3rd Debate: Mitt Romney Says Nothing, Repeatedly

I admit that I have a tendency to talk more about language than about substance when analyzing political speech, but then again there isn’t much substance to be had.  And besides, the little things matter.  Failing to take note of tricks of language and Orwellian efforts at branding can mean lowering your guard against political manipulation.  So I don’t feel bad about picking at nits, because I believe those nits have a tendency to grow and consume public dialogue if they aren’t gotten rid of.

There was one talking point in last night’s presidential debate that I found exceptionally aggravating.  It was the point that Mitt Romney made about the perilous situation that the United States faces in the world because Iran is now “four years closer” to having a nuclear weapon.  Considering that that was repeated four times over the course of the ninety minutes, it seemed to me that it relied upon the assumption of an audience that wasn’t really paying close attention.  It grabbed my attention as an utterly empty political slogan the first time it was uttered, and the rest of the audience had three additional opportunities to get that same impression.

There’s really no other impression to be had.  Saying that Iran is four years closer to a nuclear weapon is like saying that I’m four years closer to a Nobel Prize.  Chances are pretty good that I’m not going to get one of those.  I guess you could argue that even if I don’t, as long as I keep working towards a relevant goal – writing literature, for instance – I might be closer to having a Nobel Prize when I die than I am right now.  But speaking more colloquially, if a certain outcome is never going to happen, one doesn’t get closer to it over time.

Now, in the event that I am going to win a Nobel Prize, then the hypothetical statement is true.  I am four years close to that outcome than I was four years ago.  Similarly, if at any point in the future, under any circumstances, Iran develops and builds a nuclear weapon, then they are presently four years closer to that outcome than they were four years ago.  That’s the way time works.  Future events get closer every day.  Would a Mitt Romney presidency unlock some secret of the universe that would allow time to flow backwards within the borders of one country?  Or was this intended as a subtle metaphor for bombing nations back to the Stone Age?

At this point, I imagine a lot of people will narrow their eyes disdainfully at me and hiss, “Oh, you know what he meant.”  And in a vague sense, yes, of course I do.  Obviously he meant to suggest that President Obama’s first term allowed the Iranian regime to become materially closer to having the knowledge and resources required for building a nuclear weapon.  But I don’t know what Romney meant by “four years closer,” presumably because “four years closer” doesn’t mean anything.  It’s the vaguest and least substantive way he could have phrased what he was trying to say, and since it was repeated four times over, that must have been deliberate.

If Romney had had a substantive claim to make about a worsening Iranian threat resulting from an Obama presidency, he had ample opportunity to make it.  He didn’t.  That’s not to say that there’s no such argument to be made, but it does suggest that Romney’s claims relied on bullshit – a disregard for the truth value of what he was saying, in favor of whatever would serve his ends if it happened, incidentally, to be true.

That behavior is quite in keeping with Romney’s entire approach to his campaign.  Typically, he seems to accomplish this exploitation of politically convenient narratives by plainly reversing position, or by outright lying.  Now, with the third debate, he seems to have uncovered the perfect means of utilizing bullshit, which is by making claims that cannot be contradicted because they provide absolutely no information, even as they sound damning for the opposing party.  I suppose that in that way Romney has succeeded in emulating Reagan.

The public cannot allow such casual disregard for truth or rational argumentation to stand as a relevant political tactic.  We cannot allow politicians, corporations, or anyone else to believe that they can sway us by branding and rhetoric alone, without having to appeal to factual data or to be transparent about their own views.  Such dialogue will only improve if we hone our ability to parse it and separate it and call out the bullshit.  We’re failing in that responsibility if Mitt Romney believes he can say four times in the same debate that we’re four years closer to the future, and have that somehow count in his favor.

Speechless: Why Citizens United and Its Critics Are Both Wrong

[Author's Note: I wrote this essay a while ago, and I had hoped to actually publish it somewhere so that it could reach a wider audience, because I think this angle on the question of corporate personhood is important. But I now believe I'm unlikely to find a market for it, because it's too lengthy and rigidly philosophical to have a place in any popular magazine, but too brief, playful and topical to have a place in a philosophical journal, which I have no access to anyway. So I'm just putting it out as a blog post, instead, and hoping for the best. Fair warning: at five thousand words, it's longer (and perhaps drier) than blogs are supposed to be.]

Poverty in Politics - Either Used or Forgotten

I originally wrote this piece to be posted elsewhere, so the comments and events it refers to are a week or so old now. I still thought it worthwhile to post it here.

