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Economy

Conservatives Also Love To Link Inequality And IQ

By Ruy Teixeira, Guest Blogger on May 10, 2013 at 1:15 pm

Zack Beauchamp has started an interesting discussion on TP Ideas on how and why conservatives love to link race and IQ. Allow me to point out that they don’t just stop with linking race and IQ. They also delight in linking economic inequality in general to IQ, for the same reasons: to make conservatives appear to be the reasonable ones not afraid to face the hard truths about a troubling social problem.

It should be no surprise to anyone that Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, is once again taking the lead in making this case. In last year’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, he argued that to understand today’s economic inequality you need to go back to the 1960s. Since then, American society has been coming apart. Under the baleful influence of a relativistic, anything goes, 60s morality, America’s work ethic and honesty have been destroyed: the commitment to religion and the institution of marriage has been all but lost. As a result, the less-educated bottom 30 percent of whites have seen their economic and social fates diverge radically from the well-educated top 20 percent of whites. Weirdly, Murray dubs the former group “Fishtown,” in honor of a white working-class Philly neighborhood on the banks of the Delaware River; the latter group is named “Belmont,” after a tony Boston suburb.

A segment of Belmont whites — comprising perhaps 5 percent of the U.S. population — make up what Murray believes is the new upper class. These are the folks who hold the most powerful managerial and professional jobs in our social institutions and really run the country. Unlike in the good old days, they live in a culture that is separate and distinct from the rest of America (think upscale coffeehouses and restaurants, gourmet food stores, “green” consumer goods, highbrow news media, and “serious” movies and TV). They even live together in the same places, huddled together in what Murray calls “SuperZips,” where they can escape the unrefined masses, send their kids to good schools, and marry each other. Oddly, it is this very same new upper class that most fervently embraces the values of the 1960s — and yet they are doing very, very well.

And why are they doing so well? For Murray, it’s simple: they’re smarter! In his view, the sorting mechanisms in our technologically advanced society have become ever more efficient at ferreting out the cognitively gifted among us (elite colleges play a big role) and slotting them into positions where they can reap the market’s increasing return for high-level skills. So the cognitively advanced Belmont whites pull even farther away from the cognitively challenged Fishtown whites, who, you will remember, no longer have even their sturdy values of honesty, hard work, marriage, and traditional religion to rely upon.

As for the problems of blacks and Hispanics, Murray stands by his earlier work in The Bell Curve, where he argued that they’re just not as smart as whites and hence do more poorly in a society that increasingly rewards cognitive ability.  So blacks and Hispanics are dumber than whites and lower class whites are dumber than upper class whites. That’s Murray’s view of the world and his overarching explanation for the ongoing pathologies of racial and class inequality.

None of this makes any sense. On the one hand, Murray laments over and over the depth of the inequality problem we face; some of the economic trends he documents are the sorts of things you’d expect a liberal think tank or academic to lament. Yet that overlap has not led him to pay the slightest attention to the careful work these think tanks and academics have done analyzing the growth in inequality (well-summarized in Timothy Noah’s book, The Great Divergence). Murray dismisses out of hand explanations rooted in structural shifts in the economy, slower growth in educational attainment, changes in labor market institutions (unions, the minimum wage), or really anything other than increasing rewards for smart people and declining morals for dumb people. Thus in his quest for a scientific, hard-headed explanation for inequality, he winds up rejecting all the real science on the issue.

Don’t be surprised if this view, as appalling and absurd as it seems, continues to surface in conservative circles. The temptation to don the mantle of science, even when it is fundamentally fraudulent, will, for some, be too great to resist.

Immigration

Why Conservatives Love To Link Race And IQ

By Zack Beauchamp on May 9, 2013 at 1:58 pm

For whatever reason, conservatives can’t get over their fascination with race and IQ. The recent revelation that a lead author of the Heritage Foundation’s immigration plan study had written his graduate dissertation at Harvard on the intellectual inferiority of Hispanic immigrants is merely the latest in a string of controversies, starting with the publication of The Bell Curve in 1994, prompted by conservative speculation (depressingly common in the immigration debate) about links between race and IQ.

These spats don’t generally endear conservatism to the general public, so it’s not like this is a political move. So why is it that the right-of-center intelligentsia keeps coming back to this topic? I’d suggest two reasons: first, a link between race and IQ moots the moral imperative for public policy aimed at addressing systemic poverty; second, it allows conservatives to take up the mantle of disinterested, dispassionate intellectual they so love.

Jason Richwine, the newly controversial Heritage author, makes the first point explicitly in his dissertation. Richwine argues that the genetically low IQ of Latinos is responsible for the persistent fact of Latino poverty; in his words, the existence of “a larger and increasingly visible Hispanic underclass…cannot be understood without considering IQ.”

One of the reasons this is true, Richwine suggests, is that Latinos are too dumb to realize that remaining on welfare is hurting them. Richwine points to a real hole in the classic conservative theory that welfare is entrenching poverty — that people must be able to realize that they can make more money in the long run by trying to get a job — and plugs it by arguing that Latinos are, like most unintelligent people, incapable of weighing future rewards against short-term costs. “In order to explain the creation of the underclass,” he puts it in typically euphemistic fashion, “the welfare theory requires present-oriented recipients, a common trait in low-IQ populations.”

This vein of argument was pioneered by Richwine’s mentor, Bell Curve author Charles Murray. Murray’s research focused more on the purported unintelligence of African-Americans, but his conclusions about its role in sustaining poverty were similar. Murray has taken this conclusion and used it to argue against everything from affirmative action to essentially all policy interventions aimed at reducing economic inequality. It’s easy to see how this argument works — if some people are less intelligent than others, as a consequence of either genetics or “underclass culture,” then government programs aren’t likely to help equalize society — creating an economically more level playing field will only cause the most talented to rise to the top again. Inequality is thus natural and ineradicable; poverty might be helped at the margins, but helping the unintelligent will be fraught with unintended consequences.

Moreover, this framing allows conservatives to explain the obviously racial character of American poverty without having to concede the continued relevance of racism to American public life. If it’s really the case that people with certain backgrounds simply aren’t as smart as others, then it makes sense that they’d be less successful as a group. What strikes progressives as offensively racial inequality thus becomes naturalized for conservatives in the same way that inequality and poverty writ large do.

Not only does positing a link between race and IQ provide conservatives with an overarching intellectual framework that supports their public policy preferences, it does so while allowing them to claim the mantle of objective scientists persecuted for telling “hard truths.” One of the founding myths of modern conservatism is that conservatives are hard-headed rationalists, while liberals let their soft-minded care for the downtrodden get in the way of rational public policy. Race and IQ theory, despite being based in truly shoddy data, presents itself as neutral social science, allowing conservatives to take refuge in the “it’s not our fault that the truth is what it is” argument when dismissing public policy ideas to take on American racism.

Moreover, positioning race and IQ as a “hard truth” allows conservatives to cast themselves as defenders of free intellectual inquiry in the face of stifling political correctness. After John Derbyshire, a 12 year contributor to National Review and self-described “race realist,” was fired last year for penning a particularly offensive screed, his colleague Mark Steyn defended Derbyshire on the grounds that one should never concede to PC zealotry:

My default position is that I’d rather put up with whatever racist/sexist/homophobic/Islamophobic/whateverphobic excess everybody’s got the vapors about this week than accept ever tighter constraints on “acceptable” opinion….The net result of Derb’s summary execution by NR will be further to shrivel the parameters, and confine debate in this area to ever more unreal fatuities. He knew that mentioning the Great Unmentionables would sooner or later do him in, and, in an age when shrieking “That’s totally racist!” is totally gay, he at least has the rare satisfaction of having earned his colors.

