The Week looks at the Federal Reserve chairman’s new effort to bolster the economic recovery as Republicans argue that he’s in the tank for President Obama.
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Romney Refocuses on 5-Point Plan
Mitt Romney’s campaign speeches “now center on his five-point economic plan that, he says, will create 12 million jobs over the next four years,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
The current plan boils down Romney’s 59-point primary season proposal on jobs and the economy.
“It’s surprisingly difficult to find substantive, independent analysis of the plan… The bottom line seems to be that few people are certain that the plan would work because aspects of it remain vague. Still, it includes some of the most specific policies that Romney has described for how he proposes to jump-start the economy. And its importance has only been underscored in recent days by polls showing that President Obama has drawn even with Romney on the question of who is better equipped to manage the economy.”
Warren Opens Up Lead in Massachusetts
A new Western New England Polling Institute poll in Massachusetts finds Elizabeth Warren (D) pulling away from Sen. Scott Brown (R) in the U.S. Senate race and now leads 50% to 44%, among likely voters.
Said pollster Tim Vercellotti: “This may be not just due to her speech, but the overall enthusiasm Democrats have had coming out of their convention. The data shows that Democrats are more fired up right now than independents or Republicans.”
A new Public Policy Polling survey is coming later tonight and a Suffolk University poll is due out on Monday.
Quote of the Day
“We’re not impotent.”
— U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, in an interview with ABC News, saying the United States can defend itself in the face of violent protests against American interests sweeping the Muslim world.
Pelosi Says Ryan Pick Will Help Democrats Retake House
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told CNN that Mitt Romney’s pick of Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate will give Democrats a better shot at retaking control of the House of Representatives.
Said Pelosi: “On August 11, when Gov. Romney chose Ryan, that was the pivotal day. That is the day things really changed. We were on a path. I would have said to you then we were dead even. Well, the momentum is very much with us, the Medicare issue in this campaign.”
Lawmaker’s Children Still Vote for Him Despite Moving Away
Three of powerful New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s (D) adult children “remained registered to vote in their father’s Lower East Side district long after moving out,” the New York Post reports.
“And they continued to vote for years at the same Delancey Street polling place as their parents — presumably pulling the lever for Papa in his re-election bids — even when, as in the case of one child, they lived out of state.”
Said a Silver spokesman: “The election law is clear that voters have wide latitude to vote from the residence they choose, so long as they are not dually registered. They all vote from only one place, and under New York law that is clearly legal.”
GOP Lawmakers Nervous About Romney Campaign
Republican lawmakers “are grumbling about the direction of Mitt Romney’s campaign and say he needs to change course,” The Hill reports.
The GOP members say Romney must do a better job of communicating to voters what to expect of him, either by making a bold pledge or fleshing policy proposals with more details.
Said one Republican senator: “Papa Bush was down after the Democratic convention in 1988, people worried he couldn’t come back and then he made his ‘read my lips, no new taxes’ pledge.”
Said another: “My advice is don’t try to turn him into something he’s not. You’re never going to turn him into a teddy bear.”
The Foreign Relations Fumbler
Nicholas Kristof: “Diplomacy is a minefield, and Mitt Romney spent the last week blowing up his foreign policy credentials to be president. He raised doubts about his capacity to deal with global crises, and we were left hoping that if that 3 a.m. call ever went to him, he’d have set up call forwarding.”
“The essential problem is that every time Romney touches foreign policy, he breaks things. He went on a friendly trip to Britain — the easiest possible test for a candidate, akin to rolling off a log — and endeared himself by questioning London’s readiness to host the Olympic Games. In the resulting firestorm, one newspaper, The Sun, denounced ‘Mitt the Twit’…”
“Then there was the Romney trip to Israel, where he insulted Palestinians and left some Jews uncomfortable with stereotyping by praising Jewish culture in the context of making money… Yet with the Middle East exploding in recent days because of a video insulting the Prophet Muhammad, Romney dived in with a statement that hit a trifecta: it was erroneous, inflammatory and offensive.”
Bonus Quote of the Day
“We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country. We will never have the elite, smart people on our side.”
— Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R), quoted by BuzzFeed, at the Value Voters Summit.
Hidden Video Shows Romney at a Fundraiser
A fascinating hidden camera video shows Mitt Romney talking at a fundraiser about investing in a Chinese factory that he described as surrounded by barbed wire and packed with 12 women per dormitory room.
Romney’s point in telling the story was that “95% of life is settled if you’re born in America.”
Romney Campaign in Crisis
John Heilemann: “And so it does, with the past week proving another maxim: that when shit rains, shit pours. In the space of 72 hours, what began, horrifically enough on September 11, with the murder of four Americans (including one of our best and bravest, Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya) at the consulate in Benghazi spiraled into a region-wide upheaval, with angry Muslim protests directed at American diplomatic missions erupting in sixteen countries. Suddenly, the president was facing just the kind of externality that his team had been bracing for: a full-blown foreign-policy crisis less than eight weeks out from Election Day. And a campaign marked by stasis and even torpor was jolted to life as if by a pair of defibrillator paddles applied squarely to its solar plexus.”
“Moments like this are not uncommon in presidential elections, and when they come, they tend to matter. For unlike the posturing and platitudes that constitute the bulk of what occurs on the campaign trail, big external events provide voters with something authentic and valuable: a real-time test of the temperament, character, and instincts of the men who would be commander-in-chief. And when it comes to the past week, the divergence between the resulting report cards could hardly be more stark.”
Inside the Supreme Court
Out this week: The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin.
“This book is based principally on my interviews with the justices and
more than forty of their law clerks. The interviews were on a
not-for-attribution basis – that is, I could use the information
provided but without quoting directly or identifying the source.”
Judge Throws Out Wisconsin Collective Bargaining Law
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) law repealing most collective bargaining for local and school employees was struck down by a judge, “yet another dramatic twist in a year and a half saga that likely sets up another showdown in the Supreme Court,” the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports.
Quote of the Day
“I am the adoptive father of four children, each of them either — each of them either black, Hispanic, Native American, and I am incensed that this president pays money to an entity that was
created for the sole purpose of killing children that look like mine — a
racist organization, and it continues specifically to target minorities
for abortion destruction.”
— Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS), quoted by NBC News, on President Obama’s support for Planned Parenthood.
Are You Better Off?
President Obama’s campaign answers the question Mitt Romney keeps asking.
Greg Sargent: “The use of Clinton in the new ad is also interesting: As noted here recently, the Obama campaign believes that true undecided voters see Clinton as a kind of ‘referee’ figure on the economy — hence the ad’s back-to-back footage of Clinton and Obama both making the case that electing a Republican president would take us back to the policies that got us into trouble in the first place. Clinton will play a major role in trying to get swing voters to feel that things are indeed recovering.”
An Interview with Invisible Obama
Mashable talks to @InvisibleObama, the Twitter handle born during Clint Eastwood’s bizarre convention appearance last night.
Extra Bonus Quote of the Day
“I remain very, very skeptical of hearing anything that will change the course of history. We have a debt problem. We have a spending problem, but how many things did he list to cut?”
— Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), in an interview with Bloomberg TV, on Romney’s speech to the Republican convention.
Pentagon Threatens Ex-Navy SEAL with Legal Action
The Pentagon “threatened legal action against the former member of the Navy SEALs who has written a first-person account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, but the author’s lawyer and the book’s publisher, Penguin, said they were proceeding with publication on Sept. 4,” the New York Times reports.
A spokesman said that the book’s author, Matt
Bissonnette, was “in material breach of nondisclosure agreements he
signed with the U.S. government” to not reveal classified information.
If you want to read the book, you might want to get your order in quickly.
