The following article by Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
After he lost the 1992 presidential election to Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush reportedly confided that one of his major political problems was “the vision thing.”
The first President Bush did not appear to voters to have a sense of where he wanted to take the country. At every level of government, and especially President, voters want leaders with vision. And vision is just one more leadership quality that is noticeably absent in Mitt Romney — unless, of course, what you want is “rear view vision.”
In the four and a half decades I have consulted or managed election campaigns, one thing has become indisputably clear. Elections are not fundamentally decided by debates about issues, or economic policies, or ideologies. Voters choose between candidates — between living, breathing human beings. And they make those judgments in the same way we make judgments about whom we want as a boss, or a friend or a spouse. Voters evaluate a series of character qualities and decide who they want to be their leaders.
Don’t get me wrong. The economic situation, positions on issues and policies and ideologies definitely affect voter evaluation of these candidate leadership qualities. These questions help us decide who we believe is on our side, who is an effective leader, who is committed to principle rather than simply his or her own success. These are critical questions for voters. But in making their decisions, voters — and especially low-information swing voters — don’t generally make detailed analyses of policy positions — or parse candidate statements. They make their decisions based on judgments as to which candidate possesses these leadership qualities, and others that are often even more intuitive. Into the decision mix go qualities like who respects us, who has integrity, who is self-confident, who is likeable and makes an emotional connection, who inspires us — and who has a sense of vision.
In this fall’s election these more intuitive factors will play an especially important role in the voting decisions of the historically low number of remaining swing voters. Last week, New York Times reporter Rebecca Berg profiled these swing voters — noting that many are low-information voters who rarely follow politics. The Times story describes Curtis Napier, a 52-year-old, swing voter from Ohio who says he does not yet have enough information to decide what to do in November.
“Between working full time for a fabrication company and attending school part time for a degree in manufacturing engineering, he said consideration of the presidential election was an afterthought,” wrote Berg.
In 2008, Mr. Napier drew much of his information from the presidential debates, in which he says, ‘McCain seemed to be distracted most of the time when he talked, and Obama seemed to be an educated man who has focus.’
In the end, swing voters will make an intuitive judgment about which of the two presidential candidates they want to trust as their leader.
Why do voters care about vision? The great baseball player Yogi Berra used to say: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” Voters want leaders who know where they are taking us in the same way that you want a pilot who knows how to get to the correct airport.
And especially when it comes to presidents, voters want leaders who give them a sense that they understand the forces of history and change that will shape the future they are leading us into — the same way they want pilots who know what kind of weather lies ahead.
John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign centered around his vision for the future. Kennedy’s campaign themes: “A Time for Greatness” and “Leadership for the 60’s,” and “Getting America Moving Again” gave voters a sense that he had a clear vision for America’s future.
In 1996, Clinton’s attacks on Bob Dole for his lack of vision were devastating. In one commercial the Clinton campaign ran clips of Dole recounting how he had opposed Medicare, how he opposed the Department of Education and uttering his famous quote:
I’m not sure what everyone is looking for in a candidate for President. Maybe we shouldn’t have one at all, leave it vacant. But there’s going to be one, every country ought to have one, so we’re out here campaigning.
The spot concluded: “No Vision: Wrong in the Past, Wrong in the Future.”
Whether it involves the future of the middle class, or the earth’s environment, or national security, Mitt Romney is visionless.
Then again, what would you expect from a guy who spent his career focused only on the next quarter’s bottom line?
Romney seems clueless when it comes to the major forces that have affected the economic prospects of everyday Americans. He apparently never noticed that while per capita economic output (GDP) — and per capita productivity — have both steadily risen for the last twenty years, the incomes of everyday Americans have remained stagnant.
There is only one way to account for this phenomena: a tiny sliver of the population has siphoned off the fruits of that increased productivity for themselves. This is exactly what the economic data tells us is true. And that is what has left the middle class, and those who aspire to it, without the money in their pockets to buy the increasing volume of goods and services that have been generated by that increased productivity. The resulting stagnation, coupled with an orgy of reckless speculation on Wall Street, sent us tumbling off the worst economic cliff in 60 years.
But Romney’s prescription to improve the economy is to go back to exactly the same failed Bush era policies that lead to this disaster. Romney’s prescription: shower the top 2% with more tax breaks and they will allow some of that shower to trickle down to everyday people. And, of course, Romney wants to allow Wall Street to run wild. We tried that, just four short years ago. It didn’t work then, it won’t work now.
