To be The Donald is to possess The Confidence. It’s to revel in your own appeal. That hair, that birtherism — who could resist? Certainly not the Republican Party, at least not in The Donald’s objective estimation. So when the first round of speakers for the party’s late August convention leaked out Sunday and he wasn’t on it, he fretted not a whit. In due course he would surely get his summons to participate. “I know they want me to,” he said on Monday on “Fox and Friends.” “I’ll see what happens.” So will we. The giddy excitement of Convention Season is here. The Republicans go first, in Tampa, while the Democrats follow a week later, and just as humidly, in Charlotte. In the matter of convention sites, neither party gave much thought to global warming. But the lineups of speakers: that’s an issue of the utmost deliberation and sometimes consternation and enormous, epic consequence. All party stalwarts agree on that, until they think about it a bit longer and realize that, well, they’re really not so sure. On Monday I talked to two prominent Republican strategists in a row who said that Mitt Romney’s choice of keynote speaker, not yet determined, was essential. Then they tried to recall who that essential choice from the 2008 Republican convention was, and came up blank. I myself had to Google it: Rudy Giuliani. There are some things you really do force yourself to forget. One of the strategists asserted that Romney’s greatest mistake would be to emulate the Democrats in 2004, when the keynoter, a certain Barack Obama, shone brighter than the nominee, John Kerry, perhaps making him look duller in contrast. The strategist did not admit per se that Romney had a luminescence problem. There are some things you really needn’t say. He recommended that Romney take a page from the Republican grand master of stagecraft, Ronald Reagan, and select a keynote speaker of restrained wattage. “Do you know who did the 1980 keynote for Reagan?” he asked. I said I was mortified that I didn’t. I wasn’t being entirely truthful about the mortification part. “Guy Vander Jagt,” he said. “Guy who?” “Exactly,” he said. “Reagan understood what it meant to be the star, and he had seen ‘All About Eve.’ ” Has Romney? And does Eve ride in an Escalade with Florida or New Jersey plates? Those are the home states of the other strategist’s suggested keynoters, Marco Rubio and Chris Christie. This strategist said that a real dynamo was just what the convention and Romney needed, and that Rubio and Christie qualified. Bear in mind that everything is relative, and that the dynamo yardstick includes Mitch McConnell and Roy Blunt. The conventions indeed speak volumes about each party’s anxieties and stratagems, two words that fittingly bring us to Bill Clinton. He was among the first speakers confirmed for a prime-time slot during the Democratic convention, proving that all is forgiven when everything’s on the line. And he’s meant, clearly, to remind Americans of the sustained prosperity during his administration, a Democratic one. Another confirmed speaker, Elizabeth Warren, symbolizes the party’s supposed taming of Wall Street, while the chosen keynoter, Mayor Julián Castro of San Antonio, underscores the importance Obama places on the Latino vote. Over recent presidential elections, that vote has grown while the Republican share of it has shrunk. George W. Bush got 44 percent in 2004, John McCain just 31 in 2008. According to a recent poll, Romney is poised to get 23. That’s a dismal projection and disastrous trend line. And Republicans will try to counter or at least camouflage it with convention staging. The first list of confirmed speakers includes Susana Martinez, the New Mexico governor. There’s not an iota of doubt that Rubio will be added to the roster, and there’s a chance that Ted Cruz, the Republican nominee for the Senate from Texas, will be, too. Will that help? “Well,” said one Republican strategist, “Bob Dole chose Susan Molinari as his keynote speaker and proceeded to lose the women’s vote by 16 points.” That was in 1996, the year of Clinton’s re-election, when the health care debacle was receding from memory and Monica Lewinsky had not yet sidled into view. I’m less heartened by whom the Republicans have included than by whom they haven’t, at least so far: Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain. It suggests a limit to the party’s enthusiasm for carnival barkers. And it doesn’t bode well for The Donald. He may have to make do with the “Statesman of the Year” award that he’s inexplicably receiving from the Republican Party of Sarasota County a day before the convention and an hour’s drive down the road. Though if he re-emerges as El Donald, with fluent Spanish, all bets are off.