I think it’s honest of me to identify myself as coming solidly from the left with all of my political writing. But I certainly don’t make a conscious effort to fit myself into a particular camp, so even while I acknowledge my liberal tendencies, I won’t hesitate to begin an editorial with my own criticisms of fellow liberals or the Democratic Party. One party obviously contradicts my ideals more often than the other, but I have no love for political parties in general. And there is plenty of common ground on which I think both Democrats and Republicans routinely fail to serve the country’s interests.

It’s cheap politics for the DNC to utilize Mitt Romney’s remark that he’s “not concerned about the very poor” and to make a campaign ad out of it. In that ad, the quotation is very conspicuously cut off, and anyone who views such things objectively ought to immediately recognize that it both mischaracterizes Romney’s remarks and allows the Democratic Party to dodge the need to present a clear distinction between their policies and his. Taken out of context, Mitt Romney’s comment sure does portray him as callously out of touch. And indeed, I believe he is just that. But he didn’t say what he’s being accused of saying.

What Mitt Romney really said was, “I’m not concerned about the very poor; we have a safety net there, and if it needs repair, I’ll fix it.” That’s quite different from simply declaring that you don’t care one bit about a particular segment of the population. Romney’s not saying that society has no responsibility for the poor; he’s saying that we already do enough for them. I don’t think one needs to twist that argument in order to criticize it. It would be cartoonishly villainous for a presidential candidate to say, “I don’t care if the poor starve to death,” but it’s not exactly saintly to say, “as long as the poor don’t starve to death, I’m satisfied.” It worries me that the Democratic Party feels the need to mischaracterize Romney’s remarks so they sound like the former statement, because that implies that they don’t see the latter as being sufficiently divergent from their more liberal views.

It says something about the alienation of liberalism in modern American society that commentators like Rush Limbaugh unabashedly deride Romney for defending the very existence of the social safety net while Democrats merely pretend that he doesn’t defend it and make that the focus of their criticism. If liberalism were genuinely at home in American politics, somebody would be quoting Romney’s words exactly as he said them and using them to express indignation at the idea that the poor are sufficiently taken care of. Not only is no prominent politician or commentator saying that in this case, no one ever says it.

After his misleadingly shocking sound bite, Romney went on to say, “We will hear from the Democrat Party: ‘the plight of the poor.’” But will we? Honestly, I can’t think of any Democrat who has reliably expressed lofty ideals about ending the epidemic of homelessness or providing assistance to the poor that goes beyond food stamps and unemployment insurance and that attacks the actual system that keeps people poor, by providing public works employment, for instance.

“You can choose where to focus,” Romney said, ostensibly differentiating his campaign from that of Democrats and other Republicans. “You can focus on the rich – that’s not my focus. You can focus on the very poor – that’s not my focus. My focus is on middle-income Americans.” I don’t believe him when he says that his focus isn’t on the rich, but that aside, I find that everyone in politics today pronounces their focus to be entirely on the middle class. And that’s easy to understand, since not many votes are found on either extreme of the income scale. In fact, given how broad and flexible different people’s conceptions are of “middle-income,” that’s where all of the votes are. Frequently, Americans, whether sitting comfortably within the top five percent of income earners or walking the poverty line like a tightrope, view themselves as middle class. So when a politician talks about defending middle class Americans or putting his political focus on their interests, citizens will tend to think that he’s talking about them. And there’s little doubt that politicians know this.

President Obama’s comments at the National Prayer Breakfast regarding the Christian obligation to help the poor were striking precisely because they are so anomalous in mainstream politics. The sentiment seemed earnest and was well-placed at the event, but the fact that the DNC ad was released on the same day compels me to view it with a great deal of cynicism. The ad is a transparent attempt to score points by leaping on an easy way of portraying the Democratic Party, fairly or unfairly, as having more compassion for the poor than their opponents. I can only hope that the prayer breakfast speech was genuine, and not a more subtle example of the same – a quick response to Romney’s ostensible gaffe the day before.

If it was intended as a response, that illustrates the very problem with political treatments of the issue of poverty and economic disparity. The best that the Democratic Party can do most of the time is wait for a Republican to say something objectionable, and then issue a response that says, “We’re not like that; we care about everybody.” I’d be far more convinced if they took the lead, if they actually demonstrated their commitment to solving society’s ills from the bottom up, rather than from the middle out. As it is, the commitment to helping the poor is only something that is claimed, and rarely something that decides policy.

