posted
I actually think the idea of "smaller government" makes sense in some places. I'm a pretty centrist voter in that I've voted for both parties at different parts of time.
I mean, I voted for Bush because I agreed with him on some pertinent points. I actually even voted for Perry at one point in time, though that was mostly because the Democrat he was running against was pretty much even more sleezy. I tend to think that we need to be more conservative with our government spending - but I also don't believe that allowing a continually widening wealth divide in our country is healthy.
The thing is, right now, I feel like the conservative party has all run the way of super rich guys tittering behind their hands, idiots who are taking the government check while claiming they don't want the government to write the check, especially because if the government writes the check it will mean they are also allowed to be as violent and bigotted as they want and run off all the Blacks, gays, and hispanics.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: And if you're a Republican, you can get elected, as long as you don't actually do half of what you promise you're going to do. That's just ideological corruption 101. Ideology that can get you elected- but that you could never actually follow.
Sounds like Obama to me. Just sayin'.
As for your "voting against their interests" argument, it sounds a lot like Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas." You might be interested in the complementary study "What's the Matter with Connecticut" by Andrew Gelman, who's a Professor of PolySci at Columbia. This line of research eventually led Gelman to write the book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do, which I'd highly recommend. It debunks lots of popular myths about people's voting habits and offers one of the best analyses of the subject that I've seen.
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Sounds very much like Obama to me as well, although I think Obama has at least tried to keep many of his promises so it's not really fair to accuse him of "bait and switch".
To be fair to all politicians, we need to remember that no elected official has much power individually. My father was a representative in the state legislature for about a decade. At one point I asked him "Why don't you do X?" and his response was "Because I have to get 35 other members of the legislature to agree."
Sometimes we forget that we don't elect dictators, we elect people to positions in a democratic government. As long as that's true, we have to accept that politicians can't actually keep any promise that goes beyond "I will work for X".
I also think Americans view "consistency" as too great a virtue. My father recently told me that when he was in the state legislature, there was a group that asked all the legislators to sign a vow never to raise taxes. He told them, "If you want someone who will decide their vote before knowing all the relevant facts and details, I'm not your man." Changing your position as you learn more about the relevant facts is not the same a vacillating. I'm automatically suspicious of anyone whose position on issues hasn't changed in decades.
[ October 28, 2011, 12:00 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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quote:Changing your position as you learn more about the relevant facts is not the same a vacillating. I'm automatically suspicious of anyone whose position on issues hasn't changed in decades.
Despite having said that, it does concern me when politicians change position with no apparent reason except to please the electorate. Its something of a fine line to walk because politicians should be listening to their constituency but they also need to have enough conviction to not be blown about by every popular wind.
My biggest concern with Romney is that I have no idea what he actually stands for. His political position were fairly liberal when he was running for office in a liberal state, but have shifted considerably to the right when he needed to court the conservative vote. I can't tell whether he has any real political goals besides getting elected. He seems to be an extremely competent manager but that isn't the only or even primary trait I want in a President.
[ October 28, 2011, 12:21 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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quote:Sounds very much like Obama to me as well, although I think Obama has at least tried to keep many of his promises so it's not really fair to accuse him of "bait and switch".
Doesn't sound THAT much like Obama. He's actually done quite a bit, and of the things he didn't get done, he's TRIED to do most of the rest. I'm betting less than half of his major campaign promises totally fell by the wayside and were never even addressed.
I have my bones to pick with him as much as anyone, but Congress has been the major stumbling block.
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Other than his goofy Nirvana joke a couple debates ago, he's been by far the funniest candidate. I wish he'd unleashed that earlier, might have won more attention earlier on.
Supposedly his daughters told him to be himself and himself is a funny sarcastic guy.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: And if you're a Republican, you can get elected, as long as you don't actually do half of what you promise you're going to do. That's just ideological corruption 101. Ideology that can get you elected- but that you could never actually follow.
Sounds like Obama to me. Just sayin'.
Campaigning on something you may not be *able* to accomplish is one thing. Campaigning on something you would not actually choose to do, given the opportunity to do it, is quite another. That's more than a matter of degree. For instance, I do think Obama *wants* and wanted a single-payer NHS. He knew he would not get it, but he did campaign on reform based on that goal (more or less). However, I think that there are certain ideas kicking around the GOP candidates that they are campaigning on, but would *not* choose to do if elected. For instance, shrink the size of government, repeal the Health Care law of 2009, Balance the federal budget, and grant greater autonomy to states and districts in education.
