Romney vs. Obama

[jonottawa]

I feel kinda sorry for Mitt. His constituency is crazy; he isn't. Unfortunately, the lesson the Repugs will draw from this won't be 'Our party's ideas are morally and intellectually indefensible.' It will be 'Mitt blew it.'

 

All he can do is keep lying to/misleading the American people (and being as non-specific as possible about his policy proposals) because if he started telling the truth now his party would crucify him.

 

As an aside, I wish the press would stop describing members of the modern Republican party as 'conservative'. They're not. I'm a conservative and these people are batshit crazy.

 

I believe in equality of opportunity. They believe in 'you're on your own'.

 

I believe in freedom of religion and freedom from religion. They believe in religious zealotry and intolerance.

 

I believe that the military industrial complex has way too much power (I like Ike!) and that there is exponentially more waste and fraud in the defense budget than in any other area of government spending. They believe in writing a blank check to defense contractors.

 

I believe that the pernicious influence of the prison-industrial complex and the 'war on drugs' on our society is an outrage. They believe that for-profit prisons are just dandy.

 

I believe that in a world of crony capitalism, massive amounts (say >$10M) of untaxed inherited wealth are incompatible with a just society. They believe that what your great great grandfather did during Prohibition (bootlegging) or during WWII (war profiteering) or more recently (government bailouts/corporate welfare) should set you up for life.

 

I believe that polluters should pay for the damage they do to our air, our water and our environment. Hence I favor a significant energy tax (which would obviously allow the government to lower taxes on other things.) They believe that inserting the word 'clean' before 'coal' somehow makes it so.

 

I believe that health care professionals are some of the smartest people in the country and that it is their moral responsibility to craft (or to have the AMA craft) a far more efficient and fair health care delivery system than what we have now. If they don't accept that responsibility, then they shouldn't grumble when government imposes (an imperfect) one on them. They believe in blocking any attempts at serious reform ('death panels' 'rationing') and allowing health care costs to continue to skyrocket while drug companies, insurance companies and doctors make out like bandits and the taxpayer ends up with the bill.

 

I believe that meaningful campaign finance reform needs to be enacted so that billionaires and corporations are unable to exert so much influence on the political process. They believe that the 1% should run things, by whatever means necessary.

 

I'm a middle of the road conservative. And the Republican party doesn't represent me.

[dwar0123]

I believe that in a world of crony capitalism, massive amounts (say >$10M) of untaxed inherited wealth are incompatible with a just society. They believe that what your great great grandfather did during Prohibition (bootlegging) or during WWII (war profiteering) or more recently (government bailouts/corporate welfare) should set you up for life.

I agree with everything you say, I even agree with this specific quoted sentiment. It is just a pet peeve of mine, but I get bothered when someone tries to make a point by creating an artificially biased relationship by using only negative examples.

[billw55]

In 1976, Bob Dole was a serious candidate for VP; 20 years later he was a 73-year-old retiree-in-waiting who was simply holding his party's space on the ballot. Ronald Reagan (1980) and Bill Clinton (1992) were serious enough candidates to defeat incumbent presidents.

I guess these fell in a blind spot for me as far as what I was thinking of as an incumbent. Carter did such a poor job that I hardly thought of him as an incumbent, having no chance to get reelected against any opponent. And I usually think of HW as an extension of the Reagan presidency.

 

But really? Clinton?

[billw55]

Doubling down on his 47% gaffe was, imo, not smart. It sounds like he doesn't understand that the FICA payroll tax is also an income tax that is paid by almost all workers. Indeed, it is usually twice what most people see on their pay stub.

Agree, and the only reason I didn't post it myself is that I am just tired of debunking this particular bit of right wing baloney. Everyone who works at all pays social security and medicare taxes.

[PassedOut]

I'm a middle of the road conservative. And the Republican party doesn't represent me.

Same here. And you gave a good list of the reasons why.

[nigel_k]

I'm a middle of the road conservative. And the Republican party doesn't represent me.

I don't disagree with a lot of what you posted, but it puts you on the far left of US politics whether you like it or not. Honestly, I am over hearing people basically say that they are middle of the road when they also think a party (may be either one) supported by close to half of voters is filled with crazy people.