Month: August 2012
From TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore’s Washington Monthly post, “Who’s Really Threatening to Gut Welfare Reform?“
So the lies go on: yesterday the Romney/Ryan campaign put out a set of talking points commemorating the sixteenth anniversary of Bill Clinton’s signing of the 1996 welfare reform legislation by continuing to ignore Clinton’s own rebuke of their race-baiting, mendacious ads on the subject and repeating the lies all over again.
But Team Mitt stepped in at least one cow pie in the latest broadside: linking to a 2006 Clinton op-ed ruminating on the lessons of the original debate over welfare reform….
Read the whole post here.
The following comes from an e-blast by Chris Bowers, campaign director of Daily Kos:
Our fight against Pennsylvania’s voter ID law just got a huge boost. In less than 24 hours the Daily Kos community has raised $45,000 to run online ads to sign up thousands of volunteers who will make sure that everyone in this must-win swing state can still vote.
Our volunteers will be partnering with experienced organizers who know how to register voters, get them in compliance with voter ID laws, and then get them to the polls on Election Day. This is the roll-up-your-sleeves groundwork of phone calls, door knocking, data entry, and trips to the DMV that absolutely must be done in order to prevent the nation’s harshest voter ID law from having its intended effect.
We need your help to win this crucial fight against voter suppression. The more ads we can run, the more local volunteers we can sign up.
Please click here to contribute $3 to Daily Kos so we can run online ads to sign up thousands of volunteers who will make sure everyone in Pennsylvania can still vote.
Keep fighting,
Chris Bowers
Campaign Director, Daily Kos
It’s a measure of how extreme and radical the Republican party has become that one of progressives’ favorite centrist/false equivalency whipping boys, Thomas Friedman, now recognizes that the GOP leadership has gone starkers. Here’s Friedman, from his recent NYT column, “We Need a ‘Conservative’ Party“: “We are not going to make any progress on our biggest problems without a compromise between the center-right and center-left. But, for that, we need the center-right conservatives, not the radicals, to be running the G.O.P., as well as the center-left in the Democratic Party.” Better late than never.
Is it just me, or does this much-hyped, but poorly-reported and rather extreme outlier of a forecast smell a wee bit funky?
According to the latest AP-GfK poll, reported by AP, most Americans disagree with the above-noted forecast at this point: “Asked to predict the race’s outcome, 58 percent of adults say they expect Obama to be re-elected, whereas just 32 percent say he will be voted out of office.” The poll also gives Obama a 47-44 edge over Romney.
For some clear thinking about the problem of slack youth voter participation, I highly recommend Ann Beeson’s ‘Campaign Stops’ post, “Scared Straight — Into the Voting Booth” at the NYT. Beeson, senior fellow and lecturer at the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life at the University of Texas, explains: “Three causes are worth exploring. First of all, many young people just don’t see the connection between voting and their commitment to improve their communities, advocate for a cause, or change the world. Secondly, there are very real grounds for political cynicism. And finally, let’s face it, civic engagement can be a snore.” She’s also got some interesting remedies the Democratic party would be wise to explore.
Looks like there has been an uptick in kinder public attitudes toward children of undocumented workers, which should encourage Democratic candidates to speak out in their behalf a little more boldly.
At HuffPo, Sam Stein has an encouraging post, “Obama 2012 Campaign Helped By MoveOn.org, AFL-CIO Super PAC Alliance.” The partnership, which was launched on Tuesday, brings together two organizations with a combined total of 17 million members to mobilize what could be the most extensive GOTV ground game ever, with an estimated 400K volunteers and 1.5 million phone calls.
The ‘Akin effect’ seems to be reverberating down-ballot. Birds of a crackpot feather…
Kenneth P. Vogel’s Politico post, “Liberal group targets Koch brothers with $500K ad buy,” suggests that Dems should monitor how much traction they can get from attacks on Big Money like Patriot Majority’s ad campaign targeting the Koch Brother’s attempt to flood the airwaves with nearly $400 million worth of right-wing propaganda. The election outcome may depend on people “seeing through” the GOP ad blitz.
Can Florida’s shameless Governor Rick Scott stoop any lower than this?
The following is cross-posted from an e-Blast by Chris Bowers, campaign director of Daily Kos:
Last week a judge upheld the new voter ID law in Pennsylvania. This is the law that the Pennsylvania House Republican leader said “is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania” because it potentially disenfranchises 750,000 voters.
Well, that’s what he thinks. A huge coalition of 100+ labor and civil rights groups has come together to do the door knocking, phone banking and voter education necessary to make sure everyone in this must-win swing state can still cast a ballot.
At Daily Kos, we’re helping out by running online ads in Pennsylvania to sign up more than 1,000 volunteers so that this coalition has the people power it needs. Please, click here to contribute $3 to Daily Kos so that we can sign up the thousands of volunteers needed to overcome Pennsylvania’s voter ID law.
To get a sense of how blatant an attempt at voter suppression this voter ID law is, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation will not extend business hours or hire new staff to assist the nearly one million people who now need IDs in order to vote. Further, the contract to educate Pennsylvania voters about the law went to a public relations firm with deep ties to the Republican Party.
To stop this, we need to get thousands of volunteers on the ground working with an experienced coalition that knows how to get voters to the polls and in compliance with the new law. We can do it, but we need your help.
Please click here to contribute $3 to Daily Kos so we can run online ads to sign up thousands of volunteers in order to make sure everyone in Pennsylvania can still vote.
Keep fighting,
Chris Bowers
Campaign Director, Daily Kos
This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is crossposted from The New Republic.
Political polarization has become an obstacle to economic growth because it is increasing uncertainty, and delaying new private sector investment and hiring. That’s the view emerging from the business community and–increasingly–from the economics profession.
Earlier this month, in a front-page New York Times story, a number of CEOs gave voice to their fears about the fiscal cliff and the broader policy impasse in Congress. According to Vincent Reinhart, chief U.S. economist at Morgan Stanley, more than 40 percent of companies in their monthly survey cited the fiscal cliff as a major reason for pulling about on hiring and investment, and he expects that percentage to rise. These concerns go well beyond the defense sector, whose stake in a speedy resolution of the controversy is direct and clear. Alexander Cutler, the CEO of a large Ohio-based maker of industrial equipment, put it this way: “We’re in economic purgatory. In the nondefense, nongovernment sectors, that’s where the caution is creeping in. We’re seeing it when we talk to dealers, distributors, and users.”
A few days later, the Wall Street Journal ran an article by Dennis Berman, a reporter who sometimes sits in on the conference calls companies use to preview earnings results. According to Berman, “You can hear the bafflement, the anger, on the just completed run of company earnings calls. Typically scripted and banal, the calls have become an unexpected public platform for chastising Democrats and Republicans alike for what’s become of our way of governing … Most spread the blame on the broader culture of Washington itself. Its dysfunction, they say, is having real-world effects.”
Skeptics might discount all of this as anecdotal. It turns out, however, that a growing academic literature is working to measure policy-related economic uncertainty and to quantify its effects on economic activity. A recent paper, “Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty” by Stanford economists Scott Baker and Nicholas and Steven Davis of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, constructs a sophisticated index of economic policy uncertainty and finds that it has risen substantially during the past five years. The authors are able to disentangle the portion of overall economic uncertainty that is driven by public policy from the portion that isn’t, finding the former as a share of overall uncertainty has risen substantially as well, now amounting to about 65 percent of total uncertainty. Using standard regression techniques, they estimate that the increase in policy-related economic uncertainty is associated with peak effects declines of 4.0 percent in industrial production, 3.2 percent in GDP, 16 percent in private investment, and 2.3 million jobs.
As my faithful readers never tire of pointing out, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an economist. Those who are and want to judge for themselves can find the paper at www.policyuncertainty.com. But everyone should keep in mind that the thrust of the research I’ve just summarized is hardly outside the mainstream. Indeed, nearly two decades ago, a young economist named Ben Bernanke published a paper arguing that when it is expensive to cancel investment projects or to hire and then fire workers, then high levels of uncertainty increase the incentive of firms to delay making new investments and hiring additional workers. Unlike many other economic discoveries, this one makes intuitive sense as well.
Although the U.S. economy and political system are inextricably intertwined, the gulf between economic and political leaders has rarely if ever been wider. CEOs simply can’t understand why politicians are behaving in such a myopic and destructive manner, multiplying uncertainties and depressing economic activity. At the same time, the business community has been much less willing than it once was to weigh in on the side of the long-term policies it favors.
This year, Romney is getting massive corporate support, especially from the financial community, for his election bid. But I can see no evidence that business leaders have had any influence on Romney’s fiscal policy, the details of which just don’t add up. Romney has yet to explain how his tax reform can approach revenue neutrality, and taken literally, his overall fiscal program is a formula for even larger deficits. Most business leaders I know support a grand bargain along the lines of the Simpson-Bowles or Domenici-Rivlin proposals, but few of those plans have gone much beyond kibitzing from the sidelines. (There have been some signs in the past month that this may be changing, but it’s too early to tell whether the shift is real.)
