In Republican circles, what goes around comes around.
Largely under the radar, Team Romney has recruited some of the more loathsome members of the George W. Bush Administration as its policy advisors and strategists for the upcoming campaign.
From policy advisers to campaign strategists, more than two dozen veterans of the Bush administration have flocked to Romney's campaign.
Their key roles contrast with Romney's rhetoric on the stump. The former Massachusetts governor has tried to cast himself as a Washington "outsider," largely avoided mentioning Bush's tenure and made a point of criticizing several programs at the heart of Bush's legacy.
With good reason, Romney isn't advertising his substantial and close ties to these former Bush Administration officials. With an approval rating of 22% upon leaving (more like crawling out of) office, George W. Bush left a record of economic and foreign policy wreckage which historians will judiciously study for decades if not centuries to come. As one prominent but still unidentified member of that Administration put it:
And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
The historical actors who pointlessly killed a million in Iraq, killed or maimed thousands in the U.S., devastated the U.S. economy, ruined our international reputation and left entire cities to drown have been patiently awaiting the opportunity to hitch their star to a new stand-bearer. It goes without saying that should Romney win the election he will turn to these same former Bush-ites for prominent positions within his Administration.
Privately, they believe that however anti-Bush the chatter gets during the campaign, Romney is the Republican most likely to defeat Democratic President Barack Obama in the November 6 election - and that a Romney presidency could have a look much like Bush's presidency.
Romney's campaign is "a restoration of the Bush establishment," said former Bush speechwriter Matt Lattimer, who is not supporting Romney. Bush loyalists "all want to be back in power again, and Romney's the best bet."
Romney's chief political strategists, Russ Schriefer and Stuart Stevens, are veterans of both Bush-Cheney campaigns. Romney campaign adviser Kevin Madden was a spokesman for the Bush-Cheney effort in 2004, then was a spokesman for Bush's Justice Department.
Romney's economic advisers include Glenn Hubbard, architect of the Bush-era tax cuts as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and now dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He's joined by Harvard's N. Gregory Mankiw, author of a popular economics textbook and Bush's primary economic adviser from 2003 to 2005.
Which tells us nothing about who these people are. Let's take a closer look:
I--Economic Policy:
Glenn Hubbard is primarily responsible for designing the Bush tax cuts and is a strong proponent of deregulation--coincidentally two of the primary factors in precipitating the 2008 economic collapse and its continual perpetuation:
Hubbard was interviewed in Charles Ferguson's Oscar-winning documentary film, Inside Job (2010), discussing his advocacy, as chief economic advisor to the Bush Administration, of deregulation, which Ferguson argues led to the 2008 international banking crisis sparked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the sale of Merrill Lynch. In the interview, Ferguson asks Hubbard to enumerate the firms from whom he receives outside income as an advisory board member in the context of possible conflict of interest. Hubbard, hitherto cooperative, declines to answer and threatens to end the interview.[10
Here is Mitt Romney's Economic Advisor--in all his glory, interviewed in
Inside Job:
Gregory Mankiw is another Bushie responsible for driving the economy off a cliff. He's known for his enthusiastic praise of outsourcing. He's also known for this episode last November at Harvard:
On November 2, 2011, some of the students in his Economics 10 class walked out of his lecture. About 60 to 70 out of 750 students participated.[26][27] Before leaving, they handed Mankiw an open letter critical of his course, saying in part:
"we found a course that espouses a specific—and limited—view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today ... Economics 10 makes it difficult for subsequent economics courses to teach effectively as it offers only one heavily skewed perspective rather than a solid grounding on which other courses can expand. ... Harvard graduates play major roles in the financial institutions and in shaping public policy around the world. If Harvard fails to equip its students with a broad and critical understanding of economics, their actions are likely to harm the global financial system. The last five years of economic turmoil have been proof enough of this."[28]
The students concluded their letter by stating they would instead be attending the Occupy Boston demonstration then under way.
On Education, Romney is also being advised by Margaret Spellings, proponent of the disastrous example of Republican social engineering known as the "No Child Left Behind Act."
II.Judges:
Judicial appointments are extremely important to the GOP base, and Romney more than anyone in recent memory is desperate to keep the GOP base happy. They were very happy with George W. Bush's extremist appointments, and they want to see more.
