Bad Triangulation Theatre Starring John Carney
Bumped up to get a wider, non-holiday weekend audience.–Delaware Dem.
WDEL did an interview with John Carney yesterday and they put a snippet of it up on their website. It is worth it to go over there to hear the whole thing. Our lone Representative in the House tries to have it both ways on the critique of Bain Capital and ends up looking pretty insensible in the end.
Here’s a rough transcript of Carney’s soundbite from WDEL:
The vast majority of jobs are created by small businesses, so while critiquing the approach of Governor Romney, we don’t want our constituents — sound like we are anti-business because you have to create conditions where businesses can be successful.
The WDEL piece ends with this:
Carney says the question voters should ask is whether rich investors or blue-collar workers reaped benefits from Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital.
I’ve been thinking about this since I saw it this AM and I can’t quite figure out what he is trying to get to here. The choices are:
- John Carney thinks that we really are that stupid.
- John Carney actually believes this stuff.
Seriously, the vast majority of small businesses are not private equity firms in the bustout business so that their investors can benefit. And if the free market is actually working, it doesn’t need John Carney to create conditions where businesses can be successful. In fact, the market is specifically damaged every time John Carney (and his colleagues to be fair) are providing subsidies and supports to businesses as a way to minimize business risk. None of them have but the mushiest of reasons why we have to accept socialized business risk.
It doesn’t matter though. Bain is a specific type of business (and not small worth a damn), and if you are paying attention to the President, he is specifically calling out the destructive tendencies of the Bains of the world, while their investors make tons of money and the workers at these busted out firms end up with the short end. So if voters are asking themselves about who benefits from the Bain experience, you certainly are not going to have blue collar workers on the winning end. That is something of the business model for Bain and the like, right?
If you are going to triangulate here, Representative Carney, you need to start with understanding the two points you will be triangulating from. Defending Bain as a way to support small businesses is something of an insult to most small businesses and definitely an insult to Delaware voters.
Tags: John Carney
This is the same John Carney who supported Minner’s veto of em domain bill….lets see, Carney supported mega developers like Buccini Pollin over hard working small business guys and regular people. Look in your own backyard before attacking Romney. One of the reasons Jack Markell beat him in the Dem primary!
Pitiful.
Bravo Cassandra!
Striving to be the next Mike Castle, team Carney comes off as rather clueless. If the GOP had the slightest ability to mount a decent statewide campaign, he could be in trouble. It doesn’t, so he is not.
He is in trouble. Kovach is not a Urquhart. Unless he latches onto Obama, he loses. Based on this statement, I may not vote him. I don’t vote for Democrats who betray the President.
And someone should remind Carney that when voters get to pick between a real republican and one who tries to triangulate to the GOP neighborhood, they pick the republican.
DD and Cass: While I agree that Carney is a dreadful excuse for a Democrat, I think you’re being alarmist. Kovach has no name recognition, he’s changed jobs every election and 2012 will be a big year for Democratic turnout. Carney might have a smaller margin of victory than other statewide Ds, but I’ll be surprised if he wins by less than 10 points.
Unlike DD, I don’t think that Carney is doomed. But I do think that in a reliably blue state, Carney makes his own job harder by taking on republican plumage in an obviously calculating way. And I don’t think that the bluer part of this Blue State especially cares about holding him to account on this.
I am very confused by this post.
John Carney pretty much pulled his statement from DNC talking points. He first qualified that he believes small businesses are the key to our economic recovery, and that they should not face undue regulation. He then ATTACKED BAIN CAPITAL, and implied that you can’t lump corporations and small business together in justifying bad policy, as the republicans DO!
I will agree with others that at times Carney isn’t as blue as he could be. But this is quite an odd statement to try to use as a highlight of that digression.
PS
Tom Kovach has less than 20k on hand, Urquhart spent hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars. Tom Kovach is not going to beat John Carney.
“John Carney pretty much pulled his statement from DNC talking points.”
Yeah, that’s worth voting for — a generic Democrat with the political courage of a mouse.
I guess I read the Carney quotes like hmmm did. I thought Carney was saying that just because we are attacking Bain doesn’t mean we are anti-business (which is true), and when evaluating a particular business like Bain, you have to ask yourself who it’s success helped: did it help working people or the very wealthy? Maybe I am missing something.
News Journal reported last week Carney spent most taxpayer funds on franked mail of any freshman member in US House . This guy needs some folks with polit savvy around him, FAST. Looks bad! Where’s the fiscal prudence?
I guess you could read the Carney quotes abit more benignly, but what he is saying is not the President’s point. Obama is specifically calling out Bain and Rmoney’s experiences as a bustout artist. Carney mushes up that point (with a question voters have to ask themselves, so that no one can point the finger at him for calling out a business) with that long preamble trying to re-establish his business-friendly bona fides.
Okay, here’s what Carney said in the clip:
Sounds more like Republican talking points to me. I wish we had the kind of reporters who would ask follow-up questions like “What do you mean by creating the conditions where business can be successful?” Guaranteed it involves tax cuts and deregulation.
John Carney of all people has no business lecturing Democrats on how to be Democrats. There’s a campaign on, and we don’t need any concern trolls on our team.
We have allowed Republicans to control the meaning of pro-business. Being pro-business does not mean giving business everything on their wish list. The most pro-business thing you can do is maintain proper regulations to keep capitalism strong. John freaking Carney does not get to tell us what pro-business is or is not.
Romney-style LBO vulture capitalism is a part of business that deserves scrutiny. We’re talking about strengthening regulations to protect business, not nationalizing industries. That is a very pro-business position.
This is the Republican ratchet at work. Regulations must always be repealed and never strengthened, no matter what happens. Carney is helping Republicans make that point.
Creating conditions where businesses can be successful involves good schools and an educated workforce. So Jack Markell and Alan Levin keep telling me every time I pick up the News Journal.
So why can’t we raise business taxes just a little bit to pay for that education? Surely they won’t begrudge paying a few extra pennies to have children who can read.
Oh, that’s right. Tax cuts are good. Tax cuts are good. Tax cuts are good. Tax cuts are good … sorry, I forgot we were all paying homage to Reagan’s ghost.
There is a real overlap here on the hard core position Paul Clark takes on NCC land use code – continually amending the code to be favorable to business, mostly the people in the business of land use. You will find them in his payer column of the campaign reports.
It all goes to show the dichotomy between someone’s perception of reality, and reality itself. The perceived notion, in DC right now, can best be expressed in the historical term; royal court. A royal court is appointed by the king, to serve the king, and is loyal in looking out for the king’s best interests However the monarch here, ain’t the president: it’s the corporate interests. Whether because of lobbyists, because of phone calls from one’s high rolling constituents, or because of a dire need of campaign money, Washington has become a bubble, where one’s placement on the ladder in the hierarchy of DC, is far, far, far more important than that person’s placement among his constituent’s hearts and their loyalties…
The home voters don’t matter anymore; they are seen as a vestigial organ, a minor flaw that the entire system occasionally has to address….
That shift of focus, is what killed Castle. That’s what gutted Lugar. This notion from those back home, that those in Washington, are completely out of touch with what we feel, down here on the ground. I see no evidence of care or concern about Delaware’s day to day problem from either Carney or Carper. Coons seems smitten as well.
Unfortunately as voters, we aren’t really given much to choose between. It has become an exercise of picking out who is the least worst…. And so, the same-ole, same-ole,… continues the next cycle…
I’d simply like to point out the bullshit statistic about small businesses that Carney’s statement takes to heart: Though small businesses create about 75% of jobs, they also account for an equal number of jobs lost.
At any given time, about half of American workers are employed by small businesses, the other half by large ones. Those statistics are quite stable over a long period of time. Pandering to small businesses might be good politics, but it’s based on BS. When it comes to Carney, my worry is that he doesn’t know the actual facts, because he’s so terrible at acting like a politician.
