Mitt Romney

Trump insinuates self into Romney campaign

How a toxic attention-seeker (not Newt) will likely end up speaking at the RNC

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Trump insinuates self into Romney campaignBusinessman and real estate developer Donald Trump (L) greets Mitt Romney after endorsing his candidacy for president at the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada February 2, 2012. (Credit: Reuters/Steve Marcus)

So. Donald Trump again? Are we really doing this again? I guess we are!

There were stories, recently, in the usual places, about how Trump was being seriously considered for a major speech at the Republican Convention. I did not dwell on the story much, because I assumed that these rumors were a product of Donald Trump’s prodigious vanity and powerful imagination. Ha ha ha, sure, the Republicans will definitely want the stupid make-believe TV mogul who pretends to fire people for a living, at their big party.

Now that “Celebrity Apprentice” is done, Trump is back to pretending to be a major political player. He just announced his intention to start his own super PAC, because he is a weird attention-hungry idiot with a bit of money to burn (though not as much money to burn as he would like you to think he has to burn).

He is just, essentially, begging the party to let him be on TV at their convention. But Maggie Haberman wrote today that while Trump is just definitely not going to be anyone’s running mate, the Republicans might actually have him speak at their convention. Because Romney is actually getting a lot of use out of Trump:

He’s been a surrogate for Romney, recorded robocalls for him and pushed him on the Fox News airwaves and over Twitter. He’s also raised money for him, and both Ann and Mitt Romney have thanked him in public for his help. There is no question that he has an appeal to some voters and that Romney has been better off having Trump with him than against him.

“Some voters.” Awful voters. The worst voters. But yes, it is basically true: Romney embraces Trump because there’s very little downside. He gets support from horrible people, and he is not really taken to task by non-horrible people (or, for the most part, journalists) for associating with him. This is how Trump will end up at the convention, despite being the most prominent birther in the nation.

In fact, the Romney campaign is auctioning off dinner with Donald Trump, in case you have a couple thousand dollars and some sort of horrible grudge against someone. That does not suggest that anyone at the Romney campaign is particularly wary of the guy.

Here’s another line from Trump’s Newsmax interview, just so we understand that this Donald Trump is not any less invested in conspiratorial race-tinged dog-whistle Jerome Corsi nonsense than he was last year:

He adds: “If you’re going to look at that, on something that I don’t believe ever happened, you have to look into Barack Obama saying that he was heavy into drugs, heavy into alcohol, was a total disaster, was a horrible student. Then you have to say if he was a horrible student, how did he get into Columbia? How did he get into Harvard?

Suspicious! How did Obama get into Harvard? (Maybe his father was secretly … Charles Kushner!)

Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene

“Battlefield Earth”: Romney vs. the Psychlos

The GOP's standard bearer calls L. Ron Hubbard's bizarro sci-fi epic his favorite novel. Is that cause for concern?

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Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney reads a book to children in Manchester(Credit: Brian Snyder / Reuters)

There’s a scene near the end of “Battlefield Earth,” Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s 1982 science fiction epic, that may explain a bit of why Mitt Romney has said (most recently this week) that it’s his favorite novel.

Our hero, Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, has just finished taking down the Psychlo empire, which has ruled Earth for the past millennium and has dominated most of the known 16 universes for going on 300,000 years. Now Jonnie has to negotiate with the alien powers who are jockeying to fill the power vacuum left behind, and things aren’t looking so good for the human race.

Homo sapiens seem destined to suffer one of the more common fates of common folk after the end of totalitarian rule — war, chaos and brutal, if less total, exploitation at the hands of tyrants, oligarchs, warlords and military juntas.

Into this dire situation steps Jonnie, who proves that his genius isn’t just for armed insurrection but for diplomacy and great power politics as well. He outwits his enemies at the conference table, finds a way to settle the 60 trillion galactic credit debt that Earth discovers it owes to the Galactic Bank and threatens the assembled dignitaries and thugs into signing a treaty forbidding war forever. Then to top it all off, he draws on his recently acquired knowledge of ancient Earth economic theory to persuade them that their interests would be best served not by reaping wealth through war, as they’ve been accustomed to doing, but by introducing free market capitalism, and commercial banking, to the universes.

