Jeff's Lunchbreak: Response to E-mail: Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney I've received another e-mail forward that I couldn't resist responding to. I've done my usual format of indenting the original e-mail and interspersing my comments throughout. I may have gone a little far in playing Devil's advocate a few places replying to this e-mail, but it never hurts to see things from a different perspective. Plus, there were a few places where the writer made blatantly untrue statements.

This is good stuff.... TODAY'S MUST READ AND PASS ON TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!
Why Mitt Romney is Unlikable!

A lot is being said in the media about Mitt Romney not being "likable" or that he doesn't "relate well" to people. Frankly, we struggled to understand why. So after much research, we have come up with a Top Ten List to explain this "un-likabliity."

Nothing to respond to so far.

Top Ten Reasons To Dislike Mitt Romney:
1. Drop-dead, collar-ad handsome with gracious, statesmanlike aura. Looks like every central casting's #1 choice for Commander-in-Chief.

No argument, but also nothing too different from Obama.

2. Been married to ONE woman his entire life, and has been faithful to her, including through her bouts with breast cancer and MS.

No argument, but also nothing different from Obama (aside from breast cancer & MS).

3. No scandals or skeletons in his closet. (How boring is that?)

Really? Tax returns, dog on roof, Damon Corp, high school homophobic bully, etc.*

Or just go to this site:

RealChange.org - Mitt Romney's Skeleton Closet: Scandals, Quotes, and Character

In fairness, here's their page on Obama:

RealChange.org - Barack Obama's Skeleton Closet

4. Can't speak in a fake, southern, "black preacher voice" when necessary.

Well, here's what an ex-Mormon had to say about Romney's speech at the Republican Convention (in a comment that seems to have been expunged from the original forum due to a ban on political arguments, but can still be found for the moment by Googling it).

"Mr. Romney's big speech, delivered in a treacly tone with a strange misty smile on his face suggesting he was always about to burst into tears, was of a piece with the rest of the convention."
Looks like Mitt was unleashing his "Fast and Testimony Meeting" persona. It often, in Mormon circles, involves actual bursting into tears, but Mitt probably thought that was a bridge too far for national television.

Note that that quote at the beginning was in reference to the New York Times editorial linked to below.

NY Times Editorial - Mr. Romney Reinvents History

5. Highly intelligent. Graduated cum laude from both Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School...and by the way, his academic records are NOT sealed.

Actually, his academic records are sealed, as are pretty much everybody's. There's no precedent for presidential candidates to release their academic records. Unless something has changed since the article linked to below (and I couldn't find anything through Google), neither he nor Obama have released their academic records.

Media Matters - Limbaugh Uses Dishonest College Transcripts Argument To Defend Romney

6. Doesn't smoke or drink alcohol, and has never done drugs, not even in the counter-culture age when he went to college. Too square for today's America?

No argument (not really a big mark for or against the man, either, when around half of Americans have tried pot at least once and the vast majority have tried alcohol).

7. Represents an America of "yesterday", where people believed in God, went to Church, didn't screw around, worked hard, and became a SUCCESS!

Many people have a rather skewed perception of religion in American history. Thomas Jefferson was a deist who cut out all the miracles from his Bible because he didn't believe them. George Washington refused to take Communion, and eventually just quit going to Church on Communion Sundays when his preacher said something about it. The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli (unanimously approved by the Senate at the time), openly stated "As the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion..."

The rest of that statement is just nostalgia. It reminds me of a quote from Franklin Pierce Adams, "Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory." Let's not forget that the America of "yesterday" didn't let women vote, allowed people to own other human beings, and had incidents like the Ludlow Massacre against hardworking Americans.

8. Has a family of five great sons....and none of them have police records or are in drug rehab. But of course, they were raised by a stay-at-home mom, and that "choice" deserves America's scorn.

It's great that his family has turned out so well, but some people argue that having that many children is itself irresponsible:

BBC - Is it selfish to have more than two children?

And who, exactly, thinks women deserve scorn for staying at home. They may not get much respect, but scorn? Actually, I did find a statement by a politician arguing for welfare reform who wanted a work requirement, even for single mothers, "to have the dignity of work," because apparently, he didn't consider raising children to be work.

Washington Post Blog - Mitt Romney flashback: Stay-at-home moms need to learn 'dignity of work'

9. Oh yes.....he's a MORMON. We need to be very afraid of that very strange religion that teaches its members to be clean-living, patriotic, fiscally conservative, charitable, self-reliant, and honest.

No argument. It's just frustrating that religion is such a big part of politics. When every politician these days ends their speeches with 'God bless America,' can you even imagine a candidate getting elected who said, "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own, " or "Priests...dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversions of the duperies on which they live," or "And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter."

NoBeliefs.com - Thomas Jefferson on Christianity & Religion

People are entitled to their religious beliefs, but government is a secular institution, and supposedly "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

10. And one more point.....pundits say because of his wealth, he can't relate to ordinary Americans. I guess that's because he made that money HIMSELF.....as opposed to marrying it or inheriting it from Dad. Apparently, he didn't understand that actually working at a job and earning your own money made you unrelatable to Americans.

This 'self made man' talk is one of the more irritating narratives about Romney. Yes, he's worked hard and made successful business decisions, but he was lucky enough to be born into a situation that gave him more opportunities than most. He came from a wealthy family with lots of connections. Andrew Sabl summed it up well when he wrote:

Look. I don't begrudge Romney's having had his college tuition and living expenses paid for with family money. Mine were too. My background, though not as fancy as Mitt or Ann Romney's, was privileged enough. But the guy should just come out and admit it: "I was a child of privilege and have my parents' wealth to thank for my education. That said, I worked very very hard in business, and the vast majority of my fortune I earned myself."

I would add to that, though, that Romney did have more freedom in taking the risk than many. If his business failed, he knew that he wouldn't be out on the streets looking through dumpsters for food. He knew that if it came to it, he'd have his parents to fall back on. That's great for him. I'm in a similar (though not nearly the same scale) situation myself. I would wish such good circumstances for everybody. But rather than have the hubris to call myself a self made man, I'm grateful for the opportunities my parents have provided me.

The Reality Based Community - Mitt Romney and Ann: the students "struggling" so much that they had to sell stock.

And just to add one more thing to this, back in April, in a speech to some college students, Romney suggested that they take the risk to start their own business, and to "borrow money if you have to from your parents". That's a perfect example of his family's wealth affecting his perception of most Americans. Most people don't have enough money to loan their children enough to start a business.

CBS News - Romney advice to students: Take a risk to start a business

The Daily show has also done a humorous take on this:

Mediaite - Jon Stewart Offers Up Hilarious Parody Version Of Romney's Biographical Film

* Why is being a Mormon considered a thing of concern, but being a muslum isn't? More weirdness! My goodness, it's a strange world, isn't it?

Is the writer of this still really suggesting that Obama is a secret Muslim?

*****************************************************
Personal Information:

His full Name is: Willard Mitt Romney
He was Born: March 12, 1947 and is 65 years old.

His Father: George W. Romney, former Governor of the State of Michigan

He was raised in Bloomfield Hills , Michigan

He is Married to Ann Romney since 1969; they five children.

Education:
B.A. from Brigham Young University,

J.D. and M.B.A. from Harvard University

Religion:
Mormon - The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints

Nothing controversial in that.

Working Background:
After high school, he spent 30 months in France as a Mormon missionary.

There is a bit of controversy in that in how it relates to the Vietnam War, but I'll get to that in a bit.

After going to both Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School simultaneously, he passed the Michigan bar exam, but never worked as an attorney.
In 1984, he co-founded Bain Capital a private equity investment firm, one of the largest such firms in the United States.

In 1994, he ran for Senator of Massachusetts and lost to Ted Kennedy.

He was President and CEO of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games.

In 2002, he was elected Governor of the State of Massachusetts where he eliminated a 1.5 billion deficit.

There are some things to be said about some of those points, but I'll just provide a few links.

Some Interesting Facts about Romney:
Bain Capital, starting with one small office supply store in Massachusetts, turned it into Staples; now over
2,000 stores employing 90,000 people.

Bain Capital also worked to perform the same kinds of business miracles again and again, with companies like Domino's, Sealy, Brookstone, Weather Channel, Burger King, Warner Music Group, Dollarama, Home Depot Supply and many others.

I've been doing some reading about Bain Capital and have discovered some interesting things. Here's a pretty thorough article from Rolling Stone:

Rolling Stone - Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital

Here are a few excerpts:

The reality is that toward the middle of his career at Bain, Romney made a fateful strategic decision: He moved away from creating companies like Staples through venture capital schemes, and toward a business model that involved borrowing huge sums of money to take over existing firms, then extracting value from them by force. He decided, as he later put it, that "there's a lot greater risk in a startup than there is in acquiring an existing company." In the Eighties, when Romney made this move, this form of financial piracy became known as a leveraged buyout, and it achieved iconic status thanks to Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Gekko's business strategy was essentially identical to the Romney-Bain model, only Gekko called himself a "liberator" of companies instead of a "helper."

Take a typical Bain transaction involving an Indiana-based company called American Pad and Paper. Bain bought Ampad in 1992 for just $5 million, financing the rest of the deal with borrowed cash. Within three years, Ampad was paying $60 million in annual debt payments, plus an additional $7 million in management fees. A year later, Bain led Ampad to go public, cashed out about $50 million in stock for itself and its investors, charged the firm $2 million for arranging the IPO and pocketed another $5 million in "management" fees. Ampad wound up going bankrupt, and hundreds of workers lost their jobs, but Bain and Romney weren't crying: They'd made more than $100 million on a $5 million investment.

The only ones who profited in a big way from all the job-killing debt that Romney leveraged were Mitt and his buddies at Bain, along with Wall Street firms like Goldman and Citigroup. Barry Ritholtz, author of Bailout Nation, says the criticisms of Bain about layoffs and meanness miss a more important point, which is that the firm's profit-producing record is absurdly mediocre, especially when set against all the trouble and pain its business model causes. "Bain's fundamental flaw, at least according to the math," Ritholtz writes, "is that they took lots of risk, use immense leverage and charged enormous fees, for performance that was more or less the same as [stock] indexing."

Moving on...

He was an unpaid volunteer campaign worker for his dad's gubernatorial campaign 1 year.
He was an unpaid intern in his dad's governor's office for eight years.

He was an unpaid bishop and state president of his church for ten years.

He was an unpaid President of the Salt Lake Olympic Committee for three years.

He took no salary and was the unpaid Governor of Massachusetts for four years.

This is one of the reasons that people say Romney is out of touch. He's so rich that he was able to do all those things without getting any salary in return. When income and wealth inequality are at all time highs, and when so many people are living from paycheck to paycheck, being able to spend four years of your life volunteering for public service is a luxury most people can't fathom.

He gave his entire inheritance from his father to charity.
Mitt Romney is one of the wealthiest self-made men in our country but has given more back to its citizens in terms of money, service and time than most men.

And in 2011 Mitt Romney gave over $4 million to charity, almost 19% of his income.... Just for comparison purposes, Obama gave 1% and Joe Biden gave $300 or .0013%.

Fairly commendable. However, it depends on what you want to call 'charity' vs. just a non-profit organization. It looks like the majority of his donations are going to the Mormon Church. Churches in general do not devote much of their budget to what most people would consider charity, and the Mormon Church seems to be particularly bad. According to the third link below, the Mormon Church contributed just $1 billion to charitable causes between 1985 and 2008, averaging just 0.7% of its annual income. By comparison, Wal-mart donates around $1.75 billion in food aid to charities every year - 75% more in a single year than what the Mormon Church contributed in twenty. The Methodist Church tends to be one of the most charitable churches, giving about 29% of it's revenues to charitable causes. A true secular charity, The American Red Cross, spends just over 92% of its revenues on actually helping people.

Mitt Romney is Trustworthy:
He will show us his birth certificate

He will show us his high school and college transcripts.

He will show us his social security card.

He will show us his law degree.

He will show us his draft notice.

He will show us his medical records.

Wow. I wasn't going to research all of those, but 'draft notice' caught my eye as a weird document to release, so I looked up 'mitt romney draft notice' just to fact check to see if he had actually shown it. What I found was pretty surprising. Romney demonstrated in support of the draft while he was at Stanford, while at the same time filing for and receiving draft deferments for himself. In fact, between his time at Stanford and his overseas mission to France, he received a total of four draft deferments. He was a draft dodger who demonstrated in support of having other young men drafted and sent off to war.

And as I noted above, he hasn't released his college transcripts. I haven't fact checked the other documents.

He will show us his income tax records.
He will show us he has nothing to hide.

This is one of the areas where Romney has broken from tradition. It's customary for candidates to release several year's worth of tax returns (Obama has). Romney has only released 2 years worth.

