Talk Elections

The Obama campaign has been targeting Romney viciously and unfairly over the last few weeks over his business career. Should I point out that Obama was a lawyer, which are much more disdained than businessmen? We'll leave that for another time.

What Obama is doing is exactly the thing that fires up the crazy "birthers" and the claims that he is a socialist or a communist.

He is attacking capitalism. He is attacking business. Business is capitalism. AMERICA is a capitalistic society. Remember, just over 20 short years ago, we would have had a nuclear war to prevent (or attempt to prevent) the loss of our capitalistic society. Now, we have a President who is blatantly and immorally attacking capitalism, capitalistic careers, ideas, ect.

Then you wonder why the crazies begin to call him a communist or socialist.

If it fires up the birther crazies and rallies them to Romney, well that's Obama's objective achieved. And he's not attacking capitalism, he's attacking those who abuse capitalism - big difference.

You just don't do that. What do you say about the boom of the 1980s? Do you attack the so-called corporate raiders and "hostel" takeovers (eye-roll) or do you consider them part of the 80s economic success machine?

Really????
I thought he was an egghead professor and prominent member of the Harvard pampered East Coast Elite.


Actually what fires them up is that he is a Kenyan-born, crypto-muslim, baby-eating nig**r.

If you were to lose your job as a result, it's unlikely anyone'd shrug their shoulders and say "ah well, that's capitalism". That wouldn't make them some raving socialist.

Yes, that's what we do in America. That's what makes us a Capitalist society. This isn't something new...

I take the opposite view- this is intended to scare swing voters in the Rust Belt, especially low-info ones. Plays the protectionist, anti-Wall Street and elitist cards all in one shot. Romney needs to find an easy counterattack and then bring it back to Obama's record. If you're explaining you're losing, which is why Romney is so far losing the tactical battle on this issue. He can't afford to lose the strategic war.

So here comes the spin..........

Romney has made his business record the main reason why he should be President, so it is fair to discuss it and even criticize it.

Obama was a constitutional law professor at Harvard. Romney's entire reason for being president is his work at Bain. This is a legitimit attack on Romney's record that he loves promoting. If he was running as Governor of Massachussets and Obama attacked his record there, would it be an attack on the entire state government? If he attacked him as head of the Olympics, would he be attacking the all the Olympic Games of the past? Obama attacking Romney while at Bain is just that, an attack on Romney's Baim record. Not an attack on capitalism collectively.

"You just don't do that"?? Says who? Is our country now so dominated by the corporate elite that even the president isn't allowed to speak critically of them?

So what happens if us normal people dare to question the means by which these people have made their money? Will we get thrown in jail or something?

I'm not part of the "occupy" crowd, but in this country no powerful group of people is above scrutiny, especially when their juggling of billions of dollars of funds on any given day has the potential to throw us into a recession, as we have already seen. You can certainly make an argument for capitalism, and I might agree with you, but it's much more American to question and criticize the powerful than it is to keep quiet and let them do whatever they want.

I think for Republicans the problem with Obama's anti-Romney campaign is that it is working.

You admit that the 80s economic success machine ran on smoke and mirrors and bullsh**t.

The problem with Obama and his cabal of deceipt purveyors is that they are lying about Romney and his tenure at Bain.

John King and David Gergen of CNN both agree on this and said so the other day.

This only goes to prove that the nation is being run by the most dishonest President since Nixon and that his inner circle is composed of 21st century Mitchells, Haldemans, and Ehrlichmans.

Oh, so now you guys are all about that "lamestream media"

As much as it pains you, Naso, we're not in the '80s any more.  Wall Street is not exactly popular right now, and yet it just so happens that the GOP just nominated Gordon Gekko for the presidency.  No wonder Obama is capitalizing (pardon the pun) on that.

Also, it's only taken me seven years to bring this up, but the correct abbreviation of et cetera is 'etc.', not 'ect.'  I wouldn't mind, but you misuse it in every thread you create.

Given that it's Naso I'd assume he may know, but not care. The 80s was smoke, mirrors, and big hair, and it was glorious!

So what are we to assume? That the reason for some of the economic success of the 1980s was at the expense of others? That the whole notion of a nuclear war between Communists and Capitalists was just a misunderstanding and we should freely allow communist ideas to be taught and discussed as logical in America? I heard people scoff at the idea of executing the U.S. solider who was the perpetrator of the Wiki Leaks information. Did I miss the memo that suddenly treason wasn't punishable by death? Why? Because it is the year 2012? I heard Occupy Wall Street protestors openly saying they were communists. Why were they not considered an adversary? Did I miss the memo that communism is something that is "okay" and just another viewpoint? Why? Because the Warsaw Pact is gone?

