Month: September 2012

Casino Mogul Adelson who funded Newt Gingrich and now has promised another $100 million to Romney must be very pleased. He’s got the Republican candidate in his back pocket. Israeli peace with the Palestinian people? NEVER!  See also my previous comment on Adelson who shot down Ehud Olmert in 2008 when he suggested a negotiated peace settlement.

SECRET VIDEO: On Israel, Romney Trashes Two-State Solution

(Mother Jones) – At the private fundraiser held May 17 where Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney candidly spoke about political strategy–noting that he saw half of the American electorate as freeloaders and “victims” who do not believe in personal responsibility–he discussed various foreign policy positions, sharing views that he does not express in public, including his belief that peace in the Middle East is not possible and a Palestinian state is not feasible.

FULL TEXT in article Mother Jones

Mother Jones has obtained video of Romney at this intimate dinner and has confirmed its authenticity. The event was held at the home of controversial private equity manager Marc Leder in Boca Raton, Florida, with tickets costing $50,000 a plate. During the freewheeling conversation, a donor asked Romney how the “Palestinian problem” can be solved. Romney immediately launched into a detailed reply, asserting that the Palestinians have “no interest whatsoever in establishing peace, and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish.”

Romney spoke of “the Palestinians” as a united bloc of one mindset, and he said: “I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say there’s just no way.”

Romney was indicating he did not believe in the peace process and, as president, would aim to postpone significant action: “[S]o what you do is, you say, you move things along the best way you can. You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem…and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.”

Marc Leder loves a wild bash – nude frolic in tycoon’s pool  

Meet the Press – Netanyahu decries ‘tinderbox of hatred’ plus transcript

Iran on brink of nuclear bomb in six-seven months: Netanyahu

(Reuters) – Netanyahu said that by mid-2013 Iran would be “90 percent of the way” toward enough enriched uranium for a weapon. He again urged the United States to spell out limits that Tehran must not cross if it is to avoid military action – something Obama has refused to do.

The unusually public dispute between close allies – coupled with Obama’s decision not to meet with Netanyahu later this month – has exposed a gaping U.S.-Israeli divide and stepped up pressure on the U.S. leader in the final stretch of a tight presidential election campaign.

It was the clearest marker Netanyahu has laid down so far on why he has become so strident in his push for Washington to confront Tehran with a strict ultimatum. At the same time, his approach could stoke further tensions with Obama, with whom he has had a notoriously testy relationship.

Netanyahu showed no signs of backing off and equated the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran with the Islamist fury that fueled attacks on U.S. embassies across the Muslim world last week and shocked many Americans.  

Maybe we really will look back on September 17 as the day that Mitt Romney definitively lost the presidential campaign.  If so, I think it’s less likely to be because of the secret video recording of Romney’s comments at a private fundraiser at the Boca Raton estate of hedge fund manger Marc Leder than it is the hastily called and poorly executed Romney press conference at the end of the day.

To recap:  At 4 pm Eastern time, Mother Jones’ David Corn reported on (and vouched for the authenticity of) the video in which, among other things, Romney said:

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.”

Campaign reporters and analysts immediately jumped on the story, focusing on Romney’s “47 percent” comments.  (MSNBC’s Ed Schultz played the tape at least four times during his hour-long show, starting at 8 pm Eastern last night.)  But that was just the lede of Corn’s story.   Corn wrote another 10-12 paragraphs and embedded four additional clips of Romney speaking at the fundraiser, and ended the story with a bold print teaser:  “COMING SOON: More from the secret Romney video”.

The Romney campaign brain trust (already reeling from a Politico story the night before citing chapter and verse of the campaign’s missteps and dissension) decided to send the candidate out for a hastily called 10 pm (ET) press conference to try to quell the rising storm.

At the press conference, Gov. Romney took a grand total of…3 questions, responding only to the “47 percent” remarks before walking off the stage, looking pale and shaken.  (If you think I’m overstating how bad Romney looked, watch the video here and decide for yourself.)

But the worst moment of the day came not quite halfway through Romney’s 4 minute press conference when Romney—without prompting from the assembled reporters said, “We don’t even have the question given the snippet there, nor the full response, and I hope the person who has the video would put out the full material…”.  (Starting at 1:44 of this clip.)

Two things:

   
1. By the time Romney went out to give his press conference, a longer video excerpt that included the question had been released, and broadcast repeatedly on cable news shows.  That’s just poor staff work to send a candidate out to the wolves without knowing the full extent of the damage.  If the news is bad enough that it requires an emergency late night press conference with the candidate, then it’s bad enough to sit the candidate down for 30 minutes so he can watch and digest all of the damaging videotape that’s in heavy rotation on cable news.