Or, as Andrew Sullivan (who first published a symposium on the Bell Curve whilst editor of The New Republic) puts it, “the study of intelligence [has] been strangled by P.C. egalitarianism.” In a world where conservatives constantly under fire for know-nothingism on topics like climate change and evolution, standing up for the so-called “science” on race and IQ allows them to position liberals and liberal anti-racism as the enemies of reason.

Climate Progress

A Price Is Right: Carbon Tax Has Very Broad, Bipartisan Support (Outside Of Congress)

By Ryan Koronowski on May 8, 2013 at 4:59 pm

The Washington Post editorial board calls a carbon tax “one of the best ideas in Washington almost no one in Congress will talk about.” It joins a very diverse group (including conservative economists, big oil companies, environmental advocates, and most Americans) that thinks pricing carbon pollution is smart policy. People are talking about it, if you know where to listen.

First, there is some activity in Congress. The Senate Finance Committee released a white paper last month which recommended a carbon tax as a way to reduce the estimated $16 billion of foregone energy tax expenditures in 2013. Back in February, Senators Bernie Sanders and Barbara Boxer introduced comprehensive climate legislation that would put a price on carbon pollution and invest in a renewable energy economy. Boxer, Chair of the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee, said she would move the bill through her committee and hopefully to the Senate floor this summer. Rep. Henry Waxman, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, and Sen. Brian Schatz have also released a carbon price discussion draft for review.

However, given the last few years of congressional inaction, it would be surprising if the Senate passed legislation to put a price on carbon or the bill received bully pulpit support from the White House. Even more so if the House took it up. During the budget debate in March, the Senate rejected an amendment that would have made it more difficult to pass a carbon tax, though it did get majority support. The GOP House leadership, following the lead of Americans for Prosperity and the Tea Party, signed a “no climate tax” pledge along with nearly 100 other House members. And new Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said in a written statement prior to his confirmation that the administration is not planning to propose a carbon tax, though its hard to believe President Obama would veto a bill containing one if it actually arrived at his desk.

That is a lot of strikes against a proposal, even by the standards of the barely-functioning U.S. political system. 90 percent of Americans support background checks on gun sales but that could not make it out of the Senate. So is a price on carbon completely dead? Or mostly dead?

Putting a price on carbon pollution is something that finds support in across the globe, and in some very unexpected places.

Large areas of the world have already put a price on carbon:

  • 33 countries and 18 sub-national jurisdictions will price carbon in 2013. This comprises 850 million people and nearly a third of the global economy.
  • An official in the Chinese Ministry of Finance said that the country was considering a price on carbon along with a market-based cap-and-trade system. China’s emissions are the largest in the world and if the nation put a well-designed price on carbon it would have a significant impact.

Support for pricing carbon pollution is surprisingly widespread in the U.S.:

  • 67 percent of Americans would rather reduce the deficit via a carbon tax than through cutting government programs, according to a poll conducted last December. A revenue neutral carbon tax that would provide dividends back to taxpayers and invest in renewable energy received 70 percent support in the poll.
  • Another poll by YouGov found 56 percent of Americans would prefer a carbon tax to help reduce the deficit. The poll used an interesting tool that allowed participants to try to balance the budget themselves, which led to more than half concluding that a carbon tax would be a good idea. (Another poll found less support if the revenue would only be used to pay for renewable energy initiatives, so the fiscal component is key to gaining wider support.)

Many businesses prefer taxing carbon pollution:

Read more

Election

Are We All Ideologically Confused?

By John Halpin, Guest Blogger on Apr 9, 2013 at 1:35 pm

Towards the end of a backpacking trip in the Smokies last week, I encountered a large SUV plastered with bumper stickers extolling the virtues of private property rights and decrying eminent domain – sitting in a public parking lot next to a public waterway in a national park.

