Mitt Romney, Even Less Worthy of Consideration with Ryan on the Ticket

In my last post, I explained why Mitt Romney shouldn't even be given serious consideration for the job of President of The United States. Now he's even less worthy. That's a pretty amazing accomplishment. Not a Presidential accomplishment. More like a Stephan Feck high dive accomplishment.

Romney's pick of Ryan does answer some questions about which Romney was being intentionally vague. It may not tell us how little Romney pays in taxes while proposing to lower them and raise ours, but it does tell us that he's endorsing Ryan's plans, at least enough that he's willing to put Ryan's name under his own on a million bumper stickers.

It also tells us that Romney is running scared. It seemed the Republican plan was to run a guy so milquetoast that we wouldn't think about him at all so that the entire election could be referendum on Obama. That's an entirely understandable miscalculation. Our country is now so polarized that people on both sides of the fence now live in hermetically sealed bubbles. While liberals can't imagine why anyone would be angry at Obama for being too liberal (we see him as being far too centrist), many conservatives can't believe that anyone would like him. Newsflash, conservatives: Despite the fact that all your Facebook friends are posting Obama-bashing clips from Fox News on their pages, most people like the President. His job approval numbers fluctuate with the economy, but his personal likability numbers have been consistently positive, and he edges Romney in likability 60% to 30%. Sure, likability isn't everything. People generally liked Gerald Ford, and he was a one-termer. But if the whole strategy is to run a blank slate and count on antipathy to the sitting President, that's a really bad strategy when the President is personally popular. Really bad. Like Feck's dive bad.

The Ryan pick (which, according to the AP, should happen today), shows that the Romney campaign is realizing just where they are in that fateful dive, legs apart and back nearly parallel to the water. If he'd chosen someone boring, he'd be staying the course, staying bland, staying nondescript. Choosing Ryan shows that he knows being the other guy isn't going to be enough.

Here's why Ryan is a terrible move; Romney has now gone from being the other, less popular guy, to being the very specific guy who still won't answer your interview questions but goes out of his way to insult you at the job interview. As Ezra Klein points out, "Ryan has told the Congressional Budget Office that his budget will bring all federal spending outside Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050. That means defense, infrastructure, education, food safety, basic research, and food stamps — to name just a few — will be less than four percent of GDP in 2050. To get a sense for how unrealistic that is, Congress has never permitted defense spending to fall below three percent of GDP, and Romney has pledged that he’ll never let defense spending fall beneath four percent of GDP." Klein is pretty generous about this discrepancy, commenting only that, "It will be interesting to hear him explain away the difference." Yeah, Mr. Klein, just like it has been interesting to read Romney's last ten years worth of tax returns. Romney will never explain that difference. If he were asked point blank, I would bet my dressage horse he would dance around well enough to score higher than Rafalca Romney did at the Olympics. So now Romney has refused to answer some vital interview questions, and will continue to run on the platform that Americans are too stupid to know that 3.75 is a number lower than something-higher-than-four.

The other thing this tells us about Romney is that he bends to the political winds even more than we thought he did before. He was willing to be a pro-choice, pro-government healthcare governor when he needed to be in Massachusetts. He was willing to be a pro-life, anti-Romneycare primary candidate. It was reasonable to wonder if he wouldn't tack back to the middle once the general got under way, and many dyed-in-the-wool conservatives were rightly cautious about him. Too many of them, in fact. Because now he's shown that, in an effort to appease them, he's willing to tack even further to the right. Progressives like me should be concerned that he will go even further to keep the Tea Party happy if he has to once he's in office, but conservatives should now see that he would be a gun-rights-limiting, pro-choice, pro-gay-marriage, pro-flag burning, French speaking (Oh, wait!), Harvard and Stanford educated (Hey, wait a minute!) LIBERAL if it meant getting his agenda passed. Those conservatives should wonder what exactly that agenda is beyond becoming President. From what I can tell, beyond his 40+ years effort to get into the White House, the only thing Romney has consistently favored is lowering his own taxes. Those of us not in Romney's tax bracket (which includes 99% of all conservatives, too) should all worry what he would sell out to accomplish that goal.