This line of BS about small business has been around for a while and has some truth to it, but got new life when Obama proposed letting the Bush tax cuts expire for individuals making over $250K.
Republicans were horrified by how popular Obama’s tax proposal was and started looking for something to counter it. They pointed out that many small businesses were S-corps that are taxed as individuals, and that somehow letting their top marginal rate expire from 36% to 39% would constitute a Communist revolution and bring about a new Great Depression.
To reinforce their argument, they started talking up how many people are employed by small businesses. The idea was to create fear that Obama’s expiration of tax cuts over $250K would lead to job losses. This was of course based on multiple false premises, none of which the media bothered to run down and expose.
But the narrative is still around, and to this day, talking about “small business” as job creators is now a dog whistle for not raising taxes on “individuals making over $250K.”
Ironically, in the end Republicans had nothing to fear from Obama’s tax-cut expiration proposals, but that’s our own damn fault, not theirs.
So we are now stuck with a bogus Republican counter-argument to a tax increase that never happened.
@puck: Somebody finally did the calculations on this — about 7% of filings for $250K+ are S-corps. Which is all it would have taken to debunk that argument.
“So why can’t we raise business taxes just a little bit to pay for that education? Surely they won’t begrudge paying a few extra pennies to have children who can read.”
Because there are prime examples of where spending per pupil does not translate to results. The DC school system has nearly the highest spending per pupil in the nation…
The line between “paying a few extra pennies” to an outcome of “children who can read” is not evident. I bet you could convince business to pay the pennies, if you could provide some reasonable assurance of results. I think we can all agree that our educational model is deficient. We’ve known that for years. The problem is how to fix it.
@Dave–
You state, “there are prime examples of where spending per pupil does not translate to results.” You then cite ONE statistic about the DC public school system to “prove” your point. That’s a dishonest argument.
Examine the DC public school student population…I don’t know this for a fact, but I’ll bet you’ll find a majority are single parent households and parents who aren’t very involved in their child’s education for one reason or another.
To make a long story short–you look like a turgid dick when you cherry-pick a stat from a notoriously troubled school district and attempt to apply it to public education as a whole.
@Roland
1. Data is data. Cherry picked or not. I said there were examples, I picked one off the top of my head.
2. The reason you gave is a perfect example of why more money is not working.
3. I did not apply it to education as a whole. I merely said that spending per pupil does not translate to results.
4. If you want to argue my assertion do so, but have some class and do it without calling me names as a counter argument.
The stat is not cherry-picked. High levels of spending per pupil is a common feature of troubled urban school districts; remember that not all that money gets to the classroom, as urban school districts are also used as a parking spot for patronage jobs (a few years ago the Inquirer reported that fewer than half the employees of the Philadelphia School District were teachers).
The No. 1 predictor of student performance is family income.
@G “The No. 1 predictor of student performance is family income.”
No. The No. 1 predictor of student performance is parental education level.
I hold up GWB as the poster child of my assertion (mother was a college dropout,…).
There is a correlation between income and education level. Income begats education level or education level begats income. They kinda go hand in hand.
To me, the point would be that the education system cannot replicate, replace, or act as a gap filler for every missing element in the equation. Everthing matters. So if you are in the education business it would make sense that you stick to your core competencies and avoid those areas where you have neither the resources nor the expertise. I don’t mean society shouldn’t address those other factors. I’m just suggesting that the education system shouldn’t try to do it all.
“I’m just suggesting that the education system shouldn’t try to do it all.”
Yet it is blamed when it fails to “do it all.” We have spent more than 20 years in Delaware coming up with a method of trying to “hold teachers accountable,” as if teachers were the only variable in the equation. (Thanks, then-Gov., now-Sen. Crapper.)
Whatever the issue, except for defense, you can count on Republicans to bitch about the amount of money being spent on it, especially if the money is going disproportionately to poor people.
Scott Gesty is the best candidate in this race. Kovach is just another government job hopper like Carney, and Carney has trashed our civil rights. Bernie August would be better than Carney if you can’t get with Scott.