The Liberal Dog Whistle: Why Bain is a Four Letter Word

      As Krugman suggested yesterday, in Bain, we liberals finally have our dog whistle. This is very important. As Krugman says, while some progs have been uncomfortable with its use, this is a very mistaken sentiment.

      "And Romney’s biography offers a golden opportunity to do just that. His policy proposals amount to a radical redistribution of income away from the middle class to the very rich; he’s also being highly dishonest about budgets and just about everything else. How to make those true facts credible? By associating them with his business career, which involved a lot of profiting by laying off workers and/or taking away their benefits; his personal finances, which involved so much tax avoidance that he’s afraid to let us see his returns before 2010; his shiftiness over when exactly he left Bain."

       "You could criticize the biographical focus if it were being used to convey a false impression of where Romney stands, but that’s not what’s going on here; instead, it’s being used to get the truth about the candidate past the noise and the media barrier. The truth is that the Obama campaign would be doing the American people a disservice if it didn’t make the most of Bain."

          http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/no-bain-no-gain/?gwh=94367C1DBD47442833F85BDF4A0FA576

           He's absolutely right, if the Obama team were piously not ringing the bell on this, deciding it's "beneath the dignity of a campaign" it would be an outrage.

            Ok. A word on "dog whistles." For the most part liberals are terrible at dog whistles, indeed, I'd say that in my lifetime-I was born in 1971 (LOL)-this is the first time that we have actually had a dog whistle. Ok, maybe technically Watergate was a dog whistle but I was a little young then-in fact I was born in England and only came to the country in 1974, actually during the hey day of Watergate.

            In recent times all the dog whistles have been Republican, whether or not it was, Monicagate in the 90s, or even recently the contempt vote on Eric Holder. This list might well suggest that the use of dog whistles are often used in dishonest ways to mislead the public down a false path. Very true. As Krugman says that is not what's happening on the Bain issue. This is what makes a liberal dog whistle different from a conservative dog whistle.

           What is a dog whistle? Chris Mathews gave a great definition of it during the public outrage over the AIG bonuses back in 2008. He made the case that "we're like dogs, we only see other dogs." Ie, while the AIG outrage was in many ways small beer and a peripheral issue compared with the true malfeasance, this more tangential issue was what fired the public's imagination. The details of subprime mortgages and CDOs on the other hand tended to make the eyes glaze over. But the AIG bonus thing gave it breadth. Put it this way, people can understand the idea that AIG failed, and yet the highly payed management and traders received a reward-bonuses.

           So it is with Bain. It is not a diversion from the President's record or because he's afraid to talk about his policies, nor is it a tangential or peripheral issue. It's central to the entire campaign. Rather than enabling him to avoid a policy discussion it facilitates him in being able to have one, it enables him to discuss policy issues, his policies vs. those of Mitt Romney.

            I would encourage all liberals to begin every discussion of this election with a four letter word-Bain.  We want to get to the point that the Romney team dreads nothing more than the simple four letter word Bain. The true beauth in this that makes it a grand slam is that this was what he wanted to run on-his personal biography running Bain. This is right out of Karl Rove-your strength is your weakness. So yes in this sense this is the Swift Boating of Romney-again, though as Krugman says it's being uses to get at the truth in the case of Bain which was the opposite of Swfit Boat.

           We want it to be so that they dread the word Bain, that they would rather tallk about anything in the world than Bain.

           The question of Bain gets to the heart of questions about Mitt Romney who is the most secretive candidate we've had for a very long time. It goes to the question of his character and his credibility. When he says he was gone at Bain after February, 1999 as if this is some magic cutoff date he's trying to duck responsibility.

             As the President suggested, it defied common sense that the guy who's name is listed for at least there years after this on SEC filings as the absolute decider had no control of his own firm and does not deserve ultimate responsibility during the 1999-2002 period.

              The question of when he left cuts both ways. In the highly inflated job creation numbers he gave us for Bain-he now claims 100,00 but when he ran against Ted Kennedy in 1994 he claimed only 10,000 which was, whether he left in 1999 or 2002,  already two thirds of his Bain tenure-  he is no doubt factoring in anything that can be called "job creation" after 1999 as well as before. So if he can be held responsible for good things after February, 1999 how can he not be held responsible for the bad things like the outsourcing to China, India, and Mexico?

               The question of when he left Bain-his version of what did Mitt Romney know and when did he know it?-is among other things a question of how he can have is cake and eat it to, not just on Bain, but on every question. He gets to have his cake and eat it too when he tells us he's for gender equity but won't say whether he does or does not support Lilly Ledbetter, how he can both pass Obamacare and be the candidate of repeal, how he can both support better immigration policies for Latinos and not tell us whether or not he supports the President's exeuctive order. Mitt Romney is truly the man of who the saying 'I was for it before I was against it' is most applicable.

                Then we have interlaced with the questions of Bain, the issue of why he won't release his taxes for at least as many years as the eight years President Obama has. Indeed, due to all the haziness about Bain-remember, Romney is running on his Bain experience-we really need to see his taxes even a few more years.

                  Really some of these questions can't be answered without seeing his tax returns during 1999-2003. This is nothing so unreasonable-he showed this to John McCain when he was hoping to be his Vice President back in 2007.

                   As Krugman says, the reason Romney doesn't want to show us his taxes is because of his history of aggressive tax avoidance. His own personal history of tax evasion-whether legal or not we can't say until he releases his taxes as every candidate has done since 1968-is a very good narrative to begin a larger discussion of his plan to continue the conservative shift that begun with 'Ronald Reagan to shift the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class. In this sense, Romney's tax evasion could not be a more appropriate place to begin this conversation.