Florida Straw Poll Won by … Cain?

If you’re a supporter of the GOP establishment, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that Rick Perry came in second in today’s Florida Straw Poll, nearly tied with Mitt Romney at third place. The bad news is that the runaway winner was Herman Cain.

Cain, former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, was one of just three contenders who showed up to speak at the Saturday convention. He got a particularly enthusiastic reception, disputing the “rumor” that he couldn’t win the election and saying it was time to send “a problem-solver” rather than a politician to the White House. “Send Washington a message!” he said, bringing the crowd to its feet.

Listing crises on everything from the economy to moral values, he said he could “hit the target called fix-it.”

Yes, running a chain of pizza parlors is just like running a country. Just yell, and the employees will scamper around and bring those cheese suppliers to heel.

The straw poll is meaningless except as a test of momentum, I suppose, but the participants paid $175 each to attend a political event in Orlando called Presidency 5, hosted by the Florida GOP. And I assume some of the participants came from out of town. This crew didn’t just wander in off the streets, in other words. Most probably are active in Florida Republican politics.

In a field that might be called Mittens and the Seven Clowns, the base definitely prefers the clowns. Results:

Cain, 37%
Perry 15%
Romney 14%
Santorum, 11%
Paul, 10%
Gingrich, 9%
Huntsman, 2%
Bachmann, 2%

Bachmann’s falling off the map, it seems. Are these clowns going to take turns at front runner? Is T-Paw sorry he dropped out so soon?

Update: Someone with more time and patience than I have please explain to this pathetic boob what the word “racism” means. The concept seems to elude him.

GOP Vs. the GOP Base

Since Thursday night’s Republican presidential candidate debate, what passes for the GOP “intelligentsia” has been really, really down on Rick Perry. In fact, I haven’t heard anyone on the Right say anything positive about him for a couple of days.

So does this spell the end of his front runner status? Perry is campaigning hard to win the Florida straw poll being held today, and if he pulls it out we might see a whole lot of backtracking.

Nate Silver writes,

Mr. Perry’s Intrade contract has been bid down substantially since Thursday night’s debate. Going into the evening, bettors gave him roughly a 36 percent chance of winning the Republican nomination. Now, his odds are all the way down to 26 percent.

I understand that Mr. Perry had a poor evening on Thursday night. But that seems like an awfully strong reaction to it — probably an overreaction.

Nate points out that only a small part of eventual Republican primary voters watched the Thursday night debate, and also that Perry’s standing in the polls hasn’t changed significantly in several weeks. But the most telling thing was that while most of the rightie pundits agreed that Perry bombed in the debate, there was no consensus among them about who won.

Mr. Kristol, for instance, was so dismayed by the performance of Mr. Perry and the other candidates that he called for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to enter the race. Mr. Erickson said he thought Herman Cain performed well. Byron York of the Washington Examiner declared Rick Santorum to be the winner.

Seriously?

Nate thinks that unless and until the bobbleheads reach a consensus on who the front runner should be, and fall in line to support the anointed one, their influence on public opinion will be minimal. And everyone but Perry and Romney are polling in single digits.

My question is, are rank-and-file Republican primary voters paying any more attention to what the likes of Kristol, Erickson or York are saying than they are to the content of the debates themselves? Today’s straw poll might tell us something. Although the straw poll by itself may not mean much, if Perry shows he’s still got some Big Mo with the rank-and-file, you might see some genuine panic set in among the bobbleheads. They might even be spooked enough to fall in behind someone else they seem to universally loathe — Mitt Romney.

Santorum: Soldiers Take Vows of Celibacy

Rick Santorum says U.S. soldiers take vows of celibacy along with their vows to protect and defend the United States —
[Sorry; video is now unavailable.]

See, if gay soldiers are recognized it gives them a special privilege that other soldiers don’t have. He believes that sex should be kept completely out of the military, meaning (I assume) heterosexual soldiers also live like monks who never even express sexual preference.

Obviously, this vintage recruitment poster was for the Women’s Air Force.

This soldier obviously is expressing solidarity with feminist values.

With the USO in Korea, Miss Monroe was admired for her acting skills.

