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.

This item by Ed Kilgore is crossposted from The New Republic, where it was originally published on July 27, 2012.
The most fascinating aspect of the 2012 presidential campaign has become Mitt Romney’s incredible shrinking campaign-relevant biography. Seriously, think about it: his entire strategy is to keep the focus on unhappiness with the performance of the economy under Barack Obama’s stewardship, and then glide to victory after easily crossing the invisible threshold of acceptability that challengers to struggling incumbents supposedly need to navigate.
Yet the number of items from his resume that he is willing and able to talk about in order to cross that threshold is close to the vanishing point. His governorship of Massachusetts? No way; it’s loaded with base-angering heresy and flip-flops. His Bain Capital tenure? Not any more, particularly now that he can’t even establish when he left that company. His “success” as measured by his fabulous wealth? Not so long as he won’t release his taxes. His clear, lifelong identification with a coherent ideology? Not applicable! His party’s agenda, as presented most comprehensively in the Ryan Budget? Don’t wanna go there! His values as expressed in his strong personal faith? You gotta be kidding!
What was left until this week as the one untarnished moment of Mitt Romney’s adult life was, of course, his triumphant stewardship of the 2002 Olympic Games. And now, having been talked by his staff into coordinating his obligatory pre-election international trip with the opening of the 2012 Games in London, that decision is looking hourly like less and less of a good idea. And we haven’t even gotten to the dressage competition.

The following item by Alan I. Abramowitz, author of The Polarized Public, is cross-posted from HuffPost, where it was originally published on July 27, 2012.
According to the Gallup Poll, there is a fairly large enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to voting this year. In an article just published on their website, Gallup’s Jeff Jones reports on the findings of a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted from July 19-22 in which Americans were asked whether, compared with previous elections, they were more or less enthusiastic about voting this year. Fifty-one percent of Republican identifiers and leaners said that they were more enthusiastic than usual versus only 39 percent of Democratic identifiers and leaners.
The 39 percent of Democrats who were more enthusiastic than usual about voting this year represents a sharp decline from four years ago when 61 percent of Democrats reported that they were more enthusiastic than usual. On the other hand, the 51 percent of Republicans who are more enthusiastic than usual this year represents a significant increase from the 35 percent of Republicans who were more enthusiastic than usual four years ago.
According to Gallup’s Jones, the 12 point enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans, which was up from 8 points in February, would pose a serious threat to President Obama’s chances of reelection if it continues into the fall and results in a Republican turnout advantage. But before speculating about how the enthusiasm gap might affect turnout of party supporters in November, there is an important question that needs to be asked. Is the enthusiasm gap real or is it an artifact of the way this particular question was worded?
A potential issue with the wording of this question is that it asks about enthusiasm compared with previous elections which would appear to cue respondents to think about their feelings during the most recent presidential election in 2008. Thus, Democrats might be comparing their level of enthusiasm this year with their very high level of enthusiasm four years ago while Republicans might be comparing their level of enthusiasm this year with their relatively low level of enthusiasm four years ago.
The fact that Democrats feel less enthusiastic than four years ago and Republicans feel more enthusiastic than four years ago does not necessarily mean that Democrats are now less enthusiastic than Republicans in any absolute sense. To determine whether that is the case, we would need to ask a question that focuses on respondents’ absolute level of enthusiasm, not their enthusiasm compared with 2008. Fortunately, the Gallup poll asked just such a question one month ago and the results present a very different picture of the relative enthusiasm of Democrats and Republicans.
In a national survey conducted on June 25-26, Gallup asked Americans to rate their enthusiasm about voting this year on a five-point scale. The choices offered were extremely enthusiastic, very enthusiastic, somewhat enthusiastic, not too enthusiastic or not at all enthusiastic. On this question there was almost no difference between the responses of Democratic identifiers and leaners and those of Republican identifiers and leaners: 43 percent of Republicans were extremely or very enthusiastic compared with 39 percent of Democrats. On the other hand, 34 percent of Republicans were not too enthusiastic or not at all enthusiastic compared with 32 percent of Democrats. On a 1 to 5 scale, where 1 is the highest enthusiasm score and 5 is the lowest, the average score was 2.87 for Democrats and 2.88 for Republicans.
These results indicate that Democrats are just as enthusiastic about voting this year as Republicans. And other evidence from Gallup’s national tracking poll suggests that there is unlikely to be an unusually large Republican turnout advantage in November. In Gallup’s most recent three-week compilation of their tracking poll results from July 3-22, 83 percent of registered Democrats said that they would definitely vote in November compared with 87 percent of registered Republicans.
One important point to bear in mind when it comes to turnout is that Republicans almost always turn out at a higher rate than Democrats, regardless of enthusiasm. So the 4 point gap in the Gallup tracking poll is nothing unusual. In fact, according to evidence from the highly respected American National Election Study surveys, Republicans turned out at a higher rate than Democrats in both 2004 and 2008 despite the supposed Democratic advantage in enthusiasm in those elections.
Republicans will almost certainly enjoy an advantage in turnout this year but it won’t be because of their greater enthusiasm. It will be because Republicans identifiers are disproportionately white and affluent and find it easier to overcome numerous obstacles that make it difficult for many lower income and minority citizens to register and vote including, increasingly, voter identification laws enacted by Republican legislatures.