Objectively, the long-term interests of the business community are more closely aligned with those of business-friendly wing of the Democrats than they are with a Tea Party-dominated Republican Party. Business leaders may hope that Romney would govern as the CEO he used to be rather than the populist he now pretends to be. If so, they have not reckoned sufficiently with the forces in his party who will block any serious move toward economic sanity. If CEOs really wants the kinds of long-term economic policies that will give them the ability to plan and the confidence to invest, they will have to get off the sidelines and enter the fray.
This item by Ed Kilgore is crossposted from The New Republic, where it was originally published on August 17, 2012.
For the third consecutive time, Republicans are planning to feature an aggrieved Democrat (or ex-Democrat) at their national Convention to personalize claims that the latest Democratic presidential nominee has abandoned the true legacy of his party and left moderate-to-conservative donkeys no option but to vote for the GOP.
As it happens, I know the most recent trio of apostates pretty well. 2004’s Zell Miller, who was enlisted to savage John Kerry’s national security credentials, was my boss in Georgia back in the early 1990s. And I worked with Joe Lieberman (2008’s cross-endorser) and Artur Davis (the latest model) when both men were active in the now-defunct Democratic Leadership Council, where I was policy director for a good while. So what if anything do they have in common? Is there a template for party-switchers?
If there is, it might well be a combination of these three men’s qualities. Miller is the full convert, who changed his positions on a host of issues to reflect conservative ideology even before endorsing George W. Bush (and subsequently, a long line of other Republican candidates in Georgia and elsewhere). Miller is also, as anyone who knows him will agree, one of the least neutral people in American politics, a true Appalachian character in the mold of Andrew Johnson who is capable of rolling around in an eye-gouging fight in one ditch and then the other with equal passion.
Lieberman, like his predecessor the neocon “Reagan Democrat” Jeane Kilpatrick (the star of the 1984 Republican Convention) is someone who strayed far outside the boundaries of his party on one set of issues–national security. After being denied renomination to the Senate as a Democrat in 2006, he had few qualms about endorsing his old friend and comrade-in-arms John McCain, even though McCain had by 2008 been forced to renounce most of the domestic policy projects on which he and Lieberman had worked together. In effect, Lieberman was endorsing the man who was briefly discussed as a cross-party running-mate for John Kerry–and getting revenge on his many Democratic enemies.
Davis is a different matter. A very early supporter and personal friend of Barack Obama, and once (despite a pro-business and socially conservative record that discomfited some national Democrats) a passionate advocate of universal health coverage and stronger federal support for public education, Davis set his sites on the audacious goal of becoming governor of Alabama (as he told me years earlier, just after giving an inspiring speech on how conservatives were starving the public schools and the economic opportunities of his very poor majority-black district). Having done so, he systematically began adjusting his ideology to the views of his state’s conservative general electorate, to the point of becoming a national spokesman against the Affordable Care Act and a voice of open contempt towards Alabama’s embattled pro-Democratic interest groups, presumably believing his race and the radicalism of Alabama’s GOP would maintain his base of support.
His extreme “triangulation” didn’t work, and he was absolutely trounced in the 2010 Democratic gubernatorial primary by an underfunded white candidate who swept Davis’ own majority-black congressional district. Practically from the moment of his concession speech, he left his party and his state behind, and soon surfaced as a columnist for National Review and then a transplanted Virginian expressing interest in a future congressional race as a Republican. The one-time champion of better-funded public education recently emerged as a vocal defender of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s radical Christian-Right-based school voucher program in Louisiana.
Davis has none of Miller’s fire, and little of Lieberman’s desire to maintain an independent position outside both parties. His current posture has all the trappings of a professional “reboot,” and his invitation to go to Tampa and shiv his old friend the President of the United States must look to him like a heaven-sent opportunity to become a national celebrity and leapfrog the many prospective congressional candidates in his new digs who never had a “D” next to their names on any ballot.
I say this not to accuse Artur Davis of insincerity. He took on a nearly impossible task in running for governor in the most pro-Republican year in the state’s history, and he did have the decency to get out of Alabama before switching parties, lest he give aid and comfort to the neo-confederates who dominate the GOP in the Heart of Dixie. But his claim that it’s Obama, not himself, who changed since 2008 is disingenuous, and he will obviously be used by his new friends to provide cover for the Romney/Ryan ticket’s heavily race-inflected attacks on the president on the entirely phony grounds that he’s gutting welfare work requirements and “raiding” Medicare to redistribute tax dollars to poor and minority people–you know, Artur Davis’ former constituents.
