Monthly Archives: January 2012
All Bets Are Off
There are all kinds of commentaries today about how the contest for the GOP nomination refuses to follow any known pattern. Nate Silver says that it hasn’t broken all known patterns just yet, but if Florida breaks for Gingrich next week, “all bets are off.”
Josh Marshall says pretty much the same thing —
My best guess is that Gingrich will come on strong or even win Florida. And it’ll be bad for Mitt for a while. But eventually Mitt and really the GOP establishment will just grind him down. Do I know that? Not at all. Unless Mitt can totally shut Gingrich down in Florida, it’s really all bets are off territory.
Conventional wisdom on the Left is that the GOP establishment won’t let Newt win, in fear that he will be a drag on congressional tickets as well as lose to Obama. But if Romney can’t close the deal, who is going to stop him?
Truly, about the only chance the Right has of winning the White House in November is if in July they pick someone entirely off the radar (Jeb! Jeb! Jeb!) and then keep that guy hidden in a box so the voters can’t get a good look at him before November.
Newt Gingrich didn’t just beat Romney in South Carolina, he crushed him. Even among those predicting a win for the disgraced former House Speaker, few saw a 12.6-point victory coming. South Carolina has 46 counties, and Gingrich won 44 of them. After losing every congressional district in the state, Romney emerges from this contest with exactly zero delegates.*
Put it this way: in less than a week, Romney managed to turn a double-digit lead into a double-digit defeat, despite an aggressive effort and nearly $5 million in investments. That’s not an easy feat to pull off.
Indeed.
What’s remarkable is how often this seems to happen. As weak as this year’s Republican field has proved, it’s not that much weaker than a number of recent presidential vintages, from the Democrats’ lineups in 1988 and 2004 to the Republican field in 1996. In presidential politics, the great talents (a Clinton, a Reagan) seem to be the exception; a march of Dole-Dukakis-Mondale mediocrity is closer to the rule.
However, I well remember in 1992 that the pundit commentary on the Democratic field was all about whether Mario Cuomo would run. The lot of the television bobbleheads didn’t seem to think the other Democrats running were worthy of their attention. Oh, but if only Mario Cuomo would run, it would be a real race!
Of course Cuomo didn’t run, and Bill Clinton won instead, and now in retrospect Clinton is seen as a political powerhouse. But that’s not what the pundits saw in 1992. And also in retrospect, the Democratic field in 1992 (which included Bill Clinton, Jerry Brown, Paul Tsongas, Bob Kerrey, Douglas Wilder, Eugene McCarthy, and Tom Harkin) looks pretty respectable to me. Nowhere near the walking freak show we’re getting now from the GOP.
The truth is, the last several presidential elections cycles have seen the Republicans scramble for someone they could clean up and present as a credible candidate. Remember who ran in 2000? The only reason Dubya came across as electable is that the entire GOP and right-run media packaged him to look like something he never was, an intelligent adult.
There’s not enough lipstick in the world to make any of the current contenders presentable in a general election, IMO, and it’s too late for the GOP establishment to re-package any of them. They need to find a whole new product.
Joe Paterno, 1926-2012
The end of a triple overtime.
Good Analysis
The first real primary where all the participants are members of the Republican Party base is done. Newt wins and the Mittens coronation tour is over. Trench warfare now begins.
Iowa and New Hampshire will let anybody in to play Republican-for-a-day and influence the results, but South Carolina is different and only the true faithful participate. South Carolina is to Wingnutopia what Mecca is to Islam. In this primary, the 27 percenters are a majority. South Carolina is a center of neo-Confederate thought and conspiracy theories about white victimhood at the hands of
the Federal GovernmentThe Union are fed to the base from childhood.
Yeah, pretty much.
Newt Wins SC
Rachel Maddow is saying this is the first time in history that three different candidates have won Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Anyway, I don’t yet know how big Newt won.
Update: It says on the teevee that people who voted for Newt say they think he is more electable in the general election than Romney. Unreal.
Un-Freakin’-Believable
Charles Murray of Bell Curve fame explains that if there is increasing inequality in the U.S., it’s the lower classes’ fault. Why? Because they aren’t getting married enough.
When Americans used to brag about “the American way of life”—a phrase still in common use in 1960—they were talking about a civic culture that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace. It was a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity.
I thought the American dream ca. 1960 was owning one’s own home and seeing the U.S.A. in our Chevrolet.
Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.
He then goes on to explain how two hypothetical neighborhoods of white people fall along the cultural divide based on rates of marriage, out-of-wedlock births, church attendance, crime, etc., and argues that these “lifestyle” changes lead a lack of “industriousness” and thereby to income inequality.