This item by James Vega was originally published on July 26, 2012.
A recent profile of Colin Powell described his growing concern about Romney’s disturbingly narrow range of foreign policy advisors. As the article noted:

Romney’s team of about 40 foreign policy advisers includes many who hail from the neoconservative wing of the party…Many were enthusiastic supporters of the Iraq War, and many are proponents of a U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran.

This group includes a number of well-known Neo-con figures like John Bolton, Elliot Cohen and Robert Kagan but it also includes a variety of lesser-known individuals who were intimately connected with the botched planning and execution of the war in Iraq. As a Nation review of Romney’s advisors noted:

Romney’s team is notable for including Bush aides tarnished by the Iraq fiasco: Robert Joseph, the National Security Council official who inserted the infamous “sixteen words” in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union message claiming that Iraq had tried to buy enriched uranium from Niger; Dan Senor, former spokesman for the hapless Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer in Iraq; and Eric Edelman, a top official at the Pentagon under Bush. “I can’t name a single Romney foreign policy adviser who believes the Iraq War was a mistake,” says the Cato Institute’s Christopher Preble.

Given Romney’s very narrow set of pro-invasion advisors, it becomes particularly important to review what the invasion of Iraq actually accomplished in strategic terms. Dan Froomkin, who wrote penetrating commentary about Iraq for the Washington Post during the period of the Iraq War, recently wrote a very useful review of that history and an overview of the situation today. He began his review as follows:

In the run-up to the war in Iraq, neoconservative hawks in and out of the Bush administration promised that the U.S. invasion would quickly transform that country into a strong ally, a model Arab democracy and a major oil producer that would lower world prices, even while paying for its own reconstruction.
“A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region,” President George W. Bush told a crowd at the American Enterprise Institute in 2003, a few weeks before he launched the attack.

In fact, the Neo-con promises for what the invasion of Iraq would produce were actually even more flamboyantly manic and — in retrospect — patently delusional then even this summary suggests. The Neo-con’s actually promised that the invasion would achieve two objectives of absolutely breathtaking scope.

Read more…

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on July 3, 2012.
Greg Sargent reports on the decision of five Republican governors to screw impoverished and working people out of the health care they are supposed to get from Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. As Sargent explains:

Iowa governor Terry Branstad has now become the fifth GOP governor to vow that his state will not opt in to the Medicaid expansion in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. He joins the ranks of Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, Florida’s Rick Scott, South Carolina’s Nikki Haley, and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.
It’s worth keeping a running tally of how many people could go without insurance that would otherwise be covered under Obamacare if these GOP governors make good on their threat.
The latest rough total: Nearly one and a half million people.

…And counting. Sargent rolls out the breakdown estimates for the five states, with Florida leading the pack with more than 683,000 citizens at risk by Governor Scott’s threat. Sargent adds,

Of course, it’s still unclear whether these governors will go through with their threats. David Dayen and Ed Kilgore have both been making good cases that they will. As Dayen and Kilgore both note, some of these GOP governors are relying on objections to the cost of the program to the states — even though the federal government covers 100% of the program for the first three years and it remains a good deal beyond — to mask ideological reasons for opting out…Dayen rightly notes that the media will probably fail to sufficiently untangle the cover stories these governors are using.

if there is a silver lining behind the shameful threats of the five Republican governors, it is that there is a good chance that their actions will provoke mass demonstrations in at least some of their states, hopefully right in front of the gubernatorial mansions, where possible. And wouldn’t it be justice, if those demonstrations were lead by people with serious health problems, bringing along their oxygen tanks, wheelchairs, dialysis machines and other health care devices, joined by nurses and hospital workers in uniforms for exactly the kind of photo ops these governors don’t want?
Perhaps the key player in mobilizing mass demonstrations against the Republican Medicaid-bashers would be the nurses unions, which did such an outstanding job of making former Governor Schwarzenegger eat crow in CA over staffing ratios in hospitals.
In a way, the five governors are daring sick and needy people to protest against being targeted for health hardships. Given the large numbers of those threatened in these states, it’s an arrogant dare they may regret very soon — as well as on November 6.