   

2. If you’ve spent the past two decades in the political spotlight (starting with running against Ted Kennedy in the most high-profile Senate race of 1994, heading the Salt Lake City Olympics, governing a state whose capital is in a top 10 media market, and spending the past 8 years running for president), then you don’t throw down challenges to unknown opponents who are damaging your campaign.

“I hope the person who has the video would put out the full material…”???!!!

First, there are already at least four more damaging clips that the campaign media hasn’t begun to digest.  (Remember that Corn’s story wasn’t published until 4 pm ET yesterday.)  Second, unless the Romney campaign in in the habit of videotaping all of the candidate’s closed-door events, there’s no way Gov. Romney knows what else is on that videotape.

This could be Romney’s “Follow me around” moment.  And that’s why yesterday may have ended Romney’s chances of getting elected president.

Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/

I hope you have a great day today (and that our latest monsoon stops long enough for you to get out and enjoy it)!

There are so many ways I could approach Mitt Romney’s recently revealed secret speech. People will snark it to death. We can have hours of fun with this thing. If we’re feeling really mischievous, we can even torture it a little bit before we kill it, like a cat playing with a shrew. But I want to be serious for a moment. Will it matter?

The first thing that came to mind when I read the transcript was Obama’s famous comments about people clinging to their guns and their religion. Those comments were also made at a private fundraiser. And I thought to myself that the “clinging” comments must not have hurt too badly because Obama went on to win the nomination and the presidency. But when I thought a little harder, I changed my mind. Obama had already won the nomination from a statistical point of view by the time the “clinging” comments became public. By the time November came along, not only were those comments old news, but the financial sector had collapsed. Obama overcame those comments but they still exacted a price. Even today, I’d argue that people wouldn’t so readily buy the idea that Obama has a secret plan to take away their guns if he hadn’t secretly expressed a degree of disdain for gun owners. And people might not so readily suspect that he isn’t a Christian if he hadn’t secretly disparaged people who cling to their religion.

In any case, I believe that Obama’s comments hurt him and that he is still paying a small price for them. People don’t like to be psychoanalyzed by egghead Harvard lawyers and they don’t like to be disrespected. And that’s precisely why Romney’s comments will hurt him. And I suspect the damage will be greater in this case for several reasons.

First, as indelicate as Obama’s comments were, he was trying to explain to the Napa Valley Chablis Set why people in the Rust Belt feel alienated and pissed off. He was trying to induce empathy, not disdain. His intent, as opposed to his effect, was absolutely not to talk down to or make fun of the religious gun owners of Pennsylvania. He was saying that their communities have been destroyed by deindustrialization. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, was saying that everyone who voted for Obama in 2008 is just looking for a handout from the government and refuses to take any personal responsibility for their own lives. He was talking down to and making fun of the 53% of the people who put Obama in office.

Which leads to the second problem. Elsewhere in the speech, Mitt Romney makes the point that the only undecided people in the country are people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and are disappointed. They still like Barack Obama. They don’t necessarily regret voting for him. And they are seriously considering voting for him again. That is why, Mitt Romney explains to his audience, it doesn’t do him any good to attack Obama personally or repeat a bunch of Tea Party lines about birth certificates or Marxism or whatever. If he tries to make people feel stupid for voting for Obama, they’ll just get defensive. If he’s attacks him unfairly, they’ll just get protective. Romney bases this opinion on careful research about undecided voters.

And the problem is that these are precisely the people who he just insulted. It’s true that he tried a create a special carve-out for the people who voted for Obama and are not sure that they want to do so again. But there are still two problems. First, he insulted all Obama voters, whether he wants to gift retroactive immunities or not. Second, he insulted undecided voters, too.

He said, “What I have to do is convince the 5-10% of independents, who are in the middle, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not.”

The irony is that the millionaire attendees of this secret speech should have gotten up and left right there, since it was obvious that Romney was not going to emotionally connect with these “thoughtful” independents and make them like him more than the president. But, regardless, Romney basically said that the voters he is after are voting on the basis of their emotions, not their reasoning capabilities. And he made the point more explicit later on when he explained why he isn’t discussing his policy goals.

