What Romney and his friends don't tell you

I've was away more than I was home for the past month, and have only been back since last Sunday night. I have seen a lot of political ads on television, though, in Ohio, and when I've been home, in Wisconsin. There are differences in the regional ads: in Ohio, Sherrod Brown gets trashed a lot by various Republican ads; here in Wisconsin, Tammy Baldwin gets trashed by the same Republican organizations, in eerily similar ads. And of course, in both places, President Obama gets trashed as well.

The local ads are worth discussing, but for now I want to concentrate on the Republicans' national messaging, and how people who don't know the full background of the people sponsoring the messaging can understand what is really going on.

For people who don't understand where these ads are coming from, i can only think they must wonder how the world has not yet come to an end. If one is to believe all these incredibly negative ads, they pound certain themes:

The economy has gone into terrible decline on President Obama's watch.

His administration is the "status quo" and he has no plan for the next four years to make things better.

Mitt Romney will make things better for everyone. He will bring the "big change" we need to turn the economy around.

The messages above, and the many variations on these themes suggest that President Obama has utterly failed as a President. But every one of these messages is false, for several reasons.

First of all, let's just look at who actually pays for these messages, and what possible reasons they could have for spending the hundreds of millons of dollars they have spent to create and air them:

Some of the ads are run by the Romney campaign, or the National Republican Party. O.K. They are understandably partisan for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. I'll come back to them.

Other ads are run by various patriotic sounding or forward-sounding organizations:

Crossroads GPS, Restore our Future and Americans for Prosperity are two of the bigger sponsors of ads that criticize the President for being either ineffective, clueless or simply unable to deliver on promises because of some intrinsic personality flaw.

Why are these ads being run? Both organizations, and others with a similar agenda, have disclaimers that run with each ad stating that they are not authorized by any political party or candidate. Yet with utter consistency they advocate against a single candidate: President Barack Obama.

One of these, Crossroads GPS is run by Karl Rove. If you don't think he is a political parisan, you haven't been paying attention. He was known, during the George W. Bush administration, as Bush's Brain, and he has been a key Republican political operative for more than a decade on the national stage, and longer than that in Texas. He is a commentator for Fox News, but I would not say this qualifies him as non-partisan. When I think of a news organization, I think of reporters who investigate stories, and don't rush to spread specious, barely possible rumors from partisan, extremist bloggers or other internet sites. Yet Fox News has repeatedly picked up and run with stories that accuse one or another Democrat of one crime or misdeed or another, only to have it subsequently be proven that the story was either utterly false, or seriously flawed by half-truths or cleverly edited video clips that created a deliberately false impression.

But even if one can excuse sloppy journalism, what is inexcusable about a news organization that propagates such true-fact-free news is that they never, ever correct their false stories. They never issue apologies or admit that they made a mistake. I'm sorry. That is simply not what a news organization should do. And for an organization with the word "News" in their name, that is not a good sign.

So Mr. Rove, who is an acknowledged booster of all things Republican, is in charge of Crossroads, and Crossroads GPS. And all their ads are basically "anti-Democratic-party" ads. But they say that these ads are not authorized by any political party or candidate. They can say that, and technically it is true, but only technically. In reality, his agenda is to help the Republican party defeat the Democratic Party. That's his prerogative, but for the ads to say that Crossroads, GPS or not, is not affiliated with a political party is only true in that technical sense. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but has a label that says, "not a duck" . . . draw your own conclusions.

Then there is Americans for Prosperity. Who are these patriotic sounding people? Well, the prime movers behind this "non-partisan" organization is the Koch brothers, whose father was one of the founders of the John Birch Society, and who own their own very large Oil company, as well as the Union Pacific Railroad and other corporate interests. When an ad run by Americans for Prosperity talks about creating jobs, or about the failure of President Obama's economic program, they are not non-partisan. When here in Wisconsin Governor Walker  came into office and with a Republican majority in both houses of the State Legislature began to reshape Wisconsin's agenda by such measures as rejecting the $800 million the federal government had given to Wisconsin for a high-speed rail line from Madison to Milwaukee, mandating an abstinence-only sex education regime for our schools, an making it illegal for public-employee unions to negotiate with the government, Americans for Prosperity was behind the governor, running ads in support of his programs, and more to the point, paying for tens of millions of dollars of ads against the democratic candidates running in recall elections against Walker and various Republican State Senators. Americans for Prosperity claims to be in favor of jobs for Americans, but what they really support are candidates who support their own causes--tax breaks for big corporations and tax cuts for the very wealthy. They are strenuously anti-union, and when they talk about "tax breaks for the middle class" what they really mean is tax breaks for everyone . . . including the wealthiest--the very wealthiest--people in the country, who have done very well the past ten years or so, since the Bush tax cuts were passed into law.

Restore Our Future was started by Charles Spies, a Mitt Romney aide, in 2010, and has raised more than $50 million dollars in the past two years to advocate against Romney's political rivals, including at least #20 million from Sheldon Adelson, the casino owner and operator, as well as tens of millions of dollars from Wall Street investment funds.

