Desperation Time
by David Atkins
Mitt Romney has gone full birther--to the great delight of Donald Trump, of course. And he has followed that up by making his false accusations that President Obama is gutting welfare-to-work programs with the even more incendiary claim that Obama is doing it (the thing he's not doing) in order to "shore up his base."
Given the unquestioned importance of the minority vote to this election and to future elections, it might not initially seem to make sense for Romney to cater to the extremist cesspool of birtherism and spend so much time flat-out lying in the hopes of capturing a greater share of the white working-class vote. But the truth is, Romney's all out of options. He hilariously took zero percent of the black vote in a recent NBC/WSJ poll, and a poll released today showed Romney down 65-26 among Latino voters. These numbers are not surmountable and Romney knows it. That means it's desperation time: Romney has to drive up his share of the working-class white vote, no matter how and no matter what. In a must-read piece in New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait explains the full ramifications of this dynamic:
A Republican strategist said something interesting and revealing on Friday, though it largely escaped attention in the howling gusts of punditry over Mitt Romney’s birth certificate crack and a potential convention-altering hurricane. The subject was a Ron Brownstein story outlining the demographic hit rates each party requires to win in November. To squeak out a majority, Mitt Romney probably needs to win at least 61 percent of the white vote — a figure exceeding what George H.W. Bush commanded over Michael Dukakis in 1988. The Republican strategist told Brownstein, “This is the last time anyone will try to do this” — “this” being a near total reliance on white votes to win a presidential election.
Right. But let's say that Romney does pull this off based on stoking up race resentment among working-class whites with lies about welfare and subconscious xenophobia. What then? It's not exactly like he could duplicate that result in four years when minorities are an even larger share of the electorate, all while enacting policies that would keep the base happy at the same time. But as Chait explains:
The “2012 or never” hypothesis helps explain why a series of Republican candidates, first in the House and most recently at the presidential candidate level, have taken the politically risky step of openly declaring themselves for Paul Ryan’s radical blueprint. Romney’s campaign has been floating word of late that it sees a potential presidency as following the mold of James K. Polk — fulfilling dramatic policy change, and leaving after a single term. “Multiple senior Romney advisers assured me that they had had conversations with the candidate in which he conveyed a depth of conviction about the need to try to enact something like Ryan’s controversial budget and entitlement reforms,” reports the Huffington Post’s Jonathan Ward. “Romney, they said, was willing to count the cost politically in order to achieve it.” David Leonhardt floats a similar sketch, plausibly outlining how Romney could transform the shape of American government by using a Senate procedure that circumvents the filibuster to quickly lock in large regressive tax cuts and repeal of health insurance subsidies to tens of millions of Americans.
Blowing up the welfare state and affecting the largest upward redistribution of wealth in American history is a politically tricky project (hence Romney's belief that he may need to forego a second term). Hence the Romney campaign's clear plan to suture off its slowly declining but still potent base. Romney’s political-policy theme is an unmistakable appeal to identity politics. On Medicare, Romney is putting himself forward as the candidate who will outspend Obama, at least when it comes to benefits for people 55 years old and up. Romney will restore the $700 billion in Medicare budget cuts imposed by Obama to its rightful owners — people who are currently old.
See? They don't care if they don't stand a shot in 2016 or a few cycles afterward, as long as they can ramrod the Ryan agenda starting in January 2013. They don't care if Romney is a one-term president, just as long as in that one term, he's able to end Medicare, cut taxes for the wealthy, and generally do anything and everything else that enables a massive transference of wealth from the lower- and middle-class families to the wealthy.
On a side note, this is also why anyone who thinks that Mitt Romney is too moderate for this sort of thing is so horribly wrong. The demographics are such that Republicans have to make hay while the white sun still shines. Grover Norquist said it already: Romney is nothing other than the robo-signer for the Ryan agenda, and 2012 is their last serious chance at getting it done for a long time, given their current base.