Monday Open Thread [9.24.12]

“Well, it doesn’t need a turnaround. I’ve got a very effective campaign. It’s doing a very good job.” — Mitt Romney, in an interview on 60 Minutes.

Anymore, Mitt Romney seems to be the very type of arrogant, entitled, delusional Wall Street monster who destroyed our economy in the first place. And to prove that, Mr. Romney awarded his senior campaign staff $200,000 in bonuses after the GOP Convention, according to Politico. Mind you, the Convention is widely viewed as an epic disaster that gave Romney a negative bounce. Sounds just like Wall Street.

Meanwhile, Paul Ryan says things: “Social Security right now is a collectivist system, it’s a welfare transfer system.” — Rep. Paul Ryan in a 2005 audio recording talking about privatizing the “socialist-based system” of social security. And they wonder why they are losing the senior vote now.

Andrew Sullivan loves to compaire the trajectories of President Obama’s presidency with that of Ronald Reagan.

“If Obama wins, to put it bluntly, he will become the Democrats’ Reagan. The narrative writes itself. He will emerge as an iconic figure who struggled through a recession and a terrorized world, reshaping the economy within it, passing universal health care, strafing the ranks of al -Qaeda, presiding over a civil-rights revolution, and then enjoying the fruits of the recovery. To be sure, the Obama recovery isn’t likely to have the same oomph as the one associated with Reagan–who benefited from a once-in-a-century cut of top income tax rates (from 70 percent to, at first, 50 percent, and then to 28 percent) as well as a huge jump in defense spending at a time when the national debt was much, much less of a burden. But Obama’s potential for Reagan status (maybe minus the airport-naming) is real.”

“Yes, Bill Clinton won two terms and is a brilliant pol bar none, as he showed in Charlotte in the best speech of both conventions. But the crisis Obama faced on his first day–like the one Reagan faced–was far deeper than anything Clinton confronted, and the future upside therefore is much greater. And unlike Clinton’s constant triangulating improvisation, Obama has been playing a long, strategic game from the very start–a long game that will only truly pay off if he gets eight full years to see it through. That game is not only changing America. It may also bring his opposition, the GOP, back to the center, just as Reagan indelibly moved the Democrats away from the far left.”

First Read:

“The Romney camp’s timing was smart — on its worst week of the campaign, dump all the bad news you can to get everything out of the way. But the campaign also didn’t answer all the questions about Romney’s past tax returns; the only way to do that would be to release the actual returns, not a short summary. But here’s the bottom line about the tax-return issue: The Obama campaign succeeded in making it a talking point and attack (just see its new TV ad), and the Romney camp seems to have succeeded in its goal to not release the actual returns prior to 2010.”