"It is disqualifying for a modern-day presidential nominee to refuse to release tax returns to the voters..."

Writes Mitt Romney at Facebook.

Have you noticed the overuse of the notion of "qualification" in this election cycle? It irritates me. It sounds so high-handed to declare the other person "disqualified."

Bernie Sanders asserted that Hillary had said that he's "not qualified to be president," and he took off on her:

"I don't believe that she is qualified if she is, through her super PAC, taking tens of millions of dollars in special interest funds. I don't think that you are qualified if you get $15 million from Wall Street through your Super PAC. I don't think you are qualified if you have voted for the disastrous war in Iraq. I don't think you are qualified if you've supported virtually every disastrous trade agreement, which has cost us millions of decent-paying jobs." 

In fact, Bernie's assertion about Hillary was rated "mostly false" by Politifact. She avoided — even when pushed — using that word against him. She was cagey enough to respond to "Is he qualified?" with a list of his supposed shortcomings and "that does raise a lot of questions." Bernie's assertion that Hillary is unqualified brought out the indignant supporters:

Prominent surrogates for Mrs. Clinton such as Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York and Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri vouched for her qualifications and warned that Mr. Sanders was crossing the line.

“Calling Hillary Clinton not qualified is like fingernails on a black board to many women across this country, and I think Bernie probably knows that,” Ms. McCaskill told MSNBC on Thursday.

Having lived through the Bernie-and-Hillary back-and-forth over who's "qualified," I was annoyed by Romney's approach. We already knew how much Romney opposes Trump. It might be desirable that presidential candidates release their tax returns, but it's not on the level of being 35 years old and a natural-born citizen.

Spare me the q-word.

"When I watched Romney, I thought: that's probably what I'd be like if I ran for president."

"I'd be stilted and awkward and overly calculating. Probably most people I know would be. Most normal people would be uncomfortable as national politicians. Very few people would be as cool and effortless as Obama."

Says my son John, who's 33, in what was an IM'd dialogue with Alex Knepper, who's 24. The conversation took place "a few weeks ago," so it doesn't reflect the 2014 election.

Romney in 2016?

"My time has come and gone."

UPDATE: I wrote this post based on the squib at Talking Points Memo (where the link goes), but now I've watched the Romney interview (on "Fox News Sunday"), and I need to say that Romney clearly leaves the door open to a 2016 run. Chris Wallace tries to close the door by inviting him to make a "Shermanesque" statement, that is, to say that he would not run if nominated and would not serve if elected. I need to get the exact response from the transcript, but he absolutely does not accept the invitation.

ADDED: Wikipedia has an entry for "Shermanesque statement."

UPDATE: Now, I've got the transcript. So let's take a close look:

Is "horses and bayonets" Obama's new thing — after Big Bird and Binders Full of Women?

Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams says these things aren't working:

Where are those glorious debate memes of times gone by?...

There was Battleship. And there was the night’s biggest winner, Obama’s smooth dis to Romney, “You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed.” Faster than you could tweet “Oh, snap!,” the inevitable Tumblr was born.

Yet the whole thing felt less fun this time around, and a lot more forced. 

Big Bird and Binders Full of Women were words that came out of Romney's mouth. "Horses and bayonets" was inserted by Obama. It's one thing to have fun with Romneyisms, quite another to accept a faux-Romneyism cooked up by Obama... especially when Obama is making fun of the military and what comes out of his head is an old children's game — suggesting that he thinks this real-life killing and dying is some kind of game — and an image of the historical military — which seems to be about the movies he's watched, not anything that about Romney.

Bob Schieffer was a little doddering, but couldn’t match Jim Lehrer for FAIL worthiness. Josh Romney did not make with the crazy eyes. In short, as we all learned long ago from “Mean Girls,” you can’t make a thing a thing any more than you can plan for spontaneity.

Speaking of movies, I've never seen "Mean Girls." I don't get the reference. I'm not in your "we all." Is it the making a thing a thing thing or the plan for spontaneity thing?

But back to the landscape of Obama's mind — where kids fiddle with plastic Hasbro toys and old war movies play, from which he concocted a Romney gaffe that Romney never gaffed — why is there no picture there of the horse soldiers of the Afghanistan War?

The U.S. special operations teams that led the American invasion in Afghanistan a decade ago did something that no American military had done since the last century: ride horses into combat.

"It was like out of the Old Testament," says Lt. Col. Max Bowers, retired Green Beret, who commanded the three horseback teams.

"You expected Cecil B. DeMille to be filming and Charlton Heston to walk out."

It was like a movie, but it really happened, and those men were heroes. Is it so hard to call them to mind, now — in these days of unmanned drones, who kill when you point at a name on a card, or hover overhead and watch as — it can't be real — our ambassador fights for his life for 7 hours?

Obama and Romney tell jokes on themselves...

... because — exactly why? — there's this Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner to which solemn obeisance must be paid. Hilarious, no? Who is better at being self-deprecating without actually hurting his cause... and don't you need to know in order to determine who would make the better President?

"Anything as perfect and simple-sounding as this motto is always in danger of becoming a cliché..."

"...  but there’s nothing like putting it in the mouths of politicians to speed up that process."

What's the point of a catchphrase? You want it to catch on and then you want to control it? Speech doesn't work like that. Words have a life of their own. Phrases are born, have their narrative arcs, and sometimes they die — that is, they come to be regarded as clichés, and then no one wants to use them anymore.

The dispute at the link is over the Mitt Romney's use of “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose" from the TV show “Friday Night Lights.”

Hey, remember when Walter Mondale appropriated "Where's the beef?" from the Wendy's commercial? Where was the outrage?

"Romney’s tongue-tied eloquence."

Fareed Zakaria is back, back to kick Romney in the mouth, back from exile, presumably now purged of his plagiarism sins. Let's see how eloquent his eloquence critique is:

As President Obama has surged in the polls, Republicans have been quick to identify the problem: Mitt Romney. Peggy Noonan eloquently voiced what many conservatives believe when she said that Romney’s campaign has been a “rolling calamity.” Others have been equally critical of his candidacy. And yet, shouldn’t it puzzle us that Romney is so “incompetent” (also from Noonan), given his deserved reputation for, well, competence? He founded one of this country’s most successful financial firms, turned around the flailing Salt Lake City Olympics and was a successful governor. How did he get so clumsy so fast?

Rasmussen has the candidates locked in a tie. They're 46/46 again today, same as yesterday, and pretty much the same for the past week.  But if you want to find Obama surging, there are polls to satisfy your urge for the surge. These polls are grotesquely oversampling Democrats, to the point where the joke has become obvious, but maybe you can find your pleasure there, if you're also the sort that listens to Peggy Noonan as the exemplar of what conservatives are thinking. She eloquently voiced the opinion you want to hear: Romney’s campaign has been a “rolling calamity.”

If you bother to keep reading — and it's likely both Obama fans and Romney fans stopped at "rolling calamity," either pleased or disgusted — you'll see many paragraphs asserting that Romney doesn't want to talk about taxes and illegal immigration. He's "tongue-tied" because there's "a new kind of political correctness" in the GOP:

They cannot speak certain words (taxes) or speculate about certain ideas (immigration amnesty) because these are forbidden.... As a result, he has twisted himself into a pretzel, speaking vacuously... That’s a straitjacket that even Peggy Noonan’s eloquence cannot get him out of.

I'm picturing Peggy using her tongue to untwist a pretzel. Or is she unbuckling a straitjacket? Marvelous writing, Fareed. Did you make that all up yourself?

Madonna "was being ironic on stage" when she said we have "a Black Muslim in the White House."

“Yes, I know Obama is not a Muslim — though I know that plenty of people in this country think he is. And what if he were? The point I was making is that a good man is a good man, no matter who he prays to. I don’t care what religion Obama is — nor should anyone else in America.”

Should on-stage performers dumb it down for the people who aren't sophisticated enough to process humor?

I'm sure it's all very amusing for Madonna, who gets big publicity and looks "edgy" again. People call her stupid, and then she one-ups them and can seem — certainly to herself — to be quite smart. (Did you hear she has an IQ of 140? Same as Hillary Clinton. And Shakira.)

