Random Blogging – Page 330

Chutzpah

The time-honored personification of “chutzpah”–a yiddish word usually translated as “nerve” or “gall”– is “a guy who kills his mother and father and throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.”

I have a better example: Brent Waltz.

Waltz, for those who’ve never heard of him, is the radical Right ideologue who defeated Senate legend Larry Borst in a Republican primary a couple of cycles ago. More recently, he has been in the news for non-ideological reasons: when a business venture he founded went belly-up, it turned out he had failed to make the legally-required payments into the State’s unemployment compensation fund. Whoops! Well, as he explained, these things happen–as a lawmaker, he’d been busy with other, more pressing matters, and well…those pesky legal requirements sort of escaped his notice. (Think he’d be equally nonchalant about Indiana citizens who fail to abide by the rules he is helping to pass at the General Assembly?)

According to a court filing in February, Waltz and his investment company received more than 145,000 from the failed enterprise, while as a result of his “inadvertence,” the workers who lost their jobs when the business closed were unable to collect either the pay they were owed or unemployment benefits.

Now, Waltz and (inexplicably) ISTA have teamed up to promote …wait for it…a new school program in fiscal literacy. I kid you not.

That’s chutzpah.

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Selling Cars and Candidates

When I was in college, I worked one summer for a friend of my father; he owned a Cadillac-Rambler agency (no kidding!), and I was billed as the first female used-car salesman (not “salesperson” back then) in Anderson, Indiana. I soon learned that if I wanted to sell a car, I needed to find out what the buyer wanted and emphasize those features–if someone came in wanting a red car, I talked about what a great shade of red this one had; if they wanted a V-8 engine, I talked about that.

A pretty elementary lesson in marketing.

Unfortunately, that’s the one lesson political candidates at all levels have really learned well.

We like to think of the democratic system as one where candidates and parties offer us competing visions and philosophies, and we choose between them. But all too often, that isn’t what happens. Instead, candidates hide or minimize agendas that they think (usually correctly) voters won’t “buy.” They become stealth candidates of a sort. So we have a Richard Mourdock, a man who won his primary promising to be intransigent, suddenly talking about co-operation and bipartisanship. You have Mike Pence, who has spent his entire time in Congress fighting for far-right culture issues, suddenly voicing concern about jobs and economic development, and another culture-warrior, Scott Schneider, running ads touting his bona fides as a “family man, and small businessman” who serves the public in the Indiana legislature.

It’s enough to make me sympathize with the folks on the far right who are always complaining that their Republican candidates won’t run a full-throated conservative campaign. That complaint assumes that a campaign run forthrightly on Right issues–defunding Planned Parenthood, passing a “personhood” amendment to outlaw not just abortion but also most birth control, anti-GLBT measures and of course starving government until it’s small enough to drown in Grover Norquist’s bathtub–would be a winner.

Candidates who aren’t entirely delusional recognize that these positions do not reflect the will of the larger electorate, no matter how fervently they are embraced by the True Believers. So they lie. They try to re-invent themselves. They tell us what they think we want to hear. And if they have enough money and good advertising consultants, they often win.

Because selling that car is more important than admitting that it’s maroon, not red. Being elected–achieving some measure of power–trumps running a campaign based upon telling voters the truth.

It’s interesting that so many of these profoundly dishonest campaigns are run by candidates who talk incessantly about the importance of religion, and who want us to know how godly and pious they are. I guess they missed that part about “bearing false witness.”

They’d make great car salesmen.

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Culture War Governor

I see from the morning news that Mike Pence is promising to attack Indiana’s economic woes by focusing like a laser on “protecting marriage.” If the nexus between those things seems a bit…shall we say “attenuated”…he explains that children of intact marriages are less likely to live in poverty.

That’s true enough. The question is whether we elect a governor to address a long-standing social issue with complex causes rooted in social change–social change a Governor is unable to affect (or evidently, in Pence’s case, understand), or whether we elect a chief executive of our state to manage budgets, pave roads, maintain state parks and improve underperforming social service agencies. Those mundane tasks clearly do not interest Mr. Pence.

We all recognize that Pence’s interest in the health of the institution of marriage rests less on his belief that intact families will lead to a better Indiana economy than on his determination to keep GLBT folks from forming those families. If Pence really cared about the health of families, he wouldn’t be waging war against Planned Parenthood, opposing access to contraception, or even more adamantly opposing the Affordable Care Act. The availability of affordable health care and family planning do have a demonstrable impact on families. Same-sex marriage just as demonstrably does not.

If Pence’s unctuous concern for the state of Hoosier marriages actually extends to the prevalence of divorce, how does he plan to insert the Governor’s office into that issue? Will he make it more difficult for the woman leaving an abusive spouse to exit that relationship? Work toward restrictive divorce policies that keep children in intact, unhappy homes?

There really are public policies that are family-friendly, that support women and children and ameliorate some of the predictable effects of single-parenting. Income supports and social services for impoverished children would make a real difference. SChip has been a godsend to thousands of them. But those aren’t policies Mike Pence has ever supported. In his case, “concern for marriage” is just a euphemism for policies that discriminate against gay people.

If Pence becomes Governor, it is going to be a long four years.

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Mitt’s “Macaca Moment”

Wow. Just wow.

By now, half of America has seen and heard the surreptitious recording of Romney telling a group of well-heeled donors that 47% of Americans would vote for Obama no matter what because they were non-taxpaying moochers who depend on government for handouts.

A few thoughts–none, I’m sure, original.

First of all, in an age of pervasive digital technology, why on earth would anyone be stupid enough to say something like that? No matter how congenial the group, no matter how hand-picked, in today’s world the odds of your “confidential” statements staying confidential are exceptionally low. The days when political candidates could say one thing to one group and something very different to another are long, long gone–and failure to realize that is probably as great a sign of being “disconnected from reality” as the actual sentiments being expressed. Ask George Allen (he of the “macaca moment.”)

Second, how immensely ironic that a man who pays far, far less than his fair share of taxes would characterize people who don’t pay taxes as moochers. Forget how inaccurate and unfair his statement was–forget the fact that even people who don’t make enough money to pay income taxes nevertheless pay all manner of other taxes, from payroll taxes to sales taxes to gas and property taxes. Forget the fact that most of us in middle America not only pay income taxes, but do so at a far higher effective rate than Romney. Here is a man running on a platform that would decrease his own tax liability and the tax rate of people like himself; a man who has used offshore accounts and other tax avoidance strategies, and who has defended that behavior by saying he’d be stupid to pay more than he owed, denigrating Americans who don’t pay because they don’t owe. (And where are your tax returns, Mitt? How do we know you paid anything in those years you refuse to release?)

Finally, this dismissive and self-satisfied man seems utterly oblivious to the extent to which he and his wealthy donors are themselves “moochers.” Recent articles have detailed the extent to which Romney and Bain used debt and public subsidies of one sort or another. It is particularly distasteful to watch crony capitalists who have benefitted from multiple public and private privileges crow about how they are “self-made” men. Can we spell “un-self-aware”?

Before the GOP convention, we were told the American public needed to be introduced to the “real Romney.”

I think we just were.

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A Peek in the Mirror

Ross Douthat is a conservative columnist at the New York Times (given David Brooks’ frequent forays into non-ideological common sense, it would not be inaccurate to say he is THE conservative columnist there). This morning’s column displayed an interesting combination of obtuseness and dawning recognition of political reality.

Douthat joins other conservatives who simply cannot fathom why Romney isn’t walking away with this election. He goes through several possible reasons–identifying “villains” like the “liberal education establishment” that has shifted the culture to the left–before settling on the likely culprit. And that culprit is…George W. Bush! He’s the one who destroyed the party’s brand!

Now, Bush clearly deserves a good deal of blame for the electorate’s distrust of GOP competence. But nowhere does Douthat suggest that the ham-handed Romney campaign with its wooden candidate might have something to do with the current status of the race. And only at the very end of his column does he grudgingly admit that the party doesn’t seem to have learned anything from the disaster in Iraq and the rape of the middle class by the bankers and other Masters of the Universe.

Conventional political wisdom tells us that “it’s the economy, stupid!” So Douthat and other conservative pundits are mystified by the increasing likelihood of a second Obama term. What seems to have escaped them is yet another timeworn political adage: “you can’t beat something with nothing.”

You can’t beat a sitting President with a deeply flawed candidate whose only persuasive argument is that he isn’t Obama. And you can’t beat a party that reflects the ideas and aspirations of a diverse and ever-changing electorate with a party composed mainly of rigidly ideological old white guys.

As the GOP keeps reminding Obama, you can’t blame George W. Bush for everything.

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