I think just about any social psychologist would argue that the real data show that economic instability is the cause of social instability, not the other way around. In other words, people aren’t poor — financially insecure — because they don’t get married; they don’t get married because they are poor. A man who doubts his ability to support a family is less likely to pursue marriage, for example.
Daniel Larison at the American Conservative points out that Murray’s arguments have no internal logic, never mind any connection to the real world.
I suppose the degree of racism one sees in Murray’s essay depends on how you read it. He says he is comparing populations of white people to argue that race isn’t a factor. Well, he could have just said, “race isn’t a factor.” He could have made his hypothetical population plaid, I suppose. But really, IMO what he’s saying here is that lower-class whites are getting to be just as lazy and shiftless as the Colored Folk.
In other class warfare news. William Tucker of the American Spectator dismisses “environmentalism” as an indulgent affectation of the leisure class. “Only in the highest echelons do we hear people say, ‘We don’t need to build any pipelines. We’ve already got enough energy. We can all sit around awaiting the day we live off wind and sunshine,'” he says. Real Americans, of course, want to drill, baby, drill.
I don’t know anybody who says that, of course; what some of us say is that we ought to be working our butts off developing alternate and sustainable energy sources instead of ripping our planet apart squeezing the last drop of fossil fuel out of it. This is less about the “leisure class” versus the “working class” than it is about “vested interests” versus “people who would like to believe there will be a habitable planet for our grandchildren to live on.”
Today in South Carolina
© Karen Roach | Dreamstime.com
(Regarding the lipstick, if you’re in the mood for some undiluted and unmitigated crap, check this out. It’s such self-evident moonshine I’m not even going to waste bandwidth commenting on it, although others have. See Steve M, Zack Ford, and Charles Johnson.)
See also how Newt seems to need wives as emotional and political props, and also that America really hates him.
It Just Keeps Getting Better
A significant portion of the seed money that created Mitt Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, was provided by wealthy oligarchs from El Salvador, including members of a family with a relative who allegedly financed rightist groups that used death squads during the country’s bloody civil war in the 1980s
But, y’know, the world turns round and round. Once upon a time money went from U.S. taxpayers to the Reagan Administration, which sent it to the right-wing government in El Salvador, which used it to form death squads, which terrorized the country, so the wealthy oligarchs had to find a safe place to dump their money. So they unloaded several million into Bain capital, and Mittens made several fortunes, and now he’s tapping on some of that wealth to run for President. Ain’t capitalism grand?
Also — in the New York Times, Michael Shear writes that Romney’s wealth was not an issue in 2008. Now it is. The times, are they a-changin’?
South Carolina Primary Eve
Nate Silver’s most recent data:
| South Carolina | VOTE PROJECTION |
CHANCE OF WIN |
|---|---|---|
| Newt Gingrich | 35.4% | 62% |
| Mitt Romney | 32.7 | 38 |
| Ron Paul | 16.0 | 0 |
Obviously Newt’s recent racist tirade won over much of the Confederate vote in SC. But there’s also this, Nate says:
Some of this, I suspect, is because voters in both parties seem to have developed a resistance to falling in line when the news media expects them to. There were numerous reversals of momentum in the 2008 Democratic primaries, some of which seemed to represent an open rebellion by voters against the news media’s expectations of how they might behave. Even candidates as strong as George W. Bush in 2000 — who may have been the best non-incumbent primary candidate ever, with exceptionally strong fund-raising totals and polling numbers — have encountered a few bumps along the road.
Personally, I think seeing a bunch of smug, overpaid “pundits” on television schmooze about how Candidate X is “inevitable” before votes are cast does pre-dispose some of us to support Anybody But X. The only thing that’s saved Mitt’s ass so far is that the “Anybodies” are such nobodies.
From what I’ve read, Mitt had a really bad debate last night. He got booed for his tax return evasion. Richard Adams says Romney as much as admitted that his tax returns are a political liability. He also actually referred to his own Massachusetts health reform plan as “Romneycare.”
On top of that, the Romney campaign is circulating a video that shows Mittens being insufferably 1 percentish toward a heckler. Someone off camera asks Romney what he plans to do for the 99 percent, and Romney replies —
Let me tell you something. America is a great nation, because we’re a united nation. And those who are trying to divide the nation, as you’re trying to do here, and as our president is doing, are hurting this country seriously. The right course for America is not to try to divide America, and try and divide us between one and another. it’s to come together as a nation.
And if you’ve got a better model — if you think China’s better, or Russia’s better, or Cuba’s better, or North Korea’s better — I’m glad to hear all about it.
But you know what? America’s right, and you’re wrong.
This is what they think is a “good” answer? Someone said Romney might as well start wearing a top hat and a monocle.