The subject of this post was What Romney and his friends don't tell you. And while I've dealt with the identities of some of the many organizations that are running ads for Mr. Romney or against the President, I haven't really said what they don't tell you. Here's some of what they don't tell you:

When their ads talk about the state of the economy, they always fail to mention exactly why the economy is not as vigorous as any of us would like. They never mention simple, large contributing factors such as the fact that the congress has been locked in stalemate since Obama was elected. Why has there been legislative stalemate? Well, in 2009, Mitch O'Connell, the Republican Minority Leader in the Senate stated publicly that his single biggest goal during the Obama administration was to ensure that Barack Obama would be a one-term president. And to try to achieve that goal, the Republicans in the Senate have engaged in many filibusters to prevent legislation from being passed.

Now, there have been filibusters in the Senate for many years. But never in such numbers. If you look at a chart at the number of filibusters by year, you'll find that in the past few years the number of filibusters or threatened filibusters to block legislation has skyrocketed. Some of these actions have been to block judicial or other administration appointments, such as the appointment of the first head of the new Consumer Protection Agency. But many of them blocked jobs bills, tax bills, transportation bills, infrastructure bills, farm aid bills . . . the list goes on and on. So when the ads that accuse President Obama of not being able to improve the economy or cut unemployment, they are being entirely disingenuous by omitting the fact that the congress has made it almost impossible for the President to pass the vast majority of the economy-helpful measures he quite reasonably expected to see enacted during his first term in office.

Exactly why the Republican Party has been so rigorously obstructionist is a matter one can debate. But considering McConnell's avowed goal in 2009, it is not difficult to see a simple motivation: A sluggish economy is the single biggest reason for voters to reject a second term by a sitting president. And with the enormous deficit rolled up during the George W. Bush administration by a combination of two wars, the cost of which Bush literally simply left out of his budgets, and the tax cuts he initiated which cut revenues, coupled with the terrible financial crisis and $700 million Wall Street bailout and mortgage market collapse in late 2008, President Obama was faced with not a bad economy, but a really terrible economy, giving the Republicans a clear opportunity to take advantage of poor economic conditions to retake the White House.

Their strategy worked in 2010 in the House of Representatives, when the Tea Party, another disingenuously concocted organization funded largely by Dick Armey, a former Republican congressman via his FreedomWorks organization. Claiming to be a grassroots organization, in fact, FreedomWorks received more than a million dollars via Armey's lobbying firm DLA Piper from pharmaceutical and health insurance companies. In 2009,  when the administration was trying to pass healthcare reform, Rachel Maddow accused FreedomWorks of inciting Tea Party members and others to disrupt the town hall meetings being held by Democratic members of Congress, for the purpose of distracting the electorate from the real issues and instead focusing attention on a series of specious, anti-administration issues, with signs such as those that equated the President with Adolph  Hitler, or  with loudly shouted protests, like the bizarre plea: "Keep your hands off my Medicare" from someone who clearly didn't understand that Medicare was a program run by the government . . . the same government from which he wanted to protect his Medicare.

My point is simply that the Republicans have been using a wide range of tactics, executed by a number of different organizations, only a few of which I've mentioned here. I won't say that there are no organizations working for the Democrats. However, the campaign ads that I have seen from the left, while some of them have questioned the character of Mitt Romney, have not been the same kind of utterly disingenuous ads the Republicans and their allies have employed against the President.

But what Romney does not tell you, which to my mind is worse than the ads that are shown for the benefit of his campaign, is that when he talks, whether it is during a debate, in a stump speech, or in his own ads (though I have noted that he seldom if ever speaks in his ads), a lot of what he says is either extremely vague:

"We need big change to get the country moving forward again," for example, is one of his big lines lately. What is fascinating and somewhat horrifying about this particular line is that it seems clearly to be an attempt to co-opt one of President Obama's biggest buzzwords from 2008, Change" and also a basic progressive buzzword, "Forward," Wisconsin's motto, which Governor Walker also co-opted in his successful defense against the recall effort this past summer.

More troubling, though, are his utterly baseless attacks on the President, always spoken with an air of great certainty and confidence. These include the accusation that unemployment is increasing under President Obama, which is not true. In fact, the unemployment rate is under 8% for the first time since before the President took office, and more than five million jobs have been created in the past four years; also, In fact, if the Republican obstructionists in Congress had not been so effective in blocking legislation (and also in changing the stimulus of 2009 from one of primarily one which gave money to the states for various projects to one which had a large tax-cut as a component) there would have been a significantly greater number of people in government jobs than there are now, which in turn would have reduced the unemployment rate and stimulated the economy to a significantly greater extent than has been possible in the absence of the blocked legislation.

These are just two assertions by Romney or his campaign that are verifiably untrue. But most people don't have the combination of resources, time, and desire to look into the claims of negative ads or campaign rhetoric.

So, for example, when Romney ads criticize the President for the "status quo" they neglect to mention that the "status quo" --of economic underperformance and high unemployment--was a product of the Bush administration's policies, and has been perpetuated by Republican obstruction of legislative initiatives in Congress. Nor do Romney or his ads acknowledge that the economy has been waking up, slowly, but steadily, despite the deliberate obstruction of measures in congress that would hasten a bigger recovery.

These are just the tip of the iceberg of what Romney and his friends aren't telling you. But he and those friends have amassed, thanks to the unshackling of huge, anonymous donations by corporations, an enormous amount of money for ads in these last eleven days before the election. so there will be lots more of the vicious attacks.

But maybe if we all tell everyone we know about how false these ads and Romney's stump speeches are, how fact-free are his blithe assertions; how full of guile and subtle but false emotional appeals are the ads . . . maybe we can allow the truth of the situation to be what people understand when they go to the polls.