splitting hairs over bain capital

When Mitt Romney first started running for president in 2008, the major reason he offered that we should vote for him was his acumen as a business man who knew how to lead us out of our economic doldrums, and the primary piece of evidence he offered in support of that reason was his career as founder and CEO of Bain Capital. 

            What can’t be argued is that, under Romney’s leadership, Bain Capital became one of the most successful private-equity firms in this country, a multi-billion dollar entity that provided almost uninterrupted generous dividends to its shareholders.  What can also not be argued is that a number of the companies Bain invested in, Staples the example most cited, grew into highly successful businesses at least partly as a result of the capital Bain provided and the management it exerted.

            What also can’t be argued is that at least as many companies became little more than short-term cash cows for Bain and either slid ultimately into bankruptcy or emerged from Bain’s tether as a significantly reduced version of their former selves.

            In Romney’s speeches, he talks loudly about the number of jobs Staples and Bain’s other success stories created subsequent to the Bain takeover and styles himself a job creator on the basis of those jobs.  He doesn’t talk much about the companies that Bain forced to shed jobs, or send them overseas, and he talks not at all about those that eventually collapsed, taking not just some but all of their jobs with them.

            Just taken at face value, what Romney seems to be suggesting is that, as head of Bain, he should be given credit for any jobs companies it invested in created, but should be absolved of responsibility for jobs destroyed in other companies it invested in.  Kind of a “have my cake and eat it too” thing.

            There are a couple of things worth considering here.  First, private equity companies like Bain generally target two kinds of companies: those that are relatively small and young and appear to have a business model that could be successful, or those that have reached a point where they are established businesses but find themselves strapped for capital.

            If you look at the companies Bain took over, all of the success stories—especially as success relates to company growth and job creation—fall into the first category.  They were, like Staples, relatively young and small and growing.  To be sure, not all young and small and growing companies that Bain took over grew like Staples, but all of the Bain takeovers that did grow fall into this category.

            On the other side of the coin, you find companies like Dade International, GS Industries or American Pad and Paper, all of which had successful established businesses but lacked the funds to protect themselves from a Bain takeover.  In each of those cases, and many more like them, Bain closed facilities and fired workers to create the illusion of a better bottom line.  At the same time, the Bain management team put huge loans  on the companies’ books, part of which was used to boost the company’s cash reserves and further create the illusion of profitability, and part of which was to pay very sizeable “management” fees to Bain.  In the end, many of the companies simply went bankrupt, largely because of the debt burden forced on them by Bain, and the ones that didn’t, Bain sold at a profit.  In either case, Bain and its shareholders made significant money, while the companies emerged either non-existent or markedly smaller than before Bain took over.

            What’s important here, and needs to be placed in counterpoise to Romney’s campaign claims, is that the business model he created for Bain had no direct relation to the creation of jobs, but a very direct relation to their elimination.  Bain didn’t change Staples’ business model when it made its investment.  It was, to be sure, the infusion of Bain cash that allowed that business model to flourish, grow and create jobs, but the job creation was the result of a Staples business model that was the right idea at the right time.

            With Dade International, on the other hand, Bain took over a company that was established, settled and generating sufficient profit to remain healthy.  In a very short period of time, Bain—not Dade International-- ordered the elimination of nearly 1,700 jobs.  With GS Industries, Bain—not GS Industries—ordered the merger of several steel plants and the subsequent elimination of 700 jobs.

            The second point, and the one that becomes relevant to the much discussed flap about when Romney left Bain, is that Romney founded the company and until 2002 was listed as the firm’s “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president.”

            That is relevant because it means that the Bain Capital business model-- what kind of investments it would seek, how it would make and finance those investments, what fees it would charge for its management services and what degree of management control it would exert over companies it invested in—was created by Romney. 

            He served as its very much controlling head until at least 1999, so the “Romney way”—to coin a phrase—was very much ingrained in Bain Capital when he left.  Nothing that Bain has done since then departs in any significant way from the modus operandi it followed while Romney was actively in charge.   The business model, in other words, didn’t change because the founder left. 

            It was the period between 1999 and 2002 when the most egregious job-killing effects of Bain investments were felt.  It was during that period that Bain essentially took the lead in encouraging—even requiring in some cases—companies to send jobs off-shore or simply reduce employment by eliminating jobs.

           

Romney claims he should bear no responsibility for that because he was no longer in charge but that’s a little like George Bush claiming no responsibility for the 2009 recession because he was no longer president. 

            What Romney created was a company designed to maximize profit for his partners and their investors by doing whatever would maximize the value of their investments.  When that meant eliminating jobs, jobs were eliminated.  When that meant loading otherwise healthy companies with unsustainable debt, debt was undertaken.

            I confess to not understanding what difference it makes whether Romney actually left in 1999 or not until 2002.  The company he created behaved during those years exactly as it had behaved in the 15 years prior to 1999 and there is certainly nothing to suggest that, had the olympics not come along, Romney would have made any changes in that behavior. 

            Nor is there anything to suggest that anything in Romney’s soul has changed.  It’s considered a low blow to call Romney a Gordon Gecko capitalist, but it’s difficult to examine his years at Bain and find very many things he did that Gordon wouldn’t have done—or didn’t do that Gordon would have done. 

            It’s almost impossible to put real numbers on how many jobs Bain investments helped create as opposed to how many they directly killed.  Charitably, we could perhaps call it a wash; less charitably, and probably more accurately, Bain’s net impact on jobs was probably negative.

            Either way, what’s important to note is that while Romney can take credit for having a direct hand in eliminating thousands of jobs, he can at best claim indirect credit for any jobs created.  And while he may indeed have had no direct influence on Bain Capital decisions between 1999 and 2002, those decisions were very clearly in keeping with the business model—and business philosophy—he created for the firm.  

gop fictions about the Affordable Care Act

            Shortly after I posted my last blog, focusing on a couple of the larger “untruths” coming from the GOP these days, I received an e-mail dismissing my argument by noting that, “Politicians lie.  That’s what they do.”  He (or she) was right of course.  Politicians do lie; probably always will. 

            My concern is not that individual pols will bend the truth when they think it is to their advantage to do so; my concern is that completely ignoring the truth or deliberately misrepresenting it seems to have become an integral strategy for an entire political party.  It isn’t that Mitt Romney or one of his surrogates is occasionally disingenuous; it’s that the official talking points of the GOP as a whole are so often clear and deliberate fabrications.

            Nowhere is this more in-your-face than in the broadside of attacks launched against the Affordable Care Act, or, as Republicans like to phrase it, “Obamacare.”  (as an aside, have you noticed how they always encase the word in quotation marks—you can almost see the air quote gesture and the accompanying snide look)  Some of these attacks are more egregiously lies than others, but all of them fly directly in the face of easily checked facts.

            Let’s start with perhaps the most egregious lie, the one that most often is the lead attack—that the Affordable Care Act is socialist and represents a federal government takeover of health insurance.  There are, to be sure, a lot of things in the Affordable Care Act that are complex, expressed in very dense legalese, hard to wrap a layman’s head around.  That the law requires everyone who doesn’t have health insurance to purchase it from a private insurance company isn’t one of them.  That is the central tenet of the law, and it is expressed in very clear, very direct terms.  If you don’t have health insurance but can afford to purchase it—either on your own entirely or with some assistance from the government—you must do so and the beneficiary of that transaction must be a private insurance company.

            When you point that out to a Republican, the response is usually a shuffling of the feet, a quick glance at the floor and a mumble that includes something about all the regulations insurance companies have to follow in order to sell those new policies.  Well, yes.  They have to agree not to cancel your policy the first time you need to use it; they have to agree not to raise your premium because you filed a claim; they have to agree to accept you regardless of pre-existing conditions; they have to agree not to impose a cap on the total amount you can receive in benefit payments.  When you ask a Republican which of those regulations they would prefer go away, they generally excuse themselves from the conversation and look for a more hospitable corner of the room.

            The deliciously ironic aspect of this lie is that the GOP gets no support from the insurance industry when they express it.  The insurance industry is not stupid, nor, in this case at least, interested in participating in deliberate prevarication.  The industry recognizes that, beginning in 2014, the Affordable Care Act has delivered about 30 million potential new customers.  Far from a government takeover of the private health insurance industry, the ACA is perhaps its biggest booster.

