Are Obama And Romney The Same Guy?

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney just may be the same person. Think about it. Have you ever seen the two of them in the same limo?

All right. Of course, the pair of politicians who will in all likelihood be the major party nominees for the 2012 presidential election have their differences. Republican Romney, for instance, has been a governor and chairman of the Olympics; Democrat Obama has not. Obama, on the other hand, has been a senator and a president. Romney has not.

The two men do have different skin colors and they were raised with different religious beliefs. But we are here to explore their likenesses. Of which there are so many — major and minor — that political wags have referred to the two with mashed-up monikers, such as Barack Oromney, Baromney Obamitt and just plain Obomney.

President Obama, speaking at the recent White House Correspondents Association dinner in Washington, joked about his similarities with Romney: "He and I actually have a lot in common," Obama said. "We both think of our wives as our better halves. And polls show, to a alarmingly insulting extent, the American people agree."

Other people have noticed parallelisms between the pols. From the left, billionaire political activist George Soros told Reuters in January, "Between Romney and Obama, there isn't all that much difference."

From the right, Newt Gingrich agreed with Soros — which does not happen often. Gingrich, putting himself forward as different from Romney, told ABC News in January that Obama and Romney are "the same people." There are "a lot of parallels between these two guys," Gingrich added, pointing out that they both receive massive funding from Wall Street investors and share similar views on health care issues.

Both Obama and Romney "are very successful guys who kind of figured it out," says Mac McCorkle, who teaches the politics of public policy at Duke University. "They both have faced major challenges and they both have met those challenges."

And both Obama and Romney come across as cool and somewhat aloof. Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, says, "I've joked that we may finally have found a political solution to global warming. Let these two campaign incessantly for six months and we'll lower the temperature by a few degrees."

Tale Of The Tape

Arguably, Obama and Romney see the world pretty much the same way — in very many ways. They have at least a dozen data points in common:

1) Neither man served in the armed forces. This would be the first election without a veteran representing a major party in the race since 1944.

2) Both Obama and Romney hail from far-flung family histories. Obama's father was born in Kenya; his mother in Kansas. Romney's father was born in Mexico; his mother in Utah.

3) Both men operate from out-of-the-norm religious backgrounds. Obama, the Christian son of a Muslim father, says that his faith guides his decision-making; Romney is the Mormon son of a Mormon father. Both religious upbringings can elicit prejudice.

4) Both men earned degrees at Harvard University. Romney spent four years among the ivied towers, graduating in 1975 with a joint degree in law and business. Obama spent three years in Cambridge, graduating from Harvard Law School in 1991.

5) Both men worked in the financial sector. In 1983, Obama took a job at Business International Corp., a New York-based multinational business counseling firm, as a researcher in the financial services division. "He wasn't there long — only about a year," NPR's Scott Horsley reported in 2008. "But the job at Business International Corp. provided a crash course in market economics." Both politicians have been heavily funded by Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg reports.

Romney migrated from the banks of the Charles River to the banking world of Bain Capital, a private equity firm. "What Bain Capital did — and was among the first, if not the first, to do it — was to look at the operations before buying the company, as well as after," Romney told NPR's Ari Shapiro in 2011, "and try to figure out, how can we make it better and then help the management team to improve the company."

6) Both served, for a time, as advisers to their communities: Obama as a community organizer in Chicago; Romney as a bishop — a spiritual lay leader — in the Boston area.

7) Each man lost his first federal election. Romney lost to incumbent Ted Kennedy in a 1994 Massachusetts senatorial contest; Obama lost to incumbent Bobby Rush in a 2000 Illinois House of Representatives election.

8) Both men have championed comprehensive health care initiatives. Romney, when he was governor of Massachusetts and Obama as president. "Romneycare and Obamacare are essentially the same," Gingrich told ABC News.

9) Both Obama and Romney stay fit, dress sharply and look vaguely out of sync when wearing blue jeans.

10) Both occasionally laugh uncomfortably at their own humor.

11) Both have been known to lapse into song during public speaking.

12) Both are political pragmatists. "This presidential election tells us something unexpected about American politics," writes presidential historian Julian Zelizer on CNN.com. "For all the talk about polarization and discord in Washington, it appears that both parties will have pragmatic problem-solvers at the top of their tickets."

The Party Trumps All

Watching the 2012 slates materialize — bringing together two similar political figures — reminds Sabato of certain similarities between the candidates in the election of 2000. George W. Bush and Al Gore "were crown princes who had gotten as far as they did because of their fathers' successes," Sabato says. "So the parallels between Obama and Romney aren't that unusual in American politics." (Which may raise another question about the type of person who runs — and whom we nominate — for president.)

But what is different this time, Sabato says, is the political climate and the potently partisan atmosphere. The major distinction between Obama and Romney is where their support comes from — their parties.

"What they don't share politically — their party — trumps all similarities," Sabato says. "We live in a highly polarized era, and in the modern age at least, Democrats and Republicans have never had less in common on politics and policy."

The fact that Obama and Romney, left to their own devices, might well meet in the middle and find common ground, Sabato says, "is literally irrelevant. Their party bases will not permit them to do so, and their own partisan activists will go after them hard if they try to compromise too much. Or maybe at all."

On Monday's Morning Edition, NPR will air the first in its series, "Parallel Lives," comparing President Obama and Mitt Romney.

http://www.npr.org/2012/04/17/150795727/are-obama-and-romney-...

To help you get ready for next week's arguments on the health care law before the U.S. Supreme Court, we will be publishing some helpful guides and summaries. For our first installment, we're re-publishing our fiendishly difficult quiz to see if you know the difference between RomneyCare and ObamaCare.