I base that on the fact that Bush was elected with these as campaign issues, and he did not even *attempt* to complete them, with the exception of some seriously half assed legislation regarding Medicare. In every other regard, he and the GOP majorities in congress expanded government size and spending, made no attempt to address the federal deficit (choosing to cut taxes instead), and produced the travesty that is NCLB. These were not compromise positions between liberals and his stated goals. They completey ignored his stated goals.
So based in that rather poor showing for bush and the GOP for nearly 8 years, I think there is some justice n saying the GOP does not seem to use positions of power to accomplish effective and cohesive legislation, but rather abandons most ideological principles until they are once again in the minority. It suggests to me that the GOP's favored ideologies are fundamentally incompatible with governing. They cannot be, or at least do not, drive actual policy decisions and active legislation- better serving as disruptions to policy making and legislation.
Everything Obama has done so far, and trust me, I am far from satisfied with much of it, has been movement toward his campaign platform. The issue where I think you can draw *some* valid equivalence is on the tax issue. He has been unaccountably cowardly in that regard, even if I feel he hasn't actually gone *against* his word on it.
So while you could say the same about Obama, you would be far less right, I think. Not all rats smell the same.
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quote:Everything Obama has done so far, and trust me, I am far from satisfied with much of it, has been movement toward his campaign platform.
But that's obviously not true. Lobbyists, transparency, reigning in presidential abuses of power. These are all things that he campaigned on that he has shown no interest in following through with.
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Not only are they not happy with Obama's reform, many of them want to get rid of student loans all together and let the private sector take over.
As someone who has both private and federal student loans, I'll tell you right now that anyone who calls for total privatization will get me off my ass and out the door to start a rally against them. Every single friend of mine in college probably wouldn't have bothered with it if we would have had to pay for all of it on private loan rates, it would have been like taking out thirty grand on a credit card. The rates are terrible. Actually, my one credit card has a LOWER rate than what's on one of my private loans.
I sort of see the complaint that it enables universities to hike tuition, and don't get me wrong, that pisses me off more than anything. But refusing student loans just punishes the students, not the universities. It's easy to see why we're caught in the middle when higher education is increasingly necessary but it's all about dollars. But while I might appreciate the principle of standing up to universities, I'm not a fan of playing around with the lives of millions of students just to make a point.
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Blayne Bradley
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In Canada, I don't think Universities can set rates, but its up to the provinces I think.
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I know Michigan has imposed funding penalties on state universities that raise the rates over a certain amount, but it's still doing little to stem the rise.
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It seems to me that it might eventually punish the universities somewhat-if you make it harder (costlier) to get a college education, economics suggests fewer people will, meaning less attendance for universities-but it's 'punish the universities through the students'.
I don't see how on Earth anyone can look at the world, and the USA, and our relationship with the world, and go on to say, "We need to make it harder to get an education." Well, I do see-it ties in with that whole 'removing public anything is more efficient' angle-but that seems to take a whole lot of buying into the initial argument than anything else.
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There has to be a more direct and less punishing to students way of forcing universities, at least, forcing public universities, to reign in costs. Private universities can do whatever they want.
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The way you force universities to rein in costs is to make students unable to afford college. Seriously. That's just about the only way.
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I'm not specifically saying I think that making it harder to get a college education is a good thing... however, I do think that the way we have emphasized that everyone should get a college degree (and therefore likely saddled with lots of debt) rather than, say, go to a trade school, isn't really a great thing for the country.
Has everyone seen Mike Rowe's TED Talk? He touches on this a bit. I don't think it would necessarily be a bad thing if a few more people chose to learn a skilled trade instead of going to a 4 year university. And I don't think that forgoing a university education is actually all that harmful.
PS: This is tangential, something that occurred to me reading some of your posts. I'm not really addressing the student loan link, in case it wasn't obvious.
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: The way you force universities to rein in costs is to make students unable to afford college. Seriously. That's just about the only way.
Yeah, but see, that would preclude the real purpose of privatizing student loans in the first place, and raising university tuition at the same time.
This way, the baby boomers and echo boomers get to treat the youth of today like a kind of piggy bank. You raise rates and saddle students with plenty of loans. The money flows from the bank to the university, into their pension programs and their administrator salaries, and their infrastructure (and ultimately *back* to the same bank), and then the students spend the rest of their lives paying off a volume of debt the people who are benefiting from it never faced in their lives. Not much different from the housing bubble, actually.
