The Evolution of Mitt Romney's Abortion Views

William Saletan, national editor for Slate Magazine, has published an incredibly well researched and documented article in Slate on the evolution of Mitt Romney's views on abortion rights.   Saletan starts tracing the path way back in Romney's childhood, in 1963, when a family relative died from a botched illegal abortion.  He describes Romney's rise to Bishop of the Boston Stake of the Mormon Church, where he actually counseled Mormon women contemplating abortion, encouraging two of them to carry their babies to term, and offering to a third, with a potentially fatal ectopic pregnancy, compassion and the church's permission to protect her own life with her choice.

Saletan describes how Romney's careful assessment of voter sentiment in Massachusetts lead him to repeatedly declare himself a pro-choice candidate when seeking unsuccessfully to oust Ted Kennedy as a U.S. Senator in 1996.  This was followed by a sharp turn rightward while he considered running for public office in Utah during his stint leading the Salt Lake City Olympic Organizing Committee.  Upon his return to Massachusetts after the Winter games, Romney ran for governor and Saletan describes Romney skewing pro-choice once again:

To appreciate how avidly Romney reabsorbed and deployed pro-choice language in 2002, you have to watch him in action. One clip (watch it here) shows him seated with his wife on a sofa, assuring women that they need not fear him on social issues. He tells the interviewer: “So when asked, ‘Will I preserve and protect a woman's right to choose?’ I make an unequivocal answer: yes.”

The section of the article on Romney's purported conversion to a strong pro-life position begins:

 Most pro-life conversions start with God, fetal heartbeats, or sonograms. Romney’s conversion started with shapeless embryos in dishes.

Saletan describes how Romney later claimed that he was shaken by a conversation he had with the head of Harvard's stem cell research program in early November 2004:

November 2004 was the turning point in Romney’s political calculus. He had served two years as governor. He was beginning to build a network of allies in key presidential primary states. He was testing his message. And he recognized that he couldn’t run as a moderate, as his father had done in 1968. Romney was a Northeastern, Mormon technocrat in a party dominated by Southern evangelicals. He needed credibility with cultural conservatives.

November 2004: The Epiphany

It was at this moment that Romney saw the light. Here’s his version of what happened, as told to Redstate in September 2006:

My position changed during the stem-cell research debate. The provost of Harvard and the head of stem-cell research came into my office and at one point said that stem-cell research was not a moral issue because they killed the embryo at 14 days. And it hit me hard at that very moment that the Roe v. Wade philosophy had cheapened the value of human life. And I said to my chief of staff, who was with me in the meeting, as we came outside, “I am no longer content with the description of my position. I want to call myself pro-life.”

Saletan explains why Romney's later conduct and public and private statements make it less likely that he had a true conversion on abortion rights:

The problem with Romney’s story lies not in its core but in the larger narrative Romney later wove around it. How did a meeting about stem-cell research lead to a broad and yet strangely selective pro-life conversion? How did Romney get from cloning to abortion and morning-after pills without changing his position on the underlying question of embryo destruction? Why would a man who had accepted abortion rights despite his experience as a pro-life abortion counselor—and who had paid almost no attention to partial-birth abortion, the bloody, raging late-term abortion controversy of his day—renounce abortion based on a conversation about microscopic embryos? And why doesn’t the record of Romney’s words and deeds after November 2004 fit his account of a sweeping pro-life conversion? Logically, emotionally, and factually, almost nothing about his story stands up to examination.

Saletan points out that Romney, an utterly logical business leader, could not have intellectually pivoted to a public anti-abortion position from his opposition to cloned stem cell research.   As Saletan explains, Romney continued to support embryonic stem cell research using donated embryos from in vitro fertilization clinics, basing his distinction between these cells and cloned cells on the right of the cell donors to chose to donate their IVF embryos to research to improve human health:

“I support legislation that will permit scientists to obtain stem cells from embryos donated from fertility clinics,”

But why, if human life began at conception for purposes of opposing stem cell research using cloned cells, and for assessing the morality of abortion, did it not similarly begin at conception with respect to embryos stored but not implanted in the IVF process?  Once again, through his careful research Saletan found a possible answer for the careful distinction Romney made:  Three of his five sons have used IVF to overcome difficulties in getting pregnant.

Among the observations made by Saletan in conclusion are the following:

Of all Romney’s revisions, the boldest is his effort to imply that he deliberately governed as a pro-lifer. The record, as documented above, shows that Romney ran for governor in 2002 as a man who would protect the right to choose abortion because he believed in that right, regardless of politics. Then, in 2005, he reinterpreted his pledge as a neutrality pact with the state’s pro-choice majority. “We're going to maintain the status quo,” he told reporters in June 2005. “It's a moratorium, if you will, on change.” Romney reaffirmed that position in July 2005, when he vetoed the bill to distribute morning-after pills: “I pledged that I would not change our abortion laws either to restrict abortion or to facilitate it.”

. . . 

My favorite Romney abortion moment happened four months ago, in October 2011, on Mike Huckabee’s Fox News show. According to news reports, Romney said on the program that he wished courts would “decide that states have the ability to make their own decisions in regards to abortion.” But that isn’t what Romney said. If you watch the video, here’s what he said: “I am pro-life and would prefer to have the courts decide that individuals—rather, that states have the ability—to make their own decisions with regards to abortion.”

Not a single transcript or media report caught the goof. But it wasn’t really a goof. It was Romney the pro-choicer speaking through Romney the pro-lifer. With the substitution of a single word, he had slipped seamlessly from one persona to the other.

Which persona is real? Neither. Romney’s soul isn’t in the five minutes he spent as a pro-lifer in that interview, or in the two seconds he spent as a pro-choicer. It’s in the flux, the transition between the two roles. It’s in the editing of his record, the application of his makeup, the shuffling of his rationales. Romney will always be what he needs to be. Count on it.

Saletan's article invites the reader to see Romney as a unique, highly intelligent and ambitious human being.  As one who tried to weigh the moral nuances surrounding the abortion issue, but who ultimately chose to focus his energy on staking out opaque positions that would leave him maximum flexibility for future political gain.  In this final sense he really doesn't seem that different from the rest of the politicians running for the presidency. 