Friday, August 10, 2012
Fear of ‘Fiscal Cliff’ Has Industry Pulling Back
Executives at companies making everything from electrical components and power systems to automotive parts say the fiscal stalemate is prompting them to pull back now, rather than wait for a possible resolution to the deadlock on Capitol Hill. Democrats and Republicans are far apart on how to extend the Bush-era tax breaks beyond January — the same month automatic spending reductions are set to take effect — unless there is a deal to trim the deficit. The combination of tax increases and spending cuts is creating an economic threat called “the fiscal cliff” by Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve. Until recently, the loudest warnings about the economy have come from policy makers and economists, along with military industry executives who rely heavily on the Pentagon’s largess and who would be hurt by the government reductions. But more diversified companies like Hubbell Inc. in Shelton, Conn., have begun to hunker down as well. Hubbell, a maker of electrical products, has canceled several million dollars’ worth of equipment orders and delayed long-planned factory upgrades in the last few months, said Timothy H. Powers, the company’s chief executive. It has also held off hiring workers for about 100 positions that would otherwise have been filled, he said. “The fiscal cliff is the primary driver of uncertainty, and a person in my position is going to make a decision to postpone hiring and investments,” Mr. Powers said. “We can see it in our order patterns, and customers are delaying. We don’t have to get to the edge of the cliff before the damage is done.” The worries come amid broader fears that the economy is losing momentum — the annual rate of economic growth in the second quarter fell to 1.5 percent from 2 percent in the first quarter, and 4.1 percent in the last quarter of 2011. On Thursday, the Commerce Department reported that factory orders unexpectedly fell 0.5 percent in June from the previous month, while data on the labor market released Friday showed job creation still falling short of the level needed to bring down the unemployment rate. All told, the political gridlock in the United States, along with the continuing debt crisis in Europe, will shave about half a percentage point off growth in the second half of the year, estimates Vincent Reinhart, chief United States economist at Morgan Stanley. More than 40 percent of companies surveyed by Morgan Stanley in July cited the fiscal cliff as a major reason for their spending restraint, Mr. Reinhart said. He expects that portion to rise when the poll is repeated this month. “Economists generally overstate the effects of uncertainty on spending, but in this case it does seem to be significant,” he added. “It’s at the macro- and microeconomic levels.” Unless Congress acts to extend the tax provisions and comes up with a budget deal that averts the planned reductions in military spending and other government programs, taxes will rise by $399 billion while federal government spending will fall by more than $100 billion, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office. The end-of-year battle comes after Democrats and Republicans have failed over the last year to reach long-term agreements on how to tackle the budget deficit. Last week, Congressional leaders did manage to agree tentatively to keep the government financed through next March, extending a deadline that had been set to expire Oct. 1, but that deal did not address the extension of the tax cuts or spending reductions. All together, the fiscal cliff’s total impact equals slightly more than $600 billion, or 4 percent of gross domestic product, and if no action is taken, the Congressional Budget Office projects the economy will shrink by 1.3 percent in the first half of 2013 as a result. With many Fortune 500 companies now setting budgets and planning for 2013, chief executives say they cannot afford to hope for the best. Wall Street is also paying more attention: over the last few weeks, chief executives of companies like Honeywell, U.P.S. and Eaton all cited the uncertainty as a threat to earnings in the second half of 2012.
Thursday, August 9, 2012
Romney Calls Reid's Tax Claims a Diversion From Jobs Report
6:26 p.m. | An updated version of this article can be found here.
NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. — Mitt Romney on Friday said that he had paid “a lot of taxes” every year and accused the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, of falsely claiming that he had not — saying the senator did so as a tactic to draw attention away from lackluster employment and economic numbers under President Obama.
Mr. Romney also suggested that either the White House or Obama campaign officials could be behind what he characterized as false accounts of him not paying taxes for years.
“Harry Reid really has to put up or shut up,” Mr. Romney said. “So Harry, who are your sources? Let’s have Harry explain who that is.”
Mr. Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said in a statement on Thursday that “I was told by an extremely credible source that Romney has not paid taxes for 10 years.” But the senator has provided no evidence to back up the assertion.
Mr. Romney has said he is likely to pay a total of $6.2 million in taxes on $45 million in income over the two tax years of 2010 and 2011; he has released his 2010 return and says he will release his 2011 return when it is completed.
But he declined again on Friday to disclose more than those two years, a refusal that has drawn attacks from Democrats — who argue he must be hiding something — and criticism from many Republicans who fear his unwillingness to adhere to a more detailed and customary tax disclosure is distracting from the Romney campaign’s message.
Mr. Romney said that Mr. Reid’s attacks and the call for more of his tax returns was really an effort to divert attention away from poor jobs numbers and the unemployment rate, which has ticked up to 8.3 percent, according to a new government report on Friday.
“By the way Harry, I understand what you are trying to do here,” Mr. Romney said. “You are trying to deflect the fact that jobs numbers are bad, that Americans are out of work, and you’re trying to throw anything up on the screen that will grab attention away from the fact that the policies of the White House haven’t worked to put Americans to work, and the policies of the Senate haven’t even got a budget in place.”
“Now let me also say categorically: I have paid taxes every year, and a lot of taxes, a lot of taxes,” Mr. Romney added. “So Harry is simply wrong, and that’s why I’m so anxious for him to give us the names of the people who have put this forward.”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear the names are people from the White House or the Obama campaign, or who knows where they are coming from,” he said.
