September 21, 2012
Four months ago, Mitt Romney delivered one of the most influential speeches of the 2012 campaign. Sadly, the campaign itself was too shy to publicize the speech, and so its influence wasn’t felt until earlier this week, when Mother Jones magazine posted video footage of it. (The video is also notable for its lovely golden palette, and for the shiny tableware in the foreground, both of which suggest that the anonymous cinematographer was the rapper Drake.)
The speech was more of a talk—a question-and-answer session with donors in Florida. And the most provocative part comes at the end of the first of two recordings, when Romney offers a rather pessimistic assessment of his chances:
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September 20, 2012
Mohammadi Younus grew up in Ghazni Province, in the east of Afghanistan, and studied medicine in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. He had “a problem with the Taliban… a political problem” during the dark days of their rule, and he landed in jail. He decided to leave the country and crossed into Iran.
He bought a fake passport for a little more than two thousand dollars and made it to Turkey. He registered there as a refugee with the United Nations and chose Greece as his next destination because he had learned the Hippocratic oath, and Hippocrates was Greek. In 2004, he applied for asylum and was accepted, probably because of his medical education.
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September 19, 2012
“My question is, why don’t you stick up for yourself?” a man who had paid fifty thousand dollars to attend a dinner with Mitt Romney asked. “To me, you should be so proud that you’re wealthy.” That remark was recorded in a video of the dinner, at a hedge-fund manager’s home in Boca Raton, which was released by Mother Jones. In it, Romney complains that just under half of all Americans had come to see themselves as “victims,” when they were actually, as he sees it, entitled and demanding dependents. But there is a character who he and everyone else in the room seem to agree most certainly is a true victim: Mitt Romney, martyr to the envy of the masses.
Romney has been running a campaign centered on resentment, in many forms: the resentment directed at the “successful” that he imagines is driving his critics; the resentment he is trying to fan in his base voters; and, increasingly and most strangely, his own. Romney’s resentment has become a matter of temperament, of policy, and of politics. He and his wife, Ann, have made it clear that they take offense when his good will is questioned. Fixated on what he sees as the jealous motives of his critics, he misses the important truths about our economy and the reality of people’s lives that might have informed his agenda. He also reveals a great deal about himself.
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September 18, 2012
The Supreme Court is likely to take up the subject of same-sex marriage in its coming term, which begins next week. But how the Justices decide to approach the issue—and which case they choose to resolve—may make all the difference in the result. Proposition 8 vs. the Defense of Marriage Act is the first contest before the Court.
Two cases, in broad terms, will go before the Justices for review. The first, and more famous, is the Proposition 8 case out of California. There the lawyers David Boies and Ted Olson, who were antagonists in Bush v. Gore, are challenging the voter initiative that banned same-sex marriage in the state in 2008. The trial court in San Francisco overturned Prop. 8, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that ruling last year. Charles Cooper, the lawyer who defended Prop. 8, has asked the Justices to hear the case and overturn the Ninth Circuit. This trial is already so celebrated that there’s a play about the trial-court proceedings.
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September 17, 2012
Where does God fit in on the 2012 campaign trail? In Comment this week, Hendrik Hertzberg considers the reaction provoked by the omission—and subsequent insertion—of the word “God” in the Democratic platform:
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September 14, 2012
In the aftermath of the gruesome mob violence in Benghazi this week that resulted in the murders of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other American diplomats, together with as many as ten Libyan security guards, as well as attacks on U.S. embassies elsewhere in the Middle East, it is easy to recall the 1993 Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia, in which eighteen American servicemen were killed, their bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by angry mobs.
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September 13, 2012
Were the attacks on the United States Consulate in Benghazi, which killed the American Ambassador and three other diplomats, motivated by the film that the assailants, and many news networks, claim was their motive? Was it really religious outrage that made a few young men lose their heads and commit murder? Have any of the men who attacked the consulate actually seen the film? I do not know one Libyan who has, despite being in close contact with friends and relatives in Benghazi. And the attack was not preceded by vocal outrage toward the film. Libyan Internet sites and Facebook pages were not suddenly busy with chatter about it.
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September 12, 2012
Tuesday’s anniversary of September 11, 2001, turned out to be quieter than the last one, proving that eleven can add up to less than ten, at least in terms of noise and ceremony. Because the Presidential candidates said that they’d lay off each other a little, in honor of the victims, it even started more calmly than an ordinary day might have at this stage in the campaign. (That broke down by the evening, thanks partly to Benjamin Netanyahu and more to attacks on the American embassy in Cairo and consulate in Libya.) The ceremonies in New York included a reading of the victims’ names and a minimum of speeches, next to a memorial that one can, finally, begin to think of as a true part of the city; after dark, there was also the Tribute in Light, two towers projected in the sky. In Washington, there was a moment of silence at the White House, a wreath-laying at the Pentagon, and proper remarks from the President; in western Pennsylvania, where the passengers and crew on United 93 brought down a plane in an empty field, Joe Biden gave a speech that sounded both maudlin and true (a mix he does know how to manage). The memorial in Pennsylvania is still being built; each of the forty victims will have a grove of trees on land that used to be a strip mine—a different kind of healing.
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September 11, 2012
Not long ago, I ran into someone I’d not seen for a while, who moves in moneyed circles in New York. We started chatting about the usual things—kids, schools—and she told me she’d been consumed lately with political work, raising money for candidates nationwide who were committed to breaking teachers’ unions. She said this with the same kind of social enthusiasm with which she might have recommended a new Zumba class, or passed on the name of a place to get really great birthday cakes.
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September 10, 2012
With the days of secret deals in smoke-filled rooms behind us—we think—are the Republican and Democratic Conventions worth anything anymore? In Comment this week, Steve Coll considers that question:
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