Something Completely Different

BuzzFeed has a pictorial history of racism in advertising.

Walker Not to Blame for Job Numbers - It's The Poorly Trained Labor Force

President Obama and Governor Walker at Mitchell Field on February 15.




In today's Los Angeles Times there is an article about Scott Walker's appearance at the White House yesterday during the National Governors Association meetings which started this weekend:

At this weekend’s National Governors Assn, meeting, many of Walker’s Republican colleagues were happily condemning the president and arguing that any improvement in the economy is happening despite, not because, of his policies. But Walker was walking a fine line.

"I'm not worried about the politics of it.  I just want results," Walker said as he left a White House meeting between the president and the nation's governors Monday.  "Obviously, as the economy improves it helps people like me, it helps people like him.... But ultimately, I want a strong recovery for the people of Wisconsin."

Walker said he asked Obama to continue to use the bully pulpit to encourage more Americans to pursue careers in the manufacturing sector, as the president did during his trip to Wisconsin earlier this month.

"One of our biggest problems is not just unemployment; it's the fact that we have job openings in manufacturing, but we just don't have the skilled workers," he said, adding that Obama was receptive to his request.

The January job numbers press release from Wisconsin  DWD is always delayed annually until early March, followed just two weeks later with the February job numbers.  So on March 8, next Thursday we will see how the state's economy did creating jobs during January, and on Thursday, March 22, we will see about February.

The state has fallen well short on the Governor's job creation promise, actually under-performing all the Midwestern states.   In the final quote above, we can see a glimpse of the Governor's strategy for dealing with the poor results.  It is not his policies, but the lack of skills of the workforce that is holding back the recovery in Wisconsin.

David Brooks, NYTimes Conservative, Throwing in the Towel on GOP?

 Rhino.  A tough noble beast






David Brooks in his column today in the New York Times, entitled, "The Possum Republicans:

Politicians do what they must to get re-elected. So it’s not unexpected that Republican senators like Richard Lugar and Orrin Hatch would swing sharply to the right to fend off primary challengers.

...

Still, it is worth pointing out that this behavior is not entirely honorable. It’s not honorable to adjust your true nature in order to win re-election. It’s not honorable to kowtow to the extremes so you can preserve your political career.

But, of course, this is exactly what has been happening in the Republican Party for the past half century. Over these decades, one pattern has been constant: Wingers fight to take over the party, mainstream Republicans bob and weave to keep their seats. ll across the nation, there are mainstream Republicans lamenting how the party has grown more and more insular, more and more rigid. This year, they have an excellent chance to defeat President Obama, yet the wingers have trashed the party’s reputation by swinging from one embarrassing and unelectable option to the next: Bachmann, Trump, Cain, Perry, Gingrich, Santorum.

 ...

But where have these party leaders been over the past five years, when all the forces that distort the G.O.P. were metastasizing? Where were they during the rise of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck? Where were they when Arizona passed its beyond-the-fringe immigration law? Where were they in the summer of 2011 when the House Republicans rejected even the possibility of budget compromise? They were lying low, hoping the unpleasantness would pass.

The wingers call their Republican opponents RINOs, or Republican In Name Only. But that’s an insult to the rhino, which is a tough, noble beast. If RINOs were like rhinos, they’d stand up to those who seek to destroy them. Actually, what the country needs is some real Rhino Republicans. But the professional Republicans never do that. They’re not rhinos. They’re Opossum Republicans. They tremble for a few seconds then slip into an involuntary coma every time they’re challenged aggressively from the right.

Without real opposition, the wingers go from strength to strength. Under their influence, we’ve had a primary campaign that isn’t really an argument about issues. It’s a series of heresy trials in which each of the candidates accuse the others of tribal impurity. Two kinds of candidates emerge from this process: first, those who are forceful but outside the mainstream; second, those who started out mainstream but look weak and unprincipled because they have spent so much time genuflecting before those who despise them.

If New Hampshire Tosses Three Year Old Law Permitting Same Sex Marriage, It will Still Have More Progressive Rights Than Wisconsin

The "Live Free or Die" state, New Hampshire, narrowly passed legislation in 2009 permitting marriage by same-sex couples.  Since the legislature passed into Republican hands in January 2011, a bill has been slowly coursing through the legislature to reverse the three year old law.  The New York Times reported late today:

Should the repeal pass, New Hampshire would be the first state in which a legislature has reversed itself on the issue of same-sex marriage. In Maine, voters repealed a marriage law through a referendum in November 2009, shortly after the Legislature approved it. This fall, a ballot initiative will ask voters to make same-sex marriage legal again. The California Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that same-sex couples there had a right to marry, but voters banned same-sex marriage in an initiative later that year. The issue remains in court. 

In a recent poll by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, 59 percent of respondents were either strongly or somewhat opposed to repealing the law, while 32 percent said they supported repeal.

 When New Hampshire became the sixth state to approve same-sex marriage, in 2009 — following California, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts and Vermont — it was not an easy feat. The law passed with close votes in both chambers, which were then under Democratic control, and with last-minute support from Governor Lynch, who had preferred civil unions.

Since then, about 1,900 same-sex couples have wed in the state. The repeal bill would not invalidate those marriages, but would allow only civil unions for gay couples moving forward.   (Emphasis supplied.)

Thus, even if the repeal law passes and a promised veto by New Hampshire's Democratic governor Lynch is over-ridden, the revision will still leave New Hampshire a more progressive state on marital equality than Wisconsin.

Santorum Viewed as Imprudent by the Right

Rick Santorum





Kathleen Parker, a Pulitzer Prize winning conservative columnist at the Washington Post published a recent op-ed piece called "The Trials of Saint Santorum."  In it she spoke admirably of Santorum's personal values, but dismissively of his judgment in describing them:

It is easy to pound Santorum, and no one makes it easier than Santorum himself. Nevermind that he invokes Satan, claiming that the “Father of Lies” has his sights on the United States, as Santorum did in 2008 at Ave Maria University in Florida. He has never met a question he wouldn’t answer or a combatant he wouldn’t engage. Thus, when a reporter asks whether he thinks states should be able to ban birth control, Santorum says yes, but . . .

