Romney's FEMA Fail

By John Avlon, The Daily Beast

31 October 12

Mitt Romney’s suggestion during the primary season that he might do away with FEMA has come back to haunt him in the wake of Sandy, writes John Avlon.

n the wake of Hurricane Sandy, President Obama has been coordinating storm response from the White House-while Mitt Romney has been dodging questions about what critics say was a primary campaign call to cut funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

At a campaign stop in Ohio that hastily was rechristened a Hurricane relief event but nonetheless began with a Romney bio video, the candidate didn't respond to what the press pool report said were 14 questions about FEMA funding.

The controversy stems from a tortured answer Romney gave at one of the countless Republican primary debates-when he lumped FEMA into a federalist argument about devolving funding and power to the states, specifically with regard to disaster relief. "Absolutely," he said when asked if he'd support shutting the agency down and having the states handle emergency relief.

"Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction. And if you can go even further, and send it back to the private sector, that's even better."

To be fair, it's very unlikely Romney would defund FEMA as president. He was simply doing what he often does-pandering to a particular audience. As a rule, Republican candidates object to federal government power, while Republican presidents end up seeing its virtues when they are in control of it.

But speaking to Republican voters, Romney's suggestion that disaster relief funding was part of the "immoral" growth of the deficit and debt illustrates a larger problem: the disproportionate influence that ideological activists have on our primaries at a time when the parties are so polarized. Practical considerations and common sense take a back seat to pandering to the cheap seats.

The response to Hurricane Sandy shows just why we have a federal government as a backstop, particularly when our country is facing a massive natural disaster that does not neatly correspond to state lines.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican and Romney surrogate, was off-script but on-topic Tuesday morning when he told the Today show:

"The federal government's response has been great. I was on the phone at midnight again last night with the president, personally; he has expedited the designation of New Jersey as a major disaster area ... the president has been outstanding in this. The folks at FEMA, Craig Fugate, and his folks have been excellent."

That's the point of federal emergency management, and of a national government for that matter: to help states and citizens recover from disasters that they could not afford to rebuild from themselves. Putting ideology first is idiotic and impractical.

The issue was gaining traction at a Union Hall in Canton, Ohio on Tuesday, when a Union Steelworkers leader named Leo Gerard slammed Romney's comments to cheering workers at the Golden Lodge: "Ask him to go down there this afternoon and tell those people it's immoral to have the government come help you when you've lost your business, you've lost your roads, you've lost your schools!"

Putting the heated spin aside, let's look at how Republican budgets have been influenced by ideology. The Hill noted that Ryan's 2012 budget proposal from Rep. Paul Ryan, Romney's running mate, called for disaster relief funding to "be fully offset within the discretionary levels provided in this resolution." That means that whenever a disaster occurred-and the federal government stepped into help-the cost of the response would need to be met with cuts in other nondefense discretionary budget items. To put that in perspective, even before Sandy is accounted for, the Obama administration has spent more than $5 billion in disaster assistance since 2009. Does anyone seriously find that "immoral"?

A second threat to FEMA has come from the "fiscal cliff" looming in 2013, when most of the post-2001 tax cuts will expire and automatic spending cuts to almost all programs-including FEMA-will be triggered if Congress can't reach a more rational agreement before then. An Office of Management and Budget report on the impact of falling off that cliff states that "The Federal Emergency Management Agency's ability to respond to incidents of terrorism and other catastrophic events would be undermined."

The Obama administration does not want these sequestration cuts to occur, but the failure of congressional negotiators to come to agreement on a bipartisan measure- and the mechanism for automatic cuts if a deal isn't reached that congressional Republican leaders insisted on-has compounded the fiscal cliff and now threatens to impact disaster relief.

This should be something we can all agree upon. Disaster relief is an essential role of the federal government. Getting these practicalities wrapped up in ideological debates is irresponsible and reflects the way party activists have become isolated from the realities of governing. And Republican budget plans have real-world implications that won't pass the common-sense test for the vast majority of citizens.

It exposes the absurdity of the ideological straight-jacket that candidates like Mitt Romney put themselves in when they pander to the ideologues within their party during the primary season, whether they actually mean to implement their ideas or not.

Mitt Romney's Closing Con Game

By Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast

30 October 12

Mitt Romney's latest political ad makes it clear that he's trying to portray himself as a uniter who will heal the divisions of the Obama years. Don't believe it for a second.

o one of Mitt Romney's closing plays is that he's the great conciliator. He released an ad several days ago and has been hitting the theme ever since, arguing that we need (as Romney said in the first debate, quoted in the ad) "leadership that … could not care less if it's a Republican or a Democrat" that said leader is working with. With this, Romney makes the full leap into Orwell-land, but with signs that some folks actually buy or at the very least want very much to believe this, it's important to point out to those voters the precise nature of this con game.

Presidential candidates always promise that they're going to change the tone in Washington. They have to. The media demand it. Polls show them that independent and swing voters (two different things, really; the latter is a subset of the former) yearn for it. Their advisers tell them that's how they win over the undecideds. Also, and crucially, they come equipped with egos that permit them to convince themselves that they are unique among men, and they can indeed change this "tone."

Barack Obama ventured further than most down this boulevard of broken dreams. He had an analysis, you see: The right hated the Clintons because of certain things the Clintons represented about the '60s because the Clintons were products of that generation. Since Obama wasn't a product of that generation, it wouldn't be so bad for him. He believed it. I believed it too. In a career sprinkled with its share of shoddy predictions, I think that one may have been my worst.

While Obama and I were believing - on Inauguration Day 2009, say - that things would be different, key Republicans were meeting in a restaurant not far from the very mall where the celebrations had taken place that day. They agreed, wrote Robert Draper in his book Do Not Ask What Good We Do, that very night to oppose Obama with all they had. Within the month, the Tea Party movement was born, and compromise with Obama became the moral equivalent of shaking hands with the devil.

The particulars of the ongoing opposition are well-known enough that I needn't rehearse them all. Suffice it to say that the GOP of this Congress set records on Senate filibusters real and threatened, and en bloc (or almost en bloc) no votes. There's never been a Congress like these past two, especially since the GOP took over the House.

Obama has tried from the start. The stimulus bill was about 38 percent tax cuts. You'd think Republicans might have gone for that. The individual mandate came from the Heritage Foundation. He cut payroll taxes (Republicans did end support for that, but only after the ludicrousness of their initial opposition to a tax cut became too much to endure). And more. But they said no every step of the way - even breaking from the precedent of Congress raising the debt limit more than 70 times since the 1940s. Now it was deemed acceptable to tie that increase to other matters and even, for the first time in history, to filibuster it.

No, no, no, no, no. And then, come 2012, they turn around and say, "See? Obama failed to unite this country." They say it's because he pursued a hard-left agenda, but that's not true and they know it's not true. What they know to be true is that most centrist voters will believe them, because the mood in Washington is still toxic and the president promised to fix that, by cracky.

All of that, we've known. But now comes the new twist. Now Romney gets to come in and say, "I will be a conciliator." Perversely, there is a potential grain of truth to the claim, but only because Democrats in opposition don't behave in the Leninist fashion that Republicans do. (I have demonstrated this numerically - 41 percent of congressional Democrats supported George W. Bush on his four major legislative initiatives, while 6 percent of Republicans backed Obama on his top four). But bear in mind it's going to be a very strange definition of "conciliation." What Republicans generally mean by "working across the aisle" is terrifying just enough Democrats from red states and districts into supporting their initiatives and destroying them if they fail to, like the old ads from 2002 that impugned the patriotism of Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, who left three limbs in Vietnam but opposed Bush's war in Iraq.

And the final note that takes us into full surrealism. Republicans know very well that Obama can't say any of this during election time because he'd sound "whiny" and will be admitting "failure" at the task of uniting the country. This is really the Ministry of Reality Suppression at work, and why I wish Mr. Orwell were around to see it.

He'd know it well, because it is, in fact, a very communist (small c) mindset, about which Orwell wrote in the Spanish context if not others: act obstreperously and disruptively, create conditions that make it impossible for the bourgeois or reformist party to succeed, and then turn around and blame the reformist party for the resulting failures. And then sit back and laugh if the reformists try to point this out and attack them as weak. It's one of the oldest tricks in the ideological book, and it's hostage-taking, basically, and our system of government - especially the rules of the Senate, where a minority of 40 has the power of a majority - permits it.

It must infuriate Obama that all this is true, and it must infuriate him further that, if he does win, he will still have to extend olive branches, because he will be the president and that is what people expect of the president. In the future, I hope no Democrat ever again promises to change the tone in Washington. "I'll try," Democrats should say. "But it takes two to tango on this." Then at least the public might fix the blame for this problem where it so richly belongs.