Tag Archives: election 2012

Why GOPers don’t talk about campaign debt

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Why Republicans don’t talk about campaign debt

For a while there, back in August 2011, the CEO of Starbucks floated an idea of boycotting campaign contributions to all incumbents. Within days, more than a hundred CEOs of large companies had joined/signed on to the idea. We have heard little about it since, undoubtedly for a combination of reasons. Many corporate donors are indeed holding back even now, closer to the election, but less because of an objection to money in politics than because of a predilection for fence-sitting. They are by no means confident that Mitt Romney can win the 2012 presidential election and are not eager to bail on a popular president to become linked with a ludicrous challenger. Their state and local incumbents will either win the election and thus don’t need money—so far as they know—or will not win and thus are a losing proposition. In any case if they want to donate to politics, they can smoothly and discreetly do so through PACs and super-PACs.

 

Romney

Possibly there is another reason as well. At the time Starbucks’ Howard Schultz floated his proposal, it would have particularly damaged the new GOP members of Congress. As the public generally knows, big money in politics does not rain on the just and the unjust alike; the biggest donations—especially from big pharma, big oil and the finance sector–flow mostly to Republican candidates. And for all the hoopla over those budget-cutting deficit-hawk tightfisted Tea Party-influenced GOP freshmen in Congress, the majority of them finished their campaigns in serious debt—and stayed that way.

 

Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.)

A quick overview of new GOP congress members, in a snapshot of their indebtedness as of Aug. 15, 2011, indicates that at least 45 of them* were still carrying serious debt from their election campaigns a year later. The Republican wave of 2010 did not carry its victorious campaigns to solvency. The situation has altered by now, of course, but there are still some interesting indicators.

Steel belt

A perennial GOP election tactic is to characterize the major industrial states as ‘swing’ states. At best, this characterization is seldom corrected in the national political press. No matter how many times Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin vote for the Democrat for the White House—the last FIVE elections, from 1992 through 2008, for Pennsylvania; the last SIX elections, back to 1988, for Michigan and Wisconsin—they still get pitched as swing states when an election year rolls around. There must be a lot of GOP consultants, or commentators who might as well be, left over from 1988. (There are.) This passive-aggressive media tactic, or sometimes genuine political ignorance, is particularly damaging as newspapers shrink in number and coverage and as the media are blanketed with multi-million-dollar false advertising. (Successfully-not-recalled Gov. Scott Walker’s dubious claim that he has brought about a budget surplus in Wisconsin is only one recent example. Walker’s claim looks likely to be rebutted by events, and a federal investigation is underway.)

The swing-state mentality, or analysis if it’s called that, is inherently pro-GOP. At least eleven new Republicans swept into Congress in the industrial ‘swing’ states in 2010 are on the list below—if they won at all, they ended their campaigns in serious debt, and they stayed in debt for at least another year. A set of hard, expensive campaigns does not look like a groundswell of enthusiasm for the GOP or even for throwing out incumbents.

To do them justice, at least all but one of them eventually voted in Congress to raise what is called the debt ceiling. The lone holdout, Michigan’s Justin Amash, seems to try to be a consistent libertarian conservative on the model of Ron Paul.

Illinois

Four new GOP members on the list below came in from Illinois. Of these, Randy Hultgren (Ill. 14th) still has money problems, relatively speaking—at least if the Dems have the sense to support challenger Dennis Anderson. House speaker John Boehner, leaving nothing to chance in the 14th, is out fundraising for Hultgren, whose district went solidly for Obama in 2008.

 

More ludicrously, Illinois also still has Rep. Joe Walsh in situ. Walsh is the notorious child-support dodger and debt defaulter who ended his 2010 campaign at least $340,000 in debt—and then voted in Congress against raising the debt limit, on grounds of fiscal probity. Walsh’s unsavory finances—besides child support–have been discussed elsewhere, including here and here, but he has drawn big-bucks support, presumably because of his low-rent-style personal attacks on the president. Everything that turns the public off on politics benefits the GOP and its corporate donors. Still, if someone like Joe Walsh could beat someone like Tammy Duckworth, Illinois has a worse literacy problem than yet brought to light. In fact, if the national GOP or its supporting orgs are actually still throwing money Walsh’s direction, there are few stronger indicators that they have money to burn.

