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What 'President Romney' Would Mean for Women |
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Wednesday, 16 May 2012 15:27 |
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Cohen writes: "Even if 'the GOP war on women' - the metaphorical talking point - is dead, as at least one pundit has suggested, the GOP war on women - the real and continuing Republican drive to set back women's rights and opportunities - remains very much alive."
Presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks at the CPAC convention. (photo: Reuters)
What 'President Romney' Would Mean for Women
By Nancy L. Cohen, Rolling Stone
16 May 12
 itt Romney wants you to know that he and his party are "extraordinarily pro-woman" - "pro-opportunity for women, pro-moms, pro-working moms, pro-working women," as he put it on Fox News the other night. This idea Democrats are pushing of a Republican "war on women"? "Misguided, wrong, dishonest," he told Sean Hannity. "Look" - here came the pivot - "this is a race about helping America do a better job caring for the people of America.... The policies I’m promoting will get America back to work and assure greater prosperity for our citizens."
It was a telling exchange. Ever since Obama opened up a double-digit lead with women voters during the recent controversies over birth control, Republicans from Romney on down have worked hard to steer the conversation away from divisive social issues that make them look like religious nuts and back to more swing voter-friendly territory. "It’s still about the economy, and we’re not stupid," Romney proclaimed after all but wrapping up the GOP nomination late last month.
The conservative push to change the subject has basically succeeded, albeit with an assist from lousy job numbers. This is dangerous. Even if "the GOP war on women" - the metaphorical talking point - is dead, as at least one pundit has suggested, the GOP war on women - the real and continuing Republican drive to set back women’s rights and opportunities - remains very much alive.
And make no mistake: A Romney presidency will only escalate the assault. Let's take a look at exactly how, starting with the issue he says will attract women voters to the Republican ticket.
The Economy
American women earn on average 23 percent less than men - which adds up to an average loss of $383,000 in income over a working lifetime. Romney’s campaign couldn’t say recently whether their man would have signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act making it easier for women to file pay discrimination lawsuits (a law made necessary, by the way, because the conservative Roberts Supreme Court had eviscerated equal pay protection for women in its 2007 Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co ruling). All Romney himself could muster, eventually, was a grudging commitment to not repeal it. Democrats are pushing the Paycheck Fairness Act, which directly addresses the male-female pay disparity by putting teeth into the half-century old Equal Pay Act. Republicans oppose it and even deny the facts about wage inequality. Romney remains mum about his position on the bill.
It’s a safe bet that Romney won’t buck his party or its corporate sponsors for the sake of working women. He’ll undoubtedly say we should trust the "job creators" to fix whatever’s wrong.
Romney famously declared,"I like being able to fire people," and certainly he got a lot of practice during his tenure at the private equity firm Bain Capital (where women made up only 10 percent of 95 vice-presidents when Romney was in charge). And a President Romney will be issuing plenty of pink slips to at least one large group of working women: public employees. He proposes to cut government jobs as part of his plan to reduce the deficit and rein in Washington, jobs disproportionately held by women. (Of the 601,000 government workers thrown out of work since June 2009 due to budget cuts, two out three were women.)
A Romney presidency would inflict particular pain on women already struggling on the economic edge. The GOP nominee has warmly embraced the "marvelous" Ryan budget which ends Medicare in any recognizable form and would throw between 14 million and 27 million people off of Medicaid, around two thirds of them women. And then, if Romney and a Republican Congress succeed in repealing "Obamacare" - assuming it survives next month’s ruling at the hands of the Roberts Court - 17 million women due to get health coverage under the law will remain uninsured.
President Obama proposed a budget this year that protects the social safety net and includes a number of women-friendly measures, such as increased funding for child care, early education, and enforcement of labor laws barring gender discrimination. Romney lauded a budget passed by the Republican House that cuts childcare and reduces food and health care assistance for roughly 20 million children as "responsible."
All of which is to say: Under a President Romney, expect economic progress for women to grind to a halt. And what about women’s sexual freedom and reproductive rights? On those issues, be prepared for a warp-speed ride in reverse.
