Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Business experience, Edwards mistrial, and more

Visual source: Newseum

A video of former president Bill Clinton praising Mitt Romney's "sterling" business career is making the rounds this morning. Timothy Egan at The New York Times explains why the "business experience" argument for presidents is utterly bogus:

On Tuesday, the same day Trump proved yet again that money and truth, like money and taste, are seldom twined, Romney talked about amending the Constitution to require the president to have business experience. He spoke approvingly of a notion from a store owner who wanted to make anyone who does not have at least three years of business background ineligible to lead the country.

'He said, 'I'd like to have a provision in the Constitution that in addition to the age of the president and the citizenship of the president and the birth place of the president being set by the Constitution, I'd like it also to say that the president has to spend at least three years working in business before he could become president of the United States,'' said Romney, cheerfully summarizing this rewrite of the founders' governing blueprint.

Well, there goes Teddy Roosevelt, the writer, rancher and police commissioner, not to mention his distant cousin Franklin Roosevelt, the assistant naval secretary and politician, or Dwight Eisenhower, the career soldier. Ike's résumé, which includes defeating the world's most concentrated form of evil in Nazi Germany, would not be not enough to qualify him for the presidency.

At The Washington Post, Jo-Ann Armaro provides her take on the John Edwards mistrial and acquittal on one count:

I ' along with a lot of other Americans ' were fooled before by this man who is very good at appearing to be something he's not. Not the faithful husband nor the teller of hard truths nor the champion of the underdog. Federal prosecutors may not have proved their criminal case against the one-time presidential hopeful, but the four week trial more than proved what a big phony Edwards is and how adept he is at manipulating others.

No doubt it's that ability ' not to mention his boyish good looks ' that contributed to his success as a trial lawyer and as a politician. Indeed, it's scary to think how close those abilities got him to the Oval Office. And no doubt there probably are lots of people who will buy his performance on the steps of the North Carolina courthouse and believe he learned his lesson, he's a changed man.

The Washington Post editorial board:

We remain troubled by the effort to turn Mr. Edwards's undeniably reprehensible conduct into a criminal offense and would urge the government not to seek retrial on the remaining counts. [...] The flurry of checks and cash to support ' and presumably keep quiet ' Mr. Edwards's mistress arguably constituted illegal contributions to the Edwards campaign that violated the law because they exceeded the permissible limit for giving.

'In a democracy, it matters what we know about our candidates. We need to know who is influencing them, we need to know where they get their money from, and we need to know how they choose to spend that money,' prosecutor Robert Higdon told jurors in his closing argument.

That is true, yet the sordid Edwards episode was never a good case with which to make this point. In order to find him guilty, the jury would have had to determine beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Edwards acted knowingly and willfully to violate the campaign finance laws. That was always a stretch.

Speaking of campaign finance, also at The Washington Post, Ruth Marcus highlights another infuriating example of the desperate need for real campaign finance reform:

To grasp the clear and present danger that the current flood of campaign cash poses to American democracy, consider the curious case of Post Office Box 72465. It demonstrates that the explosion of super PAC spending is only the second-most troubling development of recent campaign cycles.

Box 72465, on a desert road near Phoenix, belongs to a little-known group called the Center to Protect Patient Rights. According to reports by the Center for Responsive Politics and the Los Angeles Times, the center funneled more than $55 million to 26 Republican-leaning groups during the 2010 midterm election.

There's a movement to allow political donations via text to help provide campaigns with a larger grassroots donor base:

The purpose of campaign finance laws and regulation is to promote confidence in government and to encourage people to engage in the political process. This mission is being advanced in a new way by states on opposite coasts, California and Maryland. The California Fair Political Practices Commission and the Maryland State Board of Elections, two independent state agencies that oversee campaign finance, recently approved first-in-the-nation rules permitting low-dollar text message contributions to political campaigns. Our agencies recognize that technological advances have opened the door for unparalleled involvement in public life.

Text-message political giving has the potential to transform the political process by democratizing fund-raising. Perhaps most important, it is one way to encourage grass-roots participation in political campaigns. People tend to have a greater sense of personal involvement in the issues in an election if they have made a contribution, even if it's a small one. This connection can lead to increased civic engagement and ultimately a more robust democracy. Increased participation by many small contributors is also one way to counter the effect of big money in politics. Encouraging grass-roots giving is sorely needed in an election season where there is unlimited independent spending through 'super PACs.' [...]

Permitting text contributions will encourage participation in political processes by a new generation as well as by those who have been traditionally uninvolved. There are many people, young and old, who are not accustomed to writing contribution checks and certainly are not likely to attend a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser. The ease of mobile contributions and the fact that more and more Americans have smartphones and not land lines would allow those who may be inspired by a candidate or cause to send $5 or $10.

Paul Krugman's latest is, as always, a must-read:

The bad metaphor ' which you've surely heard many times ' equates the debt problems of a national economy with the debt problems of an individual family. A family that has run up too much debt, the story goes, must tighten its belt. So if Britain, as a whole, has run up too much debt ' which it has, although it's mostly private rather than public debt ' shouldn't it do the same? What's wrong with this comparison?

The answer is that an economy is not like an indebted family. Our debt is mostly money we owe to each other; even more important, our income mostly comes from selling things to each other. Your spending is my income, and my spending is your income.

So what happens if everyone simultaneously slashes spending in an attempt to pay down debt? The answer is that everyone's income falls ' my income falls because you're spending less, and your income falls because I'm spending less. And, as our incomes plunge, our debt problem gets worse, not better.