            The second most common false assertion from Republicans is that the ACA is a potentially lethal “job-killer.”  FactCheck.Org, a completely non-partisan project from the Annenberg Public Policy Center, placed this one very high on its list of “Whoppers of 2011.”  Nonetheless, there have been thus far in 2012 no fewer than 5 national ad campaigns from the Chamber of Commerce dedicated to labeling ACA as a job-killer. And John Boehner, not surprisingly, used the phrase 7 times during a 14 minute press conference.

            Republicans base this claim on a Congressional Budget Office (non-partisan) study that said ACA would likely reduce “the amount of labor being used in the economy by a small amount—roughly half a percent.”  Republicans didn’t actually base their attack on the CBO report directly, but instead on the report analyzing it issued by their propaganda machine, The Heritage Foundation.  According to Heritage, that “half a percent” “equates to about 700,000 additional Americans being unemployed.”

            As usual, the Heritage Foundation cherry-picked the CBO paper in order to draw the conclusion it wanted.  What the CBO said—in the paragraphs immediately following the one Heritage quoted—is as follows: “The expansion of Medicaid and the availability of subsidies through the exchanges will effectively increase beneficiaries’ financial resources.  Those addition resources will encourage some people to work fewer hours . . .” 

In the next paragraph, the CBO said, “Changes to the insurance market, including provisions that prohibit insurers from denying coverage to people because of preexisting conditions and that restrict how much prices can vary with an individual’s age or health status, will increase the appeal of health insurance plans offered outside the workplace for older workers.  As a result, some older workers will choose to retire earlier than they otherwise would.”

What the CBO actually was saying then is that many young and middle-aged people currently working multiple jobs or 60 hour weeks in order to afford health care, will, under ACA, be able to afford to work fewer hours and/or fewer jobs.  They will be voluntarily, in other words, “reducing the amount of labor in the economy.”  The CBO did not say this, but it follows that when people quit a second job they no longer need, that job then becomes available for someone who currently has none.  The CBO didn’t go there because, while it’s reasonable to assume that employers will still need someone to fill the vacated job, there’s no way at this point to put a hard number on how often that will occur.

The same factor is involved with the CBO’s second point, that, with affordable health care available outside the workplace, many older Americans will retire earlier.  Again, the job vacated will still need doing, and so represents another opportunity for an unemployed person to become employed.

What I’m not claiming here is that ACA will lower unemployment. The act hasn’t taken full effect yet, so it would be just as preposterous to make that claim as it is for Republicans to declare with certainty that it will kill jobs.  The most reasonable conclusion that can be drawn with the facts available now is that there’s no way to say whether the net effect of the bill on jobs will be positive or negative, but the most likely effect of it will be neither.

The closest we can come to a meaningful conclusion about the job-killing power of ACA comes from Massachusetts, where for all intents and purposes the law has been in effect since 2006.  In an article entitled “Timely Analysis of Immediate Health Policy Issues” prepared in June of 2012, the authors (Lisa Dubay, Sharon K. Long and Emily Lawton) compared employment trends in Massachusetts to those in four economically similar states (Delaware, Wisconsin, Nebraska and Minnesota), and with trends nationally. 

They broke the firms being studied into several categories, the one of most interest here being firms with between 10 and 499 employees.  The Chamber of Commerce defines small businesses as those with fewer than 500 employees (in my view a rather high number for a small business).  The ACA excludes businesses with fewer than 10 employees, so this would seem the most appropriate category to look at.  The figures are revealing.

Between 2006 and 2008—the last good economic years before the Great Recession—employment in this category of small businesses was up slightly in Massachusetts and the four comparable states by 0.5%.  Employment in the nation as a whole for the category was flat.  So in the first years of the Massachusetts health care law, employment gains actually outstripped the rest of the country.

In the years 2008-2010—the worst part of the Great Recession—in the 50-499 category employment fell 1.9% in Massachusetts, 1.6% in the four comparable states, and 2.2% in the nation as a whole.  In other words, the only state with mandatory health insurance, during the worst years of the recession, suffered less small business employment drop off than did the nation as a whole.

One other point worth noting on the job-killer front.  Republicans screaming about the deleterious effect of ACA on small businesses always skip the part about businesses employing 25 or fewer people.  Such businesses that already offer health care for their employees will, starting in 2014, be eligible for new tax credits based on the premiums they pay.  And businesses with fewer than 25 employees who opt to start providing insurance will also get tax credits.

And yet, you cannot listen to a Republican talk about ACA without hearing the term job-killer in at least every other sentence.

The last lie we’ll cover here (there are several more) originated, big surprise here, with Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS PAC.  In 201l, Crossroads ran a series of television ads charging that the Obama administration was granting ACA waivers to unions as a payoff for union support in 2008.  The charge was of course picked up immediately by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and all the usual right-wing bloviation groups.

What they claimed was that unions that offered health insurance plans to their members were being allowed to opt out of the law’s requirement that plans could not cap benefits, either annually or over the life of the policy, while company’s who offered insurance plans were not allowed that option.

This one is so patently false that one has to assume Rove et al knew it was bunk when they made the charge but decided it would play so well for their base that it was a lie worth telling.

The truth is that ACA calls for a phasing in of the cap: $750,000 was the minimum in the first year, with the cap escalating to no cap after full implementation of the plan in 2014.  Some companies, mostly those with a preponderance of low-wage employees, immediately started complaining that the increase in premium being demanded by insurance companies would force them either to increase what their employees had to pay or end coverage altogether.  The law of unintended consequences rearing its ugly head.

Since that was clearly not the goal of the new law, the Department of Health and Human Services (which administers this portion of it), began granting waivers—actually partial waivers—to the new rule.  The waivers were granted until 2014 when ACA fully kicks in—at which point employees would have the option of buying private insurance themselves (with no cap), and low-wage workers would be eligible for tax credits to help them with said purchases.  The waivers were granted, in other words, so that low-wage workers who already had some degree of health insurance wouldn’t lose it prior to ACA’s full implementation.

Union plans were caught in the same box as employer plans.  As of this writing, HHS has received 1,372 applications for waivers, 1,280 of which have been approved.  Of those, 27 were union plans, 315 were plans managed jointly by unions and employers, and 938 were company plans.  If you count both union only and joint managed plans as being union plans, they total less than 25% of the waivers granted.  If, as would seem more appropriate, you look at only the fully union plans, the figure is less than 2%.

Kind of hard to see favoritism or some kind of payback in those numbers.

What is disturbing to me is that on this, as with many other issues, the GOP predilection for dispensing with any concern for the truth seems integral to their campaign strategy.  Lying is essentially a basic component of their playbook.

Equally concerning is that it can be a basic component of their playbook because they know they have major media outlets—Fox, Drudge, Limbaugh, Malkin the most obvious—that will give their lies extensive air time with no questioning much less editing.

But perhaps most concerning is the number of people in this country whose only source of information (voluntarily in most cases) are those right wing media outlets, and for whom the lies are self-evident truths.

lies and other non-truths

            I can’t remember who it was originated the maxim, “if you tell a lie often enough it begins to seem like truth.”  Nor do I know for certain that there is a GOP sacred book from which all its policies and strategies flow.  But if such a thing exists, “if you tell a lie often enough it begins to seem like truth” must be its first sentence.  And it must be printed in ALL CAPS.  And end with several exclamation points!!!!

            I don’t know any other way to explain why Republicans keeps saying so many of the things they are saying.  You may remember, back during the Republican primaries, the Romney campaign ran a TV ad showing President Obama saying something to the effect of “with the economy this bad,  we deserve to lose.”  The ad went on to nearly guffaw over Obama’s admission that he hadn’t done much to improve the economy.

            Only problem was that, in the speech where Obama uttered those words, he was quoting John McCain talking about the economy the Republicans and George Bush had created.  The Romney campaign knew it was guilty of creative editing, and when virtually every news outlet except Fox pointed that out, the campaign’s response was, essentially, “yeah, it was a lie and we knew it, but it worked.  Let’s move on.”

            I’m enough of a student of history that I don’t really believe in seminal moments, single points in time from which everything that follows emanate, but on the matter of GOP callousness about the truth, maybe this was one.

            Let’s look at a few other “biggies,” as my mother used to call them.

            Within hours of the Supreme Court upholding the Affordable Care Act by ruling that the “fine” for not purchasing insurance was not a fine at all but a tax, every Republican talking head and every Republican politician, as if reading from the same teleprompter, called it “the single biggest tax increase in history.”  Rush Limbaugh actually went a little further, calling it the biggest increase “in the history of the world.”

