Justin's Political Corner
Because he’s refused to release more than two years of tax returns, and has rooted his entire campaign in tax, spending, and economic growth plans that lack critical details and defy logical scrutiny, Mitt Romney’s critics, starting with senior Obama advisers, have assailed him as the least transparent candidate since Richard Nixon.
It’s a catchy attack — one that recalls not just Nixon’s candidacies, but his scandal-plagued presidency and ignominious resignation. Which is no doubt why “least transparent candidate since Nixon” has become one of Chicago’s favorite phrases.
But setting aside the Obama campaign’s partisan desire to make voters think of Watergate when they hear the name Mitt Romney, there’s something to the notion that Romney is unusually opaque compared to presidential candidates in the modern era, according to some presidential historians.
“I think the comparison to Nixon is not a very good one, because … Nixon may have been a shadier character in some respects — the Southern strategy, laundering campaign money — but he abided by the norms of the time in terms of disclosure,” said Norm Ornstein, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute.
Candidates in earlier decades inhabited different political cultures, faced different pressures and different media. In some ways, those differences have made it harder for Romney to get by on a purely superficial appeal to voters. But Ornstein said despite new challenges, Romney stands alone as the least-known quantity to be within grasping distance of the White House in the modern era.
“I think there’s nobody like Romney,” Ornstein. “Romney is like the Michael Phelps of presidential candidates. if you’re looking for gold medals in terms of audacious lying, and adamant refusal to turn over personal information, nobody comes close. I’m sure others would’ve liked to have done it, but the culture in the past was one where lying attracted some level of approbation and shame.”
Romney’s fiscal policies remind Buchanan of Nixon’s 1968 campaign, in which he pledged to end the war in Vietnam without providing details — what came to be known as his “secret plan.” Likewise, after winning his first election in 1980 on fairly specific pledges to reduce deficits, cut social programs, and increase defense spending, Ronald Reagan glided to re-election in 1984 largely on the winds of an improving economy.
“In the second campaign it was all gauzy,” Buchanan said.
But that was after Reagan, like Obama, had amassed a four-year record.
“Not many have been as under as much scrutiny as Romney because he’s saying he can do things that on the face of it seem illogical and un-doable, and that creates more pressure on him to provide specifics,” Buchanan said. “That’s what’s different about Romney.”
Of course, the history of presidential politics is littered with candidates who understood the perils of getting too specific.
Romney’s been pretty candid — to friendly sources — about why he’s been so platitudinous.
“One of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, that was used to suggest I don’t care about education,” Romney told the conservative Weekly Standard in April. “So I think it’s important for me to point out that I anticipate that there will be departments and agencies that will either be eliminated or combined with other agencies….but I’m not going to give you a list right now.”
“I can’t remember anyone being that bald faced on it off the top of my head,” Buchanan told me. “I suspect it was like that 47 percent comment — it wasn’t intended for a wide audience. It just got picked up and reported.”
The other side of the coin is that Romney’s life story — his youth, his early career, his governorship, if not his finances — are plain to everybody in a way that wasn’t possible half a century ago.
h/t: Brian Beutler at TPM
One issue that won’t go away in Illinois’ 12th congressional race: taxes.
Democrats have blasted Republican lumber heir Jason Plummer for not releasing his tax returns. Now comes news that Plummer has paid property taxes late on his home in Edwardsville, which is outside the district he’s running to represent. Records show Plummer paid the taxes late for tax years 2011 and 2009, according to Madison County property records.
The taxes are about $5,500 per year, which Plummer has paid in installments. He was billed minimal penalties for the late payments, but has brought everything current.
Democrats say the issue demonstrates why Plummer should release his income tax returns, which he has declined.
Deb Detmers, a Plummer campaign operative, said the taxes “aren’t an issue” and stressed that Plummer has brought everything current.
Plummer, who is a multimillionaire according to a personal financial disclosure, also took an owner occupied exemption on the property, which means the house must be your primary residence. The house is outside of Illinois’ 12th district, which runs from parts of eastern Madison County to the Kentucky border. His campaign noted that the tax bill was for the past year. He moved to O’Fallon, Ill., which is in the district, in October of 2011. Plummer’s campaign said the house, in the 100 block of Knights Bridge Court in Edwardsville, is now up for sale.
