[Ryan] has clearly picked up the Romney campaign’s habit of playing fast and loose with facts. For example, he declared of President Obama, “He created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.”
Somehow, Ryan said not a word about the fact that he was himself a member of the commission and that he voted against its report, one reason it did not get the votes it needed to for adoption.
Taken in context, [Obama] meant that no person or business succeeds alone. For those who care about such things, here are his actual remarks:
“Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.”
In my mind, it says a lot that the Republicans are building their 2012 convention message, and much of their 2012 campaign, around what they know in their hearts to be a blatant lie. That lie is repeated and repeated and repeated, and it gets no more truthful with each iteration.
10:44: Christie bragged about the tax cuts he’s passed since coming into office. As the Newark Star-Ledger put it, “Here are the facts: The 16,000 families in New Jersey earning more than $1 millon will get an average tax break of $40,000 apiece under [Christie’s] budget. At the same time, a single mom working for minimum wage will pay $300 more in state taxes.”
10:40: CNN is confirming that a Republican attendee was removed after throwing nuts at black CNN camerawoman. The delegate reportedly said, “this is how we feed animals.”
10:38: Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) is touting the fact that his dad went to a publicly funded university, on the publicly funded GI bill, and that his mom traveled on publicly funded transportation. …
6:55: Tuesday’s convention theme is “We Built This,” a riff off of President Obama’s claim that the government can help businesses succeed. Republicans have criticized the argument all summer and will poke fun at the president from a convention center built with tax-payer dollars. Two of tonight’s speakers run businesses that benefited from government contracts and grants and one even offered a detailed presentation about how businesses can secure more government work.
The Mitt Romney who ran in 1994 started out as a political independent. He’s somebody who railed against the Contract with America, which of course was the big Newt Gingrich GOP revolution that year. He was a strong supporter of abortion rights. He was very outspoken in favor of gay rights, even writing this famous letter to the Log Cabin Republicans, a Republican gay rights group, talking about how he could be more effective than Ted Kennedy could be, his opponent, on gay rights.
So you go up and down the line and it’s a very, very different political profile. So I think the one thing ideologically almost that’s consistent from then to now is he’s a pragmatist. And at the time, he was running against a very liberal senator, with an impressive civil rights record and he was in very blue Massachusetts, so he had to be a certain type of candidate to be successful — and to a large extent that continued in his gubernatorial run in 2002. After that, when he starts to run for president, it’s a very different environment and he realizes he has to be someone completely different to succeed in a Republican primary." …
… I was particularly surprised is that it was Mitt’s father, George, who ran for president despite being born in Mexico and did not come to this country until he was 5 years old. At the time, his father’s campaign took some questions about that and it never really came to complete conclusion because George dropped out before the first primary.
But I looked back at newspaper stories of the time and there were serious questions being raised about whether George was qualified since he was born in Mexico and didn’t come here until he was five, whether he could fit the definition of being a native-born citizen and so forth. And their explanation was that George’s parents had lived in the U.S. at a certain time and that he was therefore qualified under that. But I think he’s been particularly sensitive because his father went through some of these same questions when his father ran for president."
As I have written before, Republicans have cause and effect backwards.
The reason for the rise in food stamps, unemployment benefits and other safety net programs is Americans got clobbered in 2008 with the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. They and their families have needed the help.
This isn’t an "entitlement society." Americans weren’t overly dependent before the slump and they won’t be dependent when jobs and income return. But America is still reeling from economic trauma.
If anything, America’s safety nets aren’t strong enough. That’s why the number and percentage of Americans in poverty has increased dramatically since 2009.
The real scandal – which no speaker in Tampa will mention – is only 40% of America’s unemployed qualify for unemployment benefits. That’s because most people who lost their jobs had been working part-time on several jobs before they were let go. Or they hadn’t been working long enough on a full-time job to qualify for unemployment insurance.
In addition, only a small fraction of the nation’s poor any longer qualify for welfare. The 1996 legislation that formally ended the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program provided just five years of aid in a person’s lifetime. But given how deep the recession has been and how long it’s continued, many of the nation’s poor have reached their lifetime limit.
Meanwhile, millions of unemployed Americans and their families have lost health insurance that had been provided by their employers. What’s the Republican answer? To repeal Obama’s Affordable Care Act, so 30 million Americans will lose health-insurance coverage.
The truth is America’s safety nets are in tatters exactly when a large portion of America still needs help. And apparently Republicans don’t care.
Medicare has fundamentally transformed the experience of aging in this country by providing a guarantee of health care.
[I]t was Democrats who conceived of Medicare, passed it into law and kept it viable all these years. It was Republicans who denounced the program as “socialized medicine” — and who now want to replace Medicare’s guarantee with a system of vouchers.
Republicans may tell themselves that the GOP is the party of Medicare. But I doubt seniors will be convinced.
By E.J. Dionne Jr., Published: AUGUST 26, 8:03 PM ET
In 1964, George Romney, then the governor of Michigan, walked out of the Republican National Convention during Barry Goldwater’s acceptance speech. He was protesting his party’s sharp turn rightward and its weak platform plank on civil rights.
This week, 48 years on, Mitt Romney is set to achieve what his father never could. But his great family triumph will not represent a vindication of his father’s principles. Mitt Romney reached the summit not by battling the GOP’s staunchest conservatives but by accommodating them. Nothing better captures the absolute victory of the forces of Goldwaterism than a Romney triumph on the basis of Goldwater’s ideas.
There will certainly be no speeches akin to the one offered by Nelson Rockefeller, the champion of liberal Republicanism. He was booed and hissed by the Goldwater legions who dominated the 1964 gathering.
Scorning the militants of a new right, Rockefeller pronounced their views “wholly alien to the sound and honest conservatism that has firmly based the Republican Party in the best of a century’s traditions, wholly alien to the sound and honest Republican liberalism that has kept the party abreast of human needs in a changing world, wholly alien to the broad middle course that accommodates the mainstream of Republican principles.”
Liberalism cannot speak its name at a Republican convention anymore. And the contemporary figure closest to the liberal Republicanism of old may well be a man named Barack Obama.