Posted by Parker V on February 25, 2012 under President, Republican | 
Politico claims the 2012 GOP Primary race to be a “gotcha” campaign and Mitt Romney to be the “gotcha candidate”. Why? Because attacks levied against him in the debates have notably failed and backfired. Instead of noting these failures, however, Politico oddly blames/credits Romney for…knowing the substance behind the attacks against him as well as the weaknesses in the background of his opponents on the very issues they’re attacking him on.
Throughout the 20 GOP debates, Romney has been the candidate most prepared to take down his rivals’ records. When Rick Perry threatened, Romney delivered fatal blows to the governor’s immigration record.
In October, when Gingrich whacked Romney for the individual mandate at the core of his Massachusetts health-care law, Romney replied with a tart, “Actually, Newt, we got the idea of an individual mandate from you.”
And in Wednesday night’s CNN debate in Arizona, the Santorum offensive was thorough and concise. When Santorum mounted his most extensive health care attack of the night, a lengthy treatise of how the Massachusetts plan wouldn’t have been possible without federal funds, Romney cut him off at the knees with two words: “Arlen Specter.”
It was gotcha Romney at his best — using two words to force Santorum into a 262-word explanation that was, in the end, not helpful to his cause.
Santorum’s stumbling defense of his record in Thursday’s debate left Romney another opening he exploited at a tea party town hall here Thursday — he argued that Santorum is unprincipled, the very charge GOP opponents have now been throwing at Romney through two presidential cycles.
Traditionally the term “gotcha” is used to describe an unfair trap or meaningless distinction. Politico may be showing a little bias by applying a term that implies unfair tricks attempting to paint a person poorly in situations where all that is demonstrated is the failure of such unfair tricks to paint a person poorly.
Posted by Parker V on February 17, 2012 under President, Republican |
John Ziegler wants to know why Sarah Palin has not been suspended from Fox News, given the channels policy on political contributors and potential candidates.
In order, she has made the following on-air pronouncements in the role of Fox News commentator:
- A long primary is good for the process and the candidate which emerges.
- Voters should support Newt Gingrich in order to keep the primaries going.
- There is nothing wrong with a brokered convention.
- Conservatives should have doubts about the perceived front runner, Mitt Romney.
Now all of these statements are certainly legitimate opinions, though when they come from someone who teased for months that she was going to run for president and who may have a profound political interest in no Republican becoming president so that she can remain more relevant, having her specifically urging voters to take certain actions while in her role as a paid commentator is clearly a cause for concern for any journalistic organization.
However, any question as to whether Palin has indeed crossed the line into the realm of commentator illegitimacy ended yesterday when she said on Fox that she might run for office again and strongly implied that she would accept the nomination of a brokered convention.
So, the obvious question is: If Fox’s policy is to suspend commentators who are making moves to run for high office, how in the world does campaigning on air for a brokered convention, urging voters to take actions which would facilitate that, knocking the frontrunner, and giving the impression you would accept the nomination of any such brokered convention, possibly NOT qualify for such an action?
Posted by Parker V on January 20, 2012 under President, Republican |
“I just stared at him and he said, ‘Callista doesn’t care what I do,’” Marianne Gingrich told ABC News. ”He wanted an open marriage and I refused.”
Mr. Gingrich,
If I may ask a couple follow up questions, since I would hate to think you were engaging in a cover-up. You said you have always been upfront abotu your extramarital affairs.
So, first, when you say the story from your ex wife is completely false, are you denying that you had a 6 year affair behind your wife’s back and thus were having an “open relationship” albeit in secret? You have previously admitted to this affair, so does that not mean that at least that much is true?
Second, when your wife found out about the affair, if her version of events is false then what DID happen?
How DID that conversation go? You ended up choosing your mistress over your wife, after being discovered, but are you saying that you would not have been willing to continue having both a wife and a mistress, if your wife had consented to the idea?
Thank you for your time.
Posted by Parker V on October 4, 2011 under President, Republican |
Philip Klein, senior editorial writer for The Washington Examiner, wrote a piece titled, Romney’s false health care claims echo Obama’s. Klein attacks a few sound bites Mitt Romney gave at the recent Fox/Google debate while trying to explain his 2006 MA health care bill. Unfortunately, Klein ignores the larger context of what Romney is saying, which Romney amply provides in his book, No Apology.
