Author Archives: suratsweet

Rockefeller Romney or Ayn Rand Romney?

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Mitt Romney has, in the space of a single week, shifted his positions on tax cuts, the social safety net, Medicare coverage, abortion rights & women’s right to choose. The Ayn Rand/Paul Ryan Romney has been sublimated to the Rockefeller Romney. It will be fascinating in tonight’s VP debate to see which of the dueling Romneys Paul Ryan chooses to channel.

Interestingly enough, Ryan himself hasn’t always been permitted to “play himself” during the campaign as Republicans desperately try to soften his hard-edged economic austerity, Social Darwinism, puritanical approaches to birth control and sexuality, and pandering to the rich.  And when he tries to play the “boy genius” role, he gets especially truculent when challenged. The numbers wonk has little patience for explication–he prefers declaratives.

Being two-faced, Romney and Ryan  always want to have things both ways.

Let the Chess Game Begin: Rope-A-Dope

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If rhetoric is akin to a chess game, with strategies, maneuvers, feints and sudden attacks (sort of like boxing), then Wednesday’s first debate was just the opening gambit. Neither candidate performed his expected role: Romney became a born-again moderate redistributionist, while Obama retreated to the chilly Olympian heights of the Presidency, giving all the correct answers but conveying none of the necessary emotions. So everyone says Obama lost the rhetorical battle (which is always to persuade your audience by connecting to them both emotionally and substantively), though if you read the transcript he pretty much countered everything Romney claims. It just didn’t feel that way.

In Aristotelian terms (Rhetoric, 1356 A), oratorical persuasion relies on three elements: ethos (establishing an image or identity), logos (the appeal to reason through argumentation), and pathos (arousing the audience’s passion).  All three have to work in tandem. On Wednesday, Obama failed at pathos, but Romney is now even more vulnerable on ethos and logos because his identity is ever-shifting and his arguments don’t add up.

Romney’s is now totally exposed as Etch-A-Sketch Man, Hollow Man. The rhetorical key is that Obama did not surrender his authenticity or authority, and did not shape-shift. His identity, gravitas, and dignity remained firmly intact. He banked his fires and  stayed within himself because he’s the one with a core and a consistency. He still has authority because he is the author of himself. He just needs sharper focus and cogency, as Jonathan Alter put it to Rachel Maddow.

He needs presence, not just reporting as present.

The Town Hall format of the next encounter should prove more conducive to openly challenging Romney face to face. Obama can try a little more of that scoffing, mocking tone he clearly excels at when he allows himself off the leash. (He did it a bit on Wednesday, like when he said that Romney’s new campaign slogan should be “never mind.”)

And let’s also hope for the return of Wednesday’s no-show memes that play so well for Obama–practically every women’s issue, “the 47%”, immigration, labor rights, Republican obstructionism, Bain, Romney’s offshore tax shelters, etc. Obama is playing the long game and betting that Romney will not wear well over the next few weeks as his evasions, hypocrisies and contradictions become transparent. Like Warren Buffet says, you don’t know who’s not wearing trunks until the tide goes out.

Apples, Oranges and Mush: Romney’s Sleight-of-Hand

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One of the reasons the commentariat is so befuddled about Romney’s first debate performance is that everyone (especially Mitt) conflates entirely different things: tax cuts (aka, revenue reduction), tax deductions (aka, tax hikes for the punters who can longer write off their mortgage interest), spending cuts, and revenue increases from accelerating economic growth (aka, “trickle down”.)

Here’s the Mittmaster’s hocus-pocus at work at a key moment early in the debate:

 

The second area, taxation, we agree, we ought to bring the tax rates down. And I do, both for corporations and for individuals. But in order for us not to lose revenue, have the government run out of money, I also lower deductions and credits and exemptions, so that we keep taking in the same money when you also account for growth. (emphasis added)

 

So this is how he can say that his $5 trillion tax cut is not a tax cut at all because it is “revenue neutral.”  In Mittworld, things both are and are not.

And where does the offsetting revenue come from? Two places: one unspecified  (which “deductions, credits and exemptions”  beyond PBS?) and thus impossible to ever reach, and the other (from “growth”)  purely fantastical. Like Wimpy in Popeye, Mitt wants to pay us on Tuesday for a hamburger he wants to feed the super-rich today. Pay it forward, Mittman!

To disentangle this rat’s nest, I’d suggest that next time Professor Obama practice the Socratic Method:

Obama: Do you not agree, Governor, that when speaking of more than thing, that it is prudent to understand each thing fully in its own turn before going on to another?

Romney: Yes, that seems prudent.

Obama: And would you not further agree that you cannot deny the existence of one thing simply by projecting the existence of an entirely different thing?

Romney: That is self-evident.

Obama: Then, sir, let us first speak solely of tax cuts, irrespective of offsets. Is it not true that tax cuts–considered wholly on their immediate and primary effect– only increase the deficit?

Romney: Yes, I suppose that’s true, strictly speaking, in a reductionist way of looking at things.

Obama: And would you not further agree then that your proposed 20% across-the-board tax cuts would deprive the government $5 trillion over ten years?

Romney: No, because, as I’ve already explained, I’m not in any way calling for a tax cut that will cost the government anywhere near $5 trillion. In fact, my tax cut will pay for itself.

