Ari Berman | The Nation
Florida Voter Purge Is Unlikely to Resume
Last week Florida federal district court judge Robert Hinkle ruled against the Justice Department’s motion for a temporary injunction against Florida’s voter purge. The ruling was widely portrayed as a victory for the state, by Florida Governor Rick Scott and many in the media.
Yet the ruling itself was less of an endorsement for Florida and more of a rebuke. “There were major flaws in the program,” Hinkle wrote. “The [Florida secretary of state] compiled the list in a manner certain to include a large number of citizens…The program was likely to have a discriminatory impact on new citizens.” Hinkle ruled in favor of the state “primarily because the Secretary has abandoned the program.”
In case you’ve forgotten, Florida’s voter purge was riddled with errors (“98.4% of the 2,625 people identified by the Florida SOS as ‘potential noncitizens’ remain on the rolls because the Supervisors of Elections found insufficient evidence that they were ineligible to be registered voters,” found University of Florida political science professor Daniel Smith), racially biased (minorities comprised 80 percent of the list but only 30 percent of Florida’s population) and blatantly partisan (Democrats outnumbered Republicans by two to one). That’s why Florida’s supervisors of elections overwhelmingly refused to implement the purge—which remains their position following Judge Hinkle’s ruling.
“The supervisors are where we were before—we’ve stopped the purge,” Vicki Davis, president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections, told me. “The list was much too flawed for the elections supervisors to move forward with in the same format and without backup documentation.”
“We’re not going to see any further activity in most of the counties in the state’s direction,” adds Ion Sancho, supervisor of elections in Tallahassee’s Leon County. “It’s just too close to the election at this point.”
Two heavily Republican counties, Collier and Lee, are the exceptions, comprising 65 percent of the 107 potentially ineligible voters purged in Florida from early April to early June. Collier County, which includes Naples, removed 26 alleged “non-citizens” from the rolls based on the state’s list—eight of whom did not respond to contact attempts from the county to determine whether they were or were not citizens. “The worst-case scenario is that we’ve wrongfully removed somebody from the rolls,” says Tim Durham, the county’s deputy elections supervisor. If that’s the case, legitimate voters wrongly branded as “non-citizens” would have to cast a provisional ballot, which may or may not be counted (Durham says two-thirds of provisional ballots are counted in Collier County).
Lee County, home to Fort Myers and fittingly named after the Confederate general, is the other rogue county—and the only one in the state still purging voters. Lee removed forty-four suspected “non-citizens” from its rolls from April to June, according to Daniel Smith, but only two were from the state’s list. The other forty-two were evidently based on the county’s records of people who identified as non-citizens in order to avoid jury duty, a highly unreliable way to determine citizenship. (Lee County election officials were out of the office and did not respond to interview requests).
So what happens now? Collier is one of five counties in Florida subject to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), meaning it must seek approval from the federal government to make sure any voting change does not discriminate against minority voters (which the county failed to do). The Justice Department, whose lawsuit against Florida under the National Voter Registration Act is moving forward in Hinkle’s court, could also challenge the voter purge under Section 5. The ACLU and Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights are already suing Florida under that provision, alleging that the counties needed preclearance for the voter purge, while the Advancement Project and other voting rights groups filed another lawsuit under Section 2 of the VRA, noting the purge’s discriminatory impact.
Florida has said the voter purge will not resume unless the state gains access to the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE database—which tracks government benefits for non-citizens and is not intended as a tool for purging ineligible voters. “The State's insistent claim that access to the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program will resolve any deficiencies in the current match process seriously overstates the usefulness and accuracy of SAVE for the purposes of verifying names in a voter list maintenance program,” writes the Brennan Center for Justice. Moreover, Florida lacks the identifiers necessary to properly use the database.