Abortion
"Do I believe the Supreme Court should overturn Roe v. Wade? Yes, I do," Romney said during one debate, talking about the 1973 Supreme Court decision that affirmed a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. He also has called the decision "one of the darkest moments in Supreme Court history."
The next president will almost certainly have the power to determine whether Roe stands or falls. There is currently a 5-4 pro-Roe majority on the Supreme Court. Yet Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court’s most eloquent defender of women’s rights, including abortion rights, is 83 and in failing health, and likely to retire during the next presidency.
When asked what he will look for in a Supreme Court nominee, Romney name-checks the four anti-abortion conservatives on the Court: John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito. And he has picked up endorsements from antiabortion PACs, such as the National Right to Life Committee, that impose an antiabortion litmus test on judicial nominees.
Take Romney at his word: If he wins, Roe v. Wade will be overturned, leaving it up to the states to decide whether abortion remains legal.
Romney and other establishment Republicans tout states rights as the way to resolve a contentious issue in a divided country. "I would love the Supreme Court to say, 'Let’s send this back to the states,'" he said in an interview with Diane Sawyer. "Rather than having a federal mandate through Roe v. Wade, let the states again consider this issue state by state." Republicans would prefer you not look too closely at their platform, which calls for outlawing all abortions, without exception.
But isn't Romney just pandering to the religious right? Isn't he, at heart, a moderate on this and other issues? Romney’s record as governor of Massachusetts - that is, in his relatively "liberal" incarnation - suggests otherwise. In 2005, Gov. Romney vetoed a bill requiring hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims. He justified the move by citing the anti-birth control claptrap of the rightwing fringe that the morning after pill is a form of abortion. (It isn’t - it prevents conception.) The liberal Massachusetts legislature overrode Romney’s veto, ensuring that rape victims in that state would not be forced against their will to bear the child of their rapist. Women who live in the Red States of the Bible Belt won’t be so blessed.
The recent wave of state Personhood amendments and laws suggests this is not a far-fetched scenario. Personhood measures endow fertilized eggs with full legal rights, typically ban abortion in all cases, including rape and incest, and open the door to bans on in-vitro fertilization, the IUD, and hormonal contraception. Granted, Personhood initiatives have been rejected by the voters by large margins in Colorado and even in staunchly pro-life Mississippi. But with Roe overturned, all that will be needed to enact a Personhood law is a conservative majority in the state legislature and a willing governor. Note, too, that Romney has assured the antiabortion right that he "absolutely" supports state and federal constitutional amendments defining life as beginning at conception, a position that puts him to the right of the Mormon Church.
The best that can be hoped for post-Roe is that legislators in the nearly two dozen states where abortion will likely be banned show some humanity and write rape, incest, and life exceptions into legislation.
Contraception
In January, when Romney was cruising to the nomination, he ridiculed George Stephanopoulus for asking him, during a presidential debate, if he thought states had a right to ban contraception. "George, this is an unusual topic that you’re raising," he huffed.
Six weeks later Romney had endorsed the Blunt-Rubio Amendment, which would have allowed any employer to claim a "moral objection" and exclude potentially millions of women from getting birth control under their insurance coverage.
As you'll recall, the simmering war on women boiled over last February when Congressional Republicans convened an almost all-male hearing on the Obama administration’s mandate that insurers cover birth control with no co-pay under the Affordable Care Act. Romney joined the chorus of outraged conservatives and attacked the birth-control regulation as a heinous attack on religious liberty, even though the administration had already revised the initial regulation to insure that no religious institution would have to pay for contraception. He dogwhistled to the far-right repeatedly with statements that the mandate covered "abortive pills." Even after Romney had wrapped up the nomination and the Blunt Amendment had been defeated, the presumptive Republican nominee was still campaigning against the contraception mandate. "As President, I will abolish it," he told the National Rifle Association.
Romney wasn’t just defensively tacking right to fend off Rick Santorum and his hard-right legions. Before the controversy erupted, Romney had already signaled his intent to chip away at access to birth control, vowing to defund Planned Parenthood and eliminate Title X, the federal family planning program that provides family planning and screenings for breast and ovarian cancer, high blood pressure, and the like for five million women. Killing the program would deprive many of these women of their only source of health care. Romney had also pledged to restore George W. Bush’s so-called "conscience clause" allowing anyone in the health care delivery chain, say a clerk in a pharmacy, the right to refuse to sell contraceptives.
