The Great Debate

No matter how artificial and canned the candidates can seem at a presidential debate, no matter how competent or ineffectual the moderator — the nominee’s true self will peak out at some point.

Thus did GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney tip his hand when it comes to the all-important female vote — which both he and President Barack Obama have been scrambling after. He didn’t make a huge gaffe or get ensnared in a tough debate about choice. Moving around the stage, he seemed a 1950s throwback who had wandered in from a different decade — one where men were men, women wore shirtwaist dresses (Ann Romney’s uniform) and marriage was between a man and a woman.

Of course what drove this home was Romney’s anecdote about trying to find talented women for his staff when he was governor of Massachusetts from 2003-2007. He said he actually went to a number of women’s groups “and they brought us whole binders full of women.” Though he apparently flipped this story: The groups came to him unsolicited.

However it happened, it was the telling moment, the one that has continued to dog him.

What? He couldn’t just look around and find qualified women? He couldn’t look through the ranks of his colleagues at Bain Capital or down the corridors of state power and pick out any number of terrific women? No, quite clearly he didn’t know such women because he was still operating in a world of men — the place he is comfortable.

At Tuesday’s debate, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney offered glimmers of proof that when it comes to women’s economic parity, he takes a solidly conservative approach. However, in appealing to social conservatives, Romney’s personal stance may have been solidified at the expense of a host of real issues facing women. What Romney thinks of these, we do not yet know.

A question from a woman in the Town Hall-style audience asked specifically what each candidate would do about the fact that women currently earn 77 cents for every dollar that men earn. President Obama offered a cursory reference to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act – heralded as one of his first great policy accomplishments, and one that addressed women’s economic issues.

Romney’s response, which offered no concrete policy position, included the following:

The incomes of the top 1 percent — and especially of the top one-half of the top 1 percent — have skyrocketed over the past 30 years. The latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office show that the inflation-adjusted average income of the top 1 percent of households was $340,000 in 1979 but $1.4 million in 2007, quadrupling over less than three decades. Popular discussion of the top 1 percent tends to highlight how different, say, Mitt Romney and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg are from typical Americans. In reality there is as great a disparity between Zuckerberg’s and Romney’s income as between Romney’s and yours. Disparities in income are so dramatic it is difficult to comprehend them.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Or rather, it’s not necessarily the case that there’s anything wrong with inequality levels. Whether American-style inequality’s costs outweigh its benefits remains an open question. Too many accounts of inequality today simply assume that it must be bad — that gains at the top have come at the expense of the middle class and bottom, that high inequality has diminished opportunity, that it has stunted economic growth or led to financial instability, or that it has turned our democratic system into a “plutocracy.” But there is scant evidence for each of these propositions.

Note, first, that the CBO data indicates that median household income — the income of the person in the middle of all households — rose by 46 percent from 1979 to 2007, and the income of the average household in the bottom fifth has risen by a similar amount. To be sure, that’s a smaller increase than Americans saw in the 1950s and 1960s and a much smaller increase than the top has seen. But it’s not the case that the middle class and poor have been doing worse over time. (Male earnings have not increased much over recent decades, reflecting the competing away of the union-based advantages that in earlier decades sent pay levels above what productivity gains would have dictated, but analyzed correctly, the data shows they have not fallen either. Female earnings have risen smartly.)

Apple and Samsung, you might have heard, have spent the last many months in a California courtroom haggling over who violated whose patents. At the end of August, Apple was awarded more than a billion dollars in damages by a jury, and the Samsung is now claiming jury misconduct. Just last week a U.S. appeals court threw out the judge’s ban on Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus phone. The whole situation is, really, turning into a bit of a confusing mess.

Also messy: a lesser-known but hugely important struggle among Samsung, Apple, and those members of the press trying to write about the court battle. While otherwise adversaries, the two companies have joined forces to keep some of the evidence in the case off the public record. But how much secrecy in the Apple v. Samsung proceedings is too much for the public to tolerate? It’s a meta legal question, and one that might not have the same billions directly at stake as the main event. But the outcome of the dispute about the transparency of our courts is central to understanding the future of these big tech trials. And there will likely be plenty more of those.