Unexplained millionaire Jason Plummer is still lying about Democratic TV ads being pulled down. The reality is that Plummer has a problem with the truth and can’t face tough questions about his so-called business and policy experience and his support for plans that end the Medicare guarantee just to give tax breaks to millionaires like himself and companies that outsource jobs. Cap Fax first caught Plummer in the lie about TV ads and the Belleville News Democrat pointed out Plummer is still lying about the ads and other misleading claims he made during this week’s congressional debate.
“Jason Plummer is giving Illinois voters a front row seat into the kind of politician they can expect in Washington – a first-rate liar,” said Haley Morris of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Apparently running for 4 years has schooled Jason Plummer to lie about just about anything, but Illinois families deserve better.”
Plummer Refused to Release His Tax Returns, Falsely Claims All His Financial Information is Publicly Available. In an October 10, 2012 debate Plummer again refused to release his tax rates, and falsely claimed “anything that people want to know about my assets, my investments, any liabilities, anything I have, it’s all public information you can go look it up.” In reality, Plummer has never released his tax returns. [Belleville News-Democrat’s 12th Congressional District Debate, 10/10/12; St. Louis Post Dispatch, 2/23/12]
Plummer Touts Business Experience, But He Never Worked Anywhere but the Family Business. During an October 11, 2012 debate Plummer said that voters of Illinois’ 12th Congressional District should send a small businessman to Congress. Plummer said, “I’d argue you send a small businessman to Washington, D.C., a small businessman who understands public policy.” The Chicago Tribune has previously reported, however, that other than his internships, Plummer had never worked anywhere but the family business, RP Lumber. In addition, Plummer has been repeatedly caught exaggerating his resume. [Belleville News-Democrat’s 12th Congressional District Debate, 10/10/12; Chicago Tribune, 10/10/10; Chicago Tribune, 2/13/10; State Journal-Register, 2/11/10]
Plummer Lied About Endorsing Paul Ryan’s Plan. In an October 10, 2012 debate Plummer denied endorsing vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s budget plan. In reality, during a June 2012 town hall, Plummer was asked if he supported the Ryan plan. He answered “The specifics of it are pretty simple. I think that the Ryan plan aggressively addresses basically every entitlement program that we have. […] I think the benefits of the Ryan plan are pretty obvious. They aggressively put Social Security in a situation where it will actually be there for people that are retiring. It puts Medicare in a situation that it will actually be there to fund the healthcare needs of the people that it’s there for. The negatives of the Ryan care are very political to be frank.” [The Southern, 10/11/12; Alton Town Hall, 6/12/12, 2:07]
h/t: DCCC
On Wednesday night all the news hole-driven stories about debate expectations will give way to real evaluations of the candidates’ performances and the accuracy of their statements.
Health Care
During the primaries, Romney would often boast that he’s strongly positioned to undercut Obama’s best defense of the Affordable Care Act. If Obamacare really is modeled after Romney’s own Massachusetts health care law, why didn’t Obama call Romney during the legislative process for help designing it. Here, the facts are on Obama’s side. Most succinctly, MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, who provided both Obama and Romney health care reform advice, called Obamacare and Romneycare “the same f***ing bill.”
Medicare and Medicaid
Relatedly, the Romney camp’s plans for Medicare and Medicaid — but particularly for Medicare — have become central liabilities for them over the past several weeks. Specifically, they propose to cut funding to Medicaid dramatically and hand management of the program to individual states, and to provide seniors vouchers to buy either private health insurance or access to traditional Medicare. They’ve tried to neutralize the issue by attacking Obama for cutting Medicare spending by over $700 billion for current seniors. Those cuts — part of the ACA — come from ending overpayments to hospitals and private insurers, and restoring that spending to Medicare would render the program insolvent by 2016.
Welfare
Obama thinks the debate will be an ideal venue to call Romney out for a claim widely disputed by journalists and independent fact checkers: that Obama “gutted” the 1996 welfare reform. The Obama administration has proposed allowing states more flexibility to move people from welfare to work if they can demonstrate an ability to do so with greater efficiency. Romney and his campaign have falsely construed this as ending the welfare to work requirement. “It will be a little tougher [for him] to defend face-to-face,” Obama said recently. Ironically a bunch of House Republicans did in fact vote to end welfare to work requirements as part of an effort to further roll back the welfare program.
Tax Returns
A companion piece to Obama’s attacks on Romney’s tax plan is the fact that Romney himself has paid a very low effective tax rate the past two years — and that he refuses to release tax returns for any year before 2010. Romney recently dispelled one of the nastiest pieces of Democratic speculation about his taxes — that he paid no taxes for 10 years. But what he’s already revealed, and the fact that he refuses to release more information, leaves him vulnerable in the debate to questions about transparency and the unorthodox wealth management strategies he’s used to build his fortune.
47 Percent
Romney’s unearthed remarks attacking the 47 percent of people who pay no federal income tax was the most defining and revealing moment of the campaign. We expect it to get extensive treatment Wednesday night. Romney and his campaign have attempted to walk the remarks back, or at least soften the impact they’ve had. But Obama has capitalized on the remarks in ads and public comments. But this is a long-standing conservative bugaboo. And the substantive implications of wanting everyone to pay federal income taxes are ugly and politically damaging.
h/t: Brian Beutler at TPM
Mitt Romney told CBS’s 60 Minutes that it’s “fair” for him to pay a tax rate of just 14.1 percent on his investment income of $20 million, a lower rate than someone earning $50,000 a year in wage income:
SCOTT PELLEY (HOST): Now, you made on your investments, personally, about $20 million last year. And you paid 14 percent in federal taxes. That’s the capital gains rate. Is that fair to the guy who makes $50,000 and paid a higher rate than you did?
ROMNEY: It is a low rate. And one of the reasons why the capital gains tax rate is lower is because capital has already been taxed once at the corporate level, as high as 35 percent.
PELLEY: So you think it is fair?
ROMNEY: Yeah, I think it’s the right way to encourage economic growth, to get people to invest, to start businesses, to put people to work.
There is little economic evidence to support Romney’s argument that higher capital gains and dividend rates will discourage investment.
In a long floor statement Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) excoriated Mitt Romney’s leaked comments on government dependency, again suggesting that the Republican presidential candidate himself may have dodged taxes.
Romney, he said, “only wants to be president of half the United States of America” — a response to Romney’s remark that 47 percent of Americans are “victims” who cannot be shaken from their dependence on government.
Reid said that Romney was disparaging toward — and hoping to raise taxes on — the elderly, the disabled, young students and members of the military.
“The 47 percent are ordinary, hard-working Americans who deserve respect – especially from a man who wants to be their president,” Reid said. “They’re not avoiding their tax bills using Cayman Island tax shelters or Swiss bank accounts, like Mitt Romney.”
The Top Five Reasons Why Mitt Romney Won’t Release More Tax Returns (by BarackObamadotcom)
Release them!
On Meet The Press this morning, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney claimed that his tax plan — which provides a 20 percent tax cut for all Americans — would not “reduce the tax burden” on the rich, even as he has touted the plan as a tax cut for everyone and independent analyses show that it would, in fact, provide a massive tax break to the wealthiest Americans:
GREGORY: Give me an example of a loophole you will close?
ROMNEY: Well I can tell you that people at the high end, high-income taxpayers, are going to have fewer deductions and exemptions. Those numbers are going to come down. Otherwise they’d get a tax break, and I want to make sure people understand, despite what the Democrats said at their convention, I am not reducing taxes on high-income taxpayers. I’m bringing down the rate of taxation, but also brigning down deductions and exemptions at the high end so that the revenues stay the same, the taxes people pay stay the same — middle income people are going to get a break, but at the high end the tax coming in stays the same…
From the 09.09.2012 edition of NBC’s Meet The Press:
Romney’s plan, in reality, would provide the very richest Americans a $264,000 tax break. It alsomaintains current tax rates on investments that are otherwise set to expire at the end of the year, and it eliminates the estate tax, paid by only the richest one-quarter of one percent of Americans.
Mitt Romney’s a devious asshole.
During the opening night of the Democratic convention, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid again swung at Mitt Romney for refusing to release more tax returns.
“When you look at the one tax return he has released it’s obvious why. It’s obvious why there’s only been one. We learned that he pays a lower tax rate than middle-class families; we learned that he chose Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island tax shelters over American institutions,” Reid said Tuesday. “We could only imagine what new secrets would be revealed if he showed the American people a dozen years of tax returns — like his father did.”
The Nevada Democrat ignited a firestorm late July after he said an informed Bain investor told him that Romney hadn’t paid taxes for a decade. Lacking evidence for his claim, Reid faced fierce criticism, but repeatedly stood by his charge, putting the Republican nominee on defense for weeks over his taxes.
h/t: Sahil Kapur at TPM
Mitt Romney says “every year I’ve paid at least 13 percent [of my income in taxes] and if you add in addition the amount that goes to charity, why the number gets well above 20 percent.”
This is supposed to be in defense of not releasing his tax returns.
Assume, for the sake of the argument, he’s telling the truth.Since when are charitable contributions added to income taxes when judging whether someone has paid his fair share?
More to the point, Romney admits to an income of over $20 million a year for the last several decades. Which makes his 13 percent — or even 20 percent — violate the principle of equal sacrifice that lies at the core of our notion of tax fairness.But Romney’s alleged 13 percent tax rate is lower than that of most middle class Americans who earn a tiny fraction of what he earns.
At a time when poverty is increasing, when public parks and public libraries are being closed and when public schools are shrinking their offerings and their hours, when the nation’s debt is immense, and when the 400 richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together — Romney’s 13 percent is shameful.
Jason Plummer, the GOP nominee for the 12th U.S. House District seat, on Friday accused Democratic challenger Bill Enyart of being “out of touch” on unemployment.
The state’s unemployment rate for July rose to 8.9 percent — up from 8.7 percent in June. It was the second month in a row the rate increased after nine months of falling unemployment, according to figures released Thursday by Illinois Department of Employment Security. A year ago, the jobless rate was 10. 1 percent in Illinois.
“We really need to make sure that we have folks in Washington that are in touch with what’s going on economically,” Plummer said during a media teleconference Friday afternoon. “We can’t have people who are blinded by partisan loyalties when we have such an economic crisis going on. It’s really stunning to see how out of touch some people are.”
The Enyart campaign responded to Plummer’s remarks by calling for Plummer to follow Enyart’s “lead as a problem-solver who wants to fix the economy and attract and save good jobs in Southern Illinois,” according to a press statement. “We challenge Plummer to share how much he stands to personally profit from the tax breaks for millionaires he supports.”
Enyart last month released 11 years’ worth of tax returns and called on Plummer to do the same, but the GOP candidate has declined.
Jason Plummer is out-of-touch with the middle class, just like Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, Eric Cantor, John Boehner, and the GOP.
h/t: BND.com
The gloves are off in the race for the 12th Congressional District.
The campaign of Democratic candidate Bill Enyart, a Belleville attorney, on Wednesday released audio of a radio commercial that the campaign said is being unleashed.
Jason Bresler, Enyart’s spokesman, said the ad has not yet aired but it will air on radio stations throughout the 12th District.
The Enyart commercial criticizes Republican opponent Jason Plummer’s decision not to release his tax returns.
The spot opens with ominous-sounding music, and a narrator asking, “What’s Jason Plummer hiding? He’s running for Congress, but he refuses to make any of his tax returns public.”
The spot uses the word “millionaire” three times and the word “billionaire” once. It accuses Republicans of “extending tax cuts to millionaires like Jason Plummer.”
H/T: bnd.com
In an interview with NBC set to air Thursday, Ann Romney, wife of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, said her husband’s campaign will not release any additional tax returns to the public ahead of the election.
“We have been very transparent to what’s legally required of us,” Romney told reporter Natalie Morales, according to excerpts from NBC News. “There’s going to be no more tax releases given.”
Defying a longstanding trend among presidential candidates, the Romney campaign has only released a single — and likely incomplete — tax return. Politicians and pundits from both sides of the aisle have been pressuring Romney for weeks to disclose more of his tax history, culminating with a claim from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) two weeks ago that he’d heard from an early investor in Bain Capital that Romney didn’t pay any taxes for a decade. Romney has denied that claim.
Ann Romney said that releasing more details on the family’s taxes would merely give the Obama campaign “more ammunition.” The Romneys’ wealth is rumored to be as much as $250 million, and since much of Mitt Romney’s earnings come from investments, he would pay a lower effective tax rate than many lesser-off Americans.
h/t: Huffington Post