The baby boomers were the first generation to figure out you could essentially borrow from your own children before they even had any money to lend you.
Not that I think most people are even aware of the pattern. It's this kind of thing that has kept me till the age of nearly 27 without ever having had a credit card. (To be fair, I do have a cash rewards card with a low limit for emergency flex money- the actual purpose of a credit card).
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: The way you force universities to rein in costs is to make students unable to afford college. Seriously. That's just about the only way.
I disagree. Universities also make alot of money through research and sports, and that is how they get alot of prestige. If you began penalizing them in those areas for increases in student costs, I bet many of them could reign in costs.
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They aren't ENTIRELY wrong on this. The plan Obama has will basically make it education cost meaningless after a certain threshold. If everyone will, in the end, pay the same amount for college, why would a future social worker choose a state school over an IVY League?
The only way you could induce them to do so would be to place even more severe restrictions on the amount of federally backed loans a student could take out, but then you end up facing the same problem as getting rid of federal loans entirely. As tuition explodes, everyone will either have to eventually take out private loans or go without education.
And, quite frankly, Obama doing this WITHOUT going through congress is a blatant abuse of power. I think it's absolutely foolish for him to do this in his first term.
Also, I think having all the loans held by the Federal Government is unwise - and not just because it's causing my own employer some strife. The FELP program had pretty good controls in it to make sure that federally backed student loans stayed tied to market rates. Sure, sometimes the federal government paid a subsidy to the loan holders, but in the last few years, the loan holders were actually paying subsidy BACK to the federal government! Laws that surrounding interest rates protected students from anything two terrible and provided students with alot of borrower benefits. While there were some problems with it, it was a fairly solid program.
The new "all direct federal loan" program isn't so great. For one thing, it allows our president to do this kind of forgiveness program WITHOUT going through congress. This is a double edged sword, because the exact same power could essentially let the next president to do the exact opposite! That could make student borrowing costs very unstable! Also, now the government has to hold the debt on the student loans directly, which isn't exactly a good thing for our "debt ceiling". Plus, they really don't know what they're doing trying to administer their program. I've gotten 3 different notices from them in 1 week about my account, all with totally different information on it! So, I do think that we've gone quite a bit too far in the direction of federal control over student loans, and a BIT more private enterprise involvement wouldn't be a bad idea.
quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: Crossposted from another thread I started, but it is relevant here:
Not only are they not happy with Obama's reform, many of them want to get rid of student loans all together and let the private sector take over.
As someone who has both private and federal student loans, I'll tell you right now that anyone who calls for total privatization will get me off my ass and out the door to start a rally against them. Every single friend of mine in college probably wouldn't have bothered with it if we would have had to pay for all of it on private loan rates, it would have been like taking out thirty grand on a credit card. The rates are terrible. Actually, my one credit card has a LOWER rate than what's on one of my private loans.
I sort of see the complaint that it enables universities to hike tuition, and don't get me wrong, that pisses me off more than anything. But refusing student loans just punishes the students, not the universities. It's easy to see why we're caught in the middle when higher education is increasingly necessary but it's all about dollars. But while I might appreciate the principle of standing up to universities, I'm not a fan of playing around with the lives of millions of students just to make a point.
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: The way you force universities to rein in costs is to make students unable to afford college. Seriously. That's just about the only way.
State universities are controlled by the state. Why can't they simply pass a law?
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Are you going to force the professors to work without raises? I ask this as someone who lives in Wisconsin, where the professors are being forced to live without raises -- but not to save students money.
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Canadian provinces do sometimes go through tuition freezes. I couldn't tell you why they start or stop in particular provinces, but they did save me some money.
quote:Currently, the provinces of Manitoba, Quebec, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland have tuition fee freezes in place. The provinces of British Columbia and Ontario have previously had tuition fee freezes.
Practically speaking, I don't think the differences between the two systems have been enough to solve the problem, merely enough to severely slow it down.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Are you going to force the professors to work without raises? I ask this as someone who lives in Wisconsin, where the professors are being forced to live without raises -- but not to save students money.
Why would you have to?
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quote:Originally posted by DDDaysh: They aren't ENTIRELY wrong on this. The plan Obama has will basically make it education cost meaningless after a certain threshold. If everyone will, in the end, pay the same amount for college, why would a future social worker choose a state school over an IVY League?
