2012 republican presidential nominee III: can romney get santorum out of his hair?

doubt this arc is gonna run til November

xp

there's the meta-effect of determining the grounds and bounds of 'conversation' about the candidate. the media and public chase each other in these things and candidacies try to control the perceptions of both. mitt romney does not want his character or the election to be about leveraged buyouts or private equity firms; chances are everyone will be talking about something else soon anyway, but even conservatives have to admit that everyone hates bankers and managers at the moment. the hysterical treatment of all of this from places like NR is clear enough.

note how romney responded to the attacks from gingrich about bain capital by saying, in his acceptance speech, that obama wants to put all of free enterprise on trial

"I think anytime a job is lost, it's a tragedy," the candidate admitted. "For the family, for the individual that loses the job, it's just devastating. And every time we invested in a business, it was to try to encourage that business to have ongoing life. The idea of making a short-term profit doesn't really exist in business."

wd've linked Giuliani on Fox calling Newt an "ignorant" anti-capitalist, but why spoil everyone's lunch?

doubt this arc is gonna run til November

it's not, but it does its work! I'm sticking with my early-rounds metaphor man. Don't get me wrong I'm w/you on the bigger question of what's the fuckin difference but to switch sports, from a handicapping-the-race standpoint the GOP horse looks pretty washy at its morning workouts

Meanwhile (consider the links Sullivan provides):

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/01/does-romney-have-a-mormon-problem-with-evangelicals.html

Consider that any attacks made by Obama on Romney's Bain connection would have to be made by surrogates atm, it is highly convenient that his surrogates happen to be Republicans. Romney is still struggling with how to answer these. Of course, if he solves this puzzle now, it will help deflect the attacks in Sept and beyond, when it counts.

I don't think there is a 'solve this puzzle', rich people who fire poor people will be a sore subject in nov 2012 absent uh 10% gdp growth every month til then

isn't the answer to call everyone a commie, like Giuliani and Limbaugh have been doing?!

the politics of "envy" stuff still plays well with some stubborn dittohead folks who won't admit Wall Street and mortgage industry folks did anything sleazy

right but the fact that the guy who already won the nomination still has to alienate the public just to keep the base is telling

rich people who fire poor people will be a sore subject

Ah, yes, but hard-working capitalists who reorganize businesses to strengthen them and let them grow new jobs in the future, now that is a different kettle of fish. It's the old competing narratives thingie again.

that kettle of fish doesn't smell the same in 2012

There's a large portion of the public that he is not alienating. There are polls showing Romney ahead of Obama in Florida and elsewhere

yeah he polls better against a currently unpopular president than the rest of the field, but that's just due to...the rest of the field.

the bigger issue is that the guy who just won the nomination isn't gonna have the chance to 'move to the center', there's not gonna be any 'compassionate conservative' talk, he's being forced to double down on the brute force capitalism and robot businessman persona. that might not alienate everybody, but it does alienate plenty of people. and his business career - his ace in the hole w/ a shitty economy - is already being framed as the guy who fires people instead of the guy who hires people.

worth noting that gingrich's attack -- that private equity is 'vulture capitalism' and not good for anyone else is basically true.

well that's something of a simplification, I'd go for 'quite often true'

http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/an-interview-with-josh-kosman-on-the-embeddedness-of-private-equity-in-the-tax-code/

Kosman: The whole industry started in the mid-to-late 1970s. The original leveraged buyout firms saw that there were no laws against companies taking out loans to finance their own sales, like a mortgage. So when a private equity firms buys a company and puts 20 percent down, and the company puts down 80 percent, the company is responsible for repaying that.

Now the tax angle is that the company can take the interest it pays on its loans off of taxes. That reduces the tax rate of companies after they are acquired in LBOs by about half. Banks, also realizing this tax effect, were willing to finance these deals. At the time, you could also depreciate the assets of the company you were buying — that’s not true today.

They saw that you could buy a company through a leveraged buyout and radically reduce its tax rate. The company then could use those savings to pay off the increase in its debt loads. For every dollar that the company paid off in debt, your equity value rises by that same dollar, as long as the value of the company remains the same.

Konczal: So the business model is based on a capital structure and tax arbitrage?

Kosman: Yes. It’s a transfer of wealth as well. It’s taking the wealth of the company and transferring it to the private equity firm, as long as it can pay down its debt. It think it is real – the very early firms targeted industries in predictable industries with reliable cash flows in which they by and large could handle this debt. As more went into this industry, it became very hard to speak to the original model. Now firms are taken over in very volatile industries. And they are taking on debts where they have to pay 15 times their cash flow over seven years — they are way over-levered.

well my point was more in this paragraph

That sounds about right. If you took away this deduction, you’d still have takeovers, but you’d have a lot less leverage and the buyer would be forced to really improve the company in order to make profits. I think that would be a great thing.