HEADLINE!!! “Santorum says states should be able to ban birth control!!!”

Except that’s not what he meant, . . . Santorum was expressing a legal opinion, and his answer was within the context of whether states have any regulatory jurisdiction over the question. Otherwise, he has said repeatedly that he does not support banning contraceptives and that he would oppose any such efforts.

Everything stems from his allegiance to the Catholic Church’s teachings that every human life has equal value and dignity. The church’s objection to birth control is based on concerns that sex without consequences would lead to men reducing women “to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of (their) own desires,” as well as abuse of power by public authorities and a false sense of autonomy.

Within that framework, everything Santorum says and does makes sense, even if one doesn’t agree. When he says that he doesn’t think the government should fund prenatal testing because it leads to abortion, this is emotional Santorum, father of a disabled child and another who died hours after a premature birth. In both instances, many doctors would have recommended abortion, but Santorum believes that those lives, no matter how challenging, have intrinsic value.

Though Santorum’s views are certainly controversial, his biggest problem isn’t that he is out of step with mainstream America. His biggest problem is that he lacks prudence in picking his battles and his words. The American people are loath to elect a preacher or a prophet to lead them out of the desert of unemployment. And they are justified in worrying how such imprudence might translate in areas of far graver concern than whether Santorum doesn’t personally practice birth control.

 On Friday the National Review Editorial Board took a similar tack:

Critics of Senator Santorum’s moral and religious views, especially in the media, have not been wholly scrupulous about identifying what they are before attacking them. He has been described, falsely, as an advocate of banning contraception. A dated joke about birth control made by one of his major supporters has been treated as a campaign scandal. A remark about Obama’s misguided environmental “theology” has been turned into an insinuation that the president is not a Christian.

But the press has not had to invent controversial remarks by Santorum, who has supplied them himself. He has said that Satan is undermining America, in part by corrupting mainline Protestantism; that liberal versions of Christianity are distortions of the creed; that as president he would speak out against birth control, and that states should be free to prohibit it; and that John McCain “doesn’t have any” religious views.

Some of his comments are indefensible, and even some of Santorum’s defensible assertions would have been better left to someone else — someone not seeking the presidency — to say. Santorum’s remarks about Senator McCain were unwise and uncharitable. Nor do we need political leaders to share their theological judgments about the various denominations that call themselves Christian. There is no good reason for a prospective president to pledge to lecture Americans about contraception.

He seems serenely confident that with enough time he can change anyone’s mind on the issues. But he has not always shown that he knows how to pick his battles wisely, or that he understands that voters want a president with a suitably modest conception of a president’s proper role in national life. . . . The challenge before him is to marry his self-confidence to a more consistent exercise of discrimination and tact.

Romney is Severely Conservative, at Least on Women's Health

In a speech to the annual Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) meeting in Washington two weeks ago, Mitt Romney tried to beef up his conservative bona fides with a quintessential Romneyism:  "I was a severely conservative Republican governor."  The effort brought forth lots of gleeful commentary by the media and real conservatives who found the characterization, in a word, weird.  Rush said the next day on his program: “I have never heard anybody say, ‘I’m severely conservative'." 


Paul Krugman in an op-ed piece in the New York Times commented:

Mitt Romney has a gift for words — self-destructive words. On Friday he did it again, telling the Conservative Political Action Conference that he was a 'severely conservative governor.'

As Molly Ball of The Atlantic pointed out, Mr. Romney 'described conservatism as if it were a disease.' Indeed. Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provided a list of words that most commonly follow the adverb 'severely'; the top five, in frequency of use, are disabled, depressed, ill, limited and injured."

 I was prepared to write off the CPAC self-description as simply in-artful.  Similar to his "I like to fire people,"  and "Corporations are people, my friend."  After last night I have now decided I was wrong.  Romney is, in my view, a certifiable severely conservative politician. 

Last night in the final Republican presidential debate in Mesa, Arizona, Romney needed once again to establish himself as a true conservative.  He decided he needed to move right of Rick Santorum, who is currently leading him in the national polls, on social issues.  He chose to criticize Santorum for voting numerous times in favor of Title X funding.  His verbal challenge to Santorum clearly conveyed the impression that Romney thought this was an utterly wretched thing for a true conservative to do.  I wondered after the debate if Romney really felt that Title X funding for family planning was something that needed to end.  It turns out that he does. Here is a section of his campaign website explaining how he intends to bring about a "fiscal turnaround:"

First, eliminate every government program that is not absolutely essential. There are many things government does that we may like but that we do not need. The test should be this: “Is this program so critical that it is worth borrowing money to pay for it?” The federal government should stop doing things we don’t need or can’t afford. For example:

• Repeal Obamacare, which would save $95 billion in 2016.
• Eliminate subsidies for the unprofitable Amtrak, saving $1.6 billion a year.
• Enact deep reductions in the subsidies for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Legal Services Corporation.
• Eliminate Title X family planning programs benefiting abortion groups like Planned Parenthood.
• End foreign aid to countries that oppose America’s interests.

The Washington Post's Wonkblog described Romney as being unique among the candidates in proposing to end Title X:

In calling for Title X’s defunding, Romney is a bit of a rarity. No other candidate has taken a stand on the issue. Anti-abortion groups haven’t asked candidates to oppose Title X. The Susan B. Anthony List, for example, only goes as far as asking candidates to pledge to “defund Planned Parenthood and all other contractors and recipients of federal funds with affiliates that perform or fund abortions,” but not eliminate Title X outright. In moving to eliminate Title X, Romney is venturing into a new territory where the party doesn’t have much in the way of a definitive platform.

Romney is also now staunchly anti-abortion, having undergone a metamorphosis in this area.  As NPR reported in November, in campaign runs in Massachusetts in 1998 and 2002, Romney was expressly committed to preserving a woman's right to chose an abortion.  He claims to have undergone a Road to Damascus moment on abortion in November, 2004 while delving into a policy fight in Massachusetts on embryonic stem cell research. 