“Well, I wrote a book that lays out my view for what has to happen in the country, and people who are fascinated by policy will read the book. We have a website that lays out white papers on a whole series of issues that I care about. I have to tell you, I don’t think this will have a significant impact on my electability. I wish it did. I think our ads will have a much bigger impact. I think the debates will have a big impact….My dad used to say, “Being right early is not good in politics.” And in a setting like this, a highly intellectual subject—discussion on a whole series of important topics typically doesn’t win elections. And there are, there are, there are—for instance, this president won because of “hope and change.””

We can now safely predict that Romney will not be treating the debates as an opportunity to talk about a “whole series of important topics” because he doesn’t believe that that is what wins elections.

Even if he is right about that, his comments are contemptuous of the American voter, and especially the undecided voter. He believes they will make their decision emotionally based on trivialities like how much they like the candidates and how they respond to being saturation-bombed with substance-free advertisements.

So, Romney’s comments are worse than Obama’s were because the offense isn’t inadvertent. Romney has real contempt for undecided voters and anyone who voted for Obama in 2008 or who plans to vote for him in 2012. Obama had empathy for the people he was talking about. Romney’s comments also offend a much wider percentage of the voting public than Obama’s did. Romney insulted the key demographic that he needs to win, while Obama insulted a demographic he ultimately didn’t (and doesn’t) need.

But, worst of all for the Mitt-Man, Obama’s comments were revealed in April, and Romney’s were revealed in mid-September. People will still be talking about Romney’s comments when early voting starts just a few weeks from now.

So, will these comments matter? You bet your ass they will. Romney just had an atom bomb dropped on his campaign.

And, remember, today was supposed to be the launch date for Romney 3.0. He was going to reset his campaign and go negative on the president. All his research said that going negative would drive away the only undecided voters in the country, but his base was crumbling and he had to do something. Instead, he had something done to him. Without even wanting to, he just went negative on the only people in the country who might have still made him president.

Apparently Kos is a bit put out that his troll hunters blew it.  That a bit of news gold was dropped in their laps and was quickly shoved down some memory hole.

Odd considering how so many were taken in by “The Nephew” who seemed highly questionable to me.  Odd that they have yet to learn the first rule about suspected trolls; don’t feed them.  Without reinforcement, they get frustrated and either quickly flame out or move on.  That sort of patience and flexibility requires a liberal mind.  

The dKos community also missed out on breaking the Gannon/Guckert story.  So many on the site were doing solid and good data collection on the guy — but the threads quickly became so long and filled with unnecessary comments that a key tip uncovered in the first two or three days was overlooked.  Then a second one was consciously rejected as too unseemly because it required checking out porn sites.  Leaving it to Aravosis to find and break that part of the story.  Sadly, it mostly died after that without getting a reveal on the full story.

Why do I make these comments here instead of dKos?  After ten years, the troll hunters took me down.

   

Margaret Sullivan, NYT Public Editor speaks about what’s wrong with “fair and balanced” journalism.

IN journalism, as in life, balance sounds like an unassailably good thing.

But while balance may be necessary to mediating a dispute between teenage siblings, a different kind of balance — some call it “false equivalency” — has come under increasing fire. The firing squad is the public: readers and viewers who rely on accurate news reporting to make them informed citizens.

Simply put, false balance is the journalistic practice of giving equal weight to both sides of a story, regardless of an established truth on one side. And many people are fed up with it. They don’t want to hear lies or half-truths given credence on one side, and shot down on the other. They want some real answers.

To which I say, where were you or your predecessors when Judith Miller was your stenographer for Dick Cheney and the rest of the Bush White House Neocons?

Or to put in in terms even New York Times Editors can understand:

Duh!

Especially since they are still doing the false equivalency rag!

In his article, which led last Monday’s paper, the national reporter Ethan Bronner made every effort to provide balance. Some readers say the piece, in so doing, wrongly suggested that there was enough voter fraud to justify strict voter identification requirements — rules that some Democrats believe amount to vote suppression. Ben Somberg of the Center for Progressive Reform said The Times itself had established in multiple stories that there was little evidence of voter fraud.

The rest of Sullivan’s op-ed piece, believe it or not, goes to great lengths to say that while “balanced” journalism is a bad thing, and the rejection of “false equivalency” is a good thing, it’s hard to do because gosh we we have deadlines, and people just don’t get the pressure we are under “in an election year.” Really. It reads like an Onion article.

Here is my favorite paragraph in the whole article:

The Times does not have written guidelines for reporters on false balance. “How could you, since every situation is different?” Mr. Corbett said.

Yes, how could you have guidelines for reporters to help them understand when not to help one side of an “issue” spread lies to mislead the public even when they know the other side has facts to support their position? The horror!

See, even when the so-called liberal elites at the NY Times claim they understand “false equivalency” in journalism is a bad thing they keep excusing themselves for continuing to practice it. Over and over again. To paraphrase a former President you might remember, Okay Ms. Sullivan, you covered your ass. Too bad you’re so obvious about it.

…And if you thought the Romney campaign would be allowed to reset their campaign in a vacuum, you were mistaken. Romney has been knocked not just off-message but off the Earth’s axis by videos obtained by Mother Jones. Here is the one that will prove most damning:

In the interest of starting the conversation about this new development, I’ll just post the video and leave my analysis for later.

Long Island Representative Peter King may not care about fact checking, but I have a different question. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that President Obama did start his presidency with a global Apology Tour. Isn’t that standard public relations? After British Petroleum leaked a metric gigaton of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, didn’t they change executives and tell everyone that they were sorry? George W. Bush’s presidency was a global disaster that we are still struggling to recover from. Isn’t pretty much everyone, from the foreclosed family in Reno to the Tsonga tribesmen of Mozambique, entitled to a profuse and protracted apology? I mean, can we get serious for a moment? George W. Bush was so bad that his actual existence was airbrushed out of the last two Republican political conventions, one of which occurred while he was still in office!

So, if Obama perhaps suggested that some mistakes might have been made, is that really anything that the world didn’t already know? Isn’t the problem more that he didn’t say we’re sorry and he didn’t apologize on our behalf rather than that he did?

Rep. Peter King thinks that it’s wrong to apologize to people even if they are very deserving of an apology because it shows weakness and invites attack. But show me an example of this being true in any area of daily life. Let’s say that you accidentally cut someone off with your car or you mistakenly step on their shoe or you absent-mindedly slam a door in their face. Are you more or less likely to be attacked for those actions if you immediately and profusely apologize?

While there are some predators in the world who are on the prowl for someone weak who they can attack, it is far more common that conflicts are instigated. You can be a very peaceful person, but if someone bumps into you and then doesn’t even give you the courtesy of an apology, you’re probably going to get pretty annoyed with that person. Setting up Gitmo, legalizing torture, invading and occupying Iraq under false pretenses, and destroying the global economy were quite a bit worse than merely bumping into someone. Doing stuff like that makes people very angry, and some of them will want to make you feel some of the same pain that you’ve dished out. This is especially true if you refuse to acknowledge that you did anything wrong or harmed anyone in the process.

The truth is that Obama did not do an Apology Tour. He probably should have.

My theory on the Romney campaign is that they developed bad habits during the primaries that they found it impossible to kick when the general election season started. I don’t mean the record they compiled, because that created a different set of problems. The Etch A Sketch issue was particularly hard for a candidate known for changing his positions over time. What I am talking about is a strategy of caution. Now we can put a face on it:

Inside the Romney campaign, [Stuart] Stevens has preached a gospel of caution and consistency: Keep the candidate tightly focused on a bad economy and a worse president. In an interview last year with Robert Draper for The New York Times Magazine, Stevens explained his theory of the case this way: Philadelphia Eagles quarterback “Michael Vick’s not a real good pocket guy … So don’t tell him he can’t roll out. Try to make him the best rollout guy that’s ever played.”

A growing number of conservatives are blaming Stevens for advocating a campaign of caution, one that puts all the emphasis not on how good Romney could be but how bad Obama is.

That excerpt refers to the general election campaign, but it is basically the strategy that Romney used to win the primaries. Although Romney chose a couple of areas, like immigration, where he was willing to stake out turf on the far-right, his main goal during the primaries was simply to avoid offending anyone. He had the name recognition and the money, and he was the most plausible candidate for the presidency among a platoon of misfits. All he had to do is avoid alienating the base of the party and maintain decent press coverage, and he’d win by default.

It was basically the four-corner offense used by North Carolina’s legendary basketball coach Dean Smith. Get the lead and then play keep-away with the ball. The tactic was so effective (and boring) that college basketball instituted a shot clock to eliminate it.

Maybe it is because the Romney campaign lives in a right-wing media bubble, but they seem to have calculated that the same strategy would work against the incumbent president. The idea is to deny your opponent any ammunition. Don’t give him your tax returns. Don’t lay out any specifics in your plans. Keep the ball away and talk about the economy.

The problem is that the campaign message has been empty, and the candidate has looked hollow. People formed negative impressions of Romney because of his lack of disclosure and specificity. It looked slippery and dishonest. He obviously has something to hide. He isn’t being frank with people.