It’s interesting that Democrats don’t seem to feel the same need to recruit a high-profile apostate from the GOP ranks every four years. But whether it’s giving Zell Miller a chance to vent his perpetually swollen spleen, or offering Joe Lieberman the consolation prize of a convention speech after party conservative vetoed him as a running-mate for McCain, or giving Artur Davis a new political lease on life after he fell between two stools in Alabama–Republicans always keep the door open to anyone who can reinforce their deeply discredited reputation as a “centrist” party that’s a reasonable choice for disgruntled Democrats. If Bill Clinton were willing to play the role assigned to him in Romney attack ads as the champion of a “New Democrat” tradition Obama has abandoned, they’d give the Big Dog a Convention role as well. But that obviously ain’t happening, so they’ll take what they can get.
This item by J.P. Green was originally published on August 14, 2012.
So, here we go again with the bogus “working class hero” b.s. Mentions of Ryan’s “working class” appeal/background are starting to appear in reports by the more gullible MSM press. Romney and Ryan are even conspicuously shedding their neckties in joint appearances. “Aristocrats? Who Us?,” sort of like Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor doing the “That’s right. We bad” prison perp walk in ‘Stir Crazy.”
Yes, Like a lot of upper-middle class kids, Paul Ryan had summer jobs as a teenager. But his father was a lawyer, he grew up in an affluent neighborhood and his family were owners of a multi-state construction company doing projects worth as much as 50 million dollars. It is doubtful that he ever worked a day on a construction site in his life.
Joan Walsh says it well in her Salon post, “Paul Ryan: Randian poseur “:
The other component of GOP fakery Ryan exemplifies is the notion that a pampered scion of a construction empire who has spent his life supported by government somehow represents the “white working class,” by virtue of the demographics of his gradually gerrymandered blue collar district. I write about this in my book: guys like Ryan (and his Irish Catholic GOP confrere Pat Buchanan) somehow become the political face of the white working class when they never spent a day in that class in their life. Their only tether to it is their remarkable ability to tap into the economic anxiety of working class whites and steer it toward paranoia that their troubles are the fault of “other” people – the slackers and the moochers, Ayn Rand’s famous “parasites.” Since the ’60s, those parasites are most frequently understood to be African American or Latino – but they’re always understood to be the “lesser-than” folks, morally, intellectually and genetically weaker than the rest of us.
Reactionary that he was, Buchanan at least embraced protectionist trade policies popular with unions, an option not open to Ryan, who has cast his lot with the globalist out-sourcers Romney so ably personifies. Don’t bet that this ticket will get much traction in blue collar America.
This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it was originally published on August 13, 2012.
DES MOINES – “It’s a historic day,” Rep. Steve King of Iowa announced yesterday from the podium of the FAMiLY Leadership Summit 2012, a major gathering of social conservatives in a suburban Des Moines megachurch that drew a host of national political celebrities. King wasn’t talking about the event, or even the prospect of ejecting Barack Obama from the White House, but of the choice of his friend and colleague Paul Ryan to become Mitt Romney’s running-mate. The first mention of Ryan’s name elicted raucus applause from the crowd–which included the last two Iowa Caucus winners, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, along with one-time 2012 front-runner Rick Perry–that even exceeded that for the first reference to Chick-fil-A, the sandwich purveyor now famous among the Christian Right for its “biblical” values.
Mitt Romney, by contrast, was barely mentioned during the portion of the conference I attended; the presidential candidate’s primary significance on this day was his V.P. selection. Overall, the sense I got from the crowd was not so much the incandescent excitement that greeted the selection of Sarah Palin (a maximum celebrity in the anti-choice movement long before John McCain’s decision to make her his running-mate) among similar people in 2008, but of a quiet satisfaction that the election cycle was headed in the right direction. There was zero doubt that social conservatives are now mobilizing to support the GOP in November as never before.
This wasn’t always a given. Indeed, achieving a state of quiet satisfaction among the turbulent, ever-demanding ranks of movement conservatives may have been the most important goal motivating Mitt Romney’s surprise selection of Ryan. In a very real sense, the primaries did not end for Romney when he clinched the presidential nomination months ago, and might not have ended even with his formal crowning in Tampa on August 30. The conservative commentariat has constantly peppered Romney and his team with criticism, mainly encouraging a more sharply defined, ideological, “substantive” campaign. In some cases that criticism may have reflected sincere strategic advice for the GOP nominee. But it’s hard to avoid the more obvious conclusion that serious conservatives simply didn’t trust Mitt Romney, and were planning on continuing to insist on a serial reestablishment of Romney’s bona fides, up to and indeed far beyond November 6.