So how well do Romney's anti-abortion views comport with his desire to eliminate Title X and his desire to eliminate unnecessary spending on health care?  Not very well according to one non-partisan research institute. In an August 2011 Fact Sheet, the Guttmacher Institute made the following findings from 2008 data:

• The typical American woman, who wants two children, spends about five years pregnant, postpartum or trying to become pregnant, and three decades—more than three-quarters of her reproductive life—trying to avoid pregnancy.

• About half of all pregnancies in the United States each year—more than three million—are unintended. By age 45, more than half of all American women will have experienced an unintended pregnancy, and three in 10 will have had an abortion.

• There were 66 million U.S. women of reproductive age (13–44) in 2008.

• More than half of these women (36 million) were in need of contraceptive services and supplies; that is, they were sexually active and able to become pregnant, but were not pregnant and did not wish to become pregnant. The number of women in need of contraceptive services and supplies increased 6% between 2000 and 2008.

• Of the 36 million women in need of contraceptive care in 2008, 17.4 million were in need of publicly funded services and supplies because they either had an income below 250% of the federal poverty level or were younger than 20.

• Public expenditures for family planning services totaled $1.85 billion in FY 2006.

• Medicaid accounted for 71% of total expenditures, state appropriations for 13% and Title X for 12%. Other sources together accounted for 5% of total funding.

• Publicly funded family planning services help women to avoid pregnancies they do not want and to plan pregnancies they do. In 2006, these services helped women avoid 1.94 million unintended pregnancies, which would likely have resulted in about 860,000 unintended births and 810,000 abortions.

• Contraceptive services provided at Title X-supported centers helped prevent 973,000 unintended pregnancies in 2008, which would likely have resulted in 432,600 unintended births and 406,200 abortions.

Thomson Health Care did a study for the March of Dimes in 2007 that pegged the average costs of a live vaginal birth at about $7,700 and $11,000 for a caesarean birth for the privately insured population in the United States.  (There are probably much more recent estimates for both types of maternity care.)   The breakdown for both types of maternity care was about two to one vaginal births over caesarean births.  This would make the average cost of both types of births about $8,800.  At that price tag, the Title X savings in terms of maternity costs are almost eight billion dollars.  That price tag doesn't take into account post-natal preemie care, care of children with birth defects, and any number of other medical costs for newborns beyond maternity costs of delivery.. It doesn't take into account the significant societal costs of teen-age pregnancy.  It also does not, of course, take into account the potential societal benefits of  having an additional 430,000 births each year.

So eliminating the annual costs of Title X, $317 million in 2010 dollars according to Kaiser Health News, will cost the nation almost eight billion dollars in added health case costs for maternity care, and lead to an additional 400,000 abortions. 

If eliminating abortions and controlling medical expenses is your goal, Mitt, you have to be "severely conservative" to push to eliminate Title X. 

Bishops May Endorse Santorum Campaign's Birth Control Pill Compromise

Foster Friess is a uber-wealthy investment fund manager and politically active conservative originally from Rice Lake, Wisconsin, now living in Delaware.  He is the person underwriting the Red, White and Blue SuperPac, supporting Rick Santorum.   In an interview today with Andrea Mitchell at MSNBC, Mr. Friess proposed a contraceptive compromise that U.S. Catholic bishops may find acceptable so they can save face after their recent over-use of all caps and bold font.

In Response to Voter Apathy, GOP Going Another Direction.

Realizing that they will have trouble in the Fall with Romney, the Republicans have chosen a new direction:

Judge Maryann Sumi Named Judge of the Year by Wisconsin State Bar

 Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi




Back on May 26, 2011, Dane County Judge Maryann Sumi issued a permanent injunction against the enforceability of Act 10, the public union busting measure by the Republican controlled legislature and Governor Walker.  Earlier in late March, Judge Sumi had issued a temporary injunction on publication of the law until she could hear the trial on the merits regarding the Open Meetings Law violation which occurred in connection with the law's passage.

At the time of her two earlier rulings, Judge Sumi was excoriated by Governor Walker, Scott Fitzgerald, Jeff Fitzgerald and others in the GOP as being a "Dane County liberal " who was running amok in order to serve liberal and union masters. She was accused of bias because her son had once worked for a union.  Postings by small minds to Journal Sentinel and State Journal articles about her decisions were incredibly vile and basically stupid.  Claims of liberal bias and judicial activism are common threads woven into Republican attacks when courts attempt to enforce constitutional protections.

Ultimately Judge Sumi was reversed by a 4-3 decision by the Wisconsin Supreme Court.  Reasonable minds can differ as to whether she should have been reversed.  What is beyond question is that the Supreme Court decision weakened the rights of citizens under the state's Open Meetings Law.

So what's new with the Dane County Judge that had so much abuse heaped on her by Scott Fitzgerald,  the Governor's office and the chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party?  The State Bar of Wisconsin announced on February 9 that Judge Sumi had been named the 2012 Wisconsin Judge of the Year.  Here is what the State Bar had to say about Judge Sumi's award on its website:

Supreme Court Rule 60.04 includes the words “a judge may not be swayed by partisan interests, public clamor, or fear of criticism.” According to all of her Dane County judicial colleagues, Circuit Court Judge Maryann Sumi exemplified that requirement last year when a random case draw placed her in the center of a maelstrom in the most tempestuous political climate in Wisconsin in decades.

A suit by the Dane County District Attorney alleged the leadership of the Wisconsin Legislature had violated the Open Meetings Law when enacting changes to Wisconsin’s public employee collective bargaining law. In their letter of nomination, her colleagues note, “her ensuing conduct more eloquently defended the integrity of the courts more than any verbal response could have: she handled the case in the way she has handled countless others.”

The award recognizes an outstanding circuit court judge who has improved the judicial system during the past year by his or her leadership in advancing the quality of justice, judicial education, or innovative programs. High ideals, personal character, judicial competence, and community involvement are hallmarks of the award recipient.

