Zing along with Mitt

Incidentally, what happened to all the zingers? Remember how Willard Romney was supposed to be holed up memorizing a repertoire of expressions with which he was going to smash his opponent in debate?

Mr. Romney’s team has concluded that debates are about creating moments and has equipped him with a series of zingers that he has memorized and has been practicing on aides since August. (New York Times, 9/28/2012)

I understand why a lot of people think Romney won the debate, but I doubt anybody would claim that he zinged (zang?) to any special degree. Did he drop them? Was the whole thing just a strategic feint designed to confuse the Obama team?

Trickle Down Economic Theory, by Ashley Jackson, from the Hopkinton News, Hopkinton, Mass.

No, the zingers were there, but they don't seem to have stuck out quite as much as expected. Emma Lingan of Old Gold & Black, the student newspaper of Wake Forest University, has assembled a list of three, which I have supplemented with three more.

1. Mr. — Mr. President, you're entitled, as the president, to your own airplane and to your own house, but not to your own facts — (laughter) — all right?

This one certainly has the mark of something crafted by Republicans in a cabin retreat, with nothing to drink but Coors Lite and Google shots. A legendary zinger, attribution uncertain but most often credited to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat (natch), plus some new editing, replacing the original first clause ("you're entitled to your own opinions") with something more contextually determined. Not very good editing, either, in that the zing gets buried by all these extra words in some issues of questionable relevance: is he suggesting that he, Romney, is entitled to his own facts, as a private citizen, a retired gent with the unusual hobby of running for president?

The actual issue with this one, the fact that Obama is or isn't entitled to, had to do with Romney's education policy:

You know, this is where budgets matter because budgets reflect choices. So when Governor Romney indicates that he wants to cut taxes and potentially benefit folks like me and him, and to pay for it, we're having to initiate significant cuts in federal support for education, that makes a difference.

Which would be wrong because the governor is

not going to cut education funding. I don't have any plan to cut education funding and grants that go to people going to college.

But the factual status of that is not very clear; he's also said he supports the budget plan proposed by Paul Ryan, and that cuts education spending by 20%. What Romney himself intends to cut on the spending side remains a secret, like his tax returns from before 2010. In this sense he certainly does believe he's entitled to his own facts—i.e., entitled to keep them out of the public eye.

2. Look, I got five boys. I'm used to people saying something that's not always true, but just keep on repeating it and ultimately hoping I'll believe it — (scattered laughter)

This one looks likely to have been composed by the candidate himself. Just like him to say he's learned about the human propensity to lie by studying his own family. Josh Romney clarified it for us a little further this morning at a rally in Iowa:

We were the ones, as kids, that kept saying the same thing over and over. And we'd say the same lie over and over. And my dad learned then, not to believe it. While we didn't go to any of the formal debate preparation, we did the real hard stuff.

So as a father, he learned how to debate an obstinate child. We had a lot of fun, we had a lot of fun watching the debate.

But the funnest part of all was noting how much the 50-year-old African American president of the United States resembled the little Wally-'n'-Beav Romneys of a few decades ago, trying to put one over on the old man. This would totally be good-natured joking, and have nothing whatever in common with addressing the president as "boy".

“Milton Friedman should come and explain this to me! I’ve been waiting here for years and nothing’s trickling down!” From Sabina Becker, News of the Restless.

 The something that's not always true in this case is the allegation that Romney has proposed a $5-trillion tax cut over the next ten years. "Not always true" is an elegant way of putting it, because its truth value does seem to swim in and out of the circle, so to speak, depending on where you're focusing your gaze.

That is, when he says he is proposing an across-the-cut of 20% in income tax collection, everybody agrees that it adds up to around $5 trillion over ten years. But this will not add $5 trillion to the accumulated deficit, he explains, because he will eliminate certain loopholes that wealthy people use to lower their tax burdens. In fact it won't add to the deficit at all:

I also lower deductions and credits and exemptions so that we keep taking in the same money when you also account for growth.

So that (leaving aside the question of whether this is mathematically possible, which it isn't, because the deductions just don't add up to anywhere near $5 trillion) it's only a $5-trillion tax cut when you're talking about all those business folk who find themselves unable to help grow the economy because their taxes are so high, but when you're talking about the federal deficit it turns out that all those business folk are going to be paying the same taxes as before? You're giving them a tax cut but it's entirely imaginary? You're going to grow the economy from magic beans?

3. I love Big Bird.

An example of the kind of sacrifice we will all have to make to get our nation back on the road to fiscal rectitude:

I actually like you [Jim Lehrer] too. But I'm not going to — I'm not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it. That's number one.

So I take it back. One of the spending cuts he plans is not a secret. And PBS gets $445 million from the Feds over two years, which is not (yellow) chickenshit—almost half a thousandth of that trillion-dollar deficit, or, to put it in still more dramatic perspective, almost as much as Mel Gibson's 2011 divorce. (To be fair, that was a really expensive divorce.)

Trickle, kinetic water design. From Jarel Aircraft Design.

 Dana Milbank predicted another one, after Romney tried it out at a debate-camp speech on October 1:

4. Obama “doesn’t just like picking winners and losers,” Romney said. “He likes picking losers.”

I'm not sure most people are keyed up enough about the pseudo-problem of Democrats advocating the picking of winners and losers, that is having an industrial policy instead of allowing policy to be made by the magic of the market. In the event, this one lost whatever zing it might have had anyway, in the rarefied atmosphere of the Solyndra "scandal", an issue that only looniest of the loony right have been able to comprehend, let alone embrace:

But — but don't forget, you put $90 billion — like 50 years worth of breaks — into solar and wind, to — to Solyndra and Fisker and Tesla and Ener1. I mean, I — I had a friend who said, you don't just pick the winners and losers; you pick the losers. All right? So — so this is not — this is not the kind of policy you want to have if you want to get America energy-secure.

Note how, as he suddenly remembered he had a zinger tailored just for this moment, he characteristically slid into a lie—meaningless and completely unnecessary—with that "I had a friend". It's not even intentional, any more, if it ever was; just a feature of the way he talks.

Also meant to zing, surely, was this:

5. The second topic, which is you said you get a deduction for getting a plant overseas. Look, I've been in business for 25 years. I have no idea what you're talking about. I maybe need to get a new accountant.

But you didn't need to be a leftist to feel sure he was lying (or "exaggerating his confusion" as the Wall Street Journal discreetly put it).

Lastly, my favorite, which he liked so much he used it twice:

6. The president has a view very similar to the view he had when he ran four years ago, that a bigger government, spending more, taxing more, regulating more — if you will, trickle-down government would work. That's not the right answer for America. I'll restore the vitality that gets America working again....

But we also believe in maintaining for individuals the right to pursue their dreams, and not to have the government substitute itself for the rights of free individuals. And what we're seeing right now is, in my view, a — a trickle-down government approach which has government thinking it can do a better job than free people pursuing their dreams. And it's not working.

What do you suppose he thought "trickle-down government" was going to mean when it slid out of his mouth?

I'm imagining a wondrous world in which the poor folk are crying out for more government, and the limousine liberals are hogging it all for themselves, forcing everyone to join in their perverted pleasures of paying taxes, going to gay weddings and blasphemous art shows, and not owning guns. "Some of our government is bound to trickle down to you," they insist, but you can tell they're mocking you.

That's where he got it from? Mr. Brooks, didn't you tell us he's a moderate now?