The $7 Billion Election (A Few Thoughts)

Well, the final numbers are in, and the 2012 election officially cost a whopping $7 billion. It’s a number that will surely prompt hand-wringing on the left about “getting money out of politics.” This is an issue where I diverge with my liberal fellows; I’m as much of a First Amendment absolutist as they come, and I’d rather answer nasty or inaccurate speech with more speech than with more regulations and contribution limits. I’m all for transparency — more disclosure is absolutely essential, and while money doesn’t necessarily corrupt politics, dark money is another story — but the grand totals don’t really phase me. Like it or not, in the modern age, money is speech. (Just try to get your message out to 250 million Americans by standing on a soapbox in the town square . . . . I guarantee you’ll go running to the major networks in under a minute.)

If citizens don’t like what the onslaught of campaign advertising and ground-game efforts produce, they can leverage the ultimate recourse: voting. We all have brains and choices, and no amount of money can tell a person how to vote. Instead of blaming non-stop TV ads for brainwashing my fellow Americans, I’d rather blame the perfectly able thinkers who let themselves be brainwashed. For what it’s worth, calculations by the Post’s Wonkblog show that, despite the 2012 infusion of cash, advertising was less influential than in 2008, producing an increase of only 0.14% in the votes taken by a candidate with an 1000-ad advantage, versus .60 percentage points in 2008. (And really, a TV ad can’t make you pull the lever in the voting booth.) On that note, it’s worth examining what $7 billion really represents in the long run. Is $7 billion is too rich a price to pay for engaging in the most crucial aspect of democracy? Not if you ask the folks who spend big on other, far less consequential items. Consider the following figures:

$11 billion: Amount Americans spend per year on bottled water.

$13 billion: Disney’s parks-and-resorts 2011 revenue.

$15 billion: Estimated worth of the Harry Potter brand.

$31 billion: The auto industry’s U.S. annual advertising budget.

$35 billion: Americans’ annual spending on gambling.

$51 billion: What Americans spend on their pets each year.

Political spending itself is often considered a form of gambling — surely Sheldon Adelson was wagering on a Romney presidency when he dropped $150 million on the election — but slot machines and scratch-its cost the country five times more than the 2012 race. (Adelson is, as it happens, wonderful proof that money can’t buy votes or guarantee elections.) If given the choice between political activism and 50 billion bottles of Aquafina or Poland Spring, I’ll take the hustle for the White House any day.

Romney-Ryan 2012!

Romney and Ryan at a pancake breakfast in Milwaukee. Do these guys look like father and son or what? (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Heaven forbid the media not have a horse race to cover. Thus, on the heels of Mitt Romney’s triple primary win on Tuesday, political coverage has shifted from delegate counts and Rick Santorum’s position on birth control to what Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post calls the “veepstakes.” Calculating the vice presidential chances of various Republican governors and senators is the ultimate Washington parlor game; Cillizza, the self-professed political junkie who writes the Post’s “Fix” blog, released his first top-ten list of potential recruits last month. Appropriately for a guessing game in which the only man with the answers — Mitt Romney — is resolutely close-mouthed, the odds placed on any particular candidate can swing wildly from one day to the next. The Romney camp is certainly not giving away any secrets; when asked by Jay Leno for one-word characterizations of a list of VP prospects, Romney’s responses were a study in blandness: “creative” (Paul Ryan), “indomitable” (Chris Christie).

Ryan, as it happens, is the latest front-runner, eclipsing such earlier best bets as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty. A day after President Obama linked Romney to Ryan in a speech at the annual Associated Press luncheon, attempting to hang Ryan’s “radical” and “laughable” budget around the presumptive nominee’s neck, Romney responded not by pushing Ryan away but by tightening the embrace. He campaigned extensively with Ryan, a Wisconsin representative, during the run-up to that state’s primary, and defended Ryan enthusiastically in his own speech to the editors organization on Wednesday. Describing Ryan as someone who, “unlike this president, has had the courage to offer serious solutions to the problems we face,” Romney evidently sees his close relationship with the GOP’s favorite deficit hawk as an advantage, not a liability. The Washington Post notes that, in the eyes of Republicans, Ryan’s strengths pair perfectly with Romney’s weaknesses: “Where some conservatives see Romney as an ideological squish, they consider Ryan not only a conservative of conviction but one of the movement’s intellectual champions.” It’s an interesting observation, considering that doubts about Romney more often center on his social-issues credentials than his fiscal conservatism (though Rick Santorum has charged Romney with “dramatically” raising taxes), but Ryan is undeniably the party’s intellectual light. As Paul Krugman would say, he is viewed as a Very Serious Person, despite the fact that the savings outlined his Path to Prosperity budget are no more specific than “repealing tax breaks” (which ones?) and “cutting spending” (from which programs?). When conservative pundits gush over Ryan, words like “genius” are used without a hint of irony. The Post also suggests that Ryan might help Romney among working-class voters, given the Wisconsin representative’s blue-collar roots. (That Ryan was raised on Social Security survivor benefits after his father died of a heart attack has apparently not endeared him to the “entitlement” system.) It’s somewhat surprising that the wonky, numbers-driven Ryan is an asset on the campaign trail, but he connects easily with the Joe-the-Plumber types that the GOP claims to represent. Per the Post’s account:

Ryan talked casually about having been on “a road to opportunity” when he flipped burgers at a McDonald’s as a teenager, sold bologna — “real bologna, by the way” — for Oscar Mayer and waited tables to help pay back his student loans.

(I can see the DNC attack ad now: “Paul Ryan knows all about real bologna — just look at his budget.”)

This buddy act, along with President Obama’s concerted effort to link the men, led Chris Cillizza to upgrade Ryan from tenth place in the Veepstakes rankings. He writes: “It’s not hard to imagine this thought in Romney headquarters this morning: You want to make the Ryan plan the centerpiece of this campaign? Fine. Game on. That’s a fight we want.” Indeed, it’s hard to find an tactical issue on which Republicans and Democrats are more starkly divided. Obama’s team genuinely thinks it can sink Romney by yoking him to the author of “The Path to Prosperity,” while conservative bigwigs are falling all over themselves to applaud the relationship. Jed Babbin, writing in the conservative magazine American Spectator, calls Ryan “the best and most fact-driven running mate choice for Mitt Romney,” going so far as to assert that “the case for Ryan appears too compelling to avoid.” Babbin, who declares the Wisconsin representative “precisely the man he needs at his side throughout the fall campaign,” believes Ryan will add “star power” to Romney’s thus-far “lackluster” economic prescriptions and can contribute a vision for Medicare that will counter the past sin of “Romneycare.”

These purported strengths, however, are painted as weaknesses by such liberal pundits as the Post’s Matt Miller, who deems Romney’s embrace of the Ryan budget a “marvelous misjudgment.” Miller predicts independent voters will react with “shock and revulsion” when the Obama campaign succeeds in “pound[ing] home what is sure to be a Democratic mantra this year: all the things that could be bought with the $150,000 average annual tax cut that top American earners stand to get if Romney and Ryan have their way.” Romney, of course, is wagering that independents will not be so easily swayed, and that the all-important voter bloc will reward what he considers fiscal probity. Miller is not alone in assuming Republicans are “sticking their heads in the noose again”; as John Heilemann writes in New York Magazine,

Judging from Obama’s speech yesterday, Romney-Ryan is the new Dole-Gingrich. Please recall that in 1996, Bill Clinton’s campaign spent the spring hanging the controversial Speaker of the House around the septuagenarian senator’s neck like a twenty-ton anvil — and in the process effectively won the general election six months early. Team Obama, like the rest of the Democratic Party, is confident that the same stratagem can work again.