In his effort to make Romneycare and Obamacare seem alike, Klein doesn’t deny the differences between them. Moreover, he doesn’t even mention the differences. Romney didn’t cut Medicare/Medicaid, didn’t impose insurance price controls and didn’t do a host of other things Obama did in his 2,700 page bill. Romney’s bill is only 72 pages.
And as Marco Rubio pointed out in an interview for National Review during his 2010 campaign in which he obtained Romney’s endorsement, Romney’s plan didn’t raise taxes or add to the deficit, and is a state rather than federal plan.
“It’s a work in progress,” Rubio says, speaking of the Bay State program. “There are major distinctions between that and what Obama is trying to do in Washington. For one, it didn’t raise any taxes. Number two, it is not adding to our deficit. That is my biggest objection to Obamacare, although there are many others. My number-one objection to Obamacare is that we can’t afford it, even if it was the greatest idea in the world.”
“Florida and Massachusetts are very different places,” Rubio continues. “All I would say to you is that states were designed to be laboratories for creative thoughts and ideas. That’s what the Framers of our great republic intended. They wanted the states to be the places that came up with innovation and competition. And I’ll tell you what, if Massachusetts gets it wrong and Florida gets it right, people will move to Florida, and businesses will move to Florida, and vice versa. There are just major distinctions between what’s happening in Washington and what I hope states will do. Like I said, what I’m not in favor of is what Barack Obama has done, which is to raise taxes and add to the federal deficit in exchange of taking a step toward a single-payer system in America.”
Most importantly, Romney’s plan has slowed rising health care costs in MA, despite flawed studies claiming otherwise.
Klein cites a number of quotes from President Obama regarding his own health care plan, comparing them to selected statements from Romney, made during the debate. For our purposes, Obama’s statements are not relevant. Whether or not Obama is being truthful about his own plan has no bearing on the truth of Romney’s statements.
Rather than admitting that Romney’s 30 second debate answers are not intended for a hyper-technical audience the way his book is, Klein claims Romney is “consistently making a series of blatant lies.” That is a serious accusation, so let’s look at the first of Romney’s statements which Klein is referring to (from the official debate transcript):
ROMNEY: Let me tell you this about our system in Massachusetts: 92 percent of our people were insured before we put our plan in place. Nothing’s changed for them. The system is the same. They have private market-based insurance.
Admittedly, the second half of Mitt’s statement is not technically accurate unless taken in the context of the first sentence. Romney wasn’t saying their lives haven’t changed in any way at all, but was addressing the primary concern people have expressed to him, which is the mandate to own insurance. Mitt appears to be minimizing that particular concern by explaining that since most people in MA already had insurance, the new law was only telling them to do something they were already doing.
But Klein doesn’t see it that way:
Neither bill literally says that people have to drop their coverage, but both Obamacare … and Romneycare … effectively make people lose their current coverage. For one thing, both mandate that individuals purchase insurance, and once the government does that, it has to define what qualifies as “insurance.” Obamacare employs the phrase “minimum essential coverage,” where as in Romneycare, it’s called “minimum creditable coverage” (see Chapter 111M, section 1). In both cases, anybody who does not have a qualified insurance policy, therefore, has to obtain one that meets the government-imposed standards, or pay a fine.
The first fact to defeat Klein’s argument is that the coverage mandates are on insurance companies, not on policy holders. So his claim that people lost their coverage and had to switch is untrue.
The second problem with Klein’s argument is that he complains about “minimum essential coverage,” however states routinely “define what qualifies as ‘insurance.’” States regulate insurance just like they regulate other companies. Texas, for example, has mandated benefits for insurance coverage, which it applied universally as recently as 2004, at which point the state implemented “consumer choice plans” which do not contain all of the state mandated benefits but must be individually approved by the state. Regulations like “minimum essential coverage” were nothing new for MA. As Romney accurately said, “the system is the same.” Regulatory changes are inherent in that system.
