, and the deficit — the more time they can talk about hypotheticals that may or may not come true — is a day they want to win on. So, look, this president’s got a bigger problem and his problem is no matter what he puts out there, no matter what distractions he puts out there, he can’t change the truth and escape the reality of where we are in this American economy. And it’s no good.
Watch the video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wsv-cpC8mOA (embedded)]:
And it was Mitt Romney who, back in February, made similar attacks [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Rr4eTdpfCo ]
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/05/20/487292/reince-priebus-obama-attack-ads-race/ [with comments]
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Romney’s Faith, Silent but Deep
[tab headline: "How the Mormon Church Shaped Mitt Romney"]
FORMATIVE INFLUENCE
Mitt Romney at a campaign event in Iowa last year. “He just needs to know what God wants him to do and how he can get it done,” one friend said.
Eric Thayer for The New York Times
CONNECTED
The Romneys in 2008 with Senator Robert F. Bennett at the funeral of Gordon B. Hinckley, president of the Mormon Church.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, via Associated Press
Douglas D. Anderson, a dean at Utah State and a friend.
Michael Friberg for The New York Times
Philip Barlow, a professor who worshiped with Mr. Romney.
Michael Friberg for The New York Times
By JODI KANTOR
Published: May 19, 2012
BELMONT, Mass. — When Mitt Romney embarked on his first political race in 1994, he also slipped into a humble new role in the Mormon congregation he once led. On Sunday mornings, he stood in the sunlit chapel here teaching Bible classes for adults.
Leading students through stories about Jesus and the Nephite and Lamanite tribes, who Mormons believe once populated the Americas, and tossing out peanut butter cups as rewards, Mr. Romney always returned to the same question: how could students apply the lessons of Mormon scripture in their daily lives?
Now, as the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Mr. Romney speaks so sparingly about his faith — he and his aides frequently stipulate that he does not impose his beliefs on others — that its influence on him can be difficult to detect.
But dozens of the candidate’s friends, fellow church members and relatives describe a man whose faith is his design for living. The church is by no means his only influence, and its impact cannot be fully untangled from that of his family, which is also steeped in Mormonism.
But being a Latter-day Saint is “at the center of who he really is, if you scrape everything else off,” said Randy Sorensen, who worshiped with Mr. Romney in church.
As a young consultant who arrived at the office before anyone else, Mr. Romney was being “deseret,” a term from the Book of Mormon [ http://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm?lang=eng ] meaning industrious as a honeybee, and he recruited colleagues and clients with the zeal of the missionary he once was. Mitt and Ann Romney’s marriage is strong because they believe they will live together in an eternal afterlife, relatives and friends say, which motivates them to iron out conflicts.
Mr. Romney’s penchant for rules mirrors that of his church, where he once excommunicated adulterers and sometimes discouraged mothers from working outside the home. He may have many reasons for abhorring debt, wanting to limit federal power, promoting self-reliance and stressing the unique destiny of the United States, but those are all traditionally Mormon traits as well.
Outside the spotlight, Mr. Romney can be demonstrative about his faith: belting out hymns (“What a Friend We Have in Jesus”) while horseback riding, fasting on designated days and finding a Mormon congregation to slip into on Sundays, no matter where he is.
He prays for divine guidance on business decisions and political races, say those who have joined him. Sometimes on the campaign trail, Mr. and Mrs. Romney retreat to a quiet corner, bow their heads, clasp hands and share a brief prayer, said Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican who has traveled with them.
Clayton M. Christensen, a business professor at Harvard and a friend from church, said the question that drove the Sunday school classes — how to apply Mormon gospel in the wider world — also drives Mr. Romney’s life. “He just needs to know what God wants him to do and how he can get it done,” Mr. Christensen said.
Sacred Tenets, Secular Realm
When Mr. Romney’s former Sunday school students listen to him campaign, they sometimes hear echoes of messages he delivered to them years before: beliefs that stem at least in part from his faith, in a way that casual observers may miss. He is not proselytizing but translating, they say — taking powerful ideas and lessons from the church and applying them in another realm.
Just as Ronald Reagan deployed acting skills on the trail and Barack Obama relied on the language of community organizing, Mitt Romney bears the marks of the theology and culture of the Church of Jesus Christ [ http://www.mormon.org/jesus-christ/ ] of Latter-day Saints. (Mr. Romney declined to be interviewed.)
Mormons have a long tradition of achieving success by sharing secular versions of their tenets, said Matthew Bowman, author of “The Mormon People,” citing Stephen R. Covey’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” which he called Latter-day Saint theology repackaged as career advice.
While Mr. Romney has expressed some views at odds with his church’s teachings — in Massachusetts, he supported measures related to alcohol and gambling, both frowned upon by the church — other positions flow directly from his faith, including his objections to abortion and same-sex marriage and his notion of self-sufficiency tempered with generosity. The church, which often requests recipients of charity to perform some sort of labor in return, taught Mr. Romney to believe that “there’s a dignity in work and a dignity in helping those who are in need of help,” his eldest son, Tagg, said in an interview.
Or take Mr. Romney’s frequent tributes to American exceptionalism. “I refuse to believe that America is just another place on the map with a flag,” he said in announcing his bid for the presidency last June. Every presidential candidate highlights patriotism, but Mr. Romney’s is backed by the Mormon belief that the United States was chosen by God to play a special role in history, its Constitution divinely inspired.
“He is an unabashed, unapologetic believer that America is the Promised Land,” said Douglas D. Anderson, dean of the business school at Utah State University and a friend, and that leading it is “an obligation and responsibility to God.”
In Mr. Romney’s upbeat promises that he can rouse the economy from its long slump, fellow Mormons hear their faith’s emphasis on resilience and can-do optimism. He believes that people “can learn to be happy and prosperous,” said Philip Barlow, a professor of Mormon history at Utah State who served with him in church. “There is some depth and long tradition behind what can come across in sound bites as thin cheerleading.”
Similarly, he said, Mr. Romney’s squeaky-clean persona — only recently did he stop using words like “golly” in public — can make him seem “too plastic, the Ken side of a Ken and Barbie doll,” Mr. Barlow said.
He and others say that wholesomeness is deeply authentic to Mr. Romney, whose spiritual life revolves around personal rectitude. In Mormonism, salvation depends in part on constantly making oneself purer and therefore more godlike.
In the temple Mr. Romney helped build in Belmont, as in every other, members change from street clothes into all-white garb when they arrive, to emphasize their elevated state. As a church leader, he enforced standards, evaluating members for a “temple recommend,” a gold-and-white pass permitting only the virtuous to enter.
A Man of Rules
Mr. Romney is quick to uphold rules great and small. During primary debates, when his rivals spoke out of turn or exceeded their allotted time, he would sometimes lecture them. When supporters ask Mr. Romney to sign dollar bills or American flags, he refuses and often gives them a little lesson about why doing so is against the law.
Doing things by the book has been a hallmark of his career in public life. When Mr. Romney took over the Salt Lake City Olympics, which were dogged by ethical problems, he cast himself as a heroic reformer. As governor of Massachusetts, he depicted himself as a voice of integrity amid what he called the back-scratchers and ethically dubious lifers of state government.
In church, Mr. Romney frequently spoke about obeying authority, the danger of rationalizing misbehavior and God’s fixed standards. “Most people, if they don’t want to do what God wants them to do, they move what God wants them to do about four feet over,” he once told his congregation, holding out his arms to indicate the distance, Mr. Christensen remembered.
He often urged adherence even to rules that could seem overly harsh. One fellow worshiper, Justin Brown, recalled in an interview that when he was a young man leaving for his mission abroad, Mr. Romney warned him that some parameters would make no sense, but to follow them anyway and trust that they had unseen value.
Church officials say Mr. Romney tried to be sensitive and merciful; when a college student faced serious penalties for having premarital sex, Mr. Romney put him on a kind of probation instead. But he carried out excommunications faithfully. “Mitt was very much by the rules,” said Tony Kimball, who later served as his executive secretary in the church.
Nearly two decades ago, Randy and Janna Sorensen approached Mr. Romney, then a church official, for help: unable to have a baby on their own, they wanted to adopt but could not do so through the church, which did not facilitate adoptions for mothers who worked outside the home.
Devastated, they told Mr. Romney that the rule was unjust and that they needed two incomes to live in Boston. Mr. Romney helped, but not by challenging church authorities. He took a calculator to the Sorensen household budget and showed how with a few sacrifices, Ms. Sorensen could quit her job. Their children are now grown, and Mr. Sorensen said they were so grateful that they had considered naming a child Mitt. (The church has since relaxed its prohibition on adoption for women who work outside the home.)
Among the Belmont Mormons, stories abound of Mr. Romney acting out the values he professed in church. The Romneys left their son Tagg’s wedding reception early to take some of the food to a neighbor being treated for breast cancer.
But many also see a gap between his religious ideals — in Sunday school, he urged his students to act with the highest standards of kindness and integrity — and his political tactics. The chasm has been hard to reconcile, even though people close to him say he is serious about trying to do so.
Mormonism teaches respect for secular authorities as well as religious ones, but “politics has required him to go against form,” said Richard Bushman, a leading historian of the church who knows Mr. Romney from church.
For example, Mr. Romney had ruled out running personal attack ads against political rivals, those close to him said. When Senator Edward M. Kennedy attacked him as an uncaring capitalist in 1994, using ads that exaggerated Mr. Romney’s role in Bain-related layoffs, Mr. Romney refused to punch back and exploit Mr. Kennedy’s history of womanizing. “Winning is not important enough to put aside my ideals and principles,” Mr. Romney told aides.
But when he ran for governor in 2002, his campaign targeted the husband of his general election opponent, Shannon O’Brien (he had formerly worked as a lobbyist for Enron; the ads linked him to problems at the company that he had nothing to do with.)
Last week, Mr. Romney repudiated efforts to attack President Obama based on his past relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. But earlier this year, he suggested that Mr. Obama wanted to make the United States “a less Christian nation.”
“I have absolutely no idea how he rationalizes it,” Mr. Kimball said of Mr. Romney’s harshest statements and attacks. “It almost seems to be the ends justifying the means.”
Relying on Prayer
Though Mr. Romney almost never discusses it or performs it in public, prayer is a regular and important part of his life, say friends who have joined him. They describe him closing his eyes and addressing God with thees and thous, composing his message to suit the occasion, whether at a church meeting, at a hospital bedside or in a solemn moment with family and friends.
“Prayer is not a rote thing with him,” said Ann N. Madsen, a Bible scholar and a friend. Rather than requesting a specific outcome, he more often asks for strength, wisdom and courage, according to several people who have prayed with him. “Help us see how to navigate this particular problem,” he often asks, according to Dr. Lewis Hassell, who served with Mr. Romney in church.
Former colleagues say they do not recall Mr. Romney praying in the workplace — some say they barely heard the word “God” come from his lips — but he did pray about work from his home.
“I remember literally kneeling down with Mitt at his home and praying about our firm,” Bob Gay, a former Bain colleague and current church official, told Jeff Benedict, author of “The Mormon Way of Doing Business.” “We did that in times of crisis, and we prayed that we’d do right by our people and our investors.”
Mr. Romney also prays before taking action on decisions he has already made, asking for divine reassurance, a feeling that he is “united with the powers above,” Dr. Hassell said. Sometimes Mr. Romney would report that even though he had made a decision on the merits, prayer had changed his mind. “Even though rationally this looks like the thing to do, I just have a feeling we shouldn’t do it,” he would say, according to Grant Bennett, another friend and church leader.
Mr. Romney has also asked for divine sustenance during his political runs. The night before he declared his candidacy for governor, he and his family prayed at home with Gloria White-Hammond and Ray Hammond, friends and pastors of a Boston-area African Methodist Episcopal church.
His earlier failed run for United States Senate had all been part of God’s plan, Mrs. Romney told Ms. White-Hammond around that time. Mr. Romney had lost, but “just because God says for you to do something doesn’t mean the outcome is going to be what you want it to be,” Ms. White-Hammond remembered Mrs. Romney saying.
Having a higher purpose is part of what motivates Mr. Romney, many of those close to him say, and gives him the wherewithal to suffer the slings and arrows of political life. Mormons have a “history of persistence and tenacity, a sense of living out a destiny that is connected to earlier generations,” said Mr. Anderson, the business school dean. Mr. Romney is driven by “responsibility to his father and his father’s fathers to use his time and talent and energy and whatever gifts he’s been given by the Lord to try to make a contribution.”
And while voters tend to see Mr. Romney as immensely fortunate, those close to him say that he never forgets he is a member of an oft-derided religious minority. The chapel where Mr. Romney taught Sunday school burned in a case of suspected arson in the 1980s, a still-unsolved crime that church members attribute to prejudice.
As a candidate for governor, Mr. Romney endured crude jokes, made to his face, including about having more than one wife. After his failed 2008 presidential bid, Mr. Romney told Richard Eyre, a friend, that he wished the church could rebrand itself, replacing the name “Mormon” with “Latter-day Christian” to emphasize its belief in Jesus and the New Testament.
His response to prejudice, friends say, has always been to soldier on and to present the best possible example, knowing that others will draw conclusions about the faith based on his behavior. “In his generation, George Romney was the world’s most famous Mormon, and now Mitt is more famous than his dad,” Mr. Anderson said.
Mr. Romney told fellow Mormons at Bain & Company that they had to work harder and perform better because they had a reputation to defend. With a similar motive, Mr. Romney sent volunteer cleaning crews each week to the churches that lent space to the Belmont Mormons after the chapel fire. Confronted with the nasty joke about Mormons during the race for governor, Mr. Romney brushed it off even as his face tensed, recalled Jonathan Spampinato, his former political director.
“Romneys were made to swim upstream,” he has told friends many times.
About a year ago, Mrs. Romney told Ms. White-Hammond that her husband was probably going to run for president again, and that they were both already praying about the race.
Mr. Romney was still a bit reluctant to re-enter the fray, according to Ms. White-Hammond. But she recalled the soon-to-be candidate’s wife saying that the Romneys both “felt it was what God wanted them to do.”
Ashley Parker contributed reporting.
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The Long Run
Articles in this series are exploring the lives and careers of the candidates for president in 2012.
Previous Articles in the Series » http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/us/politics/2012_the_long_run.html
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/us/politics/how-the-mormon-church-shaped-mitt-romney.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/us/politics/how-the-mormon-church-shaped-mitt-romney.html?pagewanted=all ]
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Newt Gingrich auditions as Mitt Romney’s bulldog
Newt Gingrich, left, and Mitt Romney in an affable moment during a January debate.
AP file
by Jim Galloway
4:35 pm May 19, 2012
COLUMBUS – Newt Gingrich will not be Mitt Romney’s running mate. The former U.S. House speaker has himself admitted that he is not vice presidential material.
But at the state GOP convention this weekend, Gingrich offered up the latest iteration of himself. Until the presumptive Republican presidential nominee makes his decision, Gingrich declared himself ready to fulfill all the duties of a No. 2.
Gingrich wants to be Romney’s Georgia bulldog.
In two speeches to Republicans, his supply of adverbs and adjectives replenished after the exhaustion of a failed contest, Gingrich blistered President Barack Obama and gave a vigorous defense of the man who buried him in the Iowa caucuses under an avalanche of TV attacks.
It might not have been the defense that the former venture capitalist might have ordered up, and still holds echoes of a hard-fought primary. “Who has killed more jobs in their career?” Gingrich asked a crowd of donors on Friday night. “Romney, you could argue – yeah, these companies didn’t quite work. These companies worked and did well. But show me the big Obama success.”
The portion of the evening speech that worried Gingrich most, he said later, was perhaps the most effective – an answer to those Republicans who still have qualms about Romney’s Mormon faith.
“Look, he takes it seriously. It’s a deep part of his life,” Gingrich, a converted Catholic, told the crowd. “He is committed to it. And he understands the desperate importance of religious liberty and keeping government out of our churches and out of our synagogues. And he will be vastly better for every person of religious belief than Barack Obama.”
But more than anything, Gingrich presented himself as a man willing to scorch the earth wherever Obama might go. “I am not for a narrow victory. I am for crushing the left in every single race,” he said, bringing the crowd to its feet.
The former Georgia congressman had one more line in his speech, but knew he had peaked – and so edited himself. Gingrich abruptly walked away from the microphone and waved goodbye.
Afterward, he explained his new, post-campaign strategy. “I’m beginning to lay out a pattern by which, I think, Romney crowds Obama into a very, surprisingly small minority,” he said. “It provides very sharp distinctions between the American people and the president, on issues that Republicans can be excited about.”
On Saturday morning, Gingrich offered up one more area in which he might be of some use to Romney. In an address to the full convention, Gingrich began by pointing to his lapel. “I am wearing a Romney sticker,” the former U.S. House speaker said – setting off the day’s first round of lusty boos from Ron Paul supporters attempting to assert their influence.
Gingrich absorbed those boos, then quickly reached out to the party’s libertarian wing by giving voice to several Paul positions: an audit of the Federal Reserve, one commission to explore a return to hard currency, and another to look at shrinking the number of U.S. military bases overseas.
This weekend’s Republican meeting in Columbus was an off-Broadway appearance for Gingrich. His real debut as a member of the Romney team will come on June 11, when Gingrich and Romney will appear on the same stage at the Cobb Energy Centre – a fundraiser that also will include the current U.S. House speaker, John Boehner.
Beyond the presidential campaign, Gingrich is attempting to restart his private life
[(linked in http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=72186608 , http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=73012285 ]. His wife Callista has a sequel to her “Ellis the Elephant” children’s book. The couple is working on a film biography of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – similar to ones they’ve already produced on Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan.
“You create a boxed set that way,” he quipped in that Friday night interview.
Gingrich said he’s also negotiating with “a major online university” about offering online lectures – perhaps to pave the way for the major societal changes that Republicans need to pursue.
“I want to remain an active citizen, but it may be that my role as an active citizen is more as a teacher-problem solver-adviser than it is as the next president,” he said with a shrug.
Gingrich has another reason to stay busy. Last week, Forbes magazine pointed to the $4.3 million debt incurred by his campaign, declaring Gingrich to be “America’s most indebted politician.”
Gingrich attended two fundraisers in Columbus this weekend to help pay it down. “I think that over the next couple years, we pay it off. It’s not something which blocks you from being effective,” he said. “But as a responsible person, you feel bad about it. You want to get it solved. And it wasn’t good management. I was always prepared to come out about a million [dollars] in debt, but I wasn’t prepared to have it be this big.”
© 2012 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
http://blogs.ajc.com/political-insider-jim-galloway/2012/05/19/newt-gingrich-auditions-as-mitt-romneys-bulldog/ [with comments]
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The Romney Hypocrisy: Bain, Job Creation Fallacies and the Working-Class White Vote
Edward Wyckoff Williams
Posted: 05/18/2012 5:04 pm
Mitt Romney is a hypocrite at best, and a liar at worst.
A recent video released by Obama's re-election team reveals the truth behind Romney's assertion that his business experience qualifies him for the presidency. In particular, Romney has maintained he created jobs both as an executive at Bain and as governor. His record in Massachusetts has already been fully scrutinized, and found wanting: dropping to 47th of the 50 states in job creation during his tenure. But now the same myth regarding Romney's purported private sector acumen is being debunked [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWiSFwZJXwE (the shorter of the two recent Obama campaign ads; the two ads the 6th and 7th items at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75583191 )].
Romney was forced to walk back prior assertions. BuzzFeed's Zeke Miller reported the former governor's campaign now claims an obscure "thousands of jobs [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/heres-the-new-romney-jobs-math ]" at Bain: another embarrassing example of the candidate's flip-flopping. Alex Seitz-Wald [ http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/05/14/483676/romney-downgrades-bain-jobs/ (third item below)] of Think Progress reported that even the "thousands of jobs" figure is suspect considering the only evidence offered was a vague editorial reference by right-wing newspaper Washington Examiner that lacked any verifiable statistical data. Romney and his surrogates are fully on the defensive, as the Obama campaign has finally chosen to play hardball.
The new Obama ad highlights Romney's role in now-bankrupt GST Steel. As CEO in 1993, Romney and his partners purchased Kansas City's GST plant, a successful company with a 105 year history, and thousands of workers. Romney's team extracted profits, reduced employee levels, and by 2001 the company was forced into liquidation. Workers -- many of whom had been with GST for decades -- lost pension and health benefits. By contrast, Romney, Bain executives and investors reaped millions in profits. The result? A bailout in which the federal government was forced to guarantee the pension fund to a tune of $44 million.
The video features quotes from former GST workers whose livelihoods were lost."They came in and sucked the life out of us," one worker said. "It was like watching an old friend bleed to death."
The strategic value of the Obama team's approach cannot be under-estimated [sic - overstated]; they are speaking to working-class white American voters who are crucial in swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado and Indiana. This important demographic was devastated by the policies of the Bush era, but have been manipulated by Republican and Tea Party dogma and Fox News propaganda to vote against their own economic interests. It is imperative that the president relay his message and reveal Romney for the out-of-touch tycoon he is.
That fine point was not lost on Romney, who immediately responded with a video of his own: pointing out the story of a similar firm, Steel Dynamics, which experienced relative success after investment from Bain Capital in 1994.
But a deeper look into Steel Dynamics reveals the company's success is largely due to $37 million in government grants and subsidies, compared to the $18.2 million Bain invested. An investigative report [ http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/12/nation/la-na-bain-subsidies-20120113 (next below)] published by Los Angeles Times showed Indiana's DeKalb County provided $23.4 million in tax abatements, finance bonds and economic development funds. The state added $13.6 million in tax credits, energy grants, road and workforce development. In addition the state raised taxes on county residents in order to finance infrastructure improvements, and Bain was only one of eight investors - though Romney wants voters to believe he was the sole mastermind.
Given Bain's critical reliance on public funds, it is ironic that candidate Romney constantly espouses a platform for smaller government, less regulation and decreased federal oversight. In fact, the Steel Dynamics deal conveys the truth many of Romney's critics already knew: it would have been impossible for him to amass the $250 million fortune he enjoys without the largesse of government spending and subsidies. In fact, Romney's reluctant Tea Party and GOP allies often decry it as "corporate welfare."
Five years after buying Steel Dynamics, Romney and his investment partners sold their stake for $104 million-- reaping a profit of $85 million. But today, the governor backs Paul Ryan's budget which maintains the loopholes and tax credits for private equity firms like Bain, while slashing social welfare programs for the poor and middle-classes. Mitt boldly declares his disregard for federal investment in Pell Grants and Stafford Loans, which offer the less fortunate an opportunity to achieve higher education, and gain access to a world of opportunity that Mitt, his wife Ann, and all their five sons were born into. At a time when half of all American families are poor or low-income, Romney uses smokescreen tactics to deflect from the truth he is a poster child for the GOP's reckless attitude toward average American families.
And herein lies the rub: perhaps Romney insists on making the 2012 campaign a referendum on President Obama's record, in an effort to ignore his own.
A quick look at Obama's presidency reveals net-positive job increases, surpassing the 5 million jobs lost during the Bush-Cheney recession. Obama delivered Healthcare Reform, offering coverage to millions, and widening America's social safety net. The president's sharp business acumen led to capital investments in Detroit; and now GM is the number one automaker in the world, and Chrysler is profitable. Brave veterans returned from Iraq. DADT is dead and so is Osama bin Laden. And for the first time in American history black, brown and white alike can imagine a future in which their children can grow up to become president.
Ben LaBolt, Obama's campaign press secretary, said it best when he explained, "Mitt Romney has asked Americans to elect him based on his tenure as a corporate buyout specialist, where he profited off of outsourcing jobs and bankrupting companies."
The stark contrast between Barack's legacy and Mitt's lies could not be more apparent.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/edward-wyckoff-williams/mitt-romney-bain_b_1520130.html [with comments]
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Mitt Romney no stranger to tax breaks, subsidies
Bain Capital profited from a steel company that got them, and he used them to attract business when he governed Massachusetts
By Matea Gold, Melanie Mason and Tom Hamburger, Washington Bureau
January 12, 2012
Reporting from Washington — As Mitt Romney defends his record running a private equity firm, he frequently points to a fast-growing Indiana steel company, financed in part by Bain Capital, that now employs 6,000 workers.
What Romney doesn't mention is that Steel Dynamics also received generous tax breaks and other subsidies provided by the state of Indiana and the residents of DeKalb County, where the company's first mill was built.
The story of Bain and Steel Dynamics illustrates how Romney, during his business career, made avid use of public-private partnerships, something that many conservatives consider to be "corporate welfare." It is a commitment that carried over into his term as governor of Massachusetts, when he offered similar incentives to lure businesses to his state.
Yet as he seeks the GOP presidential nomination, he emphasizes government's adverse effects on economic growth.
"Fundamentally, what happens in America that creates jobs is not government. It has its role. But by and large, it gets in the way of creating jobs," he said during a debate Saturday sponsored by ABC News and Yahoo.
Bain Capital began looking at investing in the steel start-up in late 1993. At the time, Steel Dynamics was weighing where to locate its first plant, based in part on which region offered the best tax incentives. In June 1994, Bain put $18.2 million into Steel Dynamics, making it the largest domestic equity holder. It sold its stake five years later for $104 million, a return of more than $85 million.
As Bain made its investment, the state and county pledged $37 million in subsidies and grants for the $385-million plant project. The county also levied a new income tax to finance infrastructure improvements to benefit the steel mill over the heated objections of some county residents.
"I'm very pro-business, but I'm not pro-business-welfare," said DeKalb County resident Suzanne Beaman, 58, who fought the incentives. Steel Dynamics "would have done fine without our tax dollars, I have no doubt."
Another steel company in which Bain invested, GS Industries, went bankrupt in 2001, causing more than 700 workers to lose their jobs, health insurance and a part of their pensions. Before going under, the company paid large dividends to Bain partners and expanded its Kansas City plant with the help of tax subsidies. It also sought a $50-million federal loan guarantee.
"This is corporate welfare," said Tad DeHaven, a budget analyst with the Washington-based Cato Institute, which encourages free-market economic policies. DeHaven, who is familiar with corporate tax subsidies in Indiana and other states, called the incentives Steel Dynamics received "an example of the government stepping into the marketplace, picking winners and losers, providing profits to business owners and leaving taxpayers stuck with the bill."
On Thursday, Romney acknowledged that government can help spur private enterprise.
"When I was governor of our state, we competed aggressively to get companies to move to our state and provide benefits to them if they were to decide to bring manufacturing jobs, for instance," he said during a campaign stop in Greer, S.C. "That's the nature of competition between states. I'm happy with competition and do believe in free enterprise."
The outline of the tax subsidies to Steel Dynamics was initially provided to the Los Angeles Times/Tribune Washington Bureau by American Bridge 21st Century, a pro-Democratic "super PAC." The details emerged during a week in which Romney has repeatedly cited Steel Dynamics as an example of his successful job creation while he was head of Bain Capital.
Launched as a start-up at a time when many American steel mills were foundering, Steel Dynamics is the fifth-largest producer of carbon steel products in the country, generating $6.3 billion in revenue in 2010.
Government support was a key ingredient to getting it off the ground.
When local officials in DeKalb County learned that three veteran steel mill executives were starting the company in 1993 and looking for a home for their new mini-mill, they pulled out all the stops. "These people don't just drive by and choose accidentally to be your neighbor," said Jack Bercaw, a Butler businessman who was co-chairman of the recruitment drive.
The county promised $23.4 million in property tax abatements and tax increment finance bonds, as well as a new income tax to generate economic development funds. The latter was required by the state, which shelled out another $13.6 million in tax credits, energy grants, workforce training and funds for roads.
A new quarter-percent tax on DeKalb County residents financed infrastructure improvements such as roads and railroad exchanges that benefited Steel Dynamics, Bercaw said. The county also created a new redevelopment commission and redevelopment authority to oversee the activity.
Steel Dynamics executives did not respond to requests for comment. But in a 1994 interview with a trade journal, then-Chief Executive Keith Busse said the $4.4 million the company initially received in state tax credits, in particular, helped persuade Steel Dynamics to locate in Indiana. Busse told a business panel that same year, however, that he was opposed to the new income tax levied by DeKalb County, according to the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.
David Stickler, an investor and advisor specializing in the steel industry who engineered the original financing package that launched Steel Dynamics, said the $37 million in grants and subsidies was not only a financial boost, but also helped persuade larger lenders to sign on.
"What I've found is that the senior lending banks, especially lenders from overseas, take great comfort in the fact that the local and state government entities are showing a willingness to partner on the project," Stickler said.
Boston-based Bain became involved with Steel Dynamics about two months after the company formed in 1993. At that point, the management team had already sought incentive packages from the state and county. Stickler said Bain executives were well-briefed on the proposed deal and noted that they were particularly thorough in examining the intricacies of the deals' structure.
"They lifted up every rock, they stress-tested every financial scenario," Stickler said. "Before they put their money into a transaction, they wanted to know that as many of the risks have been mitigated as possible."
A spokesman for Bain said Thursday that the private equity firm "has had a 28-year track record of growing great companies, including partnering with the management team to help to launch and grow Steel Dynamics. We are extremely proud of the work our employees have done throughout our history to build our businesses and improve their operations."
In DeKalb County, the tax incentives rankled some local residents, who protested the deal at county government meetings.
Tim Heffley, then a Democratic county commissioner, was opposed to the new tax but was outvoted. "I was just against any company getting handouts from the government, corporate welfare," said Heffley, who nevertheless praised Steel Dynamics as a good company that has brought jobs to the region.
Nearly two decades later, some are still smarting about the subsidies.
"It was something very upsetting to me," said Beaman, a longtime Republican activist. "I hated to see the people I thought were my friends go toward the liberal socialist mind-set under the guise of creating jobs. Our government shouldn't be in the business of buying or funding companies. That is contrary to the whole conservative mind-set."
Still, Beaman said she didn't hold the incident against Romney, questioning whether he had a "true understanding of economics."
"Did he do that knowing the full ramifications of where that type of government leads?" she said. "Probably not."
matea.gold@latimes.com
melanie.mason@latimes.com
tom.hamburger@latimes.com
Times staff writer Maeve Reston in Greer, S.C., contributed to this report.
*
Related
A closer look at Mitt Romney's job creation record
The Republican presidential contender says he learned about expanding employment during his time heading a private equity firm. But under his leadership, Bain Capital often maximized profits in part by firing workers.
December 3, 2011
Shortly after Mitt Romney resigned from Bain Capital in 1999 to run the Olympics in Salt Lake City, potential investors received a prospectus touting the extraordinary profits earned by the private equity firm that Romney controlled for 15 years.
During that time, Boston-based Bain acquired more than 115 companies, according to the prospectus. Bain's estimated annual returns were more than five times that of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the same period.
Now a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, Romney says his Bain experience shows he knows how to create jobs. He often cites Bain's investment in a little-known office supply store called Staples, which now employs more than 90,000 worldwide.
But a closer examination of the prospectus [ http://documents.latimes.com/bain-capital-investments/ ] paints a different picture of Bain's operation. Under Romney's leadership, Bain became one of the nation's top leveraged-buyout firms, helping lead a trend in which companies were acquired using debt often pledged against their own assets or earnings.
Bain expanded many of the companies it acquired. But like other leveraged-buyout firms, Romney and his team also maximized returns by firing workers, seeking government subsidies, and flipping companies quickly for large profits. Sometimes Bain investors gained even when companies slid into bankruptcy.
Romney himself became wealthy at Bain. He is now worth between $190 million and $250 million, much of it derived from his time running the investment firm, his campaign staffers have said.
Bain managers said their mission was clear. "I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation," said Marc B. Walpow, a former managing partner at Bain who worked closely with Romney for nine years before forming his own firm. "The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors."
Bain's top 10 dollar investments under Romney — averaging $53 million — spanned a number of sectors, including healthcare, entertainment and manufacturing. The firm's largest investment was its 1999 buyout of Domino's Pizza, into which Bain put $188.8 million, eventually reaping a fivefold return.
Four of the 10 companies Bain acquired declared bankruptcy within a few years, shedding thousands of jobs. The prospectus shows that Bain investors profited in eight of the 10 deals, including three of the four that ended in bankruptcy.
[...]
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-romney-bain-20111204,0,343872.story [ http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-romney-bain-20111204,0,1945560,full.story ]
Mitt Romney steps up defense of Bain Capital tenure
January 12, 2012
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-romney-defends-bain-record-20120112,0,5132594.story
Romney tax returns likely to stoke debate over economic fairness
January 23, 2012
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-romney-tax-returns-release-20120123,0,5466078.story [ http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-romney-tax-returns-release-20120123,0,2967621,full.story ]
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Copyright 2012 Los Angeles Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/12/nation/la-na-bain-subsidies-20120113
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New Romney Video Touts Steel Mill That Benefited From Government Largesse
By Alex Seitz-Wald on May 14, 2012 at 3:52 pm
Seeking to combat charges [ http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/05/14/483518/steven-rattner-bain/ ] from the Obama campaign that Bain Capital extracted value from companies it purchased by firing employees and cutting benefits, Mitt Romney’s released a web video today [ http://www.mittromney.com/embed/video/american-dream ] profiling Steel Dynamics, one of the companies that Bain invested in.
The ad implies that the plant would not have been built without Romney’s assistance. Steele Dynamics “almost never got started,” the narrator says. “When others shied away, Mitt Romney’s private-sector leadership team stepped in.”
But the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reported at the time (via Nexis), that Bain was just one of eight financiers for the project — hardly the lone white knight:
Financing to build the plant is coming from the Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh, NBD Bank, Fort Wayne National Bank, Lincoln National Life Insurance Co., the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Germany and the Paris Bank. Capital and Bain Capital are also investors.
And while the video touts Romney’s “private-sector” team, the company was successful thanks in part to big government subsidies and grants — $37 million from the state of Indiana and DeKalb County. And as the Los Angeles Times reported [ http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/12/nation/la-na-bain-subsidies-20120113 (just above)] in January of this year, the county even raised taxes on residents to help fund the mill:
The county promised $23.4 million in property tax abatements and tax increment finance bonds, as well as a new income tax to generate economic development funds. The latter was required by the state, which shelled out another $13.6 million in tax credits, energy grants, workforce training and funds for roads.
A new quarter-percent tax on DeKalb County residents financed infrastructure improvements such as roads and railroad exchanges that benefited Steel Dynamics.
Indeed, while Romney and conservative allies have attacked President Obama for employing “corporate welfare” and “crony capitalism” to create green jobs, Romney-backed Steel Dynamics enjoyed government largesse on the local level. As the LA Times noted, “The story of Bain and Steel Dynamics illustrates how Romney, during his business career, made avid use [id.] of public-private partnerships, something that many conservatives consider to be ‘corporate welfare.’”
Bain invested $18.2 million in Steel Dynamics in 1994. Five years later, it sold its stake for $104 million, walking away with $85 million profit.
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/05/14/483972/mitt-romney-steel-dynamics-vide/ [with comments]
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Romney Campaign Massively Downgrades The Number Of Jobs It Claims He Created From 100,000 To ‘Thousands’
By Alex Seitz-Wald on May 14, 2012 at 12:08 pm
In its effort to sell Mitt Romney as someone who understands the economy and knows how to create jobs, one of his campaign’s early talking points was that he helped create 100,000 jobs during his tenure at Bain Capital. The campaign repeated the claim throughout the primary, despite a glaring lack of evidence [ http://www.factcheck.org/2012/01/romneys-shaky-job-claims/ ] to support it [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/12/09/386437/romney-backers-no-jobs-evidence/ ] (even Sarah Palin doubted it [ http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/01/11/sarah_palin_to_mitt_romney_prove_you_created_100000_jobs.html ]).
Romney eventually stopped repeating the talking point, which advisers had difficulty defending under pressure, and now it seems Boston has completely Etch A Sketched the number and severely lowered the number of jobs Romney is supposed to have created at Bain.
BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller reports that, in the wake of the Obama campaign’s new ad attacking Romney’s record at Bain, the “new Romney jobs math [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/heres-the-new-romney-jobs-math ]” is significantly more modest than the old. This time, the campaign is asserting that Romney created a meager and vague “thousands of jobs” at Bain and “tens of thousands” of jobs as governor of Massachusetts.
This is nothing less than an admission from the Romney campaign that their 100,000 jobs claim was entirely bogus, and acceptance that Romney created vastly fewer jobs than he claimed he had just a few months ago. It’s a welcome return to reality, but calls into question any piece of evidence the campaign puts forward. (In 1994, he claimed in an ad that he created 10,000 jobs [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/1994-romney-for-senate-ad-says-he-created-10000-j ] at Bain.)
Meanwhile, even the “thousands of jobs” figure should be suspect, as the evidence the campaign offers to support it is an editorial from the right-wing Washington Examiner endorsing Romney [ http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/romney-gops-best-choice/256896 ]. Could the Romney campaign not find a single better piece of evidence — a news article, government data, or economist’s estimate, for instance — than an unsubstantiated opinion article from a paper that is simultaneously declaring that it favors Romney’s election?
And his assertion on his record as governor also fails to include the context that his state was 47th out of 50 on job creation [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/as-massachusetts-governor-romneys-record-on-jobs-was-unremarkable/2012/02/06/gIQABzEfxQ_story.html ].
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/05/14/483676/romney-downgrades-bain-jobs/ [with comments]
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Romney's Bain Record: Playing By a Different Set of Rules Than Ordinary Americans
Robert Creamer
Posted: 05/18/2012 10:19 am
Mitt Romney's history at the helm of Bain Capital tells us a lot about the kind of leader he would make as president.
First, of course, it demonstrates conclusively that he has absolutely no experience "creating jobs." Bain Capital was not in business to "create jobs" -- it was in business to "create wealth" -- for Mitt Romney and his fellow Wall Street investors. When Bain bought businesses that happened to create new jobs, that was entirely incidental. And when Bain-owned businesses laid off workers, cut wages, eliminated pensions or health care benefits -- or went bankrupt -- that was incidental as well.
Romney and the Bain crew couldn't have cared less whether their actions created jobs, eliminated jobs, or destroyed entire communities so long as they served their one and only purpose: making themselves and their colleagues very, very rich.
Now I'm not arguing that there is anything wrong with making yourself rich. But it has absolutely nothing to do with "creating jobs" -- as the 750 workers at the 100-year-old GST Steel in Kansas City discovered when, after Bain took over their company, Bain loaded it with debt [ http://news.yahoo.com/biden-attacks-romney-tenure-venture-capitalist-100121161.html ( http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i0-rBJ6RPIZgCsyOdDNiK5OPuEhg?docId=9ed331c27dcf42359d2f02c090cceea3 )] -- milked it of cash and bankrupted the company -- but still walked away with millions.
Turns out the landscape is strewn with cases like GST -- American Pad and Paper [ http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/02/23/147257517/how-mitt-romneys-firm-tried-and-failed-to-build-a-paper-empire ] (AmPad) in Indiana, Dade Behring [ http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/the-buzz-florida-politics/content/under-romney-bain-received-millions-job-creation-tax-breaks-dade-behring-it-laid-hundreds ] in Florida.
And whether or not there are other "success stories" where new jobs were created is completely irrelevant to the central point that Romney has never demonstrated he "knows how to create jobs in the private sector." Romney was very good at extracting wealth for himself and his friends. He viewed the workers with about as much concern as you might give to a fly you flick off your desk or swat on a hot summers day.
To Romney, workers -- and the jobs they filled -- were nothing but expendable means to an end.
But that's not all his experience with Bain can teach us about Willard Mitt Romney. It tells us that he is used to playing by a different set of rules from ordinary Americans. Romney and Bain helped to create a new rulebook for the American economy -- one that ultimately helped lead to the economic disaster that came to a head in September 2008.
Most people think it's great for businesses and investors to make money. The ability to own a business and make money provides one of the major engines that has made the American economy the largest and most innovative in the world.
And we all know that some businesses fail and others succeed.
But in order for the rules of the economic game to send the right signals to incentivize innovation and efficiency, they have to work both ways. Investors win if they create successful, productive, growing businesses. They lose if they invest in businesses that are unsuccessful, inefficient or unproductive.
Romney and Bain played by a different set of rules. Their rules were simple: heads I win, tails you lose.
What ordinary Americans find so outrageous is not that people in American can make money, but rather that the folks on Wall Street make millions on businesses that fail.
Bain often did leveraged buyouts. It used the businesses it intended to buy as collateral to borrow the money to buy them. Then the partners at Bain transferred cash from the companies they bought into their own pockets -- in the form of fees and "returns on investment." If the company ultimately ran out of cash, shut down, laid off its workers, too bad -- they still walked away with millions. If they succeeded and stayed in business, so much the better.
Bain structured deals where they couldn't lose.
The problem is that ordinary Americans don't play by rules that allow them to make money whether or not they succeed.
If most Americans are fired from their jobs, with the exception of unemployment insurance, their income stops.
In fact, most Americans are not guaranteed financial security, even when they do work hard and play by the rules. Ask everyday middle class people what happened to them after they had worked diligently for years and then the recklessness of a bunch of speculators on Wall Street they never heard of -- or voted for -- crashed the economy and they lost their jobs.
Their good-paying jobs disappeared, their pensions evaporated, and the value of their houses plummeted. Now mind you that that ordinary middle-class working family didn't do anything to cause this calamity. But they paid the price regardless.
That's bad enough. But the sight of the speculator class who caused this disaster walking away with millions is beyond infuriating.
Ordinary Americans believe it is simply wrong for people like Romney to make money by bleeding companies dry and then leaving them to die.
Middle class people believe -- correctly -- that our economy works when success is rewarded -- where workers and owners benefit together.
And it works when the pain of failure is shared by workers and owners alike.
What infuriated ordinary Americans about the bailout of Wall Street was not the fact that government stepped in to save our financial system. It was that many of those whose recklessness caused the collapse of our economy walked off with billions in bonuses.
For everyday people, this is not just a question of economics -- it's a question of right and wrong.
In fact, the central question of this election is whether we are all in this together and play by the same rules, or whether there is one set of rules for the lucky few and another for ordinary Americans.
No one is arguing that you shouldn't be able to get rich in America.
I have a friend whose father made a lot of money in the 1940s and '50s -- back when the top tax rate ranged from 70% to 90% -- back when the income gap between Americans was shrinking and most people, rich and poor alike, were better off the next year than the year before. My friend recalls his father saying: "We paid a lot of taxes, but we built a hell of a country."
Warren Buffet, who advocates the "Buffet Rule" that would prevent millionaires from paying lower tax rates than their secretaries, has made a fortune investing in companies because of their underlying value -- their ability to generate profit from their operations -- from their ability to add value to products and services. Buffet does not buy companies as speculative investments. He makes money by investing in ongoing, productive businesses -- not by gambling or bleeding companies dry and leaving them to die.
In contrast, Romney economics is an economics of impunity for the lucky few. It is an economics of entitlement where those at the very top of the income ladder structure the rules of the economic game to guarantee their own success -- whether or not everyone succeeds.
Romney economics inevitably results in exactly the kind of increasing income inequality that more than any single factor caused the Great Recession. It guaranteed that the "lucky few" could siphon off all of America's income growth for decades. That, in turn, guaranteed that ordinary people would not have the increasing incomes to buy the new goods and services that were produced by an increasingly productive economy.
Henry Ford knew you had to pay your workers enough so they could buy the products they produced -- otherwise there would be no customers for a growing economy and the result would be economic stagnation. Romney economics has turned the Henry Ford Rule on its head. As a result, Romney economics guarantees more and more for the lucky few and a shrinking middle class.
Next November we face a choice between President Obama's vision of a society where everyone has a fair shot, gets a fair share, and plays by the same set of rules -- or a society where the rules are rigged for the few at the top. It is a choice between a society where we all succeed together or a society where the lucky few get a guarantee of success and ordinary people are simply pawns in their economic game.
That's why Mitt Romney's history at Bain Capital is so important. It not only demonstrates he has no experience as a "job creator." It is emblematic of the choice we face over the kind of economy and society want to leave to our children.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/romneys-bain-record-playi_b_1527163.html [with comments]
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Cory Booker[, Revealing Self as Instantly Forever a Damaged Goods Self-Serving False-Equivalence-Run-Amok Butthead,] slams Obama campaign ad attacking Romney's Bain Capital record
By Dylan Stableford
May 20, 2012
Newark Mayor Cory Booker slammed the Obama campaign's ad criticizing Mitt Romney's record as the head of Bain Capital [ http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/obama-campaign-ad-paints-romney-job-killing-economic-145406874.html (7th item at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75583191 )], and called for an end to"nauseating" attacks from both sides.
"I have to just say from a very personal level, I'm not about to sit here and indict private equity," Booker, a Democrat, said in an appearance on NBC's "Meet The Press" on Sunday [ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032608/ns/meet_the_press/ ]. "To me, it's just we're getting to a ridiculous point in America. Especially that I know I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people invest in companies like Bain Capital. If you look at the totality of Bain Capital's record, they've done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses."
The ad--released last week by the Obama re-election campaign--makes Booker, who endorsed Obama for president in 2008, "very uncomfortable," he said.
"This kind of stuff is nauseating to me on both sides," Booker continued. "It's nauseating to the American public. Enough is enough. Stop attacking private equity. Stop attacking Jeremiah Wright. This stuff has got to stop, because what it does is it undermines, to me, what this country should be focused on. It's a distraction from the real issues."
After Sunday's "Meet The Press" broadcast, Booker took to his favorite medium--Twitter--to clarify his comments [ https://twitter.com/#!/CoryBooker ].
"I will fight hard for Obama to win," Booker wrote. "But just as his '08 campaign did, I believe we must elevate [and] not denigrate. This is the Obama I know."
"We as 'the electorate' must also bear responsibility for changing the tone of politics as usual," he continued. "Not just root harder for our side ... I'm sick to my stomach of the politics of destruction. We now have a [federal government] that can't come together [and] solve our nation's problems. I'll always prioritize my nation over a political party. [And] right now crass divisive partisan politics is not serving the citizens of my city."
"Yes, Obama must be re-elected. But we as a Nation owe it to him and ourselves to reject politics as usual," Booker added. "The politics as we are now playing it calls to our lessor angels [and] lowest common denominators. Our nation can and should reject this."
Copyright © 2012 ABC News Internet Ventures. Yahoo! - ABC News Network
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/cory-booker-slams-obama-campaign-ad-attacking-romneys/story?id=16390606 [with comments]
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Cory Booker, surrogate from hell
(Credit: AP)
What Cory Booker has to gain by calling President Obama’s attacks on Bain Capital “nauseating”
By Steve Kornacki
Sunday, May 20, 2012 01:05 PM CDT
If Cory Booker went on “Meet the Press” [ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032608/vp/47494418 ] on Sunday with the intent of helping President Obama, then his appearance was an utter failure. But anyone who’s followed the enormously ambitious Newark mayor’s career closely knows he’s not one to pull a Joe Biden [ http://gawker.com/5909758/bill-maher-would-like-some-more-biden-gaffes-please ]. He’s just too smart and too smooth to screw up so epically.
More likely, Booker went on the show to help himself and to advance his own long-term political prospects. And on that score, his appearance was a success.
You’ve probably seen or are now seeing the headlines [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/politico-live/2012/05/booker-bristles-at-bain-attacks-124001.html (and e.g. the item just above)] Booker generated by calling the Obama campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s private equity background “nauseating” and likening them to efforts by some on the right to inject Rev. Jeremiah Wright into the campaign.
“Enough is enough,” Booker said. “Stop attacking private equity. Stop attacking Jeremiah Wright.”
He added: “I have to just say from a very personal level, I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity. To me, it’s just we’re getting to a ridiculous point in America. Especially that I know I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people invest in companies like Bain Capital. If you look at the totality of Bain Capital’s record, they’ve done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses. And this, to me — I’m very uncomfortable with.”
Playing up Romney’s Bain record is, of course, central to Obama’s general election plan. Romney is running as a business-savvy “job creator” and relying on the public’s tendency to associate private sector success with economic competence. There is no overstating how vital it is for Obama and his campaign to break that link, and to establish that Romney’s real expertise is in making investors rich – not adding jobs and improving the quality of life for middle class workers.
In belittling this strategy, Booker isn’t just breaking with Obama, he’s breaking with just about everyone who’s ever run against Romney [ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/14/the_bain_beast_returns/ ] – including Ted Kennedy, who used criticisms of Bain’s treatment of workers to pull away from Romney in their 1994 Senate race. Essentially, Kennedy created the blueprint that Obama is now using. Booker is also providing Republicans with a dream talking point: A top Obama surrogate not only disapproves of Obama’s use of Bain, he finds it nauseating!
It wouldn’t be surprising if Booker has already heard from the White House, and surely he’s now in for a world of abuse from Obama supporters. But that hardly means he made a mistake, at least in terms of his own ambition. Financial support from Wall Street and, more broadly speaking, the investor class has been key to Booker’s rise, and remains key to his future dreams.
It’s easy to forget, but before the world met Barack Obama in 2004, many believed that the first black president would be Booker. Armed with Stanford, Yale and Oxford degrees and all of the invaluable personal connections he forged at those institutions, he set out in the mid-1990s to craft a uniquely appealing political biography, swearing off lucrative job offers to move to Newark’s Central Ward and take up residence in public housing. Within a few years, he won a seat on the City Council, where he showed an early and consistent knack for self-generated publicity, most notably with a ten-day hunger strike in the summer of 1999.
That set the stage for Booker’s 2002 race for mayor, an ugly contest against incumbent Sharpe James, an entrenched icon of the city’s civil rights generation of black politicians. James, as any self-respecting Newark mayor would do, leveraged his clout for campaign contributions from city workers, vendors and those who aspired to be city workers and vendors.
Booker, meanwhile, had hardly lost touch with his old classmates, keeping one foot in Newark and the other in Manhattan, where he built on the connections to elite donors that he already had. He called the millions of dollars he raised for the race “love money.” The press – and James’ campaign – took note that almost all of it was from outside Newark, nearly half of it was from outside New Jersey, and a quarter of it came directly from Wall Street.
This helped bolster James’ claim that Booker, who grew up in an affluent suburb, was not an authentic Newarker. That attack resonated just enough to save James, who won in a squeaker. It was a pyrrhic victory, though: Booker had captured national interest – there was a Time profile during the campaign, and an Academy Award-nominated documentary [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8jtAASYdLw ] followed – and immediately started campaigning for the next race, while a federal investigation soon swallowed up James. In 2006, Booker was elected with ease, while James was on his way to jail.
Since then, the only question in New Jersey has been when – and not if – Booker will seek to run for statewide office. In 2009, the beleaguered Jon Corzine begged him to run for lieutenant governor on his ticket, an offer that Booker wisely refused. He’s often touted as a potential gubernatorial candidate for 2013, but those who know him say his eye is more on the Senate seat now held by 88-year-old Frank Lautenberg, which will be up in 2014.
This is why it’s not at all surprising to see Booker going to bat for private equity. The allies he’s cultivated on Wall Street and in the financial industry (think, for instance, of his chummy relationship [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIrMa5vohiU ] with Michael Bloomberg) have made Booker a prolific fundraiser, and when he ventured into the ultra-expensive statewide game, he’ll need them more than ever. Many of them have turned fiercely against Obama [ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/07/no_one_went_to_jail_so_why_is_wall_street_so_mad/ ] over the past few years, convinced that he’s unfairly targeted them. Booker’s words on “Meet the Press” may have enraged the average Obama supporter, but to the Wall Street class they were probably close to heroic – finally, a big-name Democrat with the cojones to call out Obama on his class warfare!
The Booker calculation, in other words, is probably that the average Democratic voter’s memory of his outburst will fade long before 2014 – but that the average Wall Street donor’s won’t.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/20/cory_booker_surrogate_from_hell/singleton/ [with comments]
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New Banking Regulations
The Strip | By Brian McFadden
May 20, 2012
© 2012 The New York Times Company
[currently the first one at] http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/the-strip.html
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Romney, GOP guvs have differing takes on economy
FILE - In this Jan. 21, 2012 file photo, Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney talks with Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell in Greenville, S.C. While Romney faults President Barack Obama for a weak American economy, Republican governors across the country are merrily trumpeting tales of business growth and falling unemployment.
Charles Dharapak / AP
By BOB LEWIS, AP Political Writer
Friday, May 18, 2012
(05-18) 11:35 PDT Danville, Va. (AP) --
In Virginia, Gov. Bob McDonnell runs TV ads hailing the state's business growth. Ohio Gov. John Kasich tells anyone who will listen that 100,000 jobs have been created or retained on his watch. And Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder promotes a state budget that's on solid ground for the first time in a decade.
All that optimism from Republican governors in key presidential election battlegrounds conflicts with the pessimistic message that Mitt Romney is spreading. The GOP presidential candidate is focused on the nation's fragile economic rebound as he works to persuade Americans to dump President Barack Obama.
"America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs" but instead "we are enduring the most tepid recovery in modern history," Romney said this week in Des Moines, Iowa. That's the same state where GOP Gov. Terry Branstad has been crowing about an unemployment rate that has dropped to 5.1 percent from 5.9 percent a year ago.
It's just the latest example of how, less than six months before the general election, Romney can end up in an awkward situation as he argues that the economy is deeply troubled while GOP governors salute an economic renaissance in their states.
How can it be both?
"Well, it is both," McDonnell, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said recently. "Nationally, we're still in the doldrums because our national economic policies are inept as led by this president: more taxes, more government programs, more regulation, lots of rhetoric and limited results."
But things are looking up in states like his, he said, adding: "I'd say most of the credit in Virginia goes to the private sector and the entrepreneurs."
Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, hopes to ride a wave of voter discontent with the economy into the White House. No president has won re-election with a national unemployment rate above 7.2 percent. The rate stood at 8.1 percent in April.
Any number of factors, gas prices among them, could shift voter attitudes about the economy between now and Election Day.
To win, Romney must convince voters — especially those in the roughly dozen swing-voting states where the race is likely to be decided — that the situation is so bad that that they should give him a chance to do what Obama hasn't been able to do: get the economy really going.
Obama says voters should give him four more years so the nation's recovery can continue, and he warns of a backslide if Romney takes over.
Democrats, like Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, contend the country would be in far worse condition had the president not pumped stimulus money into the economy in 2009, saying it was directly responsible for new jobs. Romney and Republican governors contend that the infusion has acted as a brake on the economy, not the accelerator.
"If our economy had been stimulated differently, we'd be farther along than we are at the present time," said Gov. Robert Bentley of Alabama, a state where the jobless rate fell by 2 percentage points over the past year.
In a way, however, Republican governors, many of them freshmen elected in 2010, aren't making it easy for Romney to make his case.
McDonnell, for one, spent an entire week canvassing his state and used $400,000 from his own political action committee to run TV ads statewide trumpeting a 2 1/2-year turnaround in job growth and business expansion. Virginia's unemployment rate fell from 7.3 percent the month he took office in January 2010 — the depth of the crippling recession — to 5.6 percent last month.
"We've been rated the top state for business in America," McDonnell bragged, ticking off citations from several outfits after touring a newly opened circuit board factory in Danville.
Ohio's Kasich is equally upbeat as he takes credit for 100,000 new or retained jobs since taking office in January 2011and for a new, private job-creation agency called JobsOhio. The state's unemployment rate ticked down from 7.5 percent in March to 7.4 percent last month.
Michigan's Snyder beams when he talks about a jobless rate that has fallen by 2.2 percentage points in his state, Romney's boyhood home, in the past year. And Branstad boasts: "The unemployment rate in Iowa is dropping dramatically, and the kind of jobs that we're creating are the kinds we want."
In some cases, the competing messages come across as GOP governors — like McDonnell and Snyder — stand next to Romney to introduce him when he campaigns in their states.
Rising-star Republican governors who are potential Romney vice-presidential picks also are publicly giddy about a thawing jobs market as corporations and small businesses expand, and they point to steadily improving tax collections in their states as proof.
In South Carolina, Gov. Nikki Haley talks up a jobless rate that slid from 12 percent in December 2009 to 8.8 percent in April. Her commerce secretary, Bobby Hitt, says that South Carolina recruited a projected 20,000 jobs and $5.1 billion in investment last year, and the state Commerce Department churns out press releases on every company expansion, whether it creates 10 jobs or 500.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal talks up his state's unemployment rate (7.1 percent in April) and job growth. Even as the latest Louisiana revenue estimates exposed a $211 million shortfall, Jindal insisted the state's economic picture wasn't grim. He notes that Bayou State unemployment rates are below the regional and national averages and points to 44,000 Louisiana jobs added over the past year.
To be sure, it's not just GOP-governed states that are experiencing economic growth. Forty-eight states have seen a drop in unemployment rates over the past 12 months — New York's rate increased from 8.0 percent to 8.5 percent, and Rhode Island's remains unchanged at 11.2 percent. Democratic governors, however, are quick to credit Obama with helping their states rebound.
"Our country has now seen 26 straight months of private-sector job growth under President Obama's leadership," said Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association. "We are moving in the right direction toward full recovery."
Ultimately, the presidential race will come down to whether voters feel the economy is improving or stagnating. And the outcome will determine whether Romney and the Republicans are successful in squaring the broader economic criticism with progress in key states.
Bob Lewis reported from Danville and Richmond in Virginia, Phillip Rawls from Montgomery, Ala. Associated Press writers Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, Kathy Barks Hoffman in Lansing, Mich., Erik Schelzig in Nashville, Tenn., Randall Chase in Dover, Del., Seanna Adcox in Columbia, S.C., Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge, La., and Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/05/18/national/a104009D00.DTL [ http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/05/18/national/a104009D00.DTL&ao=all ] [with comments]
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UPDATE 1-At 'bridge to nowhere,' Romney slams Obama on economy
* 'That's your stimulus dollars at work'
* Says U.S. faces economic path of California
* Edging up in polls
By Steve Holland
Fri May 18, 2012 7:33pm EDT
HILLSBOROUGH, N.H., May 18 (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney returned to his economic message on Friday, highlighting a "bridge to nowhere" rebuilt by stimulus money and warning the U.S. economy could suffer a fiscal crisis like California's if he is not elected in November.
Rising in the polls this week, Romney is eager to follow through by hammering at the White House's handling of the weak economy.
He used the backdrop of a 1860s-era bridge in New Hampshire to illustrate what he called the wasteful government spending of President Barack Obama's $787 billion stimulus plan passed in 2009.
The stone bridge, rebuilt with more than $150,000 of stimulus funds, crosses a river but ends abruptly on one side with an 8-foot (2.4-metre) drop to a grassy field near a Ford dealership.
"This is the absolute 'bridge to nowhere' if there ever was one," Romney told a crowd of supporters. "That's your stimulus dollars at work - a bridge that goes nowhere."
A notorious "bridge to nowhere" that connected the Alaskan mainland with an isolated island became a symbol of congressional pork-barrel projects, spurring public outrage and leading lawmakers last year to impose a temporary ban on earmarks - special-interest projects added to major bills.
Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, says he would cut spending and put America on the path to a balanced budget if he defeats Obama in the Nov. 6 election. He pointed to the stimulus as an example of the president's failed leadership.
"It is, without question, the largest one-time careless expenditure of government money in American history," he said of the stimulus.
Supporters of the stimulus said it helped prevent the United States from slipping into a economic depression.
After two weeks of a news agenda dominated by gay marriage, bullying accusations, Obama's trip to Afghanistan and controversy over a conservative group's plan to make ads about Obama's controversial ex-pastor, Romney sought to refocus attention on the economy, perceived as Obama's main weakness.
PATH TO CALIFORNIA
The former Massachusetts governor warned that the U.S. economy faced a huge fiscal hole and high taxes like California's if he is not elected this autumn.
"There are only two ways to go: Like America in the past," Romney said. "Or like California, where they raise taxes higher and higher and higher. They scare away employers ... and they have huge deficits," he said in a telephone town-hall meeting with voters from four swing states.
The comments were a departure for Romney, who usually holds up Europe's economic troubles, not California's $15.7 billion budget gap, as an example of a doom-laden scenario for the American economy.
Romney's poll numbers are rising despite his coming under fire from the Obama campaign this week for cutting blue-collar jobs when he headed the Bain Capital private equity firm.
A Gallup seven-day average rolling survey had Romney ahead on Friday by 1 percentage point at 46 percent
In an effort to look presidential, Romney released his first paid general election television ad on Friday that laid out his agenda for the first day if he is elected.
The video said he would approve the proposed Keystone pipeline from Canada, which Obama put on hold earlier this year, propose "tax cuts and reform that reward job creators" and issue an order to scrap th e healthcare law.
The Obama campaign accused Romney of mishandling debt when he was governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007.
"Mitt Romney knows a lot about broken promises - his tenure in Massachusetts was defined by them, especially of the issues of debt, spending and jobs," the campaign said. In 2002, Romney promised he'd use his private sector experience to cut spending and debt, but both increased on his watch and he left Massachusetts with the largest per-capita debt in the nation.".
Helping Romney's rise in the polls in recent weeks have been moves by Republicans to rally round him now that his main opponents for the nomination have dropped out of the race.
Romney spoke by phone to George W. Bush after the former president told ABC News that he supports, the nearest he has come to an endorsement. Romney thanked Bush for his remark, a campaign aide said.
Copyright 2012 Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/18/usa-campaign-idUSL1E8GIF3920120518 [with comments]
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Earmark Puts $17,000 Pans on Army Craft
Phoenix Products, a drip pan maker, whose owners are donors to Representative Harold Rogers.
Chris Wilson for The New York Times
Mr. Rogers
Susan Walsh/Associated Press
The Army pays far more for Phoenix Products’ drip pan on the Black Hawk than it does for pans from another company.
Justin Sullivan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In the last three years, the Army has purchased about $6.5 million worth of the "leakproof" drip pans.
Phoenix Products
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: May 18, 2012
WASHINGTON — In the 1980s, the military had its infamous $800 toilet seat. Today, it has a $17,000 drip pan.
Thanks to a powerful Kentucky congressman who has steered tens of millions of federal dollars to his district, the Army has bought about $6.5 million worth of the “leakproof” drip pans in the last three years to catch transmission fluid on Black Hawk helicopters. And it might want more from the Kentucky company that makes the pans, even though a similar pan from another company costs a small fraction of the price: about $2,500.
The purchase shows the enduring power of earmarks, even though several scandals have prompted efforts in Congress to rein them in. And at a time when the Pentagon is facing billions of dollars in cutbacks — which include shrinking the Army, trimming back purchases of fighter jets and retiring warships — the eye-catching price tag for a small part has provoked sharp criticism.
The Kentucky company, Phoenix Products, got the job to produce the pans after Representative Harold Rogers [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/harold_rogers/index.html ], a Republican who is now the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, added an earmark to a 2009 spending bill. While the earmark came before restrictions were placed on such provisions for for-profit companies, its outlays have continued for the last three years.
The company’s owners are political contributors to the congressman, who has been called the “Prince of Pork” by The Lexington Herald-Leader for his history of delivering federal contracts to donors and others back home.
Military officials have said the pans work well, and Mr. Rogers defended them.
“It’s important that Congress do what it can to provide our military with the best resources to ensure their safety and advance our missions abroad, while also saving taxpayer dollars wherever possible,” Mr. Rogers said in a statement. “These dripping pans help accomplish both of these goals.”
But Bob Skillen, the chief engineer at a small manufacturer called VX Aerospace, which has a plant in North Carolina, said he was shocked to see what the Army was spending for the Black Hawk drip pans. He designs drip pans that his company sells to the military for a different helicopter, the UH-46, for about $2,500 per pan, or about one-eighth the price that his Kentucky competitor charges. The pans attach beneath the roof of the helicopter to catch leaking transmission fluid before it can seep into the cabin.
“It’s not a supercomplex part,” said Mr. Skillen, an aerospace engineer who used to work for the Navy. “As a taxpayer, I’m just like, this isn’t right.”
He took his concerns to members of Congress, to military contracting officials and, finally, to a government watchdog group, the nonpartisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The group requested documents from the government under the Freedom of Information Act last year to learn more about the contract.
The Army turned over some information but said it did not have any specifications or designs for the drip pans that might explain the price. That was considered proprietary information held by Phoenix Products.
Melanie Sloan, who leads the Washington group, said she was troubled by the secrecy surrounding what seemed to be a routine parts order. “How is it possible that the government can’t say why it ended up with a drip pan that was this much money?” she asked in an interview.
A Congressional aide said that Mr. Rogers inserted the earmark after Army officials went to him with concerns about fluids that were leaking into the cabins of Black Hawks, splattering not only crew members but also wounded soldiers being airlifted to hospitals. “The Army came to the boss and said this is an issue,” said the aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in discussing internal communications.
The Army, however, said it was simply following a budget directive from Congress. Mr. Rogers’s earmark came before House members informally agreed to ban such provisions to for-profit companies.
“Congress mandated a leakproof transmission drip pan,” said Dov Schwartz, an Army spokesman. The contract was awarded without competitive bids because Phoenix was the only company deemed “approved and certified” for the work, he said. “The number of people that make leakproof transmission dripping pans is few and far between,” Mr. Schwartz said, adding that the steel required for such pans is more costly than the plastic used in other versions.
As of October, the Army had bought 374 drip pans from Phoenix Products at an average cost of $17,000 — discounted from the company’s usual price of $19,000, Mr. Schwartz said. He said the Army might get more pans if financing is approved.
Tom Wilson, who owns Phoenix Products, defended his company’s pans as better constructed and more durable than others on the market. Asked what made them so costly, he declined to discuss specifics, saying that disclosure of the company’s custom design could help competitors or even aid America’s enemies.
Mr. Wilson and his wife, Peggy, who is the president of the company, have been frequent contributors to Mr. Rogers’s political committee, as well as to Republican groups. The company has paid at least $600,000 since 2005 to a Washington lobbying firm, Martin Fisher Thompson & Associates, to represent its interests on federal contracting issues, records show.
Mr. Rogers, in turn, has been a strong supporter of the manufacturer. He has directed more than $17 million in work orders for Phoenix Products since 2000.
Mr. Wilson said he did not think that his company’s relationship with Mr. Rogers or its Washington connections were a major factor in the Army’s decision to buy his pan. His company got the work, he said, because its drip pan was “just simply a better product.”
But with the military facing $55 billion in budget cuts on Jan. 1 and Defense Department leaders warning of dire consequences, others are not so certain.
“You have to wonder,” said Ryan Alexander, the president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan group. “Is the Pentagon really getting the message?”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/us/politics/behind-armys-17000-drip-pan-harold-rogerss-earmark.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/us/politics/behind-armys-17000-drip-pan-harold-rogerss-earmark.html?pagewanted=all ]
===
Mitt Romney's Economic Plan: Good for a Few Laughs
By Deborah Solomon
May 15, 2012 4:09 PM CT
With fewer than six months until Election Day, you would hope the leading candidates for president would have concrete plans for how to deal with the nation's pressing fiscal problems.
Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, may well have those ideas. But he did little to elucidate them in what was billed as a major economic speech [ http://www.mittromney.com/news/press/2012/05/mitt-romney-delivers-remarks-des-moines-iowa ] today in Des Moines, Iowa.
Romney certainly painted a dramatic picture, warning Iowans about a "prairie fire of debt" and federal obligations akin to a "nightmare mortgage: adjustable, no money down and assigned to our children."
"Your household's share of government debt and unfunded liabilities has reached more than $520,000 under this president," he said.
His solutions, however, were light on details: Cut government spending, let the private-sector do more, and hand more power to state and local governments.
Romney didn't explain where he'd cut. But he said he'd get overall federal spending to about 20 percent of gross domestic product within four years -- in line [ http://www.pgpf.org/Issues/Fiscal-Outlook/2012/03/032112-Ryan-Budget.aspx ] with House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan's plan and down from today's figure of about 24 percent.
He said he'd move anti-poverty programs -- whose cost he put at more than $600 billion -- to state governments and the private sector, "where they can be run more efficiently."
To make his case, he engaged in a hypothetical about what would happen if the federal government were the sole supplier of cellphones. "The contract to make them would go to an Obama donor," he said, and they would be "the size of a shoe with a collapsible solar panel attached to them."
It's a funny line. But it doesn't help us understand why we should trust him to fix our fiscal mess. After all, the private-sector's prowess isn't looking too good right now given J.P. Morgan Chase's $2 [now (at least) $3] billion headache [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-15/u-s-said-to-start-probe-of-2-billion-jpmorgan-loss.html ].
To fix Social Security -- which will soon begin paying more in benefits than it gets in tax revenue -- Romney said he'd avoid raising taxes by reducing benefits for "high income" retirees. This sounds a lot like the progressive price indexing plan embraced by George W. Bush in 2005. But, again, Romney left out key details such as who qualifies as "high-income" and how much benefits would be curtailed.
And, of course, he said he would repeal Obamacare.
Romney is campaigning on his business credentials and private-sector acumen, telling voters he's the guy who will whip the U.S. budget into shape and restart the economy. If that's the case, Romney should do more than give pabulum campaign promises. He should offer Americans specific details of how he'll turn things around so that voters can decide if he's the one to rescue the U.S. from what he called a "debt and spending inferno."
Deborah Solomon is a member of the Bloomberg View editorial board.
©2012 BLOOMBERG L.P.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-15/mitt-romney-s-economic-plan-good-for-a-few-laughs.html [with comments]
===
Marco Rubio's Past Includes Political Vulnerabilities
By LAURA WIDES-MUNOZ and BRENDAN FARRINGTON, AP
05/19/12 11:44 AM ET
MIAMI — For freshman Sen. Marco Rubio, a rising GOP figure seen as a possible Mitt Romney running mate, there are questions about whether potential vulnerabilities in his personal and political background might hold him back.
The 40-year-old Florida lawmaker has close ties to a colleague accused of questionable financial dealings. He once was enmeshed in a controversy over the use of the state party's credit card for his personal expenses. Since emerging on the national political scene, he has faced increased personal scrutiny. There are conflicting details about his parents' immigration from Cuba and his recently disclosed ties to the Mormon faith.
The effect of those issues on his political fortunes is the subject of debate in Republican circles in Washington, Florida and elsewhere as the Cuban-American senator with solid conservative credentials works to raise his profile beyond his home state and possibly position himself for a national role.
"Marco Rubio is a huge star in the Republican Party in much the same way that Barack Obama was in the Democratic Party between his convention speech in 2004 and his candidacy for the president," said Steve Schmidt, a top adviser to GOP Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. "There are a lot of pluses when you look at Marco Rubio as a potential vice presidential candidate, but there are also unknowns."
Rubio frequently is mentioned by Republican insiders as an attractive candidate to be Romney's vice presidential pick, partly because the GOP needs to attract Hispanic voters in pivotal states such as Nevada and Florida.
Rubio denies any interest in the No. 2 spot this year, but he's working hard to stay in the national spotlight. He recently gave a major foreign policy address in Washington. He's talking about writing a bill to allow some young illegal immigrants to remain and work in the country without citizenship. Next month, he'll release a memoir.
The country is only just starting to get to know Rubio and his political vulnerabilities, though Florida residents know both well.
Both Rubio's ties with U.S. Rep. David Rivera, a fellow GOP freshman who now is facing a federal probe into tax evasion, and the state party credit card matter surfaced during Rubio's 2010 Senate campaign. While they didn't have much effect, that doesn't mean they would get a pass on the national stage.
"Floridians may be numb to these hits because of the rough-and-tumble nature of politics in the state, when it's looked at by a national audience it may not be as palatable," said Abe Dyk, a political strategist who managed the 2010 Senate campaign of Rubio's Democratic challenger.
Rubio and Rivera met in 1992, during the campaign of former Republican Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a fellow South Florida Cuban-American. The two rose through the ranks in the Statehouse with Rivera oftentimes playing bad cop to the more congenial Rubio.
During the legislative session, they shared a Tallahassee town house, which a bank began foreclosure proceedings on in 2010. Rubio and Rivera made only partial payments on that mortgage for five months in 2010; at that time, he held jobs as a consultant and professor. Rubio has said the missed payments were due to a dispute over the terms of the mortgage.
State officials closed a criminal probe into Rivera's personal financial dealings without filing charges but didn't clear him entirely. They cited Florida's brief statute of limitations and its lax campaign finance laws for not charging him with living off of his campaign funds and failing to disclose his income.
In the last year, Rubio has publicly kept some distance from Rivera and has said that his friend has some issues he must address on the campaign trail. Still, Rubio threw a small Washington fundraiser for Rivera last week. So far, Rubio hasn't faced blowback from his friendship with Rivera.
"It's tough to say how that will play out," says Emilio Gonzalez, a consultant who served in the Bush administration and sees Rubio as a potentially formidable presidential candidate in 2016.
If Rubio were to end up on the GOP presidential ticket or mount his own national campaign in the coming years, he all but certainly would face questions about the scandal over the use of state GOP funds when he was the speaker of the Florida House.
The head of the party, Jim Greer, was forced to resign following revelations he and his second-in-command charged $1.5 million on party credit cards, much of it on luxurious hotels, fancy restaurants, chauffeured sedans and lavish entertaining. Greer's trial is set to start July 30, just ahead of the Republican convention, and many Republican observers anticipate he will detail unethical use of party money by other high-ranking GOP officials.
Rubio spent more than $100,000 on the party card between 2006 and 2008, paying off about $16,000 in personal expenses and claiming the rest as official party business. His records from 2005, when he was lobbying to become Florida House speaker, never were released. When asked about using the party card for personal expenses, Rubio has said he sometimes just pulled the wrong card out of his wallet and he has called it a "lesson learned."
He also has had to answer criticism for how he spent money donated to two political committees he formed - including payments to relatives. He has acknowledged the bookkeeping for at least one of the accounts was sloppy.
Then there's his family's background.
Rubio long claimed his parents fled Fidel Castro's rule. But it was recently disclosed that they arrived several years before Castro took power, although they quickly embraced the Cuban exile community as Castro turned toward communism. Rubio has said the dates he gave were based on his parents' recollections.
There's another part of Rubio's upbringing that long had gone undisclosed, and the revelation is one that could turn off evangelicals who make up the base of the GOP.
Rubio was baptized as Mormon when his family lived for a few years in Las Vegas, thanks to the influence of cousins who belonged to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Rubio returned to the Catholic Church as a young teen, and as an adult he has also frequently attended Baptist services.
When it comes to the vice presidency, Rubio's greatest liability may be one only time can resolve.
"I suspect that the Romney campaign is going to pick someone who is viewed as unquestionably qualified for the office," said Schmidt, who was intimately involved in McCain's selection of Sarah Palin. "To the extent that (Rubio's) in his first term, he's in the first two years of his term and he's 40 years old probably doesn't help him."
Farrington reported from Tallahassee, Fla.
Online:
Rubio biography: http://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/biography
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/19/rubios-past-includes-poli_n_1529466.html [with comments]
===
Bobby Jindal: Exorcist-Science Guy
Larry Womack
Posted: 05/18/2012 6:53 am
Mitt "Electability" Romney has won just one general election in nearly twenty years of politicking. His one and only term of office left him with an approval rating of 34% [ http://www.surveyusa.com/client/PollTrack.aspx?g=454ada23-20dc-41f0-9c0c-a8a2a45d653c ]. Make no mistake about it: this was the best guy the Republicans had to offer this cycle.
Try to imagine just how bad the guy's running mate will have to be.
Of course, sane people will tell you that Rob Portman is the most obvious choice and, in this context, Portman's not bad at all. There are other promising contenders, too. Rand Paul would be great help in fundraising and energizing the Paul, er, enthusiasts, but the guy clearly isn't ready for prime time and nobody wants to be the next Sarah Palin in that regard. Paul Ryan offers similar benefits, but would have the unfortunate side effect of calling attention to what Republicans have actually been up to these last couple of years. Jeb Bush would make a great running mate, if it weren't for the fact that his last name is poison outside Florida. And, hey, maybe with enough coaxing Mike Huckabee could be convinced to--no, wait. No he couldn't.
But sane people aren't terribly involved in the GOP nomination process. The people who are have--strangely enough, even for them--spent the last week or so lobbying [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76335.html ] to [ http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/02/opinion/frum-vice-president-rubio-jindal/index.html ] make [ http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/jindal-romneys-best-veep-choice-hands-down/548156 ] Bobby Jindal Romney's #2. Bobby freakin' Jindal.
Bobby Jindal, Bobby Jindal... How can I put this kindly? Bobby Jindal is an outright curiosity. Bobby Jindal is beyond gifted academically, yet he more often than not manages to come off like the lost cousin of Goober and Gomer Pyle. The one they never talk about. When Barney asks how Bobby is doing, Goober and Gomer just shake their heads and stare at their feet. Still, he is a Republican-friendly curiosity: Jindal is, after all, walking validation of every anti-intellectual suspicion the right wing holds about higher education.
Most of the world was introduced to Jindal through his shockingly daft 2009 State of the Union response [(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=35857611 (the video's still there at http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/02/25/us/politics/1194838132435/jindal-delivers-republican-response.html ) and preceding and following], described as "painful" by Republican Strategist Ed Rollins immediately after.
If you don't recall Jindal's bizarre, all-smiles rant about "out of control" government spending, it might be because he managed to identify none. His list of pork included just three items: High speed rail systems (since when is the government responsible for infrastructure, anyway?), "cars for the government" and "something called volcano monitoring."
"Something called volcano monitoring." Those were Jindal's very words. It was as if to say, "What sorcery is this!"
"Instead of monitoring volcanoes," he concluded, "what congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, DC." Funny, I know some women who would say the same thing about their uteruses [ http://thinkprogress.org/health/2011/07/07/262314/jindal-signs-anti-choice-bill-compares-women-who-receive-abortions-to-criminals/ ].
Also funny that he used the word "eruption," which made it sound like he knew why a government interested in public safety might want to monitor volcanoes. Yet, there he sat, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, in awe that such a thing might even exist. As if the Earth itself felt compelled to slap him in the back of the head, one of Jindal's volcanoes erupted [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/23/alaska-volcano-mount-redoubt-erupts ] soon after.
At the same time, it would be very, very difficult to overstate how impressive Jindal's educational pedigree is. Bobby Jindal is, literally, a Rhodes scholar. He is also a biology major who claims there is "no scientific theory [ http://www.godtube.com/watch/?v=CE21MNNU ]" that explains how organic life comes from inorganic matter. You know, like abiogenesis through the formation of amino acids, most likely in the Eoarchean era, as demonstrated in the Miller-Urey experiment [(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=66821790 and preceding and following]. But I might be getting some of that wrong--I'm not a Rhodes scholar or biology major, after all. Bobby Jindal is the science guy; I am not.
Maybe Bobby Jindal missed that day of class because he was, at the time, living in a William Blatty novel.
You see, one of Jindal's college friends, Susan, was treated for cancer. In recounting the events that spun out of that tragedy, Jindal takes great pains to imply that the young woman was in love with him, but that he wanted only a very close friendship. One night, with an operation imminent, the young woman suddenly left a concert they had attended together, sobbing. Later, Jindal noted that she had been acting strangely even apart from that... but for whatever reason? The cancer? The treatment? Unrequited love? Demonic possession?
The next day, she collapsed in extreme pain, followed by a seizure--the sort of thing that might prompt you or me to call an ambulance. Unfortunately for the young woman, this happened at a prayer meeting. Demonic possession was the preferred diagnosis. Jindal and his campus crusader pals decided to perform an exorcism rather than call for help.
Here's a taste of Jindal's account [ http://www.newoxfordreview.org/article.jsp?did=1294-jindal ]:
"The students, led by Susan's sister and Louise, a member of a charismatic church, engaged in loud and desperate prayers while holding Susan with one hand. Kneeling on the ground, my friends were chanting, 'Satan, I command you to leave this woman.' Others exhorted all 'demons to leave in the name of Christ.' It is no exaggeration to note the tears and sweat among those assembled. Susan lashed out at the assembled students with verbal assaults."
Clearly, this was a case of demonic possession, as no person in the throes of a genuine and serious medical emergency someone might lash out at those people like that.
Jindal's full account reads like satire--a black-as-night comedy that would be hilarious if it were not, allegedly, true. After more "oooh-woo-oooh" and bumps in the night, he continues:
"Maybe she sensed our weariness; whether by plan or coincidence, Susan chose the perfect opportunity to attempt an escape. She suddenly leapt up and ran for the door, despite the many hands holding her down. This burst of action served to revive the tired group of students and they soon had her restrained once again, this time half kneeling and half standing. Alice, a student leader in Campus Crusade for Christ, entered the room for the first time, brandishing a crucifix. Running out of options, UCF had turned to a rival campus Christian group for spiritual tactics. The preacher had denied our request for assistance and recommended that we not confront the demon; his suggestion was a little late."
Apparently, no one suggested the "spiritual tactic" of calling an ambulance to the man Grover Norquist would like to see a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-womack/bobby-jindal-exorcistscie_b_1526263.html [with comments]
===
(linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=69577859 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=71568915 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75197318 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75271936 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75440190 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75537322 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75583191 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75672695 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75765172 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75780416 (and any future following)
Romney in St. Petersburg, Fla., on May 16
(Edward Linsmier / Getty images)
Republicans specialize in accusing opponents of the dirty tricks they themselves are doing—or planning to do. Exhibit A: Romney accusing Obama of “character assassination.”
by Michael Tomasky
May 19, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
The secret of Republican political success since the rise of the right is not, as many liberals believe, that they play no-rules hardball. Instead, it’s their skill at projection—at accusing Democrats of doing what they are doing themselves, or are planning to do, or have done. That’s the real Rosetta stone. And that’s what Mitt Romney [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/17/michael-tomasky-on-mitt-romney-s-tea-party-masters.html ] did this week when he called [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/05/mitt-romney-says-bain-attacks-are-part-of-obamas-character-assassination ] Barack Obama’s tough, but hardly extraordinary, ads about Bain Capital [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/14/the-return-of-bain-capital.html (the ads 6th and 7th items at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75583191 )] “character assassination.” He’s trying to make it so that Bain as a subject becomes off limits, and he’s laying the groundwork for later, when the real character assassination starts—and I hope your memory isn’t so short that you forget that he knows a thing or two about the topic himself.
Republicans have perfected many a dark campaign art over the years, from racial nudging and winking to suggesting that we’ll all be killed by terrorists if voters elect Democrats. But projection is the darkest art of all. And it’s so simple! When Republicans are acting like a mob—down in Dade County, for example—they accuse the Democrats of having a mob mentality. When they’re planning on blowing holes in the budget deficit bigger than the one the iceberg laid on the Titanic, via Paul Ryan’s budget and tax cuts for the rich, they stand up and accuse the Democrats of blowing holes in the budget. It works pretty well, too. All the conservative blogs pick up on it, and Fox and so on. And then, when the mainstream media sit down to write about the subject at hand, stories will note that “The GOP has been saying for months…”
This is what is happening here. Romney is trying to do two things. First, he’s trying to make any criticism of his Bain record out of bounds. Aware of course that he’s been forced by reality to revise downward from “more than 100,000” to “thousands” the number of jobs he helped create at Bain, he knows that he can’t use Bain as a plus to the extent that he wanted to. Think about it—the cornerstone of his career, the thing he spent 15 years of his life doing, the business he built (with Mr. Bain’s blessing and seed money)—pretty much out the window now. So that being the case, he needs to eliminate it as a minus. See if the referee will toss it out, if the judge (the media) will rule it inadmissible.
The obvious way to do that is to call any mention of it character assassination. Are those ads really character assassination? Do they say, for example: “Mitt Romney must be a really terrible and malevolent human being to have thrown those poor steel workers out on the street”? Because that would be an attack on Romney’s character. But no, they do not. They say Mitt Romney did us dirt. They’re emotional, sure. And if you want to say emotionally manipulative, all right by me. And yes, Joe Biden took it all a step or two further with his Ohio speech, saying Romney doesn’t understand the rest of us and so on.
But come on. That’s politics. Those aren’t character attacks. They’re salvos in a debate about what kinds of capitalism are good for regular people and what kinds aren’t. Campaigns Democratic or Republican don’t exactly elevate debates, Lord knows; but if we’re going to have arguments about how our society works, that’s a pretty useful one to have.
But the character-assassination label will come in handy—and this is Romney’s second purpose—when the Republican attacks on Obama really start. Maybe Romney is telling the truth, and his campaign will be all about how Obama promised nice things and seems like a nice young man but failed to deliver on them. His polling tells him he has to campaign like that for now, because Obama is far more likable to more people than he.
Something tells me, though, that the Romney campaign will eventually lower the boom. One might argue that it has already. What’s “apologizing for America,” after all? Aside from being a cheap and contemptible lie, is it not a kind of assault on the character of the president of the United States to accuse him of doing something that he hasn’t done, especially when the accusation is obviously meant to carry treasonous connotations? Romney’s “apologizing for America” line has always told us a great deal about character—Romney’s, not the president’s.
Don’t forget, finally, that Romney is pretty adept at character assassination himself. What do you call it when in those crucial primaries that he barely won against Rick Santorum—Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin—he was outspending Santorum six and nine and 12 to one with incredibly negative ads? Or the “tsunami of sleaze,” as my colleague John Avlon put it at the time [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/01/31/romney-ramps-up-attack-ads-against-gingrich-to-unprecedented-levels.html ] that the Romney campaign dumped on Newt Gingrich in Florida, where 92 percent of the aired TV ads were negative? Those gutter attacks, aired over and over and over, are, it is worth remembering, the main reason the guy is the nominee. He was tied or behind in all those states until he emptied the trash. He wasn’t winning them over with his wit.
So it’s a bit rich to hear him saying now that he’s sad to see Obama in the gutter and he’s going to keep it on the up and up. But at some point, he’ll attack. And when he does, he’ll sigh sadly and say that he was forced into this position by that mean Obama, and he’ll count on everyone to forget the primary season, the foulest one by far in the modern history of American politics, for which the man who neither drinks nor swears bears the vast majority of the blame. That, come to think of it, is a “character” issue too.
© 2012 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/19/michael-tomasky-on-mitt-romney-s-character-assassination-game.html [with comments]
===
Magnate Steps Into 2012 Fray on Wild Pitch
Wrigley Field, the home of the Chicago Cubs, which is owned by the family of Joe Ricketts.
Jose More/Chicago News Cooperative
A storyboard for a proposed ad linking President Obama to the incendiary statements of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
Graphic
Ricketts Family Ventures
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/18/us/ricketts-family-ventures.html
Interactive Feature
[complete] Storyboard: ‘Next’
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/17/us/politics/super-pac-storyboard.html [at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75672695 ]
Graphic
Character Matters PAC: Key Players
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/17/us/politics/20120517-founders.html [at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75672695 ]
Document
‘Super PAC’ Plan to Link Obama to Rev. Wright
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/17/us/politics/17donate-document.html
By JIM RUTENBERG and JEFF ZELENY
Published: May 17, 2012
Joe Ricketts, an up-by-the-bootstraps billionaire whose varied holdings include a name-brand brokerage firm in Omaha, a baseball team in Chicago, herds of bison in Wyoming and a start-up news Web site in New York, wanted to be a player in the 2012 election. On Thursday he was, though not in the way he had intended.
Word that Mr. Ricketts had considered bankrolling a $10 million advertising campaign linking President Obama to the incendiary race-infused statements of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., brought waves of denunciation from Mitt Romney, the Obama campaign and much of the rest of the political world.
Highlighting the perils of mixing partisan politics and corporate citizenship, the reverberations also swept through the Ricketts family’s business empire.
Liberal groups encouraged like-minded investors to drop their accounts with TD Ameritrade, the brokerage firm Mr. Ricketts founded. His family’s plan to seek public financing for improvements to Wrigley Field, home of their baseball team, the Chicago Cubs, ran into new political opposition. And he was forced to write a letter to reporters at his New York news organization, DNAinfo.com [ http://dnainfo.com/ ], assuring them he believed that “my personal politics should have absolutely no impact on your work.”
By early afternoon, Mr. Ricketts had announced that he had rejected the ad campaign as out of keeping with his own political style, a day after his aides indicated that it was still under consideration.
The episode all but ensured that Republicans would remain under intense pressure not to invoke Mr. Wright’s provocative statements so directly for the balance of the campaign. And, in a year when the loosened system of campaign finance regulations is encouraging wealthy individuals to weigh in on behalf of candidates and causes, Mr. Ricketts became a case study in the risks of political neophytes with big checkbooks seeking to play at the highest and roughest levels of politics.
After a storied career, Mr. Ricketts, 70, set out to break into the exclusive but growing new fraternity of megarich, conservative “super PAC [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/campaign_finance/index.html ]” donors, people willing — and permitted as never before — to pour millions of dollars into influencing an election. He has seemed motivated primarily by his belief that government spending is out of control and that Mr. Obama cannot be trusted to rein in the deficit and reduce the national debt.
But associates acknowledged that his experience on Thursday, when a confidential proposal for the Wright campaign became public in The New York Times, helped hammer home the high stakes of his decision to initiate discussions with some of the most seasoned and aggressive strategists in Republican politics about going after Mr. Obama in a high-profile way.
The proposal was drafted under the leadership of Fred Davis, a veteran political advertising strategist who worked for the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush, John McCain and, most recently, former Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah.
In a statement on Thursday, a spokesman for Mr. Ricketts said the plan Mr. Davis’s team submitted was “merely a proposal” and “reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects and it was never a plan to be accepted but only a suggestion for a direction to take.”
The president and general counsel of the Ending Spending Political Action Fund, Brian Baker, said through a spokesman that the plan was submitted to a group that included him and two of Mr. Ricketts’s sons at a meeting in Chicago last week. “I was surprised and troubled by what I saw,” he said. “It was not what we asked for.”
But on Wednesday, when Mr. Baker was asked in an interview whether Mr. Ricketts had rejected the advertising proposal, he said only that no decisions had been made.
A page in the proposal about potential staff members for the effort says, “With your preliminary approval at the New York meeting, we have discussed this plan in highly confidential terms with the following proposed team members,” who, it says, are “ready to jump into action upon plan approval.”
Associates of Mr. Ricketts acknowledged that upon seeing a commercial Mr. Davis produced in 2008 for Mr. McCain featuring Mr. Wright, which Mr. McCain rejected, Mr. Ricketts said. “If the nation had seen that ad, they’d never have elected Barack Obama.” The quote was highlighted in the proposal.
Mr. Ricketts was shown the commercial at an initial meeting at Mr. Davis’s offices in California, which Mr. Ricketts requested as he sought to build a team of top Republican strategists to lead his foray into the presidential campaign. (Aides acknowledge that a second meeting followed in New York, where, they say, he gave Mr. Davis general directions to move ahead with a proposal that would create maximum impact for $10 million but did not specifically approve one based on Mr. Wright.)
After retiring from Ameritrade’s board in 2011, Mr. Ricketts began putting more energy into philanthropy and politics, initially with a nonpartisan group Taxpayers Against Earmarks. After Congress banned earmarks, the group shifted into a debt-focused organization, Ending Spending. The effort Mr. Davis was working on would have been undertaken by the group’s political arm, the Ending Spending Action Fund.
Though newer to presidential politics, Mr. Ricketts has long been politically active in Nebraska. He was defeated in a local race for Republican Party chairman because he was seen as too moderate. He was a prolific donor to state candidates, investing money for ads that helped influence a United States Senate race this week.
Mr. Ricketts is described by friends as difficult to characterize politically.
He is not registered in either party in Wyoming, where he spends much of his time. He is a fiscal conservative who has grown increasingly frustrated at the economic and tax policies of the Obama administration. He also has supported Democrats who he perceives have a good record on spending restraint. “Half the time he’s a Libertarian and half the time he’s Rush Limbaugh,” said one associate, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The Ricketts family is close, friends say, but politically divided. Two of his sons, Pete and Todd, attended the meeting in Chicago last week to review the advertising proposal, which was titled, “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama.” His daughter, Laura, is one of the top contributors to Mr. Obama’s re-election bid and is a member of the campaign’s national finance committee. His other son, Tom, is the general chairman of the Chicago Cubs and said he was not politically active.
Laura Ricketts, who is gay and is a proponent of same-sex marriage, embraced her family on Thursday and said her father and brothers were “passionate about doing what is right for the country.” In a statement, she added, “Though we may have diverse political views, above all we love and respect each other.”
Tom Ricketts, whose baseball team is pursuing city and state assistance for a $300 million stadium renovation, said in another statement, “I repudiate any return to racially divisive issues in this year’s presidential campaign or in any setting — like my father has. My focus is on one of the great American pastimes, baseball.”
But perhaps no comment received more attention on Thursday than that of Mr. Romney, who said at a press briefing in Jacksonville, Fla., “I repudiate that effort.”
“I think it’s the wrong course for a PAC or a campaign,” he said.
Mr. Romney also said that he had been a victim of “character assassination” from the Obama campaign, referring specifically to a new campaign commercial that suggested his work in the private equity firm Bain Capital was meant to imply that, “I’m not a good person or a good guy.”
Mr. Romney’s statement was a clear signal to outside groups that he and his strategists have no desire to wade into the commentary of Mr. Wright, preferring to remain focused on Mr. Obama’s economic record.
Mr. Baker said Thursday that whatever messages Mr. Ricketts backs during the rest of the campaign would “be focused entirely on questions of fiscal policy, not attacks that seek to divide us socially or culturally.”
Kitty Bennett and Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.
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Related
G.O.P. ‘Super PAC’ Weighs Hard-Line Attack on Obama (May 17, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/politics/gop-super-pac-weighs-hard-line-attack-on-obama.html [at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75672695 ]
The Caucus: Romney Raises $40.1 Million in April, Nearly Matching Obama (May 17, 2012)
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/romney-raises-40-1-million-in-april-nearly-matching-obama/
The Caucus: Billionaire Rejects Proposal to Revive Jeremiah Wright Controversy (May 17, 2012)
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/ricketts-disavows-super-pac-proposal/
Related in Opinion
Editorial: Racial Politics, 2012-Style (May 18, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/opinion/racial-politics-2012-style.html
Taking Note: How to Energize the Liberal Base (May 17, 2012)
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/how-to-energize-the-liberal-base/
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© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/us/politics/magnate-steps-into-2012-fray-on-wild-pitch.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/us/politics/magnate-steps-into-2012-fray-on-wild-pitch.html?pagewanted=all ]
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Race and Religion Rear Their Heads
The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose words nearly derailed the Obama presidential bid in 2008, was back in the news.
Brendan Smialowski/Bloomberg News
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
Published: May 18, 2012
WASHINGTON — Perhaps the uglier side of politics is always close to the surface.
President Obama and his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, have said for months that the 2012 election will be about the economy. But on Thursday, it became — at least for a brief moment — about the always touchy issues of race and religion.
The continuing economic struggles in the country will almost certainly dominate the debate in the next six months. The unemployment rate remains above 8 percent, the housing slump continues, debt is rising rapidly and overseas economies are flailing.
But the events Thursday suggest that it does not take much to divert the presidential campaign conversation back into the sensitive and politically dangerous questions of Mr. Obama’s race, his religion and the place of his birth.
A report [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/politics/gop-super-pac-weighs-hard-line-attack-on-obama.html (at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75672695 )] in The New York Times on Thursday exposed a secret plan by Republican strategists and financiers to rekindle questions about the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Mr. Obama’s onetime pastor, and his angry black-power sermons.
Mr. Romney repudiated the plan to use Mr. Wright’s words as a racially tinged cudgel against Mr. Obama. But the report served to once again steer the campaign away from the economy and onto the tricky terrain of racial politics.
Reporters brought up Mr. Romney’s comment in February suggesting that Mr. Obama wanted to make America into “a less Christian nation.” Asked if he stood by that comment, Mr. Romney said that he did.
“I’m not familiar, precisely, with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was,” Mr. Romney said.
Aides to Mr. Obama said that they were not surprised by the day’s events and that they remained prepared to respond even more forcefully — with television ads, if necessary — if the religion- or race-based attacks return later in the year.
“To the extent that this ever raises its head, we will certainly be ready with a forceful response,” said one adviser to Mr. Obama’s campaign, who requested anonymity to discuss strategy.
Mr. Obama’s campaign advisers said the American people had largely dismissed the questions about his birth and about links to his former pastor. They pointed to polls that show that the president remains personally likable.
“The American people know who he is,” the adviser said.
But the issues of race and religion never go completely away, at least in some extreme quarters of the American electorate.
On Thursday, the Drudge Report posted a link on its Web site to a report [ http://www.wnd.com/2012/05/shocker-obama-was-still-kenyan-born-in-2003/ ] that sought to revive the long-discredited assertion that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States. And as election season heats up, so does publication of books promoting various conspiracies and theories, including a new one seeking to focus new attention on Mr. Obama’s dealings with Mr. Wright.
The Romney campaign has kept a considerable distance from the anti-Obama fringe. It only turns off moderate and independent voters, while stirring up Mr. Obama’s base.
And Mr. Romney has his own experience with the staying power of personal attacks. During the Republican primary campaign, ugly questions about his Mormon faith were revived by a few conservative pastors who called it a “cult.”
Mr. Romney’s advisers have rejected the idea of a religion speech like the one he gave in 2007, saying members of the public know Mr. Romney and his personal history in a way they did not back then. But it is interesting to wonder what the campaign might do if a “super PAC” raised his religion in an attack ad.
On Thursday, Mr. Romney sought to go on the offensive by accusing Mr. Obama of conducting a campaign of “character assassination” over the past several months. He said Mr. Obama’s attacks on his record at Bain Capital were intended to suggest that he was not “a good person.”
But in truth, as the final six months of campaigning begin, both the campaigns and the candidates have shied away from the charged issues of race and religion. Both men have powerful incentives to keep the campaign from becoming a nasty dissection of their personal backgrounds. Both want to avoid a focus on what might strike some voters as exotic backgrounds that set them apart from middle-class Americans.
Their actions suggest that — at least for now — there remains a line that neither side is willing to cross. The question is: will the superrich backers of super PACs play by the same rules?
Politicians, consultants and voters are all bracing for the answer.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/us/politics/race-and-religion-rear-their-heads.html
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Romney: "I stand by what I said, whatever it was"
Published on May 17, 2012 by CBS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WVH-H9BVnk
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Santorum: Romney Will Say Anything to Win
Published on Mar 21, 2012 by AssociatedPress
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D8MGFFfPa8
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Mitt Romney tells Jay Leno he'd be happy to have Rick Santorum as vice president
Published on Mar 27, 2012 by telegraphtv
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIeZHRJbZNQ
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Mitt Romney: "I stand by what I said, whatever it was."
Published on May 18, 2012 by BarackObamadotcom
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ6wF7PTyEY
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RNC Chairman Says Republican Proposal For $10 Million Of Race-Baiting Anti-Obama Attack Ads Is Obama’s Fault
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus
[(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=74108261 ]
By Josh Israel on May 20, 2012 at 11:47 am
In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley this morning, host Crowley asked RNC Chairman Reince Priebus about a widely-denounced proposal for a pro-Mitt Romney outside group to run millions of dollars in race-baiting attack ads highlighting controversial statement’s by President Obama’s former pastor.
Rather than denounce the proposal or the dangers of having a small group of rich outside donors and corporations free to spend as much as they want to influence elections, Priebus blamed Obama.
After lamenting that Romney and his party had to spend a day and a half dealing with the fallout from the Super PAC proposal, Priebus told Crowley:
I know how it works. It’s the Democrats and Barack Obama that want the story out there. He wants the story to play out in the media, because for every day that [Obama adviser] David Axelrod and this President don’t have to talk about their broken promises when it comes to jobs, the debt, and the deficit — the more time they can talk about hypotheticals that may or may not come true — is a day they want to win on. So, look, this president’s got a bigger problem and his problem is no matter what he puts out there, no matter what distractions he puts out there, he can’t change the truth and escape the reality of where we are in this American economy. And it’s no good.
Watch the video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wsv-cpC8mOA (embedded)]:
It was, of course, actually a Republican strategist with a long history of race-baiting ads [ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/05/17/485907/wright-ads-obama/ ] who proposed these attack ads for a Super PAC led by a billionaire [ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/05/19/487214/meet-joe-ricketts-cubs/ ] determined to defeat President Obama’s re-election.
And it was Mitt Romney who, back in February, made similar attacks [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Rr4eTdpfCo ]
on President Obama saying: “I don’t know what is worse, him listening to Rev. Wright or him saying that we must be a less Christian nation.” When asked this week about the comments, Romney told reporters [ http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/05/17/486254/mitt-romney-on-wright/ ] “I’m not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was.” This, of course, the same Romney who repudiated [ http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/05/17/485854/romney-refuses-to-rule-out-reverend-jeremiah-wright-as-a-campaign-issue/ ] the Super PAC proposal as “character assassination.”
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/05/20/487292/reince-priebus-obama-attack-ads-race/ [with comments]
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Romney’s Faith, Silent but Deep
[tab headline: "How the Mormon Church Shaped Mitt Romney"]
FORMATIVE INFLUENCE
Mitt Romney at a campaign event in Iowa last year. “He just needs to know what God wants him to do and how he can get it done,” one friend said.
Eric Thayer for The New York Times
CONNECTED
The Romneys in 2008 with Senator Robert F. Bennett at the funeral of Gordon B. Hinckley, president of the Mormon Church.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, via Associated Press
Douglas D. Anderson, a dean at Utah State and a friend.
Michael Friberg for The New York Times
Philip Barlow, a professor who worshiped with Mr. Romney.
Michael Friberg for The New York Times
By JODI KANTOR
Published: May 19, 2012
BELMONT, Mass. — When Mitt Romney embarked on his first political race in 1994, he also slipped into a humble new role in the Mormon congregation he once led. On Sunday mornings, he stood in the sunlit chapel here teaching Bible classes for adults.
Leading students through stories about Jesus and the Nephite and Lamanite tribes, who Mormons believe once populated the Americas, and tossing out peanut butter cups as rewards, Mr. Romney always returned to the same question: how could students apply the lessons of Mormon scripture in their daily lives?
Now, as the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Mr. Romney speaks so sparingly about his faith — he and his aides frequently stipulate that he does not impose his beliefs on others — that its influence on him can be difficult to detect.
But dozens of the candidate’s friends, fellow church members and relatives describe a man whose faith is his design for living. The church is by no means his only influence, and its impact cannot be fully untangled from that of his family, which is also steeped in Mormonism.
But being a Latter-day Saint is “at the center of who he really is, if you scrape everything else off,” said Randy Sorensen, who worshiped with Mr. Romney in church.
As a young consultant who arrived at the office before anyone else, Mr. Romney was being “deseret,” a term from the Book of Mormon [ http://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm?lang=eng ] meaning industrious as a honeybee, and he recruited colleagues and clients with the zeal of the missionary he once was. Mitt and Ann Romney’s marriage is strong because they believe they will live together in an eternal afterlife, relatives and friends say, which motivates them to iron out conflicts.
Mr. Romney’s penchant for rules mirrors that of his church, where he once excommunicated adulterers and sometimes discouraged mothers from working outside the home. He may have many reasons for abhorring debt, wanting to limit federal power, promoting self-reliance and stressing the unique destiny of the United States, but those are all traditionally Mormon traits as well.
Outside the spotlight, Mr. Romney can be demonstrative about his faith: belting out hymns (“What a Friend We Have in Jesus”) while horseback riding, fasting on designated days and finding a Mormon congregation to slip into on Sundays, no matter where he is.
He prays for divine guidance on business decisions and political races, say those who have joined him. Sometimes on the campaign trail, Mr. and Mrs. Romney retreat to a quiet corner, bow their heads, clasp hands and share a brief prayer, said Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican who has traveled with them.
Clayton M. Christensen, a business professor at Harvard and a friend from church, said the question that drove the Sunday school classes — how to apply Mormon gospel in the wider world — also drives Mr. Romney’s life. “He just needs to know what God wants him to do and how he can get it done,” Mr. Christensen said.
Sacred Tenets, Secular Realm
When Mr. Romney’s former Sunday school students listen to him campaign, they sometimes hear echoes of messages he delivered to them years before: beliefs that stem at least in part from his faith, in a way that casual observers may miss. He is not proselytizing but translating, they say — taking powerful ideas and lessons from the church and applying them in another realm.
Just as Ronald Reagan deployed acting skills on the trail and Barack Obama relied on the language of community organizing, Mitt Romney bears the marks of the theology and culture of the Church of Jesus Christ [ http://www.mormon.org/jesus-christ/ ] of Latter-day Saints. (Mr. Romney declined to be interviewed.)
Mormons have a long tradition of achieving success by sharing secular versions of their tenets, said Matthew Bowman, author of “The Mormon People,” citing Stephen R. Covey’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” which he called Latter-day Saint theology repackaged as career advice.
While Mr. Romney has expressed some views at odds with his church’s teachings — in Massachusetts, he supported measures related to alcohol and gambling, both frowned upon by the church — other positions flow directly from his faith, including his objections to abortion and same-sex marriage and his notion of self-sufficiency tempered with generosity. The church, which often requests recipients of charity to perform some sort of labor in return, taught Mr. Romney to believe that “there’s a dignity in work and a dignity in helping those who are in need of help,” his eldest son, Tagg, said in an interview.
Or take Mr. Romney’s frequent tributes to American exceptionalism. “I refuse to believe that America is just another place on the map with a flag,” he said in announcing his bid for the presidency last June. Every presidential candidate highlights patriotism, but Mr. Romney’s is backed by the Mormon belief that the United States was chosen by God to play a special role in history, its Constitution divinely inspired.
“He is an unabashed, unapologetic believer that America is the Promised Land,” said Douglas D. Anderson, dean of the business school at Utah State University and a friend, and that leading it is “an obligation and responsibility to God.”
In Mr. Romney’s upbeat promises that he can rouse the economy from its long slump, fellow Mormons hear their faith’s emphasis on resilience and can-do optimism. He believes that people “can learn to be happy and prosperous,” said Philip Barlow, a professor of Mormon history at Utah State who served with him in church. “There is some depth and long tradition behind what can come across in sound bites as thin cheerleading.”
Similarly, he said, Mr. Romney’s squeaky-clean persona — only recently did he stop using words like “golly” in public — can make him seem “too plastic, the Ken side of a Ken and Barbie doll,” Mr. Barlow said.
He and others say that wholesomeness is deeply authentic to Mr. Romney, whose spiritual life revolves around personal rectitude. In Mormonism, salvation depends in part on constantly making oneself purer and therefore more godlike.
In the temple Mr. Romney helped build in Belmont, as in every other, members change from street clothes into all-white garb when they arrive, to emphasize their elevated state. As a church leader, he enforced standards, evaluating members for a “temple recommend,” a gold-and-white pass permitting only the virtuous to enter.
A Man of Rules
Mr. Romney is quick to uphold rules great and small. During primary debates, when his rivals spoke out of turn or exceeded their allotted time, he would sometimes lecture them. When supporters ask Mr. Romney to sign dollar bills or American flags, he refuses and often gives them a little lesson about why doing so is against the law.
Doing things by the book has been a hallmark of his career in public life. When Mr. Romney took over the Salt Lake City Olympics, which were dogged by ethical problems, he cast himself as a heroic reformer. As governor of Massachusetts, he depicted himself as a voice of integrity amid what he called the back-scratchers and ethically dubious lifers of state government.
In church, Mr. Romney frequently spoke about obeying authority, the danger of rationalizing misbehavior and God’s fixed standards. “Most people, if they don’t want to do what God wants them to do, they move what God wants them to do about four feet over,” he once told his congregation, holding out his arms to indicate the distance, Mr. Christensen remembered.
He often urged adherence even to rules that could seem overly harsh. One fellow worshiper, Justin Brown, recalled in an interview that when he was a young man leaving for his mission abroad, Mr. Romney warned him that some parameters would make no sense, but to follow them anyway and trust that they had unseen value.
Church officials say Mr. Romney tried to be sensitive and merciful; when a college student faced serious penalties for having premarital sex, Mr. Romney put him on a kind of probation instead. But he carried out excommunications faithfully. “Mitt was very much by the rules,” said Tony Kimball, who later served as his executive secretary in the church.
Nearly two decades ago, Randy and Janna Sorensen approached Mr. Romney, then a church official, for help: unable to have a baby on their own, they wanted to adopt but could not do so through the church, which did not facilitate adoptions for mothers who worked outside the home.
Devastated, they told Mr. Romney that the rule was unjust and that they needed two incomes to live in Boston. Mr. Romney helped, but not by challenging church authorities. He took a calculator to the Sorensen household budget and showed how with a few sacrifices, Ms. Sorensen could quit her job. Their children are now grown, and Mr. Sorensen said they were so grateful that they had considered naming a child Mitt. (The church has since relaxed its prohibition on adoption for women who work outside the home.)
Among the Belmont Mormons, stories abound of Mr. Romney acting out the values he professed in church. The Romneys left their son Tagg’s wedding reception early to take some of the food to a neighbor being treated for breast cancer.
But many also see a gap between his religious ideals — in Sunday school, he urged his students to act with the highest standards of kindness and integrity — and his political tactics. The chasm has been hard to reconcile, even though people close to him say he is serious about trying to do so.
Mormonism teaches respect for secular authorities as well as religious ones, but “politics has required him to go against form,” said Richard Bushman, a leading historian of the church who knows Mr. Romney from church.
For example, Mr. Romney had ruled out running personal attack ads against political rivals, those close to him said. When Senator Edward M. Kennedy attacked him as an uncaring capitalist in 1994, using ads that exaggerated Mr. Romney’s role in Bain-related layoffs, Mr. Romney refused to punch back and exploit Mr. Kennedy’s history of womanizing. “Winning is not important enough to put aside my ideals and principles,” Mr. Romney told aides.
But when he ran for governor in 2002, his campaign targeted the husband of his general election opponent, Shannon O’Brien (he had formerly worked as a lobbyist for Enron; the ads linked him to problems at the company that he had nothing to do with.)
Last week, Mr. Romney repudiated efforts to attack President Obama based on his past relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. But earlier this year, he suggested that Mr. Obama wanted to make the United States “a less Christian nation.”
“I have absolutely no idea how he rationalizes it,” Mr. Kimball said of Mr. Romney’s harshest statements and attacks. “It almost seems to be the ends justifying the means.”
Relying on Prayer
Though Mr. Romney almost never discusses it or performs it in public, prayer is a regular and important part of his life, say friends who have joined him. They describe him closing his eyes and addressing God with thees and thous, composing his message to suit the occasion, whether at a church meeting, at a hospital bedside or in a solemn moment with family and friends.
“Prayer is not a rote thing with him,” said Ann N. Madsen, a Bible scholar and a friend. Rather than requesting a specific outcome, he more often asks for strength, wisdom and courage, according to several people who have prayed with him. “Help us see how to navigate this particular problem,” he often asks, according to Dr. Lewis Hassell, who served with Mr. Romney in church.
Former colleagues say they do not recall Mr. Romney praying in the workplace — some say they barely heard the word “God” come from his lips — but he did pray about work from his home.
“I remember literally kneeling down with Mitt at his home and praying about our firm,” Bob Gay, a former Bain colleague and current church official, told Jeff Benedict, author of “The Mormon Way of Doing Business.” “We did that in times of crisis, and we prayed that we’d do right by our people and our investors.”
Mr. Romney also prays before taking action on decisions he has already made, asking for divine reassurance, a feeling that he is “united with the powers above,” Dr. Hassell said. Sometimes Mr. Romney would report that even though he had made a decision on the merits, prayer had changed his mind. “Even though rationally this looks like the thing to do, I just have a feeling we shouldn’t do it,” he would say, according to Grant Bennett, another friend and church leader.
Mr. Romney has also asked for divine sustenance during his political runs. The night before he declared his candidacy for governor, he and his family prayed at home with Gloria White-Hammond and Ray Hammond, friends and pastors of a Boston-area African Methodist Episcopal church.
His earlier failed run for United States Senate had all been part of God’s plan, Mrs. Romney told Ms. White-Hammond around that time. Mr. Romney had lost, but “just because God says for you to do something doesn’t mean the outcome is going to be what you want it to be,” Ms. White-Hammond remembered Mrs. Romney saying.
Having a higher purpose is part of what motivates Mr. Romney, many of those close to him say, and gives him the wherewithal to suffer the slings and arrows of political life. Mormons have a “history of persistence and tenacity, a sense of living out a destiny that is connected to earlier generations,” said Mr. Anderson, the business school dean. Mr. Romney is driven by “responsibility to his father and his father’s fathers to use his time and talent and energy and whatever gifts he’s been given by the Lord to try to make a contribution.”
And while voters tend to see Mr. Romney as immensely fortunate, those close to him say that he never forgets he is a member of an oft-derided religious minority. The chapel where Mr. Romney taught Sunday school burned in a case of suspected arson in the 1980s, a still-unsolved crime that church members attribute to prejudice.
As a candidate for governor, Mr. Romney endured crude jokes, made to his face, including about having more than one wife. After his failed 2008 presidential bid, Mr. Romney told Richard Eyre, a friend, that he wished the church could rebrand itself, replacing the name “Mormon” with “Latter-day Christian” to emphasize its belief in Jesus and the New Testament.
His response to prejudice, friends say, has always been to soldier on and to present the best possible example, knowing that others will draw conclusions about the faith based on his behavior. “In his generation, George Romney was the world’s most famous Mormon, and now Mitt is more famous than his dad,” Mr. Anderson said.
Mr. Romney told fellow Mormons at Bain & Company that they had to work harder and perform better because they had a reputation to defend. With a similar motive, Mr. Romney sent volunteer cleaning crews each week to the churches that lent space to the Belmont Mormons after the chapel fire. Confronted with the nasty joke about Mormons during the race for governor, Mr. Romney brushed it off even as his face tensed, recalled Jonathan Spampinato, his former political director.
“Romneys were made to swim upstream,” he has told friends many times.
About a year ago, Mrs. Romney told Ms. White-Hammond that her husband was probably going to run for president again, and that they were both already praying about the race.
Mr. Romney was still a bit reluctant to re-enter the fray, according to Ms. White-Hammond. But she recalled the soon-to-be candidate’s wife saying that the Romneys both “felt it was what God wanted them to do.”
Ashley Parker contributed reporting.
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The Long Run
Articles in this series are exploring the lives and careers of the candidates for president in 2012.
Previous Articles in the Series » http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/us/politics/2012_the_long_run.html
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/us/politics/how-the-mormon-church-shaped-mitt-romney.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/us/politics/how-the-mormon-church-shaped-mitt-romney.html?pagewanted=all ]
===
Newt Gingrich auditions as Mitt Romney’s bulldog
Newt Gingrich, left, and Mitt Romney in an affable moment during a January debate.
AP file
by Jim Galloway
4:35 pm May 19, 2012
COLUMBUS – Newt Gingrich will not be Mitt Romney’s running mate. The former U.S. House speaker has himself admitted that he is not vice presidential material.
But at the state GOP convention this weekend, Gingrich offered up the latest iteration of himself. Until the presumptive Republican presidential nominee makes his decision, Gingrich declared himself ready to fulfill all the duties of a No. 2.
Gingrich wants to be Romney’s Georgia bulldog.
In two speeches to Republicans, his supply of adverbs and adjectives replenished after the exhaustion of a failed contest, Gingrich blistered President Barack Obama and gave a vigorous defense of the man who buried him in the Iowa caucuses under an avalanche of TV attacks.
It might not have been the defense that the former venture capitalist might have ordered up, and still holds echoes of a hard-fought primary. “Who has killed more jobs in their career?” Gingrich asked a crowd of donors on Friday night. “Romney, you could argue – yeah, these companies didn’t quite work. These companies worked and did well. But show me the big Obama success.”
The portion of the evening speech that worried Gingrich most, he said later, was perhaps the most effective – an answer to those Republicans who still have qualms about Romney’s Mormon faith.
“Look, he takes it seriously. It’s a deep part of his life,” Gingrich, a converted Catholic, told the crowd. “He is committed to it. And he understands the desperate importance of religious liberty and keeping government out of our churches and out of our synagogues. And he will be vastly better for every person of religious belief than Barack Obama.”
But more than anything, Gingrich presented himself as a man willing to scorch the earth wherever Obama might go. “I am not for a narrow victory. I am for crushing the left in every single race,” he said, bringing the crowd to its feet.
The former Georgia congressman had one more line in his speech, but knew he had peaked – and so edited himself. Gingrich abruptly walked away from the microphone and waved goodbye.
Afterward, he explained his new, post-campaign strategy. “I’m beginning to lay out a pattern by which, I think, Romney crowds Obama into a very, surprisingly small minority,” he said. “It provides very sharp distinctions between the American people and the president, on issues that Republicans can be excited about.”
On Saturday morning, Gingrich offered up one more area in which he might be of some use to Romney. In an address to the full convention, Gingrich began by pointing to his lapel. “I am wearing a Romney sticker,” the former U.S. House speaker said – setting off the day’s first round of lusty boos from Ron Paul supporters attempting to assert their influence.
Gingrich absorbed those boos, then quickly reached out to the party’s libertarian wing by giving voice to several Paul positions: an audit of the Federal Reserve, one commission to explore a return to hard currency, and another to look at shrinking the number of U.S. military bases overseas.
This weekend’s Republican meeting in Columbus was an off-Broadway appearance for Gingrich. His real debut as a member of the Romney team will come on June 11, when Gingrich and Romney will appear on the same stage at the Cobb Energy Centre – a fundraiser that also will include the current U.S. House speaker, John Boehner.
Beyond the presidential campaign, Gingrich is attempting to restart his private life
[(linked in http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=72186608 , http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=73012285 ]. His wife Callista has a sequel to her “Ellis the Elephant” children’s book. The couple is working on a film biography of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – similar to ones they’ve already produced on Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan.
“You create a boxed set that way,” he quipped in that Friday night interview.
Gingrich said he’s also negotiating with “a major online university” about offering online lectures – perhaps to pave the way for the major societal changes that Republicans need to pursue.
“I want to remain an active citizen, but it may be that my role as an active citizen is more as a teacher-problem solver-adviser than it is as the next president,” he said with a shrug.
Gingrich has another reason to stay busy. Last week, Forbes magazine pointed to the $4.3 million debt incurred by his campaign, declaring Gingrich to be “America’s most indebted politician.”
Gingrich attended two fundraisers in Columbus this weekend to help pay it down. “I think that over the next couple years, we pay it off. It’s not something which blocks you from being effective,” he said. “But as a responsible person, you feel bad about it. You want to get it solved. And it wasn’t good management. I was always prepared to come out about a million [dollars] in debt, but I wasn’t prepared to have it be this big.”
© 2012 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
http://blogs.ajc.com/political-insider-jim-galloway/2012/05/19/newt-gingrich-auditions-as-mitt-romneys-bulldog/ [with comments]
===
The Romney Hypocrisy: Bain, Job Creation Fallacies and the Working-Class White Vote
Edward Wyckoff Williams
Posted: 05/18/2012 5:04 pm
Mitt Romney is a hypocrite at best, and a liar at worst.
A recent video released by Obama's re-election team reveals the truth behind Romney's assertion that his business experience qualifies him for the presidency. In particular, Romney has maintained he created jobs both as an executive at Bain and as governor. His record in Massachusetts has already been fully scrutinized, and found wanting: dropping to 47th of the 50 states in job creation during his tenure. But now the same myth regarding Romney's purported private sector acumen is being debunked [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWiSFwZJXwE (the shorter of the two recent Obama campaign ads; the two ads the 6th and 7th items at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75583191 )].
In an effort to sell Mitt as someone who "understands the economy", unsubstantiated figures of over a "100,000 jobs created" became regular talking points early in the primary season. Curiously, the campaign never provided evidence, causing even the likes of Fox News celebutante Sarah Palin and former GOP candidate Newt Gingrich to question Romney's veracity. The Former House Speaker once referred to Romney's role at Bain as "exploitive" and "not defensible."
Romney was forced to walk back prior assertions. BuzzFeed's Zeke Miller reported the former governor's campaign now claims an obscure "thousands of jobs [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/heres-the-new-romney-jobs-math ]" at Bain: another embarrassing example of the candidate's flip-flopping. Alex Seitz-Wald [ http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/05/14/483676/romney-downgrades-bain-jobs/ (third item below)] of Think Progress reported that even the "thousands of jobs" figure is suspect considering the only evidence offered was a vague editorial reference by right-wing newspaper Washington Examiner that lacked any verifiable statistical data. Romney and his surrogates are fully on the defensive, as the Obama campaign has finally chosen to play hardball.
The new Obama ad highlights Romney's role in now-bankrupt GST Steel. As CEO in 1993, Romney and his partners purchased Kansas City's GST plant, a successful company with a 105 year history, and thousands of workers. Romney's team extracted profits, reduced employee levels, and by 2001 the company was forced into liquidation. Workers -- many of whom had been with GST for decades -- lost pension and health benefits. By contrast, Romney, Bain executives and investors reaped millions in profits. The result? A bailout in which the federal government was forced to guarantee the pension fund to a tune of $44 million.
The video features quotes from former GST workers whose livelihoods were lost."They came in and sucked the life out of us," one worker said. "It was like watching an old friend bleed to death."
The strategic value of the Obama team's approach cannot be under-estimated [sic - overstated]; they are speaking to working-class white American voters who are crucial in swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado and Indiana. This important demographic was devastated by the policies of the Bush era, but have been manipulated by Republican and Tea Party dogma and Fox News propaganda to vote against their own economic interests. It is imperative that the president relay his message and reveal Romney for the out-of-touch tycoon he is.
That fine point was not lost on Romney, who immediately responded with a video of his own: pointing out the story of a similar firm, Steel Dynamics, which experienced relative success after investment from Bain Capital in 1994.
But a deeper look into Steel Dynamics reveals the company's success is largely due to $37 million in government grants and subsidies, compared to the $18.2 million Bain invested. An investigative report [ http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/12/nation/la-na-bain-subsidies-20120113 (next below)] published by Los Angeles Times showed Indiana's DeKalb County provided $23.4 million in tax abatements, finance bonds and economic development funds. The state added $13.6 million in tax credits, energy grants, road and workforce development. In addition the state raised taxes on county residents in order to finance infrastructure improvements, and Bain was only one of eight investors - though Romney wants voters to believe he was the sole mastermind.
Given Bain's critical reliance on public funds, it is ironic that candidate Romney constantly espouses a platform for smaller government, less regulation and decreased federal oversight. In fact, the Steel Dynamics deal conveys the truth many of Romney's critics already knew: it would have been impossible for him to amass the $250 million fortune he enjoys without the largesse of government spending and subsidies. In fact, Romney's reluctant Tea Party and GOP allies often decry it as "corporate welfare."
Five years after buying Steel Dynamics, Romney and his investment partners sold their stake for $104 million-- reaping a profit of $85 million. But today, the governor backs Paul Ryan's budget which maintains the loopholes and tax credits for private equity firms like Bain, while slashing social welfare programs for the poor and middle-classes. Mitt boldly declares his disregard for federal investment in Pell Grants and Stafford Loans, which offer the less fortunate an opportunity to achieve higher education, and gain access to a world of opportunity that Mitt, his wife Ann, and all their five sons were born into. At a time when half of all American families are poor or low-income, Romney uses smokescreen tactics to deflect from the truth he is a poster child for the GOP's reckless attitude toward average American families.
And herein lies the rub: perhaps Romney insists on making the 2012 campaign a referendum on President Obama's record, in an effort to ignore his own.
A quick look at Obama's presidency reveals net-positive job increases, surpassing the 5 million jobs lost during the Bush-Cheney recession. Obama delivered Healthcare Reform, offering coverage to millions, and widening America's social safety net. The president's sharp business acumen led to capital investments in Detroit; and now GM is the number one automaker in the world, and Chrysler is profitable. Brave veterans returned from Iraq. DADT is dead and so is Osama bin Laden. And for the first time in American history black, brown and white alike can imagine a future in which their children can grow up to become president.
Ben LaBolt, Obama's campaign press secretary, said it best when he explained, "Mitt Romney has asked Americans to elect him based on his tenure as a corporate buyout specialist, where he profited off of outsourcing jobs and bankrupting companies."
The stark contrast between Barack's legacy and Mitt's lies could not be more apparent.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/edward-wyckoff-williams/mitt-romney-bain_b_1520130.html [with comments]
===
Mitt Romney no stranger to tax breaks, subsidies
Bain Capital profited from a steel company that got them, and he used them to attract business when he governed Massachusetts
By Matea Gold, Melanie Mason and Tom Hamburger, Washington Bureau
January 12, 2012
Reporting from Washington — As Mitt Romney defends his record running a private equity firm, he frequently points to a fast-growing Indiana steel company, financed in part by Bain Capital, that now employs 6,000 workers.
What Romney doesn't mention is that Steel Dynamics also received generous tax breaks and other subsidies provided by the state of Indiana and the residents of DeKalb County, where the company's first mill was built.
The story of Bain and Steel Dynamics illustrates how Romney, during his business career, made avid use of public-private partnerships, something that many conservatives consider to be "corporate welfare." It is a commitment that carried over into his term as governor of Massachusetts, when he offered similar incentives to lure businesses to his state.
Yet as he seeks the GOP presidential nomination, he emphasizes government's adverse effects on economic growth.
"Fundamentally, what happens in America that creates jobs is not government. It has its role. But by and large, it gets in the way of creating jobs," he said during a debate Saturday sponsored by ABC News and Yahoo.
Bain Capital began looking at investing in the steel start-up in late 1993. At the time, Steel Dynamics was weighing where to locate its first plant, based in part on which region offered the best tax incentives. In June 1994, Bain put $18.2 million into Steel Dynamics, making it the largest domestic equity holder. It sold its stake five years later for $104 million, a return of more than $85 million.
As Bain made its investment, the state and county pledged $37 million in subsidies and grants for the $385-million plant project. The county also levied a new income tax to finance infrastructure improvements to benefit the steel mill over the heated objections of some county residents.
"I'm very pro-business, but I'm not pro-business-welfare," said DeKalb County resident Suzanne Beaman, 58, who fought the incentives. Steel Dynamics "would have done fine without our tax dollars, I have no doubt."
Another steel company in which Bain invested, GS Industries, went bankrupt in 2001, causing more than 700 workers to lose their jobs, health insurance and a part of their pensions. Before going under, the company paid large dividends to Bain partners and expanded its Kansas City plant with the help of tax subsidies. It also sought a $50-million federal loan guarantee.
"This is corporate welfare," said Tad DeHaven, a budget analyst with the Washington-based Cato Institute, which encourages free-market economic policies. DeHaven, who is familiar with corporate tax subsidies in Indiana and other states, called the incentives Steel Dynamics received "an example of the government stepping into the marketplace, picking winners and losers, providing profits to business owners and leaving taxpayers stuck with the bill."
On Thursday, Romney acknowledged that government can help spur private enterprise.
"When I was governor of our state, we competed aggressively to get companies to move to our state and provide benefits to them if they were to decide to bring manufacturing jobs, for instance," he said during a campaign stop in Greer, S.C. "That's the nature of competition between states. I'm happy with competition and do believe in free enterprise."
The outline of the tax subsidies to Steel Dynamics was initially provided to the Los Angeles Times/Tribune Washington Bureau by American Bridge 21st Century, a pro-Democratic "super PAC." The details emerged during a week in which Romney has repeatedly cited Steel Dynamics as an example of his successful job creation while he was head of Bain Capital.
Launched as a start-up at a time when many American steel mills were foundering, Steel Dynamics is the fifth-largest producer of carbon steel products in the country, generating $6.3 billion in revenue in 2010.
Government support was a key ingredient to getting it off the ground.
When local officials in DeKalb County learned that three veteran steel mill executives were starting the company in 1993 and looking for a home for their new mini-mill, they pulled out all the stops. "These people don't just drive by and choose accidentally to be your neighbor," said Jack Bercaw, a Butler businessman who was co-chairman of the recruitment drive.
The county promised $23.4 million in property tax abatements and tax increment finance bonds, as well as a new income tax to generate economic development funds. The latter was required by the state, which shelled out another $13.6 million in tax credits, energy grants, workforce training and funds for roads.
A new quarter-percent tax on DeKalb County residents financed infrastructure improvements such as roads and railroad exchanges that benefited Steel Dynamics, Bercaw said. The county also created a new redevelopment commission and redevelopment authority to oversee the activity.
Steel Dynamics executives did not respond to requests for comment. But in a 1994 interview with a trade journal, then-Chief Executive Keith Busse said the $4.4 million the company initially received in state tax credits, in particular, helped persuade Steel Dynamics to locate in Indiana. Busse told a business panel that same year, however, that he was opposed to the new income tax levied by DeKalb County, according to the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.
David Stickler, an investor and advisor specializing in the steel industry who engineered the original financing package that launched Steel Dynamics, said the $37 million in grants and subsidies was not only a financial boost, but also helped persuade larger lenders to sign on.
"What I've found is that the senior lending banks, especially lenders from overseas, take great comfort in the fact that the local and state government entities are showing a willingness to partner on the project," Stickler said.
Boston-based Bain became involved with Steel Dynamics about two months after the company formed in 1993. At that point, the management team had already sought incentive packages from the state and county. Stickler said Bain executives were well-briefed on the proposed deal and noted that they were particularly thorough in examining the intricacies of the deals' structure.
"They lifted up every rock, they stress-tested every financial scenario," Stickler said. "Before they put their money into a transaction, they wanted to know that as many of the risks have been mitigated as possible."
A spokesman for Bain said Thursday that the private equity firm "has had a 28-year track record of growing great companies, including partnering with the management team to help to launch and grow Steel Dynamics. We are extremely proud of the work our employees have done throughout our history to build our businesses and improve their operations."
In DeKalb County, the tax incentives rankled some local residents, who protested the deal at county government meetings.
Tim Heffley, then a Democratic county commissioner, was opposed to the new tax but was outvoted. "I was just against any company getting handouts from the government, corporate welfare," said Heffley, who nevertheless praised Steel Dynamics as a good company that has brought jobs to the region.
Nearly two decades later, some are still smarting about the subsidies.
"It was something very upsetting to me," said Beaman, a longtime Republican activist. "I hated to see the people I thought were my friends go toward the liberal socialist mind-set under the guise of creating jobs. Our government shouldn't be in the business of buying or funding companies. That is contrary to the whole conservative mind-set."
Still, Beaman said she didn't hold the incident against Romney, questioning whether he had a "true understanding of economics."
"Did he do that knowing the full ramifications of where that type of government leads?" she said. "Probably not."
matea.gold@latimes.com
melanie.mason@latimes.com
tom.hamburger@latimes.com
Times staff writer Maeve Reston in Greer, S.C., contributed to this report.
*
Related
A closer look at Mitt Romney's job creation record
The Republican presidential contender says he learned about expanding employment during his time heading a private equity firm. But under his leadership, Bain Capital often maximized profits in part by firing workers.
December 3, 2011
Shortly after Mitt Romney resigned from Bain Capital in 1999 to run the Olympics in Salt Lake City, potential investors received a prospectus touting the extraordinary profits earned by the private equity firm that Romney controlled for 15 years.
During that time, Boston-based Bain acquired more than 115 companies, according to the prospectus. Bain's estimated annual returns were more than five times that of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the same period.
Now a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, Romney says his Bain experience shows he knows how to create jobs. He often cites Bain's investment in a little-known office supply store called Staples, which now employs more than 90,000 worldwide.
But a closer examination of the prospectus [ http://documents.latimes.com/bain-capital-investments/ ] paints a different picture of Bain's operation. Under Romney's leadership, Bain became one of the nation's top leveraged-buyout firms, helping lead a trend in which companies were acquired using debt often pledged against their own assets or earnings.
Bain expanded many of the companies it acquired. But like other leveraged-buyout firms, Romney and his team also maximized returns by firing workers, seeking government subsidies, and flipping companies quickly for large profits. Sometimes Bain investors gained even when companies slid into bankruptcy.
Romney himself became wealthy at Bain. He is now worth between $190 million and $250 million, much of it derived from his time running the investment firm, his campaign staffers have said.
Bain managers said their mission was clear. "I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation," said Marc B. Walpow, a former managing partner at Bain who worked closely with Romney for nine years before forming his own firm. "The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors."
Bain's top 10 dollar investments under Romney — averaging $53 million — spanned a number of sectors, including healthcare, entertainment and manufacturing. The firm's largest investment was its 1999 buyout of Domino's Pizza, into which Bain put $188.8 million, eventually reaping a fivefold return.
Four of the 10 companies Bain acquired declared bankruptcy within a few years, shedding thousands of jobs. The prospectus shows that Bain investors profited in eight of the 10 deals, including three of the four that ended in bankruptcy.
[...]
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-romney-bain-20111204,0,343872.story [ http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-romney-bain-20111204,0,1945560,full.story ]
Mitt Romney steps up defense of Bain Capital tenure
January 12, 2012
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-romney-defends-bain-record-20120112,0,5132594.story
Romney tax returns likely to stoke debate over economic fairness
January 23, 2012
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-romney-tax-returns-release-20120123,0,5466078.story [ http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-romney-tax-returns-release-20120123,0,2967621,full.story ]
*
Copyright 2012 Los Angeles Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/12/nation/la-na-bain-subsidies-20120113
===
New Romney Video Touts Steel Mill That Benefited From Government Largesse
By Alex Seitz-Wald on May 14, 2012 at 3:52 pm
Seeking to combat charges [ http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/05/14/483518/steven-rattner-bain/ ] from the Obama campaign that Bain Capital extracted value from companies it purchased by firing employees and cutting benefits, Mitt Romney’s released a web video today [ http://www.mittromney.com/embed/video/american-dream ] profiling Steel Dynamics, one of the companies that Bain invested in.
The ad implies that the plant would not have been built without Romney’s assistance. Steele Dynamics “almost never got started,” the narrator says. “When others shied away, Mitt Romney’s private-sector leadership team stepped in.”
But the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reported at the time (via Nexis), that Bain was just one of eight financiers for the project — hardly the lone white knight:
Financing to build the plant is coming from the Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh, NBD Bank, Fort Wayne National Bank, Lincoln National Life Insurance Co., the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Germany and the Paris Bank. Capital and Bain Capital are also investors.
And while the video touts Romney’s “private-sector” team, the company was successful thanks in part to big government subsidies and grants — $37 million from the state of Indiana and DeKalb County. And as the Los Angeles Times reported [ http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/12/nation/la-na-bain-subsidies-20120113 (just above)] in January of this year, the county even raised taxes on residents to help fund the mill:
The county promised $23.4 million in property tax abatements and tax increment finance bonds, as well as a new income tax to generate economic development funds. The latter was required by the state, which shelled out another $13.6 million in tax credits, energy grants, workforce training and funds for roads.
A new quarter-percent tax on DeKalb County residents financed infrastructure improvements such as roads and railroad exchanges that benefited Steel Dynamics.
Indeed, while Romney and conservative allies have attacked President Obama for employing “corporate welfare” and “crony capitalism” to create green jobs, Romney-backed Steel Dynamics enjoyed government largesse on the local level. As the LA Times noted, “The story of Bain and Steel Dynamics illustrates how Romney, during his business career, made avid use [id.] of public-private partnerships, something that many conservatives consider to be ‘corporate welfare.’”
Bain invested $18.2 million in Steel Dynamics in 1994. Five years later, it sold its stake for $104 million, walking away with $85 million profit.
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/05/14/483972/mitt-romney-steel-dynamics-vide/ [with comments]
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Romney Campaign Massively Downgrades The Number Of Jobs It Claims He Created From 100,000 To ‘Thousands’
By Alex Seitz-Wald on May 14, 2012 at 12:08 pm
In its effort to sell Mitt Romney as someone who understands the economy and knows how to create jobs, one of his campaign’s early talking points was that he helped create 100,000 jobs during his tenure at Bain Capital. The campaign repeated the claim throughout the primary, despite a glaring lack of evidence [ http://www.factcheck.org/2012/01/romneys-shaky-job-claims/ ] to support it [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/12/09/386437/romney-backers-no-jobs-evidence/ ] (even Sarah Palin doubted it [ http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/01/11/sarah_palin_to_mitt_romney_prove_you_created_100000_jobs.html ]).
Romney eventually stopped repeating the talking point, which advisers had difficulty defending under pressure, and now it seems Boston has completely Etch A Sketched the number and severely lowered the number of jobs Romney is supposed to have created at Bain.
BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller reports that, in the wake of the Obama campaign’s new ad attacking Romney’s record at Bain, the “new Romney jobs math [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/heres-the-new-romney-jobs-math ]” is significantly more modest than the old. This time, the campaign is asserting that Romney created a meager and vague “thousands of jobs” at Bain and “tens of thousands” of jobs as governor of Massachusetts.
This is nothing less than an admission from the Romney campaign that their 100,000 jobs claim was entirely bogus, and acceptance that Romney created vastly fewer jobs than he claimed he had just a few months ago. It’s a welcome return to reality, but calls into question any piece of evidence the campaign puts forward. (In 1994, he claimed in an ad that he created 10,000 jobs [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/1994-romney-for-senate-ad-says-he-created-10000-j ] at Bain.)
Meanwhile, even the “thousands of jobs” figure should be suspect, as the evidence the campaign offers to support it is an editorial from the right-wing Washington Examiner endorsing Romney [ http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/romney-gops-best-choice/256896 ]. Could the Romney campaign not find a single better piece of evidence — a news article, government data, or economist’s estimate, for instance — than an unsubstantiated opinion article from a paper that is simultaneously declaring that it favors Romney’s election?
And his assertion on his record as governor also fails to include the context that his state was 47th out of 50 on job creation [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/as-massachusetts-governor-romneys-record-on-jobs-was-unremarkable/2012/02/06/gIQABzEfxQ_story.html ].
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/05/14/483676/romney-downgrades-bain-jobs/ [with comments]
===
Romney's Bain Record: Playing By a Different Set of Rules Than Ordinary Americans
Robert Creamer
Posted: 05/18/2012 10:19 am
Mitt Romney's history at the helm of Bain Capital tells us a lot about the kind of leader he would make as president.
First, of course, it demonstrates conclusively that he has absolutely no experience "creating jobs." Bain Capital was not in business to "create jobs" -- it was in business to "create wealth" -- for Mitt Romney and his fellow Wall Street investors. When Bain bought businesses that happened to create new jobs, that was entirely incidental. And when Bain-owned businesses laid off workers, cut wages, eliminated pensions or health care benefits -- or went bankrupt -- that was incidental as well.
Romney and the Bain crew couldn't have cared less whether their actions created jobs, eliminated jobs, or destroyed entire communities so long as they served their one and only purpose: making themselves and their colleagues very, very rich.
Now I'm not arguing that there is anything wrong with making yourself rich. But it has absolutely nothing to do with "creating jobs" -- as the 750 workers at the 100-year-old GST Steel in Kansas City discovered when, after Bain took over their company, Bain loaded it with debt [ http://news.yahoo.com/biden-attacks-romney-tenure-venture-capitalist-100121161.html ( http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i0-rBJ6RPIZgCsyOdDNiK5OPuEhg?docId=9ed331c27dcf42359d2f02c090cceea3 )] -- milked it of cash and bankrupted the company -- but still walked away with millions.
Turns out the landscape is strewn with cases like GST -- American Pad and Paper [ http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/02/23/147257517/how-mitt-romneys-firm-tried-and-failed-to-build-a-paper-empire ] (AmPad) in Indiana, Dade Behring [ http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/the-buzz-florida-politics/content/under-romney-bain-received-millions-job-creation-tax-breaks-dade-behring-it-laid-hundreds ] in Florida.
And whether or not there are other "success stories" where new jobs were created is completely irrelevant to the central point that Romney has never demonstrated he "knows how to create jobs in the private sector." Romney was very good at extracting wealth for himself and his friends. He viewed the workers with about as much concern as you might give to a fly you flick off your desk or swat on a hot summers day.
To Romney, workers -- and the jobs they filled -- were nothing but expendable means to an end.
But that's not all his experience with Bain can teach us about Willard Mitt Romney. It tells us that he is used to playing by a different set of rules from ordinary Americans. Romney and Bain helped to create a new rulebook for the American economy -- one that ultimately helped lead to the economic disaster that came to a head in September 2008.
Most people think it's great for businesses and investors to make money. The ability to own a business and make money provides one of the major engines that has made the American economy the largest and most innovative in the world.
And we all know that some businesses fail and others succeed.
But in order for the rules of the economic game to send the right signals to incentivize innovation and efficiency, they have to work both ways. Investors win if they create successful, productive, growing businesses. They lose if they invest in businesses that are unsuccessful, inefficient or unproductive.
Romney and Bain played by a different set of rules. Their rules were simple: heads I win, tails you lose.
What ordinary Americans find so outrageous is not that people in American can make money, but rather that the folks on Wall Street make millions on businesses that fail.
Bain often did leveraged buyouts. It used the businesses it intended to buy as collateral to borrow the money to buy them. Then the partners at Bain transferred cash from the companies they bought into their own pockets -- in the form of fees and "returns on investment." If the company ultimately ran out of cash, shut down, laid off its workers, too bad -- they still walked away with millions. If they succeeded and stayed in business, so much the better.
Bain structured deals where they couldn't lose.
The problem is that ordinary Americans don't play by rules that allow them to make money whether or not they succeed.
If most Americans are fired from their jobs, with the exception of unemployment insurance, their income stops.
In fact, most Americans are not guaranteed financial security, even when they do work hard and play by the rules. Ask everyday middle class people what happened to them after they had worked diligently for years and then the recklessness of a bunch of speculators on Wall Street they never heard of -- or voted for -- crashed the economy and they lost their jobs.
Their good-paying jobs disappeared, their pensions evaporated, and the value of their houses plummeted. Now mind you that that ordinary middle-class working family didn't do anything to cause this calamity. But they paid the price regardless.
That's bad enough. But the sight of the speculator class who caused this disaster walking away with millions is beyond infuriating.
Ordinary Americans believe it is simply wrong for people like Romney to make money by bleeding companies dry and then leaving them to die.
Middle class people believe -- correctly -- that our economy works when success is rewarded -- where workers and owners benefit together.
And it works when the pain of failure is shared by workers and owners alike.
What infuriated ordinary Americans about the bailout of Wall Street was not the fact that government stepped in to save our financial system. It was that many of those whose recklessness caused the collapse of our economy walked off with billions in bonuses.
For everyday people, this is not just a question of economics -- it's a question of right and wrong.
In fact, the central question of this election is whether we are all in this together and play by the same rules, or whether there is one set of rules for the lucky few and another for ordinary Americans.
No one is arguing that you shouldn't be able to get rich in America.
I have a friend whose father made a lot of money in the 1940s and '50s -- back when the top tax rate ranged from 70% to 90% -- back when the income gap between Americans was shrinking and most people, rich and poor alike, were better off the next year than the year before. My friend recalls his father saying: "We paid a lot of taxes, but we built a hell of a country."
Warren Buffet, who advocates the "Buffet Rule" that would prevent millionaires from paying lower tax rates than their secretaries, has made a fortune investing in companies because of their underlying value -- their ability to generate profit from their operations -- from their ability to add value to products and services. Buffet does not buy companies as speculative investments. He makes money by investing in ongoing, productive businesses -- not by gambling or bleeding companies dry and leaving them to die.
In contrast, Romney economics is an economics of impunity for the lucky few. It is an economics of entitlement where those at the very top of the income ladder structure the rules of the economic game to guarantee their own success -- whether or not everyone succeeds.
Romney economics inevitably results in exactly the kind of increasing income inequality that more than any single factor caused the Great Recession. It guaranteed that the "lucky few" could siphon off all of America's income growth for decades. That, in turn, guaranteed that ordinary people would not have the increasing incomes to buy the new goods and services that were produced by an increasingly productive economy.
Henry Ford knew you had to pay your workers enough so they could buy the products they produced -- otherwise there would be no customers for a growing economy and the result would be economic stagnation. Romney economics has turned the Henry Ford Rule on its head. As a result, Romney economics guarantees more and more for the lucky few and a shrinking middle class.
Next November we face a choice between President Obama's vision of a society where everyone has a fair shot, gets a fair share, and plays by the same set of rules -- or a society where the rules are rigged for the few at the top. It is a choice between a society where we all succeed together or a society where the lucky few get a guarantee of success and ordinary people are simply pawns in their economic game.
That's why Mitt Romney's history at Bain Capital is so important. It not only demonstrates he has no experience as a "job creator." It is emblematic of the choice we face over the kind of economy and society want to leave to our children.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/romneys-bain-record-playi_b_1527163.html [with comments]
===
Cory Booker[, Revealing Self as Instantly Forever a Damaged Goods Self-Serving False-Equivalence-Run-Amok Butthead,] slams Obama campaign ad attacking Romney's Bain Capital record
By Dylan Stableford
May 20, 2012
Newark Mayor Cory Booker slammed the Obama campaign's ad criticizing Mitt Romney's record as the head of Bain Capital [ http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/obama-campaign-ad-paints-romney-job-killing-economic-145406874.html (7th item at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75583191 )], and called for an end to"nauseating" attacks from both sides.
"I have to just say from a very personal level, I'm not about to sit here and indict private equity," Booker, a Democrat, said in an appearance on NBC's "Meet The Press" on Sunday [ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032608/ns/meet_the_press/ ]. "To me, it's just we're getting to a ridiculous point in America. Especially that I know I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people invest in companies like Bain Capital. If you look at the totality of Bain Capital's record, they've done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses."
The ad--released last week by the Obama re-election campaign--makes Booker, who endorsed Obama for president in 2008, "very uncomfortable," he said.
"This kind of stuff is nauseating to me on both sides," Booker continued. "It's nauseating to the American public. Enough is enough. Stop attacking private equity. Stop attacking Jeremiah Wright. This stuff has got to stop, because what it does is it undermines, to me, what this country should be focused on. It's a distraction from the real issues."
After Sunday's "Meet The Press" broadcast, Booker took to his favorite medium--Twitter--to clarify his comments [ https://twitter.com/#!/CoryBooker ].
"I will fight hard for Obama to win," Booker wrote. "But just as his '08 campaign did, I believe we must elevate [and] not denigrate. This is the Obama I know."
"We as 'the electorate' must also bear responsibility for changing the tone of politics as usual," he continued. "Not just root harder for our side ... I'm sick to my stomach of the politics of destruction. We now have a [federal government] that can't come together [and] solve our nation's problems. I'll always prioritize my nation over a political party. [And] right now crass divisive partisan politics is not serving the citizens of my city."
"Yes, Obama must be re-elected. But we as a Nation owe it to him and ourselves to reject politics as usual," Booker added. "The politics as we are now playing it calls to our lessor angels [and] lowest common denominators. Our nation can and should reject this."
Copyright © 2012 ABC News Internet Ventures. Yahoo! - ABC News Network
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/cory-booker-slams-obama-campaign-ad-attacking-romneys/story?id=16390606 [with comments]
===
Cory Booker, surrogate from hell
(Credit: AP)
What Cory Booker has to gain by calling President Obama’s attacks on Bain Capital “nauseating”
By Steve Kornacki
Sunday, May 20, 2012 01:05 PM CDT
If Cory Booker went on “Meet the Press” [ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032608/vp/47494418 ] on Sunday with the intent of helping President Obama, then his appearance was an utter failure. But anyone who’s followed the enormously ambitious Newark mayor’s career closely knows he’s not one to pull a Joe Biden [ http://gawker.com/5909758/bill-maher-would-like-some-more-biden-gaffes-please ]. He’s just too smart and too smooth to screw up so epically.
More likely, Booker went on the show to help himself and to advance his own long-term political prospects. And on that score, his appearance was a success.
You’ve probably seen or are now seeing the headlines [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/politico-live/2012/05/booker-bristles-at-bain-attacks-124001.html (and e.g. the item just above)] Booker generated by calling the Obama campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s private equity background “nauseating” and likening them to efforts by some on the right to inject Rev. Jeremiah Wright into the campaign.
“Enough is enough,” Booker said. “Stop attacking private equity. Stop attacking Jeremiah Wright.”
He added: “I have to just say from a very personal level, I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity. To me, it’s just we’re getting to a ridiculous point in America. Especially that I know I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people invest in companies like Bain Capital. If you look at the totality of Bain Capital’s record, they’ve done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses. And this, to me — I’m very uncomfortable with.”
Playing up Romney’s Bain record is, of course, central to Obama’s general election plan. Romney is running as a business-savvy “job creator” and relying on the public’s tendency to associate private sector success with economic competence. There is no overstating how vital it is for Obama and his campaign to break that link, and to establish that Romney’s real expertise is in making investors rich – not adding jobs and improving the quality of life for middle class workers.
In belittling this strategy, Booker isn’t just breaking with Obama, he’s breaking with just about everyone who’s ever run against Romney [ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/14/the_bain_beast_returns/ ] – including Ted Kennedy, who used criticisms of Bain’s treatment of workers to pull away from Romney in their 1994 Senate race. Essentially, Kennedy created the blueprint that Obama is now using. Booker is also providing Republicans with a dream talking point: A top Obama surrogate not only disapproves of Obama’s use of Bain, he finds it nauseating!
It wouldn’t be surprising if Booker has already heard from the White House, and surely he’s now in for a world of abuse from Obama supporters. But that hardly means he made a mistake, at least in terms of his own ambition. Financial support from Wall Street and, more broadly speaking, the investor class has been key to Booker’s rise, and remains key to his future dreams.
It’s easy to forget, but before the world met Barack Obama in 2004, many believed that the first black president would be Booker. Armed with Stanford, Yale and Oxford degrees and all of the invaluable personal connections he forged at those institutions, he set out in the mid-1990s to craft a uniquely appealing political biography, swearing off lucrative job offers to move to Newark’s Central Ward and take up residence in public housing. Within a few years, he won a seat on the City Council, where he showed an early and consistent knack for self-generated publicity, most notably with a ten-day hunger strike in the summer of 1999.
That set the stage for Booker’s 2002 race for mayor, an ugly contest against incumbent Sharpe James, an entrenched icon of the city’s civil rights generation of black politicians. James, as any self-respecting Newark mayor would do, leveraged his clout for campaign contributions from city workers, vendors and those who aspired to be city workers and vendors.
Booker, meanwhile, had hardly lost touch with his old classmates, keeping one foot in Newark and the other in Manhattan, where he built on the connections to elite donors that he already had. He called the millions of dollars he raised for the race “love money.” The press – and James’ campaign – took note that almost all of it was from outside Newark, nearly half of it was from outside New Jersey, and a quarter of it came directly from Wall Street.
This helped bolster James’ claim that Booker, who grew up in an affluent suburb, was not an authentic Newarker. That attack resonated just enough to save James, who won in a squeaker. It was a pyrrhic victory, though: Booker had captured national interest – there was a Time profile during the campaign, and an Academy Award-nominated documentary [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8jtAASYdLw ] followed – and immediately started campaigning for the next race, while a federal investigation soon swallowed up James. In 2006, Booker was elected with ease, while James was on his way to jail.
Since then, the only question in New Jersey has been when – and not if – Booker will seek to run for statewide office. In 2009, the beleaguered Jon Corzine begged him to run for lieutenant governor on his ticket, an offer that Booker wisely refused. He’s often touted as a potential gubernatorial candidate for 2013, but those who know him say his eye is more on the Senate seat now held by 88-year-old Frank Lautenberg, which will be up in 2014.
This is why it’s not at all surprising to see Booker going to bat for private equity. The allies he’s cultivated on Wall Street and in the financial industry (think, for instance, of his chummy relationship [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIrMa5vohiU ] with Michael Bloomberg) have made Booker a prolific fundraiser, and when he ventured into the ultra-expensive statewide game, he’ll need them more than ever. Many of them have turned fiercely against Obama [ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/07/no_one_went_to_jail_so_why_is_wall_street_so_mad/ ] over the past few years, convinced that he’s unfairly targeted them. Booker’s words on “Meet the Press” may have enraged the average Obama supporter, but to the Wall Street class they were probably close to heroic – finally, a big-name Democrat with the cojones to call out Obama on his class warfare!
The Booker calculation, in other words, is probably that the average Democratic voter’s memory of his outburst will fade long before 2014 – but that the average Wall Street donor’s won’t.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/20/cory_booker_surrogate_from_hell/singleton/ [with comments]
===
New Banking Regulations
The Strip | By Brian McFadden
May 20, 2012
© 2012 The New York Times Company
[currently the first one at] http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/the-strip.html
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Romney, GOP guvs have differing takes on economy
FILE - In this Jan. 21, 2012 file photo, Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney talks with Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell in Greenville, S.C. While Romney faults President Barack Obama for a weak American economy, Republican governors across the country are merrily trumpeting tales of business growth and falling unemployment.
Charles Dharapak / AP
By BOB LEWIS, AP Political Writer
Friday, May 18, 2012
(05-18) 11:35 PDT Danville, Va. (AP) --
In Virginia, Gov. Bob McDonnell runs TV ads hailing the state's business growth. Ohio Gov. John Kasich tells anyone who will listen that 100,000 jobs have been created or retained on his watch. And Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder promotes a state budget that's on solid ground for the first time in a decade.
All that optimism from Republican governors in key presidential election battlegrounds conflicts with the pessimistic message that Mitt Romney is spreading. The GOP presidential candidate is focused on the nation's fragile economic rebound as he works to persuade Americans to dump President Barack Obama.
"America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs" but instead "we are enduring the most tepid recovery in modern history," Romney said this week in Des Moines, Iowa. That's the same state where GOP Gov. Terry Branstad has been crowing about an unemployment rate that has dropped to 5.1 percent from 5.9 percent a year ago.
It's just the latest example of how, less than six months before the general election, Romney can end up in an awkward situation as he argues that the economy is deeply troubled while GOP governors salute an economic renaissance in their states.
How can it be both?
"Well, it is both," McDonnell, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said recently. "Nationally, we're still in the doldrums because our national economic policies are inept as led by this president: more taxes, more government programs, more regulation, lots of rhetoric and limited results."
But things are looking up in states like his, he said, adding: "I'd say most of the credit in Virginia goes to the private sector and the entrepreneurs."
Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, hopes to ride a wave of voter discontent with the economy into the White House. No president has won re-election with a national unemployment rate above 7.2 percent. The rate stood at 8.1 percent in April.
Any number of factors, gas prices among them, could shift voter attitudes about the economy between now and Election Day.
To win, Romney must convince voters — especially those in the roughly dozen swing-voting states where the race is likely to be decided — that the situation is so bad that that they should give him a chance to do what Obama hasn't been able to do: get the economy really going.
Obama says voters should give him four more years so the nation's recovery can continue, and he warns of a backslide if Romney takes over.
Democrats, like Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, contend the country would be in far worse condition had the president not pumped stimulus money into the economy in 2009, saying it was directly responsible for new jobs. Romney and Republican governors contend that the infusion has acted as a brake on the economy, not the accelerator.
"If our economy had been stimulated differently, we'd be farther along than we are at the present time," said Gov. Robert Bentley of Alabama, a state where the jobless rate fell by 2 percentage points over the past year.
In a way, however, Republican governors, many of them freshmen elected in 2010, aren't making it easy for Romney to make his case.
McDonnell, for one, spent an entire week canvassing his state and used $400,000 from his own political action committee to run TV ads statewide trumpeting a 2 1/2-year turnaround in job growth and business expansion. Virginia's unemployment rate fell from 7.3 percent the month he took office in January 2010 — the depth of the crippling recession — to 5.6 percent last month.
"We've been rated the top state for business in America," McDonnell bragged, ticking off citations from several outfits after touring a newly opened circuit board factory in Danville.
Ohio's Kasich is equally upbeat as he takes credit for 100,000 new or retained jobs since taking office in January 2011and for a new, private job-creation agency called JobsOhio. The state's unemployment rate ticked down from 7.5 percent in March to 7.4 percent last month.
Michigan's Snyder beams when he talks about a jobless rate that has fallen by 2.2 percentage points in his state, Romney's boyhood home, in the past year. And Branstad boasts: "The unemployment rate in Iowa is dropping dramatically, and the kind of jobs that we're creating are the kinds we want."
In some cases, the competing messages come across as GOP governors — like McDonnell and Snyder — stand next to Romney to introduce him when he campaigns in their states.
Rising-star Republican governors who are potential Romney vice-presidential picks also are publicly giddy about a thawing jobs market as corporations and small businesses expand, and they point to steadily improving tax collections in their states as proof.
In South Carolina, Gov. Nikki Haley talks up a jobless rate that slid from 12 percent in December 2009 to 8.8 percent in April. Her commerce secretary, Bobby Hitt, says that South Carolina recruited a projected 20,000 jobs and $5.1 billion in investment last year, and the state Commerce Department churns out press releases on every company expansion, whether it creates 10 jobs or 500.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal talks up his state's unemployment rate (7.1 percent in April) and job growth. Even as the latest Louisiana revenue estimates exposed a $211 million shortfall, Jindal insisted the state's economic picture wasn't grim. He notes that Bayou State unemployment rates are below the regional and national averages and points to 44,000 Louisiana jobs added over the past year.
To be sure, it's not just GOP-governed states that are experiencing economic growth. Forty-eight states have seen a drop in unemployment rates over the past 12 months — New York's rate increased from 8.0 percent to 8.5 percent, and Rhode Island's remains unchanged at 11.2 percent. Democratic governors, however, are quick to credit Obama with helping their states rebound.
"Our country has now seen 26 straight months of private-sector job growth under President Obama's leadership," said Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association. "We are moving in the right direction toward full recovery."
Ultimately, the presidential race will come down to whether voters feel the economy is improving or stagnating. And the outcome will determine whether Romney and the Republicans are successful in squaring the broader economic criticism with progress in key states.
Bob Lewis reported from Danville and Richmond in Virginia, Phillip Rawls from Montgomery, Ala. Associated Press writers Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, Kathy Barks Hoffman in Lansing, Mich., Erik Schelzig in Nashville, Tenn., Randall Chase in Dover, Del., Seanna Adcox in Columbia, S.C., Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge, La., and Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/05/18/national/a104009D00.DTL [ http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/05/18/national/a104009D00.DTL&ao=all ] [with comments]
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UPDATE 1-At 'bridge to nowhere,' Romney slams Obama on economy
* 'That's your stimulus dollars at work'
* Says U.S. faces economic path of California
* Edging up in polls
By Steve Holland
Fri May 18, 2012 7:33pm EDT
HILLSBOROUGH, N.H., May 18 (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney returned to his economic message on Friday, highlighting a "bridge to nowhere" rebuilt by stimulus money and warning the U.S. economy could suffer a fiscal crisis like California's if he is not elected in November.
Rising in the polls this week, Romney is eager to follow through by hammering at the White House's handling of the weak economy.
He used the backdrop of a 1860s-era bridge in New Hampshire to illustrate what he called the wasteful government spending of President Barack Obama's $787 billion stimulus plan passed in 2009.