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Democrats Draft Gay Marriage Platform
The move would place the party in line with the beliefs of President Obama, who in May became the first sitting president to declare that gay men and lesbians should be able to marry. Democratic Party officials had squabbled over the issue in the past. But at a platform-drafting meeting over the weekend in Minneapolis, they approved the first step to amend their platform, placing the amendment on track for adoption. In two weeks, the entire platform committee will vote at a meeting scheduled in Detroit. Then, if approved as expected, it would go before convention delegates in Charlotte, N.C., for final passage in early September. According to Democrats who were briefed on the vote in Minneapolis, there was no objection when the issue came up. Though the language that was voted on could still be revised, party officials do not anticipate any major obstacles going forward. The platform language approved over the weekend also reiterated the party’s disapproval of the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits the federal government from recognizing legal same-sex marriages. The 2008 platform had a similar section. The Democratic Party’s move comes more than two months after President Obama personally backed the rights of same-sex couples to wed. The president’s reversal — he had said previously that while he could not support same-sex marriage, his views on the issue were “evolving” — was a significant move, though it carried no legal weight. The Democrats would become the first major party to embrace same-sex marriage. But as historic as the platform would be, the president’s position makes it decidedly less controversial. News of the platform amendment was first reported by The Washington Blade. Gay rights supporters praised the Democratic Party’s vote. “Like Americans from all walks of life, the Democratic Party has recognized that committed and loving gay and lesbian couples deserve the right to have their relationships respected as equal under the law,” said Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign. “I believe that one day very soon the platforms of both major parties will include similar language on this issue.” The Democratic Party platform that was drafted four years ago, when Mr. Obama was first running for president, called for “full inclusion of all families, including same-sex couples, in the life of our nation,” and for “equal responsibility, benefits and protections.” But the platform stopped short of endorsing same-sex marriages, in part because Mr. Obama had said he remained opposed. Despite the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage, the issue remains a difficult one for some Democrats, particularly those in the midst of hard-fought re-election campaigns in conservative-leaning states. Those include Tim Kaine, the former Democratic National Committee chairman who is running for Senate in Virginia, and Senators Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Jon Tester of Montana. And while an increasing number of Republicans are coming around to support marriage rights for gays and lesbians, the Republican Party as an institution is still far from declaring that marriage is for anyone but heterosexuals. Peter S. Sprigg, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, predicted that Democrats will regret their decision to include the marriage plank in their platform. “There are many places in the country where Democratic candidates will not want to be identified with the gay-marriage party,” Mr. Sprigg said. “I think this is more politically correct than it is politically smart.”
July Jobs Report Likely to Preserve Status Quo
The government reported that 163,000 payroll jobs were created in July. But the unemployment rate — which is calculated through a separate survey — ticked up to 8.3 percent from 8.2 percent.
The payrolls number taken alone is a decent one; it beat the market’s expectations of about 100,000 jobs being created.
But it is important to take the number in context. Forecasts of the payrolls numbers are quite inaccurate; they miss, on average, by 68,000 jobs in one direction or another. In this case, the miss was to the upside — and better for job-seekers than the other way around.
Still, it is hard to calculate the number of jobs in the economy at any given time, let alone to forecast it accurately. That is why, as Jonathan Bernstein advised on Thursday, and as I suggested on TimesCast, we ought to have a fairly high threshold for what qualifies as a newsworthy jobs report.
Mr. Bernstein argued that any payrolls number between 50,000 and 150,000 jobs was not likely to have much effect politically. The actual gain of 163,000 jobs sits right on the brink of that.
So it is worth looking toward tiebreakers. For instance, were there substantial revisions to the previous numbers? In this case, they were a wash; the May jobs number was revised up, but the June figure was revised down.
And you can certainly look at the unemployment rate. The survey from which those numbers are calculated is subject to more statistical noise than the payrolls numbers, but that does not mean that it is meaningless. In this case, the unemployment numbers were poor.
So I think this report ought to mostly reinforce pre-existing impressions about the economy: that the recovery is slow, but that the nation is probably not on the verge of a double-dip recession.
Politically, the status quo appears to favor President Obama. If the election were held today, he would have a 77 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, according to our forecast model’s “now-cast,” although the victory would almost certainly be by a slim margin — possibly even a victory in the Electoral College that is not reflected in the national popular vote.
By November, Mr. Obama is less certain to win, since there is more uncertainty about the economy, and other factors come into play. Our model figures that there is about a 70 percent chance that he does so.
The July jobs numbers might reduce that uncertainty slightly. Whatever impressions Americans had about the economy are likely to be reinforced by the report; Democrats will cite the relatively favorable payrolls numbers, and Republicans will trumpet the increase in the unemployment rate. There are just three more jobs reports between now and the election.
