Nearly a year ago I wrote that this presidential election was a battle for America’s soul. That is truer today than it was on Oct. 12, 2011, when that post first appeared. You don’t agree? Take a look at this election cycle and you will see what I mean. There is an assault on the ideas that make America great. It is not only the mendacity of the Republican presidential candidate. It is the efforts by the GOP, particularly conservatives, to roll back the progress that has occurred over the last 50 to 60 years, from civil rights to voting rights, from education to worship. No longer do we discourage the corrupting influences of big money in our elections, we revel in it.
And we do it all in the guise of protecting the U.S. Constitution, though many of those who claim to hold that document sacred fail to adequately distinguish it from the Declaration of Independence. We have become a nation of angry tribes whose members cannot see beyond their own myopias, unable to discern fact from fiction, dogma from policy, substance from style, bluster from diplomacy. You sell it, we'll buy it. The market place of ideas has been inundated with cheap products with fake expiration dates.
Willard Mitt Romney’s recent debate performance was a prime example of the obfuscating that is occurring in this election. Indeed, Romney and President Barack Obama have engaged in hyperbole in an effort to win votes. When facts were not available, each has turned to spin and speculation to make a point. But what we are seeing from Romney is a complete abandonment of the ideas that sprung from his “severely conservative” philosophy. His dodging is beyond what we have seen in previous elections. Romney shows the sales skills that helped him become a multi-millionaire, not the skills that are needed to be a leader.
During the Republican presidential primary, for example, Romney promised that his tax cut plan would help the “job creators” (the 1 percent) not the moochers (the 47 percent). During the presidential debate, he declared that he had no tax cut for the wealthy, just a gosh-darn great plan to cut taxes by 20 percent across the board. According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, as well as other groups, Romney’s math does not add up because there are not enough high-end loopholes to make up for the level of tax reduction he seeks. The center estimated that Romney’s “plan” would cost $456 billion by 2015. Extrapolated over 10 years, including inflation and other costs, the total would be $4.8 trillion, the center concluded. Of course that $4.8 trillion ($5 trillion when rounded) is not a hard number because Romney has refused to give details. But that is not the problem. No, the problem occurred when he tried to suggest that he would not reduce the amount of money that the wealthy pays in taxes, a counter argument to what he had been saying since the Republican primary.
Add to that his statements about having a health plan that protects people who have pre-existing conditions (not so said his campaign after the debate); his claims that he would seek no limits to abortion access (he has said he wants to appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe v Wade and he wants to defund Planned Parenthood); his support for hiring more teachers (in June and again this week he mocked Obama for wanting to hire more teachers); his claim that Obama wants to drastically cut the defense budget (a plan approved by the House GOP); and one sees the manner in which Romney has distorted the political landscape.
The same is true of his party. Republicans have been claiming since their national convention that they, like much of America, supported the President and wanted him to do well. The problem, they say, is the President was in over his head. That argument requires us to forget that since the first day of the Obama presidency GOP lawmakers have done all they could to deny him a second term. That included taking the nation to the fiscal cliff during the debt ceiling debate, spending more time on voting to repeal Obamacare than helping to fix the economy, and launching all out attacks on women’s reproductive rights, including suggesting that abortions should only be available in the cases of “forcible rape.” (This week House Republicans are investigating "lax" security at the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, although they will say little about more than $400 million in GOP cuts to the State Department's security budget over the last two years.) Add to that local Republican efforts to tamp down the vote through a series of voter identification laws and we see a GOP that has put its interests before that of the nation.
And they have been able to do so because of the shady dealings of a host of conservative billionaires who have created shell groups disguised as grass-roots movements in an effort to buy the campaign without most people knowing. From the Koch brothers to Sheldon Adelson to Karl Rove’s army of check-writing robots, conservative billionaires have decided that no political race will be without their financial influence. (Conservative billionaires have spent $20 million in Ohio alone in an effort to oust Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown.) They have pumped millions upon millions into congressional campaigns not to promote the general welfare, but to increase their own.
David Siegel, the chief executive of the timeshare company Westgate, went so far as to send a menacing email to his employees telling them that their jobs would be in jeopardy if Obama wins next month, according to a story posted to The Huffington Post. While the email was couched in terms of tax increases, it raises questions about whether Siegel was making an indirect threat against his employees. Vote for Obama and you get to be part of the mooching 47 percent. Richard Lacks, the chief executive of the car parts manufacturer Lacks Enterprises, told his workers that an Obama election would result in a decrease in their pay, the Huffington Post article said. Those two incidents came after a Republican coal mine owner forced his workers to take part of the day off without pay so they could be props for a Romney campaign stop.
The result is a close election where few people truly understand the issues or are willing to study them. Instead they are swayed by bluster. Too many voters have decided that the election season is too long and every politician is too corrupt to warrant citizen participation in the political process. More pronounced, of course, are the so called undecided voters, those who have not made up their minds this late in the game. One has to ask: If one cannot choose between Obama and Romney after more than a year of campaigning, then what else does one need before making a choice?
What makes it all the more appalling is the U.S. Supreme Court’s failure to recognize that its Citizen United decision has indeed corrupted the political system, turning corporations into people and making the will of the few more valuable than the needs of the many. The High Court, as well as several lower Federal courts, has all but gutted Montana’s century-old, anti-corruption laws, which were aimed at protecting the electoral process.
It is a Faustian bargain that Republicans have made in an effort to wrest control from President Obama. It was most evident when Romney went from being “severely conservative” to “moderate” in 90 minutes. He leads that team that has put a “For Sale” sign on America’s soul. But what can one expect from a man who – if not for the advantages of his family pedigree – might otherwise be selling used cars in Roxbury?
And we do it all in the guise of protecting the U.S. Constitution, though many of those who claim to hold that document sacred fail to adequately distinguish it from the Declaration of Independence. We have become a nation of angry tribes whose members cannot see beyond their own myopias, unable to discern fact from fiction, dogma from policy, substance from style, bluster from diplomacy. You sell it, we'll buy it. The market place of ideas has been inundated with cheap products with fake expiration dates.
Willard Mitt Romney’s recent debate performance was a prime example of the obfuscating that is occurring in this election. Indeed, Romney and President Barack Obama have engaged in hyperbole in an effort to win votes. When facts were not available, each has turned to spin and speculation to make a point. But what we are seeing from Romney is a complete abandonment of the ideas that sprung from his “severely conservative” philosophy. His dodging is beyond what we have seen in previous elections. Romney shows the sales skills that helped him become a multi-millionaire, not the skills that are needed to be a leader.
During the Republican presidential primary, for example, Romney promised that his tax cut plan would help the “job creators” (the 1 percent) not the moochers (the 47 percent). During the presidential debate, he declared that he had no tax cut for the wealthy, just a gosh-darn great plan to cut taxes by 20 percent across the board. According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, as well as other groups, Romney’s math does not add up because there are not enough high-end loopholes to make up for the level of tax reduction he seeks. The center estimated that Romney’s “plan” would cost $456 billion by 2015. Extrapolated over 10 years, including inflation and other costs, the total would be $4.8 trillion, the center concluded. Of course that $4.8 trillion ($5 trillion when rounded) is not a hard number because Romney has refused to give details. But that is not the problem. No, the problem occurred when he tried to suggest that he would not reduce the amount of money that the wealthy pays in taxes, a counter argument to what he had been saying since the Republican primary.
Add to that his statements about having a health plan that protects people who have pre-existing conditions (not so said his campaign after the debate); his claims that he would seek no limits to abortion access (he has said he wants to appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe v Wade and he wants to defund Planned Parenthood); his support for hiring more teachers (in June and again this week he mocked Obama for wanting to hire more teachers); his claim that Obama wants to drastically cut the defense budget (a plan approved by the House GOP); and one sees the manner in which Romney has distorted the political landscape.
The same is true of his party. Republicans have been claiming since their national convention that they, like much of America, supported the President and wanted him to do well. The problem, they say, is the President was in over his head. That argument requires us to forget that since the first day of the Obama presidency GOP lawmakers have done all they could to deny him a second term. That included taking the nation to the fiscal cliff during the debt ceiling debate, spending more time on voting to repeal Obamacare than helping to fix the economy, and launching all out attacks on women’s reproductive rights, including suggesting that abortions should only be available in the cases of “forcible rape.” (This week House Republicans are investigating "lax" security at the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, although they will say little about more than $400 million in GOP cuts to the State Department's security budget over the last two years.) Add to that local Republican efforts to tamp down the vote through a series of voter identification laws and we see a GOP that has put its interests before that of the nation.
And they have been able to do so because of the shady dealings of a host of conservative billionaires who have created shell groups disguised as grass-roots movements in an effort to buy the campaign without most people knowing. From the Koch brothers to Sheldon Adelson to Karl Rove’s army of check-writing robots, conservative billionaires have decided that no political race will be without their financial influence. (Conservative billionaires have spent $20 million in Ohio alone in an effort to oust Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown.) They have pumped millions upon millions into congressional campaigns not to promote the general welfare, but to increase their own.
David Siegel, the chief executive of the timeshare company Westgate, went so far as to send a menacing email to his employees telling them that their jobs would be in jeopardy if Obama wins next month, according to a story posted to The Huffington Post. While the email was couched in terms of tax increases, it raises questions about whether Siegel was making an indirect threat against his employees. Vote for Obama and you get to be part of the mooching 47 percent. Richard Lacks, the chief executive of the car parts manufacturer Lacks Enterprises, told his workers that an Obama election would result in a decrease in their pay, the Huffington Post article said. Those two incidents came after a Republican coal mine owner forced his workers to take part of the day off without pay so they could be props for a Romney campaign stop.
The result is a close election where few people truly understand the issues or are willing to study them. Instead they are swayed by bluster. Too many voters have decided that the election season is too long and every politician is too corrupt to warrant citizen participation in the political process. More pronounced, of course, are the so called undecided voters, those who have not made up their minds this late in the game. One has to ask: If one cannot choose between Obama and Romney after more than a year of campaigning, then what else does one need before making a choice?
What makes it all the more appalling is the U.S. Supreme Court’s failure to recognize that its Citizen United decision has indeed corrupted the political system, turning corporations into people and making the will of the few more valuable than the needs of the many. The High Court, as well as several lower Federal courts, has all but gutted Montana’s century-old, anti-corruption laws, which were aimed at protecting the electoral process.
It is a Faustian bargain that Republicans have made in an effort to wrest control from President Obama. It was most evident when Romney went from being “severely conservative” to “moderate” in 90 minutes. He leads that team that has put a “For Sale” sign on America’s soul. But what can one expect from a man who – if not for the advantages of his family pedigree – might otherwise be selling used cars in Roxbury?
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