The question at stake is whether the tech firms will be allowed to tie up the courts with their business disputes while engineering it so they don’t face the full scrutiny of a truly public trial.

This is the second response to an excerpt from Chrystia Freeland’s Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, published this week by Penguin Press. The first response can be read here.

Today’s plutocracy, as described by Chrystia Freeland, can make for an ugly spectacle. It is an increasingly stateless and distant class. The very rich may sometimes dress scruffily or express an affection for common tastes, but their wealth naturally separates them from the rest of the public. It isolates them physically, as they flit from palace to palace in private jets. And it isolates them psychically, as they grow comfortable with the view that their wealth is not merely the fruit of talent and work but the mark of superiority.

Their wealth and isolation often contributes to a shortfall in empathy (or exacerbates a pre-existing condition, which may have helped raise them to plutocratic status in the first place). They are more likely to feel deserving of rewards, well-earned or ill-gotten. And they are less likely to feel a twinge of hesitation or regret when inflicting hardship on business partners or employees in the name of efficiency and profit.

Whoever wins on November 6, and however the president is thought to have done in the remaining debates, the only sure winner of the debate season is Joe Biden.

He has moved from the nearly man to the coming man, from also-ran to man-to-watch. Why so? Biden attracted a great deal of criticism from conservatives for his grimacing in the veep debate in Danville, Kentucky, for laughing in the face of GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, for shamelessly grabbing all the attention so that even when Ryan was speaking, everyone was watching Biden’s scoffing antics on the split screen. The Democratic base loved every second.

In a practical lesson on how to hug the limelight and dominate the conversation, Biden showed President Barack Obama how he should have torn into GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney in Denver — and how he will have to make up lost ground in the few remaining weeks.

GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, like so many Republicans today, continually try to grab onto Ronald Reagan’s legacy and call it theirs. They might know my father’s politics — but they didn’t know the man.

After the first Republican presidential debate last September at the Reagan Library, I wrote a piece for Time.com about how all the candidates seek to stuff themselves into my father’s image. Ironic, since he never tried to imitate anyone.

What set my father apart was his character – the very thing that can’t be successfully imitated or cobbled together in strategy sessions or rehearsals.

President Barack Obama may have lost the first debate the minute he appeared on stage in Denver.  Just by showing up, he changed the terms of the campaign.  Viewers immediately saw the election as a referendum on the president.  The decision became whether to fire him or rehire him.

This was bound to happen sooner or later.  It always happens when an incumbent is running for reelection.  Until the Oct. 3 debate, Democrats had made a vigorous, and mostly successful, effort to turn the election into a choice rather than a referendum: Which guy do you like better — Obama or Mitt Romney?

Democrats managed to demonize Romney as a rich guy totally out-of-touch with ordinary Americans.  Romney made it easier for them by constantly calling attention to his wealth.  Democrats went after Romney’s business record, his flip-flops and his efforts to pander to the extreme right.  It was working.  Last month, Romney had the most negative public image of any presidential candidate in at least 25 years, according to the Pew Research Center.

This is a response to an excerpt from Chrystia Freeland’s Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, published this week by Penguin Press.

It’s great to be what you people are now calling a plutocrat.  I know.  I am one.

We plutocrats live incredible lives, surrounded by luxury and insulated from risk and discomfort.  Things have gone very well for us over the last several years.  Since George Bush left office, the stock market has doubled, we got a (sweet!) $700 billion rescue of the financial system, and corporate profits are at a 50-year high.  BOOYA!

GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney talked about the United States’ “proud history of strong, confident, principled global leadership” in his foreign policy speech last Monday.

Yet Romney’s foreign policy advisers have written a private memo  recommending that the U.S. resume “enhanced interrogation techniques,” according to The New York Times. What these GOP advisers are saying is the U.S. should return to what former Vice President Dick Cheney called “the dark side” — using torture to interrogate suspected terrorists.

Cheney still defends his support of techniques such as  waterboarding, painful stress positions, extreme sleep deprivation, slamming detainees into a wall, sexual humiliation and mortal threats. So does his daughter, Liz Cheney — now a Romney adviser.