Originally Posted By Vic Sage <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/morning-jay-subtle-exercise-media-bias_648608.html#read-more" target="_blank">http://www.weeklystandard.com/...ead-more</a> Are these lies and distortions about Romney's record the Democrats are pushing simply a distraction from the fact that the President's policies are a miserable failure?
Originally Posted By wahooskipper I'm done with both of the parties. That said, if anyone thinks we can put the "outsourcing genie" back in the bottle you can forget about it. That ship has sailed.
Originally Posted By Dabob2 But should we reward one of the people who was a pioneer in rubbing the lamp real hard and let that genie (and those jobs) escape, reaping millions for himself in the process with little regard for those on the other end?
Originally Posted By ecdc I read an interesting point. Obama was unreasonably asked for his birth certificate out of racism and the right's refusal to accept his legitimacy as President. He provided the birth certificate. Romney is being asked for his tax returns, something every major candidate has provided since his father started the practice. He won't do it.
Originally Posted By dshyates Mitt has released everything that is required of him. Take it or leave it. I don't need to see anything else from him. I feel I have a pretty good understanding of who Mitt is. Bring on the ballot.
Originally Posted By ecdc >>Mitt has released everything that is required of him. Take it or leave it. I don't need to see anything else from him. I feel I have a pretty good understanding of who Mitt is.<< We follow politics pretty closely. We have pretty specific ideologies that dissuade us from voting for Mitt. (Well, at least I do - don't mean to speak for you.) But a lot of independent voters in swing states don't follow it like we do. They may have more middle-of-the-road views. So I think it's important that they understand why Mitt Romney refuses to do something every serious candidate has done for fifty years. I'm not convinced Mitt's hiding something illegal. I just think he and his campaign realize how out of touch he'll seem to voters when a decade's worth of returns are released showing additional offshore accounts and how little he paid in taxes on his multi-millions.
Originally Posted By wahooskipper When is the last time a candidate who was "one of us" ran for President? They aren't like us. Maybe Mitt is less like us than others but this idea that a man (or woman) of the people is going to be our leader is just silly. The average person can't sniff DC (and is probably better off for it).
Originally Posted By Dabob2 I really wonder what it is. I'm assuming it's not just the 13.9% effective rate he paid on his millions in the one year he released - that's maddening that he pays a lower rate than many middle class families, but we've sort of seen that now, so I wouldn't think that he'd think that simply showing more years of that would be a big problem. That says to me there's something else in there he doesn't want the voters to see. Maybe not. But the very fact that our minds go there is a problem for him. Put it this way: he's making a calculated decision that there's something in those returns that would cause him MORE damage than the damage he's sustaining now for not releasing them - and make no mistake, he's sustaining damage.
Originally Posted By ecdc >>When is the last time a candidate who was "one of us" ran for President?<< If it weren't for our politically toxic atmosphere, I think most people would recognize Obama as the epitome of the American dream. Didn't he do what conservatives are always insisting is possible, by pulling himself up by his own bootstraps? What was handed to him on a silver platter? Didn't he work hard for what he has? He achieved what every parent hopes for with their children - he worked hard and went to the best schools. And then he tried to help others as a community organizer. Is he given credit for that? Is he recognized as a great American story? Nope, unless you're an Obama supporter, he's just like all those other slimy politicians at best, or a Kenyan socialist at worst. Don't blame the system for American cynicism. We created it ourselves.
Originally Posted By Dabob2 <When is the last time a candidate who was "one of us" ran for President? > Bill Clinton came from very modest means. He got into good schools through smarts, and then rose through the ranks of Arkansas politics. With the exception of generals, we don't tend to elect as president people with no prior political experience, so anyone running seriously will have been a Governor or Senator (usually) or at least a House member, so in that sense they'll have been removed from being "one of us" for a while... but some people - and I would include Clinton here - still pull off seeming like one of us pretty well. Whatever else he was, he never lost the Bubba from Arkansas part of himself. Obama came from pretty modest means as well (if not as modest as Clinton), but can't pull off "Bubba" - and to his credit doesn't try to. He's less gregarious/more introverted than Clinton, but he had no problem connecting with average folks in 2008, obviously.
Originally Posted By Dabob2 And BTW, McCain usually came off pretty down to earth too, despite being pretty wealthy by the time he ran.
Originally Posted By dshyates I would vote for someone who has at least, at one point in their lives, not been the Elite. I honestly believe that Romney has a certain disdain for those less fortunate the himself. I believe that Mitt and the GOP in general hate the working and lower class. As if supply side economics (trickle down theory) wasn't proof enough. And Mitt is still preaching that the problem in this country is that the rich people aren't rich enough to create the jobs we need. Well the Bush tax cuts on the job ctreators have been in place for 12 years, when is all that promised job creation going to kick in?
Originally Posted By Vic Sage Going back to the subject of releasing information, when are we going to get that transparency we were promised? <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/73606.html" target="_blank">http://www.politico.com/news/s...606.html</a> And if what Bain Capital did was so bad, why did the President hire a Bain man as his budget director? <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/organization_office" target="_blank">http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/...n_office</a>
Originally Posted By oneyepete Just playing devil's advocate here. Say Romney answered the many questions and accusations/allegations that posters have voiced on here to your satisfaction, would you vote for him or not? And I'm not Vic Sage.I am one of those independant undecided voters.
Originally Posted By ecdc >><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/07/why-wont-romney-release-more-tax-returns.html<<" target="_blank">http://www.newyorker.com/onlin...<<</a> Here's a good, short review of Mitt's tax return problem. As that raging liberal, George Will pointed out, Mitt's not an idiot and he's not some principled guy standing by his belief in privacy. He's done a careful cost-benefit-analysis and determined that the costs of releasing his returns outweighs the benefits. Which begs the question, what's in there that has the Romney campaign so convinced there's a net negative to releasing these?
Originally Posted By ecdc >>would you vote for him or not<< I personally wouldn't. I might respect him more. Before this campaign, I used to see Mitt as a moderate, competent leader. I live in Salt Lake—there's a lot of respect here for what he did for the Olympics. But that image of Mitt is gone for me. It's become clearer and clearer that he truly stands for nothing and that he was up for just about anything to make himself even richer (including bankrupting companies and still getting money from them).
Originally Posted By mawnck >>Say Romney answered the many questions and accusations/allegations that posters have voiced on here to your satisfaction, would you vote for him or not?<< Yes. He'd better get started, huh.
Originally Posted By Dabob2 <Say Romney answered the many questions and accusations/allegations that posters have voiced on here to your satisfaction, would you vote for him or not?> Nope, I sure wouldn't. I like Obama for starters, and think he deserves some real credit for us not sliding into a second Depression, which was far from a gimme in 2008/2009. He took an economy that has hemorrhaging 750,000 jobs a month (!) and turned that around to many many months now of private sector job growth. The ACA, while far from perfect, is an improvement. He killed bin Laden, and (largely) ended our ill-conceived adventure in Iraq, as he said he would. Meanwhile, what's Romney proposing? Further tax cuts for the mega-wealthy, even on top of Bush's cuts, which explodes the deficit while doing NOTHING to create jobs, despite GOP rhetoric (and you only have to look at our own recent history to see this.) The only other specific economic proposal among a sea of vagueness is his endorsement of the Ryan budget, which turns Medicare into an inadequate coupon system that throws seniors to the mercy of private insurance companies, and is a disaster for the middle class in general. He's made belligerent noises towards Iran that are neither intelligent nor helpful, and I fear further foreign entanglements if he's elected, while Obama is carefully getting us out of them. So no - I'm not inclined to vote for Romney even if the tax records showed him squeaky clean. My guess is there's nothing in there illegal per se, but probably plenty of legal but "come on, only rich guys get away with that!" stuff that makes the huge deduction he took for a dressage horse last year, for instance, look like chump change. And perhaps things that, while still legal, contradict his statements that he paid just as much tax from his foreign holdings in the Caymans and Bermuda as he would if he'd kept it all in the States (and if so, why move it there to begin with??). Of course, we can only guess he's lying about that if he doesn't release the returns; if he does we may know for sure. Maybe not. But he's inviting all this speculation by not releasing them.
Originally Posted By oneyepete Meanwhile, what's Romney proposing? I think this is what I am waiting for. Instead of listening to all the negativity from both side, I'll bide my time and weight things out when both proposals are on the table.