Mitt Romney has gone to great lengths to distance his Massachusetts health plan from the federal law, even giving a PowerPoint presentation to emphasize the differences. But the truth is that there are an awful lot ofsimilarities between the plan he signed in Massachusetts in 2006, often called "RomneyCare," and the one that President Barack Obama signed in 2010, dubbed "ObamaCare."

Both leave in place the major insurance systems: employer-provided insurance, Medicare for seniors and Medicaid for the poor. They seek to reduce the number of uninsured by expanding Medicaid and by offering tax breaks to help moderate income people buy insurance. People are required to buy insurance or pay a penalty, a mechanism called the "individual mandate." And companies that don't offer insurance have to pay fines, with exceptions for small business and a few other cases.

Take the quiz

Are you smart enough to tell the difference between ObamaCare and RomneyCare? Here are 10 descriptions of the plans that we got from the legislation that created the two plans, official summaries, private reports and interviews with experts. See if you know whether each description is for ObamaCare or RomneyCare.

1. "Individuals who are deemed able to afford health insurance but fail to comply are subject to penalties for each month of non-compliance in the tax year ... . The penalties, which will be imposed through the individual’s personal income tax return, shall not exceed 50% of the minimum monthly insurance premium."

2. Employers "who employ 11 or more full-time equivalent employees" and do not make a "fair and reasonable contribution" to their employees' health insurance are required to pay a fine.

3. "Tax credits to make it easier for the middle class to afford insurance will become available for people with income between 100 percent and 400 percent of the poverty line who are not eligible for other affordable coverage."

4. Children and adolescents up to age 18 "whose financial eligibility as determined by the division exceeds 133 per cent but is not more than 300 per cent of the federal poverty level" will be eligible for Medicaid.

5. "Americans who earn less than 133 percent of the poverty level (approximately $14,000 for an individual and $29,000 for a family of four) will be eligible to enroll in Medicaid."

6. A recent poll asked people whether they had a generally favorable or unfavorable view of the health plan. Responses split 41 percent and 41 percent between favoring and not favoring. Another 18 percent said they were undecided.

7. Small businesses qualify for tax credits if they pay for at least half of the workers' health insurance. A small business is defined as having fewer than 25 full-time workers paid average annual wages below $50,000.

8. Experience shows the plan is not significantly going to lower costs. Supporters of the law are actively considering new legislation aimed at cost containment.

9. The plan creates a Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute "to conduct research to provide information about the best available evidence to help patients and their health care providers make more informed decisions."

10. For individuals who make more than $200,000 or couples that make more than $250,000, the plan increases Medicare taxes on wages in 2013 by 0.9 percent and imposes a 3.8 percent tax on investment income.

So how many did you get right? (Answers below)

All 10: You're CBO Gold! You qualify to be an analyst at the Congressional Budget Office!

8-9: Lobbyist Silver! You're good enough to be a health care lobbyist! Watch out, Billy Tauzin!

6-7: Bronze Policy Wonk Circle! You can be a researcher at the Kaiser Family Foundation -- or Ezra Klein!

5-6: Talking Head Honorable Mention. You're good enough for shouting matches on cable news channels!

3-4: Pollster's "don't knows." It's hard to have an opinion when you don't know what's in the plan!

0-2: Chain E-Mail Level. You forward chain e-mails that say the federal health care law puts a tax on real estate. (Pants on Fire, by the way.)


ANSWERS:

1. RomneyCare

Source: Massachusetts Department of Revenue, TIR 09-25: Individual Mandate Penalties for Tax Year 2010
Note: Both plans have individual mandates. The federal penalties start small, but eventually ramp up to $695 per year or 2.5 percent of income, whichever is higher. Eventually, federal penalties will tend to be higher than the Massachusetts plan.

2. RomneyCare

Source: Massachusetts Department of Revenue, Health Care Information for Employers
Note: Federal law exempts employers with fewer than 50 workers. Additionally, under the federal plan, employers pay fines only if their workers qualify for tax credits to buy insurance.

3. ObamaCare

Source: HealthCare.gov, Provisions of the Affordable Care Act, By Year
Note: The Massachusetts law also provides subsidized health insurance, but the income cut-off is 300 percent of the federal poverty level.

4. RomneyCare

Source: Massachusetts health care law
Note: The Massachusetts law expanded Medicaid for children. The federal law expands Medicaid to adults, but sets the cut-off at 133 percent of the federal poverty level.

5. ObamaCare

Source: HealthCare.gov, Provisions of the Affordable Care Act, By Year
Note: The Massachusetts law expanded Medicaid for children. The federal law expands Medicaid to adults, but sets the cut-off at 133 percent of the federal poverty level.

6. ObamaCare

Source: The Kaiser Family Foundation, Kaiser Health Tracking Poll, April 2011
Note: Polls show the federal law has split public opinion. Polls in Massachusetts show the program is significantly more popular.

7. ObamaCare

Source: Internal Revenue Service, Small Business Health Care Tax Credit for Small Employers
Note: Tax credits start at 35 percent of the employer's health premium costs and increase to 50 percent in 2014.

8. RomneyCare

Source: Gov. Deval Patrick, Patrick-Murphy administration proposes comprehensive health care cost containment legislation, Feb. 17, 2011; AP, Lawmakers hear bill to rein in Mass. health costs, May 16, 2011

9. ObamaCare

Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office, Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) Governing Board; Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), About Us

10. ObamaCare

Source: Kaiser Family Foundation, summary of new health reform law