Others wielding humor have more to worry about. Like Romney with his "trees are just the right height" and, more recently, about those airplane windows that "don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that." People aren't going to get it if they don't want to get it, if they're looking for material to use to say you're an idiot.

And Romney can't make the Madonna move and call his antagonists dumb. Mitt Romney — who, like Madonna, was born in Michigan, where the trees are just the right height — has an estimated IQ  in the range of 130 to 139, which is smart enough to choose whether to dumb it down in self-defense.

ADDED: Look at how Paul Ryan's antagonists are trying to hurt him by pretending not to get his sense of humor. Are they stupid or pretending to be stupid? Tobin Harshaw writes:

There is no underestimating the literal-mindedness of the American reader: Years ago when I worked at the Times we published a satirical op-ed column by Steve Martin riffing on the idea that a NASA Mars probe had discovered millions of kittens on the Red Planet. Shortly thereafter, a subscriber sent a terse letter to the editor asking us to "inform your science correspondent" that the lack of oxygen on Mars made kitten infestation highly unlikely.

Wait. Why is Harshaw assuming the letter-writer wasn't doing humor?

AND: Wait. Ryan never even made those "Stench" remarks. A Politico writer made them up and intended it as satire.  I thought they were good enough jokes to be believable as the casual humor of a relatively young man, and I would have appreciated them as such. Harshaw is attacking Ryan's antagonists as so hostile that they didn't pick up that it was humor. I didn't pick up that it was humor, and I was defending Ryan. That's all very odd.

ALSO: I like the way Drudge is putting it: "MEDIA 'SATIRE' HIT PIECE ON PAUL RYAN BACKFIRES.../O'Donnell, Krugman 'fooled'..." Drudge is, I think, insinuating that Politico's Roger Simon intended to be misunderstood, for the Ryan quotes to be believed, and then to reveal that it was satire after the damage was done.

MORE: Fake quotes live on as real. Remember Sarah Palin's most famous quote: "I can see Russia from my house."

A NYT headline: "Mitt Romney Says, 'I Am The Confidence Fairy!''"

But Romney never said "I Am The Confidence Fairy!" There's some other Romney quote — some dull thing about economics — and then Paul Krugman says: "In effect, Romney was saying, 'I am the confidence fairy!'"

Krugman really, really wants Romney to lose. So, presumably, does the NYT. I don't have a problem with an opinion writer paraphrasing somebody's quote like that. It's the use of quotation marks in the headline that's wrong.

The gap in the Romney "secret" video: Corn says "the recording device inadvertently turned off"...

... according to his unnamed source who, he says "noticed this quickly and turned it back one [sic]. The source estimates that one to two minutes, maybe less, of recording was missed."

Really only 2 minutes? You sure it wasn't 18 minutes? Could the name of the source be Rosemary?

Letterman says to Obama "You haven’t seen me naked," and Obama responds "We’re going to keep it that way."

They also talked about how "great" Obama looks, how "good" he feels, how much he weighs, and how "sharp" he looks. The 2 guys had to talk a lot to fill up the entire show. They talked about the 47% thing of Mitt's...

“If you want to be President, you have to work for everyone,” Obama said. “This is a big country. And people disagree a lot. But one thing I’ve never tried to do and I think none of us can do in public office is suggest that because someone doesn’t agree with me that they’re victims or they’re unpatriotic.”

Did Mitt say anybody's unpatriotic? No. Here's the full transcript of the "secret" Romney speech to donors. The word "unpatriotic" (or "patriotism" or "-patriot-" anything doesn't appear.) Did Romney call people "victims" because they "don't agree" with him? No. The word "victim" appears like this:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. 

He doesn't call them victims. He calls them "dependent" and says they "believe that they are victims." Obviously, Romney thinks they are wrong about that. And Romney's not calling them dependent because they don't agree with him. He's saying because they are dependent, they take the political position that says they are entitled to what they've become dependent on, and therefore they'll vote for Obama. I'm not saying Romney's right about all those things. Surely, some people accept government benefits that they qualify for — like unemployment compensation — but would prefer a government that doesn't provide such lavish benefits and might give conservatism a chance if they heard it explained well. I'm just saying Obama distorted what Romney said in the "secret" video. 