The passion!

http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/santorum-calls-romney-bland-1301750.html

"You think of Romney, you think of boring times! You think of Santorum and you're all excited, I can tell!"

Meantime, the continuing success of Rick Perry's presidential campaign:

http://www.wtvr.com/news/wtvr-virginia-gop-primary-ruling-20120113,0,6053544.story

Rick Perry is an incredible candidate, it's like watching a real-life Peter Griffin running for office

actually, more like Mayor Adam West

In retrospect I really wish he had somehow muddled through to win the nomination and then completely fallen apart after that.

This gives added weight to Paul's call for the rest of the pack to quit.

I am still laughing about the mannequin story.

Rick's presidential campaign > movie comedies where a schmuck runs for office.

the thing about the mannequin story is that it's obvious that he's joking, but it says TONS that there was actually a brief, serious conversation about whether he could tell that it was a mannequin or not

Rick has to be primaried next go-round in Texas right?

Meanwhile (consider the links Sullivan provides):

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/01/does-romney-have-a-mormon-problem-with-evangelicals.html

― Ned Raggett, Friday, January 13, 2012 1:55 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i almost find it hard to believe that mitt WOULDN'T have a problem with evangelicals...like if voting your religion is a big part of your worldview, how could you justify voting for him?

^^

alot of the mormons I knew were just as stupid close minded and uptight as most of these evangelicals.. its just a difference in details

From Ned's link:

"In essense, they played the game, lost, and then complained that the rules were unfair," wrote Judge Gibney in his opinion released Friday afternoon in Richmond, Virginia.

http://petswithnewt.com

Newt back-pedalling like a motherfucker:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/gingrich-repudiates-super-pac-for-inaccurate-video

But probably not unhappy with the results:
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/elections/election_2012/election_2012_presidential_election/south_carolina/election_2012_south_carolina_republican_primary
http://americanresearchgroup.com/pres2012/primary/rep/sc/

Also have we had this?
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/tyFaWhygzjQ"; frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Hey let's try that again:

http://www.youtube.com/embed/tyFaWhygzjQ

Fuck it, you get the idea.

heard on the radio something that made it sound like the new "back pedaling" might have actually been clever political judo---apparently the romney campaign was associated with a super-PAC produced video that was inaccurate, and didn't have it pulled because they claimed that they were not allowed to communicate with super-PACs, legally. sooooo this happens with the newt campaign and it makes him look like a stand-up guy who's against negative politics

Gingrich soundbite on NPR: "If we nominate a moderate who's anywhere near Obama, we will lose."

1) admits O is a 'mod' Repug and not a socialist!
2) stoopid for not recognizing the only way to win!

To a large extent Obama has followed a strategy of becoming a moderate republican as a way of forcing the republicans to further identify with their fringier elements as the only way to accentuate their differences with the democrats. The core problem with this strategy is obvious: the definition of a moderate republican keeps sliding rightward, the policies of the government keep sliding rightward and the plutocracy has become so entrenched we may never disodge it without actual bloodshed.

Obama's not much further right than Nixon at this point

urgh

eh I think that's reading a meta-strategy on top of something that's happening for other reasons. and 'moderate republican' doesn't really mean anything today so there's nowhere for it to slide.

@RobbieBrown07 Romney just handed a wad of dollar bills to a woman at an event in Sumter, S.C., who said she's homeless and jobless.

make it bain

Obama's not much further right than Nixon at this point

um

Newt would have given her
audio cassettes of his old lectures. That's what she really needs to get her life in order.

x-post imagine I said that sarcastically, then sighed heavily

I've officially missed my first "debate"--just found out via Sullivan that there's another one of those I-Heart-Huckabee forums going on (minus Paul). He says Gingrich got booed for a mild reference to Romney (thereby contravening the no-criticism rule). Shades of Dylan at Newport, I'm sure.

Obama's not much further right than Nixon at this point

um

People are saying "um" a lot lately for reasons I can't fathom.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/us/politics/mitt-romney-offers-praise-for-a-donors-business.html?_r=1

Mitt Romney and predatory for-profit secondary education, getting together to ensure that I hate them both that much more.

People are saying "um" a lot lately for reasons I can't fathom.

That's not particularly surprising

*sitcom clarinet*