And it turned out that the strategy didn’t work. They tried to flesh out the candidate with humanizing anecdotes during the Republican National Convention, but the effort was largely a failure. Most of the speakers didn’t even want to mention Mitt Romney, except in the most perfunctory way. It turned out that Romney’s hollow campaign had failed to win the loyalty and enthusiasm of other Republican leaders.

So, post-convention, the Romney campaign has decided that they need to change course and do more to motivate the base. Instead of arguing that the president is a good man who is doing a bad job, as they did at the convention, they now will argue that he’s a god-hating socialist who celebrates when State Department officials are attacked or killed.

In heavily-Evangelical Sioux County, Iowa, Romney’s introductory speakers — including conservative Rep. Steve King — sermonized at length about keeping Christian values, and vouched for his love of Jesus Christ. In Virginia Beach, he spoke to a flag-waving crowd of veterans and military families — appearing alongside televangelist Pat Robertson — and built his remarks around patriotism, defense spending, and keeping God on the national currency…

…Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist and ad-man, said the case against Obama’s record will be made on the airwaves by the campaign and outside Republican groups — and it no longer needs Romney as a daily spokesman.

“On the outside, here’s what going to happen: we’re going to nuke Barack Obama into radioactive sludge in the swing states with 3000-4000 points of TV in September,” Wilson said. “Crossroads and Restore [two Republican SuperPACs] will do the same. It’s going to be hitting in concert with the terrible economic news, and it’ll strike a chord.”

Most people remember McCain’s campaign (at least, post-Palin) as particularly nasty but, on the right, they think that McCain pulled too many punches and didn’t go after Obama for being some kind of secret Marxist, Kenyan, Socialist, Muslim. Clearly, arguing that he liked to pal around with terrorists wasn’t sufficient. But, by setting some limits to how far he would go, John McCain maintained a little dignity in defeat. It now appears that Mitt Romney (and the outside groups) have no intention of hoarding their dignity.

As for specifics, it looks like Romney will try to do something to satisfy his critics, but the truth is that he can’t disclose his tax returns or talk about his tax plan or his Medicare plan because the specifics would poll worse than a case of genital warts. People on the right thought that his selection of Paul Ryan meant that he was going to try to make an effort to convince the American people that they’d be better off with genital warts, but even Romney isn’t that stupid.

What Romney will do is talk about goals, like energy independence and deficit reduction and fairer trade relations with China, but most of the specifics will still be lacking, or based on fantasy math.

Part of Romney’s problem is that he is kind of a dick and no one likes him. Part of his problem is that he had to commit to a bunch of stupidity to win the nomination. But part of his problem is that he thought the strategy he used to beat Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain was going to be sufficient to beat Barack Obama. That was delusional.

The Romney campaign has done some internal soul-searching after realizing that they were on a trajectory for certain defeat. This week, they are prepared to roll out a forward-looking message that focuses on a five-point plan, including a promise of energy independence by 2020 and the creation of 12 million new jobs. Unfortunately for them, they ran into massive self-inflicted headwinds and articles about a campaign in disarray before they could even launch their reboot. The primary source for this is an article published last night in Politico that airs a tremendous amount of internal discord and bickering. Most of the unhappiness is directed at Romney’s top strategist, Stuart Stevens, but most of the criticism rubs off directly on the candidate and his decision-making.

So, before we even get a glimpse of the Obama campaign’s plans for the week, we see the Romney campaign bogged down in a tar pit of their own making. President Obama will announce today that he’s taking a complaint about China to the World Trade Organization, arguing that state subsidies to their auto industry create an unfair trade advantage. The announcement will be made in Ohio, where it is certain to receive an enthusiastic response.

The move on China is preemptive, as getting tough on China is one spoke in Romney’s five-part wheel:

The Romney campaign has prepared a series of ads, to air in battleground states, arguing that Romney’s plan would create 12 million jobs. Aides said the ads will highlight his trade policies to crack down on China, his plans to help small businesses grow and his specific plan to cut the spiraling federal deficit.

Thus, this is a case of Team Obama cutting off Team Romney at the pass. However, the first focus for Romney is supposed to be the national debt.

The national debt will be a key focus early this week. Romney and his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, will highlight the debt burden that mothers and grandmothers will pass onto their children and grandchildren — an issue advisers think can help Romney close the gap with Obama among women voters. The campaign also plans to stage a ticking electronic debt clock at campaign rallies, an aide said.

I don’t know how the Obama campaign plans to counter that particular message, but with Romney’s camp preoccupied with putting out self-set office fires, they may not need to.