Recently, while cleaning up his law firm files, Friend of RP Harvey Burg uncovered a gem of a speech by the late Michigan Governor (and HUD Secretary) George Romney, who’s earning greater renown as the father of the GOP’s current presidential nominee.
In vivid contrast to his son — and to the current direction of much of his own Grand Old Party — George Romney makes a well-reasoned appeal to stimulate private participation by investors, by having the government prime the pump and put in place appropriate and coordinated programming. Mitt’s dad understood that federal government programming on a major level was required to stimulate the economy.
Here are several excerpts:
Speaking about his Republican government’s accomplishments in 1969, Romney states:
“Despite the worst credit crunch in modern times…we were able to keep enough capital flowing into the mortgage market to sustain housing production…”
Speaking about needed ingredients of a national housing policy, he lists among his components:
“adequate levels of government assistance for housing low income families.”
“efficient administration and prompt processing in government programs” and
“effective concern for the economic and social implications of housing, including equal job and enterprise opportunity for minority citizens.”
Read the rest of… RP EXCLUSIVE: A Full-Throated Appeal For Government Stimulus…By George Romney
For those concerned about the “context” of the Mitt Romney fundraiser video circulating over the Internet tubes, Mother Jones has published the full 50 minute video. Here it is, divided in two parts:
By Lauren Mayer, on Tue Sep 18, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET
Romney’s remarks (and economic policies) are strangely reminiscent of 1929, right before the Great Depression. Fortunately, that was a really good time for songwriters, so I couldn’t resist . . . .
Here’s one 23-year Washington veteran (and friend of The RP) who became so frustrated by the Obama Justice Department’s failure to make Wall Street investigations a top priority that he moved to Savannah to write a book about it.
Jeff Connaughton, a former Biden Senate staffer and Clinton White House lawyer, most recently served as chief of staff to then Senator Ted Kaufman (D-DE), who chaired two oversight hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee on financial fraud prosecution — the first in December 2009 and a second in September 2010.
Check out this review in Main Justice, and read an exclusive excerpt of “The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins” below:
Click here to review and purchase
“For me, what is deplorable is not the Justice Department’s failure to bring charges, but its failure to be adequately dedicated and organized either to make the cases or reach a fully informed judgment that no case could be made.
Given the inadequate effort, as President Obama virtually admitted in his 2012 State of the Union address when he announced the formation of yet another task force (which remains an ill-staffed farce), we’ll never know what an appropriate effort would have produced. And that has resulted in the appearance of a double standard.
If the explanation for the inadequate effort is corruption (the administration could not afford to anger Wall Street contributors), the revolving door, or a belief that the health of the financial industry is more important than legal accountability, then we have an actual double standard.
I don’t know the explanation, but in terms of faith in our institutions, it may not matter whether the double standard is real or apparent. That double standard has torn the social and moral fabric of our country in a way I find to be unforgivable.”
At long last, thanks to the folks at ESPN, WSOP.com, Caesar’s, Veetle.com, and our extraordinary Webmaster, Justin Burnette, we are now proud to share with you video from The RP’s impossible journey to the final table of the 2012 World Series of Poker, $1000-buy-in no limit Texas hold ’em event. (Click here to read his full account.)
Specifically, the video below shows the final twenty minutes of The RP’s four day, 40 hour marathon in which he finished in 8th place out of the original 4,260 entries.
The folks at ESPN obviously knew The RP’s best side, so most of the video of the final table is shot from behind our erstwhile blogger, who sits in front center of the screen, back to camera, in a white shirt with blue sleeves and a tan No Labels hat — which unfortunately, had no label on its back. So we miss his poker face — and the naive surprise in his eyes for having the extraordinary luck to be where he was.
But, we do get to see some entertaining hands in these 20 minutes: The RP surviving two all-ins in which he was the big underdog; an opponent with a much larger stack getting eliminated, thereby earning The RP an additional $14,000; and the final hand in which The RP gracefully exits the stage.