“There are other ways of handling economies,” Jonnie explains. “You could phase every war industry you have over to what is called ‘consumer production.’ You make things for the people. The people are employed. They make things for one another. Your people are your best market for your industries. … Your people, now starving and rioting, can become gainfully employed in peace industries. They can have things for themselves. Such things as better houses and furniture, better clothes, better food.”

It does not require an esoteric reading of Hubbard’s text, in other words, to identify conservative notions of the kind Romney seems to hold. It’s full of explicit commentary about the stupidity of taxes and the dangers of an overly intrusive state. The Earth government that Jonnie helps set up after the dust settles is a kind of paternalistic libertarian utopia, in which no one pays any taxes except what they volunteer as donations; the rest of the expenses are quietly covered from Jonnie’s personal account. There’s even an offhand insult of “some nut named Keynes,” whose bad theories Jonnie encounters while cramming for his meeting with the Galactic Bank.

Earth’s foreign policy, once the Psychlos are gone, is like a neoconservative fantasy of what the Forces of Freedom and Light could do if we had a Death Star and were willing to use it. Jonnie coerces the signatures on his pan-universal peace treaty by showing his rivals a holographic recording of the nuking and subsequent implosion of the Psychlo planet. He then calmly explains to them that he’ll do the same to their planets if they don’t comply. They sign, and freedom rolls forth.

Even for 1982, when the novel was published, it reads a bit retrograde in its earnest celebration of white guys kicking ass. There are almost no women, and the few who show up are virginally pure. There’s a sentimental ethnotyping of the various surviving human populations (Chinese people are good at cooking and understanding the rules of courtly etiquette; Scottish men all sound like Montgomery Scott and dress like highlanders). And the white guys are total Übermenschen. Jonnie himself was “a muscular six feet shining with the bronzed health of his 20 years,” with “corn yellow hair and beard,” and “ice-blue eyes.” It was as if Hubbard hadn’t gotten the memo that it wasn’t the 1940s anymore, when he and his buddy Robert Heinlein had helped work out the formula for this kind of high adolescent science fictional adventure tale.

But for all that, my guess — and I can only guess at this — is that it misses the point to assume that Romney likes the book for these reasons. I suspect he’s drawn to it more for the reasons I was.

I first read the novel when I was 12 or 13. I didn’t quote the above passages from memory, but you’ll have to trust me when I say that I knew exactly where to find them in the text when I booted it up on my iPad. “Battlefield Earth” is a ridiculous book, every bit the gargantuan exercise in nerd-boy wish fulfillment you’d expect from someone like Hubbard, who was such a nerd-boy bent on wish fulfillment that he invented a religion to fulfill his dreams of mastery and immortality.

But “Battlefield Earth” is also an incredibly exciting book, pulp of the pulpiest order. It’s the kind of adventure story that exerts a particularly strong pull, I’d wager, on boys of a certain age with a certain need to escape into, or project themselves into, heroic tales of conquest, mastery and moral clarity.

For me it was, I half-realized as a teenager and fully realize now, consolation. It was comfort food, compensation for my feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, anxiety.

I don’t think I read the whole, 1,000-plus-page thing through more than twice, but I read my favorite set pieces dozens of times. I read it late at night, when I should have been getting sleep for school. I read it, at times almost hungrily, when I was home on vacation from college. I read it to feel better, to feel nothing, to escape.

That’s not to say that there was nothing political about my attraction to the book, and to the hundreds of other such books I read. But the politics of it went deeper, into the muck of those psychological processes by which we process, deny or sublimate the data of the world, our fears, our fantasies. I wanted to save the world. I wanted to be strong. I wanted to vanquish enemies. I wanted good and evil to be clear. I wanted to run away. I wanted to escape the anxieties of my family, of school, of sexual desires that I had no real means of satisfying. A lot of the time I just wanted to disappear into the time-displacing comfort of a well-plotted adventure.

At a minimum Mitt Romney was 36 or 37 when he first read the book. I’m now 36, and though I haven’t read “Battlefield Earth” in a while, I’m not clean. I still read science fiction and fantasy, and though I’m wiser and more sophisticated than I was as an adolescent, when they exerted their strongest pull, that hasn’t meant discarding those parts of me that were formed by the books.

It hasn’t meant rejecting the books. It’s meant reckoning with the influence they’ve had on me, and with those parts of me that sought them out. It’s not wrong to want to save the world, be a hero, fight for the cause of justice, live a purposeful life. But it’s unserious to believe that these things are easy, that they can be achieved without sacrifice or compromise, that being heroic in one’s own life is going to look anything like what it looks like for Jonnie Goodboy Tyler. And it can be horribly toxic to continue as an adult to view the world through an unreconstructed Hubbardian lens. Women, I’ve learned, actually do exist. Death Star foreign policy is problematic in a number of ways. It’s not bogus left-wing literary theory to notice that aliens, in books like “Battlefield Earth,” are often proxies for the kinds of dark-skinned humans that we palefaces have historically had a hard time seeing as human. Problems like war, poverty, oppression and exploitation don’t just melt away when you set loose patriotic, super-resourceful, can-do capitalist-engineer-ninjas to do their thing.

The key question about Romney and “Battlefield Earth” — or Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragon Flight,” or Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game,” two other old favorites of mine that Romney’s mentioned liking — isn’t: What does it mean that he likes the book so much? I like the book. I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that Barack Obama likes the book, or Karl Rove, or David Petraeus (all of whom have at least a glint of the nerd-boy about them). The question is what has Romney done with it? How has he reckoned with it?

What was going through his mind, back in the 1980s, when he came home at night after a long day of leveraged buyouts, when the kids were all in bed and he and his wife, Ann, lay side by side in their bed, she with her “Anna Karenina” and he with his “Battlefield Earth”? Did he see himself as heroic like Jonnie Goodboy Tyler? Was he saving companies from the Forces of Bad Management and Government Intrusion? Was he reading, instead, as an escape from the moral compromises of the work he was doing at Bain Consulting, which, however you slice it macroeconomically, didn’t meet the standards of moral purity that would have satisfied Jonnie Goodboy Tyler?

What does he think about the politics (explicit and implicit) of “Battlefield Earth” now that he’s running for president, and may soon end up in a position where he has to decide how to handle the Psychlos at home and abroad?

It seems unlikely that Romney’s going to engage these questions, and in the absence of such answers it’s inappropriate to go too far in analyzing him by way of the book. But it’s worth saying this: “Battlefield Earth” is in most respects a silly story, but for a lot of us it’s just such silly stories that have made us who we are. If Romney is elected president, he will wield enormous power over the people of Earth, and I have a feeling that somewhere in that psyche of his there’s the voice of Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, and L. Ron Hubbard, saying something about how to be righteous in the world. I hope for our sake, and for the sake of galactic peace and prosperity, that Romney has enough wisdom to take from those voices what’s good in them, and to keep the rest in proper perspective.

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Daniel Oppenheimer's book "Turncoats: The Journey from Left to Right and How It’s Transformed America," a political and intellectual history of six prominent American intellectuals who journeyed from the left to the right of the political spectrum, will be published by Simon and Schuster

Romney pal defends Obamacare

Sen. Roy Blunt supports part of the bill his ally Mitt Romney has pledged to fully repeal

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Romney pal defends Obamacare(Credit: Reuters/ Jonathan Ernst)

Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., gave a strong defense yesterday of a portion of the Affordable Care Act that allows children up to 26 years old to remain on their parents’ health insurance plans, breaking a bit from the GOP’s hard-line opposition to Obamacare.

Blunt endorsed Mitt Romney early on and led the campaign’s efforts to recruit Republican lawmakers during the GOP primary. But his comments in an interview on KTRS radio in St. Louis may give Boston some heartburn as it tries to convince conservative voters that Romney, who enacted the predecessor of Obamacare in Massachusetts, will actually repeal the healthcare law.

“It’s one of the things that I think should continue to be the case,” Blunt said of the “dependent coverage” provision, explaining that “it’s a way to get a significant number of the uninsured into an insurance group without much cost,” because young people are generally healthy.

Blunt noted that he even introduced a bill when he was in the House that would do exactly what the provision of the Affordable Care Act does now, saying, “I was for it then, and I’d be for it now.” “You’re breaking some news,” host McGraw Milhaven quipped.

While Blunt said he still favors repealing most of the health law, he would want to preserve a few sections, including the dependent coverage provision and the creation of high-risk pools for patients with preexisting conditions.

Romney has repeatedly vowed to fully repeal the Affordable Care Act, though he hasn’t spoken out specifically on the dependent coverage provision and he enacted a similar provision as governor. The provision is hugely popular, even though the overall law is not. And while Republican leaders supported the extension of coverage to 26-year-olds as recently as 2009, when it was included in the GOP’s healthcare alternative proposal, the GOP’s message today is that they’re for a complete repeal of the law, including the minimum coverage provision.

This got Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., in trouble after it was revealed that he takes advantage of Obamacare to make sure his daughter has insurance.

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Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon's political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter @aseitzwald.

Romney: Bain’s in bounds

The GOP candidate tells Time's Mark Halperin that he welcomes a discussion of his business record

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Romney: Bain's in boundsMitt Romney (Credit: Reuters/Larry Downing)

After some debate this week about whether Bain Capital is fair game in the wake of Booker-gate, Mitt Romney himself ruled his private equity record as being “in bounds” Wednesday. Romney has made Bain a central focus of his campaign, and in an interview with Time magazine’s Mark Halperin, Romney said he welcomes the discussion:

Halperin: So when the President says he wants to focus a lot of the election and debate on your career at Bain Capital, do you welcome that?

Romney: Well of course, I’d like to also focus on his record.

Pressed again by Halperin, “But you welcome scrutiny of your business record, is that right?” Romney replied, “The fact is that I spent 25 years in the private sector. And that obviously teaches you something that you don’t learn if you haven’t spent any time in the private sector.”

It’d be impossible for Romney to avoid completely talking about Bain, considering how central it is to his narrative about his ability to fix the economy, but some people on both sides of the aisle have called Obama’s Bain attacks unfair.

But even some of Romney’s own surrogates — perhaps veering a bit off message — have sanctioned putting Bain in play. Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, who was one of Romney’s key allies in the first-in-the-nation primary, told reporters yesterday, “I think the Bain record as a whole is fair game, and what you have to do is do an honest evaluation.” Former GOP presidential candidate turned Romney-backer Newt Gingrich agreed in an interview on CNN this week, though he cautioned Democrats that his own experience attacking Romney over Bain didn’t work out too well.

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Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon's political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter @aseitzwald.

Romney shifting focus from economy to education

Romney stresses "better teachers, better options" as he lashes out at teachers unions

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Romney shifting focus from economy to educationFILE - In this May 8, 2012 file photo, Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks in Lansing, Mich. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)(Credit: AP)

NEW YORK (AP) — Mitt Romney is wading into a new policy arena — the nation’s education system — as he broadens his focus to appeal to general election voters still getting to know President Barack Obama’s likely opponent.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, who has been reluctant to stray far from economic issues, is expected to outline a proposal for improving education in a speech Wednesday at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington.

Romney has offered few details for his plans on several key policy areas, including foreign policy, health care and education. He attacked Obama’s education policy while speaking to donors in New York City on Tuesday evening, previewing themes likely to play prominently in Wednesday’s speech.

“This president receives the lion’s share of funding from organized labor, and the teachers’ unions represent a massive source of funding for the Democratic Party,” Romney said. “The challenge with that is when it comes to actual reform to make schools better for our kids, they talk a good game, but they don’t do it.”

He continued, “If I’m president of the United States, instead of just giving lip service to improving our schools, I will actually put the kids first and the union behind in giving our kids better teachers, better options and better choices for a better future.”

The message is consistent for the Romney campaign, which regularly heaps criticism on the Democratic president’s policies but offers only a vague road map for what Romney would do.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday that Romney’s shift to education was welcome after a long campaign season in which he said the GOP rarely mentioned the issue.

“Education never came up in the Republican primary in any of the debates, or if it did, it came up almost never,” Carney said.