The stone bridge, rebuilt with more than $150,000 of stimulus funds, crosses a river but ends abruptly on one side with an 8-foot (2.4-metre) drop to a grassy field near a Ford dealership.
"This is the absolute 'bridge to nowhere' if there ever was one," Romney told a crowd of supporters. "That's your stimulus dollars at work - a bridge that goes nowhere."
A notorious "bridge to nowhere" that connected the Alaskan mainland with an isolated island became a symbol of congressional pork-barrel projects, spurring public outrage and leading lawmakers last year to impose a temporary ban on earmarks - special-interest projects added to major bills.
Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, says he would cut spending and put America on the path to a balanced budget if he defeats Obama in the Nov. 6 election. He pointed to the stimulus as an example of the president's failed leadership.
"It is, without question, the largest one-time careless expenditure of government money in American history," he said of the stimulus.
Supporters of the stimulus said it helped prevent the United States from slipping into a economic depression.
After two weeks of a news agenda dominated by gay marriage, bullying accusations, Obama's trip to Afghanistan and controversy over a conservative group's plan to make ads about Obama's controversial ex-pastor, Romney sought to refocus attention on the economy, perceived as Obama's main weakness.
PATH TO CALIFORNIA
The former Massachusetts governor warned that the U.S. economy faced a huge fiscal hole and high taxes like California's if he is not elected this autumn.
"There are only two ways to go: Like America in the past," Romney said. "Or like California, where they raise taxes higher and higher and higher. They scare away employers ... and they have huge deficits," he said in a telephone town-hall meeting with voters from four swing states.
The comments were a departure for Romney, who usually holds up Europe's economic troubles, not California's $15.7 billion budget gap, as an example of a doom-laden scenario for the American economy.
Romney's poll numbers are rising despite his coming under fire from the Obama campaign this week for cutting blue-collar jobs when he headed the Bain Capital private equity firm.
A Gallup seven-day average rolling survey had Romney ahead on Friday by 1 percentage point at 46 percent
In an effort to look presidential, Romney released his first paid general election television ad on Friday that laid out his agenda for the first day if he is elected.
The video said he would approve the proposed Keystone pipeline from Canada, which Obama put on hold earlier this year, propose "tax cuts and reform that reward job creators" and issue an order to scrap th e healthcare law.
The Obama campaign accused Romney of mishandling debt when he was governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007.
"Mitt Romney knows a lot about broken promises - his tenure in Massachusetts was defined by them, especially of the issues of debt, spending and jobs," the campaign said. In 2002, Romney promised he'd use his private sector experience to cut spending and debt, but both increased on his watch and he left Massachusetts with the largest per-capita debt in the nation.".
Helping Romney's rise in the polls in recent weeks have been moves by Republicans to rally round him now that his main opponents for the nomination have dropped out of the race.
Romney spoke by phone to George W. Bush after the former president told ABC News that he supports, the nearest he has come to an endorsement. Romney thanked Bush for his remark, a campaign aide said.
Copyright 2012 Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/18/usa-campaign-idUSL1E8GIF3920120518 [with comments]
===
Earmark Puts $17,000 Pans on Army Craft
Phoenix Products, a drip pan maker, whose owners are donors to Representative Harold Rogers.
Chris Wilson for The New York Times
Mr. Rogers
Susan Walsh/Associated Press
The Army pays far more for Phoenix Products’ drip pan on the Black Hawk than it does for pans from another company.
Justin Sullivan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In the last three years, the Army has purchased about $6.5 million worth of the "leakproof" drip pans.
Phoenix Products
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: May 18, 2012
WASHINGTON — In the 1980s, the military had its infamous $800 toilet seat. Today, it has a $17,000 drip pan.
Thanks to a powerful Kentucky congressman who has steered tens of millions of federal dollars to his district, the Army has bought about $6.5 million worth of the “leakproof” drip pans in the last three years to catch transmission fluid on Black Hawk helicopters. And it might want more from the Kentucky company that makes the pans, even though a similar pan from another company costs a small fraction of the price: about $2,500.
The purchase shows the enduring power of earmarks, even though several scandals have prompted efforts in Congress to rein them in. And at a time when the Pentagon is facing billions of dollars in cutbacks — which include shrinking the Army, trimming back purchases of fighter jets and retiring warships — the eye-catching price tag for a small part has provoked sharp criticism.
The Kentucky company, Phoenix Products, got the job to produce the pans after Representative Harold Rogers [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/harold_rogers/index.html ], a Republican who is now the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, added an earmark to a 2009 spending bill. While the earmark came before restrictions were placed on such provisions for for-profit companies, its outlays have continued for the last three years.
The company’s owners are political contributors to the congressman, who has been called the “Prince of Pork” by The Lexington Herald-Leader for his history of delivering federal contracts to donors and others back home.
Military officials have said the pans work well, and Mr. Rogers defended them.
“It’s important that Congress do what it can to provide our military with the best resources to ensure their safety and advance our missions abroad, while also saving taxpayer dollars wherever possible,” Mr. Rogers said in a statement. “These dripping pans help accomplish both of these goals.”
But Bob Skillen, the chief engineer at a small manufacturer called VX Aerospace, which has a plant in North Carolina, said he was shocked to see what the Army was spending for the Black Hawk drip pans. He designs drip pans that his company sells to the military for a different helicopter, the UH-46, for about $2,500 per pan, or about one-eighth the price that his Kentucky competitor charges. The pans attach beneath the roof of the helicopter to catch leaking transmission fluid before it can seep into the cabin.
“It’s not a supercomplex part,” said Mr. Skillen, an aerospace engineer who used to work for the Navy. “As a taxpayer, I’m just like, this isn’t right.”
He took his concerns to members of Congress, to military contracting officials and, finally, to a government watchdog group, the nonpartisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The group requested documents from the government under the Freedom of Information Act last year to learn more about the contract.
The Army turned over some information but said it did not have any specifications or designs for the drip pans that might explain the price. That was considered proprietary information held by Phoenix Products.
Melanie Sloan, who leads the Washington group, said she was troubled by the secrecy surrounding what seemed to be a routine parts order. “How is it possible that the government can’t say why it ended up with a drip pan that was this much money?” she asked in an interview.
A Congressional aide said that Mr. Rogers inserted the earmark after Army officials went to him with concerns about fluids that were leaking into the cabins of Black Hawks, splattering not only crew members but also wounded soldiers being airlifted to hospitals. “The Army came to the boss and said this is an issue,” said the aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in discussing internal communications.
The Army, however, said it was simply following a budget directive from Congress. Mr. Rogers’s earmark came before House members informally agreed to ban such provisions to for-profit companies.
“Congress mandated a leakproof transmission drip pan,” said Dov Schwartz, an Army spokesman. The contract was awarded without competitive bids because Phoenix was the only company deemed “approved and certified” for the work, he said. “The number of people that make leakproof transmission dripping pans is few and far between,” Mr. Schwartz said, adding that the steel required for such pans is more costly than the plastic used in other versions.
As of October, the Army had bought 374 drip pans from Phoenix Products at an average cost of $17,000 — discounted from the company’s usual price of $19,000, Mr. Schwartz said. He said the Army might get more pans if financing is approved.
Tom Wilson, who owns Phoenix Products, defended his company’s pans as better constructed and more durable than others on the market. Asked what made them so costly, he declined to discuss specifics, saying that disclosure of the company’s custom design could help competitors or even aid America’s enemies.
Mr. Wilson and his wife, Peggy, who is the president of the company, have been frequent contributors to Mr. Rogers’s political committee, as well as to Republican groups. The company has paid at least $600,000 since 2005 to a Washington lobbying firm, Martin Fisher Thompson & Associates, to represent its interests on federal contracting issues, records show.
Mr. Rogers, in turn, has been a strong supporter of the manufacturer. He has directed more than $17 million in work orders for Phoenix Products since 2000.
Mr. Wilson said he did not think that his company’s relationship with Mr. Rogers or its Washington connections were a major factor in the Army’s decision to buy his pan. His company got the work, he said, because its drip pan was “just simply a better product.”
But with the military facing $55 billion in budget cuts on Jan. 1 and Defense Department leaders warning of dire consequences, others are not so certain.
“You have to wonder,” said Ryan Alexander, the president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan group. “Is the Pentagon really getting the message?”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/us/politics/behind-armys-17000-drip-pan-harold-rogerss-earmark.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/us/politics/behind-armys-17000-drip-pan-harold-rogerss-earmark.html?pagewanted=all ]
===
Mitt Romney's Economic Plan: Good for a Few Laughs
By Deborah Solomon
May 15, 2012 4:09 PM CT
With fewer than six months until Election Day, you would hope the leading candidates for president would have concrete plans for how to deal with the nation's pressing fiscal problems.
Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, may well have those ideas. But he did little to elucidate them in what was billed as a major economic speech [ http://www.mittromney.com/news/press/2012/05/mitt-romney-delivers-remarks-des-moines-iowa ] today in Des Moines, Iowa.
Romney certainly painted a dramatic picture, warning Iowans about a "prairie fire of debt" and federal obligations akin to a "nightmare mortgage: adjustable, no money down and assigned to our children."
"Your household's share of government debt and unfunded liabilities has reached more than $520,000 under this president," he said.
His solutions, however, were light on details: Cut government spending, let the private-sector do more, and hand more power to state and local governments.
Romney didn't explain where he'd cut. But he said he'd get overall federal spending to about 20 percent of gross domestic product within four years -- in line [ http://www.pgpf.org/Issues/Fiscal-Outlook/2012/03/032112-Ryan-Budget.aspx ] with House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan's plan and down from today's figure of about 24 percent.
He said he'd move anti-poverty programs -- whose cost he put at more than $600 billion -- to state governments and the private sector, "where they can be run more efficiently."
To make his case, he engaged in a hypothetical about what would happen if the federal government were the sole supplier of cellphones. "The contract to make them would go to an Obama donor," he said, and they would be "the size of a shoe with a collapsible solar panel attached to them."
It's a funny line. But it doesn't help us understand why we should trust him to fix our fiscal mess. After all, the private-sector's prowess isn't looking too good right now given J.P. Morgan Chase's $2 [now (at least) $3] billion headache [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-15/u-s-said-to-start-probe-of-2-billion-jpmorgan-loss.html ].
To fix Social Security -- which will soon begin paying more in benefits than it gets in tax revenue -- Romney said he'd avoid raising taxes by reducing benefits for "high income" retirees. This sounds a lot like the progressive price indexing plan embraced by George W. Bush in 2005. But, again, Romney left out key details such as who qualifies as "high-income" and how much benefits would be curtailed.
And, of course, he said he would repeal Obamacare.
Romney is campaigning on his business credentials and private-sector acumen, telling voters he's the guy who will whip the U.S. budget into shape and restart the economy. If that's the case, Romney should do more than give pabulum campaign promises. He should offer Americans specific details of how he'll turn things around so that voters can decide if he's the one to rescue the U.S. from what he called a "debt and spending inferno."
Deborah Solomon is a member of the Bloomberg View editorial board.
©2012 BLOOMBERG L.P.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-15/mitt-romney-s-economic-plan-good-for-a-few-laughs.html [with comments]
===
Marco Rubio's Past Includes Political Vulnerabilities
By LAURA WIDES-MUNOZ and BRENDAN FARRINGTON, AP
05/19/12 11:44 AM ET
MIAMI — For freshman Sen. Marco Rubio, a rising GOP figure seen as a possible Mitt Romney running mate, there are questions about whether potential vulnerabilities in his personal and political background might hold him back.
The 40-year-old Florida lawmaker has close ties to a colleague accused of questionable financial dealings. He once was enmeshed in a controversy over the use of the state party's credit card for his personal expenses. Since emerging on the national political scene, he has faced increased personal scrutiny. There are conflicting details about his parents' immigration from Cuba and his recently disclosed ties to the Mormon faith.
The effect of those issues on his political fortunes is the subject of debate in Republican circles in Washington, Florida and elsewhere as the Cuban-American senator with solid conservative credentials works to raise his profile beyond his home state and possibly position himself for a national role.
"Marco Rubio is a huge star in the Republican Party in much the same way that Barack Obama was in the Democratic Party between his convention speech in 2004 and his candidacy for the president," said Steve Schmidt, a top adviser to GOP Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. "There are a lot of pluses when you look at Marco Rubio as a potential vice presidential candidate, but there are also unknowns."
Rubio frequently is mentioned by Republican insiders as an attractive candidate to be Romney's vice presidential pick, partly because the GOP needs to attract Hispanic voters in pivotal states such as Nevada and Florida.
Rubio denies any interest in the No. 2 spot this year, but he's working hard to stay in the national spotlight. He recently gave a major foreign policy address in Washington. He's talking about writing a bill to allow some young illegal immigrants to remain and work in the country without citizenship. Next month, he'll release a memoir.
The country is only just starting to get to know Rubio and his political vulnerabilities, though Florida residents know both well.
Both Rubio's ties with U.S. Rep. David Rivera, a fellow GOP freshman who now is facing a federal probe into tax evasion, and the state party credit card matter surfaced during Rubio's 2010 Senate campaign. While they didn't have much effect, that doesn't mean they would get a pass on the national stage.
"Floridians may be numb to these hits because of the rough-and-tumble nature of politics in the state, when it's looked at by a national audience it may not be as palatable," said Abe Dyk, a political strategist who managed the 2010 Senate campaign of Rubio's Democratic challenger.
Rubio and Rivera met in 1992, during the campaign of former Republican Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a fellow South Florida Cuban-American. The two rose through the ranks in the Statehouse with Rivera oftentimes playing bad cop to the more congenial Rubio.
During the legislative session, they shared a Tallahassee town house, which a bank began foreclosure proceedings on in 2010. Rubio and Rivera made only partial payments on that mortgage for five months in 2010; at that time, he held jobs as a consultant and professor. Rubio has said the missed payments were due to a dispute over the terms of the mortgage.
State officials closed a criminal probe into Rivera's personal financial dealings without filing charges but didn't clear him entirely. They cited Florida's brief statute of limitations and its lax campaign finance laws for not charging him with living off of his campaign funds and failing to disclose his income.
In the last year, Rubio has publicly kept some distance from Rivera and has said that his friend has some issues he must address on the campaign trail. Still, Rubio threw a small Washington fundraiser for Rivera last week. So far, Rubio hasn't faced blowback from his friendship with Rivera.
"It's tough to say how that will play out," says Emilio Gonzalez, a consultant who served in the Bush administration and sees Rubio as a potentially formidable presidential candidate in 2016.
If Rubio were to end up on the GOP presidential ticket or mount his own national campaign in the coming years, he all but certainly would face questions about the scandal over the use of state GOP funds when he was the speaker of the Florida House.
The head of the party, Jim Greer, was forced to resign following revelations he and his second-in-command charged $1.5 million on party credit cards, much of it on luxurious hotels, fancy restaurants, chauffeured sedans and lavish entertaining. Greer's trial is set to start July 30, just ahead of the Republican convention, and many Republican observers anticipate he will detail unethical use of party money by other high-ranking GOP officials.
Rubio spent more than $100,000 on the party card between 2006 and 2008, paying off about $16,000 in personal expenses and claiming the rest as official party business. His records from 2005, when he was lobbying to become Florida House speaker, never were released. When asked about using the party card for personal expenses, Rubio has said he sometimes just pulled the wrong card out of his wallet and he has called it a "lesson learned."
He also has had to answer criticism for how he spent money donated to two political committees he formed - including payments to relatives. He has acknowledged the bookkeeping for at least one of the accounts was sloppy.
Then there's his family's background.
Rubio long claimed his parents fled Fidel Castro's rule. But it was recently disclosed that they arrived several years before Castro took power, although they quickly embraced the Cuban exile community as Castro turned toward communism. Rubio has said the dates he gave were based on his parents' recollections.
There's another part of Rubio's upbringing that long had gone undisclosed, and the revelation is one that could turn off evangelicals who make up the base of the GOP.
Rubio was baptized as Mormon when his family lived for a few years in Las Vegas, thanks to the influence of cousins who belonged to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Rubio returned to the Catholic Church as a young teen, and as an adult he has also frequently attended Baptist services.
When it comes to the vice presidency, Rubio's greatest liability may be one only time can resolve.
"I suspect that the Romney campaign is going to pick someone who is viewed as unquestionably qualified for the office," said Schmidt, who was intimately involved in McCain's selection of Sarah Palin. "To the extent that (Rubio's) in his first term, he's in the first two years of his term and he's 40 years old probably doesn't help him."
Farrington reported from Tallahassee, Fla.
Online:
Rubio biography: http://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/biography
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/19/rubios-past-includes-poli_n_1529466.html [with comments]
===
Bobby Jindal: Exorcist-Science Guy
Larry Womack
Posted: 05/18/2012 6:53 am
Mitt "Electability" Romney has won just one general election in nearly twenty years of politicking. His one and only term of office left him with an approval rating of 34% [ http://www.surveyusa.com/client/PollTrack.aspx?g=454ada23-20dc-41f0-9c0c-a8a2a45d653c ]. Make no mistake about it: this was the best guy the Republicans had to offer this cycle.
Try to imagine just how bad the guy's running mate will have to be.
Of course, sane people will tell you that Rob Portman is the most obvious choice and, in this context, Portman's not bad at all. There are other promising contenders, too. Rand Paul would be great help in fundraising and energizing the Paul, er, enthusiasts, but the guy clearly isn't ready for prime time and nobody wants to be the next Sarah Palin in that regard. Paul Ryan offers similar benefits, but would have the unfortunate side effect of calling attention to what Republicans have actually been up to these last couple of years. Jeb Bush would make a great running mate, if it weren't for the fact that his last name is poison outside Florida. And, hey, maybe with enough coaxing Mike Huckabee could be convinced to--no, wait. No he couldn't.
But sane people aren't terribly involved in the GOP nomination process. The people who are have--strangely enough, even for them--spent the last week or so lobbying [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76335.html ] to [ http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/02/opinion/frum-vice-president-rubio-jindal/index.html ] make [ http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/jindal-romneys-best-veep-choice-hands-down/548156 ] Bobby Jindal Romney's #2. Bobby freakin' Jindal.
Bobby Jindal, Bobby Jindal... How can I put this kindly? Bobby Jindal is an outright curiosity. Bobby Jindal is beyond gifted academically, yet he more often than not manages to come off like the lost cousin of Goober and Gomer Pyle. The one they never talk about. When Barney asks how Bobby is doing, Goober and Gomer just shake their heads and stare at their feet. Still, he is a Republican-friendly curiosity: Jindal is, after all, walking validation of every anti-intellectual suspicion the right wing holds about higher education.
Most of the world was introduced to Jindal through his shockingly daft 2009 State of the Union response [(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=35857611 (the video's still there at http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/02/25/us/politics/1194838132435/jindal-delivers-republican-response.html ) and preceding and following], described as "painful" by Republican Strategist Ed Rollins immediately after.
If you don't recall Jindal's bizarre, all-smiles rant about "out of control" government spending, it might be because he managed to identify none. His list of pork included just three items: High speed rail systems (since when is the government responsible for infrastructure, anyway?), "cars for the government" and "something called volcano monitoring."
"Something called volcano monitoring." Those were Jindal's very words. It was as if to say, "What sorcery is this!"
"Instead of monitoring volcanoes," he concluded, "what congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, DC." Funny, I know some women who would say the same thing about their uteruses [ http://thinkprogress.org/health/2011/07/07/262314/jindal-signs-anti-choice-bill-compares-women-who-receive-abortions-to-criminals/ ].
Also funny that he used the word "eruption," which made it sound like he knew why a government interested in public safety might want to monitor volcanoes. Yet, there he sat, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, in awe that such a thing might even exist. As if the Earth itself felt compelled to slap him in the back of the head, one of Jindal's volcanoes erupted [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/23/alaska-volcano-mount-redoubt-erupts ] soon after.
At the same time, it would be very, very difficult to overstate how impressive Jindal's educational pedigree is. Bobby Jindal is, literally, a Rhodes scholar. He is also a biology major who claims there is "no scientific theory [ http://www.godtube.com/watch/?v=CE21MNNU ]" that explains how organic life comes from inorganic matter. You know, like abiogenesis through the formation of amino acids, most likely in the Eoarchean era, as demonstrated in the Miller-Urey experiment [(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=66821790 and preceding and following]. But I might be getting some of that wrong--I'm not a Rhodes scholar or biology major, after all. Bobby Jindal is the science guy; I am not.
Maybe Bobby Jindal missed that day of class because he was, at the time, living in a William Blatty novel.
You see, one of Jindal's college friends, Susan, was treated for cancer. In recounting the events that spun out of that tragedy, Jindal takes great pains to imply that the young woman was in love with him, but that he wanted only a very close friendship. One night, with an operation imminent, the young woman suddenly left a concert they had attended together, sobbing. Later, Jindal noted that she had been acting strangely even apart from that... but for whatever reason? The cancer? The treatment? Unrequited love? Demonic possession?
The next day, she collapsed in extreme pain, followed by a seizure--the sort of thing that might prompt you or me to call an ambulance. Unfortunately for the young woman, this happened at a prayer meeting. Demonic possession was the preferred diagnosis. Jindal and his campus crusader pals decided to perform an exorcism rather than call for help.
Here's a taste of Jindal's account [ http://www.newoxfordreview.org/article.jsp?did=1294-jindal ]:
"The students, led by Susan's sister and Louise, a member of a charismatic church, engaged in loud and desperate prayers while holding Susan with one hand. Kneeling on the ground, my friends were chanting, 'Satan, I command you to leave this woman.' Others exhorted all 'demons to leave in the name of Christ.' It is no exaggeration to note the tears and sweat among those assembled. Susan lashed out at the assembled students with verbal assaults."
Clearly, this was a case of demonic possession, as no person in the throes of a genuine and serious medical emergency someone might lash out at those people like that.
Jindal's full account reads like satire--a black-as-night comedy that would be hilarious if it were not, allegedly, true. After more "oooh-woo-oooh" and bumps in the night, he continues:
"Maybe she sensed our weariness; whether by plan or coincidence, Susan chose the perfect opportunity to attempt an escape. She suddenly leapt up and ran for the door, despite the many hands holding her down. This burst of action served to revive the tired group of students and they soon had her restrained once again, this time half kneeling and half standing. Alice, a student leader in Campus Crusade for Christ, entered the room for the first time, brandishing a crucifix. Running out of options, UCF had turned to a rival campus Christian group for spiritual tactics. The preacher had denied our request for assistance and recommended that we not confront the demon; his suggestion was a little late."
Apparently, no one suggested the "spiritual tactic" of calling an ambulance to the man Grover Norquist would like to see a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-womack/bobby-jindal-exorcistscie_b_1526263.html [with comments]
===
(linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=69577859 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=71568915 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75197318 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75271936 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75440190 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75537322 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75583191 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75672695 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75765172 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75780416 (and any future following)
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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