"Let Detroit Go Bankrupt"

Mitt Romney, Age 12





Here are the results of the most recent polls in Michigan, where a lose by Romney would do his political aspirations serious damage:

Date	Poll	Santorum	Romney	Paul	Gingrich	Santorum Lead
Feb. 14	Mitchell	34%	25%	11%	5%	+9
Feb. 13	Rasmussen	35%	32%	13%	11%	+3
Feb. 12	ARG	33%	27%	13%	21%	+6
Feb. 12	PPP	39%	24%	12%	11%	+15

Nate Silver (at the FiveThirtyEight blog on the New York Times' website) notes that Public Policy Polling's (PPP) method of robo-call polling may be overly weighted in favor of the most zealous potential voters:

Automated polling firms, like Public Policy Polling, often have low response rates, meaning that they tend to poll only the most enthusiastic supporters. At the same time, turnout in primaries and caucuses is normally quite low — so if a poll’s sample is biased in the direction of more enthusiastic voters, it may nevertheless have strong predictive power.

He notes that PPP's poll, which has Santorum up by the greatest amount, 15 points has actually tended to underestimate Santorum's success this year:

Michigan is a state where Romney is trying to paint himself as a native son, given his father's service as governor following  success as president of American Motors Corporation in Detroit.  As recently as two weeks ago, Romney was projected to be some sixteen points up in Michigan. That was before Santorum consolidated his preferred status with the far right by sweeping Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado.  Romney is trying hard to restore his native son status in Michigan with this pretty hokey ad:



Here is what the Romney campaign may be afraid Michigan voters are likely to remember about him however:

If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.

Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.

That are the introductory paragraphs to Mitt Romney's op-ed piece in the New York Times in mid-November 2008, a piece entitled "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt."   If one bothers to get past the first few paragraphs, Romney lays out an approach to a managed bankruptcy of the auto industry that Presidents Bush and Obama essentially collaborated on to restore the American auto industry.  The only major difference was that Bush and Obama used public monies to fund the restructuring instead of private equity, as Romney claimed was the best way to go.

Romney has tried to mollify Michigan voters through a new op-ed piece in yesterday's Detroit News, claiming his 2008 op-ed was written because he wanted to see the industry saved, but in the right way, using private equity to fund the re-organization of the industry.  In it he essentially argues that the bailout was crony capitalism designed to reward the unions at the expense of American taxpayers.  He argues that the unions were rewarded through protection of their pensions and retiree health benefits.  (That criticism  is sure to sell well in Michigan!)  He also argues for the government to immediately sell its remaining shares in GM, and return the money from the sale to the American taxpayer.  He doesn't bother to address the question of whether today is really the best time to sell the shares to maximize return for the American taxpayer. Given the recent strong growth in GM profits, $8 billion, the largest profits in its history, one might question his wisdom in arguing for an immediate sale.  An immediate sale would lock in the U.S. taxpayers' cost of funding the bailout at about $18 billion dollars, a nice hearty number for a GOP candidate to highlight in the fall presidential campaign.

A piece at Bloomberg blog today argues that things may not go as well for GM (and the U.S. Taxpayer) in 2012 and going forward.  One point made is that the record profits for GM occurred in the wake of the Japanese tsunami, which caused chaos to the supply chains in Japan and reduced the availability of Japanese made vehicles. 

Yesterday, Obama's auto bailout director,  Steve Rattner, responded to the new op-ed and called Romney's position on private equity funding of the restructuring "clueless."

"Romney's op-ed piece once again demonstrated that he is either completely clueless or thoroughly disingenuous when it comes to the auto rescues," Rattner said Tuesday. "The fact is that had the government not stepped in (under both President Bush and Obama), GM and Chrysler would have closed their doors and liquidated, bringing down the entire auto sector, with them. With suppliers also closed, Ford would have had to shut, at least for a time. More than a million jobs would have been lost. Michigan, and the entire industrial Midwest, would have been devastated."

"Romney's suggestion that private capital could have been found is utterly fantastical. The Auto Task Force spoke diligently to every conceivable provider of funds and at that moment, with the stock market in free fall and the economy shedding 700,000 jobs a month, no one — I repeat, no one — had the slightest interest in funding these companies on any terms. I challenge Romney to produce one single individual, investment fund or other source of money that can demonstrably disprove the conclusion of every member of the Auto Task Force and virtually every independent expert who was consulted."

The Politics of Contraception - Making the Cover of Newsweek

As noted on the Andrew Sullivan blog today, Newsweek features a new site that shows the alternative covers for each week's edition considered and rejected by the staff.

Here are a few:

Number three gets my vote as most creative, with number 4 a close second.

Rush Limbaugh, Conspiracy Theorist

 Rush Limbaugh, Cigar afficionado







On today's broadcast, Rush Limbaugh discussed the contention by Republican pundit Dick Morris, announced on Sean Hannity's show the night before, that a question posed by George Stephanopoulos to Mitt Romney in a January 7 debate at Saint Anselm's College in New Hampshire, had been a "set up" to position Mitt Romney on the extreme right side of the current debate on access to contraception.  Here was Morris last night:



Here is the key point made by Morris in arguing that there was coordination between the Obama campaign and its "hit-man" Stephanopoulos:

They want to create the idea, and it’s no coincidence, that he came out with it after Minnesota and Colorado which was Santorum’s victories. They want to create the impression that the Republicans will ban contraception, which is totally insane, but they’re floating it out and they’re bringing it out there. And this move on Obama’s part was part of injecting that issue.

Here is the supposed "set up" question to Romney at the Saint Anselm's debate:



Rush said today that when Stephanopoulos pressed the question about the right of states to ban contraception, he came totally "out of the blue" with it.  Rush claims it seemed bizarre being injected into the debate.  He talked about the fact that he and his staff were laughing the morning after the Saint Anselm debate over how stupid and meaningless the issue seemed at the time.  Thus in retrospect to Rush, the inanity of the question to Romney makes it considerably more likely that it was a coordinated action to set up the contraception mandate issue for later in the presidential campaign.