Even the down-home folksiness that straight news articles attribute to Ryan is up for debate in the partisan arena. Where Babbin refers to Ryan as “likeable . . . a warm, personable kind of guy” who “seems comfortable speaking in terms people use at their kitchen table,” left-wing columnist Eugene Robinson claims that “Ryan is even less charismatic on the stump than Romney.” Despite Ryan’s ominous YouTube videos of himself stalking the halls of Congress, a la Buffy the Budget Slayer, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt here. Romney didn’t spend four days campaigning with Ryan in Wisconsin for nothing; the congressman obviously has a common touch that works well enough in his home state, where the Times noted he “joined [Romney] at town-hall meetings” and “schooled him on the pleasures of a ButterBurger.” When Miller wonders whether Romney will be able to “extricate himself from being tied to Ryan as Dole was to Gingrich,” it seems the more relevant question is whether Romney will even want to.

As bad as Ryan’s budget is — and it is bad, aiming to hold all discretionary spending (food stamps, infrastructure, research funding) below 3.75% of GDP when defense spending alone has never dipped below 4.00% — it may not pose much of a threat to the GOP base. Ryan deliberately constructed his proposal to go easy on the average Republican voter (old, white and wealthy) while sticking it to constituencies that typically vote Democratic (young, diverse and poorer). For all the attention paid to Ryan’s plan to replace Medicare with a “premium support” voucher system, the real cuts come to domestic programs like Medicaid, food stamps and welfare that mostly benefit the “entitled” people that the Tea Party loves to hate. “The Path to Prosperity” may be immoral in the eyes of liberals — Paul Krugman, in a brilliant bit of rhetoric, called it “pink slime” — but it’s not a huge liability among senior citizens in Milwaukee or Dubuque.

Carbon copy button-downs, carbon-copy tykes from the prop shop. (Image: ABACAUSA)

One thing Ryan wouldn’t bring to the ticket is specific demographic appeal. Yes, Chris Cillizza notes the advantage of having a running mate who is “telegenic, beloved by tea party conservatives and from a swing state like Wisconsin,” but Ryan is no Marco Rubio or Susana Martinez. He is pretty much Mitt Romney, just twenty years younger. He would not bring in the Hispanic vote that even Republican pollsters admit will be crucial to winning the nomination. (Of course, the reality is that even a Spanish-speaking VP may not be able to save Mitt “Self-Deportation” Romney on this one.) Quite obviously, Ryan is also not female; unlike, say, Nikki Haley, he will not do much to erase the 18-point advantage President Obama currently holds among women in swing states. It must be said, however, that there is danger in picking a running mate based on the simplistic notion that people will vote for the candidate who shares their skin color or bust size. Heck, I would sooner vote for Anthony Weiner than Sarah Palin, and I assume other slices of the electorate feel the same way about “their” candidates.

In reality, it’s far too early to know who will rise to the top of Romney’s VP pool. Babbin points out the obvious when he writes that “Mitt Romney will choose his running mate based on whatever criteria he has in his mind. Frank Bruni, in a wonderfully comedic Monday column for the Times, dismisses all this Veepstakes talk by observing that, when Romney chooses his running mate in four months, “the national mood and state of the race — two of the most important factors in any selection — could be significantly different then than they are now.” The eventual choice could be as unknown now as Sarah Palin was in early 2008. Bruni also reminds us that running mates are hardly the make-or-break factors in an election that the talking heads on CNN would have us think:

You show me a voter so taken with a vice presidential nominee that he or she swallows real reservations to vote for the ticket and I’ll show you a member of the veep-to-be’s extended family or someone else angling for an invitation to the inauguration.

Ah, yes, but despite the vice president’s relative unimportance (John Nance Garner, Teddy Roosevelt’s VP, supposedly referred to his job as “not worth a bucket of warm spit”), once the Republican nominee has been chosen, the Veepstakes is the only game in town. The Post’s Chris Cillizza exudes the dorkiness of political junkies: “There is nothing — literally, nothing — that the Fix loves more in politics than the speculation surrounding who the presidential candidate will pick as his vice presidential running mate.” Meaningless guessing games, a vast waste of time on something that is not Fantasy Football — what’s not to love?

It doesn’t get much better than this, folks.

(Part II of the Veepstakes, Non-Ryan Edition, coming soon . . . .)

Welcome to the Hall of Lame

Another week, another round of “huh?” remarks from the GOP presidential field. The latest, along with some snark from the peanut gallery:

Rick Santorum attacked Mitt Romney recently for his changing positions on abortion, health care mandates and the like by saying this:

I am not someone when the climate changes, I change.

Hey, did Rick “Global Warming Is A Hoax” Santorum just admit the climate is changing?

*****

Extending the GOP’s impressive track record on energy policy, Newt Gingrich mocked President Obama for suggesting that algae-derived biofuels could one day reduce the country’s reliance on oil:

Maybe we should, as an experiment, get some algae and go to a gas station, and you know, sort of the “Barack Solution.” Would you like some algae instead of gasoline? This is the kind of stuff that’s Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Gingrich was practically born in Cloud Cuckoo Land. This is the guy who promised to give statehood to a Moon colony once it reached 13,000 people. Who planned to light cities with giant, sun-reflecting mirrors in Earth orbit. Who sponsored legislation to give marijuana smugglers the death penalty. And who, most pertinently, is currently promising to bring gas prices down to $2.50 per gallon. “I think grandiose thoughts,” Gingrich announced. “I accept the charge that I am grandiose and that Americans are instinctively grandiose.” So, remind me — what’s his problem with algae again?

*****

Rick Santorum gets frustrated when reporters focus on social issues and neglect what he considers his economic bona fides. Why can’t Santorum shake his reputation for being obsessed with other people’s sex lives? This sort of remark, in which he criticizes his opponents’ plans to limit charitable tax donations, may have something to do with it:

Mitt Romney is bed with Barack Obama on destroying these vital mediating institutions in our society by starving them of money from the very people that keep these organizations alive and well in our society.

Of course, his Freudian slips don’t help much either, as when he lays out his policy on Iran by beginning, “Under a Santorum pregnancy . . . .”

*****

Writing on the conservative website Redstate, Santorum castigated Romney for being insufficiently committed to destroying the environment. Not only has Romney “appointed litigation-happy environmentalists to key government jobs, flip-flopped on cap and trade, flip-flopped on carbon taxes,” but he also “made the following promise about a coal-fired plant: ‘I will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people, and that plant, that plant kills people.’”

Rick Santorum: Protects the unborn, but A-OK with killing people.

 

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 2012 Edition

Gingrich supporters in South Carolina (Photo by Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine)

This photo from a Jonathan Chait article in New York Magazine captures a central truth of the Republican race: it’s been a real downer. Newt Gingrich may describe himself as “cheerful,” but the Newtser is far from a happy warrior. In fact, the entire Republican field is in a funk. Debates are BYOR — bring your own raincloud. Of course, for every angry audience shot, you could probably dig up a photo of gleeful kids crowding around Ellis the Elephant. But there is truth to this meme of negativity. Not only is it a contrast to Obama’s 2008 campaign, which packed stadiums with excited fans and spawned spontaneous YouTube love letters to the candidate, but it is a contrast to Obama’s 2012 campaign. The president may be looking for a new slogan — “hope” is still on the menu, but an incumbent can’t exactly call for “change” — but he is still pushing the theme of a brighter future. Columnists have compared his most recent push to Reagan’s Morning in America; the Republican candidates, on the other hand, see not sunshine but gathering storm clouds on the horizon.

Ellis the Elephant and Callista Gingrich (Photo by CNN)

There is an element of necessity in the Republican rhetoric. The job of any challenger is to tear down the incumbent, while the sitting president is charged with defining his record in the most positive terms possible. Even Obama, in 2008, positioned himself in opposition to George W. Bush; if Obama was the country’s great hope, Bush was the war-monger who had driven hope into the ground. If you’re trying to convince voters to change horses midstream (or, as it was cleverly recast in one of the left’s few messaging victories, to change horsemen in mid-apocalypse), you’d better argue not only that the horse is too small but that the stream is too deep and swift for the beast in question. Beyond demonizing the opponent himself, the opponent’s entire record — and thus the state of the country — must be tagged as a failure. The GOP’s problem is that it has crossed the line from criticizing the “Obama economy” to painting the entire nation as a gloomy, dismal place.

