Liveblogging Romney

Mitt Headroom

7:38 p.m. PT: Got to love the playlist gags, though I'm surprised Ryan mentioned '70s artists AC-DC and Led Zeppelin instead of Gen. X artists.

7:40: The day's immigration theme continues. Will this and Rubio's speech help the GOP get right with Hispanics?

7:43: Feeling the middle class's pain: "You took two jobs at nine bucks an hour." Gas bill hitting $50 (but what exactly are you going to do about that, Mitt?). Good line: "I wish President Obama had succeeded, because I want America to succeed." Take that, Rush.

"I was born in the middle of the century in the middle of the country, a classic baby boomer." John F. Kennedy is first presidential reference, as usual in acceptance speeches regardless of party. Hey, I remember that night in July 1969: Neil Armstrong's "soles on our soul." A great way to work him into the speech.

7:46: George Romney's working class background. "My friends cared more about what sports teams we followed than what church we attended." A natural, easy delivery, verging on the mawkish; but that's okay. "Every day my dad gave my mom a rose," until the day he died, when there was no rose. Killer story. His voice is cracking -- as he segues quickly into a play for gender equality as he goes transparently to work on the gender gap.

7:50: Life wasn't easy as a trust fund scion. It's important to connect and personalize. His tribute to Ann is touching. But what are you going to do?

7:52: Republicans know that Obama can't tap into his faith story this way.

7:53: "If you felt that excitement when you voted for Barack Obama, shouldn't you feel that way now, when he's President Obama?" This is Karl Rove's playbook: Treat Obama with respect; more in sorrow than in anger; acknowledging the excitement of his election. He's right about Obama's inexperience, though not that Obama really thinks that jobs come from government.

7:55: Oh, those hardscrabble Bain days! And then there was the $25 million IRA. Weird reference to not investing LDS money and risking hell. OMG: The Episcopalians' Church Pension Fund invested with Bain Capital, resulting in a lot of "happy retired priests," almost none of whom, Romney no doubt realizes, will vote for him. He's showing a certain puckishness.

8:00: "Except Jimmy Carter, and except this president": He's had his mind on 1980 for a long time.

8:02: "These [suffering Americans] aren't strangers. These are our brothers and sisters." Indeed. So if you're elected, we'll be watching the safety net shredding in the first Romney-Ryan budget.

8:04: Twelve million new jobs. Great! I'm listening. Energy independence by 2020? I've heard heard that before, beginning with Nixon. Skills training? Great -- but you segued immediately to school choice, which has nothing to do with retraining workers, which will cost money. Will Ryan spare any? Free trade? Okay, but then more jobs lost to cheap-labor countries. Investments disappearing? That's not currently a risk in a low-inflation environment; and the stock market has roared back under Obama. Reducing taxes and streamlining regulations. Replacing Obamacare to fuel economic growth? Disconnect. Why didn't you repeal Romneycare in Massachusetts to encourage job growth?

8:07: "Life," marriage, freedom of religion. Social issues get a 30-second sentence.

8:08: Ridiculing Obama's concern about climate change and global acceptance. "My promise is to help you and your family." I'll say this: He's got impeccable timing. He's smooth and confident, and his speech is perfectly modulated to address his problems (women and Hispanics) and exploit his advantages (poor economy).

8:10: Nixon wouldn't like two minutes on foreign policy. Grudging credit to Obama for killing bin Laden. Brief reference to an old enemy, Iran, and Romney's new enemy, our friendly rival Russia. Ritualistic Cuba-bashing to help in Florida; I was unaware that Obama had gone soft on the Castros. He's wrong that Obama threw Israel under the bus and wrong to continue to ignore the Palestinians.

8:12: Good peroration on "that united America, so strong that no nation would dare to test it." But "the constellation of rights that were endowed by our Creator?" No: We were endowed by our Creator with the rights. You don't endow rights.

8:14: Good, effective speech; probably the best he could have done.

Authenticity And Tape Gaps

In his rousing acceptance speech, Rep. Paul Ryan justified yesterday's "we built that" theme, built with a 43-word presidential tape gap, a cynical distortion of Barack Obama's July speech in Virginia. Ryan said:

Behind every small business, there’s a story worth knowing. All the corner shops in our towns and cities, the restaurants, cleaners, gyms, hair salons, hardware stores – these didn’t come out of nowhere. A lot of heart goes into each one. And if small businesspeople say they made it on their own, all they are saying is that nobody else worked seven days a week in their place. Nobody showed up in their place to open the door at five in the morning. Nobody did their thinking, and worrying, and sweating for them. After all that work, and in a bad economy, it sure doesn’t help to hear from their president that government gets the credit. What they deserve to hear is the truth: Yes, you did build that.

Obama's point was gratuitously professorial. Why pick a fight with the other side's idealization of job creators, especially when your greatest and perhaps decisive error was failing to make job creation a top priority from the beginning? Even so, he wasn't crediting government with being entrepreneurs' partner but rather our "unbelievable American system." If Republicans think Obama's a lefty, find some lefty language, and make fun of that. Don't stand up for honesty and authenticity and then cheat.

Is Paul Ryan Keynesian Now?

Rep. Paul Ryan is right about Barack Obama, the 2009 stimulus, and jobs:

It was President Obama’s first and best shot at fixing the economy, at a time when he got everything he wanted under one-party rule. It cost $831 billion – the largest one-time expenditure ever by our federal government.

It went to companies like Solyndra, with their gold-plated connections, subsidized jobs, and make-believe markets. The stimulus was a case of political patronage, corporate welfare, and cronyism at their worst. You, the working men and women of this country, were cut out of the deal.

What did the taxpayers get out of the Obama stimulus? More debt. That money wasn’t just spent and wasted – it was borrowed, spent, and wasted.

Maybe the greatest waste of all was time. Here we were, faced with a massive job crisis – so deep that if everyone out of work stood in single file, that unemployment line would stretch the length of the entire American continent. You would think that any president, whatever his party, would make job creation, and nothing else, his first order of economic business.

But this president didn’t do that. Instead, we got a long, divisive, all-or-nothing attempt to put the federal government in charge of health care.

It sounds as if Ryan is saying that Obama and congressional Democrats should just have devised a smarter stimulus. That's astonishing, since according to the ideology that he and Mitt Romney now proffer, government is incapable of investing wisely in the private economy. Instead, Ryan implies that a smarter, more experienced Obama could have built that. And yet under Romney-Ryan, we wouldn't get a dollar of new stimulus. So maybe the smarter vote is for an Obama who has learned from experience and a Congress that will help him do what Ryan says he wishes they'd done in 2009.

You Think?

Headline on Kindle version of this New York Times article: "Jobs Numbers Could Affect Presidential Race."

Mourning In Red America?

All Republicans and Democrats of good will welcome today's report of 243,000 new jobs and a drop in the unemployment rate. Still, Feb. 3 may foreshadow Barack Obama's Nov. 6 reelection. Mitt Romney would find it almost impossible to run against a robust recovery. As is always the case with challengers in good or improving times, the GOP may find itself in the position of wishing-without-really-meaning-or-at-least-admitting-to-wish for bad news -- a stalled recovery, an autumn financial meltdown in Europe, or anything else that can be left at the door of White House. Nine months is a long time. But these are the kinds of numbers that decide elections.

Get To Work

Blogger-in-chief Andrew Sullivan has been criticizing Mitt Romney for lying about Barack Obama. Though he has no use for Newt Gingrich, last week he admitted to a perverse hope that Gingrich would be able to perpetuate the GOP's chaos by over-performing in Florida. But this morning, Sullivan dutifully surveys the conventional wisdom, which is that Gingrich has no way to the nomination.

Here's hoping the pundits are right. In an odd commentary implying that all politicians are just like the narcissistic demagogue Gingrich and put their emotional needs ahead of the country, Chris Matthews predicts that he will stay in the race until the end just to make Romney's life miserable. If that's really Gingrich's plan, I pray his fellow Republicans will dissuade him at last in caucuses and primaries to come.