This item by TDS Contributor and Democratic political strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPost, where it was originally published on June 29, 2012.
The most important thing about today’s Supreme Court health care decision is the victory for the millions of Americans who will live longer, happier, healthier lives because of the new health care law.
It is also an historic day for the thousands of health care warriors who have fought to make health care a right in America for decades and have finally seen their struggle rewarded with success.
But the Supreme Court’s decision has massive political implications as well:
First, this victory will send another bolt of electricity through Obama’s base. Nothing succeeds better than a hard-fought victory at pumping people up — and firing them up for the next great battle. The victory will send thousands of volunteers streaming into Obama campaign offices — and millions of dollars into its coffers. It will invigorate Obama’s army of volunteers.
It is particularly important when coupled with the president’s decision two weeks ago, protecting Dream Students from deportation. That decision already had a major impact on enthusiasm among Obama supporters — and particularly Latinos.
Their Supreme Court defeat will also dispirit the right-wing — particularly because they were abandoned by their own iconic, conservative Chief Justice who wrote the opinion finding the law constitutional.
Enthusiasm is a huge factor in electoral politics.
Second, the Romney campaign — and Republican candidates across the board — have now been forced to double down on repealing the entire bill. They will argue that now, the only way to get rid of the bill is to elect a new president and a Republican House and Senate.
Opponents of health care for all can no longer rely on arguing that the bill is an “unconstitutional usurpation” of government authority. No less a conservative icon than Chief Justice John Roberts found the law constitutional.
Since Obama Care is now a reality, Democrats can now move from defense to offense on health care.
By supporting repeal of the entire law, Republicans also support taking away the law’s protections against discrimination because of pre-existing conditions.
They support taking away access to free preventive health care for seniors.
They support taking away health care from millions of young people who can now stay on their parent’s insurance policies until they are 26 years old.
They support taking away access to contraception for women.
They support taking away enhanced prescription drug coverage for seniors.
They support taking away provisions that no longer allow discrimination against women.
They support taking away provisions that prevent people from being just one serious illness away from bankruptcy.
The support ending provisions that require that insurance companies can must spend 80 percent of their premium dollars on medical care — not on administrative costs and profits.
People may be afraid of things they don’t know much about. That helps explain some of the past opposition to the health care law by people who would benefit from it. But people are furious when you try to take something away from them. Romney will lose that argument over the months ahead.
Third, ironically, the past unpopularity of the law now positions the president as a strong, resolute leader, who does things because they are right — not because they are politically popular.
Passing health care reform was incredibly difficult and politically risky. Barack Obama is a leader that is a committed to principle — the mirror opposite to Mitt Romney, who has no core values whatsoever. Most voters want leaders who stand up for what they believe. That is a huge advantage for Barack Obama’s candidacy for re-election.
Finally, the Supreme Court victory creates political momentum. In politics as in sports, momentum — the bandwagon — is absolutely critical to the outcome. People like winners — they like to be with winners. Today Barack Obama — and the people of the United States — were winners.
That fact will give the president a major boost — a long-term boost — among swing voters over the months ahead.
This is a very, very big day for the lives of ordinary Americans.
It is also a very, very big day for the critical November battle that will chart our nation’s future.

This post by TDS Contributor and Democratic strategist Mike Lux is cross-posted from HuffPost, where it was originally published on June 22, 2012.
This news about Bain Capital being a pioneer in outsourcing, investing in some of the leading early companies that advised American companies in how to most effectively do it, is a pretty big deal on the face of it, but it has even deeper implications than many people realize. Being in this kind of business when the vast majority of Americans are so upset by out-sourcing is just one of Mitt Romney’s deep dark secrets that he has been trying to hide, and helps to powerfully make the case that Romney’s entire business career has been fundamentally at odds with the interests of the American middle class.
The other thing this news does is that it very likely ends the debate within the Democratic party as to whether it is okay to talk about Bain Capital’s business practices. There are still going to be Wall Street Democrats squeamish about beating up on this kind of wealthy financial company, but to defend a company that was literally a pioneer in helping American companies out-source jobs would be incredibly unpopular. Given how deeply unhappy voters are about out-sourcing, given how it generally is one of the top issues mentioned by voters in any poll I have seen over the last decade, it would be political malpractice not to attack Bain and Romney over this news, and any honest Democrat will have to understand and acknowledge that fact.
The reason this story goes so deep is that Romney’s entire political strategy is based on carrying blue collar white voters very heavily. Obama won 53 percent of the vote in 2008 while losing white working class voters by 18 percent. Even if you assume Obama doesn’t do quite as well turning out his base voters, to win this election Romney will have win that white working class demographic by at least 62-38 percent. Given how big a deal out-sourcing is to blue-collar workers, this story becomes close to a deal-breaker for Romney.
The Romney campaign’s reaction to the story is hilarious:
“This is a fundamentally flawed story that does not differentiate between domestic outsourcing versus offshoring nor versus work done overseas to support U.S. exports.” The very incoherence of the quote speaks to their strategy: try to confuse the issue, try to make it sound complicated. The problem for Romney is that this is a remarkably simple story: whether you call it out-sourcing or off-shoring (and I don’t see how the new word helps him), Romney was caring only about his company’s profits and not at all about creating jobs here in the U.S., and he saw out-sourcing jobs as a great new way to make money.
Perhaps as interesting as the story itself is the fact that after four years as governor of Massachusetts, and more than six years of his running for the presidency non-stop, even with all his talk about his business career helping him understand job creation, this is the first time we have heard about these investments. Mitt Romney is big into secrets, and is very good at keeping them. He has Swiss bank accounts, and Cayman Island accounts as well. His financial disclosure for years past has been unusually secretive in nature. He won’t say what his positions are on a whole range of critically important issues. I think we can guess why Romney tried to hide the news about his being a pioneer in out-sourcing, but why does he have secret off-shore bank accounts and so little information in his financial disclosure reports? What has he invested money in all those years that requires such skullduggery? This is as secretive a man as has run for president at least since Dick Nixon with all his dirty little secrets.
This is the candidate who said that we must only speak of issues about the concentration of wealth “in quiet rooms”. He prefers speaking about these kinds of things in quiet rooms, because to be open about how he made his money would be such an insult to the exact voters he most needs to win this election. But Romney made his incredible fortune by doing insider deals in those quiet rooms, by quietly helping companies turn a profit by out-sourcing their workers. After he made his money off these kinds of deals, he hid a great deal of it in secret Swiss and Caymans bank accounts. Is a man with these kinds of values — and these kinds of secrets — the kind of man we want to be president?

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on June 12, 2012.
In my June 8 post on “The Recall in Broader Perspective,” I briefly referenced the GOP meme “that public workers have extravagant pensions, propagated by Republicans who amplify a few horror stories as emblematic of public worker retirement benefits.” It’s part and parcel of a broader Republican scam vilifying public workers as overcompensated in general.
For a revealing example, see Josh Barro’s Bloomberg.com post, “Does Obama Know Why the Public Sector Isn’t ‘Doing Fine’?” in which he spotlights city employees of San Jose, CA, where

…Costs for a full-time equivalent employee are astronomical and skyrocketing. San Jose spends $142,000 per FTE [full-time employee] on wages and benefits, up 85 percent from 10 years ago. As a result, the city shed 28 percent of its workforce over that period, even as its population was rising.

The unspoken, but unmistakable gist of Barro’s post is “See, those greedy public workers are responsible for causing their own layoffs.” Without even taking a look at nation-wide data, Barro is clearly suggesting in his post’s title that San Jose’s experience is somehow typical of public workers in cities across the nation. Worse, he takes it a step further and blames public worker unions in his concluding sentence, “If the president wants to know why state and local governments can’t afford to hire, he could start by asking his own supporters in public employee unions.”
That’s why Romney can say stuff about President Obama like “He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message in Wisconsin?” and get away with it, while media dimwits point their fingers at Obama for his one gaffe in three years.
Had Barro clearly presented his horror story as an exceptional case, that would be defensible. Or had he backed it up with some credible national data, you could grudgingly credit him with a solid argument. But he didn’t do that because he couldn’t.
As David Cooper, Mary Gable, and Algernon Austin of the Economic Policy Institute note in their report, “The public-sector jobs crisis“:

Despite these significantly higher levels of education–and contrary to assertions by some governors in recent state-level debates–the most rigorous studies have consistently shown that state and local government employees earn less both in wages and total compensation than comparable private-sector workers (Keefe 2010). Using data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey and standard regression models for wage analyses, we compared the wage income of private-sector employees with that of state and local government workers. After controlling for education, experience, sex, race, ethnicity, marital status, full-time/part-time status, number of hours worked, citizenship status, Census region, metropolitan status (whether residing within or outside the boundaries of a major metropolitan area), and employer size, we find that state and local government employees make, on average, 11.7 percent less in wages than similar private-sector employees.

if those greedy public workers can be faulted for their extravagant compensation packages, what should be done about their better-paid private sector cohorts?
Look, none of this is to deny that there are public worker pension/salary horror stories. But it takes a pretty shameless media to imply that extravagantly compensated public workers are the norm. Is it too much to ask that some honest journalists call Romney out on it?