On judicial issues, Romney is advised by at least three top veterans of Bush's Justice Department.
Unfortunately they are unnamed in the article. The fact that they are from the Department that gave us Ashcroft and Gonzalez should be sufficient. We know that Romney is being advised by embittered former Supreme Court candidate
Robert Bork. Among his other views, Mr. Bork supports the states' rights to ban contraception.
III. Foreign Policy:
Romney has named 24 "special advisers" in national security and foreign policy, 16 of whom served in diplomatic or political roles under Bush. They include Michael Chertoff, the former homeland security chief, and Dan Senor, who was an administration spokesman in Iraq.
Dan Senor's Wikipedia page has been carefully scrubbed and sanitized so it's not really worth linking to. One of the more noxious members of the Bush Administration, Senor is a true neo-con, an AIPAC point man, and has written various anti-Obama articles suggesting Obama is
anti-Israel and implicitly anti-Jew. Senor received a medal from George W. Bush for his efforts in propagating the Iraq catastrophe.
Senor is married to so-called journalist, Campbell Brown.
Michael Chertoff's skeletal visage haunted us throughout the Bush Administration. Hired by Bush to head the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the Bernie Kerik scandal, Chertoff proceeded to make the Department unanswerable to any laws, particularly if they stopped his efforts to keep brown people out of the country:
In April 2008, Chertoff was criticized in a New York Times editorial for waiving the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and other environmental protection legislation to construct a 700-mile (1,100 km) fence along the Mexico–United States border. The Times wrote: "To the long list of things the Bush administration is willing to trash in its rush to appease immigration hard-liners, you can now add dozens of important environmental laws and hundreds of thousands of acres of fragile habitat on the southern border."[12]
According to New York Times columnist Adam Liptak, Chertoff had excluded the Department of Homeland Security from having to follow laws "protecting the environment, endangered species, migratory birds, the bald eagle, antiquities, farms, deserts, forests, Native American graves and religious freedom."[13]
A report issued by the Congressional Research Service, the non-partisan research division of the Library of Congress, said that the unchecked delegation of powers to Chertoff was unprecedented: "After a review of federal law, primarily through electronic database searches and consultations with various CRS experts, we were unable to locate a waiver provision identical to that of §102 of H.R. 418—i.e., a provision that contains 'notwithstanding' language, provides a secretary of an executive agency the authority to waive all laws such secretary determines necessary, and directs the secretary to waive such laws."
IV. Media Propaganda Team:
Russ Schriefer:
Schriefer produced campaign advertisements for George W. Bush in the 2000 and 2004 elections, gaining notoriety for an advertisement that aired in 2004 picturing Senator John Kerry windsurfing.[6] In 2007, Stevens & Schriefer briefly served as one of Senator John McCain's media consultants.[6][7][8]
Schriefer also does corporate consulting.[9]
Schriefer is married to Nina Easton, Washington Editor at Fortune magazine and a commentator on the Fox News Channel.[
Schriefer's the guy you don't know in this
picture. If you see him be sure to thank him for everything George W. Bush did for the country.
Stuart Stevens, the other half of Romney's media team, is (ironically) the first consultant to make use of the epithet "vulture capitalist." The term was used in an ad run by Steve Poizner, California Republican, against Meg Whitman, in the California gubernatorial contest. Stevens was Poizner's media man at the time. Rather than a vulture capitalist, Stevens' task is to portray his current master as a beneficent "job-creator." We'll see how that works out.
Kevin Madden is a ubiquitous presence on Fox and a popular go-to Republican on CNN. Long after he left his job as a mouthpiece for Bush's "Justice" Department, here's a video of him glorifying Bush his former boss and insinuating that Obama's vacation in Hawaiii made him seem like a foreigner:
* * *
Noting the efforts of Romney to reinstate the architects of his disgraced predecessor's regime, the Obama campaign has stated it intends to make Romney's choices an issue in the upcoming general election:
"It's no surprise that Mitt Romney's reckless foreign policy and failed economic philosophy look familiar," said Obama campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith. "He has surrounded himself with the same people who already helped bring us these disastrous policies."
You can donate to President Obama's re-election campaign
here.