As for Romney's campaign so far, yesterday I sent Sullivan this comment:

Imagine being a moderate Republican, fiscally prudent and leaning to the center on gay rights and abortion. Your one time in government, that's just how you behaved. But now you want to be president. You could switch parties, but you grew up in the GOP, you believe in its historic values, and you think that with the right leadership it could again be the broad-gauge, non-ideological party of Lincoln and your own father. But you realize that only a Republican president could lead in that direction, and to be nominated you have to navigate the fire swamp that the party's become. What would your campaign look like?

This explains rather than excuses Romney's rhetorical excesses. I'm not yet for him or Obama. In the fall campaign we need and deserve a serious conversation between serious people with records they can't evade. Health care, gay and women's rights, Palestine, and deterring Iran without war are vital issues. Most important is the harrowing fact of 12 million-20 million unemployed, men and women who deserve a government that enables them to thrive. With a Congress that obstructs Obama out of spite, electing Romney may at least enable collaboration on economic growth and jobs. Either that, or we could throw some of the bums out out of the House.

34,000...

...feet above the Grand Canyon ...residents lost power in and around LA during an outage in September...new troops sent to Afghanistan by President Obama in November 2009...fewer jobless claims this November than the month before...cars Toyota said it would fix in an announcement last April...as of 3:30 this afternoon, page views of The Episconixonian since I started blogging again in August. Thanks, readers!

Change I Can Believe In

Andrew Sullivan:

[H]ere's something the liberal base can chew on if they need some grist: how cool is it that Mitch McConnell just made Barack Obama's re-election more likely? Bet you didn't see that one coming, did you?

This dawned on conservatives instantly. Some want to organize a revolt based on their insistence that federal income tax rates for the rich remain at their current levels until the Second Coming. Others speculate hopefully about a left-wing challenge to Obama for the Democratic nomination in 2012 (fat chance).

On Fox News last night, Britt Hume said extending unemployment benefits was a bad idea because they prevent people from going out and finding work. I wish there were a way to give him the opportunity to test his theory.

The plain fact is that by moving to the center, Obama has done what the preponderance of Americans hoped for and liberal and conservative activists and radio and cable TV bigmouths most feared. Gone are the disquieting passions of 2008's Obamiacs, the naive confidence of those who thought '09 portended the rise of Euroamerica, and '10's lashings of tea and white toast.

Welcome back to what Richard Nixon loved to call the mushy middle. This is change I can believe in. Give me gridlock, or give me death.

Brown Sounds

Management school-tested principles of ingratiation.

Memo To The GOP: It Worked

According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, last year's stimulus bill meant that at least 1.4 million people, and as many as 3.6 million, were working in the third quarter of 2010 who otherwise wouldn't have been. More here.

GOP To Jobless: Drop Dead

In California, Republicans think they don't need Latinos. In Washington, they think they don't need unemployed people.

Early Warning

On this animation of job gains and losses in the last five and a half years, watch southern California at the beginning of 2008 as the mortgage and real estate industries herald the Ides of September.

Hat tip to Mike Cheever

Nowhere To Hide: 50 Million Jobless Worldwide?

New York Times:

Worldwide job losses from the recession that started in the United States in December 2007 could hit a staggering 50 million by the end of 2009, according to the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency. The slowdown has already claimed 3.6 million American jobs.

High unemployment rates, especially among young workers, have led to protests in countries as varied as Latvia, Chile, Greece, Bulgaria and Iceland and contributed to strikes in Britain and France.

Last month, the government of Iceland, whose economy is expected to contract 10 percent this year, collapsed and the prime minister moved up national elections after weeks of protests by Icelanders angered by soaring unemployment and rising prices.

Just last week, the new United States director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, told Congress that instability caused by the global economic crisis had become the biggest security threat facing the United States, outpacing terrorism.