Romney

SUMMARY

Romney actually has several different kinds of baggage going into the 2012 race: a number of them aren’t well-known to the voters, but the Democrats, who see him as potentially the strongest GOP presidential candidate, are going to make sure that everyone in America knows all about them. We remember from 2008 that Romney has a long track record as a flipflopper, changing his stance on almost every major issue, and recently he has taken a very public pounding on the one key issue wherein he actually stuck to his guns, the one issue which he hoped was going to be a major selling point for him, namely health care.

But there is more trouble coming. He expressed support for Paul Ryan the Medicare-killer, which the Democrats are already using in attack ads. The Democrats are also working to crush him on the issue of the auto bailout: Romney condemned the bailout and essentially wrote off his fellow Michiganders, and when the bailout turned into a smashing success, his team lamely sang multiple variations on the theme that the bailout had been Romney’s idea all along. Also, the all-powerful tea party is doing all they can to bring him down, and even the Wall Street Republicans would love to find an alternative to him for 2012; he hopes to hold his huge lead in relative moderate New Hampshire, and then woo his sometime-friend the Governor of South Carolina in order to get her critical endorsement in that state.

This post is divided into four sections, which you can find by clicking these links:

Romney and health care
Romney’s flipflops
Romney’s other problems
Romney’s candidacy

DETAILS

Romney and health care

Health care has been a major focus for the nation for three years now, and the Republicans have publicly promised to seek the repeal of Obama’s ACA: they still believe the ACA is unpopular. They want a nominee who can credibly fight that right, and Mitt Romney doesn’t qualify no matter how loudly he promises to repeal ACA, not only because he passed Romneycare but also because he predicted that someday the whole country would be using his mandate system; he has since recanted, but that in itself feeds into his reputation as a flipflopper. Nominating Romney implies that the Republicans finally accept that they were wrong on health care, which is not something the GOP does gracefully if they can avoid it.

Various factors simply rub salt in Romney’s wounds: his plan has made Massachusetts the best state in terms of percentage of people insured, particularly for children, but he can’t campaign on this, his biggest resume entry -- he doesn't even mention it in his bio. The Democrats continually praise the Romney plan because it is so similar to their plan, and helpfully point out that the Romney plan allows for abortions, which even the ACA doesn’t do. The DNC also assembled a highlight reel entirely made up of Fox commentators slamming Romney’s big health care speech (in case anyone thought Romney has closed the sale with fiscal conservatives, the Wall Street Journal slammed his health plan too). Obama went all the way to Boston to praise Romney’s help in getting the Obama plan passed. Democrats are also running ads quoting Romney’s support for the GOP plan to destroy Medicare: “I applaud Rep. Paul Ryan. We’re on the same page.”

Romney fought back, rather lamely, by arguing: "If I become president, I will repeal ObamaCare. My bill was 70 pages. His is over 2,000. He’s doing a lot of stuff that’s devastating to the health care system in this country. He’s wrong." Actually the two plans are similar in many particulars, to include mandates, affordability credits, standard benefits, exchanges, bans on cancellations, protection of pre-existing conditions, and Medicaid expansion.

In one respect he should be thankful that people are focusing on his health plan: it distracts attention from other aspects of his record. He served one term, had terrible approval ratings, and had a terrible record creating jobs -- and then fired people left and right at Bain.

Some Republicans forgave Romney in 2008 despite Romneycare, as they did with McCain over immigration. They could do so again in 2012 particularly if their animus toward the ACA is really all about Obama rather than health reform itself: this is likely since many of them favored Romney’s mandate system before Obama advocated it. The weaker the other Republican candidates seem to be, the more likely such forgiveness is; almost all of his rivals have done at least one thing to anger the extremely rigid conservatives who run the party, so the hardliners could decide that Romney is the lesser of ten evils.

Incidentally, Romney is not simon-pure on climate change, either. He said humans contribute to climate change and we need to reduce emissions. 

Romney’s flipflops

Romney is falling victim to the GOP’s great leap to the right over the last ten years: policies which would have gotten a free pass a decade ago are anathema now. But Romney put himself in this position, really: he can’t flipflop on health care, the way Pawlenty is trying to do with his apologetic abandonment of cap-and-trade, because Romney has flipflopped on too many other issues already.

His track record of flipflopping is so flagrant that Leno is already making fun of him. He has changed his tune on guns and on gay rights. He advocated a Massachusetts sex-education plan and then slammed Obama for supporting the same thing. He played the blind-trust card to evade accountability for his investments and then slammed Kennedy for doing the same; some Romney money went into casinos and stem-cell research, which the right wing base might not know. He was screeching about Hillary’s alleged socialist agenda, which actually looks a lot like Romney’s Massachusetts policies on issues such as free-market capitalism. He promised to fight for automaker jobs and then argued against the auto bailout, thus pushing things in the direction of a Chapter 11 settlement which would wipe out those very jobs. He flipped on carbon policy and the minimum wage.

He veered so far to the left on abortion, promising to keep abortion legal as president, that he was endorsed by Republicans For Choice; then he claimed he had an epiphany after his sister-in-law died from an illegal abortion, advocated a constitutional amendment banning abortion entirely, and vetoed emergency contraception for rape victims, which ironically would lead to more dangerous illegal abortions. In other words, he has violated the Wingnut Trinity: guns, gays, abortion.

So, neatly enough, it is the one issue where he has not flipflopped, health care, that is killing him.

A danger sign: the Club For Growth, which has a striking track record of finding and destroying Republican candidates who are insufficiently extreme, is already slamming Romney as a flipflopper. An anti-abortion group is going after him for flipping on the abortion issue too.  

Romney’s other problems

Conservatives are concerned about his flipflops, and also the Mormonism. Romney is no mere dabbler in Mormonism: he used a ministerial deferment to dodge the draft, spent two and a half years as a Mormon missionary, and got his bachelor’s at Brigham Young.

It will be the easiest thing in the world for the evangelicals to pull out their anti-Mormon playbook: the Mormon belief that only Mormons practice proper Christianity and that all other denominations are abominations; the statements by Mormon founders that African-Americans were cursed, inferior, lacking in intelligence, unworthy to serve as clergy until they changed the rules in 1978, descended from creatures who had refused to take a side in the battle between god and Lucifer, and that a woman who had sex with an African-American would die on the spot. Of course in the general election voters may be interested to know that Mormons oppose gay marriage and equal rights for women.

And it will take the other campaigns almost no time at all to find this tidbit: in 2005 he backed cap-and-trade, launching an $800 million energy initiative, and demanding regulations on a coal plant. “I will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people. And that plant kills people and PG&E has been given a notice to have it cleaned up by 2004 and they have thumbed their nose at the people of Massachusetts and Salem Harbor by not cleaning it up on time. So we’re saying, clean it up on time, do the job in the community, invest in cleaning technology.”

That, and his state was 47th in the nation in job creation during his tenure.

That, and he also raised taxes, but called the tax increases loophole closings, fees, fines, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Sometimes, Romney’s efforts to reestablish his street cred with the far right are embarrassing. Romney asserted that victims of floods and tornadoes should not receive help from government. “Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better….We cannot — we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all.”

Romney’s candidacy

Ironically, Romney is a perfect fit for the GOP in most other respects. He is a neocon’s dream. He supported the Iraq invasion and the surge, approved torture, advocated doubling the size of Guantanamo, and wanted to prevent the people held illegally in Guantanamo from even having their cases heard.

On social issues, he vetoed stem cell research, supported abstinence education and vouchers for public schools, praised Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, advocated making English the national language, and insisted that freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.

He wanted to keep Bush’s tax cuts, cut tax rates further for corporations, eliminate capital gains tax and inheritance tax, and cut entitlement programs. He opposes the McCain-Feingold restrictions on campaign financing.

He can win over independents better than most Republican candidates, but the hardcore conservatives dislike him; Richard Viguerie said that Romney won’t win over conservatives. Also there are still hurt feelings on the part of McCain and Huckabee from 2008, and from people like Perry who feel Romney blocked the flow of money to his gubernatorial campaign; and recently Republicans met in Texas to discuss the race, where there was a notable lack of enthusiasm for Romney.

Rachel Maddow helpfully pointed out how many Republicans hated Romney in 2008, and he had scarcely set down the microphone following his 2012 campaign announcement before fellow Republicans were attacking him: in fact Palin attacked him an hour before he even announced. Republicans want someone else, particularly the donors: even the people who are writing him checks are practically holding their noses while they do it.

He has kept up his connections in Iowa and New Hampshire, but the governor of the critically-important primary state of South Carolina is still making up her mind about him. Past polls showed him to be the most competitive candidate against Obama, but others may be closing the gap in that department. On the stump, he must avoid his signature achievement, health care, and also the Mormon issue and all the issues on which he has changed his views; he can’t hit too hard on the issues dear to the hardliners, because other candidates can outdo him on those topics. He can raise money superlatively – in May 2011 he raised $10 million in one day -- but the committee which he set up to raise money angered some Republicans, because he initially used a lot of the money for himself, although later he spread the cash around. His family is reluctant to run; his wife has MS as well as early-stage breast cancer.

So, all that baggage, health care, the flipflopping, Mormonism: in a normal year he would be a longshot. In a more propitious year, Romney would be doomed: even the field of 2008 candidates includes a handful of politicians like Giuliani or either of the Thompsons who try to could swoop in and steal the nomination from him. But there’s nothing normal about this campaign, or his competitors: this is a campaign in which a circus clown like Donald Trump was briefly the frontrunner. At one point he had a lead in all four of the early primary states, and may be hoping to ride into the nomination on sheer momentum. So, particularly since Romney is 64, this is his year. He has been the de facto frontrunner, on and off, since the 2008 election ended.

His campaign roll-out in June 2011 went poorly, and not just because Palin deliberately upstaged him. His inaugural speech was loaded with lies about his record and Obama's on taxes, lies about foreclosure levels, lies about Obama allegedly apologizing for America, and this gem: "We are only inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy.” Which is patently absurd: Obama, in the face of Republican objections, saved the auto industry, saved the financial industry, allowed corporations to make incredible profits, allowed stockholders to make a mint. 

Things will not improve even if the GOP resolves to make the economy the centerpiece of their effort against Obama.  During Romney's tenure as governor, his state was 47th in job growth, gaining only 1 percent in payroll jobs compared to more than 5 percent nationally. And at Bain one of his core businesses was outsourcing jobs and eliminating jobs in the U.S.