My first somewhat cynical thought was of the infamous Tea Party banner, “Keep government out of my Medicare!”  It seemed incongruous for this person to bumper-lecture others about the abuses of government condemnation while enjoying the beautiful surroundings of more than 500,000 acres in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, land acquired through a mix of private donations and state and federal government use of eminent domain that displaced thousands of people and private businesses  from the area in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee in the 1930’s.  A conservative might have a similar reaction, for example, encountering a liberal parent dropping off their kid at a private school with their foreign-made car covered in Obama stickers and end inequality and racism banners.  “Yeah pal, keep up the fight,” they might be thinking.

But thinking through it a bit, the scene made more sense.  I’m no libertarian but I sure would not want the government to take my home even with compensation.  Yet I love hiking the national park system on a regular basis.   Maybe the libertarian driver I encountered recently had a fight with a local government over their own land and needed to unwind away in a peaceful spot by the river, government owned or not.

Understanding that this is just a small anecdote, it’s fair to ask whether people on the whole are ideologically blinded or just plain confused about what they believe.

In highly polarized political times, we often overlook the fact that few Americans are ideologically consistent.  In 2009, we conducted a large-scale study of political ideology that explored reactions to 40 different statements split evenly between progressive and conservative ideas.  The survey asked people to rank their level of agreement or disagreement on a scale of 0-10 with progressive statements such as, “The gap between rich and poor should be reduced even if it means higher taxes for the wealthy,” and conservative ones like, “Government spending is almost always wasteful and inefficient.”  Combining responses to each of the 40 statements, we determined a composite score for various groups (you can determine your own ideological score by taking this quick quiz based on the survey):

As the chart above highlights, American ideological attitudes basically converge in the middle.  “Although there is a substantial range of ideological positions (from conservative Republicans at 160.6 to liberal Democrats at 247.1), no one group approaches the most extreme poles on either the progressive or conservative side of the continuum. Second, this middle convergence implies that Americans are not fully convinced of many ideological positions on their own side are open to ideological positions that may be different than their own.”

We also found that people’s self-described ideological labels (liberal, progressive, moderate, conservative, and libertarian) did not correspond directly to attitudes about government and society and often overlapped with beliefs typically ascribed to different ideological views:

Case in point: Majorities of self-identified conservatives agree with four out of five progressive perspectives on the role of government while majorities of self-identified progressives and liberals agree with conservative economic positions on things like trade and Social Security.

Additionally, self-identified progressives and liberals share many views and beliefs about government and the economy but hold somewhat differing beliefs on cultural and international concerns. Likewise, although conservatives and libertarians are frequently considered to be part of the same tribe, our research finds that self-identified conservatives look rather poorly upon the libertarian approach (only 35 percent of conservatives rate “libertarian” favorably).

This research shows the highly fluid nature of political ideology and suggests that people can hold seemingly contradictory political ideas in their heads without undermining their overall political identity.    The libertarian driver by the river in the national park was being reasonable if not entirely consistent with his bumper sticker views — something that affects most of us based on this data.

Climate Progress

The Loophole That’s Letting Conservatives Manipulate Renewable Energy Standards

By Climate Guest Blogger on Mar 4, 2013 at 12:30 pm

By Tiffany Germain and Matt Kasper

As the Heartland Institute and the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, continue to target states’ renewable energy standard (RES) with their model legislation — the Electricity Freedom Act — conservative lawmakers are using other unethical tactics to weaken or repeal standards.

Currently, at least five states — Connecticut, Missouri, Montana, Oregon, and Washington — have introduced legislation that would include hydropower as part of the calculation utility companies use to comply with state RES standards. Many laws already allow small hydropower facilities to be counted. But alterations allowing the inclusion of larger or already existing hydropower generating facilities essentially lowers a state’s renewable energy target — allowing utility companies to avoid investing in new wind or solar facilities, or having to buy renewable energy credits from other companies with those facilities.

Including hydropower in renewable energy standards should not be detrimental to new renewable energy projects. When produced responsibly, hydropower benefits local communities by creating jobs and is an essential part of the solution to climate change. In fact, it is the leading renewable energy source used by utilities in the United States.

However, conservative state lawmakers are not interested in developing hydropower. Their goal is only to repeal the state renewable energy standards by any means necessary. If lawmakers were truly concerned about increasing hydropower in their state, then they should add hydropower as an eligible technology and increase the percentage of the renewable energy standard by the comparable amount.

Yet bills like SB 31 in Montana, sponsored by state senator Debby Barrett, would wipe the renewable energy standard out entirely by including existing hydropower facilities. According to the Independent Record, Montana has seen more than $1.6 billion of capital investment in renewable energy, the creation of 1,500 high-paying construction jobs, 100 permanent jobs, and 650 megawatts of newly installed renewable energy since the creation of their RES. This legislation passed the state Senate 32-18 on January 31, and has been transferred to the Republican controlled House where it is expected to pass. A similar bill was vetoed last year by former Governor Schweitzer. It is unclear if current Democratic Governor Steve Bullock would do the same.

The purpose of renewable energy standards is to encourage new renewable energy development in states. Washington state lawmakers understood that when the Energy Independence Act was passed in 2006, establishing a 15 percent standard by 2020. Since the state already receives the bulk of its power from hydroelectricity — currently 66 percent of total generation — the law sought to diversify Washington’s energy portfolio. SB 5431 not only weakens the standard, but also harms the businesses that made investments in renewable energy projects, believing the law would provide reassurance for investing.

In fact, capital investments to date in Washington’s wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass exceeded $7.9 billion, according to data released this month by the Renewable Northwest Project. With stable policies in place, the renewable energy industry can continue to develop and create local manufacturing jobs. But if policies such as state renewable energy standards are weakened or repealed, then the future of renewable industry businesses and capital investments in the state are at risk.

Business leaders throughout the nation have come out in support of renewable energy standards. Julie Gorte, Senior Vice President for Sustainable Investing at Pax World Investments, wrote in the Denver Post:

In every sector, investors and businesses look for policies that are long-term, that provide a strong signal to invest and that don’t generate uncertainty by changing frequently. In other words, investors prefer policies that are long, loud and clear… Other groups are trying to paint renewable energy policies as anti-business. Our firm manages more than $2 billion in assets, and that’s not what I hear from executives at the companies we invest in. Instead, they are finding opportunities in renewable energy, not burdens.

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Politics

Five Overreactions To Obama’s Fiscal Cliff Proposal

By Scott Keyes on Nov 30, 2012 at 12:40 pm

Yesterday, the Obama administration unveiled its proposal to avert the looming fiscal showdown. The plan included $1.6 trillion in increased taxes on the rich over the next decade, $400 billion in savings to be found in Medicare and other social programs, $50 billion in stimulus spending to begin next year, and an end to current debt ceiling rules.

This proposal is not new. It reflects the very policies Obama not only put forth in 2011, as Kevin Drum noted, but also campaigned on extensively this year. They are the very policies that the American public voted for in November when they granted Obama another four years. Exit polling also showed that 60 percent of voters wanted to see income taxes increased for wealthy Americans.

However, these facts didn’t stop conservatives from acting as though Obama had proposed the “Kill All The Puppies Act of 2012″. Here are five overreactions to Obama’s plan:

  • Worse than surrender in the Civil War: Leading conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer likened Obama’s proposal to the terms of surrender offered to Confederates in the Civil War, only the president’s deal was worse. “It’s not just a bad deal, this is really an insulting deal… Robert E. Lee was offered easier terms at Appomattox and he lost the Civil War,” said Krauthammer.
  • Out of a fairytale: Writing in her Wall Street Journal column, Kimberley Strassel lambasted the plan as “something out of Wonderland and Oz combined.” She went on to argue that Obama wasn’t negotiating in good faith. “The most frightening aspect of the White House proposal is that it wasn’t an error.”
  • “Nothing good can come of negotiating further”: RedState editor Erick Erickson, whose counsel congressional Republicans regularly seek, advised the GOP to pack up, go home, and take the country over the cliff. “Nothing good can come of negotiating further,” Erickson wrote. “The GOP should pass what they want and promptly go home. Let the Democrats stay and sort things out. Dive.”
  • “I’d walk out”: MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a former GOP congressman, said that his Party ought to walk out of negotiations, saying Obama’s proposal was solely meant to “provoke” House Republicans. Speaking on his morning show, Scarborough detailed what his reaction would have been had he been in negotiations: “I would have said, ‘We’re all busy people, this is a critical time, if you’re going to come over here and insult us and intentionally try to provoke us, you can do that but I’m going back to work now.’ And I’d walk out.”
  • “Congress should dive headlong off fiscal cliff”: After a lengthy column detailing how going over the fiscal cliff “would shock the economy,” Daily Caller editor Tucker Carlson advised GOPers to “dive headlong off fiscal cliff” following Obama’s proposal. “Republicans don’t have a lot of good choices right now,” Tucker wrote. “They might as well try it.”

Economy

Watch The Media Run With Jobs Number Conspiracy Theories

By Jeff Spross on Oct 5, 2012 at 12:10 pm

As ThinkProgress reported this morning, it didn’t take long for conservatives to begin pumping out conspiracy theories about today’s unexpectedly positive jobs report. The notion that the White House somehow leaned on the Bureau of Labor Statistics to cook the books is, of course, cosmically implausible. Unfortunately, the mainstream media — including outlets such as CNN, Fox News, and CNBC — were just as swift to present the conspiracy theories as matters for serious debate.

ThinkProgress has the video report. Watch it:

Economy

CHART: Some Clear Evidence Taxes And Regulations Aren’t Holding Back The Recovery

By Jeff Spross on Sep 10, 2012 at 12:55 pm

One of the most passionately held premises amongst conservatives and the Republican Party is that employers’ fear of taxation and regulation is what’s holding back job growth. The unspoken corollary to this premise is that demand in the economy is fine as is — that consumers could be buying far more goods and services than they are.

But as the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted on Monday, this theory is empirically testable. Measurable data in the economy would behave one way if the taxes-and-regulations theory is correct, and another way if the lack-of-demand theory is correct. A prime example is average weekly hours worked by employees across the economy:

If employers are seeing increased demand but don’t want to hire because they fear an attack from the regulation monster or higher taxes then they would work their existing work force more hours. That one should be pretty painless even for our fearful job creators. After all, do we really think that they would turn away customers from their stores, restaurants, and factories rather than have workers put in a few extra hours each week?

In other words, weekly hours worked will be up if the problem is taxes and regulations, and down if the problem is weak demand. Here are the numbers from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics:

Weekly hours worked remain down from their pre-recession level. This is not the behavior of businesses held back by government interference, but of businesses hiring as many employees as consumer demand in the economy justifies.

This finding echoes a report put out by the Economic Policy Institute last year. It noted that weekly hours worked, as well as several other economic indicators, are not behaving in accordance with the “taxes and regulation” narrative. In fact, while the 2008 recession blew a much deeper hole in the economy than previous recessions, the pace of private sector job growth in the current recovery is on par with the recovery after the 2001 recession under President Bush. That doesn’t square with the theory that America now faces a uniquely burdensome threat of taxation and regulation brought about by Obama and the Democrats.

Climate Progress

Conservatives, Now Is The Time To Positively Influence Climate Policy And Challenge GOP Obstruction

By Stephen Lacey on Aug 7, 2012 at 11:40 am

If conservatives are concerned about the role of government in deploying climate solutions today, they haven’t even begun to realize the scope of government influence when the severity of climate change catches up to us.