Apparently Rush is suffering from significant memory loss. Again, the Saint Anselm debate took place on January 7, a little over five weeks ago.  Here is the political context in which the question was asked of Romney by Stephanopoulos:

1.   On November 8, 2011, the citizens of Mississippi had voted on a constitutional amendment to define "personhood" as beginning at conception, which would have run afoul of Roe v. Wade, and would have arguably banned intrauterine devices and the morning after pill.  Mississippi, one of the reddest states in the country rejected the ballot measure by 55% to 45%.

2.   Similar "personhood" ballot initiatives had already been rejected by voters in Colorado in 2008 and 2010.

3.   Similar ballot initiatives were in process in other states, including Nevada, where a federal judge held the language of the ballot initiative so misleading that he ordered that additional language on the effect of the initiative be inserted in petitions by personhood supporters before circulation.

3.   Santorum, Bachmann, Perry and Gingrich had already come out in favor of establishing by constitutional amendment that "personhood" occurred at the moment of conception.  As noted in The Caucus blog post in the New York Times on December 22:

This month, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum have all signed a pledge to support “personhood” at conception that was crafted by Personhood USA, a Colorado group that has continued to push the idea in several states.Mrs. Bachmann, Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Santorum have also agreed to celebrate the personhood concept in a “Presidential Pro-Life Forum” in Iowa next Tuesday, Dec. 27, that will be moderated by the conservative radio host Steve Deace and broadcast live on his syndicated program. The 90-minute “tele-town hall” is being hosted by Personhood USA and co-sponsored by several of the country’s most conservative evangelical Christian groups including The Call, Liberty Counsel and the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Coalition. “

4.   In early October, Romney appeared on Mike Huckabee's television on Fox and here is part of what transpired:

HUCKABEE: Would you have supported a constitutional amendment that would have established the definition of life at conception?

ROMNEY: Absolutely.

 If you want to see the context of the question and answer, here is the entire interview.  The context can be seen starting at 4:06 and running through 6:20.



So the idea that George Stephanopoulos was trying, in early January, to set up Romney in advance of an announcement of the contraception care mandate by the DHSS is silly.  The GOP candidates had already fully engaged women voters on contraception.

The Soft Costs of the Safety Net.

This Sunday's New York Times had an interesting  article on the distribution of government benefit programs as a percentage of all income.  The article, "Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It," includes a great interactive map that allows you to look into the data county-by-county and by individual categories of government subsidies.  The two major takeaways from the report are: 

(1) Over the past forty years, from 1969 to 2009 (last year data had been compiled), the percentage of all national income represented by government subsidies has increased from 8% in 1969 to 18% in 2009.  So, the trend towards dependency on government outlays (or "socialism" if you prefer) to prop up disposable income has been pretty dramatic. 

(2) The states in which the Republican party has been doing best since the days of "the silent majority" and Democrats for Nixon, continuing through Reagan Democrats, and on to the Angry White Men for Bush, have consistently been the southern states that are most heavily subsidized by government welfare programs. 

Medicaid, medicare and social security increases account for almost 8% of the nearly 10% increase in government welfare spending as a percentage of income over the past forty years,  Social Security increases can probably be traced primarily to the gradual aging of the population.  Medicaid and Medicare increases can be traced to the increased priority placed on ensuring adequate health care for all Americans, the aging of the population, and lack of adequate cost controls over health care spending under the systems in place over the past forty years. 

Mitt Romney continues to attack the President for trying to convert us to "European style
socialism."  It would be interesting to see comparative data from the European countries.  It might well be, because of the costs of our patch work system for health care, that the percentage of government subsidy for income in Sweden, for example, is not much higher that our own.

George Packer has an interesting post in today's New Yorker "Daily Comment" blog called "Poor, White and Republican" that comments on the New York Times article.  He describes a Minnesotan who is introduced in the New York Times piece as a Republican stalwart:

In the Times story, there’s a man named Ki Gulbranson from a small Minnesota town called Chisago, both barely clinging to the middle class. He tries to make ends meet selling apparel and refereeing kids’ soccer games. All around him, he sees growing dependence on government. No fan of government spending, he joined the Tea Party in 2010; at the same time, he benefits from the Earned Income Tax Credit, free school breakfasts for his children, and Medicare for his mother. “I don’t demand that the government does this for me,” he said. “I don’t feel like I need the government.” Yet he finds it hard to imagine surviving without the safety net. “I don’t think so,” he said. “No. I don’t know. Not the way we expect to live as Americans.”

Gulbranson’s moment of hesitation contains a certain explanatory power. He doesn’t want to say that he can’t live without government. In places like Chisago, the old ethic of self-reliance is real and fierce. But it’s disintegrating under the pressure of several bad economic decades. People in Park Slope, Brooklyn and the north shore of Chicago don’t see their neighbors going on disability when they could work. But the more Gulbranson sees it, the more he resents the government. Perhaps he resents it most of all because he knows he needs it. That’s a political conundrum for both parties, but even more, it’s an American problem

Santorum now leading Romney in National Polls

Talking Points Memo's (TPM) poll of polls now has Santorum slightly ahead of Romney nationally.




Date of Poll    Gingrich           Paul              Romney          Santorum
02/12/2012      17.0%             12.0%             28.0%             30.0%       Santorum +2 Pew 
02/12/2012      16.0%               8.0%             32.0%             30.0%       Romney  +2 Gallup 
02/11/2012      16.0%               8.0%             34.0%             27.0%        Romney +7 Gallup
02/10/2012      17.0%             13.0%             23.0%             38.0%        Santorum +15 PPP

Will the Tea Party Have a Revival in the Michigan GOP Primary?

Imported From Detroit






Public Policy Polling's latest Michigan poll has Rick Santorum up 15 percent among likely Michigan voters, which will include some independents and Democrats because of it being an open primary.   PPP has Santorum with 39% to 24% for Mitt Romney, 12% for Ron Paul, and 11% for Newt Gingrich.   Gingrich's favorability ranking nationally is falling like a rock.  If Gingrich gives up the ghost, Romney will suddenly look like a very bad bet to win the nomination.