As long as Republicans retain control of the House - a near certainty if the GOP wins the presidency - Romney would have the power to deliver on these promises, and the substantial advances in women’s reproductive rights made under Obama will be reversed.
But wouldn’t victory release Romney from his promissory notes to the rightwing of the Republican Party? After all, isn’t this what Etch-a-Sketch candidates do?
Again Romney’s record as Massachusetts governor, so often cited in favor of his essentially moderate outlook, points to the opposite conclusion. As well as attempting to deny rape victims the morning after pill, Romney withdrew his previous support for legal abortion, embryonic stem cell research, comprehensive sex education, and gay civil rights. On social issues he flip-flops in only one direction: to the right.
Ten days ago Romney campaigned in the crucial swing state of Virginia alongside Michele Bachmann and Governor Bob McDonnell. Bachmann praised Romney as the man who could "take the country back."
Back to what? Bachmann didn’t say. Now you know.
Nancy L. Cohen is a historian and the author of the the new book, Delirium: How the Sexual Counterrevolution is Polarizing America. Follow her on twitter @nancylcohen or on Facebook.
Also by Nancy L. Cohen
• How Obama Can Win With Women
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Romney Has Morality Upside Down |
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Wednesday, 16 May 2012 09:45 |
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Excerpt: "He doesn't want to regulate where regulation is necessary - at the highest reaches of the economy, where public immorality has cost us dearly, and will cost even more unless boardroom behavior is constrained. Yet he wants to regulate where regulation is least appropriate - at the level of the individual, in bedrooms and other intimate spaces, where private morality should govern."
Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)
Romney Has Morality Upside Down
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
16 May 12
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TB73Lw1XtE
itt Romney's reaction to J.P. Morgan Chase's mounting losses from reckless trades is “the market will take care of it.” His spokesman says “no taxpayer money was at risk” so we don't need more financial regulation. Romney has even promised to repeal Dodd-Frank if he's elected president.
Yet at the same time, Romney has come out strongly against same-sex marriage. He's also against abortion. He has no problem with government intruding on the most intimate of decisions a person makes.
He's got private and public morality upside down. He doesn't want to regulate where regulation is necessary - at the highest reaches of the economy, where public immorality has cost us dearly, and will cost even more unless boardroom behavior is constrained. Yet he wants to regulate where regulation is least appropriate - at the level of the individual, in bedrooms and other intimate spaces, where private morality should govern.
This is a dangerous confusion. It should be a matter of personal choice whom to marry and when to have children. But it is undoubtedly a matter of public choice whether big banks should be allowed to take the kind of risky bets that plunged the economy into the worst downturn since the Great Depression, and whether people with great wealth and should be able to buy our democracy with huge campaign contributions.
Please see the attached video and pass it on.
Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written thirteen books, including "Locked in the Cabinet," "Reason," "Supercapitalism," "Aftershock," and his latest e-book, "Beyond Outrage." His 'Marketplace' commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes.
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How Being 'The Party of No' Is Working for the GOP |
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Tuesday, 15 May 2012 18:00 |
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Younge writes: "Intransigent, extremist, uncompromising - the Republican party should be a basket case. Instead, it has a winning strategy."
Republican Congressman Paul Ryan with his budget plan, which would slash social spending - though that has not deterred the support of presidential candidate Mitt Romney. (photo: TJ Kirkpatrick/Getty Images)
How Being 'The Party of No' Is Working for the GOP
By Gary Younge, Guardian UK
15 May 12
Intransigent, extremist, uncompromising … the Republican party should be a basket case. Instead, it has a winning strategy.
 n exit polls during the Republican primaries, voters were given four choices about what they believed to be the most important quality in a candidate: "can defeat Obama", "true conservative", "strong moral character" and "right experience".
While all might be considered important, given that the purpose of primaries is to choose a contender to fight in the general election, one would have imagined the first would have won hands down. Not so.
While defeating Obama was always the most popular quality, it rarely exceeded 50%. Indeed, in Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire and Iowa - four swing states of the kind the Republicans must win if they hope to take the White House - defeating Obama never got more than 45% (Florida), and went as low as 31% (Iowa).
But winning has long ceased to be the primary aim of a significant portion of the Republican base. If it had been, they might have been running the Senate by now. In 2010, they selected two ultra-conservatives, Christine O'Donnell in Delaware and Sharron Angle in Nevada, in winnable contests where more moderate candidates were available. They lost them both.
The balance between principle and pragmatism is a key element of electoral strategy and political practice. On that front, in recent years Republicans have appeared to be considerably unbalanced. On the stump, they often seem to vote not with taking office in mind, but with making a noise. When in office, their target seems not to make legislation, but to make a point. In the short term, this all appears both futile and infantile - a political party intent not on governing but on opposition. But in the longer term, it may also prove incredibly effective.
Last week's ejection of Richard Lugar, Indiana's veteran senator Republican, at the hands of Tea Party activists is a case in point. Lugar's defeat hardly makes Indiana vulnerable. It's a deeply conservative state. The victor, Richard Mourdock, remains the favourite.
Nevertheless, the result does shed light on the velocity and arc of the modern Republican party's trajectory. Lugar was no moderate. He voted against Obama's healthcare reform and the stimulus bill, and has long been a proponent of a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget. His problem, apart from long-term incumbency during an insurrectionary period, is that while he was in office, he tried to get things done - or at least, did not see it as his sole function to stop things getting done.
He voted for both Obama's nominees for the supreme court and backed the Dream Act, which would offer citizenship to illegal immigrants. Striking a deal with Obama on anything, it seems, is akin to dancing with the devil. Now, Lugar's gone.
His departure sends a signal to those who remain that compromise - the means by which anything gets done in the Senate - will not be tolerated. The word is out.
Earlier this year, Olympia Snowe of Maine, one of the few moderate Republicans, retired. Last month, another veteran senator, Orrin Hatch of Utah, was forced into a run-off by a Tea Party challenge.
While, occasionally, this may mean losing seats, the overall effect is to transform the party. In a two-party system, that entails a shift in the centre of electoral gravity to the right.
A healthcare reform policy once championed by Republicans (including Mitt Romney and New Gingrich) has been implemented by a Democrat and is now fiercely opposed by its original proponents as "radical" and "socialist". What was once considered conservative is now mainstream, even - as in Lugar's case - moderate. And what was once considered moderate - Snowe - no longer exists. A recent article by Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker pointed out:
"The number of Republicans who now consider themselves 'liberal' is now close to the the number who describe themselves as Aleut or Eskimo."
This is a recent development. As Geoffrey Kabaservice asserts in Rule and Ruin:
"The appearance of a Republican party almost entirely composed of ideological conservatives is a new and historically unprecedented development. It is only in the last decade or so that 'movement conservatism' finally succeeded in silencing, co-opting, repelling, or expelling nearly every competing strain of Republicanism from the party."
The consensus used to be that this was the product of polarized politics, suggesting that both sides - Democratic and Republican - were equally responsible. That is no longer sustainable as an argument. A YouGov poll last year showed two-thirds of Democrats preferred a member of Congress who "compromises to get things done", while two-thirds of Republicans preferred one who "sticks to his principles, no matter what".
On the night Lugar lost, Democrats voted in the more moderate candidate in their Wisconsin primary to challenge Governor Scott Walker in a recall election. Democrats' willingness to compromise and, at times, even capitulate means that even when they do hold the reins of power, they are not in control of the agenda. In their new book, Even Worse Than it Looks, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann argue:
"The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."
True. Only, this "outlier" runs most states, the lower chamber of Congress, and is in serious contention for the presidency. There is method to this Republican madness, and it may yet prove even more effective.
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FOCUS | Romney's Weasel Problem |
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Tuesday, 15 May 2012 12:55 |
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Egan writes: "On multiple occasions over the last year, Romney has shown a tendency to dodge, weave, parse or deny in such a way that it outweighs the original offense. It's his weasel problem, a real character flaw."
Mitt Romney. (photo: AP)
Romney's Weasel Problem
By Timothy Egan, The New York Times
15 May 12
 ou can wince at the cruelty of adolescence, as many did, after reading the Washington Post account of how a teenage Mitt Romney led a gang of prep school buddies to attack another boy. "Senseless," "vicious" and "stupid" were the words used by witnesses quoted by name in the piece.
