Romney's gone viral (again). Just not in the way he wants.
Those in the market of turning soundbites into Internet
memes were not disappointed by last night’s presidential debate.
President Obama and Mitt Romney, the former governor of
Massachusetts, squared off in a town-hall style debate on Tuesday where they fielded
questions from the audience. Both were asked by a young woman how their respective
administrations would tackle inequalities in the workplace – specifically, the
fact that women on average make only 72% of what their male counterparts earn.
Both candidates gave wildly different answers. For his part,
President Obama mentioned the very first bill he signed into law upon becoming
President in 2009; the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which gives women full opportunity to sue their employers if they experience undue discrimination. As Obama explained, before
the Act passed women who were being unfairly paid had only 180
days to discover the discrimination and file a lawsuit. Even if they had no way
of discovering the discrimination until after this 180-day period, they were
out of luck. The Act signed by Obama allowed for a new 180-day period to begin each
time a woman received a paycheck that unfairly paid her lower wages based
solely on her gender.
While Obama directly answered the question of unequal pay by
referencing the Lilly Ledbetter Act,
Romney dodged it almost entirely when given a chance to respond. Instead, he
revealed that he initially couldn’t find enough capable women to serve in his
Cabinet upon becoming governor of Massachusetts in 2003, and in doing so coined
the phrase “binders full of women”:
“…I said, ‘Well gosh, can’t we find some women that are also
qualified? And so we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had
backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet. I went to
a number of women’s groups and said ‘Can you help us find folks?’ and they
brought us whole binders full of women.”
As the New
Yorker put it, Romney’s “binders full of women” phrase provoked instant
fascination with debate-watchers nationwide. Facebook groups, Tumblrs, and Twitter accounts devoted to Romney’s
inartful phrase captured the attention of thousands, and could very well spell
doom for Romney in the polls. Yet as much fun as it is to poke fun at the
imagery, Romney’s answer should sound alarms among voters for two important
reasons.
It has hardly been two days since the first debate between President Barack Obama and Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, yet the blogosphere and the news media are still analyzing and criticizing the event. The word is, Buzzfeed declared Romney the winner before the debate was even over - and the general consensus since has been that Romney won the debate.
However, as Mediamatters points out, an equally valid interpretation is that Jim Lehrer lost the debate.
Nevertheless, as Truthdig notes, the debate was definitely more style over substance.
Maddow also breaks down the numbers, further soothing the worries of Obama supporters who may be frustrated at the rather abrupt and widespread conclusion that he lost, to show that incumbents usually do lose the first debate.
Democracy Now! provided an alternative debate for third party candidates on Wednesday.
And besides Buzzfeed apparently calling the debate for Romney before halftime, it also declared "silly memes" the winner of the night.
Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and current Republican candidate for President in 2012 is a charlatan and a swindler.
He was a supporter of women’s rights when he was running for governor of one of America’s more liberal states, then ever-so-conveniently changed his mind years later in order to boost his social conservative credentials. He’s worth more than $260 million dollars, yet tells unemployed voters he sympathizes with their plight because he’s also “unemployed” (while running for President is hardly a money-earning endeavor, he’s still doing so by choice). Romney also once infamously asserted that his sons’ service to his failed presidential campaign in 2008 was a more important task than the service of those in the U.S. military.
However, rather than focus on these and other examples of his chicanery, prominent media figures have instead elected to unfairly attack his religious beliefs. So as much as it pains me to do it, I believe Romney deserves some defense here.
Romney is a Mormon, one of the newer and fastest-growing sects of Christianity. Even though Mormonism dates back nearly 200 years and has always professed itself as part of the umbrella of Christianity, some (such as Baptist minister and Rick Perry supporter Robert Jeffress) have obnoxiously proclaimed that Romney should not be considered a candidate for President because he’s not a “real” Christian.
Wow, the level of crazy within the leading field of Republican presidential candidates has remained incredibly consistent throughout the string of irreverent debates. However, cutting through the side issues, the primary GOP PR strategy for the election centers on economic issues: government debt and job creation.
While the potential presidential candidates largely agreed on many issues, the hot topic of job creation resulted in some major talking points clashing into an unintelligible word salad. As The Nation's Ben Adler writes, the arguments the candidates are pushing in order to at least rhetorically position themselves as job creators are just "nonsensical":
The only major back and forth occurred around a curiously meaningless debate: which governor on stage presided over the most job growth and who would create the most jobs as president. For a party that claims government does nothing as well as the private sector and that efforts to improve society are a fools errand, it’s an odd obsession. If you believe, as Mitt Romney has repeatedly asserted, that it is business rather than government that creates jobs then how can you argue that you will do so as president?
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The governors all came prepared with job-related factoids to hurl at each other. “Michael Dukakis created jobs three times faster than you did, Mitt,” said Perry, while Huntsman told Perry that forty-seventh best “just won’t cut it.” Romney countered that Texas created more jobs under Perry’s predecessor, George W. Bush, than under Perry. He also defended his record and minimized Perry’s by noting that Massachusetts and Texas have different political and economic conditions.
Although, Texas Governor Rick Perry and Mitt Romney had a "my state had more jobs than your state" pissing contest during the debate, both candidates easily play into the myth the Republican party relies on for votes: that government ... no. THE government, our government, is bad. Not only bad, but that it, and its most vital democratic institutions are not to be trusted. Controlling the political discourse on the economic issues plays well into the GOP 2012 electoral strategy. By constantly demonizing government and the positive roles it plays in our lives, a theme of deep seated mistrust of government and it's institutions emerges. Among some voters, an outright hatred of the government emerges. The apparent surge of extreme politicians in both the states and Congress, along with their determination to obstruct democratic processes at every turn, has opened the door to policies which undermine our democratic institutions to the benefit of powerful corporations. Former Republican Congressional Staffer, Mike Lofgren, describes how the Republican party essentially gets away with winning their self-perpetuating war on language:
You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even
Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative
sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly claims
something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned
benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll
taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans
don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never
the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid that the Walton
family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. All of that
lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that
women employees not be promoted and that politicians be kept on a short
leash.
It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated
farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very
accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him.
An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little
gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case
in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as
the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and
after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall
Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger
directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending" -
which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food
stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous
decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly
diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage,
abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom
line in the slightest.
Governor Rick Perry (TX) and Representative Ron Paul (TX) during commercial break.
Needless to say, the focus on stoking populist rage while bolstering polices that help businesses more than American citizens is no way to create jobs. It is almost laughable that such circular logic packaged in punchy soundbites can convince anyone that these candidates and their ideas should be taken seriously. However, I personally, cannot laugh at these people until everyone else is laughing too. Because we all should be. The real world implications of the GOP PR strategy translating into actual policies are already coming to fruition in dozens of states via union busting, de-funding or underfunding government services, and tightening voter registration requirements.
