Mitt Romney

(The white liberal establishment, says the author, was quiet in the face of Melissa Harris-Perry's baseless accusations of racism in a 2011 column in The Nation.)

The question itself is already a provocation. As I conjure up the words, I envision the Rev. Al Sharpton rousing the peanut gallery, readying himself to shoot me down. What I am about to say runs headlong against everything white liberals have learned about embracing diversity under the big tent of the Democratic Party. So let me just ask.

Why are white liberals so afraid of black liberals?

Black liberals are allowed to meander far and away from core liberal principles, all the while making unsubstantiated protestations, sometimes even going so far as to denigrate their white counterparts without ever having to worry about facing tangible consequences within the mainstream liberal establishment.

In a 2011 column titled "Black President, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama," Melissa Harris-Perry of The Nation castigates the white liberal establishment that gave voice to her so-called authentically black perspective by accusing it of racism. Curiously, she begins by applauding white liberals: “Not only did white Democratic voters prove willing to support a black candidate; they overperformed in their repudiation of naked electoral racism, electing Obama with a higher percentage of white votes than either Kerry or Gore earned.” Then she concludes that white liberals who supported Obama morphed into racists over four years.

Harris-Perry supports her supposition that white liberals are closeted racists with the flimsiest of defenses, speculating that “electoral racism cannot be reduced solely to its most egregious, explicit form. It has proved more enduring and baffling than these results can capture.” In other words — it's complicated.

The white liberals who took a chance on a young black man with a thin resume and elected him to the highest office in the land were painted with the broadest of racial brushes and offered no defense. In fact, white liberals remained uncharacteristically quiet in the face of Harris-Perry's inflammatory accusations.

Certainly there is nothing odious about exploring the possibility of whether racism would play a role in the reelection of the first black president. She should've explored that topic. She also should've reached a very different conclusion than the one she reached, especially considering the tenuous examples she laid out.

Harris-Perry uses the Clinton administration as a model for unequal racial standards within the liberal body politic, noting that Clinton was unable to pass health care reform but that “progressives complain that Obama’s healthcare reform was inadequate because it did not include a public option.” What is missing from her critique is that Hillary Clinton pushed for universal healthcare, not a hybrid Mitt Romney-endorsed imitation. It is easier though for black liberals to push a racialized assessment of American politics than to get bogged down in the minutia of hard details related to actual policies.

This isn't to say that white liberals can't be racist – or can't align with racist elements in American politics. Blacks didn't gain access to FDR's New Deal until well over a decade after the legislation was passed, mostly due to an unholy alliance between FDR and Southern Democrats. But if those on the white left are willing to allow Harris-Perry to besmirch them as racist, they should at least force her to make an actual case that withstands criticism.

Black liberals like Harris-Perry are quick to use abstract anecdotal interpretations to call into question the progressive bona fides of white liberals, but surprisingly enough, when black liberals pivot to the political right, joining forces with right wingers to attack bedrock liberal agenda issues – such as gay rights and opposition to charter schools – white liberals are reluctant to full throatedly voice justifiable criticism.

Harris-Perry is not alone among black liberals who wield racialized rhetoric as a tool for silencing white liberals. Sharpton, now an MSNBC pundit, co-authored a 2009 op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal titled, "Charter Schools Can Close the Education Gap," and has a $500,000 connection to charter schools.

Even if Obama hadn't trounced Romney, there were plenty of legitimate reasons for a principled liberals to renounce support for Obama, the most notable of which are his doubling down on Bush's war policies and embrace of austerity measures. Harris-Perry owes the white left an apology. White liberals should demand it.

Yvette Carnell is a former Capitol Hill and campaign staffer turned writer. She is currently an editor and contributor to Yourblackworld. You can reach Yvette via Twitter @YvetteDC or on Facebook.

If you like this, sign up for our free newsletter!
We'll send you a round-up of the best of the Spectator's journalism and political commentary as well as special offers and information so you can take action on issues you care most about. Sign up today!