"I urge you to beware the temptation of pride — the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”

Ronald Reagan said that 29 years ago and dammit he was right. You're trying to disavow all these anti-Capitalistic ideas and say that my capitalism argument about the Cold War and what capitalism and business means to America is all just some misunderstanding and declare yourselves above it all.

There is right and wrong, good and evil. We are the last best hope for free men on Earth. If we change our ideals, which is what this President has shown at the very least an inclination for which to do, then we have truly lost our way.

You know when one side starts talking about  "unfair" attacks then they are losing. For decades Republicans have played a rather vicious game of divisive hardball politics and dems have continued to look like hapless losers. Clearly Axelrod and team know they have an uphill battle with the current economy so they are using the GOP playbook and it is working.

The possibility exists that the world may not now be and may not twenty-nine years ago have been entirely divided into Ronald Reagans and Command and Conquer villains.

Maybe in fiction, not in reality.

America should expect more from those who are supposed to be running the country than the trash gutter politics that is the hallmark of this so called President and his venom spewing underlings.

You do realize that the only reason Romney won the nomination is because he buried his opponents in negative advertising using those same "trash gutter politics" methods. His strategy was "Kill Newt" in Iowa and Florida. His strategy was "Kill Rick" in Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Illinois. Now when Obama uses it against Mitt and they are the ones getting "Killed", it's an attack on capitalism.

You are literally the worst caricature of a Reagan supporter I have ever seen.

Teddy Roosevelt was a staunch socialist, you know.

Naso's right-wing soliloquies must spring from some ideological vacuum entirely detached from history, everything beyond the borders of the United States, and any perspective other than his own.

What is he doing here? He doesn't hesitate to label those who disagree with him as "evil," and seems to believe that hurling the epithet un-American constitutes a compelling argument. Naso, are you really here just to proselytize? Do you not find anything interesting or worth considering in the ideas of those with whom you disagree?

Everything about a candidate's past is open to scrutiny. Nobody says that businesspeople are a monolithic mass of interchangeable people. Bankers, theater managers, and advertising executives would fail badly at the specialty of each other.

For good reason attorneys are a disproportionate share of elected officials above a certain level.  They are intellectual generalists, arguably the people who specialize later than any other professionals. Sure, there are some sleazy attorneys -- ambulance chasers who gladly accept staged accidents or talk people into going for much more than an insurance company has to offer only to take any additional benefit from a settlement while stringing out a settlement, people who use their legal letterhead for collecting debts, and defense attorneys for career criminals. Add to them those who serve as legal enforcers for Big Business and you see the ones who don't get political careers because such is an economic letdown.

Judges, almost as a rule lawyers, are generally held in high regard.   


Turnabout is fair play. Except this time it is on the business record of Mitt Romney -- and entirely so. If he has done horrible things to people while a business executive while enriching himself then he should not complain about the consequences of scrutiny upon his record.

Do you want a good liberal analogy for Mitt Romney? Try John Corzine.


No, his surrogates attack a bad model of capitalism -- a predatory capitalism that finds under-valued assets that underpin a successful business and seizes them for the gain of the predators, squeezes small-scale competition into oblivion, pits worker against worker in a compulsory race to the bottom, pits community against community for tax breaks, and all in all enriches a few at the expense of everyone else. It finds cheaper ways of doing things but passes on none of the benefits to the consumer but finds ways to increase prices (and profit margins).

If the President isn't the spear-point of the attack, his surrogates have the right idea. As I see it the President doesn't so much support 'socialism' as he does competitive capitalism of the sort that we used to know -- the capitalism that gave working people stakes in the system. The road to socialism is through pure plutocracy with a corrupt government as enforcers -- the sort of economic order that suggests that anything would be better as an economic order but a political order that needs the most ruthless revolutionaries to overthrow.


Crazy people can believe anything.

The problem with the Obama's campaigning is that he has helped Romney unite the GOP quicker and to take the fundraising lead with his various attacks.

So what?

Obama is already defining Mitt in the minds of swing voters. The base was always going to vote for Romney regardless due to their hatred of Obama, so that is really is a mute point.

Republicans can try to spin it all they want, but the Obama campaign is running laps around the Romney campaign at the moment.

