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Romney’s Strategy
Mitt Romney is pushing hard against “government dependency.” Will his argument set the terms for the 2012 campaign?
{{WMR; xref; MRE – Meals Ready to Eat}}
============NH:
Moving / Inviting people closer to ‘independence’ vs. “Against ‘government dependency’…”
===========NH:
Complaint is first step [whump] It’s about what you want to do that who won’t let you do. WMR, you need to explain how dependency upon Gov. by whom prevents YOU from bering blew to do what YOU want to do.
Third step is requested remedy – where who starts – moving whom closer to independence…
==========NH//
SECOND EDIT:
December 25, 2011, 9:00 PM
The Anti-Entitlement Strategy
By THOMAS B. EDSALL
Mitt Romney wants to stigmatize most “safety net” spending – the array of social insurance programs from Medicare to food stamps to unemployment compensation to free school lunches — as a form of welfare that is “cultivating government dependence.”
“Our growing welfare state is slated to cost $10.3 trillion over the next 10 years — that’s $72,000 a household,” Romney told voters in Bedford, N.H., on Dec. 20:
Once we thought ‘entitlement’ meant that Americans were entitled to the privilege of trying to succeed in the greatest country in the world. Americans fought and died to earn and protect that entitlement. But today the new entitlement battle is over the size of the check you get from Washington.
An entitlement, as the government defines it, “legally obligates the United States to make payments to any person who meets the eligibility requirements established in the statute that creates the entitlement.”
==============NULL HYPOTHESIS:
It still reads like a COMPLAINT, and not one in which YOU have standing, and perhaps GROUNDS for a complaint, but who [rhrnrhrn mRn] tries to start, S.T.A.R.T! with a REQUESTED REMEDY, WMR.
“What do YOU want to do that the U.S. Government Dependency vote machine will not let YOU do?” is the complaint that gives YOU standing before the court, but…
…the REQUESTED REMEDY is “What do you want who to do so you CAN do what who will not let you do?” In this case the government dependency vote getting machine.
It’s traditional politics. You’re doing a great, “classic” job, but is that enough in 2011? With 30 million [”’thn] Only 30 million, generations left to go until who must be at a new prayer spot outside the red nova blast zone of our celestial campfire, sol, our sun, WMR.
And the image of you on high – in evangelical lighting; xref: the Chinese tour guide who did such a great job on the north sphinx arm of the side walk steps of the USSC.(Footnote 1.)
Political theater at it’s best.
But with the internet reading and writing, and streaming away – is that going to cut it any more?
Vote for the Norman Rockwell Image. He looks cool?
================Null Hypothesis//
tags: US Political Dynasty, Professional politicians, political theater, image, requested remedy, complaint, grounds, standing, us supreme court, article III, article I, Obama, Biden, Scranton, Delaware, Fortune 500, Scrappy Kid, The Kid, brain tumors, economists, doers, prayers, 14 year old virgins, consumerism, tariffs, gaming the jurisdictions, borders, Iran, Constitutional rights, of, US Citizens, violated, violation, by, imports, from, slave labor, dictatorships, Trust fund, Tariff, rebate, [thn/] Chinese laborers
================TAGS//
==============FOOTNOTE:
1. Iran leader 1/2 in grave with prayer line behind him facing qibla remembering what THEY must do themselves vs. Evangelical lighting, classic charismatic pedestal entertaining audience as if you would do it for them – , Screen Shot 2011-12-26 at 6.38.44 AM” title=”Iran leader 1/2 in grave with prayer line behind him facing qibla remembering what THEY must do themselves vs. Evangelical lighting, classic charismatic pedestal entertaining audience as if you would do it for them – , Screen Shot 2011-12-26 at 6.38.44 AM
2. xref: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCJqHP4gKDE where the Supreme Leader of Iran arrives from the qibla direction and then with some smooth choreography slips INTO the front row of the prayer line surrounded by body [thnk/]…
3. Still need to find the still photo of Imam’s vestibule like an open grave with brother Sayyid half way below ground level – by the way – another good security measure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Khamenei {{This could unconsciously build up an antipathy [thn/]…}}
ANY muslim Imam faces on qibla during prayers. But then during Juma Speech who is up on the speakers platform, exactly as you are in the photo, WMR. The question is does the audience EVER have a face to back relationship with our US leaders? Is that why the divide and conquer with bare one vote majority hypnotists are controlling our nation?