Will all the negativism stir up the base and drive turnout in November, or will sad-sack voters be saddled with seasonal affective disorder? (Or perhaps it’s election-season affective disorder.) The constant barrage of negativity also threatens to cast a pall on the candidates themselves. It’s no surprise that the (literal) mud thrown in attack ads can splatter even the candidate doing the attacking, but even a general aura of negativity can be a reputation-ruiner. Project gloom long enough and you will be known as the gloomy candidate, as Rick Santorum has been described. “Dismal,” “righteous” and “finger-wagging” are other words often applied to the former senator, though he is hardly the only member of the Eeyore brigade. As Steven Pearlstein writes at the Washington Post, “If all you did was to listen to Republican presidential candidates . . . you would surely be under the impression that the country was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, businesses were barely getting by under the weight of excessive taxation and regulation, and most of the middle class was standing in bread lines.”

The angry resentment on the faces in the New York Magazine photo cannot be solely attributed to standard campaign negativity, however. The downfall of western civilization is not an inherently uplifting topic, but it is one that half the Republican field — Santorum and Gingrich — feels compelled to address. Both men genuinely believe that America is on the edge of a precipice; as Gingrich says, the current “danger to America is greater than anything I dreamed possible after we won the Cold War and the Soviet Union disappeared in December 1991.” A website set up by Winning Our Future, the super PAC supporting Gingrich, announces that “Super Tuesday could absolutely mean Life or Death to America as we know and love it!” Santorum is equally convinced that America’s fate hangs on the results of the 2012 election, though he speaks less of a slide toward socialism than a future straight out of the Book of Revelation. “Satan is attacking the great institutions of America,” he told students at Ave Maria University in 2008. Gingrich may warn against President Obama’s “Kenyan, anti-colonial” radicalism, but no one can beat the Devil himself. Presumably, Beelzebub is working his dark arts through HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, as the administration’s policy on birth control is part of an agenda that is “systematically trying to crush the traditional Judeo-Christian values of America.” If I thought the country was literally going to hell in a handbasket, I would probably be depressed too. Even after George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection, liberals might have joked about moving to Canada, but I can’t remember anyone seriously claiming that the president was ushering in the End of Days. Despite the frequency with which the Republican candidates invoke “American exceptionalism” and promise to “restore America’s greatness,” they have remarkably little faith in the nation and its institutions to survive four more years of Obama. Santorum plainly states that re-electing the president will be “the beginning of the end of freedom in America.” It raises the question: If a country can be destroyed by a middle-aged community organizer from Chicago, was it really that great to begin with?

The candidates’ embrace of the dour and the grim is partly a political calculation — the worse the incumbent looks, the more appealing even a middling challenger appears — but especially in Santorum’s case, it reveals almost a fetish for the apocalyptic. David Brooks, who is no bleeding-heart liberal himself, sums it up perfectly when he writes that the former senator “has a tropism for the tragic”:

The odd thing is that Santorum seems to be enjoying all this. That’s in part because he has a tropism for the tragic. Most of us look past bad events. We want life to look like our photo albums — a bunch of happy faces, editing out all the bad times. But Santorum seems to dwell on misfortune — the enemies the country faces, the depravity closing in on us, the unfair criticism hurled against him, the terrible things that have happened. When the campaign goes into its fallen state, he has the pleasure of seeing his tragic worldview confirmed.

I get the feeling that the people who attend Santorum rallies are big fans of Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series, perhaps the sort of folks who welcome the Tribulation because it signifies the second coming of Christ. The worse the situation gets here on earth, the closer we are drawing to the End of Days — which, if you’re among the chosen, may not be such a bad thing. When the sheep and goats are separated on Judgment Day, you can bet the sheep will be wearing schadenfreude-filled smirks. And when the Obama administration plays into day-of-reckoning prophecies by waging “war on religion,” I suspect Santorum’s public rage disguises a private feeling of vindication: Finally, the evils of the godless left are being exposed.

Less clear is whether Newt Gingrich buys into this Biblical worldview. Certainly the candidate is convinced that his background as a “historian” entitles him to speechify on the Judeo-Christian foundations of America, but Gingrich is also the consummate politician. His campaign is driven by rage, and he surges in the polls when he inveighs against the “media elite” or the “Washington establishment.” If Santorum’s base is angry at the secularization of America, Gingrich’s base is angry at . . . everything. His talent is in channeling that anger, and he engages a more passionate section of the electorate than the cool, businesslike Mitt Romney, whose negativity on the stump is mostly confined to the exigencies of the “Obama economy.” When Romney attempts to emote, the furthest he gets is declaring that “If Barack Obama is reelected, Iran will have a nuclear weapon.” Hand Santorum or Gingrich the same briefing book, and you’ll get a disquisition on electro-magnetic pulses or the imminent dangers to cities like Cleveland. The most Romney can promise is this lukewarm prediction, delivered on Super Tuesday in Boston: “But, on November 6th, we will stand united, not only having won an election, but having saved a future.” Woo. Save that future — but don’t win the future, because that line, depending on who you ask, belongs to either Gingrich or Obama.

The sourness of the Republican race is the polar opposite of the increasingly upbeat attitude coming from the White House. As the man with whom the buck has stopped for the last four years, Obama has a vested interest in cultivating a positive atmosphere; the more positive voters feel, the more likely they will be to endorse the status quo. The unemployment rate has happily obliged, dropping from 8.6 to 8.3 percent in February, and public sentiment has followed:

In an Associated Press-GfK poll last month, 48 percent said they approved of how Obama was handling the economy, up 9 points from December. And 30 percent of Americans described the economy as “good” – a 15-point jump from December and the highest level since the AP-GfK poll first asked the question in 2009.

As his re-election campaign has ramped up, Obama has adopted a pugilistic yet hopeful stance, managing to criticize his rivals while keeping the emphasis on broader themes of “fairness” (what conservatives call class warfare) and “an economy built to last.” He speaks less of the catastrophe that awaits a Republican win in November and more of his own plans for a second term. Washington Post columnist Matt Miller writes that, “last week, the president’s rousing defense of his auto bailout marked the return of the ‘happy warrior’ persona that gives political leaders their greatest appeal, and which Obama too often lacks.” Of course, Obama has the advantage of running unopposed for the Democratic nomination. He has remained largely above the fray, holding his fire until the general election and rarely mentioning his potential challengers by name. This is a luxury not afforded to Romney and company, who have been forced to lace into each other with venom typically reserved for their liberal opponents. The danger of such attacks — Barbara Bush has called this year “the worst campaign I’ve ever seen in my life” — is that they leave the eventual nominee saddled with a record of denouncing aspects of the standard Republican platform. (One wonders whether Barbara Bush, in declaring this year’s campaign “the worst,” is forgetting the Willie Horton ad her husband’s backers ran against Michael Dukakis in 1988.)

Instead of focusing on the perceived shortcomings of the liberal worldview, Gingrich is forced to smear private equity as “vulture capitalism” and Santorum is obliged to dismantle the parts of the Speaker’s legacy — the 1994 takeover of the House, welfare reform — still surrounded by a rosy conservative glow. Arguing over the finer points of conservatism when they could be delivering broader rebuttal of big government, the candidates have revealed chinks in the GOP armor that Obama will surely exploit in the general election. When Obama wants to accuse his opponent of selling out the middle class, he need only cue up video of Rick Santorum going after Mitt Romney. When it’s time to debate health care, Romney’s assertion to Gingrich that “the individual mandate was your idea” will come back to haunt Newt. Forced to argue that their opponents are unelectable, the candidates inadvertently sow doubts that will haunt the party’s standard-bearer in November. In a post-Super Tuesday speech in Alabama, Gingrich declared that “we are staying in this race because I believe it’s going to be impossible for a moderate to win the general election.” Democrats will be all too happy to quote him on that once the Romney-Obama battle heats up. The electorate’s response to all the negativity has been predictable. The percent of Republican voters who view the candidates unfavorably has spiked, and the Times reports that, in an “NBC/Journal survey, four in 10 Americans say the primary process has given them a less favorable impression of the party, with only 12 percent indicating that the season has given them a better impression.”