Matt Yglesias responds to Naso:

Didn't Torie once said that he too takes pleasure in firing people?

Obama attacking capitalism? lol

These aren't communist ideas! What part of that don't you get?

This 29 minute film (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLWnB9FGmWE) was produced by Newt Gingrich's SuperPAC and is much more scathing than anything Obama's released. Is Newt now a communist?

You know you're speaking to a Republican when suddenly everyone who disagreea with them is a communist who wants to replace the Bible with Marx and Engels' Manifesto.

Well, that and the repeated endorsements of Obama by the Communist Party, USA.

No, he wasn't.


No, it's not.

Who was it who said, "It's not that our friends on the Left know so little; it's that they know so much that simply isn't so"?


Well, whoever said it, truer words were never spoken.

The problem with Obama's anti-Romney campaigning is that Romney has yet to manage a successful counterattack.  Romney has been busy retreating from Bain Capital, which isn't going to work very well. For years he kept being the official head of Bain Capital while he was off saving the Salt Lake City Olympics.  That suggests he either wasn't all that essential to Bain even before he headed off to Salt Lake City, or that he got the sort of sweetheart deal not available to ordinary joes.  How many people get to take even three months off from their job without losing it, let alone three years?

There is of course one other approach Romney could have taken, go on the offensive.  Go ahead and admit that he did retain some influence at Bain during his Salt Lake sabbatical.  Go ahead and defend the benefits of free-trade capitalism which will lead to some jobs being outsourced in exchange for growth elsewhere in the economy which will create new jobs.  However, Mitt has chosen not to do that.  He shies away from a defensible reality in which his economic proposals lead to overall improvement in which some people will take a hit, but in which even more will benefit in favor of utopian fantasy in which no-one suffers any pain but in which we'll all do better if we just elect Mitt.

The country is not in the mood to heed utopian fantasies.  It is willing to replace Obama for someone better, but not simply for someone else in the hopes they'll be better.  As bad as things are economically, people are not yet at the stage of blinding trying something different. The voters need to be convinced that the alternative will actually be better instead of simply different and so far Romney is not convincing enough of them that he is better than Obama.

It doesn't take a lot of thinking to figure out why crazy people think crazy things.

Well, clearly the fact that FDR, LBJ, and Nixon had gone to law school made them go down in flames in the 1936, 1964, and 1972 elections.

Excellent!  Judging by the reaction of the Republicans and conservatives here, clearly the attacks on Romney's record at Bain are working better than many of us previously realized.  Perhaps Obama should intensify them.  There's blood in the water, and the sharks are circling.  Let's spill a little more from Romney.  By the time he gets to the debates, he'll be damaged goods. 

According to his bio, LBJ went "briefly" to Georgetown law school in 1934 while working as a secretary to Rep. Richard Kleberg (D-TX).

http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/biographys.hom/lbj_bio.asp

Yeah, LBJ was definitely a schoolteacher first and lawyer not really at all.

Regardless, a plurality of Presidents, perhaps a majority (I can check if anyone really wants to pursue this or cares), have come from a legal background. People hate lawyers like John Edwards, and with good reason. People don't necessarily hate lawyers like Richard Nixon (well, before certain events, anyway) or Barack Obama.

Similarly, people can like businessmen like Herbert Hoover (well, before certain events, anyway) and George W. Bush (to an extent), but might not necessarily like businessmen like Mitt Romney.

According to the University itself, yes Obama was a professor (http://www.law.uchicago.edu/media), just not a full-time one.

As for Romney, is he running on his record as Governor of Massachusetts? Or his he running on his record at Bain and/or at the Olympics? Since he seems to be running away from his gubernatorial record, he's probably running on his business record.

Neither candidate can run on their record because their records suck.

Really?  At Harvard?  You may want to fact-check that again.


I've heard Romney brag several times about the number of bills he vetoed in Mass.  Of course, a lot of those were overridden and not a few of them were probably "just for show" for the presidential campaigns he expected to run.  Anyway, the point is that Romney is NOT basing his presidential qualifications only on the work he did at Bain.

Not 'only', but certainly 'primarily', as Massachusetts knows him as our third (or fourth depending on the numeration of Jane Swift) flagrantly disinterested and in the end absentee Republican governor in a row.

I don't recall saying that, but sure, as a general proposition, subject to specific circumstances, if they deserve it, and I dislike them. I'm human. But layoffs due to downsizing of otherwise worthy employees? No, of course not.