The closest we get to that is to dim the lights and all look at some audio-visual material together, and even then the ‘leader’ faces the ‘audience’ in the dark.
Leading a parade might be the ONLY time… but then the stander byers are facing the charismatic figure…
You know what who means, WMR, DNC, and RNC…
xref: [thnk/] Barbara Fritche’s younger sister who dropped the umbrella in 2000 and instantly who ended whose speech.
SECOND EDIT:
Cheryl Senter for The New York Times
Mitt Romney at the Town Hall in Bedford, N.H., on Dec. 20, 2011.
Romney and his aides have designed his rhetoric to define pretty much all spending on entitlements, including provisions for the injured, unemployed, sick, disabled or elderly as benefits to the poor who, Romney implies, are undeserving. And it doesn’t matter whether the money to pay for these programs comes from employer and employee contributions and not just tax revenue — they are all under suspicion.
In an op-ed published Dec. 19 in USA Today, Romney described the 2012 election as a battle between the partisans of entitlement and the partisans of opportunity:
Will the United States be an Entitlement Society or an Opportunity Society? In an Entitlement Society, government provides every citizen the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to innovate, pioneer or take risk. In an Opportunity Society, free people living under a limited government choose whether or not to pursue education, engage in hard work, and pursue the passion of their ideas and dreams. If they succeed, they merit the rewards they are able to enjoy.
Romney’s formulation exploits public distrust of programs that explicitly serve the poor. In 2010, about a fifth of the federal budget — $786 billion or 22 percent, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — went to programs that “kept an estimated 15 million Americans out of poverty and reduced the depth of poverty for another 29 million people.” These programs include Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, earned-income tax credits, cash payments to eligible individuals or households such as Supplemental Security Income for the elderly or disabled poor, unemployment insurance, food stamps, school meals, low-income housing, child-care and programs for abused and neglected children. 2010 spending for Pell college grants for low-income students was $21 billion and spending that year for Head Start was $7.2 billion
Without the underlying belief many voters hold that programs serving low-income beneficiaries perpetuate poverty and discourage work, Romney could not have banked on voter support for his answer in this exchange between the candidate and Chris Wallace on FOX News Sunday the week before Christmas.
Wallace pressed Romney to explain how poor recipients of government entitlement programs would fare under his campaign’s plan to “cut Medicaid, health coverage for the poor, by $700 billion. Cut food stamps by $127 billion. Cut Pell Grants for low- income college students in half.” Wallace then pointedly asked, “You don’t think if you cut $700 billion in aid to the states that some people are going to get hurt?”
Romney replied without hesitation:
In the same way by cutting welfare spending dramatically, I don’t think we hurt the poor. In the same way I think we cut Medicaid spending by having it go to the states, run more efficiently with less fraud, I don’t think we’ll hurt the people that depend on the program for their health care.
In attacking the “entitlement society,” Romney is not breaking new ground; he is following in the path of conservative talk show hosts and Tea Party leaders who think social insurance spending is destroying America.
Elements of the conservative intelligentsia see it the same way. An editorial last year in The Wall Street Journal charged, for example, that the Obama administration’s health care reform bill was designed to become another element of the Democratic “cradle-to-grave entitlement citadel.”
A sign held up prominently at Tea Party rallies reads, “You Are Not Entitled To What I Earn.”
And of course Romney is not the only candidate who likes to underscore this argument. Representative Michele Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, a competitor for the Republican nomination, told a gathering in St. Louis in February:
So, what you have to do is keep faith with the people that are already in the system, that don’t have any other options, we have to keep faith with them. But basically what we have to do is wean everybody else off. And wean everybody off because we have to take those unfunded net liabilities off our bank sheet.