Yet although the purge remains suspended, Florida has yet to admit to any wrongdoing or to address the widespread confusion surrounding the program, which may scare some minority voters away from the polls in November for fear of retaliation. “The state needs to publicly acknowledge, to both election officials and voters, that there were errors, that they’re checking to make sure no one has been wrongfully removed and that the list won’t be used anymore,” says Diana Kasdan, counsel at the Brennan Center’s democracy program.
Judge Hinkle ended his opinion with a warning to the state. “If the secretary or the supervisors of elections go forward with the program the secretary says he has abandoned,” he wrote, “the issue can be revisited.”
Howard Dean on Healthcare Ruling: 'The President Won'
Few politicians know as much about healthcare as Howard Dean, a former physician, five-term governor of Vermont and president candidate. Dean has long been an advocate for universal healthcare, although he was critical of the Obama Administration’s handling of healthcare legislation in 2009-2010, particularly the lack of a public insurance option in the final bill (which Dean ultimately supported). I interviewed Dean today about the political and policy ramifications of the Supreme Court’s ruling to uphold the Affordable Care Act.
Ari Berman: What was your reaction to the healthcare ruling?
Howard Dean: I was surprised. Like many people, I was shocked that Justice Roberts sided with upholding the bill and somewhat surprised and disappointed that Justice Kennedy voted to get rid of the entire thing along with the three right-wing justices.
I was glad that the president won a victory. But this pretty much ends the debate about the nature of the private sector in the healthcare business—it’s here to stay in a very big way. This is, after all, a Republican bill. Not the Republicans that we see today, but the moderate Republican wing under Mitt Romney in Massachusetts—this is their bill. For the foreseeable future there will be those who wish we had a single-payer healthcare system, but that’s not going to happen in Washington anytime soon.
Will the Affordable Care Act be implemented as drafted following the ruling?
For the most part. There’s still a lot of work to be done—this does not insure everyone, first off. Secondly, the Medicaid decision is extremely concerning [the justices ruled that the government could not withhold all Medicaid funds for states that refuse to implement the law]. We would have been better off as a people if the Medicaid provision had been upheld fully and the individual mandate had gone down. The Medicaid expansion insures more people than anything else in the bill. The expansion is still real, but there’s no real stick for the federal government to use against the states.
I wish the law was more comprehensive, but it’s much better than having the bill repealed.
Should the president campaign on the issue of healthcare? We’ve seen a lot of polls showing that the bill has remained relatively unpopular—can the president do anything to change that now?
He can’t. It’s too late, the Republicans have out-branded him on this one. But I do think the president can talk about the individual provisions when they come up.
If I were Obama, I probably wouldn’t talk about healthcare all that much. Why try to climb a hill? Why not just hammer the daylights out of Romney every day for his car elevators, his Cayman Islands bank account and the fact that he’s a classic 1 percenter who doesn’t care about the 99 percent.
Does Romney have any credibility to attack Obama on healthcare given his own record in Massachusetts?
No, I don’t think he does, but he’s trying to appease his base. What Obama did was adopt Romney’s bill. I don’t see how you can pretend otherwise.
Will this ruling energize conservative activists?
No, they’re so energized anyway it won’t make any difference. Although it’s going to be a little hard for conservatives to say that John Roberts condoned a socialist plan.
How worried are you about Republicans now calling the healthcare law a tax over and over and over again?
They were using that line anyway. I don’t think it’s going to be any worse than it already was.
What can Obama say in response to that?
He can say what he said today. He can tell the story of individual Americans who are going to benefit from it. And the truth is that the Congressional Budget Office says the law will save money and save jobs. He can talk about that too.
What is the importance of the Supreme Court going forward?
The Citizens United decision essentially put American politics up for sale.… Let’s not make a mistake about it: we have five right-wing judicial activists on the Supreme Court. That’s one of the reasons I decided early in the year to vigorously support the president’s re-election campaign. I believe there’s a huge difference between Scalia and Alito, and Sotomayor and Kagan.
GOP: Obama Planning to 'Steal' the Election
Michael Kinsley famously wrote: “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth—some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say.”
Pennsylvania GOP House leader Mike Turzai uttered precisely such a statement over the weekend when he said that the state’s new voter ID law “is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”
Republicans have passed more than a dozen new voting restrictions since 2010, including voter ID laws in ten GOP-controlled states, under the guise of stopping the virtually nonexistent problem of “ voter fraud.” Yet the real purpose of the new voting restrictions, as Turzai admitted, is to shape the electorate in the GOP’s favor, since such laws disproportionately impact Democratic-leaning young and minority voters. As Bill Clinton said last year: “Why is all of this going on? This is not rocket science. They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate.”
In order to justify new voter suppression laws, GOP operatives are spinning increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories about alleged schemes of the Obama campaign and its allies to try to hijack the 2012 election. “Stop the corrupt Obama machine from stealing the 2012 elections,” reads the headline of a recent fundraising letter from the conservative legal organization Judicial Watch (see below).
According to Judicial Watch, which led the fight to impeach Clinton, the Obama administration is “aggressively pursuing plans behind closed doors to enact ‘stealth’ amnesty’ for millions of illegal aliens in a move to curry favor with Hispanic voters and potentially make it easier for illegal aliens to break the law and vote in 2012,” along with “continuing to funnel tax dollars to the corrupt and criminal ACORN.”
Such assertions are easily debunked. There is no “stealth amnesty” program, there is no record of noncitizens intentionally voting in US elections and ACORN no longer exists. Yet such outlandish claims are deeply ingrained in the conservative psyche. A 2009 survey by Public Policy Polling found that “52% majority of GOP voters nationally think that ACORN stole the Presidential election for Barack Obama last year, with only 27% granting that he won it legitimately.”
The purveyors of such discredited arguments, like Judicial Watch, continue to be deeply influential in conservative political circles. Nancy Pelosi recently said that Republicans are going after Attorney General Eric Holder , another frequent Judicial Watch target, as payback for the Justice Department’s blocking discriminatory voting laws under the Voting Rights Act. “His department’s blatant refusal to enforce federal law requiring states to clean up their inaccurate voter-registration records, combined with DOJ lawsuits against state voter-ID laws, must bring smiles to any ACORN-like groups contemplating electoral mischief this fall,” conservative columnist John Fund wrote recently in National Review.
Judicial Watch’s “2012 Election Integrity Project” helped lay the groundwork for Florida’s discriminatory, illegal and inaccurate voter purge. “According to a Judicial Watch investigation voter rolls in the following states appear to contain the names of individuals who are ineligible to vote: Mississippi, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Florida, Alabama and California,” said a recent press release. “As part of its 2012 Election Integrity Project, Judicial Watch has put these states on notice that they must clean up their voter registration lists or face Judicial Watch lawsuits.” Judicial Watch and the Tea Party group True the Vote recently sued Indiana to force a Florida-esque voter purge in the Hoosier state. On Tuesday the two groups also filed a motion to intervene in support of Florida’s voter purge. (Florida says that fellow swing states Colorado, Michigan and North Carolina are trying to access a Department of Homeland Security database, potentially to conduct a voter purge of their own.)
Expect to see more voter suppression measures unveiled as we get closer to November. Because, according to the likes of Judicial Watch, the only legitimate elections are the ones that Republicans win.
Romney: Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran
Over the weekend, Jamie Fly and Bill Kristol, two high-profile neoconservatives, wrote an article in the Weekly Standard urging President Obama to “ask Congress for an Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iran’s nuclear program.” Fly is executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative, a neoconservative advocacy group that is a successor to the Project for the New American Century, which laid the intellectual groundwork for the US invasion of Iraq. Kristol is an FPI board member. Fellow FPI board members Eric Edelman, Robert Kagan and Dan Senor are foreign policy advisers to the Romney campaign.