 

Also, there is a general tendency for people to over-inflate the errors of the other side. The election won't be decided by minor errors or gaffes, but you have one guy who drew a false equivalence between 47% who don't pay income tax and 47% who vote for the other side, and the other guy who talked about people clinging to religion because they are scared, admitted he used to regularly eat dog, and said that anyone who owns a successful business didn't build it.

[dwar0123]

Also, there is a general tendency for people to over-inflate the errors of the other side. The election won't be decided by minor errors or gaffes, but ... said that anyone who owns a successful business didn't build it.

Added emphasis and deleted stuff in-between that I don't care to address here.

 

Really? This could at best be described as a minor grammatical error during a live speech. Which was grossly over-inflated, not into a grammatical error but into something that was never meant and to which no rational person could ever take him as intending from that speech.

 

That you seem to be repeating it here, not as a grammatical error, not even as an over-inflated grammatical error, but retelling Obama's speech into something that he clearly did not mean, that the audience clearly did not take him for and that no one that isn't on the extreme right has ever said he meant.

 

This is a shining example of what appalls me about the right, their shameless tactics. You can't write this off as a fringe group of republicans banging on this absurd point. It was a major theme of their convention and Romney has repeated it often himself.

[jonottawa]

I don't disagree with a lot of what you posted, but it puts you on the far left of US politics whether you like it or not. Honestly, I am over hearing people basically say that they are middle of the road when they also think a party (may be either one) supported by close to half of voters is filled with crazy people.

 

Also, there is a general tendency for people to over-inflate the errors of the other side. The election won't be decided by minor errors or gaffes, but you have one guy who drew a false equivalence between 47% who don't pay income tax and 47% who vote for the other side, and the other guy who talked about people clinging to religion because they are scared, admitted he used to regularly eat dog, and said that anyone who owns a successful business didn't build it.

 

My beliefs put me in the mainstream of traditional conservatism. Where they put me in a nation of ignoramuses is of no consequence to me whatsoever.

 

I find it somewhat comical that you talk about 'false equivalence' and then you draw a false equivalence between Romney's statements and Obama's statements.

 

Romney is channelling Ayn Rand. He wasn't misquoted or taken out of context. He is being lambasted for his open contempt of working class people and for his belief that the people who pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than he does are somehow 'moochers' or 'parasites'.

 

Obama ate dogmeat when he was a boy. Who cares? I am an animal lover but thousands of dogs are euthanized in this country every day and I have no more of a moral objection to eating them than I do to eating any other mammal. I have an 'ick factor' objection to it because of the society I was raised in, but I am intelligent enough to see the difference.

 

Obama said that business owners didn't build the American infrastructure without which their businesses would not succeed. A few deliberately dishonest people on the right try to pretend he intended to say something else. Either you're one of them or you're uninformed, I'm curious which.

 

Obama's the first to admit that the cling to guns/religion comment was a mistake. But if you read the entire monologue and not just that quote you realize that he is urging his supporters to reach out to those people, not to be dismissive of them. What he said was true, but insulting/condescending, and thus a gaffe.

[jdeegan]

...you have one guy who drew a false equivalence between 47% who don't pay income tax and 47% who vote for the other side, and the other guy who talked about people clinging to religion because they are scared, admitted he used to regularly eat dog, and said that anyone who owns a successful business didn't build it.

:P Dog eaters and agnostics are perfectly capable of governing just fine. I am a little worried that one candidate doesn't seem to understand the simplest thing about the U.S. federal tax system, and the other is ignorant of, if not prejudiced against, the business world.

[barmar]

The truth of this is pretty damning in its own right. With such an outlook, what value can we place on anything he says, ever.

The same value as pretty much any other politician actively campaigning. They all tailor their statements to the particular audience.

[dwar0123]

The same value as pretty much any other politician actively campaigning. They all tailor their statements to the particular audience.

I concede that all politicians, as a matter of practicality, have to tailor their statements to their audience.

 

But that isn't what he is doing here, he isn't making alterations to his suit, he is tossing it aside and putting on a completely new one. This isn't tailoring your statements to a particular audience, this is lying. This is of course assuming he doesn't actually hold 47% of the country in deep contempt.

[mike777]

I think the current tape issue just shows that Romney does not seem to have a real core philosophy that he has thought about over time such as Regan did.

 

Regan would say he wanted to build a "Floor" but not a "Roof" for people.