Now, it's possible that Romney is performing a great head-fake, and won't actually choose Ryan. I doubt that's even on the table now, though, since it would infuriate his base even further. It's also possible that the Ryan pick is a precurser to a campaign filled with tax returns, very specific policy proposals, and transparency about what a Romney/Ryan nation would look like after drastic cuts to the military, Medicare, and Social Security. It's also possible that I have a pet unicorn you just can't see.

But I don't.

Until Romney's campaign becomes that unlikely unicorn, he's still refusing to tell us, his job interviewers, what we need to know in order to even consider him for the job he wants, and he's made it worse by pretending to be bold while demonstrating his weakness. I might consider casting a ballot for someone other than Barack Obama, if someone like Jim Wallis or Alan Grayson were viable alternatives, but Mitt Romney isn't even a serious contender.

Conservatives Make a Liberal Argument Against Affirmative Action

I was perplexed by a question after hearing this last week's Slate Political Gabfest.

If you haven't heard, the Supreme Court has decided to hear a case which will challenge affirmative action in college admissions. Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin is a case in which a white student is saying she was unfairly denied admission because she was white. I won't get into my disdain for the "Woe is me, I'm a white person in America" ridiculousness, but there's a really interesting double standard that someone (someone much smarter and more informed than I am) should explore.

The University of Texas at Austin has an admissions policy that begins by admitting the top ten percenters from each high school in Texas. Because of the segregation in schools caused by geographic segregation, this produces some diversity on its own. Then the university takes economics into account, and that will produce some ethnic diversity, too. Ultimately, they have some wiggle room allowed by the Supreme Court's decision on Michigan Law School's admissions policy from a few years ago (Grutter v. Bollinger, 2003). It's this last part that the Supreme Court is revisiting, and which it will probably change, especially since Justice Kagan has had to recuse herself. The young woman filing the case claims that she would have been accepted if not for this last bit of racial preference in admissions.

Regardless of where you stand on admissions (for the record, I'm in favor of some racial preference to encourage diversity, because I see racial diversity, like economic diversity, as a valuable part of an education), this argument will hinge on the notion that the system was unfair to this young woman and the government should fix it. I have no problem with that kind of argument. Why? Because I'm a liberal. I believe that, when there is injustice in our society and the government creates, enables, or has the power to correct that injustice, it should. I don't believe the government can create perfect equality of outcomes or solve all social ills. That's a straw man some of my conservative friends have tried to pin to all liberals, as though being a liberal is the same thing as being a Maoist or Soviet, and that's inaccurate and unfair. However, when the government can make a system, especially a system of its own, more fair, it should do so.

My conservative friends do not believe this. They tell me that they believe in personal responsibility. They tell me they believe equality will best be produced by the free market. They detest systems like Affirmative Action because they see it as government intrusion.

Except in this case, the remedy the complainant is proposing is that government should step in (when conservatives disagree with this form of government intrusion they call this "judicial overreach") and make this system more fair. Personal responsibility, it seems to me, would dictate that Abigail Fisher could have earned her way into the University of Texas at Austen by working her way into the top ten percent of her class. Problem solved. Or she could take advantage of the free market and go to school somewhere else, and if enough disgruntled white students did this and the school took too much of a financial hit, they would adjust their admissions policy. Problem solved. But Ms. Fisher is blaming the system and trying to change it. She wants it to conform to the ideals presented by the conservative right, but the mechanism she's employing theoretically belong to the left.

Of course, it doesn't belong to the left. Conservatives are just as willing to go to court as liberals, just as willing to try to sway government to enforce their vision of a more just America. I have no problem with that. What bothers me is that, when people advocates for a more just tax policy, something that is more firmly in the sphere of government than a public university's admissions policy, they are dismissed as dirty hippies who need to get a job and stop expecting the government to solve their problems.

The practical consequence of this double standard is that when poor people and minorities, or even middle class whites struggling against a rigged economic system, go to the government for a redress of a grievance, they are dismissed by conservatives, but when a white person does the exact same thing at the expense of a poorer minority applicant to the same university, that's peachy, and yet the conservatives bristle at being called plutocrats or racists.

Pay close attention to the way this issue gets reported by the conservative media, and to the way Republican candidates comment on it when it gets a bit more attention. If you hear a noticeable absence of condemnation of Abigail Fisher as a communist, a welfare queen, a nanny-state liberal, or any of the other slurs hurled at those participating in Occupy Wall Street, ask yourself, What should we call people who only compromise their principles when it benefits white people?

Who's More Condescending, Liberals or Conservatives?

Gerard Alexander, an associate professor at University of Virginia, is sure to get lots of play with his piece in today's Washington Post, "Why are liberals so condescending?". I really hoped he could shed some light on why conservatives are far more reasonable than they appear to liberals. Instead, he makes one of weakest logical arguments I've ever heard, so much so that conservatives who cite it will be condescending to liberals and participating in a parody of themselves. I'm not sure if Alexander is in on his own joke, though.

I have great respect for my conservative friends who make reasoned arguments. More than once I've had to backtrack or concede points to them, much to my chagrin. But Alexander's arguments betray these intellectually honest conservatives by playing at the lowest kind of ad hominem exchange: "You call me a doodey-head? Well you're a bigger doodey-head!"

He goes to great lengths to show that liberals have often criticized conservatives for not being interested in evidence, then fails to provide anything but the most selective anecdotal data. He even goes so far as to say, "I doubt it would take long to design a survey questionnaire that revealed strange, ill-informed and paranoid beliefs among average Democrats." If it would be such an easy task, why doesn't he do it?

I would argue that measuring condescension isn't easy at all. Where is the line between claiming that an opponents views are incorrect and condescending to him? Ironically, one of the consistent conservative attacks against liberals is that we are too PC, too willing to see both sides of an issue, while conservatives claim he mantle of the people who can easily identify right and wrong and call it as they see it. Apparently, when they do this, it's folksy, while when liberals do it it's condescending.

Alexander even brings up Nixon and Reagan's "Southern Strategy", and subtly acknowledges that conservatives played on racial fears to get elected, but then says "survey research has shown a dramatic decline in prejudiced attitudes among white Americans in the intervening decades." This does not necessarily mean conservatives have abandoned the strategy entirely, though it certainly argues that they should. It might merely explain why Senator Trent Lot lost his job for claiming a segregationist would have been been a great president, while Senator Harry Reid gets off for complimenting a black president for weaving in and out of a "negro dialect". Conservatives called this a double standard. Is it possible that they have more ground to cover to earn back the trust of black voters than Democrats? I think it would be a more fair criticism of the Democratic Party to point out that they only did the bare minimum to position themselves as the party that was sightly friendly-er to African Americans to reel in that large voting block without doing enough to show their allegiance to them. But then, I'm an ideological liberal, not a politician who needs to get re-elected.

And that's the central problem with Alexander's piece: Without the survey data he claims would be so easy to acquire, he can make no distinction between liberal voters and liberal politicians. Politicians are in the game of persuading people, and it isn't persuasive to say the opposition is probably correct. Of course both sides claim the other is incorrect. Alexander points out criticism of "ideologically driven views from sympathetic media such as the Fox News Channel", but forgets the conservative punching bag of the so-called "liberal media". In fact, he even forgets the fact that a concerted effort was made to make the term "liberal" a slur, and that Republican strategist went out of their way to try to re-brand the Democratic Party as the Democrat Party, which they found to be more derisive.

Now, I'm not arguing that conservatives are more condescending. I don't think a good poll on this would be so easy to come by (and the little, non-scientific poll on the Washington Post page is a good example of a bad way to measure it), and I'm not qualified or resourced to conduct one. But if we're going to follow Alexander's entirely reasonable advice at the end of the piece, to think twice and listen to one another, then starting the process with a selective history of partisan name-calling seems to me like a really bad way to get that discussion going.

But maybe that just sounds like more condescension coming from this liberal.