Political Irony

© Tom Tomorrow

The ironic thing about all this is that we’ve had this fight before. The American Revolution was as much a fight against the original multinational corporations as it was against the British government. After all, one of the most famous events in the run up to the revolution was the Boston Tea Party, where colonists destroyed tea owned by the monopolistic British East India Company, which was so large it had its own army and effectively ruled India for 100 years (resulting in the Indian Rebellion of 1857).

In response to the Boston Tea Party, the British government passed the infamous Intolerable Acts (also called the Coercive Acts), which ordered the colonists to repay the East India Company for the destroyed tea. The colonists refused, and the rest is history.

And the reason the colonists destroyed the tea in the first place? It was a protest against the Tea Act, which was passed in order to save the East India Company from bankruptcy. It was the original government bailout of a company that was too big to fail!

Does this all sound too familiar? Will history repeat itself?

A fascinating opinion piece in the Boston Globe really resonated with me. It discusses how Mitt Romney seems to be unwilling to pin himself down on any issue, and even if he sort-of does, he’s willing to change his tune depending on who is paying him to fiddle. From his response to the Supreme Court decision upholding ObamaCare, how he would bring down the deficit, or dealing with illegal immigration, we keep seeing “a familiar pattern: a ringing affirmation of some major policy difference with President Obama, followed by a lot of vagueness about what he would do instead.”

What we are seeing is “the Romney Fog Machine: a great outpouring of words intended to obscure, rather than clarify, the issue at hand. … Romney has plainly calculated that he can win without explaining what he’d do as president, and seems intent on becoming the ‘generic Republican candidate’ that pollsters include in surveys (and that often outperform real Republicans).”

But the fascinating part of the article is the assertion that this is not a campaign strategy for Romney, this is who he is and has always been — someone who refuses to take any stand or any risks at all. For example, a recent biography of Romney says that “Romney initially declined to become CEO of Bain Capital for fear that it might fail and damage his career prospects.”

He did become CEO, but his risk-averse paranoia only increased:

A few years ago, a former partner at Bain Capital with Romney explained to me that this impulse to be “paranoidly downside risk-averse” had been key to Bain’s early success. In the mid-1980s, he said, once this success was evident, the firm conducted a study to better understand what had brought it about. Two things jumped out: The failure rate of their deals was “almost zero.” And, he said, “there was no deal we did in the first years that did not have incredible downside protection — you’d have assets that, in the worst case, you could sell for 90 percent of what you paid for it.”

As some of you know, I’ve started a few companies in my life and worked as CEO of other early-stage businesses. In that capacity, I frequently interacted with sources of capital, including venture capitalists. What really surprised me when I started working with venture capitalists is that they like to tell you how they take big risks and how they are helping small companies. But what I found is that they are as a class some of the most risk-averse people I’ve ever met. And they don’t actually help small companies, they act as gatekeepers. Saying that venture capitalists are helping small companies would be like saying that health insurance companies are curing cancer.

A friend of mine used to work as a venture capitalist and still works with them, and she totally agrees. (In fact, the only point on which we disagree is that I think that venture capitalists believe they are taking risks and helping small companies. She claims that is just PR, and they don’t actually believe it.)

I started thinking about this and it helped explain some things about Romney. I remember when Obama sent in the Navy SEALS to kill Osama bin Laden, and afterwards Romney’s main complaint was that it was too risky. Clearly, he would think that. I also remember during the primary, when the only time he really campaigned in a state was when the chances of him winning were already pretty good. Other states he left to his competition, not wanting to try and fail.

Would someone like this make a good president? Even worse, since we don’t know what he really believes in, how can we tell?

Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Carol Aichele repeatedly claimed that 99% of Pennsylvania voters had a photo ID that would allow them to vote. But now that they passed their voter ID law, Aichele’s department did a cross check of the voter registration rolls against the database of people with state ID (typically driver’s licenses). And you know what? They found that 9.2% of the voters don’t have a state ID.

That’s three-quarters of a million people. And in urban areas like Philadelphia (which tend to vote Democratic), the percentage is as high as 18%. People without driver’s licenses tend to be poor, elderly, or young. That’s more than enough to throw an election.

So it should come to no surprise to anyone when Pennsylvania state Republican leader Mike Turzai said at a Republican State Committee meeting last month “Voter ID – which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania – done”.

But that’s not as bad as the situation in Mississippi, where in order to vote you need a photo ID from the state. But in order to get a state ID, you need a copy of your birth certificate. And, of course, in order to get your birth certificate, you need … wait for it … a photo ID from the state.

You may not be able to buy justice, but you can buy a few justices. One of the things overlooked in most of the reporting about the Supreme Court’s decision on ObamaCare is that the lead plantiff (and sole source of legal funds) in the case was the National Federation for Independent Businesses (NFIB), which purports to be the “nation’s leading small business association” and “the voice of small business”.

But as they say, follow the money. Where does the NFIB get its funding? According to an analysis of their IRS filings, they received more than $10 million in funding from just ten contributions (and $8.5 million of that came from just four contributions, each more than $1 million). I don’t know many small businesses who make million dollar contributions. Indeed, although non-profits are not required to reveal their contributors, we do know from other IRS filings that NFIB received a contribution of $3.7 million from Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS in 2010, and likely a similar amount in 2011.

Compare this to how much they received in membership dues from actual small businesses — $230. I’m not kidding.

NFIB claims to represent small businesses, but a recent poll shows that half of small business owners want ObamaCare to remain intact, either as is or with minor changes, while only a third of them want it overturned.

Even more interesting is that after small business owners hear more about the law, the number of people supporting it goes up to 56%, while the number opposing it goes down to 28%. So with additional information, twice as many small businesses support ObamaCare than oppose it.

Maybe NFIB should be spending money on educating small businesses on ObamaCare, rather than on expensive legal challenges.

© Jim Morin

© Matt Bors

Not only does the media treat everything as if it were political, it treats politics as a simple horse race. Unfortunately, reality is a bit more complicated. Health care isn’t just a fight between the Republicans and Democrats, it affects people’s lives. You would think that the media would realize that the way to gain more viewers is to give them news about things that affect them, instead of as just some abstract competition between tribes called political parties that hardly anyone actually cares about.

© Robert Ariail

One surprise around the Supreme Court decision upholding ObamaCare is that it was Chief Justice John Roberts who cast the deciding vote, siding with the Liberals on the court instead of the Conservatives.

Ironically, the reason he did this is a severe indictment of the conservatives, not just on the Supreme Court, but in general. Initially, Roberts was willing to declare the individual mandate unconstitutional and throw it out, but the conservative justices insisted that the court throw out the entire law. Roberts couldn’t see any justification for that (indeed, I’m not even sure what it could be). In the end, it was the conservative justices’ unwillingness to compromise, even a little, that lost Roberts and led him to find a way to justify the individual mandate as constitutional by treating it as a tax instead of a regulation of interstate business under the Commerce Clause.

This is what happens when ideology trumps reality.