 

There is a difference between being for or against some form of redistribution such as a negative income tax and still calling yourself a capitalist or conservative and being for what at their heart are socialist economic policies where economic and political power rests in the same hands that nonconservatives may be in favor of.

[PassedOut]

...but you have one guy who drew a false equivalence between 47% who don't pay income tax and 47% who vote for the other side, and the other guy who talked about people clinging to religion because they are scared, admitted he used to regularly eat dog, and said that anyone who owns a successful business didn't build it.

Romney's statements can be seen in full context. The Obama "didn't build it" clip comes from an intentionally dishonest edit of his statements. To me, that is an important difference.

 

You haven't eaten dog?

;)

[jonottawa]

You haven't eaten dog?

;)

Nope, but I've eaten p- oh wait, I'm sorry, this is a family show.

[mycroft]

You haven't eaten dog?

insert roof of car joke here

[mike777]

GEEZ did I just say current tape issue.....showing my age....

[mike777]

As usual, I follow Nate Silver closely during election seasons. (These days the New York Times publishes his blog at 538: Nate Silver's Political Calculus.)

 

Today he calculates Obama's chances of winning at over 80%. Although I'd like to believe it, that number seems to me to be overly optimistic. I'd appreciate hearing the assessments of posters here who have strong backgrounds in statistics on the reliability of Nate's methods.

 

 

fwiw down to 72% in ten days.....cant claim romney has been brilliant last ten days so.........

 

 

any event see Fl, OH and VA. needs to win all three to have any chance.

[Cthulhu D]

Romney's statements can be seen in full context. The Obama "didn't build it" clip comes from an intentionally dishonest edit of his statements. To me, that is an important difference.

 

The funniest part about that was the right wing cartoonist hacks who just set out to make Obama's point for him: like the one in which he's chewing out a little girl running a lemonade stand because she didn't build that.. because she got the wood off her dad and the lemons off her mum.

 

Which was the point - no-one stands alone in some Galtian ideal, everyone else contributes as well. No trucking company could succeed without the highway system built by the government.

[mike777]

The funniest part about that was the right wing cartoonist hacks who just set out to make Obama's point for him: like the one in which he's chewing out a little girl running a lemonade stand because she didn't build that.. because she got the wood off her dad and the lemons off her mum.

 

Which was the point - no-one stands alone in some Galtian ideal, everyone else contributes as well. No trucking company could succeed without the highway system built by the government.

 

 

and yet you miss the important points

 

this kind of reminds me that most of us went to public schools and learned basic reading and math...yet you miss the main point.

 

 

If you dont know the main point that is sad

[awm]

fwiw down to 72% in ten days.....cant claim romney has been brilliant last ten days so.........

 

any event see Fl, OH and VA. needs to win all three to have any chance.

 

Nate's model weights economic news rather heavily (and rightly so). He doesn't make any attempt to weight these ridiculous statements by Romney directly (hard to do this except through the polling) and they will take a few days to show up in the polls (if at all). Also, we had some good economic news today on the housing front. I'd expect a small move back towards Obama over the next few days.

[mike777]

Nate's model weights economic news rather heavily (and rightly so). He doesn't make any attempt to weight these ridiculous statements by Romney directly (hard to do this except through the polling) and they will take a few days to show up in the polls (if at all). Also, we had some good economic news today on the housing front. I'd expect a small move back towards Obama over the next few days.

 

 

so you dont see any strong movement in those three states that Romney must win to have any any chance.

 

fwiw in my home state housing up big last month.....

 

but down big on my local small block.

[Cthulhu D]

and yet you miss the important points

 

this kind of reminds me that most of us went to public schools and learned basic reading and math...yet you miss the main point.

 

 

If you dont know the main point that is sad

 

What do you think the main point is?

[billw55]

fwiw down to 72% in ten days.....cant claim romney has been brilliant last ten days so.........

 

 

any event see Fl, OH and VA. needs to win all three to have any chance.

I have been saying all along that Obama is a shoo-in, barring some extreme event/scandal before the election. I still say so. Polls, bah.

[phil_20686]

I feel kinda sorry for Mitt. His constituency is crazy; he isn't. Unfortunately, the lesson the Repugs will draw from this won't be 'Our party's ideas are morally and intellectually indefensible.' It will be 'Mitt blew it.'

 

The problem is that the ideas are neither crazy nor indefensible. Mostly when I hear republicans talk I think "B is a crazy way to achieve objective A", not "A is a crazy thing to try to achieve".

 

Its their implementation that is crazy. They think the banks have colluded with Washington to make huge profits while the economy suffers: The answer is not to return to the Gold Standard. Ryan talking on the "insidious evil of money printing" is just crazy talk. I'm sure that he believes that his policies will fix the economy. He is just crazy :P.

 

They believe in a strong National Defence. Well, the world is a scary place. Just this week I have seen YouTube videos of Chinese Mobs chanting "death to the Japanese", and calling for War, over some basically irrelevant islands. This in the same week that Mobs in the Middle East have stormed US embassies and lynched a US ambassador while chanting "Death to America". There have always been a segment of society who believes that people are now sufficiently enlightened that we will avoid war in the future. Historically, they have been right 0% of the time. :) Lets not forget that the enlightenment started out calling for justice, liberty and brotherhood for all men, right up until the more militaristically minded revolutionaries seized control, beheaded all their political opponents, and set about exterminating all their supporters (the Vendee massacres, about 250,000 people, though estimates vary wildly), so as to to be able to build a society "free of the impurity of opposition" (Voltaire's words). The world can change very quickly, a strong military is insurance, that is an argument that has mileage.

 

Even the opposition to healthcare has play, it is clearly a rational choice to refuse medical insurance. Its a tragedy of the commons type thing. Lots of moderately wealthy healthy people who refused insurance will be worse off under the ACA. Its a long standing piece of financial wisdom is that you should never insure for things you can afford to go wrong, because it is always an EV negative proposition, and most people can afford to pay for most illnesses that young healthy people are likely to get.

 

I am sure you were partly referring to their social policies, of opposition to Abortion, but that is a policy which enjoys widespread support. Gallup suggets that the prolife-prochoice division is now 50%-41%, with 9% undecided. On Gay marriage, the republicans likewise appear to be on the right side of public opinion, with 57%-40% opposing legalisation of Gay marriage.

 

The quest for "small government" will never be over. When I went to university, I had to fill out a twelve page form about my parents income and hence eligibility or not for student loans, even though I was not applying for student loans. But the bureaucracy was set up in such a way that the university wouldn't receive their part of the funding unless I was "on the system", which required filling out reasonably personal data about income, race, gender and orientation (for monitoring purposes). When this happens you are going to feel that Government is "too large" entirely independent of the fraction of national wealth that the government spends. People on the left see "Big government" purely in terms of jobs and money, but that characterises the reason for the opposition, imo.

 

I continue to believe that a serious contender could unite the republican base sufficiently over these concerns, without needing to be crazy or stupid.

[kenberg]

Also, there is a general tendency for people to over-inflate the errors of the other side. The election won't be decided by minor errors or gaffes, but you have one guy who drew a false equivalence between 47% who don't pay income tax and 47% who vote for the other side, and the other guy who talked about people clinging to religion because they are scared, admitted he used to regularly eat dog, and said that anyone who owns a successful business didn't build it.

 

It's been several days, maybe a week, since the video was posted and I think it may well have more staying power than I first thought. I'll explain.

 

I claim I have never spent thirty seconds of my life resenting the rich. I have no quarrel with Romney using the tax laws as they are written to keep his taxes low. The laws may need re-wrting, but using the law as it is now written does not offend me. But the Governor seems to have gone out of his way to pick a quarrel with me. I often describe, with little or no exaggeration, my decision to go to college. I came home, told my parents I had decided to go to college, and they said "Oh, which one?". It never even occurred to me to ask if they were in a position to pay the tuition. So I worked. I moved furniture. I crated farm machinery. I did a lot of other less pleasant jobs. Lots of guys did pretty much the same. I am pretty sure we paid no income tax, not enough earnings. Romney had Daddy pay for it all, the tax issue never even arose. Good for him, no argument from me. No argument until he decides to lump me and everyone else together as some sort of freeloader.

 

I went to the University of Minnesota, a tax supported school that had tuition I could afford. Thank you to the people of Minnesota. I like to think that affordable tuition was a good idea. If Governor Romney thinks it was just another example of a government give away to freeloaders, then we disagree.

 

It's not about the money, it never was. It's about respect for people whose lives are different from his own. He has had time now to explain he didn't mean to be as insulting as he was. Saying that he expressed himself inelegantly does not really do it.