Jamison Foser

My Critics Are Wise And Noble People

MSNBC’s Steve Benen explains a central flaw in Mitt Romney’s strategy of elevating Bill Clinton:

Romney is making a serious mistake building up Clinton as a credible, respected voice who Americans should not only remember fondly, but listen to when it comes to politics and policy. In other words, Romney's "wedge" strategy is premised on elevating the Democratic icon on purpose.

Regardless of the fact that the differences between Clinton and Obama are effectively non-existent, what exactly is Romney's plan when Clinton starts campaigning aggressively on Obama's behalf, delivering a major primetime address in support of Obama during the Democratic National Convention?

Or more to the point, if Romney is spending much of 2012 telling voters that Clinton is reliable and worthy of respect, won't that be a problem when the Big Dog is urging voters to rally behind Barack Obama and reject Romney's candidacy?

That’s exactly right.

I don’t remember if I’ve ever made this point publicly (I know I have privately, often) but Democrats did the same thing with John McCain from the late 1990s through 2006 or so.* McCain would come to town to campaign for a Republican candidate, and the Democratic campaign would put out a press release hyping disagreements between McCain and the Republican, and playing up areas of agreement between McCain and the Democrat. I remember one mid-2000s Democratic campaign press release that announced (this is a very close paraphrase) “[Democratic candidate] and John McCain fight for working families.” Then McCain campaigned for the Republican.

Just about the best the Democratic campaigns could hope for as a result of these tactics was a line or two deep in a newspaper writeup of the GOP campaign event noting an area of disagreement between McCain and the Republican candidate. Meanwhile, they’re enhancing the credibility of someone who is endorsing and campaigning for their opponent. And, as an added drawback, they’re building up the credibility of someone who was widely seen as the best future presidential candidate the Republican Party had to offer.

If such tactics have little potential payoff, and obvious unintended consequences, why do campaigns seem to like them so much? In part because it’s the kind of superficially smart thing that wins political operatives praise from their colleagues and reporters. And because a lot of people don’t know the difference between superficially smart things that win praise from political reporters and operatives and things that are actually smart.

* The harshness of this post is addressed to my younger self as much as anyone else: In my time at the DNC and DCCC in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I engaged in this kind of thing, sometimes enthusiastically. I should also acknowledge that these are the kinds of things that get far more attention than they deserve: A Democratic Senate campaign was no more likely to be lost by building up John McCain than it was to be won by driving a wedge between McCain and the Republican candidate. These tactics just don’t matter all that much, though they sometimes demonstrate broader and (somewhat) more significant tendencies, like messaging that inadvertently reinforces counterproductive frames. Finally, and perversely: There is some benefit to being seen as smart and effective by the reporters who cover your campaign, even if it is as a result of something that is neither.

Harry Reid & Mitt Romney's Taxes

Seven things about the Harry Reid/Mitt Romney tax controversy:

1. Though I raised the possibility that Mitt Romney is refusing to release his taxes because doing so would show he had paid zero net federal income taxes in at least one year way back in January, I’d be quite surprised if he had paid no taxes for ten years.
2. I doubt Harry Reid really believes Romney paid no federal income taxes for ten years, either, so his comments on the topic are likely at least a bit disingenuous. (I don’t find it hard to believe that someone who claimed to have knowledge told Reid Romney had paid no taxes, just that Reid believes this to be true.)
3. Politicians who make disingenuous claims generally deserve to be criticized.
4. The way PolitiFact chose to criticize Reid is, unsurprisingly, stupid. PolitiFact says that because Reid has not proven his claim, he is a “pants-on-fire” liar. By this standard, Romney -- who has said there was not a year in which he paid less than 13 percent taxes, but has not proven the claim, is also a pants-on-fire liar. (Don’t hold your breath waiting for PolitiFact to tell you that.) Also by this standard: PolitiFact, which has said Reid is lying but has not proven he is lying, is itself a bunch of pants-on-fire liars. Like I said: Dumb. PolitiFact has three basic problems: Their work is often lazy, dumb, or both; they apply frequently-misleading labels like “mostly true” and “pants-on-fire” to everything in a triumph of gimmickry and marketing over clarity and substance; and they’re remarkably thin-skinned, sanctimonious, and unresponsive to substantive criticisms of their errors of fact and logic for an organization that presents itself as guardians of truth.
5. Still, PolitiFact’s incompetence doesn’t excuse Reid’s actions. If people want to criticize Reid fairly and accurately, have at it.
6. But I won’t. Harry Reid has (I suspect) made disingenuous statements, but he has done so in an effort to draw attention to Mitt Romney’s refusal to release his taxes as other presidential candidates have regularly done. Romney’s is the greater sin, and focusing criticism on Reid only makes it more likely that Romney is able to get away with his historic lack of transparency. Romney is a striking example of how the tax code is rigged in favor of the wealthy, but he refuses to release his taxes to show how he has benefited from this. Romney advocates tax and spending policies would greatly benefit the wealthy at the expense of the vast majority of Americans, yet he refuses to release his taxes to show how he personally would profit from those policies. In that context, hand-wringing over Harry Reid’s mischief seems at best a misallocation of resources and at worst has the result of enabling Romney’s stonewalling.
7. That Romney has made it this far without releasing his taxes should be an embarrassment to the political media. They’ll say there’s nothing more they could’ve done to force him to do so, which is absolute nonsense. If Mitt Romney’s refusal to release his taxes was front-page news every day, and led every evening newscast -- if reporters hounded Romney over the documents with one tenth the enthusiasm they brought to their pursuit of Bill Clinton over a land deal in which he lost money -- then, perhaps they could say they’ve done all they could. But they haven’t, and so Harry Reid is trying to force the issue.