The number is favorable for Mr. Obama in the sense that no news qualifies as good news for him if he is ahead right now. But the report is not a game-changer, economically or politically.
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Germany’s Olympics Talk Centers on Rower’s Boyfriend
The athlete, Nadja Drygalla, a rower on the German Olympic team, volunteered to leave the Olympic Village last week after a discussion with officials about her boyfriend’s extreme right-wing political activities. But instead of heading off a potential controversy through her quiet departure, Ms. Drygalla has become the focus of a national debate, her romantic choices dissected in leading newspapers and on television broadcasts. Ms. Drygalla’s boyfriend, Michael Fischer, himself a former competitive rower, was a candidate last year in a regional election for the far-right National Democratic Party and is part of an extremist group known as the Rostock National Socialists. “I have no connection to his circle of friends and this scene, and I reject it completely,” Ms. Drygalla, 23, said in an interview with dpa, a German news agency. She said that his politics were a burden on their relationship and that she had considered breaking up with him over it. She quit her career as a police officer last year after her superiors learned about the relationship. Her premature departure from the Olympic Games came only after she had competed, but the attention has raised questions about her future participation in the national team. She left the Olympics, she said, because some of her teammates “were still competing and they should be able to concentrate on that.” Both Ms. Drygalla and Mr. Fischer say that he quit the National Democrats in May. But questions remain as to how German Olympic officials could have been caught unaware on such a sensitive issue, especially after she left the police force. So while the rest of the world talks about the sprinter Usain Bolt and the swimmer Michael Phelps, Germany debates the past and future of a single rower on the women’s eight that did not even make the finals. The case is making “big waves,” as Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich put it on Monday. A parliamentary committee will discuss the controversy in a hearing next month, according to Dagmar Freitag, the sports committee chairwoman. The daily Tagesspiegel newspaper said Ms. Drygalla must have been “either unbelievably naïve or dumb or herself infected with the brown demons,” referring to the Nazi ideology. Even as many questioned the athlete’s choice of a boyfriend, a backlash quickly formed over Ms. Drygalla’s presumed guilt by association and the intensity of the news media scrutiny of her. Thomas de Maizière, Germany’s defense minister, said that while he welcomed Ms. Drygalla’s statement distancing herself from right-wing views, he believed some people had “crossed the line” in screening the friends and associates of athletes. Ms. Drygalla appeared shaken and vulnerable, fighting back tears as she tried to explain herself in the interview. “I’m not doing well,” she said, “the last few days have been pretty stressful and pretty surprising.” One young athlete’s personal choices would seem to have little to do with the highest levels of politics, but when that young woman is representing Germany at the Olympics, and her choices involve extreme right-wing politics, it becomes difficult to separate the two. Ms. Drygalla hails from Rostock on the Baltic Sea, once part of East Germany and a center of right-wing political activity. In 1992 the city was rocked by days of rioting against foreigners. Residents by the hundreds cheered as a building housing Vietnamese guest workers was firebombed. Recriminations over neo-Nazi activities, long a feature of German public discourse, have grown particularly acute this summer. There have been a series of resignations by senior law enforcement officials over the failure to stop a decade-long crime spree by the extreme-right National Socialist Underground, whose members have killed 10 people and robbed numerous banks. Investigators never caught up with the group. Instead, the two leading members died at their own hands, and a third gave herself up last year in the wake of a failed bank robbery. Embarrassing investigative failures during the group’s active years have been compounded by reports of bungled efforts to cover up miscues through shredded and misplaced documents. The head of the federal criminal police will retire at the end of the year as a result. The chief of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency stepped down last month. “There’s greater vigilance since then,” said Hajo Funke, an expert on rightist extremism at the Free University in Berlin. That also contributed to the intense glare of the spotlight that was riveted on Ms. Drygalla, he said.
Victor Homola contributed reporting.
House Reprimands Richardson
After hearing Representative Laura Richardson speak in her own defense, the House of Representatives on Thursday briskly approved a report by its Ethics Committee to reprimand her for compelling her Congressional staff to do campaign work. The resolution, which imposes a fine of $10,000 and which she had agreed to accept, passed on a voice vote.
In remarks that reflected a detailed statement that she had submitted earlier to the committee, Ms. Richardson, a California Democrat in an uphill fight to retain a seat in the House, said that she had never told staff members that they would have to work for her campaign office or lose their government jobs.
But leaders of the committee said they had already taken her version of events into account. Their scathing report, adopted unanimously by the bipartisan committee and released on Wednesday, roundly rejected her assertions.
The committee chairman, Representative Jo Bonner of Alabama, noted that members of her staff had continued for the past two years to complain to the committee about their treatment. One, he said, was a war veteran who said it would be better to deploy to Afghanistan than to work for a corrupt legislative office.
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