Duckworth

In Illinois’ 17th, Bobby Schilling came out of 2010-11 somewhat less in debt and has also pulled in large donations. Schilling has a solid challenger in Democrat Cheri Bustos, but another challenger, Eric Reyes, is trying to get on the ballot as a write-in candidate.

Tennessee, West Virginia

The most-preyed-upon belt produced three loaded-with-debt Republican freshmen in 2010—none from Kentucky, but two from Tennessee and one from West Virginia. New GOP Rep Diane Black (Tenn. 6th) had almost a million in debt a year later, David McKinley over half a million; Charles Fleischmann only $200K-plus. Black is heavily financed this time around, facing Democratic challenger attorney Brett Carter. McKinley of West Virginia is also heavily financed, against Dem challenger Susan Thorn. At least Black and McKinley eventually voted to raise the debt limit. Fleischmann, of Tennessee’s heavily gerrymandered 3rd, supported basket-case brinkmanship to the last, getting Boehner’s support anyway. Primaries still to come, in August, with the Democratic contenders looking a lot more credible than the GOP field.

For the rest

The point of highlighting some of our debt-ridden representatives is that coming in loaded with debt does not tend to make even a raw new congress member ‘independent’. Mouthing about ‘revolution’ or the Tea Party or ‘reining in spending’ or debt, when one is carrying liabilities in excess of one’s campaign’s ability to pay them off, should therefore draw some skeptical attention. In this context it might be noted that Arizona produced three of the new GOP in-the-redders, beating out California (one) and Florida (two). Paul Gosar of Arizona’s 4th and David Schweikert of Arizona’s 6th are a lot better off now, financially speaking—but face opponents in the August primaries in AZ. Schweikert’s opponent is fellow listee Ben Quayle, son of former Vice President Dan Quayle; both are lavishly funded. Presumably Quayle and Schweikert can’t both make hay in the primary over the fact that they both opposed raising the debt ceiling to the last, while in debt themselves.

*List on Aug 15, 2011:

  • Justin Amash,  MI 3: $10K cash on hand, $408K debts            N (unopposed for GOP primary Aug 7)
  • Louis J. Barletta, PA 11: $9K cash, $258K debt
  • Daniel J. Benishek, MI 1: $35K cash, $145K debt
  • Diane Lynn Black, TN 6: $36K cash, $1M debt
  • Francisco Canseco, TX 23: $141K cash, $1.1M debt
  • Steve Chabot, OH 1: $7K cash, $10K debt
  • Jeff Denham, CA 10: $47K cash, $54K debt
  • Robert Dold, IL 10: $81K cash, $144K debt
  • Blake Farenthold, TX 27: $33K cash, $157K debt
  • Michael G. Fitzpatrick, PA 8: $28 cash, $129K debt
  • Charles J. Fleischmann, TN 3: $31K cash, $250K debt            N
  • William Flores, TX 17: $44K cash, $731K debt
  • Cory Gardner, CO 4: $19K cash, $103K debt
  • Chris Gibson, NY 20: $31K cash, $50K debt
  • Paul Gosar, AZ 1: $740 cash, $59K debt
  • Tim Griffin, AR 2: $81K cash, $206K debt
  • Michael Grimm, NY  : $21K cash, $95K debt
  • Frank Guinta, NH 1: $493 cash, $355K debt
  • Richard L. Hanna, NY 24: $39K cash, $537K debt
  • Andy Harris, MD 1: $40K cash, $97K debt
  • Vicky Hartzler, MO 4: $22K cash, $163K debt           N
  • Nan Hayworth, NY 19: $53K cash, $505K debt
  • Jaime Herrerra, WA 3: $23K cash, $41K debt
  • Randy Hultgren, IL 14: $29K cash, $61K debt N
  • Bill Johnson, OH 6: $32K cash, $55K debt
  • Mike Kelly, PA 3: $28K cash, $383K debt
  • Jeffrey M. Landry, LA 3: $930 cash, $323K debt         N
  • David B. McKinley, WV 1: $77K cash, $670K debt
  • John Mick Mulvaney, SC 5: $137K cash, $210K debt N
  • Richard B. Nugent, FL 5: $12K cash, $15K debt
  • Ben Quayle, AZ 3: $8K cash, $27K debt         N
  • Tom Reed, NY 29: $37K cash, $76K debt
  • James B. Renacci, OH 16: $50K cash, $375K debt
  • Reid Ribble, WI 8: $2K cash, $173K debt
  • Scott Rigell, VA 2: $157K cash, $378K debt
  • David Rivera, FL 25: $11K cash, $137K debt
  • Jon Runyan, NJ 3:  $5K cash, $339K debt
  • Bobby Schilling, IL 17: $10K cash, $54K debt
  • David Schweikert, AZ 5: $16K cash, $523K debt        N
  • Austin Scott, GA 8: $11K cash, $99K debt      N
  • Steve Stivers, OH 15: $10K cash, $41K debt
  • Marlin Stutzman, IN 3: $523 cash, $8K debt                N
  • Scott Tipton, CO 3: $22K cash, $159K debt               N
  • Tim Walberg, MI 7: $52K cash, $72K debt
  • Joe Walsh, IL 14: $22K cash, $362K debt                   N