Romney was asked about the Fly/Kristol article on Face the Nation on Sunday. He responded:
I can assure you if I'm President, the Iranians will have no question but that I would be willing to take military action, if necessary, to prevent them from becoming a nuclear threat to the world. I don't believe at this stage, therefore, if I'm President, that we need to have war powers approval or a special authorization for military force. The President has that capacity now.
It’s worth pausing a moment to consider the magnitude of this statement. Romney is saying that he doesn’t need Congressional approval for a US attack on Iran. Notes Andrew Sullivan: “Remember that this was Cheney's position vis-a-vis Iraq. Bush over-ruled him. Romney is to the neocon right of George W. Bush in foreign affairs.” He’s also to the right of Bill Kristol, which is no small feat.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising, considering that Romney has chosen a team of neoconservative advisers hellbent on resurrecting the hawkish unilateralism of the early Bush years. As I reported in The Nation in May, nearly a dozen Romney advisers have urged the US to consider a military strike against Iran.
Top Romney adviser John Bolton, who many neocons hope will be secretary of state in a Romney administration, has been advocating war with Iran since 2008 and recently wrote that he wanted diplomatic talks between Iran and the international community to fail. “John’s wisdom, clarity and courage are qualities that should typify our foreign policy,” Romney said when Bolton endorsed him last January. (Less hawkish members of Romney’s foreign policy team have urged a negotiated settlement with Iran along the lines the Obama administration is currently pursuing.)
One could argue that the Obama administration’s refusal to seek Congressional approval for the NATO incursion in Libya set a precedent for Romney to sidestep Congress on Iran. But the Libya mission had the support of the Arab League and the United Nations Security Council, which wouldn’t be the case with an Iran attack. And a military strike against Iran would be far more dangerous and risky than taking out the Qaddafi regime. That’s why the administration and its diplomatic partners are trying to peacefully resolve what has unnecessarily become a brewing conflict.
On Saturday, Romney once again ridiculed Obama’s Middle East policy. “I think, by and large, you can just look at the things the president has done and do the opposite," Romney told the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a Christian right group run by Ralph Reed. If Obama seeks peace with Iran, then Romney and his ilk want yet another war.
Obama Has a Jobs Plan. Romney Doesn't.
President Barack Obama talks about the economy in the briefing room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
It’s no secret that the presidential election will be decided by the state of the economy and which candidate has a better plan for creating jobs. So, toward that end, consider a few relevant numbers:
+ 1.4 million to 3.3 million—that’s how many jobs were created or saved by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, otherwise known as the stimulus, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
+ 1.9 million—that’s the number of new jobs the American Jobs Act, unveiled by President Obama in September 2011, would create, according to Mark Zandi of Moody’s.
- 4.1 million—that’s how many jobs Paul Ryan’s budget, which Mitt Romney called “an excellent piece of work,” would eliminate through 2014, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
+11.5 million—that’s how many jobs Romney claimed last September he would create in the first term of his administration. But true to form, Romney never said how he would create that many jobs, nor has any reputable economist backed up his claim. “Nowhere in the 160 page plan could I find a stated job creation number,” wrote Rebecca Thiess of EPI. “The math doesn’t just appear to be fuzzy—it appears to be nonexistent.” Added David Madland of the Center for American Progress: “It is a plan from the Republican candidate for president designed to maximize corporate profits. What it doesn’t do is help the middle class or create jobs.” Even the conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal called Romney’s fifty-nine-point economic tome “surprisingly timid and tactical considering our economic predicament.”
Following last month’s disappointing jobs report, Romney offered six specific ideas to lift the flagging economy. Reported Greg Sargent:
He said he would tap our energy resources to “put a lot of people to work in the energy sector.” He said he’d repeal Obamacare, which is “scaring small businesses from hiring.” He said he’d balance the budget so people know “investing in America is going to yield a return in dollars worth something.” He vowed to “open up new markets in American trade.” He said he’d revamp the National Labor Relations Board and lower tax rates on employers, both of which would make it easier to hire people.
Sargent asked a few top economists whether Romney’s ideas would actually create jobs. “On net, all of these policies would do more harm in the short term,” responded Mark Hopkins, a senior adviser at Moody’s Analytics. “If we implemented all of his policies, it would push us deeper into recession and make the recovery slower.”
Hopkins’s quote might just be the most important one of the campaign so far. Every story about the candidates’ positions on the economy should mention this essential dynamic: Obama has a jobs plan. Romney doesn’t. In fact, according to economists, Romney’s prescriptions for the economy would only make a bad situation significantly worse.
Ari Berman is the author of Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics, out now in paperback.
The State of the Obama Coalition in 2012: Live Chat with Van Jones and Ari Berman
Note: To read a replay of the chat, click the CoveritLive box below. You can also access an edited transcript here.
After a campaign that saw an unprecedented level of grassroots activism and young voter engagement, Barack Obama’s supporters have struggled to reconcile the idealism that swept him into the presidency with the more centrist and cautious approach he has taken once in office. As the 2012 election approaches, what role will grassroots activists play in Obama's re-election campaign and in pushing him to stand up for more progressive governance?
On Friday, June 1st at 2 PM EST, Nation readers are invited to join us for a discussion with Nation writer Ari Berman and Rebuild the Dream president and co-founder Van Jones on the state of the Obama coalition in 2012.
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Ari Berman, a contributing writer for The Nation and Investigative Journalism Fellow at the Nation Institute, has reported extensively on American politics, foreign policy and the intersection of money and politics. His first book, Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics, looks at the grassroots organizing that sought to expand the Democratic coalition beginning with the Howard Dean campaign and culminating in the Democratic victories of 2008.
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Van Jones is the president and co-founder of Rebuild the Dream, an organization that seeks to implement bottom-up solutions to fix the United States economy. In his new book of the same name, he details his experience in the Obama White House and proposes strategies to build movements for progressive change.
Please join us on Friday, June 1st for a lively discussion!
Democrats Counter GOP Voting Restrictions
Since the 2010 election, Republicans have approved laws in more than a dozen states to restrict the right to vote. These laws include requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, restricting voter registration drives, curtailing early voting, disenfranchising ex-felons and mandating government-issued photo identification to cast a ballot. The Brennan Center estimates that “these new laws could make it significantly harder for more than 5 million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012,” and notes that “these new restrictions fall most heavily on young, minority and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities.” States with restrictive voting laws now comprise 70 percent of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency—including crucial swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The impact of such laws could be one of the sleeper issues that helps decides the 2012 election.
House Democrats responded to the wave of new voting restrictions by introducing a comprehensive new bill yesterday, “The Voter Empowerment Act,” aimed at expanding voting rights for all Americans, Democrats, Republicans and Independents alike. “The ability to vote should be easy, accessible and simple,” said Representative John Lewis, a civil rights hero who cosponsored the legislation with House Democratic whip Steny H. Hoyer, Assistant Democratic Leader James Clyburn, Representative John Conyers and Representative Robert Brady. “Yet there are practices and laws in place that make it harder to vote today than it was even one year ago. The sponsors of this act believe we need to take action or risk losing the liberties we have enjoyed. We should be moving toward a more inclusive democracy, not one that locks people out.” (The Obama campaign also unveiled a new voter-education website today, gottavote.org.)
The Voter Empowerment Act is the first piece of federal legislation that would modernize voter registration and includes a number of important new federal standards. They include:
-Automatically registering consenting adults to vote at government institutions like the DMV, allowing them to register to vote online and easily update their voter registration information when they move and adopting Election Day registration nationwide (states with same-day registration have the highest turnout in the United States)
• Guaranteeing fifteen days of early voting before Election Day
• Granting the right to vote for ex-felons after they’ve served their time
• Banning deceptive ads aimed at suppressing voter turnout
• Preventing election officials like Katherine Harris from working for political campaigns
(The bill does not address new voter ID laws, which nine GOP states have passed since 2010, but Representative Keith Ellison introduced a bill last year that would prohibit election officials from requiring photo identification to cast a vote or register to vote.)
“The Democratic leadership is taking voting reforms very seriously,” says Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center. “This legislation addresses the real problems in our system of elections, not the fictitious ones.” Indeed, since the 2010 election Republicans have breathlessly hyped the phantom menace of “voter fraud” in order to pass new voting restrictions that will reshape the electorate in the GOP’s favor, needlessly politicizing American elections and ignoring the real deficiencies in our electoral system.
For example, 9 million voters couldn’t vote in 2008, according to MIT, because of problems with their voter registration (13 percent), long lines at the polls (11 percent), uncertainty about the location of their polling place (nine percent) or lack of proper ID (seven percent). An additional 51 million eligible Americans are not registered to vote, notes Demos. “This represents almost one in four citizens, disproportionately low-income voters, people of color, and younger Americans,” writes Liz Kennedy. Of the 146 million Americans registered to vote in 2008, 131 million voted—a turnout rate of 90 percent. So the biggest problem in US elections isn’t that people aren’t voting, but that they aren’t registered to vote.
Unfortunately, this problem is getting worse, not better, as we head closer to the 2012 election. Crucial swing states like Florida have cracked down on voter registration drives, forcing non-partisan groups like the League of Women Voters and Rock the Vote to abandon their voter registration efforts (the Department of Justice has objected to Florida’s law under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act). Eighty-one thousand fewer voters have registered in Florida in 2012 compared to the same period four years ago, according to an analysis by the New York Times. Voter registration in Florida's communities of color has grown about half as fast as it has in North Carolina since 2008, notes a new study by Facing South. Nationally, the number of black and Hispanic registered voters has declined by 5 percent since 2008, according to the Washington Post, including 28 percent in New Mexico and 10 percent in Florida, the result of people leaving their homes because of the economic collapse or not being able to register to vote due to new voting restrictions.
Wendy Weiser notes that the main ideas included in the Voter Empowerment Act are common-sense reforms that have been adopted on a bipartisan basis in a number of states. They would make US elections more convenient, more efficient, more participatory, more secure and less expensive—virtues that all sides should be able to agree on. “These are not partisan hot-button issues,” Weiser says. Or at least they shouldn’t be. Non-partisan voting rights groups like the Brennan Center, Common Cause, Demos, the League of Women Voters and Rock the Vote have endorsed the effort. The bill has approximately 100 Democratic supporters in the House, but so far no Republicans have signed on.
Ari Berman is the author of Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics, out now in paperback.
Why Obama Must Hold Wall Street Accountable
Late last week, I heard the news about J.P. Morgan’s staggering $2 billion in losses on the same day I read Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article about the death of financial reform and Nick Confessore’s New York Times Magazine piece about President Obama’s fundraising on Wall Street. After reading these two articles in conjunction with the J.P. Morgan news, I could only come to one conclusion: it’s impossible to “reform” Wall Street if the president is dependent on the financial sector to bankroll his re-election campaign. The banks can be Obama’s friend or his enemy, but right now they can’t be both.
That’s why Obama should follow the lead of Elizabeth Warren and make Wall Street accountability a centerpiece of his re-election campaign. That would mean an end to the lavish fundraisers held by the titans of high finance (like the one last night), toughening and rigorously enforcing financial reform legislation and aggressively prosecuting Wall Street malfeasance. The banks would no doubt protest even louder than usual, but the public would heartily applaud. If the money dries up, so be it.
Obama stands the best shot at getting re-elected by making the election a choice between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, with Mitt Romney as the unabashed defender of the twenty-first-century robber barons. It’s easy to forget that the 1 percent, while overwhelmingly powerful in our political system, are by nature a tiny minority of voters. Thus, Obama’s core message should be about ensuring fairness and expanding opportunity for the 99 percent. But he won’t have the credibility to make such a message stick unless he jettisons what has been the albatross around his administration’s neck—the closeness between Washington and Wall Street.
Yesterday the Obama campaign unveiled a powerful new ad attacking Romney’s vulture capitalism at Bain Capital. Yet on that same night, Obama attended a fundraiser hosted by the president of the world’s largest private equity firm, the Blackstone Group. “Obama Hits Romney on Bain as He Raises Wall Street Money,” read a Bloomberg News headline. Republican gleefully amplified the story, branding Obama as an opportunistic hypocrite. Obama can’t afford another five months of headlines like that. Only by making clear to the public which side he’s on can the president consistently and convincingly paint Romney as Wall Street’s best friend. (Romney’s top five contributors are employees of Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse.)
Some Obama supporters will no doubt argue that Obama needs the money from wherever he can get it. Yet forgoing Wall Street cash is less of a risk for Obama than one might think. Though the president raised nearly $16 million from the securities and investment sector in 2008, he has collected less than $3 million from them in 2012. Romney and his Super PAC have outraised the president by ten to one on Wall Street (see here and here). Rather than trying to make up that gap, the Obama campaign should use that disparity to its advantage by asking Obama’s legion of small donors to make up the difference. That’s an ambitious but by no means impossible goal—the president has already collected 53 percent of his campaign cash from those giving under $200 (compared to just 13 percent for Romney). A declaration of independence from Wall Street would encourage many more people to donate to Obama’s campaign.
Obama’s failure to channel the public’s populist anger at the banks in 2010 cost his party dearly at the polls. Much of the electorate saw Washington and Wall Street as the same entity, largely as a result of the bailouts. Republicans are working hard to replay that theme in 2012. “Obama won't admit to supporting Wall Street,” says a new ad from the conservative American Future Fund running in eight swing states. “But Wall Street sure supports President Obama.” The fact that the banks have shifted their support to Romney this time around is a distinction lost on many Americans, who see both parties as wholly reliant on Wall Street cash—and with good reason. As Senator Dick Durbin famously remarked in 2009, “the banks…are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”
Obama, even if he wanted to, couldn’t change this dynamic in one election—that’s why we need to repeal the Citizens United decision and institute publicly financed elections. The president, however, is squandering a powerful wedge issue against Romney by not campaigning against the Citizens United decision and staying silent on the corrupting influence of big money in our political system. Demanding accountability from Wall Street would set a powerful precedent by Obama and free him up to pursue an ambitious second-term agenda of justice for Main Street if he’s re-elected.
Ari Berman is the author of Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics, out now in paperback.
Romney’s Fuzzy Jobs Math
The Obama campaign today launched a new ad and website attacking Mitt Romney’s record as a “job destroyer” while he ran the private equity firm Bain Capital.
The Romney campaign responded that “Mitt Romney helped create more jobs in his private sector experience and more jobs as Governor of Massachusetts than President Obama has for the entire nation.”
Romney’s jobs claims deserve serious scrutiny. According to the Associated Press, Massachusetts added 24,400 net jobs while Romney was governor. The state ranked forty-seventh out of fifty in job growth during that time.
The number of jobs Romney presided over at Bain has varied widely according to his own estimates. When he ran against Ted Kennedy in 1994, Romney said he created 10,000 jobs while at Bain. During the 2012 presidential campaign, Romney’s campaign has claimed he created “over 100,000 new jobs,” “tens of thousands jobs” and “thousands of jobs” at Bain. It’s impossible to know if any of these figures are accurate—every time the Romney campaign is pressed on the details, the number of jobs he created at Bain seems to decrease.
“If he is to continue to make claims about job creation, the Romney campaign needs to provide a real accounting of how many jobs were gained or lost through Bain Capital investments while the firm managed these companies—and while Romney was chief executive,” wrote Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler. “Any jobs counted after either of those data points simply do not pass the laugh test.” He gave Romney’s “over 100,000 new jobs” created “three Pinocchio’s,” which represents a “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.” In another analysis, Kessler wrote that “[Romney’s] campaign offered no definitive proof that Bain added more jobs than it eliminated while Romney headed the firm.”
Indeed, the jobs Romney supposedly created at Bain came from the growth of three companies Bain helped start—Staples, Sports Authority and Domino’s. But we have no idea how many jobs were lost at companies like GST Steel, which the Obama campaign spotlighted today, that went bust under Bain. Romney is only counting gross, not net, jobs created, which is not how jobs are calculated in the real economy. “It is utterly ridiculous for Romney to cherry-pick three companies where jobs were gained and ignore other companies where there were job losses while he was at Bain,” says Michael Linden, director for tax and budget policy at the Center for American Progress. “If you applied that same standard to Obama, you would have millions—if not tens of millions—of new jobs created during Obama’s term.”
Romney’s criticism of Obama’s jobs record is lacking crucial context. The country lost 4.2 million private sector jobs during Obama’s first term as a result of the economic crisis the president inherited. Since early 2010, the economy has added 4.25 million private sector jobs, resulting in a net gain of private sector jobs for the first time during the Obama administration. (The public sector has lost 607,000 jobs since Obama took office.)
These figures don’t mean that Obama has an ideal record when it comes to jobs. He should’ve been more focused on creating jobs and less concerned with reducing the deficit for the entirety of his administration and could be doing much more to stem the loss of public sector jobs. But Romney’s jobs record, to the extent that we even know what it is, is hard to take seriously, no matter what the candidate says. It’s impossible and misleading for Romney to claim he has created more jobs than Obama.
Ari Berman is the author of Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics, out now in paperback.
Richard Lugar and the End of Moderate Republicanism
UPDATE: As predicted, Lugar lost his primary challenge to Mourdock, 60 percent to 40 percent.
If Indiana Senator Dick Lugar loses his Republican primary race to Tea Party challenger Richard Mourdock tonight, as polls indicate is likely, his defeat will signal the end of moderate Republican internationalism in the US Senate and the GOP more broadly.
Lugar, a two time chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee best known for his work on arms control and nonproliferation treaties, used to be one of the GOP’s leading figures on foreign policy. Now he’s an outlier.
The Senate Republican caucus was once filled with the likes of Dick Lugar—sensible realists such as Lincoln Chafee, Chuck Hagel, George Voinovich and Olympia Snowe. Now they’re all gone or going, casualties of a Republican party where diplomacy, multilateralism and bipartisanship are dirty words. (A Mourdock ad called Lugar “Obama’s favorite Republican.”)
The decline of Lugar’s brand of pragmatic internationalism on foreign affairs helps explain why neoconservative veterans of the Bush Administration are now the principal foreign policy advisers to Mitt Romney. As I wrote in the latest issue of The Nation:
Elder statesmen from the George H.W. Bush administration like [Colin] Powell and [Brent] Scowcroft are much closer to Obama than to Romney. “The foreign policy experts who represent old-school, small-c conservatism and internationalism have been pushed out of the party,” says Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the center-left National Security Network. “Who in the Republican Party still listens to Brent Scowcroft?” Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Powell, says the likes of Powell and Scowcroft are “very worried about their ability to restore moderation and sobriety to the party’s foreign and domestic policies.”
Scowcroft, the former national security adviser to George H.W. Bush, elaborated in a recent interview with Fareed Zakaria. “I’ve been called a RINO, a Republican in Name Only,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve changed at all. I think the party has moved.”
In March, Hagel was asked, “Do you still consider yourself a Republican?” He responded, “I don’t know what the Republican Party is.”
On the contrary, I’m guessing that the likes of Hagel and Lugar know all too well what the GOP has become.
Ari Berman is the author of Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics, now out in paperback.
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