Matthew Yglesias, Slate’s Boy With a Little Curl
Lost in the shuffle here is the question of what it is Romney is denying he’s responsible for. Stipulate that Romney somehow had nothing to do with running a company of which he was the CEO and sole shareholder. Does he think, in retrospect, that his subordinates did something wrong by offshoring jobs? Clearly he didn’t, which highlights the absurdity of his claims not to have been responsible. It’s true that he wasn’t running the country [sic] on a day-to-day basis, but he really was titular CEO and had Bain been doing something he deemed outrageous he could and should have stepped in to stop them. But he doesn’t believe that. And what’s more, all indications are that Barack Obama also doesn’t think Bain was doing anything wrong. [Emphasis in original.] As president he’s made no moves to make it illegal for companies to shift production work abroad and has publicly associated himself with a wide range of American firms—from GE to Apple and beyond—who’ve done just that to varying extents. And we all remember what happened to Obama’s promise to renegotiate NAFTA after taking office, right?
In my view both Obama and Romney are quite right about this. I’ll say more on this during the workweek, but one quick test is do you think there’s something immoral about the fact that Toyota and BMW have manufacturing facilities located in the United States? Should the Japanese and German governments be stopping Japan- and Germany-based firms from locating production offshore?
—The Fake Headlines: Neither Obama Nor Romney Is Against Offshoring, Matthew Yglesias, Slate, Jul. 14
I posted a comment to it, saying:
Well, when Obama starts claiming that one of his key qualifications for reelection is that he’s helped create jobs in China—or when Romney starts saying that Bain invested in companies that specialized in moving jobs overseas in exchange for promises by German and Japanese companies to open, or keep, factories in this country—Yglesias’s equivalency argument might be less ridiculous.
One of Obama’s spot-on arguments against Romney’s claim that his Bain experience was a successful jobs-creation experience rather than merely a successful wealth-creation-for-investors experience is that there’s a huge difference between experience in creating wealth for private investors, by any means available and at whatever expense to others, and creating good for the country’s overall economy and general welfare. This offshoring issue is a classic case in point. Setting aside whether the federal government has the legal authority to prohibit private companies from offshoring—and I don’t think the government has any such legal authority, except in certain limited national security or foreign policy circumstances—there’s an obvious critical difference between not trying to stop this country’s companies from offshoring, for fear of retribution by other countries’ companies, similar to trying to avoid a tariff war, and aggressively aiding offshoring by American companies irrespective of any up-side for the general American economy.
Add to that that, as several other commenters have pointed out, the German and Japanese companies that offshore in this country do so mainly in manufacturing products or parts for products that will be sold in North America, mostly in this country. GM, Ford, Chrysler and some U.S. auto-components manufacturing companies have factories in Europe, but the products and components made there are sold in Europe. Like the German and Japanese auto companies that Yglesias equates with Bain’s offshoring-specialist companies, the American auto-industry companies continue to make the parts and cars sold in their home country in factories in their home country.
Which, of course, would not be the case any longer had the Bush and Obama administrations taken Romney’s advice and let Detroit fail.
That said—and for the same reasons—Yglesias is wrong in saying that unless Romney thinks there’s something wrong with offshoring, it’s absurd for him to deny responsibility for Bain’s investments in offshoring-specialist companies during the three-year period beginning in early 1999. If in fact Romney was no longer associated with Bain during that period, he would have every right to correct the record, whether or not he thinks there was anything wrong with what Bain did during that time. But the question of whether Bain did anything wrong in investing in offshoring-specialist companies—during the period between 1993 and 1999, when (at least as I understand it) it apparently was doing so at Romney’s clear behest, or during the following three years—depends on what is meant by “wrong.”
It was not illegal. But many voters think that, while it clearly was helpful to Bain’s investors and to Romney (who has continued since then to receive large payments from Bain), it was not helpful to the larger American economy and to the middle class. It did not create jobs in this country; instead, it eliminated them. And Romney is running for president virtually entirely on his claimed credential of being a jobs creator and of knowing how to create jobs—in America.
