You’d think we were watching a horse race the way the media is reporting on campaign fundraising. But of course that’s because the horse race metaphor is easy to understand and easier still to report on.
But NBC’s First Read makes some important points that involve more nuanced analysis and some actual THINKING to get to the heart of the matter:
Los Angeles Times reporter Maeve Reston went out on Long Island over the weekend to cover the fundraisers for Mitt Romney in the Hamptons. She hit paydirt with a a quote from a woman Reston described as a “New York City donor … who would not give her name” sitting in the “passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits.”
“I don’t think the common person is getting it. Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them. We’ve got the message. But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”
That sounds oddly reminiscent of another poster child of New York 1 Percenters, Leona Helmsley, the billionaire “Queen of Mean,” who was convicted of tax evasion in 1988. During her trial, one of her former housekeepers quoted her as saying, “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”
The Obama campaign doubled down on its attacks against Mitt Romney’s personal wealth today, releasing a new online video that slams the Republican presidential candidate over his offshore financial holdings in known tax havens.
The video, which features Obama’s campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt, makes some pretty bold claims, basically accusing Romney of using a Bermudan shell corporation to dodge U.S. taxes and hide the extent of his personal fortune.
While the attacks are so far unsubstantiated, the video does raise three interesting questions that Romney has yet to answer about his offshore holdings:
[When] Romney himself was running a government, in his case the state of Massachusetts, he was even more defensive about his lack of control of the employment picture than Obama is today. A new video unearthed by the liberal research group American Bridge shows Romney at a press conference in June 2006 admonishing reporters on disappointing jobs data. “You guys are bright enough to look at the numbers. I came in and the jobs had been just falling right off a cliff, I came in and they kept falling for 11 months,” he explains.
“And if you are going to suggest to me that somehow the day I got elected, somehow jobs should have immediately turned around, well that would be silly. It takes awhile to get things turned around. We were in a recession, we were losing jobs every month,” he added.
Here’s my theory. After it became clear that Mitt Romney was going to be the Republican nominee, persuadable voters — the “swingsters” — who somehow managed to avoid the clown-slash-horror show that was the GOP primary decided to give Romney a test drive. In other words, after tuning out the primaries, swing voters tuned in to check out Romney for themselves.
It seems a bit unusual for a journalist from the corporate press, but Cohan is more than willing to give credit where credit is due — he says the reduction in the cost of gas is a result of actions taken by Pres. Obama earlier this year:
Pundits say that Trump’s $5,000 midterm bribe was an overreach,
And they agree that if lies were a crime, he’d be impeached.
Despite all the dividend promises he’s made,
The fact is, not one has ever been paid,
So even before the midterms, he already owes us $8,000* each.
*$5000 stimulus checks via “DOGE dividend”; $2000 stimulus checks via a “tariff dividend”; $1000-plus checks via “savings” from expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies
