Predictions about Romney
Romney (Photo credit: Talk Radio News Service)
Interestingly, pundits generally make predictions that turn out to be wrong yet this seems to have no impact on their status as pundits. In this spirit, I call on you to make predictions about what Romney will do, should he win the election. The more specific the prediction, the better.
For example, Romney claims that he will create 12 million jobs, so one possible prediction is that he will do so. Another is that he will not.
If he gets elected, we can return to this post and see what predictions were accurate and which were not.
If possible, limit the comments to predictions. No mention should be made of Obama. Naturally, anyone who is physically incapable of resisting the commands of Fox and must type out talking points against Obama will be forgiven.
A Philosopher's Blog 
Romney will prove to be the moderate we always knew he was, and will infuriate his base, but they will go along with him grudgingly.
This being an article about predictions, I feel no need to use the words “I predict” before my statements about the future. If I do, I will do so out of sheer habit. If I were trying to make a point in a discussion of a different kind of article, I hope I would clearly point out that such statements are presented as predictions—not facts.
TJ: A nice, hopeful prediction, that. I’m just not so willing to believe that a moderate would, as you predict, get the base to go along with him. I don’t doubt that he would make a lot of unpopular decisions—every president does. The overriding question would be “Who would he be most willing to disappoint or hurt with his decisions?” I do predict that getting us “back on track” will not be as easy as he predicts.
Nevertheless, should Romney win, I predict the moderate power structure will be the determining factor in whether Romney runs for a second term or not. Romney will not be the “decider”. Should he fail with his campaign promises the Republican power structure will be scrambling soon enough to find someone they can put on the trail for 2016. I predict they’ll do it very soon after Romney begins to slide, so they have time to groom another candidate who can lie as efficiently as he has.
Romney will make a lot of unpopular decisions, but will put the country back on track. He will not run for a second term. Hillary will win the next election and will also govern as a moderate.
Romney will govern as a moderate, and become one of the most admired presidents in history, not for any stark feats, but for healing a nation that is tired, cynical and broke. He will also bring the left and the right together, more so than they have been in the last 20 years. Romney will display an energy and humor reminiscent of Reagan’s while maintaining a more moderate political stance, close to Clinton’s. He will withdraw US troops from Afghanistan in 2014, and may select David Petraeus as his Secretary of Defense. He will take a strong stand against Islamic fundamentalism, and will work with Israel to dismantle Iran’s nuclear ambitions. A military operation against Iran will likely take place within 6 months of Romney’s election. The unemployment rate will drop below 6% approximately 12 months after his election and there will be faster economic growth than has been seen in a decade.
I wish Romney would have campaigned as the moderate you all seem to think he will become. It would be much easier to respect him as a candidate and as a man.
“humor reminiscent of Reagan’s”? Unlikely.
Withdrawal from Afghanistan in ’14? That’s already scheduled.
Petraeus? Good choice. Obama, after all, nominated him for Director of the CIA. It would be interesting to see what Petraeus’ view of a “military operation against Iran. . .within 6 months” might be. What is the size of a “‘military operation” by the way?
“unemployment rate will drop below 6% approximately 12 months after his election”: Is this the unemployment rate nationally, or the unemployment rate in one state?
http://www.bls.gov/web/laus/laumstrk.htm
North Dakota, for example, may not be so happy with that 6% figure. 🙂
Is Obama a moderate?
magus71: I think his record answers your question. If you don’t think so, you can answer your own question, because I’m reasonably you’ve already got him tucked into your socialist drawer.
Will Romney be a moderate leaning right or a moderate leaning left? Should he win, my prediction is he would lean pretty far to the right of conservative center. He has, however, said that he supports the right to abortion for rape, incest, and the health of the mother. . . a view I happen to hold, so it must be correct. . . .
I think, though that his statement does seem somewhat less than convincing, since he began airing an ad supporting Mourdock a bit before Mourdock made his statement.
So, as with so many of his statements and positions, I’d have to flip a coin and pray to the gods that be that somewhere inside those expensive suits there’s something more than what he tries to present as a core.
. . .”because” I’m reasonably certain you’ve already. . .
I think, though, that his statement. . .
I predict Romney wins the popular vote.
Movie for Magus. Question: was Tom Cruise the right pick for Reacher?
TJ,
Have you read any of Lee Childs’ books? Reacher is like 6’5″ in the books. But I doesn’t think Cruise’s height issue is a game breaker. I think Cruise will do a good job. He was awesome in Collateral which has a similar noir feel.
Yes, I have read all the Reacher novels except the one that just came out a couple of weeks ago. They are terrific. Another writer I like is Barry Eisler: http://www.barryeisler.com/ His John Rain novels are fantastic.
Childs is great. I also recommend Stephen Hunter–in particular Point of Impact and Time To Hunt.
Yes, I have read most of the Bob Lee Swagger books as well. 🙂 They are excellent.
Like biomass and Norm, TJ and I are actually the same person….
Here’s an interesting article to skim about predictions based on polls. Not exactly what’s being discussed here, but some of the same principles apply.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/10/david-brooks-v-nate-silver-prediction-polls.html
Quotation most applicable to Mike’s request for “Predictions about Romney”:
“. . .we’ll see what happens.”
Que sera, sera, mes amis.
I predict that voting for Romney is not like having sex with him. This one is for you, Mike and bio…
Too good not to share:
Oh, my god. Lena has a tattoo! All military personnel , like all gangbangers, have tattoos. Magus is in the military. He has a tattoo, too. Perhaps two tattoos. Too. . . Oh, my God. Magus is Lena. And Lena is probably a gang member who enlisted in the military . Magus, I never pictured you with such long hair.
But wait!. What I just wrote is too magus-like . All those quick generalizations and categorizations like ‘spaghetti-armed metrosexual’ and ‘moonbat’. But I wrote it. So . . .I must be magus. And magus, that lucky bastard, must be me. It’s a heavy burden, but I accept it.
I don’t think Magus has a tat-you need to read his treatise on cats, tats and bumper stickers. He presents a damn good formula for calculating a person’s moonbat index.
Some years back, we saw a guy in a park who had a van covered in bumper stickers. He himself was covered in tats. The most bizarre thing: the picnic tables around him were covered in cats (in cat carriers). That has been the highest score to date.
From my old blog:
http://magus71.wordpress.com/2007/09/05/simplified-insanity-index-ssi/
The moonbat index–M.I. for short. I think you are on to something, Magus. Well done.
I have to say, however, that biomass is not a garden variety moonbat. I sense that he is basically a contrarian, and will take the opposing side mostly for the sake of argument. Which is as it should be on a philosophy blog.
I’ll take that as a back-handed compliment, but your contention that I’ll “take the opposing side mostly for the sake of argument” raises an interesting question or two . What makes ^me^ “the opposing side”? Why aren’t you and magus “the opposing side”? Why did I agree with WTP of all people in my 11:07am “Mourdock, God & Rape” response to you? Magus is getting nearly universal praise for his index. I point out what are, I believe, some major weaknesses in his observations in my 6:42pm. Does that make me a contrarian, a moonbat, or just someone who reads carefully and critically? Do you and magus honestly think you are right all the time, or, as magus says in his 6:59pm when describing his labeling (spaghetti-armed metrosexual) that “it’s a joke.”
It was meant as a compliment, biomass.
My motto is “often wrong, but never in doubt”
That’s biomass2. Show some respect. . .
It’s good to hear that some of us on here are contrarians. That I’m not the only “opposing side”. That the opposing side is not always the wrong side.
TJ: “often wrong, but never in doubt” I have noticed that you and magus successfully conduct your screen lives by that motto. But don’t be too hard on yourselves. It seems to me that you’re not always wrong. 🙂
I, too, have a motto: ” frequently correct, but sometimes in doubt.” I find the element of doubt useful. It helps me to avoid defending untenable positions. I don’t hesitate to say I’m wrong when the case that I am is clearly made.
By the way, I have no tattoos, no piercings, but do have two cats which have been forced upon me by my family. The cats are moonbats. I often catch them late at night staring longingly at the article in the Huffington Post, which asks of President Obama: “Boxers or Briefs?”
By your own standards, I don’t qualify for your label. Yet you applied it to me. Either your formula isn’t as “damn good” as Mike says, or your use of the label “sucks”. Surprise.
My score:
No piercings or tattoos. I’d like to know how many of your military acquaintances do . And you’ve seen them in the showers, so you can make an accurate and anatomically detailed count. 😦
No bumper stickers—not even OBX ir NOLA stickers. Again, how many soldiers have political stickers or gun talking points glued to their family cars?
Two cats, split equally between me and my wife. . . 🙂
What label did I apply to you? That you’re a sociopath? Sociopaths need not be insane. I apply my standards to the military, too.
By the way, biomass2, it’s a joke.
The term you applied was “moonbat”. Go back through the archives to my original appearance on here as biomass2.
What’s a joke? That I’m a “moonbat” or that I’m a sociopath?
Wikipedia: “A person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience.”
Seriously (or is it a joke?), you’ve been around real sociopaths in your role as a policeman, right? Is disagreeing with you an extremely antisocial act? 🙂 Are you certain that that doesn’t make me a socialist pig in your eyes, too? Does WTP qualify as a sociopath? Or is he a good Joe that you’d like to sit down with and have a beer? Because he agrees with your views? 🙂
My changing identities here are intended as a joke. Why aren’t you laughing? WTP was virtually apoplectic once he caught on. Think of this: What if I had consistently appeared as “anonymous” from the very beginning and played various roles within that context? How would that have affected the times when others accidentally forgot to type in email addresses and names? Would they have automatically been me/anonymous. Would your categorizing drawer get stuck?
magus:
I assume window stickers count? So. Does each Jesus sticker count as one point? And how about those family stickers. Does each parent, each child, and each pet sticker count as a point? Do cat stickers get special consideration? I passed a van on the road just this afternoon that would have raised the number above the magic 20. Had I not been so mesmerized by the collection of window stickers, I would probably have seen a few anti-abortion and NRA bumper stickers. . . Nah. That’s just rank generalization. 🙂
Mike, would you agree that magus’ “damn good formula” should define such “necessary conditions”?
The method provides sufficient but not necessary conditions.
A must read for people who call themselves Progressives:
The progressive case against Obama
Bottom line: The president is complicit in creating an increasingly unequal — and unjust — society
By Matt Stoller
**************************************
Under Bush, economic inequality was bad, as 65 cents of every dollar of income growth went to the top 1 percent. Under Obama, however, that number is 93 cents out of every dollar. That’s right, under Barack Obama there is more economic inequality than under George W. Bush. And if you look at the chart above, most of this shift happened in 2009-2010, when Democrats controlled Congress. This was not, in other words, the doing of the mean Republican Congress. And it’s not strictly a result of the financial crisis; after all, corporate profits did crash, like housing values did, but they also recovered, while housing values have not.
This is the shape of the system Obama has designed. It is intentional, it is the modern American order, and it has a certain equilibrium, the kind we identify in Middle Eastern resource extraction based economies. We are even seeing, as I showed in an earlier post, a transition of the American economic order toward a petro-state. By some accounts, America will be the largest producer of hydrocarbons in the world, bigger than Saudi Arabia. This is just not an America that any of us should want to live in. It is a country whose economic basis is oligarchy, whose political system is authoritarianism, and whose political culture is murderous toward the rest of the world and suicidal in our aggressive lack of attention to climate change.
Many will claim that Obama was stymied by a Republican Congress. But the primary policy framework Obama put in place – the bailouts, took place during the transition and the immediate months after the election, when Obama had enormous leverage over the Bush administration and then a dominant Democratic Party in Congress. In fact, during the transition itself, Bush’s Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson offered a deal to Barney Frank, to force banks to write down mortgages and stem foreclosures if Barney would speed up the release of TARP money. Paulson demanded, as a condition of the deal, that Obama sign off on it. Barney said fine, but to his surprise, the incoming president vetoed the deal. Yup, you heard that right — the Bush administration was willing to write down mortgages in response to Democratic pressure, but it was Obama who said no, we want a foreclosure crisis. And with Neil Barofsky’s book ”Bailout,” we see why. Tim Geithner said, in private meetings, that the foreclosure mitigation programs were not meant to mitigate foreclosures, but to spread out pain for the banks, the famous “foam the runway” comment. This central lie is key to the entire Obama economic strategy. It is not that Obama was stymied by Congress, or was up against a system, or faced a massive crisis, which led to the shape of the economy we see today. Rather, Obama had a handshake deal to help the middle class offered to him by Paulson, and Obama said no. He was not constrained by anything but his own policy instincts. And the reflation of corporate profits and financial assets and death of the middle class were the predictable results.
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/27/the_progressive_case_against_obama/
TJ: “. . .most of this shi[f]t happened in 2009-2010, when Democrats controlled Congress.”
He writes this after admitting the trend—let’s call it a disaster— that was initiated in the Bush (conservative/Republican/whatever) era. “Most of the “shift he refers to happened while we were still in the midst of recovery. Otherwise, what we have here are observations, ‘info’ from private meetings–not filmed a la the Romney 47%— but basically reported by unbiased (?) observers, and some facts.
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/06/the-big-lies-of-mitt-romney-v-obama-had-a-super-majority-
in-congress-for-two-years.html
And from
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/books/bailout-by-neil-barofsky.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
” . . . . . .This introductory episode not only sets the book’s tone, but it also embodies the contradictions and inconsistencies throughout Mr. Barofsky’s account.
He writes early on that “I had no idea that the U.S. government had been captured by the banks,” and at another point describes his strategy to use the press to get the attention of Congress, and by extension an obstreperous Treasury: “Our message was simple: Treasury’s desperate attempt to bail out Wall Street was setting the country up for potentially catastrophic losses.” Yet despite such repeated condemnations of the decision-making process in both the Bush and Obama administrations, Mr. Barofsky never really concedes that the predicted losses did not occur.
He refers throughout to the $700 billion bailout, never clarifying that less than $300 billion of that amount went out the door by the time TARP expired; that not a penny went to big banks during the Obama administration; and that those banks repaid taxpayers with interest.
As ugly and flawed as the rescue process was, and as galling as Wall Street’s revived bravado and bonuses can be to most Americans, the fact remains that an economic collapse was averted, and that Main Street is recovering: slowly, but typically so for recessions brought on by credit crises. As Europe’s crisis persists for a fourth year, commentators around the globe have suggested that the Continent should have followed America’s example.
To the extent that Mr. Barofsky acknowledges that neither big losses nor big fraud cases occurred, he credits the anti-fraud measures he pressed Treasury to include in programs and contracts. Yet his book is a chronicle of complaints that Treasury undercut, blindsided and ignored him. ”
Let’s say there are differing views of Mr. Barofsky’s version of events.
TJ:
And this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/29/neil-barofsky-presidential-election_n_2038593.html
After you read the first paragraph, you may want to read the rest. Or perhaps not. . .