Writing in the Washington Post in 2010, Bracken Hendricks, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, put it this way:

Today’s conservatives would do well to start thinking more like military planners, reexamining the risks inherent in their strategy. If, instead, newly elected Republicans do nothing, they will doom us all to bigger government interventions and a large dose of suffering – a reckless choice that’s anything but conservative.

As Benjamin Franklin famously said: “an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure.”

In a 2006 report, British economist Sir Nicolas Stern concluded that a ton of CO2 damage is worth at least $85, but those emissions can be cut at a cost of roughly $25 per ton. And without cutting those emissions, our business-as-usual scenario could cost the world between 5 percent and 20 percent of GDP in the coming decades.

Given that stark choice, conservatives have a unique opportunity to make a decidedly conservative decision: help deploy solutions today that can keep manage the cost of climate change mitigation and adaptation. If not, the future costs will be considerably higher and the role of government considerably larger.

Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp understands this framing. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, Krupp encourages conservatives to stop dismissing the problem and start seriously proposing solutions that can compete/co-exist with those proposed by progressives:

Many conservatives start out as climate skeptics for understandable reasons. To begin with, it’s an issue that’s long been associated with liberal Democrats. We’re all skeptical about issues presented by leaders with whom we normally disagree. Secondly, conservatives naturally insist on extensive evidence when a claim seems to justify more government action.

But one of the hallmarks of modern conservatism is to try to see the world as it is, not as one hopes it would be. Skeptics who make their decisions based on the best available information have long said they would reconsider their conclusions as the facts dictate. And many of them are concluding that the planet is warming in ways that outpace its natural rhythms. In a recent University of Texas poll, 70% of Americans, and 53% of Republicans, accepted the reality of climate change. This is not just a function of the summer’s brutal heat.

…We’ll have a much better shot at developing solutions to our climate and energy problems that are good for our economy if leaders from across the political spectrum get re-engaged in the debate. It is time for conservatives to compete with liberals to devise the best, most cost-effective climate solutions. Solving this challenge will require all of us.

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Security

U.K. Cabinet Minister Spurns Romney: ‘Our Heart Is With Obama’

By Ali Gharib on Jul 27, 2012 at 12:56 pm

Pres. Obama and Prime Minister Cameron enjoy hot dogs at a basketball game in March

Instead of dealing with difficult issues like Afghanistan, Mitt Romney meant for his trip abroad to highlight the Obama “administration’s shabby treatment” of allies and demonstrate that a President Romney would be “nurturing our alliances.” He probably didn’t expect that the alliance he’d be nurturing was between Britain’s ruling conservative party and President Obama.

That’s just what happened today when, after a rough day with British leaders and press, a cabinet member in the British government told the Huffington Post’s U.K. site that, despite an ideological bond with Romney, British conservatives still preferred Obama:

Our head is with Romney, but our heart is with Obama. Romney would be a fantastic CEO president but in our hearts there’s connection that we all have with Obama.

Another source in the Tory government told the Huffington Post:

The warmth that was obvious between Cameron and Obama on the president’s trip to the U.K. wasn’t really on display yesterday when Cameron met Romney.

Romney’s row with the U.K. came over comments he made suggesting London wasn’t adequately prepared to host the Olympics, which begin on Friday night with the torch lighting and opening ceremony. British Prime Minister David Cameron fired back that London was indeed ready, even taking a shot at Romney’s leadership of the 2002 winter games in Salt Lake City, Utah: “Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere.”

At an event in London’s Hyde Park attended by some 60,000 people, London’s mayor Boris Johnson mocked Romney. “I hear there’s a guy called Mitt Romney who wants to know whether we’re ready,” Johnson said as the crowd booed at the mention. “He wants to know whether we’re ready. Are we ready? Yes we are!”

British Olympic minister Hugh Robertson literally laughed off the possibility that Romney would be involved in carrying the Olympic torch after his disastrous visit to the country.

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