I admit - the only two Republicans I'm looking closely at are Governors Romney and Huckabee. Both have prior experience as a governor, and in senior leadership positions outside of politics (Huckabee as a pastor, Romney as a leader (I forget the official term - I think it was "stake leader") in his church and as a private sector executive). Senator McCain is probably my third choice, in large part because of Lieberman's endorsement. I think a McCain/Lieberman (or vice versa) ticket would be interesting. But I think legislating and executing are two different animals, and as chief executive, I'd like someone with more applicable experience.
All that said, I'm disappointed that Romney is doing the thing I like least in politics - lying about opponents with the thinnest veneer of truth to cover it. I really want to know why I should vote for him, not why I shouldn't vote for the other guy.
It's doubly worse because I think the "base position" of Republicans on immigration (amnesty is bad! walls are good! keep them OUT!) is a downright poor idea (I'm a huge fan of very open immigration, with only security considerations preventing anyone and anyone that wants to immigrate from coming in - especially in light of the growing Medicare / Social Security crunch), and I wish someone had the guts to say it and the chops to prove it. I admit, however reluctantly, that saying dumb things to get elected is probably part of the beast.
Friday, December 28, 2007
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Campaign ads and the media articles that review those ads are like mirrors facing each other. You can follow them into infinity trying to uncover the "truth."
For instance, the Washington Post omits details about Romney's positions that would cut against its negative characterization of Romney (for instance, the whole story behind Romney's characterization of McCain's immigration policy as "reasonable"). But any article review criticizing the Washington Post article will probably omit relevant information as well.
The long-and-the-short of it is that a 30-second ad, nor a half-page article cannot provide all relevant information that will potray a complete picture. Although it would be unfair and incomplete to judge McCain on Romney's ad, the Washington Post article judging Romney also contains incomplete information. All in all, I wish Romney would run a totally positive campaign.
It's not accurate, though, to label Romney as the only one who has contrasted the positive aspects of his record with the negative aspects of another (omitting qualifying details in the process). McCain and Huckabee are full of bunk when they say that Romney is the only candidate running a "negative" campaign.
Huckabee has slid from 2nd place in my mind into a last-place tie with Guiliani. He has no credibility on fiscal or foreign policy issues, he has ethical problems that fit in well with the G.O.P.'s "culture of corruption," and I find his manipulation of the Christian community intensly distasteful. I just plain don't like the guy.
What would be an ideal immigration policy for you? If one of your points is that Congress and the POTUS should focus more upon immigration law reform (i.e., provide more reasonable, less costly, swifter legal means for immigrants to enter the U.S.), I very much agree.
The security and law-and-order prong of immigration policy is important to me, however. I am pro-immigration, but I am anti-undocumented immigration.
My law-and-order side is offended by the immigrant mindset that it is acceptable to use fraudulent identity cards. Crossing an artificial border may be malum prohibitum (in other words, against the law because the U.S. says it is against the law), but fraud is clearly malum in se (inherently wrong). The law-and-order prong is the more popular political prong of the immigration reform problem, and maybe wrongfully so, but I believe, nonetheless, that it is an important prong.
Moreover, the longer the U.S. unevenly enforces its immigration policies, the more difficult the immigration problem will be to fix. The majority of problems that have emerged from the U.S.'s uneven enforcement of its own policies, not from the immigrants themselves.
I'm bothered by the fraud in illegal immigration. But I'm less upset at the perps than the system we have that has led to that point. The most common "identity theft" is to answer the "I need a stupid number to get a job" issue. It's not to actually try and assume that person's identity.
I liked the proposal before Congress - or at least several parts of it. I like the idea of a fine for currently illegal residents, to assign a price to their crime, with the opportunity to get on the legal path. When it comes to visas, I don't think it goes far enough. "Amnesty," when it contains a penalty for the past law-breaking, isn't something I have aproblem with, because I'm not worried about setting a precedent, because I would want to change the system such that being an illegal immigrant wouldn't be necessary ("necessary" here means that a preson wants to work here, but cannot obtain because of our limits on the system, a legal permit to be here).
My favorite idea for immigration is essentially to welcome any and all people that want to move here, with a background check to try and screen out people that want to do us harm. But honestly? I think the "terrorists want to cross the border to do us harm" argument is a most hideous red herring. If well-funded terrorist groups are determined to get to American soil and do us harm... they will. Our current policies do not provide security - they provide the illusion of it.
The biggest problem with open immigration is the burden it would put on our social insurance programs. But even then, I think that we gain far more by letting foreign workers come here than we lose. We have so many people that want to come here to work that the 65,000 H1B visas (temporary, professional workers) are all applied for in a day, 6 months before the applicable program year begins.
People want to come here to succeed. I believe it is in our best interest to let them.
By the way, that Romney hit piece from Kurtz that you cited is hardly objective reporting. Give me a break with the "Romney hired illegals" in his backyard nonsense. If Kurtz can't apply the same standard he imposes on Romney, he has no business saying Romney's ad is "so selective to be misleading". Get out of your glass house, Kurtz.
Most everything in the ad is true. Romney's weakest statement is that McCain "voted to allow illegal immigrants to collect Social Security". However, when they would get retroactive social security benefits for the time they spent in the U.S. illegally, I wouldn't classify it as "lying" to say the plan "allowed illegal immigrants to collect Social Security".
I am not trying to justify misleading political ads. I don't find them palatable. But that WaPo article is a bit much.
It's not my intention to be a total homer for Romney. I'm still convinced, however, that he's the best guy among the G.O.P. (Sure, maybe the fact that I was his son's neighbor while in college has biased me a bit in his favor). In my perfect world, his campaign would be totally optimistic and about his own accomplishments, and absent the potentially misleading commercials about his opponents.
I think what got under my skin was the boilerplate "Romney opposes amnesty for illegals." Set in the context of the ad, the intent of the statement is to say (or imply) that McCain supports it - following the form of "my opponent is X. I am Y." I don't think I'd call making a current illegal immigrant pay a fine as a part of a path to citizenship "amnesty." He doesn't do it explicitly in the ad, which is why I called it "lying with ... a veneer of truth."
If he makes the amnesty opposition statement in an ad that isn't trying to contrast him and an opponent, it's nothing more than a statement I dislike. But in context, it's like saying "McCain voted against hate crime legislation. Romney opposes racism."
I do agree, though, that the Post blog was overly critical of Romney. I mostly included it for the text of the ad, than for the "analysis."
Oh... and did I say I agree with opposing tax cuts unmatched by spending reductions? The biggest fiscal benefit for tax cuts in my book is the extent to which it reduces federal spending. It's the decoupling of that principle that is one of the most troubling things to happen in the past 8 years, budget-wise. Romney is, then, being critical of McCain for something I support. Tax cuts plus an increase in spending is simply irresponsible. I thought Romney responsible enough to know this. Assuming he is, characterizing McCain's votes against the tax cuts for the same reason is simply dishonest.
Nonetheless, McCain did oppose the tax cuts, regardless of his reason for doing so. People can decide for themselves whether they agree with McCain's decision or not. It is not dishonest on Romney's part, at all, to point out McCain's vote. Remember, McCain's first vote against the tax cut he came before 9/11. Like Romney's ads or not, at least they are substantive.
Contrast McCain's latest attack ad, which simply labels Romney a phony.
You are right. Dishonest is not the right word - he is stating a true fact. However, he's misrepresenting himself if these two assumptions are true:
A) McCain voted against the tax cuts because they weren't matched by spending reductions.
B) Romney would not support tax cuts that were unmatched by reductions in spending.
It is duplicitous because the ad suggests that Romney would not vote against tax cuts in McCain's place, when if these assumptions are true he would have voted the same way.
It may also be true that assumption B is false. In that case, Romney is not playing loose with the facts, but he's fiscally irresponsible in a way that reminds me of the worst of 2002-2006. But, it also toes the line of what most Republicans expect their candidate to say (which is, of course, why Romney points out McCain's vote in the first place).
And while a tax cut may have come before 9/11, the official period of the recession was March 2001 to November 2001... and UI claims were growing and growth was slowing well before the election. I still remember talking to a friend (I think it was my now-roommate) that whoever won the 2000 election would probably get blamed for the upcoming recession... so it might be a good idea to throw the election. The tax cuts were based on the idea of "returning the surplus to the people," but there was no long term surplus - it was a paper projection based on pre-bubble-bursting growth projections. Projections most conservatives now march out as obviously erroneous whenever a liberal comes out with the "Clinton surplus, Bush deficit" argument.