(Bain Capital is now famous for being founded by former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, center, whose estimated worth is $250 million. Bain Capital is one of 10 private-equity firms defending itself in a civil case that alleges they conspired to defraud investors. This photo is from 1984. Source: WP)

Private equity is poised to embark on a new era of leveraged buyouts to rival those of the late 1980s and mid-2000s. Financiers once toppled corporate giants like RJR Nabisco and and Harrah's, and devoured hundreds of small companies. As Bain & Co. observed in its 2013 report on private equity:

The hunger for yield and the rapid erosion of the “refinancing cliff” have made the debt markets more buoyant than they have been in many years. Current leverage multiples rival those at the peak of 2007, and the cost of debt is near record lows.

In other words, it's cheap to borrow money needed to launch raids. There's "dry powder" in the kegs of the investment houses, as they say, idle money that's in search of bigger returns than what's possible in the stock and bond markets. Another era of buyouts would result in all the carnage associated with private equity -- mass layoffs, asset stripping of debt-saddled companies, massive tax avoidance schemes, greater wealth inequality, and so on.

Private equity left behind a lot of wounded and dead in the wake of the two previous blitzkriegs. Most victims were and are powerless to prevent a return of the money men and nothing has changed under the law, or in politics, over the past 20 years to prevent a third debt-drunken buyout binge.

There are some, however, who are attacking private equity's privilege and power.

Members only
In late 2007, the city pensions of Detroit and Omaha, together with individual investors, filed a moonshot of a class-action lawsuit in federal court in Massachusetts against 10 of the largest private equity firms.

The case is known as Dahl v. Bain.

Kirk Dahl, a Michigan doctor who now has the distinction of having his name legally headlined in one of the largest anti-trust lawsuits in history, says he was cheated in several buyout deals. Bain is none other than Mitt Romney's former buyout powerhouse.

The plaintiffs allege that the biggest private-equity firms conspired to depress share prices of corporations that were targeted in the mid-2000s buyout boom. Plaintiffs claim the biggest firms — TPG, KKR, Blackstone, Apollo, Bain, Carlyle, Providence Equity Partners, Silver Lake, Thomas H. Lee, and a Goldman Sachs subsidiary— chose to abide by "club etiquette" to suppress outside competition for the biggest takeovers. "Club etiquette" is a phrase used in an internal e-mail to describe the conspiracy's tenor. Think men's club, where testosterone drives business acumen as much as computer models and due diligence.

Club etiquette entailed a mostly unspoken agreement not to "jump" one another's deals with competing bids, but instead to bid together so as to spread around the lucrative profits to be made from buyouts. These profits were higher thanks to the discounted share prices private equity players paid due to the fact that there was no significant competition from the handful of other firms large enough to mount multi-billion dollar raids on mega-cap companies.

The alleged conspiracy was possible because the planet-straddling world of private equity is quite small at the top. Only a few dozen firms have the necessary equity and can borrow the staggering sums of money needed to take multi-billion dollar companies private. These men, virtually all of them white men who live around New York, Boston, and San Francisco, fly in their private jets to the same private island resorts and global destinations of the luxury elite. They invest in one another's funds and co-own sports teams as hobbies. They call one another at all hours to chat about business deals and ping one another with pithy e-mails filled with obscure acronyms and friendly nicknames. They play in the same elite social clubs and dine together. They send their children to the same top private schools. You get the idea.

This secret market manipulation meant that shareholders of raided companies received less for their stock. Because institutional investors, including pensions, mutual funds, 401Ks, and other savings funds, own the largest stakes in most publicly traded corporations, an alleged conspiracy to depress share prices in buyouts cheated potentially millions of retirees and families. At stake in the 17 buyout deals at the heart of Dahl v. Bain are hundreds of billions of dollars.

The secrets of 'club etiquette'
Between 2008 and 2012, the plaintiffs weathered a barrage of motions to delay and dismiss the case. "We've had rounds of motions to dismiss," Christopher Burke, an antitrust litigators, told me. Burke is a lawyer with the San Diego-based Scott & Scott law firm. He said the private equity firms "have just sprayed money at the process."

"Every white-shoe firm you can imagine is on their side. These are very rich people — billionaires. They don't like to be held  accountable or garner unwanted publicity. They are the beneficiaries of a tax system that subsidizes what they do, loading up companies with debt, making interest payments on that debt, to obtain profits for themselves and their investors."

Burke and his colleagues survived motions to dismiss and reached the discovery phase in May of 2010. Discovery in this case has generated an unprecedented look into the inner-workings and deliberations of an elite world. The defendants coughed up more than 5.6 million documents and the masters of the universe were forced to submit to depositions. But their lawyers succeeded in sealing nearly all of the evidence generated by the case, arguing that disclosure would reveal proprietary trade secrets.

"Keep in mind they've shared all this info with one another," Burke said. "Now they say it's competitive secrets? The normal practice for them is to share information, so it's a little disingenuous for them to argue this."

The only glimpses we have are references in the amended complaints (especially the case's 5th Amended Complaint) and in court transcripts (most recently Dec. 18, 2012, and Dec. 19, 2012). Even this almost never saw the light of day. Lawyers representing The New York Times had to to unseal the 5th Amended Complaint.

Among the more incriminating bits of information are statements made by dealmakers in e-mails with one another. Illustrative of their "club etiquette" is an exchange between Blackstone's Hamilton James and KKR's George Roberts after Blackstone agreed not to compete for the buyout of Hospital Corporation of America for $21 billion in 2006. James wrote:

"Thx for the call George. I talked to Henry [Kravis] Friday night and he was good enough to call Steve [Schwarzman] Saturday. We would much rather work with you guys than against you. Together we can be unstoppable but in opposition we can cost each other a lot of money."

Hamilton James is worth about $1.1 billion; George Roberts about $4.1 billion. These men made a lot of this cash during the alleged conspiratorial era under examination by the court in Dahl v. Bain.

At stake, hundreds of billions of dollars
Bringing their case under the Sherman Act's antitrust provisions has been challenging for the plaintiffs. Proving a conspiracy among powerful finance capitalists is made more difficult because their money is sheltered in limited partnerships and private corporations, many of them incorporated offshore, and therefore secret. Without a smoking gun, the plaintiffs in antitrust cases must build their argument around the totality of evidence, statements, and broader context.

In March, the plaintiffs prevailed against a motion for summary judgement in which the defendants sought to throw out the entire case. The judge ruled that there is sufficient evidence to infer the presence of an over-arching conspiracy among the private equity firms to suppress share prices by not "jumping" one another's deals. The judge further ruled that with respect to the takeover of HCA, the evidence is strong enough to proceed with an individual count of conspiracy and antitrust activity.

According to Judge Edward F. Harrington:

The evidence establishes that each Remaining HCA Defendant showed interest in the HCA transaction, but promptly “stepped down” from making a topping bid within 48 hours of the commencement of the fifty-day “go-shop” period. The evidence further shows that the Remaining HCA Defendants communicated their decision to “step down” on HCA to KKR or Bain within ninety-six hours of the commencement of the “go shop” period and subsequently lamented having forgone a potentially lucrative deal. While this uniform conduct on the part of the Remaining HCA Defendants would not, on its own, support an inference of a conspiracy as to HCA, in combination with at least two statements made by executives of the Remaining HCA Defendants, it does support such an inference.

Those admissions in a couple of e-mails buried in the prolific correspondences between the firms, tipped the scale. In one, a top a executive at Carlyle remarked matter-of-factly that “KKR asked the industry to step down on HCA.” A second statement from Blackstone described how KKR abided by "club etiquette" in backing away from Blackstone's bid for another company: "Henry Kravis [of KKR] just called to say congratulations and that they were standing down because he had told me before they would not jump a signed deal of ours."

"In the HCA count," explained Burke, "Bain and KKR and Merrill Lynch got together and got an agreement from the rest of the major private equity firms to not bid on HCA."

The plaintiffs may have caught the private equity big shots red-handed in suppressing competition on the HCA buyout. It's going to be tougher for them to prove a broader overarching conspiracy among all 10 private equity firms to allocate the broader market for mega-cap buyouts in the mid-2000s. The case will surely generate more juicy inside information on the operations of private equity, and we'll be following it.

Darwin Bondgraham is a sociologist and journalist who writes about political economy. His writing has appeared in Counterpunch, Truthout, Z Magazine and others. Follow him @DarwinBondGraham and @WashSpec.

Like this article? Get more for free!
We'll send you a round-up of the best of the Spectator's journalism and political commentary as well as special offers and information so you can take action on issues you care most about. Sign up today!

Reporters appreciate the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. It never fails to provide good copy.

Consider.

On the mid-March Monday morning when CPAC 2013 opened its doors, there was Congressman Louie Gohmert, trying to make his way to an interview with the Tea Party Network Radio host, a six-foot tall blond woman in a slinky red dress and leopard pattern stiletto heels. Gohmert was navigating a swarm of college students swapping smart phones so everyone could get a picture with the congressman.

Louie Gohmert? The short, bald Teabagger who has accomplished nothing in the six years as he has represented his East Texas district—other than establish himself as a cable news curiosity whose comments are so over the top that they go viral in 24 hours?

Less than 30 feet from Gohmert, in front of the NRA Radio booth, another pack of students has Allen West pinned against the wall, handing him programs to sign and jostling to snap photos with yet another CPAC rock star. West served one term in the House, where like Gohmert, he made his bones by making outrageous statements. It helped that he was a black Republican Congressman taking on Obama, “who uses welfare to keep us all on the plantation.” It also helps with this crowd that he was fined and discharged from the Army for shoving an Iraqi prisoner’s head into a barrel and firing his pistol beside the prisoner’s ear.

If you like this, sign up for our free newsletter!
Every week, we'll send you a round-up of the best of the Spectator's journalism and political commentary as well as special offers and information so you can take action on issues you care most about. Sign up today!

Across radio row from Col. West is Dr. Orly Taitz, Esq., the Russian-born naturalized citizen dentist and lawyer from Southern California whose sui generis second career is a campaign to prove that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

Taitz is telling a TV news team that she has just tracked down the individual whose Social Security number Obama uses to pass himself off as an American citizen.

This abundance of lowhanging fruit distorts reporting on CPAC and its relationship with the party that controls the House and could be a majority in the U.S. Senate in 2015.

CPAC is a right-wing Brigadoon, where the Republican grassroots gather once a year to hear from party leaders and celebrities discuss public policy, and if you’re young and lucky, find someone to sleep with and a job on the Hill or at Heritage.

A slot in the speaker’s lineup is a requisite for every Republican elected official or candidate of national standing. (Reagan addressed CPAC 14 times.) Speakers (pick one: John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal) establish their bona fides by dedicating themselves to the extreme policy positions that are canonical in this crowd.

After four days of immersion, 8,000 to 10,000 participants depart, convinced that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax; government warnings about BPA plastic bottles are a plot designed to create hysteria to drive the public into the arms of the Nanny State; and that Rand Paul is a viable candidate for the presidency of the United States.

Professional politicians leave with a list of positions they promised to support and a reading of which tropes get the best response. The 2012 Republican primary was rehearsed and crowdsourced at CPAC 2011 and 2012. And you can consider Rand Paul placing first in the 2013 Straw Poll the beginning of the 2016 Republican primaries.

As CPAC grows extreme and more inbred each year (it just turned 40), it continues to move the GOP’s center of gravity further to the right.

All of this—underwritten by the American Conservative Union, whose non-profit IRS status designates it an “educational organization”—serves the interest of the Democratic Party. Compared to the political flatearthers who show up in Washington every winter, Democrats come off as even more centrist and moderate than they actually are.

Yet if Republican extremism is good for the Democrats, it is bad for the country. That is the thesis of Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein’s indispensable 2012 book: It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.

“When one party moves this far from the political center of American politics,” the authors write, “it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country’s most pressing problems.”

One factor that contributed to the Republican shift from the political center, according to Mann and Ornstein, is the movement conservatism that Newt Gingrich adopted when he realized that a radical political insurgency was the easiest route to a Republican majority in the House.

After Gingrich was elected House Speaker in 1994, moderation and compromise became anathema to the party. Once a year, the Republican base gathers in a convention hotel in Washington to ensure that doesn’t change.

Beyond the right-wing funhouse stories, the public that pays attention to politics sees CPAC as a series of political speeches delivered by the luminaries of the Republican Party. Mitt Romney delivered the concession speech he didn’t have prepared when he was “surprised” by Obama in November. Rand Paul and Marco Rubio began their presidential races. Rick Santorum kicked off his 2016 campaign for whatever (or the fundraising campaign for his non-profit foundation, which pays his salary and travel expenses) with a jeremiad that used the death of his adolescent nephew the previous day as a ghoulish set piece to attack “the left in government who for 100 years have made it their mission to have a government program that addresses every pain.” And the dimwitted but ruggedly handsome governor of Texas said that Republicans lost the last two presidential elections because their candidates were not conservatives.

The big-name speeches are half the story. CPAC is a right-wing politics kindercamp, where college students are flown in for four days of political indoctrination. Sarah Palin recognized them with a shoutout in her speech: “Yeah, you Young Republicans, especially you who went Greek. I’m so proud of you guys. All of you college Republicans there on campus. You are so bold.”

Fifty percent of this year’s CPAC attendees were between the age of 18-25, according to The Washington Times. All of them looked Greek to me, dressed for fraternity or sorority pledge-class installations.

Blazers, khaki pants, buttoned-down shirts, ties (or bowties) for college-aged men; elegant dresses and heels for young women. (For four days sitting in hotels listening to speeches and panels?) The curriculum is predictable. Among this year’s offerings:

•Former Apollo astronaut Walter Cunningham debunking scientific findings that human activity is causing global warming, while offering no scientific argument to counter what is accepted by 97 percent of climate scientists. (Walt’s work is underwritten by the Heartland Institute, which is funded by industrialist Barre Seid, Exxon Mobil, Charles Koch, the Waltons of Walmart, and Pittsburgh billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, to name a few.)

•The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Angela Logomasini describing the virtues of Bisphenol A (BPA) plastic, despite FDA’s warnings that BPA can adversely effect “the brain, behavior, and prostate gland in fetuses, infants, and young children.”

•A Heritage Foundation panel that reframed environmental politics in free-market terms. For balance, the panel included Kathleen Hartnett White from the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which is funded by San Antonio billionaire James Leininger and the Koch brothers.

Other panels argued for increased military spending, a more focused campaign against women’s reproductive freedom, expanded Second Amendment rights, and Ayn Rand’s preeminence as a public intellectual.

CPAC enthusiasts refer to their event as “Mardi Gras for Conservatives” and maybe this is what some consider a good time. It is more accurately described as a Republican Youth League camp. It recruits and trains replacement voters for a party that the Pew Research Center profiles as “92 percent white…tends to be male, married, Protestant, well off and at least 50.”

Obviously, many constituent groups make up today’s Republican Party. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute, the National Rifle Association, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, to name a few. But the party is captive to CPAC. And to Ralph Reed’s Faith and Family Coalition, the Family Research Council Values Voter Summits, along with other ideological groups that book the same speakers, advance the same arguments, and bolster the same confirmation bias.

The result is a party so extreme that it is toxic. Pew reported in February that 62 percent of the public perceives the party as out of touch with the American people and only 33 percent of the public view Republicans positively. In The Washington Post, Pew director Andrew Kohut wrote that, “The outsize influence of hard-line elements in the party base is doing to the GOP what supporters of Gene McCarthy and George McGovern did to the Democratic Party in the 1960s and early 1970s—radicalizing its image and standing in the way of its revitalization.”

Kohut describes “a party dominated by a highly energized bloc of voters with extremely conservative positions on nearly all issues…These staunch conservatives who emerged with great force in the Obama era represent 45 percent of the Republican base.”

The Republican National Committee is trying to steer the party toward a more reasonable political center. A 98-page report the RNC released last month describes the party’s demographic crisis, in particular its alienation of Hispanics, arguing that Republicans need to embrace immigration reform or risk further marginalization.

The report addresses the anti-gay positions and rhetoric that are creating a generational divide within the party.

It describes a lack of appeal among younger voters: “In 2012, Mitt Romney won individuals older than 30 by 1.8 million votes; he lost voters younger than 30 by 5 million votes.”

And it describes the “Republican Party’s ‘women’ problem.”

“In 2012, President Obama won women by 11 points, whereas Governor Romney won married women by 11 points. However, it is important to note that 40 percent of female voters are single and that Obama won single women by a whopping 36 percent.”