What makes this especially troubling is that he got caught lying about his taxes when running for governor of Massachusetts, after numerous attempts to stall at releasing those records, and eventually had to 'retroactively' pay taxes to Massachusetts just to be eligible to run for governor.

Mitt Romney's background, experience and trustworthiness show him to be a great leader and an excellent citizen for President of the United States.
You may think that Romney may not be the best representative the Republicans could have selected. At least I know what religion he is, and that he won't desecrate the flag, bow down to foreign powers, or practice fiscal irresponsibility.

Man, this writer really does think Obama is a closet Muslim. And when has Obama ever desecrated the flag?

Actually, I did find this, which is maybe what the writer was referring to:

NBC News - Obama's image on American flag angers vets

That was a local group, Lake County Democratic Party headquarters, violating the Flag Code, by replacing the union with a picture of Obama. That would have angered me, too, had I seen them doing it, but I don't think Obama himself had anything to do with it.

On the other hand, I see the flag code ignored all the time. Here are dozens of examples on Amazon of violations of Section 176 of the code:

I know he has the ability to turn this financial debacle that the current regime has gotten us into. We won't like all the things necessary to recover from this debt, but someone with Romney's background can do it.

I know it's a refrain Obama's used so many times that it's almost comical, but the current administration did not get us into the financial situation that we're in. The current situation is the result of bi-partisan bungling from Clinton through Bush, largely from misregulation and odd tax loopholes.

But, on the minus side, he never was a "Community Organizer", never took drugs or smoked pot, never got drunk, did not associate with communists or terrorists, nor did he attend a church whose pastor called for God to damn the US. IF THIS ISN'T WORTH SENDING TO EVERYONE THEN I DON'T KNOW WHAT IS!!~!!

What's wrong with being a community organizer? Granted, cocaine is not a particularly good drug, but pot is one of the safest drugs around (safer than either alcohol or tobacco). I don't see abstinence on pot or alcohol as a virtue unless you have an addiction problem. If you can use those substances responsibly (like the vast majority of the population), what's the issue?

AlterNet - Over 100 Million Americans Have Smoked Marijuana -- And It's Still Illegal?

And I know I said above that religion shouldn't play a huge role in electing our politicians, but if this writer wants to drag Obama's religion into it, then so be it. Turn about is fair play. What about the Mormon Church's flagrant disregard for its non-profit status in contributing $180,000 to fighting Prop 8 in California and fraudulently reporting that amount until they were caught (for which they were laughably fined $6000), not to mention its horrible stance in wanting to fight against marriage equality in the first place? What about their practice of posthumous baptism (which doesn't particularly bother me, but which I would imagine would offend religious descendants of those people), and then hiding the practice once people noticed? Or go read that list link below. Its main subject is something different, but it has a good section on Mormonism as "the religious equivalent of rhythmic gymnastics".

Okay, like I said at the start of this entry, a few places I may have went a bit far in playing devil's advocate. But to tell the truth, I did have more respect for Romney before I started researching the claims of this e-mail. That Rolling Stone article paints a pretty damning picture of Bain Capital and Romney's role in the company. I also didn't know about his lying about his taxes and questionable eligibility for governor of Massachusetts, nor his hypocrisy in avoiding the draft himself while simultaneously trying to get others sent off to war. And then of course, there's the flip-flopping for which he's well known (which I even mentioned before regarding global warming), but that I didn't get into too much above.

A year and a half ago, when I didn't know much about Romney besides the positions he'd held as governor of Massachusetts, I thought he would have made a halfway decent president - much better than the other Republicans running, and honestly, not too different from Obama on many issues. But now that he's done an about face on so many issues to pander to the far right, and now that I've learned more about him, including his character and scruples (rather lacking, in my opinion), I would be very disappointed to see this man win the election.

*What timing. This happened after I received this e-mail, so of course the writer of the e-mail couldn't have known about it, but now there's the video from Romney's talk to a group of wealthy donors, where he didn't guard his language in how he spoke of Americans and other issues.

Mother Jones - SECRET VIDEO: Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He REALLY Thinks of Obama Voters

Here's a good take down of one of his statements that has gathered the most attention, that 47% of Americans are reliant on the government because they don't pay income taxes.

Washington Post Blog - Mitt Romney versus the 47 percent

Updated 2012-09-24: Made a few slight revisions to typos or to make things more clear, particularly in the section on Romney's draft dodging, but nothing major.

Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons