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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.

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.