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The tale of Two
Romneys There is the
family-values Christian and there is the only
presidential candidate ever to have a Swiss bank
account. The Republican candidate's tax payments,
moreover, are shrouded in mystery. So Barack Obama
should have an easy win. Right? Not necessarily,
argues J BROOKS SPECTOR.
In
America right now it's summertime but, contrary to
what George Gershwin said, the living has not been
particularly easy for many people. The economy
remains in the doldrums, with persistent
unemployment well over 8% in many states (although
a state like North Dakota has unemployment about
three points
below the national
average). A tremendous heatwave, enveloping nearly
the entire country, together with some
astonishingly powerful summer storms, has made
life miserable for millions in the past two weeks.
To make things worse, power grids were off-line
for days on end in the midst of this heatwave -
perhaps most persistently and severely in the city
of Washington and its surrounding suburbs,
affecting millions.
For many, perhaps
most, people, it's just been too darn hot to make
too much time for politics. In any case, July is
usually a near-sacred time for vacations in
America - even if funds are very tight for many
households. As a result, not paying too much
attention to the national election bearing down on
the country in four months' time is part of a
national mental health break - at least until the
party conventions roll in at the end of August and
beginning of September.
Even the two
presidential candidates are taking vacations -
albeit mingled with some generous dollops of
close-up, "retail politics" - and fundraisers,
always the fundraisers, wherever money can be
raised. Barack Obama has been active in strongly
Democratic California, Illinois and New York (to
tap - or try to - traditional supporters from the
entertainment and IT spheres).
Meanwhile,
Mitt Romney has been at the summer-holiday
gathering points for the many of the wealthy such
as the Hamptons on Long Island, New York, for his
own fundraisers. (At one of these, a slick, pink
Ferrari apparently drew lots of media attention -
in place of the candidate.) Here and there, Romney
has also spent time at his New England waterside
home - including some well-publicised photos with
him piloting a high-powered motorboat across the
lake. (Note to senior Romney staff: being
photographed engaged in an elite, money-gobbling
sport may not have been the right photo op - just
ask John Kerry about his windsurfing adventure).
Meanwhile, when he has not been trying to
raise big bucks for the campaign, Obama has been
out and about on a multi-state, Midwestern,
battleground states, grassroots bus tour in a
behemoth of a Secret Service-blessed tour bus. The
Obama cavalcade has been stopping at truck stops,
restaurants and neighbourhood pubs to connect -
always connect - with that sometimes-mythic "real
America" for the ever-present TV cameras. The
point of this adventure for the Obama campaign, of
course, is to draw the sharpest possible contrast
between Obama as champion of the embattled middle
class and Romney's position as an avatar of the
unfeeling rich - the 98% versus the rest.
Defining one's opponent and thus seizing
the electoral narrative is the governing tactic in
what still shapes up to be a very close, very
hard-fought election in November. Besides the
policy arguments, this is behind the new Obama
proposal to let the temporary tax reduction for
people earning over $250,000/year lapse while
extending the reduction for everybody else.
Of course, by now, most US voters probably
think they have a pretty good idea of who Barack
Obama really is - except for maybe Donald Trump
and similar zanies who remain convinced he is
really a secret radical Muslim socialist who was
born in Kenya or Indonesia - but Mitt Romney's
portrait remains less clear for many. Is he really
the stereotypical unfeeling, rich guy with a sense
of "he can make a million so everyone else can
too", or is he a man with a strong (albeit "do it
on your own") work ethic, and a sense of personal
rectitude and religiously grounded virtue?
Well, if columnists and commentators like
Paul Krugman are anything to by, Romney is the
former. In his hotly debated and already
much-commented-upon Monday column in the New York
Times, Krugman measures Romney against his father,
the late George Romney, a Michigan governor and
automobile manufacturing executive, and the son
does not come off very well. And this is without
dredging up that old tale about how he treated the
family dog while the Romney clan went on a
self-drive vacation to Canada several decades ago,
or his changing policies on GLBT issues, abortion,
and his support for medical insurance mandates (as
governor of Massachusetts) - until he announced
for the presidency.
Writing about Romney's
personal financial history, Krugman argues that
"the contrast between George Romney and his son
Mitt - a contrast both in their business careers
and in their willingness to come clean about their
financial affairs - dramatically illustrates how
America has changed" since George Romney ran for
the Republican nomination in 1968. The columnist
compares Romney the elder's career in
manufacturing, innovating new products -
well-engineered compact cars - that gave an
American company its best years - before its
fortunes finally went sour after Romney left the
company. Yes, George Romney became a wealthy man
by virtue of his efforts, but over a decade's
worth of tax records, released when he became a
presidential candidate, show he paid an average of
37% of his income in taxes.
Krugman
compares this to Mitt Romney's business career at
Bain Capital - the leveraged buyout firm he helped
found - and then ran for many years. As the
columnist wrote: "Unlike his father, however, Mr
Romney didn't get rich by producing things people
wanted to buy; he made his fortune through
financial engineering that seems in many cases to
have left workers worse off, and in some cases
driven companies into bankruptcy." Moreover,
Krugman notes, Mitt has largely kept his personal
finances under cover - with his taxes paid at the
14% rate in the one-year's worth of full tax
returns he's actually released so far.
Putting in the knife just a bit deeper,
Krugman writes: "Put it this way: Has there ever
before been a major presidential candidate who had
a multimillion-dollar Swiss bank account, plus
tens of millions invested in the Cayman Islands,
famed as a tax haven?" Krugman adds that "there
are potentially legitimate reasons for parking
large sums of money in overseas tax havens. But we
don't know which if any of those legitimate
reasons apply in Mr Romney's case - because he has
refused to release any details about his finances.
This refusal to come clean suggests that he and
his advisers believe that voters would be less
likely to support him if they knew the truth about
his investments."
Over the weekend,
Democratic Party surrogates for Obama also took to
the political talk TV shows to make this same set
of points - pointedly. As Illinois Democratic
senator Dick Durbin told the viewers of CBS'
programme Face the Nation, Romney is "the first
and only candidate for the president of the United
States with a Swiss bank account, with tax
shelters, with tax avoidance schemes that involve
so many foreign countries." Sounds pretty
sinister, that.
For his part, Krugman then
ties this closeted personal financial history to
the Romney economic policy agenda, arguing the
only constant in Romney's proposed policies
"involves cutting tax rates on the very rich…."
Calling for Romney to divulge his real financial
situation, Krugman concludes "unless he does
reveal the truth about his investments, we can
only assume that he's hiding something seriously
damaging".
While there clearly will be no
successful effort to argue Romney is ethically
damaged goods broadly speaking - his personal
religious history, his record with the Salt Lake
City Olympics, the stalwart family-man saga would
all argue against those views. But for Democrats,
clearly, the point is to argue he is too much "the
now you see it now you don't" financier who has
unconsciously been cavalier with the lives of
hard-working men and women. And this will come as
Democrats also try to pin on him the label of
intellectual father, while governor of
Massachusetts, of Obamacare - a dilemma for a
candidate like Romney who has taken a stance in
opposition to the law even after the Supreme Court
rendered its judgment recently.
Taken
together with what is already known about Romney's
personal circumstances and his wealth - that auto
elevator in the California home to accommodate all
those Cadillacs, the hob-knobbing with the rich,
the general air of lese-majesty that emanates from
too many of his public pronouncements, and the
claim that growing a business is the real secret
of being president, even if it's a business that
ended up outsourcing jobs to China - the Democrats
would seem to have an easy meal of it, especially
if they can shape the contest into a battle over
economic equity and fairness.
Imagine, for
example, what Harry Truman, Bill Clinton or even
John Kennedy would have made of such evidence and
their reach-backs to the history of the Democratic
Party as the party of the New Deal, the Fair Deal,
the New Frontier and "it's the economy, stupid".
But, as always, things are never quite
that simple in the real political world, as
opposed to an easier counterfactual one. Obama is
stuck with defending an economic recovery that
still seems to be on life-support, in the views of
many voters. For Obama, now, it is increasingly
hard to defend this record nearly four years after
assuming the presidency. And it will be
increasingly tough to argue it is still ole'
George W Bush's fault - even if many economists
would tend to agree with that point. The task
ahead, still, for the Obama team, then, is to
define Romney convincingly and permanently as the
archetype of an uncaring rich man whose personal
biases and circumstances infect his policy
prescriptions.
Or, as Chris Cillizza
argued in Monday's Washington Post: "At the core
of Obama's argument for re-election is that he
took over in 2009 at a time of massive upheaval,
with the country teetering on the verge of
economic collapse. 'What we didn't realise at the
time was we were going to be hit by the worst
economic crisis in our lifetimes,' Obama said last
week during a campaign swing in Ohio. 'And that's
been tough on a lot of folks'…. But in politics,
arguing a hypothetical that didn't wind up
happening is difficult. People struggle to imagine
how much worse things could be than they actually
were/are."
But Cillizza adds that the
second challenge for Obama is his administration's
present difficulties with the economy. "With the
unemployment rate holding steady above 8 percent
for the past three months - it was 8.2 percent in
June - and job creation stagnating during that
time as well, Obama must walk a fine line. He has
to acknowledge that things for lots of people
aren't better while also trying to suggest that
the policies he has put in place are - slowly but
surely - making things better, even if people
don't see it just yet." It has to be a finesse
that also has enormous, telling impact to make it
work. Translating this into actual campaign terms,
they need to turn the battle into a fight over
whose vision of the future is the better one -
rather than a judgment on what has happened so
far. On this point, Mark Penn, the longtime
Democratic strategist and advisor to Hillary
Rodham Clinton in her bid for the 2008
presidential nomination, says: "The most credible
argument is that he has the best path forward,
having successfully avoided economic Armageddon."
Celinda Lake, veteran Democratic Party
pollster, adds to this point: "In this economy,
Romney has to be disqualified" so that Obama can
be re-elected.
Going forward, Obama's task
is to turn the election away from being a
referendum on what has been accomplished under his
administration so far (and why a Republican
majority in the House of Representatives made that
litany such a skimpy list of accomplishments).
Then he has to transform the election into a
debate over which man - Ritchie Rich or Everyman's
representative - has the right principles and
personal qualities to lead the country - going
forward for the next four years.
By
contrast, Romney's task is, simpler. He has to
convince voters in the crucial battlegrounds -
states like Missouri, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado,
Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, and maybe
Pennsylvania - that he is just more competent than
the other guy, and that voters need to switch now.
DM
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article is run courtesy of Daily Maverick. To
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