This Is How It Goes: The Romney Campaign Sets New Standards for Dishonesty
This Is How It Goes: The Romney Campaign Sets New Standards for Dishonesty
Politicians, like salesmen and courtroom lawyers, have a certain appreciation for fantasy; on many occasions such professionals are called upon to argue certain ideas as if they were true, but without lying by actually saying they are true. Each branch of that river of deceit has its own codes of honor; the salesman guards against fraud while the lawyer dances around perjury and bad faith. The politician might well be unique in the degree of influence he has over the limits of good faith and lack of consequences for transgression.
The Romney/Ryan campaign might well be unique among such considerations of politicians. It is a campaign that cares nothing about truth, for a candidate brassy enough to actually repeat a lie in defense of his own honesty.
Steve Benen, I think—
So let me get this straight. Romney spoke at the American Spring Wire's headquarters in Ohio to condemn Obama's trade policies towards China, and the American Spring Wire's headquarters benefited from Obama's trade policies towards China. Making matters worse, when Obama took these efforts, Romney criticized them as too tough on China.
Did the Romney campaign just not think this through?
Indeed, let's add this to the list of instances in which Romney's advance team failed to do its homework. Remember all the businesses Romney appeared as part of the "we built this" campaign that thrived thanks to government support?
—has it wrong.
I mean, look at that construction; it's a hell of an argument.
But the elements of the conundrum are accurate.
Ashley Killough reports on the labor-free roundtable at American Spring Wire:
Despite Mitt Romney's ongoing attack against President Barack Obama for not protecting American businesses against China, the Republican nominee held an event at a company Wednesday that may have benefited from an Obama administration trade action against the country.
Romney held a roundtable discussion on manufacturing with business leaders at American Spring Wire's headquarters in Bedford Heights, Ohio as part of his campaign's three-day bus tour across the Buckeye State.
The same company, along with two steel wire companies from North Carolina and Tennessee, petitioned the government on May 27, 2009 to look into a trade issue, arguing that Chinese firms were selling steel wire products in the U.S. at less than normal value. On June 17, 2009, the Department of Commerce announced a decision to start investigating the problem.
A year later, the International Trade Administration, a division within the Commerce Department, announced it was ordering an "antidumping" duty on "prestressed concrete steel wire" strands from China. It also announced a countervailing duty, aimed to counter subsidized products coming from other countries.
As part of the order, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers were instructed to suspend liquidation on the merchandise from China and "require cash deposits equal to the estimated amount by which the normal value exceeds the U.S. price," according to a Commerce statement issuing the order at the time.
The department regularly issues antidumping and countervailing duty orders on products being imported at unfair prices-a policy in place before Obama took office. Under his administration, more than 53 such orders have been issued, 39 of which have been against China.
It should be noted that the Romney campaign insists that a president should get no credit for doing his job: "President Obama deserves no credit," explained Amanda Henneberg, "for an agency enforcing pre-existing law on behalf of private parties bringing legitimate legal claims."
Then again, as
Alec MacGillis notes, it wasn't so long ago that Mitt Romney thought this sort of action against China was too rough.
And yes, it is true that Romney pushed the "we built this" campaign at a
firm that benefitted from public funds, and that the public coffers were good enough revenue sources for Bain Capital's business model.
Benen, however, seems to be giving the Romney campaign a certain benefit of doubt; indeed, this is part of the etiquette of politics that the Romney campaign hides behind.
That is, "let's add this to the list of instances in which Romney's advance team failed to do its homework", may well be the
wrong suggestion.
This is about erasure.
Invisibility.
And in a strange way, this is also about
transparency.
The construction of straw men to run against is hardly unusual in American politics, but usually the process of building a scarecrow is predicated on some pretense of nod and wink; it is a battle of competing narratives.
But the Romney campaign has dispensed with all that. On the surface, it seems very nearly a deliberate flood of deception intended to overwhelm voters:
(1) Pick a critique; it does not matter how the attack aligns, coincides, harmonizes, or disagrees with Romney's current or past policy perspectives. Facts, also, are irrelevant to the critique.
