Tag: Mitt Romney

The Bane of Bain

Back in 2012, Barack Obama made so much hay out of Mitt Romney’s connection to Bain Capital that a distraught Cory Booker was inspired to cry out, “Stop attacking private equity. Stop attacking Jeremiah Wright.” Booker called Obama’s attacks “nauseating” and “ridiculous,” which earned him a supportive tweet from John McCain. Fast-forward to 2017. The Obama people are now pushing hard for Deval Patrick, the former two-term governor of Massachusetts, to run for the Democratic nomination in 2020. Guess what Patrick has been doing since he left the governor’s mansion? Working at Bain Capital. It’s something. The combined forces of Wall Street and the Hamptons—sorry, Clinton and Obama—are pushing hard, variously, for Joe Biden (who’s making strong noises that he’ll be […]

I’m a libertarian. Which is why I’m voting for Mitt Romney.

Randy Barnett is one of the most brilliant legal theorists on the right today. He’s also a libertarian. Ever since I came across his work in the course of my research on Justice Scalia, I’ve been fascinated by him. No matter what you think of his politics, he’s always worth reading. “I am as libertarian today as I was” in 1975, writes Barnett in today’s Wall Street Journal [pdf of entire article here], when he attended his first Libertarian Party convention. And that is why he’s voting tomorrow for Mitt Romney. And urging other libertarians to do the same. Because a vote for Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson is, well, I’ll just let Barnett explain it in his own words. […]

Coal Miners Forced to Attend Romney Rally: “Attendance at the event was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend.”

From Ryan Cooper at the Washington Monthly comes this especially pointed tale of workplace coercion (h/t Douglas Edwards). So the Romney campaign visited a coal mine on August 14th, for a speech with a bunch of suitably dirty miners standing behind him, with his podium bearing a placard that read “Coal Country Stands with Mitt.” But apparently it should have said “or else” at the end: The Pepper Pike company that owns the Century Mine told workers that attending the Aug. 14 Romney event would be both mandatory and unpaid, a top company official said Monday morning in a West Virginia radio interview. A group of employees who feared they’d be fired if they didn’t attend the campaign rally in […]

What Katha Said

Katha Pollitt writing in the Nation about the Hilary Rosen/Ann Romney fracas: But the brouhaha over Hilary Rosen’s injudicious remarks is not really about whether what stay-home mothers do is work. Because we know the answer to that: it depends. When performed by married women in their own homes, domestic labor is work—difficult, sacred, noble work. Ann says Mitt called it more important work than his own, which does make you wonder why he didn’t stay home with the boys himself. When performed for pay, however, this supremely important, difficult job becomes low-wage labor that almost anyone can do—teenagers, elderly women, even despised illegal immigrants. But here’s the real magic: when performed by low-income single mothers in their own homes, […]

The Republican Debate: 5 Theses

Thesis 1: When the libertarian rubber hits the political road… Going after Mitt Romney in the first ten minutes of the debate, Rick Perry claimed that Romney had a good record of creating jobs when he was in the private sector but a terrible record as governor of Massachusetts.  Conversely, said Perry, he had a terrific record as governor of Texas.  “We created more jobs in the last three months in Texas” than Romney did during his entire term in Massachusetts.  Even Michael Dukakis, Perry added, had a better record than Romney, to which Romney replied: “George Bush and his predecessor created jobs at a faster rate than you did.” In all the back and forth, no one noted the […]