The Allure of the First Debate Winner

The political pundits and party surrogates have spoken: Willard Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and the Republican presidential candidate, won the first presidential debate in Denver Wednesday night. The problem with that conclusion is that the voters, particularly the undecided ones in the swing states, have yet to speak on the issue.

Indeed, Romney was the more assertive and more focused candidate. He rattled off statistic after statistic, and he seemed in control of the numbers. Meanwhile, President Barack Hussein Obama appeared tentative and disengaged for much of the debate. It was not until late in the exchange that the President seemed to gain his footing.

But once voters get past the style questions of the first debate they might find that the allure Romney projected is much like that presented by a hook up at a party. From across the room, that person looks attractive, worth considering for a long-term relationship. Then you get up close, engaging that person in conversation. The more that person talks and the more you listen the less attractive he or she becomes. Eventually, there comes the realization that the object of your desires, that alluring, generous specimen of humanity is actually very vacuous and self-absorbed, lacking many socially redeeming qualities.

Core values shift depending on with whom the person speaks. The passion comes and goes depending on whom that person is seeking to court. That was Willard Mitt Romney Wednesday night. He was alluring, charming, and warm from 9 p.m. to 10:30 p.m., but chances are he will become cold and unattractive at 2 a.m. when the party is well over and the euphoria of the night’s alcohol wears off.

Why? Because that is when one steps back, looks at the real person, and asks: “Did he really say that?”

Yes, America, Willard Mitt Romney really did say that.

After 18 months of proclaiming that he had a multi-billion dollar tax cut plan that included breaks for the top 1 percent of earners, Romney announced Wednesday night that he did not have a tax plan that could cost the nation $5 trillion over 10 years. While the numbers attached to Romney’s tax plan were not of his making, they were a realistic assessment by economists and tax experts – including some whom he claims agree with him – seeking to fill the numbers void left by Romney’s lack of details.

According to Romney, he will not offer any tax plan that adds to the deficit. If that is true, then how does he plan to reduce taxes by 20 percent across the board? Nearly every study looking at Romney’s proposed tax cut says he cannot accomplish his goals by simply closing loopholes and eliminating deductions for the rich. The non-partisan Tax Policy Center – which Romney views as credible when it challenges Obama’s plans, but not when it questions his – suggests that Romney would have to raise taxes on the middle class to reach his goals. So do other studies, including one by Martin Feldstein, a Romney advisor and Harvard economist.

Feldstein’s study showed that Romney can accomplish his tax-cut goals if he eliminates deductions for mortgage interest, charitable contributions, and state and local taxes for households making more than $100,000. The problem is Romney views the middle class as including people whose household income reaches $250,000, a figure many economists put above the middle class.

“First of all, I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut,” Romney proclaimed to Obama. “I don’t have a tax cut of a scale that you’re talking about. My view is that we ought to provide tax relief to people in the middle class. But I’m not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people.”

He added later: “With regards to that tax cut, look, I’m not looking to cut massive taxes and to reduce – the revenues going to the government. My – my number-one principle is, there will be no tax cut that adds to the deficit. I want to underline that: no tax cut that adds to the deficit.”

Of course, such a proclamation sounds great, but in order for it to be true we have to take the word of a man who has often changed his positions on major topics. According to Romney, 47 percent of the people who do not pay taxes in this nation are moochers, a bunch of lazy government draining takers living off the sweat and hard work of the makers. The makers, Romney proclaimed during the Republican primary, need tax relief because they are the job creators. Those job creators are the 1 percent of the population that Romney now says will not receive any tax relief beyond what can be paid for, suggesting that the tax rate cannot drop by 20 percent.

In addition, Romney wants to develop a medical insurance program that allows children to remain on their parents’ policies until age 26; that bans insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions when those people change jobs; that helps to reduce medical costs. To accomplish such Romney has vowed to repeal Obamacare and replace it with . . . Obamacare. He also said recently that sick people can get free health care in emergency rooms, a practice that both Obamacare and Romneycare seek to discourage because of the additional costs incurred in such situations. Romney did not address how he will accommodate the millions of people who would be left uninsured, or how he will replace the preventive care provisions of Obamacare that make contraceptives free for women.

On Wednesday Romney also proclaimed the need to hire more teachers -- a major shift from what he said during a speech to Iowans in June. In that speech Romney claimed that Obama's call for more teachers was an expansion of Big Government that must be stopped.

"He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers," Romney said on June 8. "Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It's time for us to cut back government and help the American people."

And then there is Dodd-Frank. For 18 months, Romney proclaimed that government regulations, particularly Dodd-Frank, were ruining the economy. That changed Wednesday night when he offered support for regulations and Dodd-Frank, if not in total at least in part.

“Regulation is essential,” Romney said. “You can't have a free market work if you don't have regulation. As a businessperson, I had to have – I need to know the regulations. I needed them there. You couldn't have people opening up banks in their – in their garage and making loans. I mean, you have to have regulations so that you can have an economy work. Every free economy has good regulation.”

It’s getting late and Willard Mitt Romney is losing his luster.

When Truth is Worse Than Lies

If one looks at former Gov. Mitt Romney’s – and by extension the Republican Party’s – push for the presidency this year, one sees that Romney has decided that no lie will go untold. Time and time again, Romney, his vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, and the campaigns sycophants have told lie after lie after lie about President Barack Obama and his policies in an effort to scare Americans into voting the GOP ticket.

What is really scary though is not the lies that the GOP tells. It is the truths that emanate from Romney. For in those truths lie the most horrific of ideas, the most stunning displays of selfishness, the most neurotic self-aggrandizement in a presidential candidate in some time.

If one did not see this before, then Romney’s comments in the last several weeks, and the release of the video from a May fundraiser in Boca Raton, FL., should provide evidence of how out of touch Romney and the Republicans are with Americans and what it means to be an American. Romney's knee-jerk response to the violence in the Middle East last week demonstrates the chest-thumping, sabre rattling that he and the conservatives seek to pass off as foreign policy. His speech in Florida lays out the plutocratic philosophy of the GOP. No longer is there the lip service to compassionate conservatism. No longer is there a pretense of creating a society where all have a chance to flourish. No longer is there a desire to reach out to others – if only in rhetoric.

Romney and the GOP have decided that the world is made up of makers and takers. The GOP is the party of the makers. The takers are all Democrats, a bunch of left-leaning, Socialist moochers trying to redistribute the gains of the wealthy. So let us now return to the Gilded Age, when the rich bought seats in the U.S. Senate from state legislators. Let us return to that time when the wealthy could live without guilt as they walked by the poor and desolate, ignoring their plight. Let us return to that time when one of the richest men in the world was seen as loving and charitable because he gave a poor child a nickel in a photo op outside a church.

We, the makers, are the worthy, the Republicans shout. We, the makers, are the job creators, they rail. We, the makers, shall allow the hoi polli to bask in our greatness, they declare.

Meanwhile, they strike at all that America should be, a country of shared sacrifice.

According to Mitt Romney's Florida comments, the takers are the 47 percent of Americans who pay no federal income tax. They sit on their oversized duffs, demanding more food, more welfare, more housing, more health care, more of everything from the glorious makers. The takers, Romney and the GOP rants, have no desire to work and they are totally dependent on government handouts.

Not the makers though. No, they built everything they have from the ground up, forsaking government assistance, thriving in a free market economy on their hard work and wits.

Of course we know better. In one of its most recent campaign ads propagating the "You didn't build that" taunt the GOP has been throwing at Obama, the owner of a small-business in Wisconsin talks about making it alone, without government assistance. The owner does not mention that the business received more than $300,000 in government contracts in the Obama years alone. Another of Romney's makers boasted about how he had built his business from scratch, while at the same time complaining that under Obama he has not received enough government contracts.

Yet, that is not the most repugnant stench that rises from the Romney camp. No, that stench comes from the trash heap onto which Romney has placed 47 percent of the American electorate, an electorate he says is beholding to Obama because of a dependency on government, an electorate whose members are unwilling to take personal responsibility or care for their own lives.

It makes you wonder what Mitt Romney's father and mother would think of their little boy. After all, George Romney's first years in America was spent on public relief after Congress created a $100,000 fund to care for the Mormons exiled from their colony in Mexico, according to a recent article on NPR's Web site.

Or at least that is what Romney's mother, Lenore, said in an interview in 1962 when George Romney was running for governor of Michigan, according to NPR. The picture Lenore Romney painted of her husband, a fiscal conservative and social moderate, was a touching one, about a man whose family relied on public assistance, but who was able to rise to become an auto executive and later a governor. And it all started with some government help.

Help that George Romney's son does not want to offer 47 percent of the country, those moochers, those takers, those Obama supporters.

