In the clip below from MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ political talk show, ‘Hardball’ Anchor Chris Matthews livens of the proceedings by calling out GOP Chairman Reince Priebus on the Republican ticket’s campaign tactics and Romney’s playing the race card.
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All in all, it’s an excellent example of what serious political journalism looks like.
Kathleen Geier’s “What Paul Ryan has in common with Marie Antoinette” at the Washington Monthly puts to rest the myth of the blue collar cred of their veep candidate. Geier draws from an L.A. Times article, “Despite working-class image, Ryan comes from family of wealth” by Ralph Vartabedian, Richard A. Serrano and Ken Bensinger:
In the year after his father’s death, Ryan’s maternal grandmother set up the Ryan-Hutter Investment Partnership, which remains an important part of Ryan’s finances with assets of up to half a million dollars, according to the congressman’s 2011 financial disclosure statement. Ryan continues as the general partner running the entity for the family.
Court records indicate Ryan’s father left a probate estate of $428,000, though the number of assets existing outside the will or the probate remains unknown. Ryan was to receive $50,000 when he turned 30.
In addition to the Ryan-Hutter Investment Partnership, Ryan also benefits from another family entity, Ryan Limited Partnership, which was established in March 1995 by an aunt. Ryan’s share of that is worth up to $500,000. Ryan makes no investment decisions in either partnership, the campaign spokesman said.
The LAT piece explains, further, that Ryan:
…was born into one of the most prominent families in Janesville, Wis., the son of a successful attorney and the grandson of the top federal prosecutor for the western region of the state. Ryan grew up in a big Colonial house on a wooded lot, and his extended clan includes investment managers, corporate executives and owners of major construction companies.
…Ryan’s rise to political power and financial stability was boosted by family connections and wealth. The larger Ryan family has repeatedly helped the candidate along in his career, giving him a job when he needed one and piling up tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions.
Geier adds, “Not only did Ryan inherit wealth, he also made money the old-fashioned way: he married it,” and quotes again from the L.A. Times:
Of the Ryans’ maximum estimated assets of $7.6 million, Janna’s holdings account for about $6.5 million. She is the daughter of Dan and Prudence Little, two lawyers in Madill, Okla., who over the years have overseen a vast network of land and oil and gas mineral rights in the Red River area straddling southern Oklahoma and northern Texas.
Geier finishes off the GOP princeling’s scam:
…Paul Ryan, like so many Republicans before him, is one of those dudes who was born on third base and is desperate to persuade the world he hit a triple. Yes, like practically every other teenager of his generation, he worked a few low-paid service jobs for some pocket change when he was in high school. But for him to distort that experience and try to pass himself off as “blue collar” is a grotesque masquerade. Historically, it calls to mind nothing so much as the antics of Marie Antoinette and the ladies of her court, who from time to time would amuse themselves by donning shepherdess drag and play-acting at being pure and simple folk, modest toilers of the earth.
As Geier concludes, it’s good that not all of the MSM has been scammed by “this piece of outrageous bamboozlement.”
Note: Working America, the AFL-CIO’s community organizing affiliate with over 3 million members, is the largest and most active progressive organizing initiative operating today in white working class and lower middle class communities. Working America does extensive door to door canvassing and organizing, collecting unique data on the evolving attitudes of moderate and persuadable “Average American” voters. TDS will periodically share their “Messages From The Field” which provide unique insight into this key voting group.
Over the past week, we’ve found that people in Missouri are very aware of–and upset by–Rep. Todd Akin’s comments about rape and pregnancy.
We have 75,000 members in Missouri, and we’ve had some 8,000 conversations at the door over the past month. We’ve been talking to a targeted audience of persuadable swing voters in Missouri, in the suburban areas around St. Louis. In the neighborhoods we’ve visited, people are upset by what Akin said.
· Each of our canvassers in the St. Louis area is hearing people bring up Akin’s comments, unprompted, 5 or 6 times a night.
· Responses are strongly negative. The most common reaction is shock and anger.
· “I really just can’t believe any woman would vote for Akin after his comments,” one member said, and that sentiment came up frequently.
· We’ve had success noting that it’s not just women’s health he is extreme on. We were able to pivot to his stance on issues like Social Security and taxes.
We called the members in Missouri who joined over the previous week to find out their take.
· 79% of the people we called had heard about Akin’s comments.
· 63% of those surveyed reported a “strongly” negative reaction to Akin, and 27% a “somewhat” negative reaction.
· “Shame on him for saying that…I thought it was horrible,” one member said.
We also sent an email survey to members in Missouri. Our email list members tend to be more progressive and engaged, but we heard responses from voters across the political spectrum.
· 39% of members who responded said Akin’s comments made them less likely to vote for him.
· “While I am pro-life, the comment that Mr. Akin made–that women who are raped do not get pregnant as often because their bodies can prevent it–is so wrong that I would never vote for a person who believes and shares that error.”
· “Originally, I was in favor of Akin. However, his comment about abortion was just wrong, as was his comment about federal student loans being a ‘cancer.'”
· A few respondents said that they were upset and disappointed by Akin even though they still planned to vote for him over Sen. McCaskill.
Karen Nussbaum, Executive Director
Working America
In this video clip, Rachel Maddow reveals the hypocrisy of Romney’s latest rationale for keeping his taxes secret, despite President Obama having made 12 years of his taxes public. The Romneys now claim that they want to keep their taxes private because of their charitable contributions to their church. A Parade magazine article quotes them saying that “we had never intended for our contributions to be known. It’s a personal thing between ourselves and our commitment to God and to our church.”
But Maddow digs out 4 previous clips showing them openly talking about their church contributions.
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Romney still lacks a credible reason why he shouldn’t be as open, transparent and forthcoming about his taxes as President Obama has been. The media should hold him to that standard.
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.
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
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
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. ”
From TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore’s Washington Monthly post, “Todd Akin, Superstar‘ at the Washington Monthly:
So the big question in Politicsland this afternoon is how and why Todd Akin was able to convince himself to defy the entire GOP establishment of his state, the GOP presidential nominee, the major national campaign funders, and nearly the entire Right-Wing commentariat, and stay on the ballot in Missouri. Is he crazy? Is he bluffing?
Read the whole post here.