Despite such internecine warfare, GOP stalwarts are convinced that the party will eventually coalesce around the nominee, whomever it may be. Bob McDonnell, the Republican governor of Virginia, maintained that “I’d love for this to be over sooner rather later so we can focus on the president’s record. But however long it takes, the desire to replace President Obama will motivate conservatives and libertarians in such a significant way.” This sentiment, though widely echoed among the Republican elite, is less of a sure thing than McDonnell might hope. Anti-Obama rage is surely a motivator for conservatives, and it will certainly drive Tea Party types to the polls, but how potent a force is it among those who don’t see the president as the anti-Christ? No less a dyed-in-the-wool conservative than Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel makes the following observation:

A senior campaign aide airily dismissed Mr. Romney’s Super Tuesday weaknesses, noting: “The areas we didn’t do as well in are rural and they are more anti-Obama.” Meaning, who else are these guys going to vote for come November?

How about: no one. They could stay home.

Anger worked for the GOP in 2010, when Tea Party fervor crested in an anti-incumbent wave that swept Democrats and insufficiently conservative Republicans out of Congress. And the party’s disparate factions could still unite behind the eventual candidate, as Super Tuesday interviews by the New York Times suggest. Reporter Kim Severson describes voters as “unanimous on one point . . . They wanted a candidate who could defeat President Obama.” Tina Kreimer, a Georgia Republican, is quoted as vowing, “I’d pick the geese in the parking lot before I’d pick Obama.” However, though Republican representatives in states like Ohio have lost primaries to challengers from the right, in 2012 the Tea Party fire is burning at a lower grade. Elections in a country split down the middle are decided by turnout; will anger be enough to bring out occasional or first-time voters? Obama won in 2008 by mobilizing segments of the population — minorities and young people — that were not even registered the year before, and his campaign apparatus is rightfully legendary. New York Times columnist Charles Blow is bullish on Obama’s chances, writing that “[t]he elections will boil down to a duel between anger and optimism, and in general elections optimism wins. Energy wins. Vision wins.” Real Clear Politics, a slightly more neutral source (Blow is uber-liberal even by the Times’ standards), offers a telling distinction between Republican and Democratic supporters:

The bulk of Tea Party activity in 2010 was inspired by intense anger at government; it rose up out of negativity. But each of the Obama volunteers RCP interviewed for this story insisted that they are fueled by a positive message. They had nothing to say about Romney or any of the other Republicans, just that they were focused on supporting the president.

To some extent, Romney is aware of this positivity gap. Unidentified aides tell the Times that he “has become too mired in the nuts and bolts of how to win the nomination rather than offering an inspiring argument for why he should.” Indeed, “inspiring” is not the word I would choose to describe Romney, who waxes about trees being the right height and whose most rousing line on the stump is that “real change is finally on the way.” Of course, insisting that declining unemployment is a mirage, or that the uptick in consumer optimism is misplaced, is not exactly the way to rev up a crowd.

Obama campaigns in Michigan in 2012: Still cheerier than Gingrich's crowd (Getty Images)

Even Obama cannot match the enthusiasm stoked by his 2008 campaign. There is truth to his acknowledgement that he is older and grayer, no longer the blank-slate candidate of hope and change. (If you’re looking for confirmation that the bloom is off the rose, note that Shepard Fairey of Obama-poster fame just pleaded guilty to charges stemming from his “borrowing” of an AP photo.) Obama spoke to stadiums full of people in 2008; crowds like that are not dime-a-dozen in 2012. But this picture, of an Obama rally this year in Michigan, nevertheless makes the case that, compared to the Gingrich crowd in the New York photo, the Democratic Party is still the place to be.

“One of the Finest Minds of the 13th Century”

Every time Rick Santorum shuts his mouth, an angel gets its wings. Unfortunately, since the guy practically leaps at every chance to say something offensive or bizarre, there are a lot of wingless angels shuffling around in heaven. Journalist Tom Ferrick, Jr., once remarked that Santorum “has one of the finest minds of the 13th century,” which pretty much sums it up. Some thoughts on the unlikely candidate’s latest gems:

1. The Times reports that Santorum offered a dismal — and personal — view of the housing market at a Friday night campaign event in Michigan:

I’m in a situation in our own house. We happened to buy in a very bad year . . . the value of my house is a fraction of what it was when I bought it.

And what a fraction it is! The five-acre property was assessed at $1.65 million in 2008, but is worth just a paltry $1.25 million today, according to the Washington Post. That must be quite a burden on Santorum’s finances, considering his income dropped from $1.1 million in 2009 to $923,000 in 2010. Perhaps that explains why, despite constantly praising Christian charities as superior to government welfare, the candidate donated only 1.8% of his 2010 income to charity, lagging Gingrich (2.8%) and Romney (13.8%) as well as President Obama (14.2%).

 

2. At the same event, Santorum challenged Romney for supporting TARP while simultaneously opposing the government bailout of GM and Chrystler:

You may not like my position on bailouts, but I’ve been principled and consistent, unlike other people in this race.

He’s right — I don’t like his position on bailouts. By his logic, should I then support the guy who was wrong 100% of the time, or the guy who was wrong only 50% of the time? Neither option is looking very attractive.

Then, in the run-up to Tuesday’s Michigan primary, Santorum’s campaign robo-called Democratic voters, hoping to encourage them to support him in the Republican race. The script: “Romney supported the bailouts for his Wall Street billionaire buddies but opposed the auto bailouts. That was a slap in the face to every Michigan worker, and we’re not going to let Romney get away with it.” Hey, Democrats — don’t let Romney get away with it! Vote for the guy who embraced those bailouts . . . oh, wait.

 

3. Last Thursday, Santorum addressed President Obama’s efforts to increase college attendance, reports the National Journal:

I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college, because of their indoctrination mills, absolutely . . . . The indoctrination that is going on at the university level is a harm to our country.

Of course, the president’s initiative has nothing to do with the fact that college graduates earn nearly double the average income of a worker with only high school diploma. It’s all about the left-wing brainwashing.

Santorum might also be interested to know that research shows that better-educated Republicans are actually more skeptical of facts and science (or, as Santorum would say, “facts” and “science”) than their less-educated counterparts. As Chris Mooney writes in Salon, “only 19 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed that the planet is warming due to human actions, versus 31 percent of non-college-educated Republicans.” In the same vein, between 2009 and 2010, the belief that Obama is a Muslim increased more among educated conservatives than among those without degrees. By this logic, Mr. “Global Warming Is Junk Science” should be pushing college on everyone.

 

4. Santorum has also criticized Obama’s health care law for mandating insurance coverage of prenatal testing, which he claims “encourage abortions” He told the CBS show “Face the Nation” that “the bottom line is that a lot of prenatal tests are done to identify deformities in utero and the customary procedure is to encourage abortions,” though the Washington Post notes that he also feels some tests — like sonograms — should be provided for free. Presumably, Santorum would also favor the controversial Virginia bill, since modified, that would have forced a woman seeking abortion to undergo a transvaginal sonogram — whether or not she needed or wanted the test.

Well, that’s one strike against “principled and consistent.” When the government requires insurers to cover one form of prenatal testing, that’s an attack on religious freedom. But when government requires women, willing or not, to undergo another form of prenatal testing, that’s just “informed consent.”

