In his column* today, Paul Krugman points to a RAND corporation study that found if 14 states whose GOP governors were opposed to the Medicaid expansion ultimately refused to adopt it, it would cause about 19,000 deaths a year.
Right now, it looks as if more than 14 states, more like 24 or 25, won’t expand Medicaid under Obamacare, so that means even more deaths.
* “The Spite Club,” NYT
Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight projects that O will get 305 electoral votes on Tuesday, with 233 for Mitt.
He gives O an 83.7% chance of winning, and Mitt a 16.3% chance.
I hope O doesn’t just win, but wins big to tell the GOP that we’re not buying the ideological and theological garbage they’re selling — that we don’t want to replace the Enlightenment philosophers on whom this country was founded with Ayn Rand nonsense, and we don’t want some people’s religious views imposed on all of us.
From “The Case Against Romney: At Heart, He’s a Delusional One-Percenter,” Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine:
“The election offers Romney his moment of maximal leverage over his party’s right-wing base. If he actually wanted to cut a budget deal along the lines of Bowles-Simpson, or replace Dodd-Frank with some other way of preventing the next financial crisis, or replace Obamacare with some other plan to cover the uninsured, there would be no better time to announce it than now, when he could sorely use some hard evidence of his moderation. He has not done so — either because he does not want to or because he fears a revolt by the Republican base. But if he fears such a revolt now, when his base has no recourse but to withhold support and reelect Obama, he will also fear it once in office, when conservatives could oppose him without making their worst political nightmare come true as a result.
“And so the reality remains that a vote for Romney is a vote for his party — a party that, by almost universal acclimation utterly failed when last entrusted with governing. … But his party has, unbelievably, grown far more extreme in the years since Bush departed.
“Economists have coalesced around aggressive monetary easing in order to pump liquidity into a shocked market; Republicans have instead embraced the gold standard and warned incessantly of imminent inflation, undaunted by their total wrongness. In the face of a consensus for short-term fiscal stimulus, they have turned back to ancient Austrian doctrines and urged immediate spending cuts. In the face of rising global temperatures and a hardening scientific consensus on the role of carbon emissions, their energy plan is to dig up and burn every last molecule of coal and oil as rapidly as possible. Confronted by skyrocketing income inequality, they insist on cutting the top tax rate and slashing — to levels of around half — programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and children’s health insurance. They refuse to allow any tax increase to soften the depth of such cuts and the catastrophic social impact they would unleash.
“The last element may be the most instructive and revealing. The most important intellectual pathology to afflict conservatism during the Obama era is its embrace of Ayn Rand’s moral philosophy of capitalism. Rand considered the free market a perfect arbiter of a person’s worth; their market earnings reflect their contribution to society, and their right to keep those earnings was absolute. Politics, as she saw it, was essentially a struggle of the market’s virtuous winners to protect their wealth from confiscation by the hordes of inferiors who could outnumber them.
“Paul Ryan, a figure who (unlike Romney) commands vast personal and ideological loyalty from the party, is also its most famous Randian. … But the Randian toxin has spread throughout the party. It’s the basis of Ryan’s frequently proclaimed belief that society is divided between ‘makers’ and ‘takers.’ It also informed Romney’s infamous diatribe against the lazy, freeloading 47 percenters. It is a grotesque, cruel, and disqualifying ethical framework for governing.” Emphasis added.
Mitt will disappear after the election, he won’t be the leader of the GOP. For the foreseeable future, Ayn Rand will be. At the time of the Great Depression, the concern was that our republic could be destroyed by the left. So we got the New Deal. I worry that our republic could be destroyed by the right if we get Paul Ryan’s Road Map.
From “In the end, it’s Mitt,” Mike Allen and Jonathan Martin and Jim VandeHei, Politico:
It isn’t the chair or the ho-hum convention. Or the leaked video. Or Stuart Stevens. Or the improving economy. Or media bias. Or distorted polls. Or the message. Or Mormonism.
It’s Mitt.
With Republicans everywhere wondering what has happened to the Mitt Romney campaign, people who know the candidate personally and professionally offer a simple explanation: it’s the candidate himself.
Slowly and reluctantly, Republicans who love and work for Romney are concluding that for all his gifts as a leader, businessman and role model, he’s just not a good political candidate in this era.
It kills his admirers to say it because they know to be a far more generous and approachable man than people realize — far from the caricature of him being awkward or distant — and they feel certain he would be a very good president.
Campaign officials, in the end, think likability is the least of his issues. The much bigger one is this sense that Romney is not comfortable in his skin, at least the conservative, no-compromise skin he had to put on to win the nomination.
His past willingness to change or shade his views for apparent political advantage resulted, over time, in one of his biggest political vulnerabilities. One close confidant said Romney sees the process like buying a company from a reluctant seller: Just do and say what you need to do to get the deal done, and then when it’s done, do what you know actually needs to be done to make the company a success. Emphasis added.
And there, I think, is the bottom line why Mitt is losing. The political consensus in this country supports programs like Social Security and Medicare. Yes, we know they have to be fixed, but we don’t want their problems to be used as an excuse to get rid of them. So you have a guy who’s perceived as willing to say anything to get elected, combined with a sense that he and his Ayn Rand-worshipping running mate are more radical than the vast majority of Americans, a ticket that wants to dismantle both the New Deal and the Great Society.
Mitt’s being told to be more specific, but if you don’t trust someone to begin with, what does it matter how specific he is? You think he’s going to do what he wants after he’s elected, and that what he wants will heavily favor the already rich. We are reluctant sellers who are not going to turn our company over to Mitt.
Embattled Farmers 