But to hold the 65-year-old presumptive Republican nominee for president accountable for what he may have done as a mean-spirited teenager is unfair. Because he acted like a bully then no more makes Romney a bully now than does that fact that young Barack Obama tried "maybe a little blow" make him a coke-head.
More troubling is Romney's continued inability to honestly face up to his own life story and those inconvenient truths that interfere with the ideas of the vocal right-wing of the party whose standard he will soon bear.
On multiple occasions over the last year, Romney has shown a tendency to dodge, weave, parse or deny in such a way that it outweighs the original offense. It's his weasel problem, a real character flaw.
On the bully attack of the boy with the bleached-blond hair, Romney issued a standard political non-apology, chuckling at first, saying he couldn't remember what he called "high jinks," but also not denying the incident.
Asked to clarify, he went into weasel mode. "I don't remember them all, but again, high school days, if I did stupid things, why I'm afraid I've got to say I'm sorry for it," he said on Fox News Radio, the corporate couch for Republicans who need a reassuring hug in a bad moment.
Still, Romney said he could remember one thing: the boy, John Lauber, who was pinned down and had his hair cut by force, was certainly not considered a homosexual, no sir. Not in those days. "That was the furthest thing from my mind back in the 1960s," Romney said, in elaborating with Fox.
This is where it gets maddening. First, his explanation is not credible. One of the witnesses, Phillip Maxwell, said to the Times, "Certainly, for the other people that were involved, nobody has forgotten." Second, what Romney seems to be implying - that bullying of effeminate-seeming boys didn't happen in prep schools in the 1960s - is preposterous.
Romney could have just owned up to the takedown of the kid, as the other assailants did, and said he has grown as a man. He could use this episode to tell a version of his own story: how an annoying little rich kid became a thoughtful leader who wants to be inclusive. Or he could have used it as another way to explain the positive influence of his wife on him as he matured.
On same-sex marriage, Romney has shown a similar kind of willful amnesia. Over the weekend, Romney assured his commencement audience at Liberty University that marriage has long been, and will always be defined as "a relationship between one man and one woman."
Except, in the case of his great-grandfather Miles P. Romney, whose idea of marriage was between one man and five women. Or his great-great grandfather Parley Pratt, one man who married twelve women.
Call them sexual outlaws, Biblical originalists, or just guys who liked a renewable supply of young women, but Romney's not-so-long-ago ancestors were anything but practitioners of the kind of marriage Romney claims has been enshrined since the dawn of civilization.
He could use his background to say that even his own family strayed from the true intent of marriage, and that modern Romneys evolved on the issue, to become the devoted monogamists we see today. But instead, he acts as if polygamy - an audacious experiment that nearly brought the United States to a second Civil War, this one in the West - never existed, in his family or his faith.
We look to leaders to be bold and to go against the grain every now and then. When Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown law student, "a slut" and "a prostitute" for advocating basic contraceptive health care, the party's leading demagogue was condemned - in a rare break - by many Republicans. But not by Romney.
Romney said Limbaugh's slander of the young woman "is not the language I would have used." The language he did use, then, was weasel-speak.
He refined this trait midway through his political career, as a way to explain his serial flip-flops. On some issues - gay rights or abortion, for example - he can somewhat implausibly say he has changed over time as his thinking has become more in line with that of his party.
But on health care, Romney is in a weasel world all his own. He can't deny being the intellectual father of Obamacare, after coming up with a fair system in Massachusetts that requires freeloaders to get health insurance so that everyone else won't have to pay for them.
So he continues to act as though there's some difference between the two plans. Romneycare works in Massachusetts, in the same way that Obamacare will work for the rest of the nation if given a chance. Romney knows that.
"Massachusetts is a model for getting everybody insured," he said before that model became public enemy No.1 in Republican eyes.
Romney's party will not allow him to say that now, so he contorts himself. You can blame the radical makeup of this year's Republicans for that. But on the character issues, when it comes time to act like a leader with an expansive heart, he wiggles, denies and shrinks.
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ight now, if nothing else changes, it looks 