The only way you could induce them to do so would be to place even more severe restrictions on the amount of federally backed loans a student could take out, but then you end up facing the same problem as getting rid of federal loans entirely. As tuition explodes, everyone will either have to eventually take out private loans or go without education.
And, quite frankly, Obama doing this WITHOUT going through congress is a blatant abuse of power. I think it's absolutely foolish for him to do this in his first term.
Also, I think having all the loans held by the Federal Government is unwise - and not just because it's causing my own employer some strife. The FELP program had pretty good controls in it to make sure that federally backed student loans stayed tied to market rates. Sure, sometimes the federal government paid a subsidy to the loan holders, but in the last few years, the loan holders were actually paying subsidy BACK to the federal government! Laws that surrounding interest rates protected students from anything two terrible and provided students with alot of borrower benefits. While there were some problems with it, it was a fairly solid program.
The new "all direct federal loan" program isn't so great. For one thing, it allows our president to do this kind of forgiveness program WITHOUT going through congress. This is a double edged sword, because the exact same power could essentially let the next president to do the exact opposite! That could make student borrowing costs very unstable! Also, now the government has to hold the debt on the student loans directly, which isn't exactly a good thing for our "debt ceiling". Plus, they really don't know what they're doing trying to administer their program. I've gotten 3 different notices from them in 1 week about my account, all with totally different information on it! So, I do think that we've gone quite a bit too far in the direction of federal control over student loans, and a BIT more private enterprise involvement wouldn't be a bad idea.
quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: Crossposted from another thread I started, but it is relevant here:
Not only are they not happy with Obama's reform, many of them want to get rid of student loans all together and let the private sector take over.
As someone who has both private and federal student loans, I'll tell you right now that anyone who calls for total privatization will get me off my ass and out the door to start a rally against them. Every single friend of mine in college probably wouldn't have bothered with it if we would have had to pay for all of it on private loan rates, it would have been like taking out thirty grand on a credit card. The rates are terrible. Actually, my one credit card has a LOWER rate than what's on one of my private loans.
I sort of see the complaint that it enables universities to hike tuition, and don't get me wrong, that pisses me off more than anything. But refusing student loans just punishes the students, not the universities. It's easy to see why we're caught in the middle when higher education is increasingly necessary but it's all about dollars. But while I might appreciate the principle of standing up to universities, I'm not a fan of playing around with the lives of millions of students just to make a point.
I'm not convinced this is a blatant abuse of executive authority. The department of education is a part of the executive branch. The changes President Obama has proposed deal only with federal loans. I could be wrong, but I think that federal student loans and federally backed student loans go through the department of education. If this is the case, so long as there aren't any particularly new ordinances being put into place, I think it's within the rights of the president to modify existing policy in the way he is. (If I'm wrong that the maintenance of federal student loans isn't a part of the bureaucracy, then I retract my position entirely) The 20 year forgiveness isn't a new policy, it's a change to the loan forgiveness plan already there. Same with the loan payment to 10% of income cap. The argument that the president doing this makes the loan system unstable has some merit. But I don't think that's a problem unique to the presidency. Every two years congress could, theoretically, pass through super majority changes to the loan program. If President Obama proposed new regulation on loans--particularly on private loans--then I think the case could be made that his executive orders overstretch the authority of the executive.
Whether or not these changes are a good thing is another debate, but I don't really think this is an abuse of power--at least, not a blatant abuse.
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Assume for a moment that tuition does not become more expensive. Where is the money for raises coming from, especially from schools without large endowments and/or research spinoffs?
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He *is* nuts because hes a hardcore libertarian who happens to sound reasonable on a few things but only because the US has been increasing going insane faster than Ron Paul.
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Assume for a moment that tuition does not become more expensive. Where is the money for raises coming from, especially from schools without large endowments and/or research spinoffs?
What the hell are they spending all their money on right now? I see tuition spiking as much as 10% at where I went to undergrad, yet the professors had to strike two years ago because the university wanted to freeze salaries and reduce benefits.
They're charging us more and more and the money isn't going to professors, so where is it going?
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
Its an awfully strange first post if ye don't mind me sayin' by my lonesome.
Regardless, I still stand by my reckoning that Ron Paul only appears to be of sound mind in some respects because of em United States getting more crazy as time goes by than Ron Paul is who already is as crazy as he will get I reckon.
edit: Also that is preciselin' what spam would claim....
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Ron Paul is a nut because he wants to walk away from Israel and because he wants to implement a gold standard. Other people think he's a nut for other reasons that I don't find as disastrous.
But if he makes it to the general, I guess I'd vote for him since he doesn't have the power to do those things single handedly. I mean, Obama's had his 3 years and I haven't succumbed to spontaneous human combustion.
And yeah, we have a civil discourse around here because we don't communicate via rosters of youtube links.
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
Actually its a scarce commodity/basket standing, it wouldn't be solely gold but a basket of scarce commodities, which I think might be more workable if it could be correlated to our current economy.
I'm not entirely sure what we do that really helps Israel today, sure we shield them in the UN but since when did we military put a foot forward to them? Its just free munitions, maybe with less of US help they wouldn't feel so free to mess around unnecessarily in the West Bank.
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quote:Originally posted by pooka: Ron Paul is a nut because he wants to walk away from Israel and because he wants to implement a gold standard. Other people think he's a nut for other reasons that I don't find as disastrous.
But if he makes it to the general, I guess I'd vote for him since he doesn't have the power to do those things single handedly. I mean, Obama's had his 3 years and I haven't succumbed to spontaneous human combustion.
And yeah, we have a civil discourse around here because we don't communicate via rosters of youtube links.
While I think that Congress would stop most of his major policy proposals, the bigger problem is that I think his principled stand, which I actually believe him on, mostly, would grind the government to a halt. He'd veto a lot of stuff, Congress wouldn't pass his legislation, and literally nothing would get done for four more years. Too dangerous a time for NOTHING to happen in four years.
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Assume for a moment that tuition does not become more expensive. Where is the money for raises coming from, especially from schools without large endowments and/or research spinoffs?
What the hell are they spending all their money on right now? I see tuition spiking as much as 10% at where I went to undergrad, yet the professors had to strike two years ago because the university wanted to freeze salaries and reduce benefits.
They're charging us more and more and the money isn't going to professors, so where is it going?
Assistant to the Assistant Vice Dean of Canadian Transfer Students' Equality of Speech?
Seriously though, I've read things that seemed to imply that universities are operating under ever-inflating bureaucratic administrations that eat up huge chunks of the budget and contribute arguably trivial value. I'll freely admit that I don't follow this topic too closely, though, and this idea plays well to my biases, so if someone has some concrete facts that contradict (or support!) this, feel free to share them. Posts: 3580 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: Assistant to the Assistant Vice Dean of Canadian Transfer Students' Equality of Speech?
How ****ing DARE you sir?
As the attache to the assistant to the vice-chancellor's bottle washer, I am DEEPLY, offended. You'll be hearing from the managing assistance secretary in charge of channeling angry letters through a thick web of bureaucracy.
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There aren't a whole lot of administrator slacking off around here. Most of them work pretty darn hard as do the staff. Even here, at a pretty expensive private school, tuition pays only part of what it costs per student. The rest is gifts, grants, and endowment. Endowments have taken a hit in recent years. We are in a pretty good position but a lot of other school are not only freezing hiring but cutting pay.
Salaries are not the only costs to a university. We have to pay electric bills, too.
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A lot of it is also simply wasted spending.
Universities have always had to pay utilities, and all the other random costs of being a university...but what has changed in the last decade to send costs spiraling out of control?
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As a vacation from the policy discussions, Politico broke some gossipy news last weekend about two women who accused Herman Cain of "sexually suggestive behavior by Cain that made them angry and uncomfortable" while he was the CEO of the National Restaurant Association. The women eventually left the Association under agreements that gave them financial payouts and also included a ban on speaking about their leaving the group.
Cain's pushed back against the story, calling it purely political, without outright denying any of the accusations.
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My, things are getting messier than I thought they were. For all the talk we usually have every four years about Democrats devouring their young, the Republicans this year, and still with two months to go, are getting particularly vicious.
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: My, things are getting messier than I thought they were. For all the talk we usually have every four years about Democrats devouring their young, the Republicans this year, and still with two months to go, are getting particularly vicious.
Why do you think it was a political hatchet job, rather than simply investigative reporting? I'd wondered the same thing, but I don't immediately see evidence that that was the case. It reminds me of the John Edwards story from 2007/8, which had dramatic political impact but didn't seem (at least to me) to be politically motivated.
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: A lot of it is also simply wasted spending.
Universities have always had to pay utilities, and all the other random costs of being a university...but what has changed in the last decade to send costs spiraling out of control?