We can't reasonably say that tax cuts based on that fictional surplus are a responsible (here used as "budget balancing") fiscal decision, and deny that Bush took Clinton's surpluses and turned them into deficits. Either the projections were good and trustworthy (Clinton did in fact have surpluses, but the money was also there for tax cuts), or they were not (Clinton didn't really have huge surpluses, and responsible tax cuts would be balanced with reduced spending). I favor the second explanation.
The funny thing is, I prefer Romney to McCain overall. But ads like this generally lead me to prefer the candidate being talked about, not the one doing the talking. Not just because I don't like negative campaigns, but because it's the middle-ground positions that are harder to take precisely because of the fact that it opens up the politician to this manner of attack later. And there's vastly more to be said for making a difficult, proper decision than for sniping at one who did.
I understand and appreciate your point. I very much agree that Romney's comparison may lead people to arrive at the conclusion that McCain's opposition to the tax cuts was the sound, courageous decision.
I disagree with both of your assumptions, however. I am pretty confident that Romney would have voted for the tax cuts. What would Romney have done to offset the tax cuts? I can only speculate.
Also, based on my review of McCain's statements about his opposition to the tax cuts, he talked a lot about objecting to the tax cuts because they mainly benefited the wealthy (in class-warfare style language) than fiscal responsibility.
If McCain believed he made the right decision, why is McCain so upset with Romney? One reason is that McCain is not terribly enthusiastic about advertising his opposition to his tax cuts.
More importantly, I believe the Huck and McCain's response to Romney have been exceptionally weak. Rather than own their record, they simply label Romney a liar and attack his character or say he is launching the ads because he is in a "tailspin" (patently untrue), without addressing the substance of his criticisms.
My main point is that Romney has not been dishonest, and the more I read, the more I believe that his ads have not even been particularly misleading.
"What would Romney have done to offset the tax cuts? I can only speculate."
The problem, alas, is that Romney could have done nothing. He's one of 100 legislators. In the end, he has to vote the package, as is, up or down. Romney, in McCain's shoes, is just a Senator.
"One reason is that McCain is not terribly enthusiastic about advertising his opposition to his tax cuts."
Because in an election season, everyone's busy saying what they feel they need to say to get elected. Romney isn't saying an awful lot about the specifics of his Massachusetts health care plan, either. Even though he believes himself right on the issue, it's not one that woos many Republican primary voters. The last thing he wants to do is talk long and hard about how he brought in a sweeping new government mandate as governor, because there's simply no way to sound-byte that in a way that Republican primary voters will get excited about.
I can't speak to what McCain and Huckabee have had to say about Romney, because I haven't really looked. I'm only talking about Romney because that's what I happened to see in the news.
Assumption B is a no-win for Romney in my book if Assumption A is true. Assumption A, however, is purely hearsay on my part and by far the weaker part of the argument. I don't actually know McCain's motivations. And I should add a third assumption, dealing with Romney's thoughts concerning why McCain voted against the tax cut package.
Most of what I can find of McCain's comments at the time are in the form of "the tax cuts come at the expense of the middle class." He also offered an amendment to shift some of the tax cut from the wealthy to the middle class, which was defeated, 49-49. But it is in a very real sense that deficit-funded tax cuts do come at the expense of the middle class because (1) they increase the debt for all Americans, who are mostly middle class, and (2) the debt burden has an adverse effect on interest rates, which affects those who need credit to buy a home or car and lack the funds to purchase such things outright (again, middle-class). I wouldn't use the pejorative "class warfare" if it's actually true.
And while Romney isn't in a tailspin, it's also true that other candidates have come from well below him, with substantially less financing, to make it a much tougher race for Romney, and in both Iowa (where Romney saw a 10-15 point lead on every challenger shift to a 10-point Huckabee lead in December... a two-man swing of 25 points) and South Carolina (where Romney saw a 2 point edge on Giuliani turn to a 5 point deficit to Huckabee) Huckabee's gains seem to have come in part at Romney's expense, with the same being true to a lesser extent for McCain in New Hampshire. I wouldn't say it's patently untrue that Romney suddenly feels a need to respond to these challengers that he did not before.
But, for what it's worth, I'm glad I have a Romney homer I can bounce these ideas off of.
Fair enough. We'll see how this primary plays out. My judge is up for re-election this year, and I've already told him I'm going to be in charge of the attack ads if he runs contested :)
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