Reading over Mitt Romney’s evolution intelligent design on abortion rights, I believe he deserves a stiletto to the groin for disingenuousness, pandering, and lack of principle. Let’s start with him telling Mike Huckabee that he would “absolutely” support a constitutional amendment defining life as beginning at conception. That seems straightforward, right? If you can pass an amendment to the Constitution like that, then it will be illegal to have an abortion unless you can argue it was in self-defense. So, that would bypass the Supreme Court and all the state legislatures, and the only legal abortions would be to save the life (or perhaps, but not necessarily, the health) of the mother.
But then Romney says that he is favor of exceptions for rape and incest. Then he says that he is unaware of any laws about abortion that would be part of his agenda. Okay, so passing a constitutional amendment isn’t part of his agenda but he’d “absolutely” sign it. He’d be “delighted” to sign a bill banning abortion after the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, even though it isn’t on his agenda.
How about this comment?
“I hope to appoint justices to the Supreme Court that will follow the law and the constitution. And it would be my preference that they reverse Roe v. Wade and therefore they return to the people and their elected representatives the decisions with regards to this important issue.”
Okay, so he says he’d appoint Supreme Court Justices who favor reversing Roe v. Wade, and then he says that people’s representatives would decide the issue, and then he says that he’d sign a bill from those representatives banning choice, and he’d even sign a federal ban (i.e., an amendment to the Constitution). But none of this would be part of his “agenda.”
Is that called “leading from behind”?
Listen up. There are nine Supreme Court Justices. Four of them are staunchly in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade. Their names are: Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito. There are five Justices in favor of upholding Roe v. Wade. Their names are: Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.
If one of the five Justices who favor upholding Roe dies or retires in the next four years and is replaced by a Romney nominee, there will be a 5-4 majority on the court to overturn choice. Romney has promised this.
And if Roe is overturned, that means that Congress can pass a law banning abortion. It wouldn’t be easy, but Republican majorities could pull it off if they eliminated the filibuster or won 60 seats in the Senate. Even if the federal government can’t ban choice in the short term, all Republican legislatures on the state level would ban it.
So, Romney can prevaricate all he wants, but he still needs a swift kick in the groin.
I would pay good green American money to kick Romney in the junk, but he’s have to get in line. Between the party and Fox, well, it’s a target-rich environment.
Romney on abortion: 9 Different Views since 1994. Y should women trust him? buzzfeed has a video timeline
http://t.co/c1NySp7f
I’ve already tweeted it to Obama team. gonna post again in morning. would love to have VP Biden get Ryan to comment on it in Thursday’s debate
A groin shot to Romney would do a lot more damage if he had any balls.
If Roe is overturned the right to privacy will be denounced as a fiction.
A hell of a lot more of the sexual revolution depends on that right than just abortion.
Oh, openly recommending violence against Romney, now, are you?
Tsk.
no, only slapstick.
Romney is telling people what they want to hear, and it is working. Yes, he is lying, but he’s not paying a price.
I think we’re going to have to reassess the view, popular on this site, that Romney is the worst candidate ever. The dramatic polling shift over the last week is real – and yes the gender gap has shrunk dramatically. Stan Greenberg, Democratic pollster, has analyzed it in detail with his own focus groups if you want to look it up – it’s scary.
We should stop piling on Obama for a poor performance on Wednesday and start recognizing that Romney really did hit the proverbial home run. He has very poor favorability ratings going in, but the thing is that most people hadn’t really seen him talk except in short sound bites. His team’s goal was to make people like him and think that Romney was atune to their interests, period.
We all saw that article about him “practicing zingers” and made fun of it. But while the zingers got the bulk of the media attention the real point of the article was that Romney spent over 6 weeks practicing phrases and mannerisms designed to make him likeable.
And it worked. Notice that Obama’s favorability also went up after the debate – but Romney’s skyrocketed.
In short, Romney duplicated Reagan’s debate win in 1980. People had tremendous doubts about Reagan and, alas, enough were won over to given him a solid victory. Prior to that debate Carter’s polls suggested that Reagan was well under 50% (remember Anderson was in the race) and just a few points ahead of Carter. That’s why Carter agreed to the last minute debate. Afterwards Reagan won by a margin greater than Anderson’s take.
Obama’s team spent the year carefully setting up Romney for failure by creating a negative image of him – start with the Bain capital days then move on to his Medicare and tax proposals. It was working so well – Romney was an unpopular candidate and people didn’t trust him.
And, amazingly, depressingly, he undid it with a terrific song-and-dance debate performance that conned the gullible low info voters.
Yeah, he lied his ass off, but those lies were part of the success. “My plan covers pre-existing conditions.” That’s what the low info voter wanted to hear. Sure, his team refuted that within an hour of the debate, but how many low info voters know that?
It’s horrifying to think that a majority of people may vote for a team who plans to replace Medicare with a voucher program that will leave most seniors without full health coverage. Of course if people were voting on that issue Obama would win hands down. But will they understand that this is the case?
Boo’s been saying for years that Obama is a rare talent, one of the best political campaigners ever. His team has its greatest test right now. Their careful strategy against Romney has been largely neutralized in one 90 minute performance. They have time to turn it around. There is no question they have to get the focus back to policy. The post-debate ads are all about “Mitt lied” – my experience is that those are very weak in terms of effectiveness. I think they have to pick one or two crucial policy areas (like Medicare) and hammer them home.
thanks for that, Dick Morris.
Might be some truth to that. Just a couple weeks ago, Romney was floundering on an airport tarmac in Ohio in front of a couple hundred people, trying to get the crowd to chant ‘Romney/Ryan”.
Yesterday he drew 12,000 at an Ohio rally.
Obama needs something to blunt the momentum.
Obama has had big crowds consistently for 4 years, but accurding ti media crowd size only mattered when Obama’s was “low”. Romney gets 1 crowd that 1/2 if a crowd that Obama got the day after the debate & all of a sudden Romney’s a crowd pleaser? Come on now. I get that people are worried, I’d say get out and do something to alleviate or tamp down on the worry, but lets not get carried away.
Romney has consistently been crap & “won” one debate, Obama has been consistently good & had an off night and now everything Romney has done/will do in hindsight was/is brilliant.
I’m sorry but that’s ridiculous.
I’m sorry that after a year of your crowing about how awful Romney is and how great Obama is that the numbers aren’t going your way. I’m greatly pissed off about it too. But this isn’t something I’m dreaming:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/dem-pollster-delivers-wake-up-call-to-obama/2012/
10/09/de870c78-122e-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_blog.html#pagebreak
Also, if you look at the full list of polls on 538 or TPM or anywhere else you’ll see the full stark, reality.
Hopefully the Obama team gets this – from the statements today in the press from Gibbs and Obama himself they are trying to let supporters know that they do plan to let Romney and Ryan have it in the coming debates.
For sanity’s sake it really, truly pays to ignore the media BS and the polling noise. The race- and this is how the Obama campaign sees it too, according to a story I read yesterday- is exactly what it’s really been all along and what the highly and almost equally divided electorate makes inevitable: very tight, but with Romney having by far the more difficult path to 271 electoral votes. GOTV in a few critical states is the key.
This election will determine the fate of Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose. That has been said before, but this time the claim is real.
The fifth vote for upholding Roe on today’s “conservative” SCt is Ginsburg. She is in poor health and will absolutely retire in the next four years. Whoever replaces her determines Roe’s fate. With Roe gone, the right to choose will (perhaps) exist in a couple states like NY and CA—after a battle. The federal congress could outlaw all abortion nationally, as Booman argues—although think about exactly what power of Congress would authorize such a law.
Anyway, Rmoney, like all “conservative” candidates, has stated that his model “justice” is the rabid monster Scalia, who has denounced Roe his entire judicial career. And even if Rmoney tried to appoint someone less rabid, the American Taliban movement, who will have Rmoney’s balls in their hands for his whole presidency, will absolutely demand a Scalia clone. Don’t expect our brave Dems (if they still control the senate, haha) not to confirm whomever Rmoney nominates. So if Rmoney wins, Roe is certainly gone.
This issue is a double-edged sword, of course, since aborting Roe has been the primary goal of the Fundamentalist Christianist movement for 4 decades now. If the reality that Roe is hanging by a thread were made clear nationally, one should expect a massive fundamentalist Christianist turnout.
Green caboose argues that as a result of the debate debacle Obama has now effectively lost the amazing gender gap he enjoyed, a debate where the Repubs’ War on Women was (of course) never mentioned. Would pushing Roe’s imminent demise into the limelight be a wise strategy for getting back the attention of America’s women, or a huge mistake?
Lots of very difficult calls to make in this election. But we are indeed on the cusp of a radical new “conservative” nation, and the American Taliban know this. The loss of Roe will be a very small price to pay for the nation’s plutocrats, almost non-existent. They and their families (like the extensive Rmoney clan) always get all the health care they ever desire. Their rich ladies will always effectively have a right to choose–a nice plane trip to a civilized non-retarded country solves the little “problem”. For everyone else, not so much.
I hate to be a pedant, but politically speaking, a “nation” is a group of people; the “nation-state” (or country) is the governing structure.
I don’t see a lot of evidence that the Fox/et al echo chamber has dramatically expanded the number of radical conservatives in this country beyond about 30-35% (albeit geographically they’re unequally distributed). That’s not representative of the nation as a whole.
That minority, however, has access to nearly unlimited amounts of money; its own alternate media universe; and a political and media establishment predisposed to treat them as a legitimate, truthful, democratically oriented political force when it is none of those things. Hence, there’s a serious danger that our nation could be governed by conservative radicals (and already is, in many states); but it’s not who we are as a nation. Even the Republicans know this, or Romney would be far more forthcoming about his policy details.
Oh, I don’t think this is being pedantical, it’s a good point.
Like authoritarian reactionary movements across world history, American “conservatism” has attained great political power while being a minority enthusiasm–although I think your estimates are a bit low. But “conservatism” unilaterally determines who the Repub prez nominee will be, which gives the movement immense power, even if that nominee has to “conceal” (usually in plain sight) the reality of (some) of the “conservative” program. And the nation’s judges, plutocrats and industrialists exand the reactionary movement’s power enormously.
The structure of American Talibanism will be imposed from the top down on a (slight) majority, most likely. Even the Hitler party was always a minority party in Weimar—but its minority status didn’t matter too much in the final implementation.
You are right, but more hangs on the right to privacy than abotion.
For example, access to contraceptives and protection from laws flatly criminalizing homosexual sodomy.
A win for Romney could be a very big win, indeed, for the reactionary aspirations of the supporters of clerical power.
Regarding the gender gap, here is a link to the Stan Greenberg study:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/dem-pollster-delivers-wake-up-call-to-obama/2012/
10/09/de870c78-122e-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_blog.html#pagebreak
Stan explains exactly WHY Obama lost the big advantage he had with unmarried woman, what Romney did that helped him so much, and what Obama needs to do to fix it.
And yes, I think that tying Romney to GOP anti-woman extremism is key. I think Romney’s team gets that, too, today in Iowa he was trying to sound almost pro-choice!!! Is this the 3rd or 4th time he’s been pro-choice, I can’t remember?
this is very plain to me. I don’t see how anyone else can’t understand this.