I’m hesitant to be too critical of Yglesias for his rather obvious conflations here. He was, after all, not just the first pundit but also one of the very few even yet to point out a stunning, absolutely jaw-droppingproposition of law stated by four of the nine Supreme Court justices in their joint dissent late last month in the Affordable Care Act case, the part of the dissent concerning the issue of the severability of the part of the Medicaid provision in the Act that the Court’s majority struck down, in which the dissenters, while claiming that the majority was rewriting the Medicaid provision in order to save much of it, wanted to rewrite, rather dramatically, the Constitution’s separation of powers between Congress and the Court. Only four hours after the release of the opinion, when almost no one except the journalists covering the Court had yet read the dissent, Yglesias wrote:
As I’ve noticed previously, there’s lots of other stuff in the Affordable Care Act besides the new regulation of insurance companies, including a move to deregulate dental services. So I was curious to see why the dissenters in the Supreme Court thought that not only was the individual mandate and the provisions related to the individual mandate unconstitutional, but also all this other stuff.
The answer is that they appear to have made up a new Christmas Tree Doctrine under which legitimate acts of Congress are held null and void if Antonin Scalia thinks they were part of some kind of unseemly horse-trading:
Some provisions, such as requiring chain restaurants to display nutritional content, appear likely to operate as Congress intended, but they fail the second test for severability. There is no reason to believe that Congress would have enacted them independently. The Court has not previously had occasion to consider severability in the context of an omnibus enactment like the ACA, which includes not only many provisions that are ancillary to its central provisions but also many that are entirely unrelated—hitched on because it was a quick way to get them passed despite opposition, or because their proponents could exact their enactment as the quid pro quo for their needed support. When we are confronted with such a so called “Christmas tree,” a law to which many nongermane ornaments have been attached, we think the proper rule must be that when the tree no longer exists the ornaments are superfluous. We have no reliable basis for knowing which pieces of the Act would have passed on their own. It is certain that many of them would not have, and it is not a proper function of this Court to guess which.
That all seems fine except I would have thought it was the prelude to the opposite ruling. It’s not the proper function of the court to guess why different provisions were enacted, just to rule on the constitutionality of laws. Since there’s plainly no constitutional problem with regulating interstate chain restaurants, the law is the law until Congress repeals the law. Instead, Justices Scalia, Alito, Kennedy, and Thomas have decided that rather than pick and choose it would be better to strike everything.
This is far, far more newsworthy than the teensy bit of attention it has received suggests. Four Supreme Court justices think legislative logrolling is improper and that therefore the Court can strike down full pieces of legislation that a majority of justices don’t like whenever they decide that some provision, however small, in the full piece of legislation is unconstitutional. After all, y’know, maybe the rest of the legislation would not have been enacted without the quid pro quo votes. Presumably, this also would apply to state laws as well as to federal laws—but, of course, as with federal laws, only to laws that the conservatives don’t like.
I’d been meaning to write about this truly radical part of the dissent in the ACA case, but hadn’t gotten around to it. Now I have.
“It’s true that he wasn’t running the country on a day-to-day basis…”
Bite your tongue!
Ahhh. Yikes. It’s Yglesias’s tongue that I should bite, since that part of a quote from him—but I should bite my own tongue, too, for not catching that. I’ve just inserted a “sic” there. Thanks kharris.
Maybe I should add: “Nor will he ever be running the country on a day-to-day basis.”
I realize I am straying from the emotion of the argument when I (repeatedly) point to the goals of each campaign, but I think getting away from the emotion is how one does objective analysis. So…
Yglesias’ claims that Obama “believes” what Romney “believes” is irrelevant. (It’s also arrogant, in a “Dean Baker” sort of way. Yglesias doesn’t know what they “believe”. Only what they say and do.) It’s irrelevant because Bain is a Romney story. Romney was the guy in charge, or not, at Bain. It is highly unlikely that “Obama thinks so too” is going to have any real political effect.
By making Romney react, Obama’s campaign is diluting Romney’s attack. That’s one goal of the Obama team. In pointing out what are meant to be “negatives” for Romney, the focus on Bain and tax returns serves the normal purpose of negative campaigning – reducing turnout for the target of the negative campaign. The added benefit is that Romney, who also mostly intends to engage in negative campaigning, is not getting the vote suppression job done as long as he’s responding to attacks instead of attacking.