Perhaps Klein is thinking of how the MA legislature expanded regulations further by mandating that “the division shall include within its covered services for adults all federally optional services that were included in its state plan or demonstration program in effect on January 1, 2002.” Romney vetoed this in the bill but the legislature overrode the veto. In his book, Romney explains, “I would reinstitute my vetoes of the legislature’s additions. Among these, one of the most significant is my conviction that the state should not mandate which benefits must be included in health insurance policies: Consumers should be free to choose which benefits they want” (PB, p. 194).
It’s hard to argue that someone supported something they vetoed. But Klein tries anyway, and in the process tips his hand about his lack of objectivity:
In the past, Romney’s tried to tout the fact that he vetoed some of the benefit mandates but was overridden by the legislature. That’s a disingenuous argument, because he spent years crafting the bill, signed it with a smiling Ted Kennedy at his side, touted it publicly, and issued symbolic vetoes knowing that they would be overridden, just to give him some conservative cover. This argument would be the equivalent of a Republican Senator having worked with Democrats for a year to pass Obamacare, voting it out of committee, giving it the 60 vote threshold it needed to break a filibuster, and then voting against final passage and trying to use that final meaningless vote to make a case to primary voters.
Contrary to Klein’s claims, the legislature in MA continued making changes to the bill throughout the entire process. His U.S. Senate analogy fails because Romney always opposed the provisions he vetoed and never did anything comparable to voting them out of a Senate committee. It would be more accurate to say the Senate sent the provisions in the first place knowing Governor Romney would not be able to stop them from overriding his vetoes (although in the case of two of the vetoes, the legislature was not able to garner enough votes to override).
Klein continues his analysis:
“Furthermore, both plans create incentives for businesses to drop employer-based private insurance and dump workers on the government exchanges. We’ve seen rumblings of this as Obamacare moves closer to implementation, and last year the Boston Globe reported the following news: ‘The relentlessly rising cost of health insurance is prompting some small Massachusetts companies to drop coverage for their workers and encourage them to sign up for state-subsidized care instead, a trend that, some analysts say, could eventually weigh heavily on the state’s already-stressed budget.’
“So, Romney’s claim in last night’s debate is just as dishonest as when Obama made the same claim to the American people two years ago.”
Romney never denied that our country is in an economic crisis. Small businesses are struggling and cutting wages and benefits. But the facts show that Romney’s health care plan has lowered the rate of cost increases.
And most importantly, Klein again neglects to crack open Romney’s book:
“When the reform was passed … we required everyone who received subsidized insurance to pay a fair share of their premiums–the new liberal administration decided that some people should get their insurance for nothing. Imagine the additional cost to the state of such a decision.” Romney further noted, “elections have consequences.” (PB, p. 194)
Now let’s look at Klein’s next example in the alleged “series of blatant lies”:
“ROMNEY: We had 8 percent of our people that weren’t insured. And so what we did is we said let’s find a way to get them insurance, again, market-based private insurance. We didn’t come up with some new government insurance plan.”
Indeed, the Massachusetts Connector is not an insurance plan. It just helps people find private insurance companies, and when necessary diverts medicaid funds for that purpose. Ronald Reagan proposed a plan to do something similar, with Medicare:
“The plan expands opportunities for Medicare beneficiaries to use their benefits to enroll in private health plans as an alternative to traditional Medicare coverage”
– Ronald Wilson Reagan, February 28, 1983, transmitting to Congress his Health Insurance Reform program
Now that we’ve heard from Reagan, let’s hear from Klein:
“It’s not clear if by “new government insurance plan,” Romney meant a “public option,” but either way, that’s moot, because the idea wasn’t a part of the final version of the national health care bill that Obama signed, either. Yet what both plans do have in common is a government-run health care exchange, in which individuals use government subsidies to purchase health insurance that meets requirements set by government-appointed officials.”
As we have already discussed, every state government sets requirements for private health insurance. If Klein is claiming that these constitute a “new government insurance plan,” he would have to apply that to the other states as well. Or perhaps he is claiming that medicaid is the “new government insurance plan,” but Romney didn’t create medicaid. It’s been around for a long time.
Now for the last of the alleged “blatant lies” cited by Klein:
“ROMNEY: Our plan in Massachusetts has some good parts, some bad parts, some things I’d change, some things I like about it. It’s different than Obamacare.”
Klein’s claim:
“Romney says there are some ‘bad parts,’ but won’t specify what they are.”