The “Growth and Opportunity Report”—shaped by pragmatic conservatives, including former George W. Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleischer—is a near-complete catalog of deficiencies the party needs to address to win national elections. Yet it avoids the rogue elephant in the room. No mention of the extremist base working to defeat moderate incumbents, such as Indiana Senator Richard Lugar.

No mention of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, Senate candidates so extreme and misogynistic that in one election cycle they converted Republican women into Democratic voters. And no examination of the extremist institutions that have redefined the party.

The “hard-line” elements represented by CPAC are too big to confront.

The tail is now bigger than the dog.

So the race to the right continues.

Rand Paul tells an on-its-feet-and-screaming CPAC crowd that “the GOP of old has grown stale and moss-covered. I don’t think we need to name any names here, do we?” He is referring to the moderate conservatives who on occasion vote with the Democrats.

The highly overrated Marco Rubio dismisses the argument that the party needs to reconsider some of its conservative positions: “We don’t need a new idea. There is an idea called America and it still works.”

Rick Perry describes John McCain and Mitt Romney as Republicans who are too moderate to win a national election.

Rick Santorum warns that President Obama is turning the United States into a country that is “godless and without faith, where the government is the center.”

The Republican Party is at war with itself.

It appears to be losing.

Lou Dubose is the editor of The Washington Spectator.

(Illustration by Edel Rodriguez)

(Click on the image to increase size)

All 10 states that Gallup categorized as “very religious” voted for Mitt Romney in the past election by an average of 58.75 percent of popular vote. All 10 states that Gallup categorized as “not very religious” voted for Barack Obama in the 2012 election by an average of 59.3 percent of the popular vote.

Extremes in religion are almost as precise a predictor as of the presidential vote as Nate Silver’s analytical models, the gold standard in handicapping elections. The country is almost as divided by religion as it is by party, as illustrated by partisan and religious belief in creationism: the idea that humans were created in their present form at one time within the past 10,000 years, rather than evolving from common ancestry over 6 million years. To understand the difference between scientific fact and religious belief, it helps to be Jewish.

Sources: Gallup Politics, Evolution, Creationism, and the Battle to Control America’s Classrooms, uselectionatlas.org.

When Democrats in Congress consider gun control, it is always through the optics of 1994, the year Republicans recaptured the House of Representatives after 40 years as the minority party. Democrats had passed (by a razor-thin 216-214 margin in the House) a crime bill that included a ban on 19 specific assault weapons.

The National Rifle Association responded with a $4.2 million campaign that backed 67 candidates, two of whom lost. Much of the spending was concentrated on a “Twelve We Gotta Have” campaign, in which the NRA lost only one race.

In the end, Republicans won 54 House races and picked up eight Senate seats. Since 1994, Democrats have avoided gun-control legislation—until the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in December.
 
Yet it is unlikely that 2014 will be 1994 redux. Months before the NRA began its campaign in response to the killings in Connecticut, its leadership learned that gun money doesn’t buy as much as it did 18 years ago.
 

I was covering the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February 2008 when right-wing radio commentator Laura Ingraham introduced Mitt Romney as "the conservative's conservative." Ingraham had no clue that Romney would conclude his speech by accounting that he was withdrawing from the race, handing the nomination to John McCain.

1970 Poses as a volunteer for a Democratic Senate candidate in Illinois and circulates a letter to homeless people, advertising “free food, beer, girls and a good time for all” at the candidate’s campaign event.

The biggest loser in the 2012 elections, perhaps a bigger loser than Mitt Romney, who does not have a future in politics, was former George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove, who remarkably still does.

The 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics were the beginning of Mitt Romney's second act in politics, a fresh audition before the public after losing a Senate race to Ted Kennedy in 1996. Although the Romneys owned a $5.25 million home in Park City, Utah, it was a temporary move. The day after the closing ceremony, they returned to Belmont, Massachusetts, where 200 supporters were waiting at their home, urging Mitt to stay in public life.

As CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee in 1999, Mitt Romney promised a cheaper, “zinc plated” Olympics. Yet the 2002 Winter Games received twice the federal funding as the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, according to a GAO audit requested by Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ):