I’m not going to say that Mark Halperin did a great job interviewing Mitt Romney, but he wasn’t terrible. And I thought Mitt Romney did a very good job answering his questions, even if I think his answers are based on magical thinking and lies. If doing interviews with Mark Halperin were all Mitt Romney had to do, he might actually win this thing.
What do you think?
All I noticed was the sweat on his upper lip– so I will defer to your analysis.
Halperin is in the process of laying the groundwork for his primary task of establishing Romney as a credible, and indeed evntually a superior candidate whose ideas make more sense than Obama’s. He’s long been a rightwinger masquerading as a credible journalist and the way MSNBC fawns over him has gone to his head.
I’d figure by the end of July the daytime gang of gasbaggers at MSNBC will be presenting Romney as a more serious and qualified candidate and they’ll be sowing seeds of doubt about Obama.
Note that I’m not a particular fan of Obama but he is qualified both intellectually and temperamentally and communicatively for the presidency. Romney is not qualified by any of those or any other measures.
Romney has more money than God. His friends have more money than him.
You sound as if there were other qualifications….
you are absolutely on point. Halperin is nothing but a right-wing lap dog.
Wake me when Romney faces an interviewer who asks tougher questions than Halperin. Questions about Irish setters and boarding school days don’t count.
I’m sorry. I just can’t stomach Mark Halperin. The fact that he is looked on as some kind of credible voice shows just how dysfunctional the pundit machine is these days.
I’m assuming that Halperin didn’t call him a dick.
You don’t get to be a Village Elder by calling Republicans dicks.
I thought Mitt Romney did a very good job answering his questions, even if I think his answers are based on magical thinking and lies.
I like Jonathan Chait’s take: Romney Can’t Explain What He Learned in Business.
Well, I saw that and expected a more inept answer. But he said this:
Read more:
I think that’s actually a good answer. He knows why jobs leave America and why they come to America, and he’ll calibrate things appropriately. I don’t see why that’s being mocked as a non-answer.
When asked to be more specific about what he learned at Bain that would relevant, he said this:
Providing low energy costs makes manufacturing more attractive. It’s a responsive answer even if the cause and effect he’s pushing is very simplistic and misleading.
I thought he gave good answers to the questions from a political point of view. I also though Halperin did a decent job of pushing him to address the Bain question. Not great, but decent.
BooMan, I don’t see either of those answers you quoted as being particularly insightful or substantive. They might have some relevance if he’d explain how the rightwing economic insanity agenda supported his absurd claims of being able to do the things he says he’d do, but even there the rhetoric and the reality ofhis actualpositions are so dissonant from each other there’s no correlation whatsoever.
I forget who it was who said about Gingrich that he sounded like what a lot of people think a smart person sounds like, and in the case of this interview I think that characterizes Romney’s rhetoric accurately.
Process-wise, I agree that some of Romney’s replies will be politically effective, (despite the absurdity and outright falseness of his assertions) and that’s why the DC punditocracy will pander to him. But that unfortunate phenomenon says more about the failures of the pundit class than it does about Romney’s qualifications, judgment and putative competence related to national governance.
Well, they aren’t all that insightful, but they do have a bit of substance.
I mean, the context is job creation. He’s saying that he has witnessed first-hand what kind of decisions CEO’s make when deciding whether to locate in the USA or elsewhere. Among those considerations are energy costs. He goes on to mention others, like health care costs, taxes, regulations, and labor laws.
Yes, this is Republican boilerplate, but he’s saying that he believes these things because he learned them from close experience. And, he’s saying that Obama didn’t learn these things because he never held a job in his life. (Not true, but, hey, he’s rolling).
I just don’t see this is a bad performance by Romney. What do people expect him to say?
BooMan, I was a small business owner with employees for many years and I learned all those things pretty much in the first few months of operation. It’s sort of automatic, requiring no special perceptual abilities.
Do I believe this makes me more qualified to opine responsibly, or advocate for and craft policies for enhancing the ability of the country to prosper than someone who has never owned and operated their own business? Of course not. Anyone with the basic ability to review and understand simple economic data can come to understand these basics with no trouble at all.
As for what I’d like to hear Romney address, presuming he’d ever put himself in a position where he’d be asked this question, (and pressed on it after he first tries to avoid answering), I’d want to hear him explain how eviscerating the social infrastructure of the country via the Ryan budget plan and attacks on health care availability and education and such can possibly be good for the business community.
In simply practical terms, disenfranchising and impoverishing the vast majority of citizens, (especially on the scale Romney and the punitive GOP zealots are pushing is bad for businesses. If Romney has a ‘coherent’ argument to make against this view I want to hear it.
Doesn’t it just boil down to their belief that if we do those things that the Free Market Fairy will magically appear and bring ponies for everyone? I don’t think, at its core, that it goes any deeper than that.
Richard, No I don’t think that’s it. Romney and the so-called ‘conservative’ economic ideologues don’t want ‘magic ponies for everyone’. They only want magic ponies for themselves because they feel they deserve them and the rest of the population, (‘moochers and losers’ as Ayn Rand said), does not.
Also, at the heart of rightwing economic dogma is the Malthusian idea that ‘There aren’t enough resources to sustain the lives and livlihoods of everyone’. So the more help the poor and disadvantaged and dispossessed receive the worse it is for everyone and the bigger the threat to their own supremacy at the top of the wealth and influence pyramid.
Romney’s own “Let the Auto Industry Fail” remark almost perfectly resonates with and echoes the “don’t help the poor too much so enough of them die off to prevent the rest of us grandees from suffering’ concept.
Well, even though I disagree with him, he’s argue two things.
The first is a bit non-responsive, but it goes like this: if we don’t tackle the structural deficit in a very aggressive way, the economy is going to tank. So, it’s not a choice between the status quo and a future where people get less government services and benefits. The future is grim either way, but it will be better if we’re proactive about it.
Second, that as long as cuts are implemented slowly and not in a sudden shock, they won’t harm the recovery. And freeing up capital and lowering overhead will lead to more businesses, higher profits, and lower unemployment.
And, you know, lowering overhead means lower energy costs, less powerful unions, fewer regulations, less paperwork, and lower taxes.
So, that’s the idea.
It’s about 70% bullshit, 10% delusion, and 10% who-gives-a-crap about-the-climate/income disparity/the middle class.
The remaining 10% isn’t disputed by Obama or any mainstream Democrats.
I think Romney has made the 2 assertions you reference, as have numerous other conservative econ types and their BlueDog brethren.
I do not, however, see anywhere that Romney or the others have actually made cogent arguments in support of those views.
If this is the kind of softball interviews that Romney will be allowed to give to the press and being praised, then I am no linfer as optimistic as some seem to be that Obama will win this thing handily.
Isnt it the job of the press to provide the citizenry with information by if not asking hard hitting questions by at least following up obvious suspect answers and not just letting th interviewee say whatever nonsense they want without any challenges to lies with ya know actual facts???
So Romneys strategy is the Palin strategy, i.e. only talking to RW media and “friendly” press, with enough of a handjob to appease the MSM idiots like ChuckTodd, Halperin, etc…