            How dishonest is that?  Well,  let’s see:  if you already have insurance, either on your own or through your employer, no fine/tax; if you accept your personal responsibility for your medical treatments and purchase insurance, no fine/tax; if your income is less than 133% of the poverty line, you can be covered by Medicaid, no fine/tax; if you earn too much for Medicaid but not enough to afford private insurance, you get a subsidy from the federal government, no fine/tax.  So who’s left for this fine/tax to be levied on?  Actually, only those people who can afford insurance but refuse to purchase it.  How many people is that?  No way to tell at this point, which means, on the basis of that fact alone, declaring it the largest tax increase in history is the most audacious of lies.  When you factor in all the people who currently have insurance, or will be covered by Medicaid—and add to them the number of currently uninsured people who will accept personal responsibility for their health care and get insurance—you’re left with a number of non-compliers that is very likely too small generate the kind of humongous tax increase the GOP wants to call it.  More to the point, you’re talking about people who are paying the “tax” only because they chose to do so.  Option One: pay a health insurance premium and be assured of medical care.  Option Two: pay a tax and have nothing to show for it but a cancelled check. 

           

            Can stupidity be called a mitigating factor?

            Here’s the thing.  The people calling this the biggest tax increase in history aren’t stupid.  Well, probably some of them are, but most aren’t.  They know that what they’re saying is factually challenged.  But in their heart of hearts they believe that if they say it often enough, enough people will believe it to get them elected. 

            Actually, the dishonesty—or at least the disingenuousness—goes even further with this one.  The ACA has been in place nearly two years.  During all that time, the GOP never once complained about the penalty for not purchasing insurance being a tax.  Did they just miss that potential talking point?  Did they really need the Supreme Court to discover it for them?  Probably not.  More likely, they didn’t talk about it being a tax because the exact same penalty provision appeared in the very Republican Heritage Foundation plan from several years back—and appears in the Massachusetts plan created by the Mittster.  To complain about a tax in the ACA would have been perhaps too much the pot calling the kettle black even for Republicans. 

            When they jumped all over the tax idea after the Supreme Court ruling, it created a bit of a problem for Romney, which resulted in some interesting sophistry.  Mitt first just disagreed with the Court, saying the penalty was a fine, not a tax.  When it was clear that put him distinctly outside the talking point boundaries, Romney announced that a tax is only a tax when the federal government imposes it.  When a state government imposes the exact same thing, it’s a fine.  Intelligent minds are spinning.

            How about this one?  “Stricter voter ID requirements are necessary to insure that our elections are fair and not stolen via rampant voter fraud.”  Couple of points worth making here.  First, the need for stricter ID requirements apparently exists only in red states, and more specifically, in red states where the GOP controls the governor’s mansion and both houses of the legislature.  Curious. 

            Second, though they vary slightly in specifics, all these stricter ID laws are built around requiring some form of government issued photo ID.  Photo ID’s protect us against one form of voter fraud, and only one: they prevent (or at least make more difficult) John Smith from presenting himself at a polling place as Pocahontas and voting in her place.

            Here’s the thing.  Prompted by GOP firebreathers, George Bush’s Justice Department in 2002 launched a nationwide probe of voter fraud that went on for 5 years.  It convicted a total of 86 people (an average of 17/year), most of whom were either felons or immigrants.  NOT ONE of the convictions involved the kind of voter fraud photo ID’s might prevent. 

            If the voter ID laws the Republicans are pressing so hard for in fact only prevent a problem that doesn’t exist, why are they pressing so hard?  Why are they seizing every available microphone to assure us that only by passing their ID laws can we guarantee that elections are fair?  Perhaps the answer was unwittingly revealed a few weeks ago by the majority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.  That gentleman, one Mike Turzai, was talking to the Republican State Committee and proudly announced the following: “Voter ID [which had just passed the Republican controlled Pennsylvania legislature and been signed by its Republican governor], which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania—done.”

            What had him so certain, and so excited?  Well, most of the Pennsylvania voters without photo ID live in urban areas—over 185,000 of them in Philadelphia alone.  Why is that important?  Because Philadelphia is traditionally a Democratic stronghold in Pennsylvania and the heavy Democratic vote it usually produces is a big reason no Republican presidential candidate has won Pennsylvania since 1992.

            The statewide vote is often close, however, and Turzai may very well have been correct in opining that suppressing the vote in Philadelphia could carry the state for Romney.  But that’s the point.  The GOP says it’s pressing for stricter controls in order to prevent fraud.  In fact, there’s no fraud to prevent.  There are, however, a lot of voters in urban areas  who traditionally vote Democratic, and making sure some percentage of them aren’t able to vote makes the fairer outcome of a Republican victory more likely.

            In states like Mississippi, where a dead man with “Republican” printed on his casket, could win in a landslide, voter ID laws are no less specious—just less problematic.  But in battleground states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and several others—this GOP lie could have enormous consequences.

            There are numerous other “lies they keep repeating” which will be the subject of coming blogs.  In the meantime, if you care about the country, accept the fact that politicians no longer care what is true.  While that is true of Democrats and Republicans, it’s way more true of the latter than the former.  The solution is to start pressuring the media outlets in your area to stop pretending that everything a politician says deserves uncritical reporting.  The truth is the truth and a lie is a lie; it’s time for the media to stop acting as though everything it’s told is true and start revealing lies for what they are. 

           

            

on mitt and hypocrisy

            OK, I’m back.

            I can’t say that my gmail account has been flooded with questions about why this blog hasn’t been updated in a while, but it’s a question that appears with some regularity; of late, that regularity itself has increased. 

            For those who are interested, it went away for a couple reasons.  For one, I shot a movie last July and August, and getting ready for that started six or seven months earlier.  Actually, if you include writing the script, it started nearly a year earlier.

            The bigger reason however was that I simply became frustrated with the political state of this country.  With the exception of health care (a big exception, granted) the Democrats were doing their best to turn the other cheek every time the GOP said no—which was essentially every time it had an opportunity to speak.   I could find lots to complain about regarding Republican behavior, but, to my consternation, the Democrats were doing next to nothing to combat that behavior except whining.  That seemed especially true of the President.

            All of which begs the question—What’s changed?  At base, probably not that much.  There are a couple things however that make me think all of us need to re-engage if, like me, they had withdrawn, engage more strongly if they’ve been at it all along, and get engaged if they’ve had their heads fully in the sand.

            The most obvious of those things is that we have an election coming up.  Like most intelligent people, I watched the Republican primaries with an uneasy mixture of  amusement and horror.  The possibility of a Herman Cain or a Michelle Bachman or a Rick Perry becoming the Republican nominee boggled the mind, but in a bemused way.  Not even this country could elect idiots like those.

            When it finally boiled down to Newt, Rick or Mitt, I felt as though the Republicans were about to choose an egomaniac, a scary Christian or a cipher.  Of the three, the cipher struck me as least objectionable.

            I no longer think that.  In fact, the thought of a Romney presidency almost scares me more than, say, a return to George W.   I found the policies the W stood for heinous, but at least I knew what they were, and I knew that what he would advocate tomorrow would have a sequential link to what he advocated yesterday.  Same with Newt and Rick.

            What it seems to me has come clear about Mitt is that he has no core belief—that, as several pundits have opined, his only bedrock principle is that he thinks he deserves to be president.  And he appears willing to say or do whatever today’s issue demands toward that end.

            That he’s a flip-flopper is no longer even debated.  Late night comics have great fun with his flips, and partisan Democrats delight in them because they make great talking points.  What I fear those partisans neglect to consider is that they may be delivering those talking points only to the choir.

            What scares me about the flip-flops isn’t that they have happened; what scares me is what they say about the man executing them.  It concerns me deeply that someone who was for abortion rights, cap-and-trade, global warming abatement, gay rights, a health insurance mandate—the list could go on—before he was against them is someone who literally has no moral compass.  The possibility of having a president who could be counted on only to do whatever struck him as best for himself at any given moment, I find terrifying.

            Mitt’s behavior since securing the Rebublican nomination has been totally consistent with the image of him as a moral and intellectual cipher.  On immigration, for example, he doesn’t talk any more about “self-deportation” or describe Arizona’s immigration law as a “national model.”  Instead, he goes in front of  an Hispanic group and talks about the importance of a “fair” immigration policy.  When the group attempted to press him about what that meant, he left the podium and his reps said unfortunately there wasn’t time for him to take questions.