This is a pretty happy situation for Obama’s people. Romney is distracted as long as they can maintain the effect of the Bain and tax return stories. If Romney goes into detail on Bain or releases more tax returns, the Obama people will attack Romney based on all the detail of making money without ever building a firm and all the detail of tax avoidance. Romney will remain under attack and so less able to do the attacking.
Romney’s team will be looking not just for ways to diffuse the Bain and tax return stories – which may not be possible anyway – but also for a way to get the spotlight back on Obama.
Paul Krugman has a terrific column today in the NYT saying that the intended and potential effect of the panoply of Bain attacks and the offshore bank-accounts attacks is as a segue to drive home to the public what Romney’s actual fiscal policy proposals are. Most of the public is unaware of the proposals, and there’s good evidence that a substantial percentage of voters will be shocked and revolted by them—once they actually learn what they are.
I agree completely with Krugman. The Bain/offshore-accounts attacks have the potential to do much more than just suppress the Romney vote. If they succeed in helping the pubic learn of and really understand Romney’s policy plans, they have the potential to cause an anti-Romney, and anti-Tea Party, landslide.
Krugman’s column is at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/opinion/krugman-policy-and-the-personal.html?_r=1&gwh=13E8874D9861016988725E17BBC613B9.
Bev, you optimist, you.
I hope you’re right, but Obama’s approval rating doesn’t suggest a big turn-out for him. Neither does the approval rating for Congressional Democrats, even though (if memory serves) they are doing less badly than Congressional Republicans.
If the normal mechanics of political momentum are operative, lots of voters from 4 years ago will stay home. So will lots of voters from 2 years ago. Since having conservative voters stay home has been the monster under Romney’s bed from the beginning, the Obama camp’s focus on Romney’s “not like us regular folk” characteristics is not, I suspect, aimed at bringing out Democratic voters. Even Obama has gone negative-Romney lately, at the expense of time spent positive-Obama. That’s a vote suppression technique.
You could make the case that virtually ANYONE involved at a high level in a business has “outsourced” jobs somehow. Even government owned GM and Chrysler do it.
So if you want someone who has never “outsourced” a job, you have to get someone who has never accomplished anything in business, like a community organizer. Well we have tried that, and it didn’t work so well.
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Birds do it, bees do it. Yes, yes, sammy. But there’s a difference between running a manufacturing plant and doing what’s necessary in order to compete, and investing in companies whose purpose is to encourage and facilitate offshoring—at least if you’re then going to run for president claiming that your business experience shows you know how to create jobs in the U.S.
And I don’t presume, as you do, that getting someone who’s never accomplished anything in business is worse than getting someone who has, irrespective of what it was exactly that the person accomplished in business. Most of the most successful presidents in American history never accomplished anything in business. And some of the worst presidents did.
Stericycle.
Forget off-shoring, forget out-sourcing, all of the time puzzles around Romney releasing two years of returns now as opposed to 23 years when he was being vetted by McCain in 2008 are explicable by the answer to one question: At what point did Stericycle became a bête noire for the ‘pro-life’ folk?
Oddly the National Review folk in a clumsy attempt to defend Mitt actually let the cat out of the bag. Nobody on the Right knew a thing about Stericycle in 2008 or indeed at any time befor Mitt was officially in the race for 2012. In the last two years it rocketed to the top of the Wingnut agenda.
Romney has to erase the first equal sign of Romney=Bain=Stericycle. Because despite some wriggling and wiggling by the brainiacs at Natl Reviewthe second equal sign isn’t going anywhere in that Bain was only partially disinvested from Stericycle when it’s extension of its business model to include disposal of aborted fetuses became known.
Romney and Bain can endure any attack revolving around off shoring, vulture capitalism, the base mostly doesn’t care. But Romney will not survive knowledge that he made dollars by disposing of ‘dead babies’.
Romney might well have expected to be forced to reveal his tax forms at some point. But that was when Stericycle was just a name among hundreds of other companies Bain entities invested in. Now any tax form that includes the word might as well be headed ‘Baby Killer and Heartless Ghoul”
“Romney and Bain can endure any attack revolving around off shoring, vulture capitalism, the base mostly doesn’t care.”
The race ain’t the base. The base has to show up, because the race is close, but a close race also means that undecided voters need to show up.