Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Education, the Forgotten Campaign Issue


MAITLAND, FL - I live in central Florida in a suburban town known for its nationally-ranked public schools. As my wife and I did in moving here in 1988, the neighborhood's reputation for delivering a very good K-12 education is probably one of the chief factors in everyone's choice. The people who live in my neighborhood, mostly middle- to upper- middle income professionals with growing families, are rightly proud of their elementary, middle and high school. But when I walk my dog on these bucolic tree-lined streets these days, I see signs of disaster ahead for public education on a majority of the front lawns. That is, political signs indicating broad support here for the Republican ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. These two confirmed enemies of public education promise to cut federal funding for public schools and, more ominously, would likely severely cut the U.S. Department of Education if elected. My neighbors, in other words, with their votes on Nov. 6, inexplicably threaten to crush their own children's future educational prospects along with the dreams of millions of young Americans today and for generations to come. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2012/0827/Obama-vs.-Romney-101-5-differences-on-education/K-12-spending

Romney and Ryan, of course, have a hand in this willful ignorance. Each of them has determinedly said as little as possible about education on the stump for good reason: They would cut federal education spending drastically, shifting costs onto already financially strapped states and families. When a student asked Romney earlier in the campaign season about his support for students struggling to pay off college tuition bills, Romney suggested that such students borrow money from their parents. His record as governor provides little promise as well. A program Romney championed in Massachusetts offering "free" tuition for the state's top 10 percent in student performance proved frustrating for many of the state's cash-strapped families because it didn't cover thousands of dollars in university student fees.

Ryan's own stated policy plans demonstrate an even more draconian intent. The Education Trust, a nonpartisan research firm, estimates the Ryan budget plan would cut almost  $170 billion in student aid over 10 years, wiping out aid for less-than-halftime students, severely limiting qualifications rules, and converting the entire Pell Grant program into a vulnerable non-discretionary line item that could easily get axed by a Republican-dominated Congress, where Ryan would be the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. About 1 million students would be out of luck if Romney-Ryan prevails. 

What would the impact be for my Florida neighbors? According to a study(http://www.americanprogressaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/RomneyUStateBudgetsBrief-1.pdf) by American Progress Action, the Sunshine State would lose $361 million in federal funding for education and job training in 2013 alone. The result of a Romney-Ryan victory threatens an added burden on Florida property taxpayers such as my friends in Maitland -- that is, a choice of cutting benefits or raising taxes. And in the Republican-dominated statehouse, chances are the only option left open for discussion would be cuts in education funding. After all, this is a state where the government-run lottery promised to bring salvation to education, but since its inception in 1988 has managed to deliver under 40 percent of its revenues to the state's Educational Enhancement Trust Fund, covering only one-twentieth of Florida's annual education budget, according to a CBS News investigation (http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500690_162-3269456.html) that also reports Florida's per-pupil education spending went from 37th to 46th in the U.S.

Why has this turned out this way? Shamelessly, the legislature simply replaced taxes shifted from the education budget with lottery proceeds, resulting in a net loss for public schools statewide over the last two decades. (61% to 53% of state spending between 1986 and 2003, as reported by the St. Petersburg Times here. http://www.sptimes.com/2003/11/03/Columns/Don_t_be_fooled__lott.shtml

In stark contrast, President Barack Obama has expanded the Pell Grant program substantially, while also pursuing changes in elementary and middle school policy geared toward improving the public school system's effectiveness in delivering positive student outcomes. His policy plans include no cuts to higher education grants, in service to his belief that broad based public support for a college education correctly addresses corporate America's growing demand for better-trained work force as the economic recovery accelerates. Furthermore, the president substantially favors policies that address the rising cost of higher education -- which is the second largest pile of debt facing American families today. He does so by cutting in half the interest owed on federal student loans, limiting monthly payments by linking them to the students' post-graduation income, and by reducing the total lifetime outlay for such loans to $20,000. No one doubts that, like their promises to kill Obamacare, Romney-Ryan administration would eviscerate most if not all of those initiatives.

President Obama has also focused on pragmatic improvements allowing schools to deliver better service to children at the classroom level. According to the White House, "To date, President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative has dedicated over $4 billion to 19 states that have created robust plans that address the four key areas of K-12 education reform as described below. These states serve 22 million students and employ 1.5 million teachers in 42,000 schools, representing 45 percent of all K-12 students and 42 percent of all low-income students nationwide." http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education/k-12/race-to-the-top

Like much of Mr. Obama's agenda since the 2010 election, his American Jobs Act proposals, with money to fund K-12 teaching positions lost to state budgetary shortfalls, have been ignored by Republicans in Congress who are intent on increasing already generous tax breaks for the very wealthy. "That's backwards. That's wrong," the president argued in a White House video seen here. http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2012/08/18/weekly-address-congress-should-back-plan-hire-teachers

So why all the Romney-Ryan signs in my school-proud Maitland neighborhood? I'm sure some of the folks here must be too busy to delve into these inconvenient facts. Perhaps my alternate hypothesis about this issue, though, is best summed up this way:
 "It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated." 
Alec Bourne

Thursday, October 11, 2012

An Open Letter to Obama: Why We Are Agitated

Dear President Obama,

I guess you’ve noticed, as I and some of my colleagues here on Daily Kos and elsewhere in the liberal punditocracy face the final weeks of the 2012 presidential race, that many supporters who were celebrating your lead in the polls merely eight days ago now are acting all jittery and agitated after you and Mitt Romney faced off last week for the debate in Denver. With all due respect, Mr. President, please allow me to explain our concern.

Mitt Romney clearly hosed you. Romney’s romp seems, overnight, to have moved the meter back toward the 48 Red-48 Blue division in America. That is a political precondition Mr. Romney and his minions wanted and needed again this election year, because it threatens to put the race for the White House, as in 2000, back into the Supreme Court, where Republicans know you will lose, 5 to 4. Even more incredulous for those of us who are counting on you, a 48-48 split in any swing state could put your fate into the hands of the many Republican voter-registration apparatchiks who are greasing the wheels of their political lives on the false accusations of voter fraud.

Mr. President, already, the resulting post-debate blowback provides a fairly obvious shift in the Right’s narrative. Your debate performance is fueling public vindication for the far-right-wing’s reality shape shifters, who are spending billions to restore the Reagan-Bush-Bush II reign of the 1%, by the 1% and for the 1%.

Your ardent supporters are mad because that unexpected debate debacle, Mr. Obama, was a stomach-wrenching turn in our political fortunes, not only yours. It was our worst nightmares realized. I can understand how this happened. You, Mr. President -- unlike the $220-Million-Dollar-Man and congenital liar that Mr. Romney surely is -- prior to the debate hadn’t arrived at the point of Electoral College Map desperation as the Romney-Ryan ticket had, and your campaign pushed you into following a run-out-the-clock game plan on debate night. Sorry to say, it was a disastrous decision.

Your supporters also are feeling knots in their stomachs today, knowing that something went terribly wrong on that stage one week ago, but not understanding exactly what was happening. The political uncertainty clouding your campaign, which has not been tamped down despite your new verbal thrusts on the campaign stump this week, may prove to be a new and corrosive element in the weeks ahead. Far from having “a bad night” as you admitted this week, the debate was an utter disaster. As Mr. Romney, Mr. Ryan and their surrogates themselves might gleely point out in the coming weeks, you built that.

Mr. President, we are angry that you apparently were prepared to debate an admitted “severe conservative,” and you appeared shell-shocked by the Moderate Mitt who showed up loaded for bear and cleaned your clock in almost every debate segment, His false attacks and reality-busting distractions (I’m talking Big Bird here) were designed to blur and lure --  blur the serious cuts to non-defense spending certain to come under a Romney-Ryan administration and lure your campaign’s brain trust into producing a “Romney Blames Big Bird” online video. We cringed today seeing that your campaign took the bait. Pathetic.

The Romney campaign took ownership of that stage appearance merely by being allowed to stand next to a great American president, before a TV audience of more than 60 million viewers. You perfunctory performance let them turn what should have been a stout defense of your policies of economic fairness into a classically misleading Republican political pitch full of false equivalency and prevarication. We feel sickened because the Republicans were, once again, proven to be the media savants who effortlessly spin fantasy and myth into focus-grouped middle-of-the-road pablum worthy of both George Orwell and Ayn Rand novels.

While you looked down, looked away, and looked disengaged, Mitt Romney attacked your policies, your promises, and your personality with almost no rebuttals. You know, rebuttals... arguments in response to debate attacks? This isn’t a “salesmanship” demonstration, as you tried to spin it yesterday. This was a heavyweight boxing match in which you, Mr. President, appeared unable to recover your footing for the entire night once Mr. Romney knocked you senseless before the first round was over.