Obama: But that is an impossibility because you cannot generate revenue out of a reduction of revenue, just as you cannot generate water out of a parched desert. The water has to come from some other source. And you specify two sources: “reduced deductions, credits and exemptions,” and the presumed economic growth that will trickle down from the rich, who most benefit from the tax cuts. Since both of these assumptions are not in any way properties of the tax cuts themselves, to speak of them in the same breath as the tax cuts in simply to change the subject, and sneak in a new ace when everyone is looking the other way.

 

Who’s Better Off? Mitt Romney, For One

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Romney’s Final 2011 return:

Adjusted gross income: $13,696,961

Total federal tax paid: $1,935,708

Effective federal tax rate: 14.1 percent

Romney’s Final 2010 return:

Adjusted gross income: $21,646,507

Total tax paid: $3,009,766

Effective rate: 13.9 percent

So Romney has made $34 million in just two years of the so-called “first socialist” (or redistributionist) President. While he won’t reveal any other taxes from previous years, let’s conservatively assume that he’s made at least a cool $60 million under Obama. So why does he want to change anything? Could he really be that avaricious?

Greed indeed seems to be the animating emotion of the Romney-Ryan-Rand ticket. Don’t forget that virtually all of Mitt’s income is from capital gains, interest and dividends. Is it any accident that the Ryan Plan would more or less eliminate these income streams from federal tax? Won’t Mitt become one of the 47% if Ryan has his way with the tax code? A recent Atlantic Magazine article estimates Romney’s post Romney-Ryan tax rate at .82 percent Let the Plutocrats’ Ball begin!

Mitt: Beware the “Are You Better Off?” Meme

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In the first Presidential debate on October 3, Mitt Romney could well step into a political quicksand lurking just beneath the surface of his political taunt, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” If voters compare 10/3/12 with 10/3/08, Romney is sunk because the comparison is so revealing.

America’s economic house is hardly in order, but trend lines are promising: housing starts and new home sales at their highest levels in two years (and projected to climb 20% more by January, 2013), the DJIA is up about 50% since October, 2008, interest rates remain at record lows (and the Fed has vowed to keep them there until unemployment dips), corporate profits are at record highs, consumer confidence has more than doubled since President Obama’s inauguration, and more jobs have been added than lost every month now for almost three years.

Compare that to a panicked America on October 3, 2008. The financial world “was on the verge of an abyss,” as Paul Krugman put it in that day’s NY Times column. 603,000 jobs had been lost in September, 2008, compounding a 592,000 job drop in August, 2008. Sept. 29, 2008 had seen the Dow’s largest one-day point decline ever, 778 points. And then the bottom really dropped out: between Oct. 1, 2008 and October 10, 2008 the Dow suffered a gut-wrenching 2,400 point further drop, nearly 22% . Housing starts were at a 17 year low, and had fallen by two-thirds since January, 2006. Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac were in federal conservatorship, Merrill Lynch and Washington Mutual were married shotgun-style to BOA, AIG had lost 95% of its stock value, Lehman had folded, and badly-rattled tough guy John McCain was running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Americans quavered every time their boss walked by or another economic report loomed. No one wanted to hear or read the news–never a good sign.

As President Obama said in a mid-term self-evaluation, the President’s main job is to make Americans feel confident about the future. And there’s no doubt we’re more buoyant now than we were that horrid first week of October, 2008.

What Politiscripts Is All About

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A nation gets the political rhetoric it deserves, and that political rhetoric reveals as well as conceals. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, not the negative connotation it has for being just double talk, b.s. or obfuscation. Political talk tries to be strictly scripted but the script is always disrupted by unexpected events and emergent or recombinant memes–“bimbo eruptions” or the fall of Lehman Brothers or “self deport” or “legitimate rape”.

This blog keeps track of the ever-shifting meanings of words, phrases, references and numbers. Especially in politics, no word, number, image, reference or metaphor is innocent; context changes content. Every thing is a weapon in the total war that is contemporary American politics.

I intend to look at “speech acts” in the double sense of speech in itself constituting an action (and thus having consequences as well as an ethos), as well as being a scripted act. Even when political speech seems genuine–in fact, especially when it seems most genuine–it is a calculated choice, all artifice, all the time.

 

Blog name: Politiscripts
politiscripts.com
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, not the black arts of double talk, b.s. or obfuscation. A nation gets the political rhetoric it deserves, and that ever-shifting political rhetoric reveals as well as conceals. Political talk tries to be strictly scripted, but the script is always disrupted by unexpected events and emergent or recombinant memes–“bimbo eruptions” or the fall of Lehman Brothers, or “self deport”, or “legitimate rape”, or Obamacare.

This blog keeps track of the ever-shifting meanings of words, phrases, references and numbers. Especially in politics, no word, number, image, reference or metaphor is innocent; context changes content. Everything is a weapon in the total word war that is contemporary American politics.

I intend to look at “speech acts” in the double sense of speech in itself constituting an action (and thus having consequences as well as an ethos), as well as being a scripted act. Even when political speech seems genuine–in fact, especially when it seems most genuine–it is a calculated choice, all artifice, all the time. The ends justify the memes and the memes justify the ends.