(2) Choose a setting that inherently undermines the critique.
(3) Recite the critique without a hint of irony.
Here, the final outcome is to suggest that people should ignore the actual record and, instead, buy the narrative. In and of itself, this is part of politics. But look at the markers: no care toward flip-flop; no caution toward fact; no acknowledgment of irony at launching the critique from a place recognizable as a symbol of the critique's weakness.
It is the brazen dispensation with conventional nicety that stands out, the craven superficiality. It's not just an attempt to erase President Obama, to render him invisible in the shadow of a radioactive fantasy, but it's not so much a matter of paying no attention to the man behind the curtain—there is no curtain. They're not even bothering to
try to portray themselves as genuine or honest.
The deception itself is transparent, yet what is the consequence?
Like
Romney lying in defense of his honesty.
The campaign has already announced that it will not be constrained by facts.
And, as
Rachel Maddow explained last night:
But even within the Romney campaign, I have to say there is another model for dealing with problems like this. And this may come from the way Mr. Romney was beaten in 2008, the last time he ran for president. It may have left his campaign determined that he not get stuck with the flip flopper label again.
So, even though they leave the ads with the lies in them up, right, sometimes Mr. Romney goes on TV and says a different kind of lie, in a sense that he invents a brand new policy position he's never had before. But after he does that, his staff follows behind him and quietly releasing statements taking back his quotes.
Has nobody else noticed this? It
can't just be leftists like me and media hosts like Maddow.
When Mr. Romney was asked in an interview with Univision America radio last week, he was about one of his immigration advisers, Kris Kobach, he's the guy who wrote the papers please law in Arizona, Mr. Romney said he had not met with Kris Kobach, and that he could not confirm whether Kris Kobach was a member of his policy team. That's what he said in the interview on
Univision.
But later that same day, the Romney campaign quietly corrected the record saying Mr. Romney has, in fact, met with Kris Kobach. And that yes, Kris Kobach is a Romney campaign adviser.
So Mr. Romney tells an interview he's never met with Kris Kobach, but then his campaign says actually what he said was not true. Same thing happened last month when Mr. Romney came out with a whole new policy position on abortion rights when he was being interviewed on "60 Minutes".
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ROMNEY: I'm in favor of abortion being legal in the case of rape and incest in the health of the life of the mother.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: Mitt Romney says he believes abortion should be allowed to protect a woman's health. You heard him say it right there. Afterwards, his campaign came out and said that's not actually what Mitt Romney believes.
His spokesman, while refusing to say that Mr. Romney misspoke nevertheless told NPR that Mr. Romney doesn't actually support the legal right to have an abortion if you need one to protect your health as a woman.
The same thing happened earlier this month when Mr. Romney came out with a whole new take on Obamacare during an interview on "Meet the Press".
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ROMNEY: I'm not getting rid of all of health care reform. Of course, there are a number of things that I like in health care reform that I'm going to put in place. One is to make sure that those with preexisting conditions can get coverage.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: I'm not getting rid of all of health reform. After Mr. Romney said that he wanted to keep the part of health reform that requires insurance companies to cover people with preexisting conditions, his campaign came out afterwards and said, what he just said there, he doesn't mean that. He does not want to keep that part of health reform, saying that Mr. Romney was not in favor of a law requiring that coverage.
The same thing happened just a week ago when Mr. Romney suddenly retreated from his foreign policy attacks against President Obama, when he suddenly, surprisingly, told George Stephanopoulos on ABC said that his red line on keeping Iran from going nuclear is the same as President Obama's red line.
After Mitt Romney said that on tape that he believes his red line is the same as President Obama's, his campaign quietly afterwards said actually what he just said there, he doesn't really believe that. They took the quote back. Mr. Romney doesn't believe that.
They said actually it was maybe the guy who was asking the question, it was maybe Stephanopoulos who was wrong and suggesting that President Obama's red line was the same as Mitt Romney's redline. And when Mitt Romney said, yes, that was in fact the case, he was just being agreeable or something.