This first debate was more than a “bad night” for the majority of Americans who are counting on you, in your second term, to keep this country of ours heading in a reasonable, forward-looking, pragmatic middle-class-jobs-building direction. We are sick to death seeing Romney’s snarky scion’s entitled smirk carry over into his numerous appearance in Ohio this week. Mr. President, we retch seeing actual voter sentiment for your campaign slipping away simply due to Mr. Romney’s demonstration of superior debating prowess.

Fact-checkers to the rescue? Hardly. Mr. Romney’s Etch-a-Sketch reversals, despite their factually specious nature, eviscerated your aimless talking points and other assorted ramblings. Like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, to name two prominent examples, Mr. Romney pretended to be the more reasonable man in the room. And while we know better, Romney’s dominance allowed uncommitted voters to take an imaginative leap to envision the upside of a Romney-Ryan administration projecting this brand of feigned forceful, confident bravado around the world.

So now we must acknowledge: Savvy political tactics, not policy wonkiness, wins the day. Fixing the strategy for your next debate starts with understanding what went wrong. I will begin the conversation here, and I invite my friends who care about your re-election to add their suggestions to this diary. Here’s some of what I think needs to be addressed:

• What to avoid: Too polite. Too cerebral. Too cool. Too disconnected. Too arrogant. Too above-the-fray.

• What one tactic to definitely nail: Going for the jugular.

• For everyone in the top tier of your campaign team, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and jettison this administration’s tendency to worship at the alter of cautious consensus. Say exactly what you feel. With passion. Sell yourself. Identify the majority voters’ attitudes where your policies coincide with public opinion.

• Don’t be shy or hang back because of any misplaced tendency to avoid confrontation. Your political strategists (should) know full well that any post-debate questions should be treated as incidental flare-ups easily mopped up in the weeks ahead, as Romney spokespeople and their paid shills at Fox demonstrate daily.

• Do your own 180-degree pivot on any and all political talking points in order to sound like the more reasonable man running for the presidency.

• Press issues and economic results during your first term that resonate with businesses, banks, and investment professionals. Don’t let Republicans define you as anti-business.

• Attend to your advantages as president. I expect Mr. Romney to keep bullying and disparaging you. Return the favor by touting your impressive results and comparing them to his spurious contributions as an entitled corporate raider and ineffectual and often absent Massachusetts governor.

• Attend to stage optics. Look directly into the camera, not at the moderator, and lean into the podium like you want to break out like a caged animal on attack.

• As I last wrote recently, I’d like to see you, Mr. President, turn in more scenes like the ones Jimmy Stewart had in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. Passionate. Directly attacking the discredited myths baked into the many years of Republican mendacity. Physically, act confident, even a bit dismissive toward Mr. Romney. Tell him to wipe that disgusting smirk off his face, to his face. Don’t call him “governor.”

• Keep this one thought in mind: that this time around, truth and good intentions must win out over lies and evil.

A week after the first 2012 Presidential Debate, one truth is clear: Being assertive and aggressive isn’t being unpresidential. For someone as resilient as you, President Obama, this should be a chance you appear hungry for. As you prepare for the rest of your campaign, look in the mirror every so often and admire the man who has courageously taken on al Qaida, taken out Osama and throttled the greedy excesses of the 1%. You have given this country a health-care plan that shows, for the first time in a generation, that government truly can do the right thing for all of us. Even the glib President Bill Clinton can't crow about that.

Sure, you’ll never be able to win the support of the Right-wing nut jobs who have taken over the Republican Party. In the coming debates, let the G.O.P. extremists seethe with hatred as you force them to confront each one of your past successes and your positive plans for future progress. Remind our citizens of the values you champion, such as compassion, justice, equal opportunity, and cautious, responsible vigilance.

One more thing. As long as I have your attention, Mr. President, I would like to thank you for all you’ve done and all you will accomplish in the coming years as president of all Americans.

Sincerely yours,

Fred Abel, blogger

P.S. My campaign contribution is on its way.

cc: Vice President Joe Biden, Michelle Obama, Jim Messina, David Plouffe, David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, Robert Gibbs, Dan Pfeiffer

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Romney's Advantage in Tonight’s Debate


As Democrats and progressives, let’s not kid ourselves about tonight’s debate. Mitt Romney is already the winner. Here’s why: superior stagecraft and tons of money.

Romney’s the winner not necessarily because his arguments were more persuasive. He’s better off merely because he showed up for the first audition and didn’t fall on his face, and the experience will only sharpen his image as a leading man in the next two debates. He’s won because, even if you don’t agree with anything he or his party espouses, Mitt Romney is a super-wealthy individual who appears to have the potential to fill the role one might imagine a Hollywood casting agent would seek for a presidential movie. He’s Michael Douglas with a taller forehead. A latter-day Ronald Reagan with a better command of tax avoidance, if not the delivery of his screenplay’s lines.

Now that Romney was able to stand on a Denver stage side-by-side with the sitting president and be treated with all the respect of that office and that event, undecided viewers, as well as advocates of the president who are professing lower enthusiasm for their choice this election season, received all the visual cues they needed to seriously allow themselves to consider -- perhaps for the first time -- Mitt Romney playing the most influential part any person could assume on the world stage.

Mitt Romney came out the winner Wednesday night because of some major built-in personal advantages he has in approaching these auditions. We have known, for example, that he himself strongly believes in his fitness for the role. He’s been angling for the part since, well, probably from the day his dad, George Romney -- the former head of a Detroit car company (American Motors Corporation), Michigan Republican governor (1963-1969), and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (1969-1973) -- was permanently furloughed on his path to the White House. That happened when George, a leading contender for the presidency in mid-1967, offhandedly described himself as being “brainwashed” by military advisors about the progress of the Vietnam War. It stands as one of the most memorable verbal turds of presidential politics in history, a gaffe heard around the world and certainly one that influenced young Mitt to tenaciously pursue the country’s highest office for much of his adult life. One could argue that George Romney’s famous abject failure back prior to the 1968 presidential primary is the foundation of his son’s passion for the part. Mitt Romney is on a mission, much like “W” was in going after Sadam Hussein, of finishing off what their fathers couldn’t.

Romney was the winner tonight because, despite new attempts at bringing common-sense rules to the 90-minute televised presidential debate format, the very form of formal debates infers a false equivalence that favors the challenger. Tonight’s debate locked the incumbent candidate in a place with no escape route from exposure to fallacious arguments or scripted attacks on his record. That is especially advantageous to Romney in light of this year’s particularly mendacious Republican campaign playbook. For the incumbent standing behind a podium on that stark stage tonight, there was no hunkering down behind the securely locked doors of the White House Situation Room or using the flag-draped backdrops of the office to burnish his message. By nature a cool customer, the president was exposed to subjective comparisons this particular man might certainly wish were ruled off limits: emotion, passion, ideological purity.

Romney and Ryan certainly have been failing -- up until the debate they were anywhere from three to ten points behind in key swing-state polls -- to make any of the G.O.P.’s well-funded scripted distortions of the president’s character or record stick. No matter. With the first debate under his belt, Mitt Romney and his supporters were smiling on the Republican talk-show victory tour on Thursday. Democrats may have had the advantage this summer and early fall, gloating over their opponent’s sliding poll numbers -- amid embarrassing videotaped sideshows showing Clint Eastwood bumbling through an imaginary inquisition of the president on stage at the Republican convention and Romney and Ryan both disparaging a large percentage of Americans as “moochers” and “takers.” The appeal of injustice among middle-class and more privileged whites has had a long history of political success in my lifetime, and it seems this year to have been given a rousing revival among a broad swath of voters who view an African-American president with suspicion if not downright scorn.

As we know from the daily tracking polls, however, Mitt has the support of 40-something percent of Americans who buy into the Romney-Ryan Republican narrative of lowering taxes on the rich purportedly to create jobs for the middle class. Why so many Americans believe that -- despite that very policy’s failure during several Republican administrations during the last 50 years -- is irrelevant, as are the arguments about it one way or the other. The month ahead will only open new opportunities for the Republican party to build their momentum and bring America, perhaps, a rerun of the 2000 election -- close enough to, um, squeak out a victory in November, by hook or by crook.

But, like all successful scripts, the next scenes certainly will come with their share of plot twists. Expect to see a barrage of Republican attack ads that will seek to put the president on the defensive over unemployment and worldwide Muslim unrest, drive up the incumbent’s negative ratings in the polls, and build on Romney’s “good first impression,” freshly viewed. The media will, of course, buy into the excitement of such a tightening race, thereby ensuring its fruition. How much money can we expect the Romney-Ryan campaign and its surreptitious SuperPacs to unleash? No one knows for sure, but with the Supreme Court Citizens United decision clearing the way for unlimited amounts of cash commitments from the wealthy, Republicans like Romney, who promise to permanently lower tax rates on the wealthy, stand to benefit.  “It will be no holds barred on the Republican side,” says a former political director at NBC News, Elizabeth Wilner, who is Campaign Media Analysis Group vice president for Kantar Media, considered to be the second largest global market research company. “All that money the Obama campaign has been expecting Romney to spend on ads will finally start to flow. The Obama campaign is betting on their message, while the Romney campaign is betting on tonnage.”

I hope I’m wrong about this prediction, but I fear I’m not. By Thursday, the presidential reelection campaign will be feeling the full force of the Republican Party’s media carpet bombing and the probable turn of voter sentiments toward their candidate, who, they will argue, they’ve successfully positioned as the “underdog.” The president’s reelection team will be scrambling to come up with a response as the race tightens. Let’s hope our president, with his extensive ground game and political campaign contributions of progressive friends in Hollywood and the business world, steps up his game and delivers a full-throated performance commensurate with the high stakes in this election.

Personally, I’d like to see Barack Obama turn in more scenes like the ones Jimmy Stewart had in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. Passionate. Directly attacking the discredited myths baked into the many years of Republican shapeshifting. Confident that this time around, truth and good intentions will win out over lies and evil.

Sounds like a great Hollywood movie in the making, but first we have to make sure we have nailed the script.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Imagining the “Presidential Zinger Debate”


Reportedly, Mitt Romney is preparing for his first meeting with Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential debates by learning to deliver what his managers describe as "zingers." As is typical for the inept Romney campaign in need of a quick injection of populist appeal, though, their very admission of his memorizing stinging remarks weeks ahead of the Wednesday night confrontation in Denver undermines the very definition of zingers as quick, witty and spontaneous. Do you wonder what a debate full of zingers might sound like? I have, and I think President Obama will be ready with his own retorts. So follow me to the first imaginary "Presidential Zinger Debate."


Romney: President Obama wants the American people to give him four more years even though the last four has been an abject failure to deliver for the middle class.
Obama: Gov. Romney’s campaign has shown great expertise in giving their candidate credit for my administration’s policies when they’ve worked, and blaming me when Republican policies haven’t.
Romney: America cannot afford more big government entitlements from an Obama administration bent on turning this country into a Paris on the Mississippi.
Obama: If Gov. Romney has his way with two terms in the White House, like President George W. Bush, American taxpayers will be on the hook for $6 trillion in debt -- all done in the name of “smaller government.” (He can be seen adding the quotes with his hands while saying this.)
Romney: President Reagan once famously said: “Government is the problem.” Mr. President, you are proving him correct.
Obama: The truth is, with the exception of Romneycare, your single term in office in Massachusetts, Gov. Romney, made that very point.
Romney: Look, my position on Obamacare is it’s a massive government takeover of health care. By definition that can’t work. It might have been right for Massachusetts, but most Americans agree it is better handled for less cost with private insurers giving the public what they ask for, unimpeded by government bureaucrats. 
Obama: Okay, so let me get this straight. You’re saying the Affordable Health Care Act actually works in practice, but as far as you’re concerned, it doesn’t work in theory?” Help us out here.
Romney: My economic plan is simple: Put people back to work by getting the government out of the business of picking winners and losers. That’s my top priority and the only road back to American prosperity.
Obama: Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of Detroit auto workers now back on the job because we believe in the American workers, who heard Gov. Romney call for America’s car companies to go bankrupt when the banks had already written them off.
Romney: Thanks to President Obama here, the amount of taxpayer spending on social programs over the last four years is greater than the New Deal and the Great Society put together. (Those are the facts, people!)
Obama: When Democrats spend money on the safety net, Republicans call it “unaffordable” and “wasteful.” Then they turn around and give billions in tax dollars to oil companies that don’t need the money and call it a “subsidy,” a “smart investment.” I call it "corporate cronyism."
Romney: The mainstream media has it wrong. Paul Ryan and I don’t favor the wealthy and big corporations over regular folks. We favor the all-American value of work rewarded.
Obama: I think Gov. Romney and Mr. Ryan have their words in the right place, but their policies not so much. An independent analyst found that their economic goals, if enacted, would cost every family in America about $2,000 a year more in taxes.
Romney: I promise you this: My administration will end the gridlock in Congress by calling for the passage of a balanced budget amendment by the end of my second term. (He smiles broadly and stares at the president.) 
Obama: Why is it whenever Republicans in Congress want fiscal responsibility and budget cuts, the discussion starts and stops with “non-defense discretionary spending” -- in other words, programs that support the 47 percent of Americans Gov. Romney says are, and I quote, “moochers”? (Again, he uses his hands for the quote marks.)
Romney: Mr. President, you want America’s needy to occupy Wall Street. I want Americans to occupy the assembly lines!
Obama: Now, I know one thing a majority of Americans doesn’t want: Mitt Romney occupying the White House!