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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: April 2012

Stalking the Elusive ‘Real Romney’

There’s a bit of a dispute going on in Democratic pundit circles about how best to ‘frame’ the ‘real Romney’ in campaign messaging. Would he be most accurately — and effectively — portrayed as a flip-flopping flibbertigibbet or a slickster wingnut?
The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber comes down on the side of characterizing the GOP nominee-in-waiting as “a Goldwater-esque extremist,” tempered by “an added selling point that the coverage has so far ignored.” As Scheiber says,

My only quibble is with Team Obama’s parsing of the allegation. The formulation David Plouffe gave the Times last week went as follows: “Whether it’s tax policy, whether it’s his approach to abortion, gay rights, immigration, he’s the most conservative nominee that they’ve had going back to Goldwater.” I’d tweak this slightly (not that anyone asked for my advice) and say, “Whether it’s tax policy … abortion, gay rights, immigration, he’s *running as* the most conservative nominee that they’ve had going back to Goldwater.” I don’t think many people look at Mitt Romney and see an authentic, fire-breathing conservative. But I do think they’ll believe he’s been willing to act like one to appease his party. And that the appeasement won’t abruptly end on Election Day…On top of which, phrasing it this way lets you use both the “too conservative” argument and the “soulless” argument in a way that’s perfectly coherent, so you don’t really have to choose.

Describing Romney as a “vulture capitalist who lacks a human core but has embraced a conservative agenda to lead his fellow Republicans and plutocrats to victory in November,” Alec MacGillis’s take, also at TNR, “A False Choice For Obama’s Anti-Romney Message,” offers a melding of the two views:

I also see the two frames as linked and not as inconsistent as some are making them out to be, but in a slightly different way–as fully symbiotic arguments that each would not work all that well entirely on their own, that are stronger if yoked together….Yoking the two frames together works even better when they are combined with the third frame at Obama’s disposal: Romney as the plutocrat who (after a blessed start in life) made his millions slicing and dicing companies, regardless of the human collateral, and who now benefits from a very low tax rate on his fortune. This framing makes each of the other two more persuasive. It buttresses the notion of Romney as one without a core–he’ll do whatever it takes to get on top. And it explains Romney’s current conservatism, making it seem more than just sheer opportunism at least when it comes to taxes and the economy–of course he’s embracing the Ryan plan: It lowers rates for people like himself, even to the point of saving his own sons millions in estate taxes!

Ed Kilgore also envisions a synthesis of the two views at WaMo’s ‘Political Animal,’, albeit angled differently:

I don’t see a problem here. Of course the Obama camp emphasized the “no core” argument during the primaries, since it reinforced conservative doubts about Romney and also painted him as someone so character-less that he’d do or say whatever was necessary to win the nomination. Now that Mitt’s spent months and months pandering to conservative activists and blasting his opponents for ideological heresies real and imagined, it’s perfectly logical to point out how he’s harnessed himself to a political movement that’s partying like it’s 1964. But the “no core” attack line must be recalled now and then to turn on bright flashing lights whenever Romney tries to reposition himself, which he really does need to do lest he come across as Paul Ryan with a lot less personality.
Is it really confusing or risky to depict Romney as an empty suit in the thrall of radicals? Weaver says something I’ve also heard from anxious Democrats who fear that calling Romney is flip-flopper could make him more attractive to swing voters: “Being a flip-flopper might actually help Romney. It shows he’s not an unreasonable person.”
Really? People who don’t like the ideology Romney has been incessantly peddling for the last two presidential cycles are going to vote for him because they believe he’s an incorrigible liar?
I don’t think so. Mitt has built a trap for himself throughout his public career, and Team Obama would be foolish not to bait it and spring it. Persuadable voters don’t much like flip-floppers and don’t much like “severly conservative” ideologues, either. And they really don’t like pols without the character to maintain a reasonably consistent point of view even as they ingratiate themselves to people who are unreasonably enslaved to an extremist ideology against which every decision made by Romney every single day of his presidency would be policed relentlessly and viciously.

Put another way, we are now talking about a flip-flopper who no longer has the wiggle-room to tack back towards sanity, much less moderation. That’s not a problem for the Obama campaign; It’s an embarrassment of messaging riches.


Labor’s Pivotal Role in Progressive Politics

Alternet’s ace Sarah Jaffe has an informative post, “Labor Unions’ Fight for the 99% Goes Way Beyond Raising Campaign Dollars,” which puts organized labor’s political role in clear perspective. I’ll just share a few graphs and urge everyone to take a few minutes and read the whole thing. Jaffe provides an historical overview and sets the stage:

You’d think people would have learned the lesson in 2011: labor is an integral part of the progressive coalition, one of the only forces capable of acting as a counterweight to the organized money that’s taken over our politics.
Yet as election season wears on, many politicians and reporters seem to have forgotten. From Wisconsin, where the former mayor of Madison claimed that candidates shouldn’t be “beholden to big unions,” to the Web, where debates over union endorsements seem to focus only on how much money labor will spend to support its chosen candidates.

Republicans whine about union money in politics. But that’s not thier greatest concern, as Jaffe points out:

“The labor movement has always given money to candidates,” Damon Silvers, policy director and general counsel at the AFL-CIO, told AlterNet. But when it comes down to winning elections, their greatest contribution is boots on the ground. “And not just any boots, but people who are plugged into their communities, who are trusted. They’re the backbone of America’s civic culture, the people who are the poll watchers, the people who volunteer at food banks, local leaders in unions, the shop stewards, the people who pound the pavement. They are the core of civil society in the United States.”
…Most of those little victories — those 4 percent raises and new contracts with health care benefits — are won day by day, inch by inch, in grinding organizing campaigns and lengthy negotiations with management. They don’t make headlines the way a multimillion-dollar ad buy does. As Perlman pointed out, unions are workers’ organizations that do politics, not political organizations. But with only 11.8 percent of Americans represented by a union, the political action unions do has become the public face of labor.

As for the real extent of union financial contributions to candidates, Jaffe notes:

“CNN’s Charles Riley calculates that for 2011-2012 the 100 biggest individual donors to super PACs make up only 3.7 percent of the contributors but supply more than 80 percent of the cash,” Noah noted.
Even as the AFL-CIO launches its own super PAC, Worker’s Voice, the difference is obvious. Eliza Newlin Carney at Roll Call reported that the AFL-CIO’s PAC has raised some $5.4 million and will report $4.1 million cash on hand when it has to file first-quarter disclosure reports. Compare that to the $76.8 million raised by Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS–which got 87 percent of its cash from just 24 donations from ultra-rich donors who gave over $1 million apiece. American Crossroads, the super PAC arm of Crossroads GPS, has already spent $29 million since its founding in 2010.
…Even with the super PAC, organized labor’s monetary contribution to the election is going to look small compared to big business. AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer told Roll Call, “We were outspent 20-to-1 last time. We will probably be outspent 20-to-1 this time. But we are going to out-organize them by more than 20-to-1.”
…The labor movement is built upon grassroots organizing. Organizing workers takes conversations, face-to-face, personal connections, and solidarity. That’s why the most important contribution from labor even in today’s big-money era is going to be, as Perlman said, “actually talking to people, explaining the issues in a real way, not in a 30-second ad way.”

As Jaffe concludes, “…Really, the most important question shouldn’t be whether labor will spend a lot of money on TV ads. The question instead, for smart political watchers, will be whether the volunteers, who do the grunt work of campaigning, the door-knocking and phone-banking and stamp-licking, will show up…”


How to Prep for Polling Anomalies

Jonathan Bernstein warns at WaPo’s ‘PostPartisan’ blog to “Be ready for goofy polls,” which is sage advice at the outset of the general election campaign. As Bernstein explains,

…With Gallup running a daily track, and other pollsters either running daily tracks or frequent polling, that we’re going to see quite a few bad numbers. Gallup, for example, has Obama’s approval spiking up to 50% today, but the odds are good that we’re just seeing a statistical blip, and his slump down to 43% late last month was also a meaningless blip.
Once again: look at the poll-of-polls averages. Mark Blumenthal’s Pollster trend line for approval sits at 47% and has hardly budget for weeks; the average over at Real Clear Politics is just barely higher.

As Bernstein sums it up: “The bottom line is that all the data help us know more about what’s going on, as long as we use it well – which means focusing on the averages, and not individual, anomalous readings. Remind yourself: we’re expecting a lot of those anomalies. In both directions. Just get ready to ignore them.”


So Howya Like Funding ALEC?

You probably didn’t know that you have been funding the work of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). That would include their efforts in helping to enact a gaggle of reactionary state laws — ‘Stand your ground,’ voter suppression, bashing immigrant workers etc.
No not directly. But your taxes have indirectly subsidized ALEC’s work because the organization has enjoyed status as a tax-exempt public charity. They haven’t paid taxes, so taxpayers have made up the difference. Here’s how Mike Baker explains it in his HuffPo post “ALEC Hit With IRS Complaint Filed By Common Cause“:

Advocacy group Common Cause said Monday it had filed an IRS complaint accusing ALEC of masquerading as a public charity. ALEC is formed as a nonprofit that brings together lawmakers and private sector organizations to develop legislation and policy.
ALEC says its work is not lobbying.
Common Cause disagrees. “It tells the IRS in its tax returns that it does no lobbying, yet it exists to pass profit-driven legislation in statehouses all over the country that benefits its corporate members,” said Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause, in a statement. “ALEC is not entitled to abuse its charitable tax status to lobby for private corporate interests, and stick the bill to the American taxpayer.”

Common Cause is demanding an audit, penalties and payment of back taxes. Baker adds, further, that “ALEC has been active since the 1970s and has long drawn the ire of open government groups who question the secretive development of legislation and close relationship between private sector officials and lawmakers who meet at conferences to jointly develop model legislation.”
All of which gives ALEC’s corporate supporters who have been departing for less thorny pastures at a quickening rate an additional reason to put their cred on the line elsewhere.


Creamer: Getting to Know ‘Real’ Romney Won’t Help Him

The following article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, is cross-posted from HuffPo.
By all rights, the Republican presidential candidate should have a lot of wind at his back in 2012.
*President Obama’s economic policies brought an end to the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression and have now yielded 25 straight months of private sector jobs growth. But many Americans are still out of work.
*The far right has been energized by passage of President Obama’s legislative agenda: health care reform, the equal pay for equal work, ending Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell, Wall Street reform. They hate these policies and they are highly motivated to stop the President’s re-election.
*The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has allowed a flood of corporate and right wing money that should allow the right to out-communicate the President’s campaign for re-election.
Instead, Mitt Romney is struggling. There are many factors:
*President Obama’s well organized, highly disciplined campaign;
*A bloody Republican primary season;
*The high regard in which most Americans hold the President — last week’s ABC News poll showed 56% regard him favorably while only 40% regard him unfavorably.
But Mitt Romney’s biggest enemy is Mitt Romney.
That same ABC News poll showed Romney is the first major Presidential candidate in modern history to be “underwater” in his favorables. Only 35% of Americans regard him favorably, while 47% regard him unfavorably.
Why does Romney have such a “Romney problem”?
People are not just reacting negatively to the “public persona” of Romney. There is no evidence the Romney campaign simply needs to do a better job getting to know the “real Romney.”
In fact, it appears that the more people to know him, the less they like him. A February Washington Post poll showed that 52% of Americans responded that the more they know about Romney the less they like him. The same was true for 39% of Republicans. That trend seems to be continuing.
No, the problem is not that they aren’t getting to know the “real Romney.” The problem is the “real Romney.”
In elections — and especially highly publicized Presidential elections — voters do not fundamentally make choices between two sets of issues positions, or economic policies. They make a choice about who should be their leader. They choose between living, breathing human beings.
They ask themselves two major sets of questions:


Political Strategy Notes

For some good news for Democrats, see the Associated Press report, “Swing-state unemployment down,” which notes “unemployment has dropped more sharply in several swing states than in the nation as a whole. A resurgence in manufacturing is helping the economy — and Obama’s chances — in the industrial Midwestern states of Ohio and Michigan…And Arizona, Nevada and Florida, where unemployment remains high, are getting some relief from an uptick in tourism….in Michigan and Ohio. In Michigan, unemployment fell to 8.5 percent in March from 10.5 percent in March 2011. And in Ohio, it dropped to 7.5 percent from 8.8 percent over the same period, putting it well below the national average of 8.2 percent…In Florida, unemployment tumbled to 9 percent in March from 10.7 percent a year earlier. That was more than twice the nationwide drop of 0.7 percentage point (from 8.9 percent to 8.2 percent) over the same period. A rise in tourism is helping.”
Scott Bauer has an AP update on Republican leaders in Wisconsin openly asking their supporters to cross party lines in the May 8 primary to vote for fake Democrats to prevent recall of GOP state Senators. As state Rep. Robin Vos, the Republican expected to serve as speaker of the Assembly next year, put it “We are encouraging Republicans to vote in the Democratic primaries.” Crossing party lines to influence the opposition party’s outcome is defensible. Running fake candidates is pretty sleazy.
Dems have a great ad spot up, riffing on Gov. Scott Walker as a job-killer. “Most states gained jobs last year,” says the narrator of the ad. “But under Gov. Walker, Wisconsin lost more jobs than any other state. Dead last.” See the ad and read Sean Sullivan’s Hotline on Call report right here.
Meanwhile in PA, Republicans are still screwing around with voter i.d. laws on the eve of the state primary. Philly Inquirer reporter Bob Warner adds “A survey by the Pennsylvania Public Interest Research Group looked at IDs issued by 110 colleges and universities and found only 19 appeared to meet the new standards. Most of them lack the expiration dates the law requires.”
Benjy Sarlin’s “Obama’s Daunting Task: Bring Back The Youth Vote” at Talking Points Memo indicates that the president’s campaign is working some bread-and-butter angles: “…The White House…would prevent interest rates on subsidized student loans from doubling to 6.8 percent. …Student loans are one area where the administration can tout concrete gains: In 2009, Obama passed student-loan reform through a controversial reconciliation procedure, transferring billions of dollars from private lenders to funding for more generous grants and loan terms…Ending the Iraq war is a big applause line on campuses, as is as the president’s successful push to allow gays to openly serve in the military. And some of the Affordable Care Act’s most popular elements have particular weight with young voters, including a provision allowing Americans to stay on their parent’s health insurance up to age 26: Over 2.5 million more young people are insured as a result, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.”
American Prospect’s Paul Waldman reports at CNN on a new Romney strategy, “bracketting” or the “pre-buttal” in which he gets to a town just before Obama and steals a big bite of his opponent’s favorable coverage. Hmm, could this work down-ballot?
Howard Kurtz reports at The Daily Beast that Romney is “carefully avoiding most national interviews outside of Fox.”
Kurtz also reports on a new study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism of 52 key newspaper, television, radio, and Web outlets, which found that “Overall, it was no contest. From Jan. 2 through April 15, Romney’s coverage was 39 percent positive, 32 percent negative, and 29 percent neutral, the researchers found. Obama’s coverage was 18 percent positive, 34 percent negative, and 34 percent neutral. That means Romney’s depiction by the media was more than twice as positive as the president’s. So much for liberal bias.”
Sen. McCaskil’s re-election campaign is making GOP Super-PAC money a central issue, according to Rosalind S. Helderman’s WaPo article, “Sen. Claire McCaskill takes fight to super PACs as Missouri swings farther right.” Helderman quotes McCaskill, “You make one company mad by casting a principled vote, and they say, ‘Okay, we’ll just gin up $10 million of our corporate money and take her out anonymously,’ ” she said. “I think if people figure out that’s what’s going on, they’re going to be very turned off by it.”


Why the Christian Right Doesn’t Care That Mitt Romney is a Mormon

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
When Dallas First Baptist Church pastor Robert Jeffress endorsed Mitt Romney this week, it raised some eyebrows. Jeffress, after all, was the evangelical leader who roiled last year’s Value Voters Summit by casually telling reporters that Mitt Romney was “not a Christian,” but instead a member of the Mormon “cult.” His endorsement should serve as a warning to any Democrats who expect that evangelical distaste for Mormonism will cost Mitt Romney a significant number of votes. Most conservative evangelical political activists, like Jeffress, have long since subordinated any theological concerns about political leaders to a cultural agenda where all are welcome allies.
There’s nothing mysterious about this phenomenon, and it doesn’t reflect dishonesty, either. Jeffress himself explained his endorsement of Romney in pretty clear terms:

Given the choice between a Christian like Barack Obama who embraces very unbiblical principles like abortion and a Mormon like Mitt Romney who supports biblical values like the sanctity of life and marriage, I think there’s a good biblical case for voting for Mitt Romney.