Obviously, this sort of thing didn’t go on until the sailor was discharged:

And as for last night’s Republican debate, the howls from the mob audience were a nice touch, too.

Update: Here’s another vintage poster —

I assume the young lady is his sister.

WSJ: Majority of Americans Are “Outliers”

There’s spin, and then there’s flat-out propaganda. The full WSJ article by Daniel Henninger is behind a subscription firewall, but according to the blurb, “Barack Obama and his perpetually angry Democratic ‘base’ are the outliers on comprehensive tax reform.”

First, according to Gallup — not generally a liberal-friendly polling crew — Americans favor taxing the rich 66 to 32 percent, and they favor raising taxes on corporations 70 to 26 percent. That’s a hell of an “outlier.”

Henninger’s article — which, again, I can’t read in full — appears to be critical of the President’s jobs bill. Again, the Gallup poll shows that most provisions of the bill enjoy the support of a generous majority of Americans. For some provisions this is true even of Republican-leaning voters.

I also like the way the blurb has “base” in quotations marks, denoting irony. What the bleep are they implying by that? And what’s with “perpetually angry”? The rightie thing about anger really needs mass psychotherapy, considering that on the whole they are perpetually among the angriest people on the planet. Yet they see anger all around them (projection, much?) and denounce it. Calling Democrats “perpetually angry” trivializes their arguments; Democrats don’t like our ideas because they’re always angry about something. Just ignore them.

Well, back atcha, boobies.

Interconnections

Are we all in love with Elizabeth Warren yet?

Steve Benen provides a partial transcript of this clip:

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” she said. “No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

One of the things I love about EW is that she sees and clearly articulates how the economy is a web of interconnections, each part supporting or being supported by the other parts.

One of the things that has long driven me bats about “conservatives” is that they don’t see that. They don’t see how allowing bridges to rot hurts them, even if they never drive over those bridges personally. They don’t see how making higher education too expensive hurts them. They don’t see how under-funding public education hurts them. They don’t see how letting someone else’s family get buried (possibly literally) in medical bills hurts them. They don’t see how allowing a predatory banking system to rip millions of other Americans out of their homes hurts them.

The hurt may not be immediate, but when one part of the system fails it sets off a ripple of effects that damages other parts. If the overall system is strong it can absorb some failures here and there so that the shocks are localized and contained. But when there are a lot of big failures causing widespread damage to the system, and no one is stepping in to repair the damage, eventually it’s all going to fail.

Very simply, that’s what caused the Great Depression. It wasn’t any one thing. The allegedly strong economy attributed to Calvin Coolidge was a volatile boom-and-bust sort of critter that allowed some people to get rich but left millions behind. And it collapsed like a house of cards because the all-glorious free market did not repair the damage from several smaller failures, and the Coolidge/Hoover administration refused to intervene. Bad for business, you know.

You can see EW’s complex thinking at work in this Morning Joe clip. Someone asked her about China as a dominant military power, and she began to answer that China is investing some significant part of its GDP in infrastructure and technological development, and someone interrupted her and said, no, no, we’re talking about China’s military, not China’s economy. And Warren said, but they go together. The military and economic dominance that China is building are of a piece.

I still don’t think the bobbleheads got that. But what do we call a nation with a big, expensive military and a stagnant, unproductive economy? The USSR.

Part of our problem is that too many Americans have bought an ideology about what’s supposed to be good for business that looks at business in a vacuum, as if all the other parts of the system — such as sound infrastructure, an educated and healthy workforce, and lots of consumers with disposable income — don’t matter. In fact, the thinking is that we have to sacrifice those things in order to pump more money directly into business. This is insane.

As long as business executives get lots and lots of untaxed money, they will grow jobs and make the economy better, they say. The fact that business is losing customers because the working middle class is being squeezed out of existence doesn’t seem to register. And it doesn’t seem to register with business owners, either.

So you’ve got Rick Perry thumping his chest and saying he grew jobs in Texas by lowering taxes, cutting health care spending, and shredding environmental and consumer protection to lure business from other states. So how is that race to the bottom supposed to work nationally? Are we going to cut wages and working conditions even more to lure business from India?

And even then, right now Texas has its highest unemployment rate in 25 years. Way to go, Perry.

The Job-Killing Republican Party

Matt Yglesias, “GOP Leaders Write Unprecedented Letter Urging The Federal Reserve To Keep Unemployment High

Robert Reich, “Republicans Threaten the Fed

Steve Benen, “GOP Leaders to Fed: Let America Suffer

Adam Serwer, “Republicans To Fed: Don’t Help The Economy—Or Else!

Stan Collender, “GOP to Fed: Let the Economy Fail

Alain Sherter: “Thug Life: Lawmakers Threaten Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke

Mark Gongloff, “If You Don’t Like Bernanke, Win an Election and Fire Him: Greenhaus

David Frum doesn’t like it, either.

Ralphing Ralph

I saw a headline this morning that said “Ralph Nader praises Sarah Palin,” and I was going to link to it under a headline that said “Ralph Bleeping Nader, Will You Please Go Now?” But there is more to the story.

Apparently Ralph and fellow geniuses such as Cornell West and Gore Vidal have declared that President Obama should be primaried. They apparently think this is an original idea, which tells us they don’t read blogs much. They also don’t have a specific candidate in mind, but acknowledge that filing deadlines are fast approaching. Maybe Ralph will decide he’s the only available choice on short notice.

In other words, they aren’t pushing to oust Obama because they have somebody better in mind. They just want to punish Obama for not being progressive enough.

At Balloon Juice, Dennis G. writes,

This Nader/West effort to marginalize the left is just another example of the progressive death wish. This recent editorial from The Nation is another. I’m 56 years old. I’ve watched the so called leaders of the Left do this dance of self-destruction over and over and over again. The results have never been good.

Humphrey had to pay a price for LBJ. They had to “punish” Carter to teach him a lesson, even if it gave us Reagan. Gore had to be disciplined for the sins of Clinton and these fools claimed there was no difference between Al and Bush. Kerry never “excited” them and also required election year chastisement. Now it is President Obama who is the target of these strategic geniuses.

Nader, West and these other fools always function as the reliable Left flank of wingnutopia. Without these useful idiots the GOP and their ideas would always be defeated. With them to serve as comic foils, vote sponges, and advocates of apathy, the GOP can get close enough to steal any election.

Ralph argues that a primary challenge will actually be good for Obama. We might remember that Ralph’s political instincts are nearly as sharp as Mark Penn‘s. Going back several years, the only incumbents who have lost the White House faced tough primary challenges. Those incumbents who enjoyed unified party support won, usually easily.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes,

As ABL notes, there are some unfortunate consistencies here. Nader began the Obama presidency by wondering if Obama would be an “Uncle Tom for the corporations..” He now joins forces with West who derides his “dear brother Barack Obama” as a “black mascot for Wall Street interests” with a “fear of free black men.” Perhaps Michael Moore shall join them and we can hear these three explain to us why Obama is actually a white president.

And the moral is, sometimes people need to learn when to shut up. Even former Naderite James Fallows thinks so.

But since Nader is too oblivious to reality to know when to shut up, I propose that any progressive who says he will vote for Nader be crowned with a dunce hat labeled “Florida 2000” and made to sit in the corner.

Update: BTW, if you aren’t already overdosed on stupid, David Brooks’s column will do the job.

Do the Math

The President’s proposals must be pretty good. I went to Firedoglake to find out in what ways I should be disappointed, and instead I found David Dayen admitting it doesn’t suck as much as he expected it to.

The money line:

“Either we have to ask the wealthy to pay their fair share, or we have to ask seniors to pay more for medicare, or gut education,” he continued. “This is not class warfare. It’s Math.”

Ooo, take that, Frank Luntz.

The President also vows to veto any deficit reduction bill that does not include tax increases. HOO-yah.

Best of all, Hillary Clinton’s former “strategist” Mark Penn hates it.

Barack Obama is careening down the wrong path towards re-election.

He should be working as a president, not a candidate.

He should be claiming the vital center, not abandoning it.

He should be holding down taxes rather than raising them.

He should be mastering the global economy, not running away from it.

And most of all, he should be bringing the country together rather than dividing it through class warfare.

Really, this is almost as good a predictor of success as being trashed by William Kristol. Four more years! See also Steve Benen.