But what have they done in hard, quantifiable fact? To a certain extent it's hard to base a predicted candidate's future performance on his past accomplishments not only because the Presidency of the United States is a job unlike any other but also because anything can happen. When the first economic bubble of the new millenium burst in 2000/2001 America people were beginning to call for Wall Street blood. But then the terrorists attacked, deflecting attention and allowing the President to turn the populist fervor towards fighting sand-dwelling Muslims instead of finance reform. Which allowed Wall Street to continue manipulating the numbers and courting big technology, leading to the collapse of 2008 and our Great Recession. That's something no amount of knowledge and experience could prepare one for.
So anyway, what did these two men do to get where they are?
EDUCATION
Obama: B.S. in Poli Sci, Columbia, and JD Harvard Law, magna cum laude
Romney: B.A. in English, BYU and JD/MBA Harvard Law, cum laude
MILITARY EXPERIENCE
Obama: Mother was a military brat but he didn't fight in a single war though, admittedly, there was no war to fight in in 1979, when he was 18 years old. Still, there's nothing very "hoo-rah" about the man's past.
Romney: In college protested against a draft protest, as a joke. Got deferments from the draft for college and then for his Mormon mission through France; returned to America to find his father had become an outspoken opponent to the war in Vietnam. Got another education deferment. Finally went through the 1969 draft and was not drafted for service so did not serve.
EARLY WORK EXPERIENCE
Obama: Was a community organizer in Chicago's southside, pulling together programs to help low-income residents of Roseland and Altgeld Gardens between his experience and his time in Harvard. That's where he met Michelle when she was his intern one summer. True story. Political scandal - hooking up with the intern?
After Harvard he got a job with Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a law firm where he was a civil rights lawyer. He was also a part-time teacher at University of Chicago Law School.
SUMMARY: Helping out the little man and teaching. Very noble but not necessarily catering to the wealth creation and profit centers that have become the center of American culture and industry. And it should be noted there are no huge legendary victories from this time to tout as evidence of impending greatness.
Romney: Heavily-recruited, he joined Boston Consulting Group in the 70's where he proved himself a shrewd consultant and deft at applying his combo law/business degree. In 1977 he was hired by Bain Consulting and was a VP there within a year. In 1983 he headed up the new Bain Capital, a spin-off envisioned by Bill Bain as a great move into the increasingly lucrative and government-friendly world of wealth creation. Romney, ever smart, convinced Bill Bain to take most of the risk and responsibility while Romney would reap a larger portion of the rewards. Bain Capital ended up having to basically bail out Bain Consulting and placing Mitt as CEO of the company.
Over his time at Bain Romney earned a deserved reputation for being extremely analytical and hesitant to act on anything unless there was very little risk of failure for his firm. This meant that in a given year Bain, out of the thousands of companies looking for money, might invest in the 6 or fewer firms that Mitt had analyzed exhaustively.
SUMMARY: Romney's smart and good at creating opportunities for success as well as extremely adept at using complex financial machinations to reduce risk for himself and his beneficiaries. The problem is, a president rarely has time for months of analysis for every issue and, even more, you can't use a leveraged buyout to reduce the debt, much less spur business growth. Many of the companies Bain Capital acquired this way were bankrupted and/or shrunk by thousands of layoffs needed to maximize profits or benefit to Bain (since industrialization, many of our country's corporate gains have either come from tech-based firings or outsourcing labor and many of Bain's takeovers were no exceptions). Though he also had success stories, such as Bain's venture investment of the fledgling Staples chain. So will he run America like it's Bain Capital and benefit us all by doing a leveraged buyout of, say, Europe; or will he run it like it's one of the lucky few companies he took over which flourished thanks to his guidance; or will our nation be one of the many unlucky companies he took over to milk out the last bit of blood and butcher the carcass for his own feast?
PRE-PRESIDENTIAL POLITICAL CAREERS
Obama: After his brief career as a lawyer - 4 years, over which he took on about 30 cases, about 70% on voting and civil rights and other good deed rights cases (though he also repped a few non-profits against suing beneficiaries) - his experience as a community organizer, and running a voter drive for Clinton in 1992, he had developed enough of a name to run for and win a seat on the Illinois state Senate.
Highlights on State Senate:
- Championed 1st campaign finance reform in 25 years
- Pushed for taping interrogations of murder suspects as well as took on racial profiling
- Tax credits for the working poor
- Welfare reform and increased child care subsidies
- Known for working well with Dems and Publicans alike
- A bit of a "know-it-all" in spite of his relative inexperience
- Quick to move on - within 3 years he was running for congress, which he lost. When the Democrats took over the state senate, he immediately ran for the national Senate.