In other words, so long as a candidate is on the same page as the Christian Right on same-sex marriage and abortion– and, increasingly, contraception–his understanding of the metaphysical nature of the universe isn’t a deal-breaker. Mormons are as welcome in the fight against encroaching secularism as anyone else.
The same principle guided the remarkable rapprochement between conservative evangelicals and “traditionalist” Catholics in recent decades. When the theocon Catholic theoretician Richard John Neuhaus and evangelical celebrity Charles Colson formed Catholics and Evangelicals Together (CET) in 1994, it was perceived as a quasi-revolutionary development. It was particularly controversial among Catholics who felt the group’s efforts to move from tactical political cooperation on issues like abortion to theological accommodation went too far. That controversy now seems quaint. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ recently released “Statement on Religious Liberty” went out of its way to endorse a recent manifesto by CET, published in the late Father Neuhaus’s magazine First Things. The Bishops’ statement echoes conservative evangelicals in demanding a high-profile campaign against the Obama administration’s so-called attacks on religious liberty–specifically, the contraception coverage mandate and recent judicial decisions that deny federal funds to religious organizations unwilling to comply with anti-discrimination laws.
To be sure, there are still cross-confessional tensions on the Right. While most conservative evangelical leaders are entirely comfortable with laissez-faire capitalism and have happily participated in the Tea Party Movement, many if not most traditionalist Catholics–along with the Church hierarchy–adhere to a social teaching tradition that inspires

of the Ryan budget But the same Bishops who have chastised Ryan have this week cracked down on American nuns for elevating social justice concerns over “the church’s biblical view on family life and human sexuality.”
And seen from this perspective, Romney’s Mormon faith is as much a positive factor as a negative one. Indeed, another prominent evangelical critic, the homophobic American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer, has said repeatedly that his biggest problem with Romney is that “he’s not Mormon enough”–meaning, he has been insufficiently faithful to LDS teachings on abortion and homosexuality.
It’s still possible that the unfamiliar nature of Mormon doctrine may have a subtle effect on evangelical enthusiasm for Mitt. But any evangelical distrust of Mormon theology pales beside the evangelical distrust of mainstream Protestantism–which happens to be the strand of Christianity that Barack Obama belongs to. This attitude can be seen in Rick Santorum’s dismissal of mainline U.S. Protestants as “gone from the world of Christianity”–a comment from 2008 that came to light during the heat of this year’s primary season. While Santorum’s statement was widely criticized, it’s a broadly held, even axiomatic, view for many conservative evangelicals and Catholics. Indeed, conservative minorities in the mainline denominations (most notably Episcopalians) have become accustomed to accusing mainline leaders of heresy and apostasy.
Sure, conservative Christians would have preferred a candidate with a less complicated and controversial belief system than Mitt Romney’s. But as Bryan Fischer indicated, their doubts about Romney probably owe more to the conservative anxiety about his slipperiness than to any particular concerns about the LDS. And in the end, as Jeffress stated plainly, the only religious test that matters is whether you support the “Biblical values” of hostility to feminists, gays, and liberal Protestants like the president.


Dick Morris’ House of Cards, and the Bishops Crack Down

Just a couple of brief notes from my blogging over at Washington Monthly:
(1) Everyone in partisan politics is tempted to harvest the available data selectively to show “Our Team” is doing better than, well, it actually is. But Dick Morris offered such an extreme example this week that it was worth the effort to deconstruct it, just to show how it worked. So it you want to see how to convert some double-loaded statistics from past presidential races, a Rasmussen poll, and some irrelevant external factors into an impending GOP landslide this fall, check it out.
(2) The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is, well, sort of everywhere on the political landscape this year. On the one hand, the Bishops have frustrated Rep. Paul Ryan’s efforts to pretend his budget reflects Catholic social doctrines. On the other, they have, in concert with the Vatican, cracked down on organizations representing American nuns who have refused to join the Bishops’ campaign against the Obama administration on health care and contraception.


Tomasky: At This Stage Negotiating with GOP is a Fool’s Errand

Michael Tomasky’s “Barack Obama and the ‘Centrist’ Fantasy About Dealing With the GOP” merits a slow, sober read by White House strategists. It’s a familiar argument from progressive Democrats. But it’s exceptionally well-stated — and very persuasive. Tomasky laments the return of the “Obama should compromise more to win centrists/independents/swing voters” meme-that-refuses-to-die, and then explains why it’s a sure loser:

…Let’s imagine a scenario. Obama comes forward with a tax-reform proposal along Bowles-Simpson lines, one that meets the GOP halfway. He comes up with three marginal rates for individuals, the highest one around 35, maybe 38 tops; or maybe he adds a fourth “LeBron James” rate, a higher rate on dollars earned above some fantastically high figure that applies to something like .2 percent of all tax filers; but that would probably be in there as a bargaining chip. He proposes the elimination of certain “tax expenditures,” or deductions and loopholes like the home-mortgage-interest deduction and the deduction for employer-sponsored health care, which are the two big ones; or maybe he’s more modest about this and places caps on those, not eliminating them entirely; or perhaps he sticks with something like getting rid of the state and local tax deduction. Finally, he lowers the corporate rate from the current 35 percent, but proposes closing several corporate loopholes, like energy-tax preferences for the oil and gas industry.
WWMD? That is, what would McConnell do–and Boehner, and Cantor, and the rest? Would they scratch their chins and say, “Gee, this is great. We’re delighted that the president has put something serious on the table, and we will work hard with him to find common ground”? Actually, they might say that, at first, just to pull the wool over people’s eyes. But in short order, the line from them and their confederates in positions of lighter responsibility would be: “This is a massive tax increase! Eliminating these deductions on middle-class people will raise their taxes, so he’s breaking his promise, see, we told you! The LeBron tax is just more ‘Democrat’ class warfare, more punishing the job creators.” “The corporate plan,” they’ll say, “sounds good on paper, but again, he’s attacking the job creators by eliminating these important deductions, and many corporations, especially small businesses”–you know they’ll throw that one in!–“are going to end up paying more.”

Hard to argue with that scenario. As for the ‘why’ of it, Tomasky adds:

If Obama meets Republicans halfway, and then they block a deal, the center will shift further to the right. Republicans know this. That’s why obstructionism suits them just fine.
And that’s just elected officials. At Heritage and Cato, they’ll comb through the fine print and find an Achilles’ heel, something that can be distorted to sound just hideous, which will of course be in there, because tax policy is unbelievably complex. And then, once Mr. Oxycontin and the Fox people start hooping and hollering about that, it won’t be long before the whole thing can be dismissed as something Marx would be proud of.
No they wouldn’t, you say? Why? Because their allegations wouldn’t be true? Oh, yes, that has regularly stopped them in the past. Or because there would be too much pressure on them to behave responsibly this time? Pressure from whom? The New York Times and Washington Post editorial pages? Please. Direct me to one instance–and no, the Post and the Iraq War doesn’t count, because that was the Post endorsing something Republicans were for anyway–when Eric Cantor has read a Times editorial and said, “Golly, these fellows make some very fair points, I must heed them.” The only pressure they pay attention to is from Limbaugh, Fox, and the base. And that pressure will consist entirely of one message: resist, at all costs, or perish.

Looking toward the future, Tomasky sees no reason to hope that the GOP will negotiate in good faith. “… There’s every reason to think it will be even worse in a second Obama term, because the base will be so enraged that the guy “stole” another election that the demand will be that the Republicans be even more obstructionist…”
The Republican strategy is ultimately very simple, says Tomasky: Resist all proposed compromises from the President and keep pushing the “center of gravity” to the right. But there is but one remedy, Tomasky sees: “What can change it? Not much. Losing lots of elections. If they’re ever down to 38 senators and 153 House members like the good old days, they’ll have to deal. Until then, Obama wouldn’t be a leader if he tried to negotiate with them in good faith. He’d be a fool.”
A harsh call. But there is absolutely nothing in the history of the President’s dealings with the Republicans to suggest it’s overstated.


Romney’s ‘Weaselly Refusal’ Re VAWA Won’t Help GOP

Ed Kilgore asks a tough question in the title of a post at his Washington Monthly ‘Political Animal’ blog” “How Much Violence Against Women’ Do Republicans Support?” Kilgore explains:

If you’ve been following the debate in the Senate over the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act [VAWA], you know that Republicans are complaining that they don’t want the act to expire, but object to “poison pills” Democrats have added to the bill, particularly protections against domestic violence for undocumented women and for people in same-sex relationships.
But they are not handling the messaging of their position very well…This GOP exercise in damage control, however, may not be enough to spare their presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, for whom the VAWA issue is becoming another in a long series of examples of his weaselly refusal to take a distinct position. He’s sort of for VAWA renewal, but doesn’t think it should become a “political football,” and won’t say what version he’d support.

Kilgore quotes from Steve Benen’s Maddow Blog litany of Romney evasions on current newsworthy issues, including the Violence Against Women Act. he notes Benen’s observation that “The American electorate can tolerate quite a bit, but no one respects a coward.”
As Kilgore concludes, “…Maybe reporters navigating the Romney campaign’s evasions should try a different tack, asking exactly how much violence against women the candidate and his party are willing to accept? Maybe that will flush them out, and produce some straight answers.”