Carney said Obama’s education initiatives have received broad bipartisan support and that the president “looks forward to defending that record.”

Romney’s shift carries some risk. His regular criticism of labor unions, in particular, threatens to alienate voters in Rust Belt states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where a close election may be decided.

Before the speech, Romney announced Tuesday a team of education policy advisers that includes former Education Secretary Rod Paige and other officials from President George W. Bush’s administration. Paige is among several prominent opponents of teachers’ unions on the panel. As education secretary in 2004, he labeled the National Education Association a “terrorist organization.”

Romney’s positions on education have evolved over time. He once supported abolishing the Education Department but reversed that position as a presidential candidate in 2007. At the time, he said he came to see the value of the federal government in “holding down the interests of the teachers’ unions” and putting kids and parents first.

Romney also changed his position on the Bush-era education overhaul known as “No Child Left Behind.” He said he supported the law as a candidate in 2007, but he has since generally come out against the policy many conservatives see as an expansion of the federal government.

Romney continues to support the federal accountability standards in the law, however. He also has said the student testing, charter-school incentives and teacher evaluation standards in Obama’s “Race to the Top” competition “make sense,” although the federal government should have less control over education. The campaign in recent days has emphasized his support for charter schools while governor of Massachusetts, a theme likely to play out in Wednesday’s address.

The speech represents Romney’s first public event in four days. Working to close Obama’s cash advantage, he’s coming off a three-day fundraising swing in the New York area that his chief finance aide said had netted $15 million. A single finance event in Manhattan on Tuesday evening generated $5 million.

Still, the campaign is eager to drive a positive message for voters now tuning in to the contest.

The education speech follows a relatively quiet phase for Romney, who has been focused on fundraising but usually delivers one major address a week. Most of his recent speeches, however, have been about the economic themes that so far have defined his campaign.

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Polls show presidential race tightening

With five months until the election, new polls show the candidates in a dead heat

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Polls show presidential race tighteningMissouri Gov. Jay Nixon, left, and Joplin Superintendent of Schools C.J. Huff, right, flank President Barack Obama as he takes the stage to deliver the Joplin High School commencement address a day before the anniversary of the twister that killed 161 people, Monday, May 21, 2012, in Joplin, Mo. Obama jetted to Joplin immediately after wrapping up the national security-focused NATO conference in Chicago, the second international summit the president hosted over the past four days. (AP Photo/The Kansas City Star, Shane Keyser)(Credit: AP)

With about five months to go, the presidential race is tightening, polls show, with voters nearly evenly divided between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, his likely Republican challenger.

Obama and Romney are locked in a dead heat over handling the economy, the top concern of voters, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows. They are tied at 47 percent.

Overall, 49 percent said they back Obama for re-election and 46 percent preferred Romney, a statistically insignificant difference.

Other recent national polls show a similarly close margin.

Earlier polls generally showed the former Massachusetts governor holding a slight lead over Obama on economic issues and Obama slightly ahead overall.

But the tightening follows an aggressive attack on Romney’s business credentials by the Obama campaign, including ads painting him as a job-destroying corporate raider at Bain Capital, the private-equity firm he co-founded.

Romney called the attacks “character assassination.” But Obama defended the tactic on Monday as legitimate and suggested Romney’s background was a poor qualification for the White House since being president involves more than “maximizing profits.”

Still, some prominent Democratic supporters have expressed discomfort with the attacks, including former Tennessee Rep. Harold Ford Jr., former Obama economic adviser Steve Rattner and Newark Mayor Cory Booker. Booker said he found attack ads from both sides “nauseating.” However, he later said Romney’s business record was fair game.

With U.S. unemployment still hovering above 8 percent and economic uncertainty widespread, both candidates have stepped up their emphasis on jobs and the economy.

Romney was fund raising in New York with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and had no public appearances. Obama was at the White House also with no public appearances scheduled.

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Associated Press News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.

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Follow Tom Raum on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/tomraum. For more AP political coverage, look for the 2012 Presidential Race in AP Mobile’s Big Stories section. Also follow https://twitter.com/APCampaign and AP journalists covering the campaign: https://twitter.com/AP/ap-campaign-2012.

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