PPP reports:

Santorum's winning an outright majority of the Tea Party vote with 53% to 22% for Romney and 10% for Gingrich. He comes close to one with Evangelicals as well at 48% to 20% for Romney and 12% for Gingrich. And he cracks the 50% line with voters identifying as 'very conservative' at 51% to 20% for Romney and 10% for Gingrich.

This is a state that all the pundits had put safely in the Romney camp two weeks ago, because of the Romney family's ties to Michigan.  The primary is February 28, just six days after the next Republican debate in Mesa, Arizona.

The Faustian Bargain of WEAC and Kathleen Falk

 Faust







Yesterday I posted about the decision by WEAC and AFSCME to seek a pledge from the Democratic recall election candidates to veto the next biennial budget unless it contained the restoration of collective bargaining rights for public employees.  Supposedly, the pledge was a major consideration in securing an endorsement from WEAC.  It still isn't clear to me whether the pledge was to veto the next budget unless it contained a total roll-back to the status of public sector collective bargaining prior to Act 10 being enacted and signed by Governor Walker.  If the unions were going to decide to be goofy enough to seek such a pledge, that would be the logical standard requiring the veto to be applied in 2013.  The reporting in yesterday's Journal Sentinel article certainly made it seem like that was the criterion for the pledge:

Falk, the former Dane County executive, has committed to restoring collective bargaining in the next state budget and vetoing the budget if those provisions come out. Four other Democrats, including Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, said they wouldn't commit to any one strategy to accomplish that.

Falk, who received the state teachers union endorsement Wednesday at an event in the Madison suburb of Monona, said Walker used a budget-repair bill to pass the repeal of most union bargaining so it was appropriate to use a budget bill to undo it.

"I have said that I will veto a budget bill if it does not have collective bargaining," Falk said. "The way you undo (Walker's) damage is the same vehicle by which he did the damage."

To me that sounds like a commitment by Falk to veto any budget bill that did not fully restore public sector collective bargaining rights to pre-March 2011 status.

But here is the statement that Falk made in Monona yesterday when asked about her veto pledge:



The statement in this video strikes me as a little more equivocal. Will some restoration of collective bargaining rights be enough to avoid a Governor Falk veto of the budget?  Maybe WEAC, AFSCME or the Falk campaign will be able to clarify the extent of her commitment to the unions. Falk doesn't touch this issue on her "Kathleen Falk for Governor" Website.   For that matter, she lays out no policy positions on her website other than these vanilla flavored ones:

My choices as your governor will be different than Scott Walker's. I know Wisconsin is a place where we can have good paying jobs, a clean environment, successful schools and affordable health care. We can have workers and management talking and working together to solve tough problems.

Politician "pledges" are  horses of a different color than policy positions. The Grover Norquist no-tax pledge is inane, and any politician signing on to it should be quickly shown out the door.  So it is with this pledge on which at least some of Wisconsin's public sector unions have insisted.  State politicians are elected to do what is best for the state as a whole, and to adapt their policies to the circumstances and challenges that may arise in the future.  I would have no problem with WEAC and AFSCME insisting that any candidate they endorse in the recall race (assuming it is certified) be committed to restoring collective bargaining rights to pre-March 2011 status.  But the veto pledge is stupid and counter-productive.

Let me give you an example.  In this morning's New York Times there was a front page article on the surprising jump in sales and income tax revenue that Michigan has experienced this year, over $457,000,000 in unanticipated revenue.  What if Wisconsin ends up at the end of 2012 enjoying a similar surplus as our economy comes back?  Assume the Wisconsin legislature in 2013, controlled at least in part by the GOP,  thinks it is fine to leave collective bargaining as it is now, but decides that there is enough good news about economic recovery to spend the unexpected surplus on improving access to Badger Care, adding money to the University budget, and increasing school aids. Do we want the governor committed to veto that budget purely in order to pay for her endorsement bargain with WEAC and AFSCME?  To ask the question is to answer it.  Do we want her to put Democratic legislators in the position of having to vote against expanding state funding for health and education in order to sustain her veto?  What a wonderful outcome that would be for the GOP!

Finally, (as I noted yesterday) apart from the inherent undesirability of these kinds of candidate pledges, this particular pledge was politically so thick-headed as to make you marvel that WEAC is led by educators. It is going to sell very badly everywhere but in a small subset of public union members' households.  I guess I could see the Marty Biels of the world being out of touch with the leanings of Wisconsin voters, but not an organization like WEAC with members in every nook and cranny of the state.  Based on the postings on the WEAC Facebook page last night and today, it seems increasingly clear that the decision to extract the pledge and jump onto Falk's bandwagon was something about which WEAC rank and file members were neither informed nor consulted.  The postings on the Facebook page are running about 50 to 1 against the endorsement.  Many of the WEAC members are calling for WEAC to "do a Komen." 

Merriam Webster describes a Faustian bargain as a bargain "made or done for present gain without regard for future cost or consequences."  The WEAC - Falk bargain seems clearly to fit this definition.  I will say again what I said yesterday:  Either Kathleen Falk will not be the candidate for governor on the Democratic side in the recall election, or the effort of 50,000 people who pounded the pavement in freezing weather to secure recall signatures will be wholly wasted.

A Devoutly Dumb Approach to a Recall Election.

 Kathleen Falk. 






The Journal Sentinel just posted an on-line article by Jason Stein that Kathleen Falk, former Dane County Executive, has made a pledge to union leaders of WEAC and AFSCME that, if elected to replace Scott Walker, she will veto any state budget that does not restore past collective bargaining rights for public workers.  If the report is accurate, then one of two things will now occur:  One, Kathleen Falk will not be the candidate of the Democratic Party in any gubernatorial recall election that may be ordered.  Two, many weeks of hard effort by folks all over the state to gather recall petitions will be flushed right down the toilet drain.

Two days ago, a Washington Post op ed columnist, Charles Lane, wrote a column entitled "Who's Progressive in Wisconsin?" that criticized the recall effort in Wisconsin as undermining democracy.  The column irritated me as I felt it reflected a somewhat arrogant lack of understanding of the many reasons that recall signatures had been gathered this winter.  Lane took a million Wisconsin citizens to the editorial woodshed:

For public-sector unions, the Walker recall is no mere exercise in payback. The unions, upon which Democrats depend heavily for funding and foot soldiers, say Walker must be ousted and his reforms reversed for the sake of the middle class. Progressive values — even democracy itself — are in mortal danger.

Actually, the opposite is true. The threat to such progressive goals as majority rule, transparent government, a vibrant public sector and equality comes from public-sector unionism.

I had supposed that Walker’s victory in 2010, along with the victory of Republicans in both houses of the state legislature, entitled the people’s choices to make policy until the next election.

I had not realized that Wisconsin’s voters were allowed to elect representatives to do everything except change the rules on collective bargaining.

Of course, collective bargaining in the public sector is inherently contrary to majority rule. It transfers basic public-policy decisions — namely, the pay and working conditions that taxpayers will offer those who work for them — out of the public square and behind closed doors. Progressive Wisconsin has a robust “open meetings” law covering a wide range of government gatherings except — you guessed it — collective bargaining with municipal or state employees. So much for transparency.

Even worse, to the extent that unions bankroll the campaigns of the officials with whom they will be negotiating — and they often do — they sit on both sides of the table.

Reading the piece made me think that Lane was just buying into the Republican meme that the recall was solely a reaction to the collective bargaining issue, and driven by the unions.  Since reading the column I have been thinking of a good way to summarize all the multitude of issues and policy screw-ups by the Walker administration that caused people in Wisconsin to pound the pavement for recall.  Now, reading Jason Stein's article, I feel like it would be a waste of time.  Kathleen Falk, WEAC and AFSCME have now made it all about the unions.

What I believe motivated most people to seek recall was the type of political brinksmanship from the right that saw meaningless and short public hearings on important issues of health care accessibility, the slashing of K-12 and secondary education budgets without carefully considering alternatives, open meeting violations, late night votes where the minority party wasn't given the time of day, and the demonizing of teachers and other public workers as greedy malcontents.

Now, because 1,000,000 signatures were gathered with the help of union members, the unions have decided the time is ripe for them to engage in brinkmanship from the left.  Politics isn't tiddlywinks, so the saying goes, and for some ill-conceived reason, the unions think that now is the time to publicly demonstrate that the recall effort was, in fact, all about them.

I signed a recall petition.  I have written (admittedly in a less than artful, often sophomoric fashion) about the political scene in Wisconsin since the end of last February.  I detest much of the policy changes that have been put in place by the Republicans since January of last year.  But if Kathleen Falk wins the nomination to oppose Scott Walker in a recall election after making a pledge to veto the state budget if it does not restore collective bargaining, then barring Walker's criminal indictment, I will  walk whistling into my polling station and cast my ballot for him.  I do not intend to replace him with a candidate who has made a promise to put at risk senior citizens, people in need of medical assistance, the university system, and public support of K-12 education, in order to play brinksmanship games on behalf of unions with a legislature that will almost certainly still be Republican in at least one house.  I can't imagine anything that the unions and Falk could do that would make the Republican Party happier, short of coming out in favor of polygamy or Sharia law,  than to have entered into the backroom bargain being reported today.  A devoutly dumb miscalculation.

Another way to look at yesterday from Think Progress

Did Romney's Campaign Fail to Anticipate the Scope of Santorum's Wins?

 President Obama, firing a marshmallow gun at a science fair in the State Dining Room of the White House yesterday.   Today he presumably feels as happy as he looks here.





Yesterday morning Mitt Romney's Political Director, Rich Beeson, sent out a memo to "Interested Parties" trying to tamp down the expectations for the Romney campaign in yesterday's three contests.  The memo can be read in PDF format here, or at the NY Times' The Caucus Blog here.   I previously posted about the setback suffered by the Romney campaign as a result of the clean sweep of yesterday's contests by Rick Santorum, and with Romney falling dismally below where he had polled in 2008.  What is interesting is that the Romney campaign seemingly did not have a good handle on how bad the day would end for their guy.  Here is the relevant part of Beeson's memo:

The Reality of February

It is difficult to see what Governor Romney’s opponents can do to change the dynamics of the race in February. No delegates will be awarded on February 7 — Colorado and Minnesota hold caucuses with nonbinding preference polls, and the Missouri primary is purely a beauty contest. Except for the Maine and Wyoming nonbinding caucuses running through February, the next contests are on February 28 in states where Governor Romney is strong. Arizona’s 29 delegates will be bound in a winner-take-all contest. Michigan, the state where Governor Romney grew up, binds 30 delegates.

What is really "difficult to see" is why Beeson would chose to make the statement that Romney's opponents  have no way "to change the dynamics of the race in February," if the Romney campaign really knew how awful yesterday was going to turn out for Romney.  The wins by Santorum will fuel the concern by base GOP voters that Romney is too far to the center, and too well heeled, to excite big GOP turnout in November.

All three of the states that voted yesterday should be seen as potential swing states this year.  Obama lost Missouri to McCain by one tenth of one percent (0.1%).  Colorado was an easier pickup for Obama with 54% of the vote, but that state had been reliably red since 1964, except when Bill Clinton won over George H.W. Bush in 2002, with the critical assistance of Ross Perot carving off 23 % of the vote as a third party protest candidate.  Minnesota has been reliably blue in the past, but in 2010, the Democratic party (Democratic Farm Labor (DFL) Party) got completely crushed in the election for the state's House of Representatives and Senate.  In the Minnesota Senate the Democrats went from a 46 to 21 advantage to a Senate where Republicans outnumbered Democrats 37 to 30.  The blood-letting in the House was almost as bad.

So today Romney looks basically unwanted and unloved in three states that can be seen as potentially crucial in November.  It seems like that reality could, in fact, "change the dynamics of the race."  While it is great to have lots of money and a well-oiled machine of political apparatchiks flowing from state to state, you still have to have a candidate that people like and relate to, and after yesterday, Romney really does not seem like that candidate.