Supporters of the Virginia legislation pointed to a recent ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upholding a similar Texas law, which concluded that “the point of informed consent laws is to allow the patient to evaluate her condition and render her best decision under difficult circumstances. Denying her up-to-date medical information is more of an abuse to her ability to decide than providing the information.” The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Conservatives assure us that the “up-to-date medical information” provided in a pre-abortion sonogram will actually empower women to make the right choices, yet their drive to deny women the similar information of a prenatal screening reveals that they obviously have little faith in female decision-making ability. Times columnist Frank Bruni writes this week about Santorum’s claim that universities threaten students’ faith, but Bruni’s perspective could apply to Santorum’s selective push for “informed consent” as well:

But to listen to him talk about universities is to get the sense that he doesn’t trust others to emerge from such an obstacle course of unsavory influences as uncorrupted as he did. For safety’s sake, he’ll bless a little ignorance.

Especially for women, it’s hard not to conclude that Santorum thinks ignorance is a good thing.

The High Price of Being Filthy Rich

Mitt Romney’s biggest problem is not that he has made gaffes but that he keeps making them. From “I’m not worried about the very poor” to “I like to fire people,” Romney’s foot-in-mouth moments just keep coming. He delivered the latest humdinger during a visit to the Daytona 500, a campaign stop obviously intended to show off his regular-guy credentials. Instead, the candidate added another notch to the bedpost of cluelessness. When asked how closely he follows car racing, he responded, “Not as closely as some of the most ardent fans. But I have some friends who are NASCAR team owners.”

President Obama is labeled a “snob” for merely encouraging kids to go to college. Imagine the ridicule if, when asked about his love of basketball, the president raved about sitting courtside at a Lakers game or mused about buying an NBA team.

It’s tempting to conclude that Romney is just a rich guy living in a bubble, but nearly all politicians are rich these days. You don’t have to spend Sundays on the couch with a six-pack to have the presence of mind to avoid talking about how many Cadillacs you own, or about how $374,000 is “not a lot of money.” No one is asking Romney to pretend he isn’t rich, but is it too much to hope that he’ll stop advertising it in neon letters?

Romney’s history of gaffes is so dangerous not because of the dumb remarks themselves — eight years of George W. Bush proved that Americans are infinitely forgiving of faux pas — but because it cuts against the narrative of Romney as a quick-learning, detail-oriented businessman. Despite four years at Yale and an impeccable political pedigree, Bush never made himself out to be the sharpest guy in the room. Romney, on the other hand, sells himself as a savvy manager, pointing to his career at Bain Capital and his overhaul of the 2002 Olympics as proof of his skills. But successful CEOs are not known for alienating customers or talking down to their workers. And no one survives long in business by failing to learn from mistakes. Whether or not Romney’s ill-advised comments are true gaffes — put in context, “I like to fire people” is not even particularly offensive — is beyond the point. A good manager would recognize the danger in making easily misinterpreted remarks and stop making them. But Romney seems incapable of devising a course correction.

When Romney gave a speech to a 1,200 people in the cavernous 65,000-seat Detroit Stadium, the media gleefully seized on the image of a largely empty arena. This particular blunder was more attributable to Romney’s host, the Detroit Economic Forum, than to the candidate himself, but the Times nevertheless made this observation about his tightly-scripted campaign:

That kind of tight management and obsession with detail, right down to the size of the American flags hung at Romney events, is precisely the image the campaign wants to convey as it seeks to present Mr. Romney as an exacting and disciplined chief executive whose candidacy is infused with inevitability . . . . But a candidate who promotes an image as a skilled manager can suffer more when things go awry.

Likewise, Romney suffers more for his hand-to-the-forehead moments than someone like Newt Gingrich, who readily admits to having “grandiose” ideas, or Rick Santorum, whose culture-warrior rhetoric (birth control is “harmful to women,” the Obama administration is “hostile to people of faith, particularly Christians”) is too deliberate to be called a gaffe. Romney is expected to be the intelligent adult in the room, making his blithe, careless remarks all the more newsworthy.

You have to wonder: Would a President Romney be similarly clueless? What would happen if he welcomed India’s Prime Minister to the White House with a beef tartare dinner? How would voters feel if he asked children on food stamps whether they were excited about the new Xbox? At least George W. Bush, with his genial Texas persona, was able to shrug off statements like “our children is learning” by embracing his Average Joe, C-student reputation. Mitt Romney, whose otherwise innocent assertion about liking to fire people resonates because his career actually led to people getting fired, may find that Americans in 2012 are less forgiving.

The GOP’s Mr. Right

Rick Santorum's three favorite words (photo via salon.com)

How do you beat the perfect Republican candidate? That is the question Mitt Romney must be asking himself right now, as he absorbs Rick Santorum’s Minnesota-Missouri-Colorado trifecta and blanches at the latest polls, which show Santorum leading the race at the national level. Newt Gingrich was easy to take down; with his history of shady ethics and $1.6 million from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Romney’s attack ads could have been written by a roomful of monkeys with typewriters. Santorum, however, is a harder nut to crack. To wit: The latest ad from Restore Our Future, the super PAC backing Romney, goes after the former Pennsylvania senator for being a “Washington insider” and a “big spender.” If earmarks and debt-ceiling hikes are the worst sins Restore Our Future’s opposition researchers can pin on Santorum, it’s going to be a long trudge to Super Tuesday. Even among pork-eschewing Tea Partiers, it’s hard to imagine an epithet like “Washington insider” will be the kiss of death. For one thing, Santorum was a senator. He worked in thecapitol building.Which, needless to say, is located in Washington, D.C. These are not earth-shattering revelations, people.

The funny thing — and I use “funny” in the sense of “isn’t it hilarious how the world is going to hell in a handbasket? — is that, in a general election, the target on Santorum’s back would be a mile wide. This is a guy who seemingly equated gay relationships with “man-on-dog” sex. Who believes global warming is a conspiracy orchestrated by liberals to “make you feel guilty so you’ll give them power so they can lord it over you.” Who neglected to correct a woman at a campaign rally who told him President Obama was an “avowed Muslim” and ineligible to be president. Who tells supporters that the president’s “overt hostility to faith in America” will lead to a French Revolution scenario complete with “the guillotine.” Who wrote a book blaming “radical feminists” for looking down on stay-at-home mothers and pushing women into the workforce — then promptly threw his wife under the bus as the (uncredited) author of the offending passage.

In short, Santorum is an ignoramus wrapped in a hypocrite surrounded by a bigot. As someone representing the left wing of teh Democratic party, I have to wonder,Who would vote for him? And that’s where things get a little — funny. The fact is, Santorum is everything that the GOP base wants. He is perfectly in sync with a party that has veered sharply to the right on equality, taxes, women’s rights, and foreign policy. In my eyes, he represents everything that is wrong with the conservative worldview; but to conservatives themselves, he represents everything that is right (no pun intended). If you believe that same-sex marriage is a threat to Western civilization, that welfare recipients are lazy moochers who sap resources from the rest of us, that a zygote is morally equivalent to a five-year-old child . . . then Santorum is your guy. Obviously I think these positions are ridiculous, but just as obviously, the people who hold them do not agree.

Attacking Rick Santorum should be easy, for all of the above reasons. But Romney can’t possibly use that line of attack, because no one voting in the Republican primaries sees these things as negatives. Ross Douhat, the New York Times columnist whose religious and social beliefs generally align with Santorum’s, suggests that, “while it was easy to design an anti-Gingrich ad assault that would render the former speaker radioactive, Santorum doesn’t present half so ripe a target.”

Romney, for all his faults, at least maintains a veneer of bipartisanship and moderation. His weaknesses in the primary campaign — health care, his flip-flops on abortion and gay rights — are the very qualities that would make him a viable candidate in November. But he is no longer in step with the heart of the GOP base, and his attempts to dance to the new conservative beat are about as successful as his renditions of “America the Beautiful.” It’s a cliche that nations get the government they deserve. But if parties get the candidates they deserve, then Romney has no business with the GOP nomination. The Republican faithful and Rick Santorum: As a snarky teenager might say about her ex-boyfriend and his new flame, “They deserve each other.”

Newt Gingrich’s Quieter Gaffe

The Republican presidential field is so prone to gaffes — Mitt Romney’s “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” Rick Santorum’s comparison of gay relationships to “man on dog” — that the subtler horrors coughed up daily by the candidates often go unnoticed. You have to give Mitt Romney credit; despite his wooden affect and G-rated vices (hot chocolate!), the man suffers from such an advanced case of foot-in-mouth disease that he’s been able to overshadow the King of Ridiculousness himself, Newt Gingrich. It takes a lot — namely, a $10,000 bet or a fondness for firing people — to outdo moon colonies and schoolkids working as janitors. So it’s no surprise that this gem from Gingrich, delivered at a campaign event at a cowboy bar (don’t ask), flew under the radar:

We think it is the left which has abandoned and betrayed the poor because its safety net is actually a spider web and it traps people in dependency. My goal is the exact opposite of Governor Romney’s. My goal is to turn the safety net into a trampoline to allow the poor to rise and be like the rest of us.

Coming from the guy who chastised Romney for even suggesting a difference between the rich and poor, saying “I am fed up with politicians of either party dividing Americans against each other,” this is pretty rich. The bizarre image of food stamp recipients performing aerial gymnastics notwithstanding, there are several things I find offensive about Gingrich’s statement.

For starters, since when are the poor not “like the rest of us”? Talk about dividing Americans against each other. The Census Bureau reports that the official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent. By that measure, more than one in ten Americans are poor. These are your neighbors, your kids’ classmates, the family behind you in the grocery store. That’s what is so scary about poverty in America; it can be almost invisible, hidden behind the doors of average-looking houses and masked by material goods like Xboxes and air conditioners — the very things Republicans cite when they insist that no one in this country is really poor. In short, the poor are “the rest of us.”

Even more disturbing is Gingrich’s casual implication that the poor lack some intrinsic work ethic or characteristic common to the rest of us. This is hardly revolutionary stuff, coming from the party that coined the term “welfare queens” and advocates drug-testing recipients of unemployment benefits, but it’s still a pernicious and offensive idea. A worldview in which CEOs “earn” every penny of their overinflated salaries and taxes “steal” from hard-working Americans is naturally one in which the poor are to blame for their situation. It is not a paradigm that allows for bad luck, lack of education or below-living-wage jobs. Anyone who is poor is obviously poor because of their own failings.

When Republicans scream about class warfare, they accuse the president of demonizing businesspeople and insulting the rich. But conservatives can’t have it both ways: If the rich are just like you and me, deserving of the billions they’ve earned through their own sweat, then the inverse must also be true. People in need of the safety net — or the trampoline, if Gingrich insists — are just like you and me as well.

In Defense of Romney (No, Really)

Who knew that Newt Gingrich was such a fan of the New  York Times? Gingrich, who wins applause at debates for insulting the moderators and blames “news media bias” for ignoring “anti-Christian bigotry,” loves to look smarter than the so-called liberal elite. But politics make strange bedfellows, and the former speaker is only too happy to engage the mainstream media to further his attacks on frontrunner Mitt Romney. Twice in the last few days Gingrich has name-checked the Times; first in Saturday’s ABC debate, when he cited a Times story about Romney laying off workers, and again today, when he said the 30-minute anti-Romney documentary purchased by a Gingrich-supporting super PAC would “be based on establishment newspapers, like The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Barron’s, Bloomberg News, and I hope it is totally accurate.” Until now, the only media “establishment” on Gingrich’s radar has been the east-coast liberal establishment.

Despite Gingrich’s convenient change of heart, there are serious problems with relying on the Times or the Post for an accurate depiction of Romney’s career at Bain Capital. Recent coverage has focused almost exclusively on Bain’s failures; indeed, the stories of bankrupt companies and laid-off workers are nearly boilerplate in their similarity. It’s hard to think of a newspaper that hasn’t had a Romney expose, from international news services like Reuters to glossy magazines like New York. Taken together, these stories provide ample fodder for criticism by Gingrich, who has suggested Romney should “give back all the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years at Bain,” and Rick Perry, who dramatically accused Romney of “looting” companies and getting “rich off failures and sticking it to someone else.”

There is delicious irony in watching two free-market conservatives, who want to privatize everything from Medicare to airport security, wrap themselves in anti-capitalist rhetoric. Gingrich sounds more like the Occupy Wall Street protesters that he encouraged to “take a bath” than a Reagan Republican who claims to have invented supply-side economics. In fact, he puts himself in the awkward position of agreeing with the White House, which has trained its firepower on what it calls Romney’s “corporate raider” background. Yet any glee I feel at the latest display of hypocrisy is tempered by a sense of unease about the “establishment” critiques of Romney with which his detractors bolster their attacks. Reasonable people can disagree with the methods of private equity companies like Bain, which use debt and investors’ money to buy up struggling companies and attempt to turn them around, often by cutting the work force. (Controversy arises mostly over the amount of debt these companies are forced to take on, and over the fact that, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, “buyout firms seek to make money not only by eventually selling a business for more than they put into it, but also by extracting fees and sometimes dividends while they own it.”)

As odious as liberals — and now some conservatives — find such practices, it’s hard to argue that Romney should be judged only by his failures. Yet failed companies are exactly what the media has focused on, often to the exclusion of the successes that Romney himself trumpets on the campaign trail. Reporters are naturally drawn to the untold stories in a candidate’s past; after all, there is little to be uncovered by probing the same success stories (Staples, Domino’s Pizza) that Romney offers as his business-world bona fides. And newspapers undoubtedly perform a service to readers when they debunk Romney’s frequent yet false claim to have “net-net” created “over 100,000 new jobs.” Indeed, by tossing out such a misleading number, Romney is almost asking to be undercut by journalists like Ezra Klein and Glenn Kessler at the Post, who have looked at Romney’s numbers and concluded the following:

Whatever you want to say about Romney’s time at Bain, the number he is providing to reporters . . . is not net-net. It takes three successful companies of the hundreds Romney was involved with and uses their employment totals now — long after Romney finished working with them . . . . It would be the equivalent of explaining President Ronald Reagan’s record by choosing the two best-performing states and then attributing their growth from 1980-2011 to Reagan’s presidency.

Unfortunately, the diligent fact-checking that Klein and Kessler apply to Romney’s history of job creation is not a common feature of the stories cited by Gingrich. During Romney’s fifteen-year tenure, Bain Capital worked with more than 150 companies, providing a smorgasboard of case studies from which to choose. After an obligatory paragraph about Staples and a reference to what the Romney campaign calls Bain’s “excellent overall track record,” these articles spend the bulk of their word count detailing bankruptcies in which average workers were laid off and Bain executives made healthy profits. Inevitably, there are interviews with former workers or union leaders, all of whom articulate some variation on comments made to the Times: “They were just trying to milk as much out of us as they could” (William Mowrey, an engineer) or “There was absolutely no concern for the employees. It was truly and completely profit focused” (Cindy Hewitt, an HR manager). Of course, people who feel their lives were ruined by Bain are eager to speak up; more difficult, perhaps, would be to find a current Domino’s delivery driver or Sports Authority cashier to rhapsodize over Bain’s contribution to their paychecks.

The media accounts of Bain’s failures are almost entirely anecdotal. Stories are told through the recollections of former employees, though not all of them blame Bain for their companies’ bankruptcies, giving the articles a strong narrative structure. By prioritizing human impact over economic analysis, the newspaper accounts offer a ground-level view into the world of private equity. Less emphasis is placed on an overview of Romney’s tenure at Bain, making it difficult to discern how representative each case study really is. The New York Times focuses on Dade International, a medical device manufacturer, while New York Magazine’s lengthy feature “The Romney Economy” brings up AmPad, where tensions with the union and waves of layoffs helped sour voters on Romney during his 1994 Senate race against Ted Kennedy. A former Bain partner defends the closure of an AmPad factory in Marion, Indiana: “Those jobs were going to get destroyed internationally. That plant was going to go out of business, and there was nothing Mitt should have done, or could have done, to prevent it.” But the story as a whole renders a negative verdict on the profits-above-people economy that accompanied the rise of private equity. The magazine writes that “it is harder to be so charitable when you look at the broader moral contours of the arrangement.” Though AmPad filed for bankruptcy and the workers the reporter speaks to lost their jobs, “Bain Capital made more than $100 million from AmPad for itself and its investors.” A damning indictment, perhaps, but with or without Bain’s involvement, it’s difficult to see how AmPad, which produced notebooks and copy paper, could have survived the decline of American manufacturing.

Reuters and the Los Angeles Times home in on the same company, which Rick Perry also referenced yesterday while stumping in South Carolina: GS Technologies, a Kansas steel mill. After the company filed for bankruptcy, 700 workers were laid off; because GS had underfunded its retirement fund, the U.S. Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation was on the hook for a portion of the workers’ pensions. Mass layoffs, a government bailout, former employees left without health insurance — what more could the Perry campaign ask for? Using language usually reserved for President Obama, who evidently enjoy killing jobs in his spare time, Perry denounced Romney and his Bain colleagues for “all the jobs that they killed” and for “getting rich off failures.” Such accusations could just as easily show up in the next attack ad from the Democratic National Committee. The Reuters article quotes a Bain spokesman who points to another steel company that succeeded under the firm’s management, but the majority of the story is devoted to former GS executives and workers who fault Bain for crushing the company with debt and paying out dividends to investors. “Romney cost me lots and lots of sleepless nights and lots and lots of money,” one millworker is quoted as saying. As a piece of investigative journalism, the Reuters reporters likely feel they got to the bottom the story. Certainly they uncovered a stain on Romney’s record that the candidate would rather not discuss. But is it the ultimate goal of journalism to reveal the disconnect between Romney’s public statements and his history? Possibly. I would suggest, however, that a better objective might be to give readers an accurate overall picture of a candidate. The GS bankruptcy is undeniably part of the Romney picture, but by relying on such specific anecdotes to illuminate an entire career, the reader is left without a coherent arm’s-length impression.

What is lacking in all of the above stories is the long view. The Times offers what seems to be a standard disclaimer: “Because financial data for many of the acquisitions are not publicly available, it is difficult to fully tally the wins and losses, the jobs created and the jobs eliminated on Mr. Romney’s watch.” It is impossible to examine everything about Romney’s tenure, and while reporters who write about the available details do so out of necessity, such stock statements as “Romney’s career at Bain included both successes and failures” don’t go far enough in expressing the level of selectiveness at work in most media accounts. Newspapers are interested in failures and the Romney campaign is interested in triumphs, but I would imagine that the majority of Bain’s companies fell into a semi-successful middle ground. Despite asserting that the candidate’s record “has rarely been closely scrutinized,” a Vanity Fair profile concedes the following:

The most thorough analysis of Romney’s performance comes from a private solicitation for investment in Bain Capital’s funds written by the Wall Street firm Deutsche Bank. The company examined 68 major deals that had taken place on Romney’s watch. Of those, Bain had lost money or broken even on 33. Overall, though, the numbers were stunning: Bain was nearly doubling its investors’ money annually, giving it one of the best track records in the business.

That is the last we hear of the Deutsche Bank analysis; the rest of the Vanity Fair article runs through a series of sketches of other Bain acquisitions. Is it really so difficult to assign an overall grade to Romney’s record? The Wall Street Journal, in a Jan. 9 story, demonstrates that it is not. “[A]iming for a comprehensive assessment,” the Journal looked at nearly 80 companies that Bain was involved with during the 15 years Romney headed the firm. By tracking these businesses for eight years after they were sold by Bain, the Journal captures their long-term fates. The author admits that the analysis “could provide fodder for both critics and supporters of Mr. Romney’s presidential ambitions.” Twenty-two percent “either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested, sometimes with substantial job losses.” Unlike other news articles, the Journal’s piece clearly presents its statistics, then offers a few lines of commentary from an industry expert. While one expert feels that more companies failed under Bain’s management than might be expected, another points out that the numbers also “reflect Bain’s investing style, which, particularly during the firm’s early years, was focused on smaller and sometimes troubled companies that Bain hoped to fix or build.” One academic notes that one “potentially mitigating factor is that these bankruptcy filings tended to be clustered during the post-2000 economic downturn.” The Washington Post has also noted the difference between Bain’s early years, when it invested in small start-ups and operated more like a venture capital firm, and its later shift toward the leveraged buyouts that characterize private equity. The successes, like Staples and Sports Authority, that Romney talks about on the campaign trail were mostly start-ups; the bankruptcies highlighted by his opponents tend to be private equity deals. “Romney himself presents his venture-capital side when explaining his business background to voters,” Ezra Klein writes on his blog at the Post. “But the difference between the two kinds of investments is key to understanding whether Romney’s time at Bain is a political asset or a vulnerability.”

The Wall Street Journal’s analysis delivers a mixed verdict on Romney’s achievements, but it identifies the positives and negatives in a manner that allows the reader to decide for himself the merit of various arguments. Most surprising is the amount of pushback the Journal receives from Bain, which contends that the newspaper “uses a fundamentally flawed methodology” and “disregards dozens of successful venture capital investments.” Perhaps Bain expects more from the business-friendly Journal than from left-of-center publications like the New York Times, but considering that the article acknowledges the limitations of its methods, Romney and his firm seem to have been given a fair shake. Despite some experts’ reservations about the relatively high bankruptcy rate among Bain companies, the article concludes that “[o]verall, Bain recorded roughly 50% to 80% annual gains in this period, which experts said was among the best track records for buyout firms in that era.”

Attacks on Romney’s business background are unlikely to dissipate simply because of some even-handed media coverage, however. To Democrats, Romney is a card-carrying member of the “one percent,” who enriches himself at a high price to others. It’s hard to believe that Gingrich and Perry really believe their vitriole about “the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of other people and walk off with the money.” The vagaries of the free market didn’t bother Gingrich when he “reformed” welfare in the 1990s, and Perry has expressed zero concern for the 6.3 million uninsured Texans for whom capitalist competition has failed to lower the cost of health care. Indeed, the Times observes that the sudden distaste for rapacious private equity firms is “incongruous for a party that is traditionally unapologetic about its embrace of corporate wealth creation.” It’s not just incongruous; it’s deeply hypocritical. Romney’s defense — that “our approach was to try to build a business. We were not always successful” — could be seen as simplistic, but it’s also the truth. Some of the companies that failed under Bain, like GS Technologies, manufactured outdated products for an industry quickly moving overseas. Debt may have hasted GS’s demise, or made the bankruptcy harder on workers, but it’s unrealistic to lay all the blame on Bain.

Companies are started for one goal: to make money. Even the AP, in an article generally critical of Romney’s record, allows that, “like any venture capital company, Bain’s main purpose was to generate profits for investors, not to create jobs.” Creating jobs and providing workers with an income are worthy side effects, but they are nevertheless side effects. To think differently, to assume some sort of “corporate conscience” that moves businesses to act against their own best interests, is to delude oneself. As a liberal, I find that fact to be one of the strongest arguments for a social safety net: the free market is not going to care for the elderly or the poor, so the government must. Faulting Romney for cutting jobs when his mission at Bain was to generate income is like complaining that the latest superhero movie is short on character development. “The Incredible Hulk” was never meant to delve into the psyche of its meathead protagonist, and a reviewer who pretends otherwise is missing the point of the movie.

Granted, Romney brought some of this trouble upon himself by asserting, repeatedly and shamelessly, that he created 100,000 jobs. It’s a claim that his campaign has failed to back up with documentation, and which the AP says “doesn’t withstand scrutiny.” Candidate Romney is trying to have it both ways, when voters — and opponents — are smart enough to know that being a successful businessman is not necessarily the same as being a job creator. The way Romney describes his career may be part of the problem. The Post’s Ezra Klein writes that “he’s framed the success of his tenure at Bain around job creation rather than wealth creation — and Bain, as many of its actions and former employees will testify, was not in the job creation business.” In Klein’s opinion, it would have been better for Romney to paint “himself as the guy who understood the creative destruction inherent in capitalism and thus understood how the modern economy worked.” But Romney has thus far been unable to turn the negatives (or perhaps simply the realities) of private equity into a selling point. Given today’s economy, in which voters are less apt to take a nuanced view of the destruction, no matter how creative, that cost them their jobs, it just may not be feasible to spin layoffs and outsourcing into an accomplishment.

Romney also has habit of making tone-deaf remarks, from his gleeful announcement that “corporations are people” to the latest declaration that “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” Neither statement is quite so laughable when put into context, but a man who has been running for president since 2007 should know that opposition campaigns aren’t big on context. Gingrich and Perry, to say nothing of the DNC, didn’t feel compelled to add that, by “people,” Romney was talking about underperforming health insurance companies, not factory workers or secretaries. New York Magazine’s John Heilemann remarked during an MSNBC appearance that “Someone said, ‘You could hear David Axelrod’s tail wagging.’” Mainstream media, hungry for sound bytes, hardly performed any better: The AP article detailing Romney’s “missteps” neglected to provide any context for the quotation until halfway through the story, leaving “I like being able to fire people” unexplained for twelve paragraphs as the reporter digressed about Rick Santorum’s chances in New Hampshire and Gingrich’s latest ad buy. As it ran in my local paper, the article didn’t print Romney’s statement in full until after the jump. Too bad for readers who neglected to turn to page A6. Of course, the AP hardly claimed the prize for Most Irresponsible Reporting; pundits and bloggers even left of center took particular delight in seeing Romney’s words twisted around, leading the Post’s Greg Sargent to write:

Let me go on record saying it would be misleading and unfair to clip the video in question in order to quote Romney this way: ‘I like being able to fire people.’ Of course, by Romney’s own standard of accuracy, clipping this down to “I like being able to fire people” is completely fair game. As you’ll recall, the Romney campaign boasted about their ad ripping Obama’s words out of context in order to show him saying it’s politically dangerous for him to talk about his economic record, when in fact he was quoting a McCain adviser saying this.

Romney’s rich-man gaffes — he attempts to convince voters that “I know what it’s like to worry whether you’re going to get fired,” and that “there were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip” — easily gain traction because voters believe they reveal something fundamental about the candidate: he just doesn’t get it. Romney’s notorious stiffness may not be directly attributable to his wealth, but his inability to connect with voters plays into the stereotype of the clueless millionaire. That perception is only reinforced when he looks for a dollar and finds only $100 bills in his wallet, or when he jokes at with job-seekers in Florida that “I’m also unemployed.” Matt Bai writes in the Times that “there is a real craft to negative campaigning. For an allegation to do real damage, it has to confirm some narrative about a candidate that voters already fear.” Bai believes the latest narrative, in which “Mr. Romney’s private equity firm routinely made money by buying struggling companies and shuttering their plants,” could undermine what Romney has touted as his biggest selling point: real-world business experience. To a lesser degree, the perception of the candidate as a cold-blooded job killer also “might bring to the surface an instinctive concern that he’s emotively challenged.”

Bai is probably correct in identifying Romney’s vulnerabilities. I can accept the fact that the business world is a cutthroat place where only the fittest companies survive, but it’s harder to justify the steep payouts that Bain extracted from failing companies. It’s one thing for Romney and his colleagues to make money off a company’s success; it’s quite another for them to siphon funds from an outfit sliding toward bankruptcy, especially if the collateral damage included employees’ retirement accounts. That said, I’m not sure private equity firms commit any greater crimes of conscience than, say, Bank of America, which awards its CEOs lavish pay packages while pruning its workforce by 30,000 people. Apple CEO Tim Cook is slated to receive $378 million in compensation (including stock options) this year, more than Mitt Romney earned over his entire career at Bain, but few people are whining about Apple’s record of shipping jobs overseas or producing the iPad in Chinese factories. Romney is no Bernie Madoff; he is not the worst of the worst by any stretch of the imagination. But is “not the worst” really good enough for the guy who could be the next president of the United States?

Well, consider the rest of the Republican field. Suddenly “not the worst” is looking a whole lot better.

Rightward March!

An editorial in today’s Times, “The Race to the Right,” says nothing revelatory yet is nevertheless a valuable (and disturbing) reminder of the GOP’s success in shifting the political center dramatically rightward. Policies once considered the bedrock of moderation — progressive taxation, the separation of church and state — are now branded as steps on the road to socialism. Republicans have managed to reframe previously routine negotiations as opportunities to ransom the country’s financial stability for ideological priorities: a “balanced-budget” amendment, the Keystone XL pipeline, even a provision preventing Washington, D.C., from using its local tax dollars to help fund abortions. Suddenly, the question is not whether to cut spending, but by how much. (Would the patient like his arm amputated, or would he prefer the arm and a leg?)

The Republican primaries are a microcosm of the GOP’s new world order. The Times writes: “Candidates often move to the ideological edges to win a primary, because that’s where the primary voters are, but the frenzied efforts of Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are particularly hard to watch.” Precisely because neither Romney nor Gingrich have the impeccable conservative credentials demanded by today’s Republican voters, “each has now adopted positions at the far end of the ideological spectrum.” Gingrich would send out the federal marshals to drag liberal judges before Congress to explain themselves, while Romney has maintained a drumbeat of falsehoods — Obama apologizes for America; Fannie and Freddie caused the financial crisis; Democrats favor “equal outcomes,” not equal opportunities — steady enough to make poor Paul Krugman reach for his blood-pressure medication.

The most interesting aspect of the Times editorial, however, is the observation that Gingrich and Romney have swung so far rightward because they “are competing with candidates like Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann who have much longer and more consistent conservative records.” On its face, this is an obvious statement; the presence of candidates who see sharia law as a looming menace and gay rights as a threat to religious freedom is bound to drive the conversation to the right. Yet neither Santorum nor Bachmann — to say nothing of Rick Perry, who thinks “there’s something wrong in America when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school” — poses a credible threat to the two frontrunners. Both are polling in the single digits, a fact all the more remarkable given Bachmann’s first-place finish in August’s Iowa Straw Poll. What is easy to forget is that a primary race, unlike a general election, is a multi-candidate field. Romney isn’t just trying to out-poll Gingrich; he’s trying to prevent Santorum and Bachmann from peeling off enough votes to become spoilers. Die-hard conservatives are already more likely to gravitate toward Gingrich, so Romney can’t risk a situation in which Santorum or Bachmann, both evangelical favorites and Tea Party darlings, plays Ralph Nader to Romney’s Al Gore. In a very real sense, Romney is competing with not only Santorum and Bachmann but Rick Perry, Ron Paul, Jon Huntsman (OK, maybe not Huntsman) and a potential Sarah Palin write-in as well. In the absence of this second tier of candidates, the two frontrunners could battle it out without being forced to throw red meat to the Tea Party. But because Iowa’s caucus-goers will be able to choose from an array of candidates who fall at every conceivable place on the conservative spectrum, Romney can’t rely on simply outdoing Newt Gingrich, whose ideological impurities include that moment on the couch with Nancy Pelosi and a $1.6 million payday from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

The losers in this breathless game of conservative one-upmanship are not necessarily primary voters. Despite polls that consistently register a high degree of dissatisfaction with the Republican field, voters and caucus-goers could hardly have a wider variety of candidates to choose from: Libertarians have Ron Paul and his quixotic battle to “End the Fed,” while the three people in New Hampshire who laughed at Jon Huntsman’s Nirvana reference can cast lonely votes for the motorcycle-riding, Mandarin-speaking moderate. The real losers will only emerge in November 2012, when the general election arrives and voters face a choice between Barack Obama and whichever rightward-charging panderer emerges from the Republican primaries. By then, the real losers will be the American people.