 

Trump, birtherism and the GOP race 2012: The more things don’t change, part 3

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The more things don’t change, part 3

2012 from primary to election

 

The dynamic that shaped the Republican primaries is now shaping the Republican campaign for the White House: Future nominee Mitt Romney is continuing the Rick Santorum strategy of going for the leftovers.

 

Romney supporters in Tennessee

As we know, the GOP primary season from summer 2011 to May 2012 shaped up as a contest dividing the voters from more populous counties, in general, from the voters of less populous counties. The GOP primary race was never between ‘moderate’ and ‘conservative’; all the candidates except in some ways Ron Paul support the same rapacious policies. The primary race was between Romney, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul on one hand and Santorum on the other, the fault line being metropolitan/suburban appeal versus rural appeal. Santorum took most of the less populated counties, and he took states where rural and small-town counties and congressional districts outweigh metropolitan areas and suburbs. In this metric, as previously written, Santorum had the advantage of a divided field among his opponents and the leftovers to himself. Romney, Gingrich and Paul divided the more populated areas.

 

Romney with Nikki Haley

Now Romney has the Republican electorate all to himself—an electorate dependent on voters in regions where population density is not high, where communications are not good, where newspapers are not strong, and where per capita wealth and computer literacy are most lopsidedly divided between highest and lowest. Meth lab country. ‘Safe states’? The only respectably safe state for Romney is Utah. Romney is inordinately dependent on states that gave Rick Santorum victories—Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee—or that would have boosted Santorum if he could have lasted longer or if he had gotten his electors/delegates on the ballot—Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Texas, West Virginia.

Of the states just mentioned, Texas comes closest to being Romney territory. (Texas also comes closest of these to being Obama territory, but so far the Dems have successfully kept that secret.) As written last week, however, out-of-the-race candidates Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and others pulled several thousand votes in the May 29 Texas primary won by Romney. So did “Uncommitted,” on the GOP ballot: More than sixty thousand voters turned out, in an uncontested Republican primary, to vote NOT for their party’s overwhelming favorite and frontrunner, rejecting even the cachet of putting the nominee over the top.

 

Trump

Enter Donald Trump, with his version of support for Romney.

Trump’s support is hardly intended for ‘swing states’. There is no evidence that Trump has wide popular appeal in Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin. Even in Missouri he looks iffy. Trump’s ‘birth certificate’ ploy is not part of a grand strategy to soften antagonism to Romney among people who work in the automobile industry in Michigan or even in Indiana. No, Trump’s support, his ghastly pitch for birtherism, is a straight-out invitation to the most ignorant counties in the U.S. Grabbing headlines big enough to reach people who don’t read and who distrust the ‘liberal media’ so intensely they refuse to read newspapers or to watch any television news except Fox, Trump is going openly for the voters in the 91 of 95 Tennessee counties won by Santorum.

 

The brighter side of factories closing

Regrettably, automobile workers in Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina are seldom allowed to know about Romney’s policy positions. If you want another trillion-dollar war and another trillion-dollar tax cut for speculators and hedge fund managers, Romney’s your man—video clips widely available. But the dearth of newspapers in places that need them most seals up policy discussion as though it were national secrets. The result is ongoing harm to U.S. manufacturing and to working families.

 

Back to the birthers—

Theoretically Romney came out of the Texas primary as undisputed top dog and all-round GOP winner, safely in a position to train effective opposition against the Democrats and the president for the next five months. No more press hype boosting minor opponents like Tim Pawlenty (see here and here and here). No more unappealing candidates like Bachmann, Gingrich and Santorum trying ham-handedly to swipe at Romney. Right? No more para-candidates like Rudy Giuliani, Sarah Palin and Trump to distract attention from the nominee. Uh. No more specter-candidates like Chris Christie and Jeb Bush as embarrassing reminders of how many GOPers hoped for more latecomers in the race—at least, not yet this week. No more speculation in the political press as to whether Romney will be downed by a much-hyped ‘Christian right’, Tea Party, and ‘rebellion’ in the ranks. Hm.

Theoretically Romney has massive advantages.

  • He was a primary candidate who did not flunk the one-look-from-across-a-crowded-room test.
  • He presumably has political infrastructure intact at the state level, remaining from a front-loaded primary schedule, copious early money and longstanding organization.
  • He will have unprecedented funding from everyone from Karl Rove to the Koch brothers and the Chamber of Commerce in between.
  • His campaign has five months to benefit from expensive and misleading television ads.
  • He can count on intransigence from Republicans in Congress, to prevent any legislation that would improve the condition of ordinary Americans.

And yet, and yet—he still faces, as previously written, the prospect of some voter sectors not finding a ‘top-tier’ candidate ugly enough for their tastes, and wishing they could have replaced him with someone more transparently unsavory. These are the Manchurian-candidate voters to whom Trump appeals.

If an obvious falsehood triumphs anywhere, it is most liable to triumph in wide-open stretches where mass communications are poor, where former farms produce hay and timber if they’re lucky, and where meth labs start looking like a good way to make a living. Even the most declined neighborhoods in the large industrial states do not tend to be hotbeds of birtherism. Susceptibility to Romney’s claim of being an effective manager is still found more in suburbs than in cities.

Perhaps by now we should all be used to wild claims, and used to the political press reporting wild claims as though they were substantive. Look at the way quintessential Washington insiders and career politicians typically claim to be outsiders, a new start, a fresh face—like Herman Cain, and Santorum with his lobbying career, and Gingrich with his contract with Freddie Mac. To some extent the discrepancies are aired by the national political press, though not as much as they should be and too often as though they are equally endemic to both sides in a national election.

Worse, such factual reporting as survives the filter of the national political press is jeopardized by continuous undertow from the business press. All the major GOP candidates, regardless of stylistic differences, are essentially corporate mouthpieces. Personality differences notwithstanding, the core fiscal trickle-down policy remains intact: it’s rich-get-richer. It’s always there.

They don’t put it that way, of course. The obfuscation is protected by the business press—the same commentators, analysts and journalists who failed to notice the impending mortgage-derivatives crisis and who almost unanimously supported ‘deregulation’. Still do.

It’s the same gang that keeps giving us Orwellianisms about ‘austerity’, ‘debt’, ‘energy’ and ‘jobs’ while doing everything it can to siphon off value from the many and convey it to the few, and a highly unqualified few at that.

Once again, a recent example—U.S. Treasury bills last week sold at a remarkably low rate of interest, yield, meaning that 1) U.S. Treasuries are regarded as rock-solid investment, and 2) their sale saddles the Treasury with little to no debt. But in all the hoopla about ‘the budget’, when was the last time you heard a GOPer in Congress mention the fiscal benefit of issuing U.S. Treasuries at a lower interest rate, to pay off bonds with a higher rate?

Once again, there is an analogy here to refinancing your mortgage. Most people understand the value of refinancing their mortgages if they can get a significantly lower interest rate. It would be illuminating to know which members of Congress have refinanced their houses, just to check on which members understand the same idea. Unfortunately, that information is not publicly available. Residences of congress members are exempted from financial disclosure.

Publicly, in any case, they all go the pro-corporate line of harping on ‘debt’ and ‘deficit’ anyway—except when it comes to discussing corporate debt.

 

More on Trump’s version of birtherism later

Déjà vu all over again: Rightwing attacks on presidents

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Déjà vu all over again: Rightwing attacks on Franklin Roosevelt

 

There are few better ways to get a handle on the current political scene than to re-read The Age of Roosevelt, the historical trilogy on the New Deal by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Volume 3 is titled The Politics of Upheaval. During the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the struggles of American labor to survive, the United States had to try to conserve fiscal and social health in the face of continuing assaults from nut-right politicians and media figures. Then as now, there was an unholy alliance between the distorted faux-populists doing the vocalizing and their funders; to some extent the self-described representatives of the people—or of religion, or of morality—represented the limited short-term interests of the very wealthy and of Wall Street.

Side note: Admittedly, the term ‘nut right’ is anachronism. Back in the 1930s the destructors were called other names, often more elegant though equally negative. There is little use in trying to quantify the ugliness of the personal attacks, to compare then and now. Obviously the anti-Rooseveltians did not have race to use against their president. But they did make fun of–for example–his being disabled and in a wheelchair. A political-social occasion described by Schlesinger gets the idea across: Republican business chiefs, gathered for a dinner meeting, all rose for a ‘toast’ to the absent president, laughing as a group at the fact that he would not be able to do the same.

 

FDR

A rose by any other name . . .

The thumbnails below should seem familiar. Let’s take, for example, the unholy alliance between the rightwing super-rich and racist-demagogue politicians not typically featured in Town and Country magazine:

“ . . . the du Ponts in particular were prepared to support almost anyone who promised to stir the masses—even, it developed, Governor Eugene Talmadge of Georgia.

Nothing better demonstrated the naivete—or the desperation—of the American right than this decision. Since his election as governor in 1933, Talmadge had become a strident figure on the national scene. He seemed a character out of Erskine Caldwell, with black rumpled hair, suspicious eyes glaring behind thick horn-rimmed glasses, a black cigar jutting out of his wide fleshy mouth, and a collection of poor-white prejudices ejaculated with restless and rabid intensity. Talmadge, who held a law degree from the University of Georgia, was actually much less the uncouth backwoodsman from Sugar Creek than he pretended.” (520)

 

Eugene Talmadge

But Talmadge had his uses. As Georgia’s governor,

 

“Talmadge spat at the New Deal with contempt. Little riled him more than [National Recovery Act] standards of wages and hours, unless possibly it was the [Works Progress Administration] standards of relief. When Ben Stolberg asked him what  he would do for the unemployed, Talmadge roared back, “Let ‘em starve.” The Governor then added, “What you need in New York is not La Guardia but Mussolini. A little castor oil would go a long ways toward starting the wheels of industry goin’ again.” (Stolberg concluded he was talking to Buzz Windrip.)” (521)

Note: The topical allusion to Mussolini here refers to one of Mussolini’s milder forms of torture, forcing political prisoners to drink the strong laxative castor oil. The offense was memorialized in Sinclair Lewis’s darkly sardonic novel It Can’t Happen Here. Buzz Windrip is a character in the novel. The Sinclair Lewis Society, of which I am a member, can and does find Lewis all over the map. Nowadays it is hard not to see him everywhere.

 

Sinclair Lewis, avatar Steve Buschemi

Back to then Gov. Talmadge,

“A Texas lumberman named John Henry Kirby presently waited on [Talmadge] as chairman of the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution. Kirby and Talmadge soon conceived the idea of a convention of grass-roots Democrats to denounce the New Deal and (though this was less advertised0 to launch the Talmadge presidential boom.

Talmadge’s retrenchment policies—especially the across-the-board reduction of the property tax, which gave immense benefits to the Georgia Power Company while saving the average Georgia farmer 53 cents a year—had won him a good name among businessmen.”

 

How time doesn’t change things:

“Late in January 1936 the forces gathered at Macon, Georgia, to save the republic—Thomas L. Dixon, the author of The Klansman, Gerald L. K. Smith, an assortment of other politicians, and Talmadge himself . . . Above the platform hung the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy. On every seat lay a copy of the Georgia Woman’s World with a two-column photograph splashed across the page [showing Eleanor Roosevelt in the company of African-Americans; offensive description].” (522)

Shades of Citizens for a Working America PAC. Grass roots? Not so much:

“Even in Georgia the grass-roots convention played only to a half-filled auditorium . . . What gave the episode significance was the readiness of northern businessmen—who presumably knew by 1936 all that it was necessary to know about Gene Talmadge—to give him money to advance his ideas and ambitions. Some of them—Sloan and Henry du Pont, for example—actually sent along their contributions after the [racist] revelations of Macon. Arthur Krock ascribed it not to malice but to gullibility, and he was doubtless right. The frightened rich were evidently at the mercy of every fast-talking political adventurer who came down the street.”

But fancily named organizations, like hope, spring eternal:

“Other attempts on the part of the Liberty Leaguers, du Pont section, to break through to the masses were even more ludicrous. One shrewd promoter sold them the idea of establishing something called the Farmers’ Independence Council. The only known address of the organization was the Liberty League office in Washington. “The biggest contributor,” remarked the Philadelphia Record, “was that old hayseed, Lammot du Pont, who kicked in $5000. (Crops pretty good this year, ain’t they Lammot!)” Other interested agriculturists were Sloan, Ogden Mills, Winthrop Aldrich, and Pew of Sun Oil. Relentless congressional investigation failed to disclose a single working farmer in the membership.”

On the other hand–here is a congressional committee whose time has come again:

“In the spring of 1936 Hugo Black’s Special Committee to Investigate Lobbying Activities got around to looking at the du Pont political subsidiaries—the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, the Farmers’ Independence Council, the Crusaders, the Sentinels of the Republic. The result of the unfeeling exposure of rich men as political suckers was merriment in the press and a permanent conviction that the American Liberty League was a political bust. By midsummer, in the cruelest blow of all, the Republican party begged the Liberty League to stay away from its presidential ticket.” (523)

By the way, this chapter from Schlesinger’s book is titled “Dissidence among the Democrats.” This week, the major media outlets gave big play to theories that President Obama’s support of marriage equality would generate dissidence among minorities, and thus loss of votes for the Democrats. The Washington Post, a newspaper with a contingent actively campaigning against President Obama, has run this kind of line at frequent intervals since November 2008, although more feebly and dispiritedly lately. As regards the 2012 election, opinion polls indicate the same-sex-marriage issue less than a game changer. Meanwhile, now as ever some of the largest media outlets continue hand-wringing over the loss of ‘moderates’ in both parties blahblahblah.

 

Once again, a question for those still literate, factual, and practical: What is the ‘moderate’ number of exotic failures on Wall Street? What is the ‘moderate’ number of oil spills? What is the ‘moderate’ amount of mortgage fraud?

The methods, like the aims—money to get position, position to get money and status—are perennial. The power and will in some sectors of corporate America to push back against the interests of the general public should not be under-estimated.

 

Note: The above is re-posted, with revisions, from an earlier piece, regrettably still relevant.

Iowa caucus day, and Gingrich calls Romney a liar; Live-blogging the coverage

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Live-blogging the coverage on the media-saturated Iowa caucuses–

7:40 a.m. We’re not off to a good start. Newt Gingrich just appeared on CBS’ The Early Show, pitching for himself, and called Mitt Romney a liar.

Gingrich

The exchange with guest interviewers Norah O’Donnell and Bob Schieffer started ordinarily. Gingrich boosted himself, then criticized Romney’s super-PAC ads against him, then characterized Romney’s positioning as less than candid.

O’Donnell: “Are you calling Mitt Romney a liar?”

Gingrich: “Yes.”

O’Donnell, flapped at getting a direct answer to an oversimplified question, pressed Gingrich to repeat. So he did. Schieffer ditto.

For the record, there is a difference between characterizing a statement as false, or even a lie, and characterizing the person as ‘a liar.’ This is a central distinction in ethics.

In politics on television, no difference. Gingrich could have said, “No. I’ve done no name-calling,” and gone on to make the distinction between lying–something everyone has done at some point–and throwing out the whole person. Of course, throwing out Romney Gingrich’s objective.