Pride in the Lies

How does one start to discuss the absurdity and hypocrisy of the 2012 Presidential campaign? Does one begin by detailing the outright distortions – actually lies – that are being bandied about? Does one seek the high road in assailing the transgressions of the candidates? Or does one simply jump into the fray, taking off the gloves and dropping all pretense of neutrality? Deciding which to do in this campaign season is difficult because one cannot be honest without stating the unadulterated truth, without seeming to take sides in a partisan manner.

Campaigns are always filled with innuendo, half-truths, political spin, and hollow promises. What one candidate sees as a strong plan to move America forward, the opposition sees as a plan to move the nation backward. Such arguments are legitimate because one person's great idea is another person's folly. It is part of our political process that we debate such things, that each candidate presents his wares in the marketplace of ideas, and the shoppers choose what they see as the best, the most worthwhile product.

That has not occurred so far in this election cycle. This presidential election has taken lying to a new low, has created an environment where there is a strong aversion to facts, has resulted in the greatest secrecy in the history of modern elections. And so much of it lies with the Republican Party and its presumptive nominee Mitt Romney.

Never before has a campaign shown such a disdain for truth. Never before has a campaign so openly lied to the public. Never before has a campaign so brazenly admitted that it is lying. Never before has a campaign hid from voters details of what its candidate believes for fear that knowledge of those ideas will result in his not being elected.

But Romney has done each. He has resorted to the age-old GOP ploy of turning a campaign that should be about ideas into one couched in racism and resentment. Worse than his actually doing those things is the inability of too many people to see the danger in his lies, to see the deceitfulness in his secrecy, to see the recklessness in his disregard.

A look at the ads offered by the Romney campaign is a good starting point in discussing the deceit and the manner in which it has gone without enough challenge. Early in the campaign Team Romney took a quote from then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama about how the economy would play in the 2008 campaign and presented it as if President Barack Obama had recently uttered those words. The edited quote was a response to Sen. John McCain and the Republicans. When challenged about the obvious inaccuracies in the ad, a Romney campaign advisor said:

“First of all, ads are propaganda by definition. We are in the persuasion business, the propaganda business…. Ads are agitprop…. Ads are about hyperbole, they are about editing. It’s ludicrous for them to say that an ad is taking something out of context…. All ads do that. They are manipulative pieces of persuasive art.”

Indeed, ads are about persuading people, convincing them that they must buy what they may not need nor want. Yet, there needs to be some truth in them, a sense that there is a foundation on which to build. Not for Team Romney. Outright lying is all within the framework of its idea of fair play.

The misuse of President Obama's quote was not an isolated incident. Recently, Team Romney took a portion of a presidential speech, edited it out of context, and argued that Obama is against small businesses. That the quote reflects an idea – no one is successful without help from somewhere or someone else – also expressed by Romney during the XIX Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City in 2002 was unimportant to Team Romney.

The same can be said of the effort to paint Obama as the "food stamp" or welfare president – code for Obama wants to take the hard-earned money of white America and give it to all those lazy black and Latino people sitting at home on welfare. Instead of honestly debating whether it is right to give states more flexibility in moving people from welfare to work, Team Romney seeks to paint a picture of Obama as simply wanting to send government checks to people unwilling to work. If one listened only to the Romney campaign one would not realize that Romney sought such a waiver while he was governor of Massachusetts or that two Republican governors sought those waivers from the Obama Administration.

The lies and deceit do not stop there.

In a speech in Colorado Thursday, President Obama said:

“I said I believe in American workers, I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back and GM is number one again. So now I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs not just in the auto industry, but in every industry. I don’t want those jobs taking root in places like China. I want them taking root in places like Pueblo.”

Republican sycophants quickly proclaimed that Obama said he wants to create an auto-bailout like policy for other industries.

As if that is not enough, the Democrats and Republicans agreed to cut defense and domestic spending by $1 trillion over 10 years as part of the debt ceiling deal. Team Romney and the Republicans now call those President Obama’s defense cuts.

Romney also refuses to detail how he will cut taxes by 20 percent in a supposedly revenue neutral plan. He says only that he will make changes to the tax code by eliminating deductions. Will those deductions be on capital gains? Mortgage interest deductions on second homes? Multi-million dollar tax right offs for owners of NASCAR tracks? Or will those deductions be the ones that middle- and working-class Americans depend on: the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, the Tuition Tax Credit?

We do not know because Mitt Romney won't say. We could probably bet that most of those deductions he plans to eliminate will not include the areas from which he benefits. Of course we can’t tell for sure since he refuses to release more than two years of his federal tax returns.