But as long as I'm being technical about rhetoric: Obama's distortion appeared in a statement about what he himself has "never tried to do" and that no one in public office should do. He doesn't say and this is what Romney did. So he has deniability. That was elegantly done, because you don't realize that he didn't directly say what it feels like he said. And yet he got the distorted accusation into your head. He made you feel that Romney said something he didn't say: Romney cruelly and falsely called the people who don't agree with him unpatriotic and victims.

After the Letterman taping:

Obama attended a cash grab at the Waldorf-Astoria, where about 200 deep-pocketed Dems paid at least $12,500 per family. Last stop was Jay-Z’s Chelsea hotspot, the 40/40 club, for a $40,000-per-plate affair that was expected to net $4 mil.

The President took the stage with “Jay-Z and Beyoncé, who wore a red dress....

He compared his upbringing to that of Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s.

“We remember what it was like not having anything,” he said. “We know people just as talented as us who didn’t get that same break.”

If you're successful, you got a "break." Plenty of people are "just as talented" — do they work hard? — but unlike Jay-Z and Beyoncé and Obama, they just didn't get lucky. That sounds a lot more like calling them victims than what Romney said.

If anybody's really listening.

"No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place where we were born and raised."

Said Mitt Romney at a campaign stop today in Michigan — "this place where Ann and I were raised, where both of us were born." Video at the link.

I'm seeing some charges that this was a "birther" joke and even that it was racist. I guess it hit a nerve.

Anyway, it's obviously not racist. In fact, it's more racist to call it racist. To see it as racist, you have to have a background belief that to think of someone as a natural-born citizen is to think of him as white. Who thinks that?!

And it's also not "birther" to say what Romney said. A birther is someone who thinks or isn't sure that Obama was born in one of the United States. But the joke doesn't depend on the listener being a birther. You simply have to understand that people had enough questions about where Obama was born that they wanted to see the proof. People don't have those questions about Romney, so no one ever asked him to prove it. That's all Romney said.

Now, we could look more deeply into why people had these questions about Obama. These questions certainly weren't because Obama is black (or half-black). The questions were because his father was not an American citizen, because his mother — and young Obama — lived for a substantial amount of time outside of the United States, and because — to some people at least — Obama hasn't seemed sufficiently American. (He doesn't identify with American exceptionalism, he sat still for "God damn America" sermons, and so forth.)

Romney is saying — in so many words — I'm more truly and fundamentally American than Barack Obama. And the implication is: I want you to think about the ways that Obama hasn't fully embraced American values of freedom, capitalism, etc. etc.

Of course, you don't have to be born in America to have those values. I imagine Ted Cruz has those values, and he was born in Canada. He might make a great Senator from Texas soon, but he can never be President. We don't need to see his birth certificate, because it's no secret. He's not qualified to be President, and it's no disparagement of him to say that. But notably — and pay attention now, because this should help with understanding Romney's joke — no one running against Cruz would make a joke about his being born outside of the United States. Romney's (implicit) joke about Obama works not because of where he was actually born, but because of much more substantive ideas about commitment to foundational American values.

ADDED: Instapundit agrees with me and adds that the press will miss this point and, thinking the joke hurts Romney, will "spread the idea further than Romney could on his own." He also prints email from a reader saying  "Why does Ann Althouse assume Ted Cruz is not eligible to be President just because he was born in Calgary? Both of his parents were American at the time of his birth, and his mother was American by birth." I didn't mean to be the first Ted Cruz birther! I agree that if both your parents are American citizens and you are therefore an American citizen at birth, that's good enough for the constitutional requirement.

Romney said "bless his heart" about Obama.

How disrespectful is that?

A preemptive “don’t even try it” to the media: It is not racist in the slightest.

Here's the Urban Dictionary's top entry for "bless your heart":

1. This is a term used by the people of the southern United States particularly near the Gulf of Mexico to express to someone that they are an idiot without saying such harsh words.

2. "You are an idiot but I like you and care about you so I dont want to hurt your feelings."

 ADDED: Here's an old Metafilter discussion:

"Well, bless your heart!" and "How nice for you!" are two of my favorite barely-veiled criticisms. Can you provide me with some more?...

"Isn't that special."...

"Duly noted."...

"Good luck with that."

"Thank you for sharing."...

"I'll keep that in mind." 

"Mr. President, take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago."

Romney responds to some sheer idiocy from Biden.

"They’ve said it. Every Republican’s voted for it. Look at what they value and look at their budget and what they’re proposing. Romney wants to let the — he said in the first 100 days, he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules — unchain Wall Street," Biden said. "They’re going to put y’all back in chains. He’s said he’s going to do nothing about stopping the practice of outsourcing."

I'm saying idiocy, but perhaps it is "anger and hate." Anger and hate... from loveable little Joe?

"They're going to put y'all back in chains" is....
	Anger and hate.
	Anger and hate and idiocy.
	Idiocy.
	Reckless Biden-talk, but not that dumb or mean.
	Clever rhetoric that succeeded in luring Romney into sounding angry/hateful.
	Demeaning to the people he was speaking to -- "y'all" gives that away.
pollcode.com free polls

New Obama ad criticizes Romney for saying that Obama said "If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen"

This is a ballsy move:



Obviously, Obama said those words, and Romney supporters have seized upon those words. Rush Limbaugh has been playing and replaying that line. Charles Krauthammer said: "I think Obama has made the gaffe of the year when he said if you created a business, you didn't build it. That phrase, 'you didn't build it' should be hung around Obama until the end of his presidency."

And now, here comes the Obama campaign not only running Obama's self-damaging words but showing Romney repeating them with a critical edge. This takes nerve... nerve or genuine, outright fear that Obama's garbled statement will be used to destroy him. They must confront it and take some of the edge off it. And maybe they've decided they shouldn't worry about breathing more life into it. It's alive and on the loose and they need to give chase.

Why Romney deleted the line "He's a nice guy."

It was a stock line, but it meant something, and it's not something Romney wants to say anymore.

"[Romney] has said Obama's a nice fellow, he's just in over his head," [one campaign] adviser said. "But I think the governor himself believes this latest round of attacks that have impugned his integrity and accused him of being a felon go so far beyond that pale that he's really disappointed. He believes it's time to vet the president. He really hasn't been vetted; McCain didn't do it."

Indeed, facing what the candidate and his aides believe to be a series of surprisingly ruthless, unfounded, and unfair attacks from the Obama campaign on Romney's finances and business record, the Republican's campaign is now prepared to go eye for an eye in an intense, no-holds-barred act of political reprisal, said two Romney advisers who spoke on condition of anonymity. In the next chapter of Boston's pushback — which began last week when they began labeling Obama a "liar" — very little will be off-limits, from the president's youthful drug habit, to his ties to disgraced Chicago politicians.

"He sure as heck ought to say that he’s sorry for the kinds of attacks that are coming from his team."

That's how Romney demands an apology (from Obama).

What do you think of the form of expression?
	Charmingly mild, indicative of a mature, good-natured man.
	Childish and defensive, suggesting a timid or inhibited mind.
	Old-fashioned, steeped in religious training, out of touch with America.
pollcode.com free polls

Mitt Romney says "The Supreme Court has the final word. And their final word is that Obamacare is a tax."

Interviewed by Jan Crawford, Romney takes the clear, straightforward separation-of-powers position. The judiciary has the work of saying what the law is:

So it is a tax and it's constitutional. That's -- that's the final word. That's what it is. Now, I agreed with the dissent. I would have taken a different course. But the dissent wasn't the majority. The majority has ruled. And their rule is final.

Crawford moves in with the challenge Romney will always have to deal with: You did the same thing in Massachusetts. If this was a tax, then that was a tax. And we expect him always to answer in about the same way: There's a difference between doing something at the federal level and doing it at the state level.

As a lawprof, I see the consistent separation-of-powers theme.