            He seizes every opportunity to insist that he will “repeal Obamacare” on day one of his presidency.  (That’s actually one item on a growing list of things he would do on day one.  To do them all, he might have to switch over to the Christian bible and make day one a Genesis-length day.)  What he doesn’t mention, in fact refuses to mention, is what he’d put in its place.

            He also says he’s going to cut all taxes significantly AND increase the defense budget exponentially AND reduce the deficit, but he won’t talk about how he’ll make the arithmetic work on that.  Actually, he said he’d be happy to talk about it, but not until after he’s elected.

            And that seems to me to be the kicker.  For Mitt, it’s all about being elected—and saying, or not saying as the case may be—whatever it takes to accomplish that.  There are those, mostly conservatives, who call this behavior sound strategic politics—do what it takes to get elected, then worry about governing.  My worry is about that second part.  So far, in my view, Mitt has plainly indicated that  in any conflict between what is best for the country and what is best for Mitt, he would choose the latter.  And that’s not governing; it’s ruling.

            One can argue or course that Obama has suffered from a surfeit of promises made during the 2008 campaign.  He promised a single payer health care system; didn’t deliver.  He promised to close Gitmo; hasn’t delivered. He promised to end the Bush tax cuts; didn’t deliver. He promised a whole battery of environmental reforms; record here is spotty at best.  There are other disappointments if you are a liberal.

            On the other hand, he delivered on middle class tax cuts—not perhaps at the level he suggested during the campaign, but something at least.  He has gotten us out of Iraq (and is getting us out of Afghanistan).  He has acted to end “don’t ask, don’t tell.”  Though admittedly grudgingly, he has supported gay marriage. 

            The point is that Obama at least in his campaign gave us a sense of his moral compass—the things he thought important—and he was specific about them.  He hasn’t delivered on all of them, and should be faulted for not even trying very hard on some—but at least he has shown a consistency of thought and purpose. 

            Logic is, as we know, a process of establishing probability from observation.  If we observe the sun rising in the east every day, logic tells us it’s likely it will do so again tomorrow.  What we have been able to observe about Mitt is that his thinking was liberal when he wanted to unseat Ted Kennedy, moderate when he wanted to be governor of Massachusetts, radically conservative when he wanted the Republican nomination, and is now a little less radically conservative since he wants to be President.  Logic, based on that pattern, can only tell us that, if elected president, there is no way to know what to expect. 

            Perhaps more frightening, it tells us to expect Mitt to do—as he apparently did at Bain Capital—whatever it takes to insure the greatest benefit to Mitt.  And I find that a little scary.

            The other thing that has brought the blog back is the growing—and frightening—number of hypocrisies I’m seeing in Republican behavior.  Those will the subject of future blogs, but for now, let me just mention one I find particularly appalling.

            It’s clear, and has been for two years at least, that too many people in this country aren’t working.  The GOP wastes no opportunity to blame that on Obama, and, to be fair, I think it’s a legitimate criticism that Obama and the Democrats waited way too long to fully address the unemployment situation.  But the fact is, they did address it; the President introduced a jobs bill which addressed the unemployment situation by proposing two things that would both  put people to work and benefit the country in other ways as well.  Part of the jobs bill was a substantial block of money for states that would enable them to put back to work the countless teachers, police and firefighters that have been let go; how the country benefits from that is obvious.  An even bigger part of the jobs bill was a major investment in infrastructure, that, likewise, would benefit the country both by putting people to work and by insuring that bridges, dams and highways don’t collapse.

            The Republicans could have responded to the jobs bill by identifying the parts of it they thought shouldn’t have been there, suggesting things not in the bill that perhaps should be, and seriously negotiating with the White House and Democrats to produce a bill that would ameliorate if not eliminate the unemployment problem.

            What they did was simply say no.  They have made no effort to offer an alternative.  They have simply said no.  Then they make “The president has no jobs bill” one of their consistent talking points.  When pressed, they tap dance around the fact that they have offered nothing to the debate by arguing that Obama wants to pay for his bill by, in part, raising taxes on the wealthy.  That may be a point they could have debated with the Democrats, but it isn’t a reason for simply saying no.

            To complain about unemployment while refusing to even talk about a jobs bill can only be characterized as hypocrisy.  The reason for that hypocrisy?  It might be found in Mitch McConnell’s famous line from the day after Obama was sworn in—that the number one Republican priority was to make him a one term president. 

            Where the country fits into that priority is a little hard to see.