No. Klein just made that up. Klein is making the same mistake as our friends at RedState. And clearly Klein did not feel the need to do any real research before writing his attack. In his book, No Apology (PB), Romney explains some aspects which he once supported but no longer does, and has consistently opposed many aspects which were foisted upon the health care plan against his desires.
If Klein would actually learn more about Romney, he might like him.
Posted by Parker V on September 23, 2011 under Republican |
Rick Perry came prepared with an attack on Mitt Romney that in Romneys book No Apologies, he claimed that he wanted the Massachusetts healthcare model to be adopted by the rest of the country, yet in the paperback edition this was deleted. While one specific line may have indeed been edited from the paperback, a scan of the original book proves that the context was unchanged and that Romney did not in fact advocate the whole country having MA-care foisted upon them. The book, provided by pro-Romney site WhyRomney.com instead says the opposite of what Perry claimed.
Reposted from WhyRomney, with permission:
Critics cite differences between the paperback and hardcover editions of Romney’s book, “No Apology,” accusing Mitt Romney of subtly changing positions on Obama’s policies to harden his stance for political reasons. However, critics falsely lead people to this conclusion by taking excerpts out of context. For instance, critics claim that Romney called Obama’s stimulus plan “a failure” in the paperback but not in the hardcover. The truth however is that Romney wrote the hardcover during the initial phase of the stimulus and thus could not yet claim that it had “failed,” or elaborate on the effectiveness of details which had not yet been implemented. But Romney specifically said on page 145 of the hardcover that Obama’s stimulus had “already been far less than successful,” and Romney predicted “it will impose a heavy burden on the economy in the intermediate and long term.”
Critics also fail to mention that on page 31 of the hardcover, Romney says “the record and achievement of modern free-market capitalism” is “now at risk because of the economic policies of President Obama.” Romney goes on to say, “His effort to expand the size, reach and role of government is without precedent in our history. His plans would leave us with a crushing deficit and debt, far beyond anything we have ever experienced.” Also on page 31, Romney writes that “at a time when Europe is moving away from socialism and its many failures, President Obama is moving toward that direction.”
Likewise, critcs claim that in the hardcover Romney promoted Obama’s stimulus on pages 144-145 as something that would “accelerate the timing of the start of the recovery.” But in fact, Romney’s statement was alluding to the limited tax cut portion of the stimulus, having put it in that context in the previous line which critics leave out, by statinSupremg that congressional Democrats fail to understand “the crucial role played by tax cuts.” It is in this context that Romney said the stimulus would not help “as much as it could have had it included genuine tax- and job-generating incentives.”
In a similar criticism, critics accuse Romney of being soft on Obamacare in the hardcover because in the paperback he stated that it should be “repealed,” but in the hardcover did not call for a “repeal.” The truth however is that Obamacare had not passed when Romney wrote the hardcover edition and its passing seemed less likely at the time because of the election of MA Senator Scott Brown. With no law to repeal, a call for repeal would have made no sense. Furthermore, Romney had no pressing need to discuss Obama’s health care ideas in extended detail.
UPDATE: Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post writes on this
In fact, while Romney has a reputation as a flip-flopper (which this ad tries to exploit), he has been consistent in saying he did not want to import his plan to the rest of the country. When the Massachusetts law was passed in 2006, he appeared on MSNBC and was asked whether it would work for the rest of the country.
“Well, it will work for Massachusetts, and that’s of course the thing that I had to focus on,” Romney replied. “There are certain aspects of it that I think would work across the country, perhaps better in some states than others. Of course the great thing about federalism is you let a state try it and see how it works before you spread it out.”
Romney made a similar point in an interview with Dan Balz of The Washington Post in 2007, as he recalled during last week’s debate. “Instead of having the federal government give us one-size-fits-all, everybody-must-follow-the-same-plan, let states develop their own,” he told Balz.
We closely compared the chapter on health care in the two editions so you don’t have to. Essentially, it is clear that the hardcover edition was written when Obama’s health-care plan was still a work in progress. For instance, Romney spends some time denouncing the idea of a public option as “government-supplied insurance.” The paperback was published after the health-care law was passed, so the paragraphs on the public option — which had been abandoned by Obama — are dropped.
The main point: Romney has long said he did not view his plan as a model for the nation, and he has not wavered on that stance.
