Las Vegas Gleaner

Romney's bold march to history's dustbin continues apace

Oh so now Obama's going all "um, I'm the president, Mitt Romney is not now and never will be the president, for which the nation can give thanks, so let's go through the motions over the next couple of months and hopefully a handful of Republicans will grow a brain cell or two after the election but if they don't we'll forge ahead best we can and at least weirdo Mitt Romney won't be president."

Fair enough. As I 'splain in this week's CityLife, that message, or something like it, has been working in Nevada for months.

The big fat X factor -- emphasis on big -- is the amount of money Sheldon Adelson and the rest of America's drooling rich old angry white guys (as Harry Reid might say) are going to spend on anti-Obama ads in Nevada and other swing states over the next two months. Romney's SuperPac has raised four times as much as Obama's, and that's not even counting the jillions that will be casually spent by secretly funded Hellmouth spawn like Karl Rove's Crossroads abomination and the Koch Brothers' Americans for the Koch Brothers' Prosperity.

By the by, we had Obama campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt on The Agenda the other day. Inasmuch as the Obama campaign is about to be terrifyingly outspent, I asked, might the campaign step back from advertising in smallish swing states like Nevada to concentrate spending on Florida, Virginia and Ohio (that latter of course is the ball game)? Never, LaBolt answered, more or less.

That's good, because the more active Obama's campaign is in Nevada, the better for Democrats down ticket (although the fact is evidently lost on several down-ticket Nevada Democrats).

Meantime, if America's campaign finance system is going to be a revolting exercise in corruption and an immoral offense against democracy, revolting, immoral and corrupt billionaire wingnuts might as well keep spending lavishly to offend Nevadans on TV. It's not like the American right has any other plan to stimulate Nevada's economy.

Now might a Nevada Democrat say something about a sort of pretty important issue, maybe, please, if it's not too much trouble...?

After the Supreme Court tossed the Medicaid expansion portion of Obamacare and said it would be up to states to opt-in, Gov. Brian Sandoval said "oh dear we must wait and see, mustn't we?" which to the highly overrated governor's credit is actually a more rational response than the flat-out "hell no" delivered by most of Sandoval's fellow Republican governors.

Nevada's Democratic legislative leadership, meantime, took a firm and strong stand in favor of ... Sandoval's wait-and-see approach. An exception was Democratic Assembly Health and Human Services Committee Chair April Mastroluca, who shamefully raced to reinforce wingnut narratives and said "I don't think it would be in our best interests to expand right now."

(Harry Reid had the sense, or at least the political investment in Obamacare, to tell the truth: that given the enormously generous federal payments [never less than 90 percent of the cost of expansion] and Nevada's traditionally sky-high rate of uninsured low-income people, Medicaid expansion in Nevada is a "no brainer.")

If state officials are going to freak out about the cost of Medicaid, they should know, as Bill Clinton pointed out while thoroughly demolishing Republican policy in Charlotte, that Mitt Romney proposes to slash federal Medicaid spending by a third over the next ten years. That means states will be forced to dramatically curtail Medicaid services, or pick up more of the tab on their own. Perhaps at some point between now and the election, Romney apologist Brian Sandoval might explain why his candidate wants to shift a huge financial burden from the federal government to Nevada, and why that is such a good idea.

Dean Heller should also be forced (media? hello? anyone?) to explain why this is such a good idea -- Heller, after all, has already voted to shift Medicaid costs to states at least twice when he voted for the original Ryan budget.

Every third word out of Shelley Berkley's mouth is Medicare. Might she be coaxed into hammering Heller on Medicaid, as well?

Medicaid is known primarily as the program that provides health care for low-income mothers and children. But as Clinton pointed out, a huge portion of Medicaid spending is used to provide nursing home and Medicare premium assistance to none other than Berkley's holy sacred senior citizens.

It is tempting to suggest that Heller either hates poor kids and their poor grandma, or he thinks that the state of Nevada (already one of the cheapest states in the nation) needs to spend less on education and infrastructure so it can spend more on Medicaid. But either suggestion assumes Heller's support for gutting Medicaid was a deliberate act of policy sentience instead of a thoughtless knee-jerk political reaction.

In any case, Sandoval and Heller, and Joe Heck too -- to say nothing of the Romney Nevada campaign and the rest of the "Team Nevada" corporate Republican machine -- are championing a policy that will either cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars or, more likely, deprive health care to Nevada's most vulnerable citizens. It would be nice, not only politically but, you know, for the poors, if Nevada Democrats could take a few minutes out of their busy schedule to pound the living shit out of Nevada Republicans on this issue. Ooh, look, another diamond ad. Sigh.

"Enthusiasm gap" may favor Democrats (just like "facts gap" and "sense gap")

Harry Reid's speech to the Democratic National Convention demonstrated all the charm, eloquence and passion we have come to expect from the Senate Majority Leader, which is to say pretty much hardly any at all.

And yet it was still better than Brian Sandoval's speech to the GOP convention, and not just because of Sandoval's monotonous insincerity.

Reid stated an obvious but no-less actual fact: If you like what the Tea Party did when they took over the House, you'll love what they'll do if, in all their collective rage, paranoia and whackadoodledoo, they take control of the Senate and the White House.

Sandoval, by contrast, merely echoed the GOP's silly trope that business owners and only business owners are Real Americans, except unlike other GOP speakers, Sandoval had been directed to use the word "Hispanic" in every third sentence. Outreach, GOP style!

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Yes, Michelle's speech was not only a far more enlightened, inspirational and, frankly, patriotic exploration and explanation of American values than anything that was muttered at the Republican convention. Education, health care and the safety net, women's freedoms, the brink of economic collapse and the need to move forward not backward -- her speech was also more detailed and sophisticated with respect to policy than either Mitt Romney's or Paul Ryan's.

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Perhaps the Republican Party's primary achievement thus far this campaign cycle, aside from going down on Sheldon Adelson, of course, has been deliberately taking an innocous Barack Obama line about the public good wildly out of context and turning into a pathetic cliche. A whole night of the Republican convention was devoted to the "we built it" nonsense. Coupled with the fact that the delegates can't stand their nominee, who is but a nominee by default because nobody else who was even remotely credible would run for the party's nomination, and little wonder the GOP convention seemed a loveless and rather dreary affair. Whether either conventions will make a dent in the overall campaign narrative remains to be seen (indeed, polling suggests the Republican gathering might as well not have happened). But if there is an "enthusiasm gap," as the nattering media grown-ups are always saying, the Republicans are the listless ones, at least judging from the conventions.