The campaign strategy adopted by Romney attempts to mitigate one of the problems facing Republicans pressing for major domestic spending cuts: the American public is highly conflicted on the subject of providing aid to people in need. While strongly opposed to “welfare,” decisive majorities support more spending in key public policy areas.
Polls conducted since 1972 by the General Social Survey show that by margins of two to one, voters consistently say too little is spent on the poor, on education, on health care, on drug treatment — the list is long.
This internal conflict on the part of voters – opposed to welfare but supportive of programs for the poor — demonstrates how important it is for each side to frame the debate in terms favorable to its own cause — just what Romney is trying to do with his use of the catch phrase “entitlement society.”
The word entitlement “implies that those receiving government aid have a sense of entitlement, that they’re getting something for nothing,” as Bill Boyarsky, a lecturer at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, points out.
The 2-to-1 level of support found for spending on the poor for health care and other social services disappears when voters are asked specifically about welfare, according to the General Social Survey; when that word is used, voters by a better than 2-to-1 margin, 49.3 percent to 21 percent, say that “too much” is spent. In other words, a politician can either use the phrase “spending to help the poor” or the words “welfare” and “entitlement” to describe the government programs to alleviate hardship and therefore produce antithetical reactions in the public.
The issue of race is ever-present. Hostility to welfare is driven by whites, 52.6 percent of whom say “too much” is spent on welfare programs, three times the 16.6 percent who say it’s “too little.” 43.2 percent of blacks say too little, and 27.3 percent say too much.
Both blacks and whites are highly critical of the effects of welfare, with strong majorities of both races agreeing that the program encourages “people to work less” — 73.7 percent in the case of whites, 74.1 percent in the case of blacks, according to cumulative answers to the General Social Survey’s polling from 1972 to 2010.
=============NH:
So, who needs to build the the most spacious indoor / outdoor combination [[thnk/]] entertainment venue, green belt, recreation and cultural center in the world and get who all participating, because by 2012 shouldn’t work be ‘fun’ by now? With all the technology at hand? U.S. Citizens working to lead Global Public’s marching [whump] heart’s [tn] club band?
Surely US citizens are highly “involved” [rpms] in their ‘Patty Layouts” [rhnrhrn] as Phillip Dick predicted. Getting all that entertainment industry participation [thn/] out and about and leading is the challenge…
Anyone can complain, and that’s all this article is about. We need leadership, alternatives […] choices, carrots of job descriptions with checks and balances who all step up to the promotions instead of laughing at who expects whom to chain [rhnrhnrhn] themselves to privative technology mainly to prove whose willingness to serve whom in what Pyramid rather than to produce anything of real value. Is that right?
==============Null Hypothesis//
In “Why Americans Hate Welfare,” Martin Gilens, professor of politics at Princeton, sums up this way of looking at the world. “In large measure, Americans hate welfare because they view it as a program that rewards the undeserving poor,” Gilens writes. “First, the American public thinks that most people who receive welfare are black, and second, the public thinks that blacks are less committed to the work ethic than are other Americans.”
Romney’s goal is to persuade swing voters of the imminent moral and material danger that Obama and the Democratic party pose. Here are three more lines from the Romney op-ed.
Over the past three years, Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an Entitlement Society.
If we continue on this course for another four years, we may pass the point of no return. We will have created a society that contains a sizable contingent of long-term jobless, dependent on government benefits for survival.
Government dependency can only foster passivity and sloth.
This is not the Republicanism of compassionate conservatism, far from it. In recent weeks, the former Massachusetts Governor has laid down a set of markers planting himself firmly on the right – just as Obama has begun to stake out a more leftward position. In outline, we are seeing the beginning of the general election campaign.
Romney’s adoption of an anti-entitlement strategy comes at a time when he appears to be looking up from the primaries toward Election Day, which suggests that his hard-line stance will be central to his campaign against Obama and not just a temporary maneuver. We are headed toward an ideological confrontation over the next 11 months of an intensity rarely seen in American political history.
Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics.”
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