The DNC ad was framed entirely as part of a negative campaign. It cites nothing that Democrats have done or plan to do in order to eradicate poverty, homelessness, or hunger. It points out the initiatives that Romney would likely undertake that would hurt the poor, and it is right to do so, but a preponderance of negative campaigns risks miring us in negative government, wherein the avoidance of harm is considered a good unto itself. I trust the Democratic Party to avoid willingly making life worse for the nation’s poorest citizens, but I do not trust them to undertake truly original initiatives to mend what is broken within American society.

So long as I have reason to believe that the choice in American politics is between the party that doesn’t care about the poor and the party that cares about them only enough to make themselves look good, I won’t be much inclined to take empty pronouncements on the topic seriously, not matter which side they come from.

Okay, so What do we Call a Rebuttal of a Pre-buttal?

Given some recent comments and maneuvers made by his campaign, I’m finding that lately I like Mitt Romney less with every passing day. The latest example of impetus for my diminished opinion of him: the State of the Union Pre-buttal.

First of all, the very notion of a pre-buttal constitutes a sad statement about the status of our national discourse. Has it really come to be too much to ask for the participants in a debate to try to let one another speak before they attempt to refute the statements that each is likely to make? What kind of example are you setting for your audience if you indicate that they don’t even have to listen to the other side of the argument in order to know that it’s wrong? I get it: You disagree with whatever he says whenever he says it. But that provides you with plenty of material to comment on from the recent past, without having to ask your audience to gather round the crystal ball while you go into detail about what’s wrong with the statements that are yet to come.

There’s no such thing as a pre-buttal. It’s a goddamn oxymoron. You either make the first volley in a debate or you rebuff the initial comments in a response. You can’t preemptively undercut the lead participant’s position and then stand back and gloat over his failure to address your objections in the remarks that he prepared well ahead of time. Your confidence is admirable, Mitt, but it’s belied by your refusal to let the audience have another opinion in memory, to which they can compare your grandstanding.

Now to be fair, Mitt Romney didn’t invent the pre-buttal. It seems like it’s becoming common practice now during the Obama administration, but John Edwards made the same dick move before George W. Bush’s 2008 address. But neither the fact that it has been done on both sides of the aisle nor the fact that he’s just going along with the devolution of political etiquette is an excuse. Anyone who thinks that a debate doesn’t have to have structure is a dim-witted political opportunist more interested in manipulating a crowd than making a valid argument, and he’s worsening the state of American politics.

But just giving a speech a stupid name doesn’t make it that objectionable, right? You’ve got to look at the content; it could be a perfectly normal campaign speech that just happens to coincide with the State of the Union address.

Well, first of all, it truly lives up to the stupid name:

“It's shameful for a President to use the State of the Union to divide our nation.”

He hasn’t said anything yet, jackass!

Mitt refers directly to the State of the Union further into the text of the speech, as well, and couples the manipulative anachronism with vibrant red herrings:

“If tonight were the first message to Congress in a Romney administration, I'd have the courage to tell the American people how it is and tell Congress what we really need to do. I wouldn't spend my time blaming others for how we got in this mess; I'd explain how we're going to get out of it. I'd use the State of the Union to lay out an agenda that will get our country back on track and get our fiscal house in order.”

Well that’s great, Mitt, but it’s really not of issue right now, is it? If you were giving your first State of the Union address, it would be either a fictitious two years ago, or a potential two years from now. And guess what? Whatever President Obama says tonight – which, again, we haven’t heard yet – it’s going to be markedly different from the remarks he made during his first year in office, or that he will make during the first year of his second term.

If you want to create an elaborate false reality in which you’re president, Mitt, fine. But you can’t choose which year of your presidency it is, so let’s assume either that it’s the present and you’ve been in charge since 2009, or that it’s 2015 and you’re three quarters of the way through the term you’re seeking now. If by some chance – and I know this is a tremendous stretch of the imagination – you haven’t managed in that time to reduce unemployment to record lows while eliminating the debt and growing the army into something that “no one would think of challenging,” what would your speech be like then? Would you charge forward and explain how we’re going to get out of it this time, and never pause to explain the context for why a Romney administration doesn’t preside over utopia? Would you still expect no one to call you on your bullshit?

Even if I were going to vote for you Mitt, I wouldn’t expect you to come remotely close to fulfilling your insanely delusional promises. I didn’t expect it of Obama, and I wouldn’t expect it of anyone. Promises do not constitute “the courage to tell the American people how it is.” Honest, thorough explanations do.