I don't see anything so show more wasted spending in universities than elsewhere. Especially when it comes to the salaries of top administrators which are certainly comfortable but in the low 6 figures rather than the high 7 figures.
Again, a big part of university expenses are paid by endowment money and giving. Both of those have taken a big hit in the past decade.
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Lyrhawn: the answer to your question, as I understand it, is -- at least for state schools -- "construction projects." And it would seem easy to say, "Oh, you should stop building things if it's going to cost the students more," but there're a couple catches there: 1) Big donors want to give to new buildings; they do not want to give to the General Fund. So while you could solicit a big gift for a building and then sit on it until you've saved up for enough to build it without costing the students anything extra, the reality is that many donors will get tired of waiting for their gift to amount to anything; often those gifts are given with strings attached that cause the money to revert back to the donor if the building isn't constructed within a certain timeframe. 2) Students and faculty both like to go to schools with big, new buildings. This is true even if the school has jacked up its tuition to build them. The school down the road that didn't leverage its student body to build that jazzy new union or science center now looks like a poor relation, even though it's actually been more fiscally responsible. 3) Sometimes you actually have to build new things in order to do groundbreaking research, replace crumbling infrastructure, or accommodate a growing student body. But this is the rare case.
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But hasn't this always been the case? Or is this building spree a recent trend?
Senoj -
The timing. It's awfully convenient for something like this to come out right when Cain is as his apex of popularity. It smacks of one of the other candidates leaking it to the press.
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The timing. It's awfully convenient for something like this to come out right when Cain is as his apex of popularity. It smacks of one of the other candidates leaking it to the press.
"Awfully convenient" was why I wondered as well, but I think the motivation evidence is weaker than it seems on the surface. Romney probably doesn't mind Cain's popularity, given that it seems unlikely to transfer into primary wins. Maybe he got spooked by Cain's reported uptick in fundraising since last quarter, but Romney's still out raising him by quite a bit and has a huge organizational advantage. Perry hasn't recovered from a disastrous September; his new team is still getting into place, so he's not really ready to capitalize on a Cain stumble. I guess it could be someone from Paul's or Gingrich's camps (I doubt Bachmann/Santorum/Huntsman have sufficient motivation), but it still seems that enterprising journalists chasing down ideas is the more likely story.
The Edwards story broke about the same time in the primary cycle, and IIRC he was polling strong in Iowa at that point (which he eventually lost to Obama, while just edging out Hillary for second). Do you think Obama or Clinton (or Biden or Dodd) were using the media to sink Edwards' campaign? I don't doubt such machinations can occur (and probably have), but I think the straightforward explanation is usually the better one.
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I heard an interview on NPR this morning with the Politico reporter who did the story. The reporter said that Politico has been trying to get Cain's campaign to respond to their questions about this for two or three weeks, and that it was the lack of response from Cain's campaign that led him to ask Cain about it directly.
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quote:"I would be delighted to clear the air," he said. "I have never sexually harassed anyone. While at the National Restaurant Association, I was accused of sexual harassment. Falsely, I might ad. When charges were brought, I recused myself and allowed my accountant my human resources officer" to handle the cases. He said he was never aware of the settlements. "I hope it wasn't for much, because I didn't do anything."
You could parse his denial finely to read that he'd never done anything that rose to the level of harassment, which doesn't directly refute the claim from the original story that he had engaged in "sexually suggestive behavior" that made the women "angry and uncomfortable." So maybe this is a non-denial denial, but that "I didn't do anything" seems likely to be pretty damning if additional details come out and are verified.
Posts: 2926 | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
I checked out the politico story. It looks to me like it started as a press leak from another campaign. Basically, all you need to do to get some positive/negative press is find a verifiable story. Give it to the press on confidential terms, and tell them who they'd need to talk to for verification. That's when you get "Multiple sources confirmed." There are people in major campaigns whose soul task is to do opposition research. During the primary, this includes opposition research on fellow Republicans. If your campaign is faltering or another's is growing too quickly, you give the information to a news source. Media outlets love an exclusive story, so they take these leaks very seriously and give them full attention.
If the article said that the women in question approached Politico, or if a member of the National Restaurant Association approached Politico on the condition of anonymity, I'd be less inclined to say that this wasn't research done by another campaign. Whether true or false, the timing and phrasing of the article is such that I think the story started from some opposition research.
Posts: 1831 | Registered: Jan 2003
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