By giving the greatest gift within his immediate power, the vice-presidential nomination, to the conservative movement’s very favorite politician, Romney has finally ended the primaries, and may now hope to have achieved his own liberation from friendly fire and the politically counter-productive need to respond whenever ideological commissars crack the whip. In effect, the Romney campaign could be saying to the Right: “Here you go! Now STFU!”
At this early date it isn’t clear if this definitive propitiation of the angry spirits of the Cause will work, or will outweigh the risks involved in elevating someone as controversial as Ryan. Perhaps the calculation is that while activists thrill with delight or horror at Ryan’s name, the actual electorate knows little about him, and the Romney/Ryan ticket can now run a campaign of its choosing, leaving the significance of this “historic day” to the activist elites and ultimately to the historians.
In any event, whether the selection of Ryan reflects Romney’s final surrender to the leaders of the conservative movement, or a crafty effort to buy them off and shut them up with the fool’s gold of symbolic power, it does represent a bit of late vindication for the Right, which seemed to have so thoroughly botched its own efforts to consummate its conquest of the GOP by controlling the 2012 presidential nomination. There was certainly no sense of lost opportunity among the attendees of the FAMiLY Leadership Summit, even in the remarks of the men who once were hailed as the candidates who might finally turn the ever-faithless GOP into a fine instrument of God’s Will and the invisible hand of unregulated markets.
If Romney/Ryan lose on November 6, it will not be for lack of conservative enthusiasm for the ticket. But it’s another matter entirely as to whether this enthusiasm will be contagious beyond the ranks of the already-persuaded.
One of the memes Republicans hype up and down-ballot races is that the GOP is the party of ‘fiscal responsibility,’ balanced budgets and such, contrary to their track record. It’s an image of considerable importance to the Republicans, especially with conservatives who put a premium on prudent tax and spend ratios. As Matt Miller notes at The Washington Post,
“it’s impossible to overstate how central the unjustified label of “fiscal conservative” is to the Ryan brand and the GOP’s strategy. As Clinton understood in the 1990s, “fiscal responsibility” is a values issue important to the voters who decide modern presidential elections…The point: Democrats can’t afford to let Ryan/Romney’s phony image as superior fiscal stewards survive.”
Miller discusses a recent interview Britt Hume did with Paul Ryan, who squirmed uncomfortably when Hume tried to pin him down about the time-table for the first balanced budget under the Romney-Ryan ‘plan.’
…For context, recall that in the last era of epic budget smackdowns, 1995 and 1996, Newt Gingrich would have had an equally simple answer: in seven years. President Bill Clinton’s failure to embrace the goal of a balanced budget at all was a major political liability that Clinton finally (and shrewdly) erased when he came out with his own 10-year plan in mid-1995. (It’s worth underscoring that a 10-year path to balance was viewed then as the outer limit of credibility — pledging to end the red ink any further than a decade out didn’t pass the laugh test.)
Ryan equivocates in an effort to dodge Hume’s question. He “stumbles momentarily before trying to move the conversation to his comfortable talking points about Romney’s goal of reducing spending to historic norms as a share of gross domestic product.” But Hume won’t let go, and,
…Ryan then adds that “the plan that we’ve offered in the House balances the budget.” But he immediately stops short of saying when — you see his eyes dart to the right at that moment, his next tell — because that would mean admitting it reaches balance in the 2030s. And Ryan wants to get through this interview without saying that, because he knows it doesn’t sound good. After all, what kind of “fiscal conservative” has a 25-year plan to balance the budget?
Bearing in mind that presidents alone don’t balance budgets, President Eisenhower was the last Republican to preside over a balanced budget, in both 1956 and 1957. Two recent Democratic Presidents presided over balanced budgets, LBJ in 1969 and Clinton in 1998 through 2001. During the last 4 decades there have been five budget surpluses under Democratic Presidents: 1969, 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001, compared to zilch for Republicans.
Miller goes on the cite “the big Republican lie — the idea that you can balance the budget as the baby boomers age without taxes rising” and he warns, “if Democrats spend all their energy on Medicare — and don’t knock out the GOP ticket’s undeserved reputation for fiscal responsibility — they’ll find themselves in unexpected peril as the race heads to the fall. ”