But the piece de resistance of irrational political discourse comes near the end, though one has to admire the balls on a man who is willing to essentially tell people with a straight face that he’s blowing smoke up their asses:

“Do we want a president who will try to explain again why his policies haven't worked? Do we want a president who will keep promising that this time he will get it right? Do we want a president who keeps telling us why he's right and why we're wrong? Or do we want the sense of excitement that comes with a new beginning?”

Seriously, Mitt? That’s your argument? That we’d be better off electing somebody different simply because he’s different, because that would be exciting and allow delusional Republicans to experience the ecstatic expectation of miracles that delusional Democrats enjoyed four years previous? You think your constituents should vote for you because you won’t have to explain why your policies haven’t worked? No kidding, they haven’t worked, you haven’t fucking done anything yet! You think they should vote for you because when you promise that you’ll get it right, you’re promising it for the first time? You think cocksure certitude about his own views somehow distinguishes Obama from you?

Jesus, Mitt, given how well-groomed you are, you must look in the mirror once in a while. Have you ever paid any attention to yourself? A few moments of introspection would probably prevent you from being increasingly insufferable. If amidst the tight schedule of your campaign you don’t have time for that, I’ll look forward to the next thing you say or do to make me despise you more.

Mitt Romney's Delusion of Meritocracy

I always find myself inching towards a breaking point in my patience for political double-talk when I hear someone who has benefited from extraordinary material and social advantages preaching about the evils of “entitlement society” and how they undercut the meritocracy in which we are supposedly now living. And so it is with Mitt Romney’s stump speech. Much of his campaign rhetoric has sought to paint him as the ideological opposite to an Obama presidency that advances entitlement and discourages hard work and education.

You may disagree with the effectiveness of Democratic policies, but it seems asinine to fail to acknowledge that the initiatives of people like President Obama are precisely aimed at providing opportunities for work and education to all Americans. But Mitt Romney apparently identifies these efforts as aspects of “a society where government takes from some and gives to others; tries to make everybody the same.”

Nobody who isn’t a robot strives to make everybody the same. No Democrats that I know of think that is either possible or desirable. The goal is to prevent an unfair disparity in the opportunities that are available to different kinds of people from cradle to grave. And I suppose that only a person who has never been on the bottom half of that divide, or who has forgotten what it was like, would fail to understand that.

As such a person, Romney says:

“I believe in something I'll call an opportunity society, a merit society where people, based upon their education and their hard work and their risk-taking, are able to earn rewards.”

And looking closely at those words, I see a significant indication of the inability of people like Mitt Romney to so much as perceive the effects of existent inequality. I believe that virtually everybody shares the ideal of a society in which hard work and education lead a person to success and prosperity. It just happens that those of us who have put forth earnest and constant efforts, and obtained the fullest education available to us have found the reality to be far from that ideal.

Meanwhile, people who have never wanted for anything tend to believe that they were competing on a level playing field and that their own hard work and education and risk-taking provided them with the fruits that they have enjoyed throughout life. But that phrase “risk-taking” points to the cognitive dissonance implicit in believing both that personal investment is foundational and that preexisting advantages are irrelevant.

If risk-taking is part of a trifecta of personal behaviors that define an individual’s success, it requires some rather fuzzy logic to conclude that everybody has an equal shot at earning the rewards that Romney speaks of. Taking a risk for the sake of success means gambling with resources, and if you don’t have sufficient resources to start with, the prospect of taking a material risk means either venturing less for the sake of a more modest reward or pursuing the irrational course of action by putting more on the table than you can afford to pay should the risk fail.

After all, the term “risk” presupposes the possibility of failure. That’s well and good if your father was the CEO of American Motors by the time you were seven, and you therefore have the means to cover your losses. But if you were born working class, have the support only of working class people, or of no one at all, and are starting your education, career, and all else from scratch, a risk that fails can doom your life. If you’re on the bottom, you can work harder than anyone you know, and educate yourself to the utmost, but if you’re not presented with an actual opportunity to ascend, the bottom is where you stay.

Romney evidently thinks that hard work and education are not enough, and that risk-taking is the third requirement of meritocracy, and perhaps the very thing that creates those opportunities for ascent. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” they say. Fine, but what if you have nothing to venture – nothing, that is, but your hard work and education? It seems to me that the only response to such a person’s hardship that still maintains a belief in meritocracy is to fault them for either choosing not to gamble more than they own or for gambling so much and losing.

But in point of fact, I think the actual response to such people is to avoid looking down the cracks through which they’ve fallen, and to simply pretend that they never existed.