Highlights on National Senate:
- Sponsored McCain's bill for immigration reform and such
- Had his name on a bill that passed calling for transparency on a dedicated website of U.S. government spending
- Had his name on a bill extending a previous WMD-prevention bill to include RPG's, mines, other more conventional weapons
- Tried to fight no-bid government contracts
- Was on a lot of committees
- Didn't actually push through any real important and substantial bills
- Supported a bill to build a wall along the Mexico/US border, a wast of resources if anything
Romney: Romney first ran for office, other than some big LDS swooning role, in 1994, for Senate against super-incumbent and royal drunk Ted Kennedy. Romney came under fire for his wavering stances, though he did later state he thought abortion should be legal. When he lost, he went back to Bain, intent on never running for anything again. Then, in '02 and with the SLC Olympics in dire straits Mitt took over and turned its budget deficit into a surplus and pulled off a great Olympics. Suddenly people liked the square, square-jawed Mormon businessman so when he ran for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002 he won.
Highlights as Governor:
- Thanks to a combination of his fiscal responsibility, gains in revenue from recent capital gains tax increases he didn't overturn and a half billion dollar federal grant, MA went from a $650M deficit when he came in to a $600M surplus his last 2 fiscal years
- though it then quickly went back into the red after he left in 2008
- And yes, at least $181M came from closing business tax loopholes, as he proposes to do now
- A healthcare revamp that expanded health care for Massachusetts citizenry made up of a mixture of requiring citizens to buy health insurance and penalizing companies for not providing insurance.
- Increased revenue by adding fees to gun sales and oil sales
- Cutting municipality funding forced them to raise property taxes or cut wasteful local spending
- His budget cuts, which reduced the deficit, included cuts in higher-education (taking tuition costs up by 63%)
- Massachusetts was 47th in the nation in job creation upon Romney's exit. Though it's debatable whether you can actually blame a leader for his constituents' employment numbers.
- He flip-flopped on his stance towards abortion and played around with the whole gay marriage question, offering benefits, taking them away, allowing it but then banning it, so on.
- His state approval rating within 2 years of taking office was 34%
PRESIDENT OBAMA
You all should know the story from there. So here's a couple bullet points:
Highlights:
- Cut deficit spending
- Guided us through the worst recession since the depression and, though loathe to speculate, may have prevented a new depression
- Lowered unemployment (though, per my above point, can you blame a leader for his constituents' employment numbers)
- Made Romneycare a national program to benefit the whole country
- Killed Bin Laden and Abu Al-Libi, Al-Qaeda's #1 and #2
- Obama has lowered carbon output, set finite and achievable longterm goals for emissions and energy-creation standards, and expanded wilderness protections
- Obama's created new and tougher federal regulation on banks which has been very effective in slowing and stopping the rampant and irresponsible speculation that led to not only our recent recession but every recession and empire collapse in world history since the 1600's. Seriously, rampant speculation is a symptom of a nation in decline. Look at Spain, the Netherlands, and Britain.
- He saved the auto industry and has attempted to foster a rebirth of American industrialization, including investment in alternate energy which, upon the fulfillment of just one of his clean energy investments, would re-establish America as #1 global superpower and overnight all but erase the deficit
- We still have a deficit and our national debt has exceeded our annual GDP and, unless something drastic happens, his plans will at best cut our deficit to half a billion but THERE WILL STILL BE A DEFICIT
- Obama only delivered about half the number of jobs he promised
- His health care bill is a eunuch version of the universal healthcare program he promised
- In an attempt to appease the "other side", Obama didn't enact half the environmental regulations he promised and basically bent over to take it from the fracking folks
- He shit the bed in Afghanistan
- In spite of his history as a community organizer and civil rights lawyer, Obama's civil rights record as President, especially when it comes to detainees and terrorist whatnots, has been atrocious
Romney's work since 2008:
- He supported TARP (the government bailout of all his finance industry croneys) but not the automotive bailout (in spite of his father's history as one of the biggest catalysts in the growth and golden years of the U.S. auto industry)
- He rallied hard against Obamacare in spite of its being borderline Romneycare extrapolated to national arena
- His family sold some of their houses
- He served on the board of Marriott, a successful chain of hotels
Tune in next week when we get into a bucket analysis of their stances on the environment, health care, and social services.
- Ryan
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