Same thing happened again this week. Mitt Romney conceded another one of his frequent attacks on the president. He's been charging for months that President Obama has raised taxes on middle class Americans. But then he admitted on tape that President Obama has not raised taxes.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OBAMA: He's got one new idea, one thing he did not do in his first four years which is to raise taxes.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: So Mitt Romney admits that President Obama has not raised taxes during his first term as president. He says that on tape and his campaign says afterwards, what he said he does not believe that.
Again, they're not admitting that he misspoke. They're not saying that he said the wrong word. They're saying he didn't mean what he clearly said.
What seems to be happening here is that in the moment, when he's talking to an interviewer or speaking to an audience, and maybe he can sense what it is they want to hear, he just says what they want to hear, even if it's not really his position or can't remember what his position is supposed to be, or if it not really what he believes.
But his campaign can't have the flip flop be on the record. They're so sensitive to that label from 2008. So quietly, a few hours, or a few days later, they just erase the quote. They take it back. They say he never said that. They never admit that he might have said the wrong thing. They just try to erase from the record the wrong thing that he said.
And this has been going on for a while. In February, Romney first said he opposed the Blunt-Rubio Amendment, the proposed ask-your-boss-for-permission-to-use-hormonal-contraception law. It took about an hour before the campaign
rolled: "Regarding the Blunt bill, the way the question was asked was confusing," a spokesman explained. "Governor Romney supports the Blunt Bill because he believes in a conscience exemption in health care for religious institutions and people of faith."
It is as if the Romney campaign, recognizing that politics is built on illusion, and knowing that American voters are well aware of the phenomenon, have dispensed with the nod and wink. It is as if they are saying, "We know. You know. We know you know. You know we know you know. So just don't worry about the fact that it's all false; it's what we say and if you're going to be fair, you need to accept that what we say is factually accurate, even though we all know it isn't."
If the maneuver fails, and Obama is re-elected, history will speak most kindly of Mitt Romney's campaign in terms of performance art:
He established a threshold for where voters just won't go. By running such an awful and dishonest campaign, he established that there is, in fact, territory beyond the outer limit of what voters will accept.
If the maneuver succeeds, and Romney wins the White House, the kindest thing history will say about the American people is that they were so desperate for a solution they would buy a ticket for any pied piper who wasn't the one in office.
Unfortunately, neither is an especially healthy endeavor. But this
is Mitt Romney, and this
is his campaign for the presidency.
If they lie enough, their dishonesty simply becomes part of the background noise.
At least that's how it seems: It is as if they hope to mitigate the damage of Mitt Romney's dishonesty by injecting so much of it into the discourse that voters grow numb, or, better yet, irritated by talk of mendacity:
How come everything has to be about Mitt Romney's dishonesty? Isn't there something more important to talk about? Like the economy, stupid?
The sad thing is that if someone wrote this campaign as fiction, nobody would believe it possible.
____________________
Notes:
Benen, Steve. "Why American Spring Wire is a bad example". The Maddow Blog. September 27, 2012. MaddowBlog.MSNBC.com. September 27, 2012. http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/09/27/14124866-why-american-spring-wire-is-a-bad-example
Killough, Ashley. "China conundrum: Romney event site benefited from Obama trade action". CNN Political Ticker. September 26, 2012. PoliticalTicker.Blogs.CNN.com. September 27, 2012. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.co...event-site-benefited-from-obama-trade-action/
MacGillis, Alec. "When Romney Was Anti-Anti-China, Not So Long Ago". The New Republic. September 24, 2012. TNR.com. September 27, 2012. http://www.tnr.com/blog/107685/when-romney-was-anti-anti-china-not-so-long-ago
Maddow, Rachel. The Rachel Maddow Show. MSNBC, New York. September 26, 2012. Transcript. MSNBC.com. September 27, 2012. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49195722/ns/msnbc-rachel_maddow_show/
Sargent, Greg. "Romney comes out against 'Blunt-Rubio'". The Plum Line. February 29, 2012. WashingtonPost.com. September 27, 2012. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...unt-amendment/2012/02/29/gIQAAjzriR_blog.html
Please prove even one of Tiassa's posts has disregarded the truth.