For the most part, Bill Clinton’s reconstruction of the Democratic Party is a masterpiece that did not survive the consummate political artist’s time in power: balanced budgets seem like a relic of a bygone era; the pro-growth, business friendly wing of the Democratic Party has given way to Elizabeth Warren style populism; and modulated stances on social issues have been replaced with legal fights against Catholic hospitals, rhetorical battle cries about a “War on Women”, and a place in the party’s platform for a fifty state right of same sex marriage.
The exception, the one preserved centrist jewel from that era, had been (until last week) the 1996 reform of welfare. As a policy instrument, the conversion of welfare from an entitlement to an earned benefit conditioned on work, job training, or secondary level education like a GDE program rested on decades of data about the perils of dependency in poor communities. As a political instrument, coupling public assistance with a work requirement achieved a stunning result: a benefit program that had been deeply controversial, and racially polarizing, was re-crafted as a bipartisan amalgam of left-leaning altruism and right-leaning notions of personal responsibility.
As a result, one of the most contentious ideological disputes between seventies and eighties era conservatives and liberals all but disappeared as a flashpoint. It has been Social Security and Medicare–not welfare–that movement conservatives have sought to redesign in the past eight years, and the most provocative expenditure of public dollars in the last four years has been the transfer of nearly a trillion dollars to the banking and automobile industries rather than any form of public assistance.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: Setting Welfare Back on Fire
I think it is a great pick. Republicans need to remind voters about all the economic, deficit and budget promises Team Obama made during the 2008 campaign and the 2009/10 recovery efforts.
These promises and efforts have fallen short. To Republicans and many other Americans, Obama promised a lot that he didn’t deliver on, and his recovery efforts broke many of the promises he made about the budget and deficits.
Republicans want to keep the campaign on the economy, deficits and our budget problems. Obama needs to keep it on Mitt Romney and how out of touch he is.
Ryan is a conservative, but his ability to lay out the numbers in a very factual way will cause the Democrats problems.
He will perfectly contrast with Joe Biden. I love Joe; he seems like a great guy who means well, but how did he ever become a senator and VP?
Let’s face it: This guy hasn’t seen the ball since kickoff.
I bet the Obama team is already shaking about the VP debate. Hopefully they can keep it on foreign policy and not the budget or economy.
Sure he is conservative, but he backs up exactly what Republicans want this campaign to be about- A president who understands the economy and jobs, along with a VP who knows the budget and government programs.
I’m sure the Democrats will want to make the campaign about their conservative views and how that will cut government programs and hurt people, but even that gets to the debate Republicans want.
I don’t know if they can win that debate, but it is worth having and it will be fun to watch.
By Robert Kahne, RP Staff, on Mon Aug 13, 2012 at 1:30 PM ET
I have to object pretty strongly to Jonathan’s first reason for liking the Paul Ryan pick–I believe the characterization of Paul Ryan as a policy wonk is an affront to policy wonks of all stripes.
As Mr. Allen very astutely characterized, Ryan is an ideologue–which is perfectly fine! He is a politician, that is the best thing for an ideologue to be! However, it frustrates me to no end when people say that Paul Ryan is driven by policy. He is clearly not.
Like most other people, he is driven by a set of core beliefs in which he has faith. They were also illuminated by Mr. Allen: tax cuts always stimulate, and government spending is fundamentally bad.
My biggest problem with Mr. Ryan is that he tries to use policy research and econometrics (my fields of study) to justify his beliefs. Here is an example of what frustrates me: when I was getting my Masters degree in public policy, we had a class which was essentially about how to be a non-partisan research staffer for a legislative branch. One of the lessons we had was about how to deal with policy makers who try to rig the rules of the game to get their research staffs to achieve the conclusions that they want, rather than conclusions that reflect reality. The example for the class? Paul Ryan. (The issue at hand was his 2010 “Roadmap”, for which he asked the CBO to ignore all possible economic effects of his tax cuts, because, as Mr. Allen states above, he believes tax cuts to be stimulatory.)
To me, Paul Ryan is Sarah Palin with a better education. His ideas are as conservative and (in my opinion) bad for the county, but he wraps them in fuzzy math to make them seem more palatable to the media adjudicators of our society–and is somewhat successful in doing that.
As somebody who spent a lot of time working hard to understand the economic effects of policy, nothing drives me more mad than seeing a trusted news person reading from a congressional white paper something that defies the basics of policy analysis.
Politically speaking, however, I think that the pick of Paul Ryan furthers my hypothesis that the 2012 election is exactly like the 2004 election–a prohibitive front runner during the challenging party’s primaries who the base really does not like running against a bunch of bad candidates who eventually and inevitably wins his party’s nomination to challenge a President with middling approval numbers but who is fiercely hated by the other party’s base, who chooses a running mate which his base absolutely adores but with whom the rest of the country is somewhat unimpressed. I see the end stacking up a lot like 2004–a clear, but close, reelection of the sitting President. (A fun game is trying to match up the primary candidates from 2004 with 2012–Gephardt-Gingrich, Cain-Dean, Bachmann-Mosely Braun, etc).
I think the pick was the best possible one Mitt Romney could have made. But, as a Democrat, I don’t like him.
By Artur Davis, on Mon Aug 13, 2012 at 11:30 AM ET
I will offer the obligatory caveat: I know Paul Ryan from serving with him on two congressional committees for all eight years I served in the House. It is not fair to call him a friend, at least not in the way human beings who aren’t politicians use that term, but I liked him a great deal. I liked the little things– when he engaged you in conversation, you had his attention and his eyes didn’t drift in search of a more powerful member, or a potential donor– and I admired the more consequential things, like his genuine smarts and the fact that when he spoke on the floor or in hearings, you heard the product of an active mind that didn’t need ghostwriting or lobbyist drafted talking points.
Frankly, I don’t know the politics of the pick. The Obama campaign is way too thrilled at this announcement for me to attribute it just to gamesmanship or wishfulness: they know that the Ryan budget plan has not polled well, that its realignment of Medicare unsettles seniors, and that to some independents (and Newt Gingrich) it looks more like ideological engineering than a response to our current bout of economic stagnation. A campaign that just wrapped a woman’s death around Mitt Romney and Bain Capital, facts be damned, will not shrink from painting Ryan as a cold-blooded, Ayn Rand inspired radical who puts theory over people.
My hope, as someone who wants this ticket to win, is that Paul Ryan, an imminently decent and pleasant man, will look to Americans nothing like the caricature that Democrats are about to paint. The campaigner who has won easily in a district Barack Obama carried has the raw ability to make a case that his budget really is a blueprint for a shared prosperity. I also think he can and will point out that an entitlement structure built for a population that rarely lived past seventy has to be refitted for a future where octogenarians are the fastest rising age demographic; that universal, one size fits all Medicare coverage has always been more a political bribe to sustain support than some solemn moral commitment; that government overpromising its capacities is itself immoral; and that the first casualties of an entitlement train-wreck would be the poor and the vulnerable, and that they above all need the current compact to be amended so its best parts can survive.
My other hopes are that Paul Ryan’s reformer instincts aren’t just built around budgets. Conservatism needs to adopt education reform as a cause, not as a wedge against the selfishness of teachers unions, but as the most effective instrument to reduce inequality. Conservatism needs not just to repeal Obamacare but to replace it with a market based correction to the inadequacies of the status quo. The political right has to reclaim legal immigration as a point of pride and to distance itself from overheated claims about “us” losing “our” culture: that means much less talk about “self-deportation” crusades against illegals, much more confidence in assimilation, much more focus on an immigration regime that privileges individual responsibility and families.
The guy I admired from across the aisle and sometimes chatted with gets all of the above. I also think that Ryan knows that his party’s (and now my party’s) future rests on conservatism growing and adapting to a changed economic world in a way that liberalism never has.
So, without minimizing the risk in claiming a space that Democrats have effectively attacked for years, I felt inspired seeing Paul Ryan rise from obscurity to the epicenter of politics in the last 24 hours. If this ends well, a campaign that has been accused of running a prevent defense without being ahead may have just made a downpayment on its party’s future.
