Democracy by Date Rape, Representation by Roofie

So this morning I was alerted - via Anne Laurie over at Balloon Juice -- about this Jon Chait piece regarding Mitt Romney.  I've read the Chait piece in its entirety and its premise is that Mitt Romney is just a goddamned liar.  He lies repeatedly, he lies often, he lies regularly, and he lies without regard for the truth.  Good.  Glad Chait recognizes that.

But then, there's this from that same piece:

I've always had a soft spot for Mitt Romney, who strikes me, in a way I can't completely define, as a good guy.  The fact that he is an audacious liar does not strike me as a definitive judgment on his character, but primarily a reflection of the circumstances he finds himself in -- having to transition from winning a majority of a fairly liberal electorate to winning a majority of a rabidly conservative one, one that cannot be placated without indulging in all sorts of fantasies. 

[snip] 

I see him as a patrician pol, like George H. W. Bush, who believes deeply in public service but regards elections as a cynical process of pandering to rubes.

I gotta tell you . . . I'm not quite sure what to make of this.  I understand what Chait is saying here -- and I understand that his main take-away is that Romney is, in fact, an inveterate liar on the campaign trail -- but couple that with the foregoing and I think what I am listening to is an excuse for Romney to be a huge liar on the campaign trail.

The excuse goes something like:  Yeah, sure . . . Romney is lying, but he's only saying things he doesn't believe in order to get elected.  Deep down and underneath it all, he's not a bad guy -- he's like Poppy Bush.

Romney: The Worst of Both Worlds for the GOP

I came across two interesting posts this morning that got me thinking some more about the Republican nomination contest.

The first is Steve Benen’s summation of Mitt Romney’s most recent political woes:

Think about where Mitt Romney stood a week ago. He’d won the nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire; his national lead was large and getting larger; and he enjoyed double-digit leads over his squabbling competitors in the South Carolina primary.

And then think about where Romney stands this morning. It turns out he lost Iowa to a candidate he outspent 7 to 1; his national lead has, according to Gallup, “collapsed” over the course of the last several days; he struggled through two widely-panned debate performances; and polls suggest he’s likely to lose the South Carolina primary.

It’s likely, in about 12 hours, the only contest Romney will have won will be in the state he lives in for much of the year.

Benen goes on to point out that far and away Romney’s biggest political liability is that voters just don’t like him – the more people see of him, the less likely they are to want to vote for him.

This ties in very well with Steve M.’s comment “A Blind Romney Finds a Nut,” in which he argues that Romney’s apparent refusal to participate in Monday’s GOP debate in Tampa may be the best way to quash Newt Gingrich’s surging momentum.  Newt doesn’t have the money to fund an ad campaign that can keep up with Romney’s in Florida, but Newt does very well in debate formats and has successfully leveraged those performances to keep his candidacy viable. 

Steve M. goes on to speculate that – as the “establishment Republican candidate” – Romney may well benefit by the GOP establishment deciding to simply cancel any further debates, thereby depriving Gingrich of the oxygen he needs to continue his assault on Romney.  I would suggest that such a move might also benefit Romney directly by keeping him from further alienating primary voters with his very personality.

Assuming both Steves’ observations are more or less on point, my question is:  what does the Republican Party hope to gain by engineering the nomination of the guy that the rabid Republican base simply cannot stand?

After all, Romney’s big selling point – the reason he was supposed to be the inevitable Republican nominee – has always been his supposed “electability.”  Bachmann, Cain, Santorum, Gingrich . . . each was considered too extreme a candidate to do well in the general election.  So while the GOP base switched from one candidate to the other searching for the anti-Romney, a candidate about whom they could be excited, the GOP political apparatus quietly lined up behind Mitt.  The thinking seems to have been that nobody in the Republican Party liked Romney, but in the general election they would all hold their noses and grudgingly vote for him and that he might in fact be able to beat Barack Obama in November.

But while Romney may not be too blatantly “extreme,” it sure is beginning to look like he is too patently unlikeable to actually win.  When it comes to Romney, even the slightest degree of familiarity is sufficient to breed truckloads of contempt.

But if Romney is just as unelectable as the other candidates (albeit for a slightly different reason), then I just don’t see what the downside is for the Republicans if they ran Gingrich or Santorum instead.  They’d lose – sure – but at least they’d be running a candidate that actual Republican voters could be enthusiastic about.  Instead, what they are likely to end up doing is running a candidate that actual Republican voters simply cannot stand and then lose the contest anyway – the worst of both worlds for the GOP.

Unfortunately, it may very well be a lousy outcome for the rest of us as well.

As others have pointed out before me, losing with Romney will only exacerbate the current craziness of the GOP.  If they run Mitt Romney and he loses to Barack Obama – the man whom most Republican know-nothings have convinced themselves is the most reviled president in modern history – it will only be further confirmation that they lost by being too moderate.

They will – just as they did after the 2006 and 2008 elections – double-down on the Crazy.  If you thought the American political landscape has been a bit nutty since the Tea Partiers got started, just wait until you see what it’s going to be like after the unlikable “moderate” Mitt Romney dashes all those Teabaggers’ dreams.

The Crazification Factor will go all the way up to Eleven.  

Random Observations Re: Last Night’s Debate

When I finally tuned out last night, the bobbleheads were calling the debate for Mitt Rombot because (i) the Rombot failed to completely short circuit on stage, and (ii) none of the other contenders really went after it.  From the bobbleheads’ perspective, calling the debate in the Rombot’s favor is undoubtedly the safe call as the Rombot is almost certain to win the New Hampshire primary two days from now and apparently is topping the polls in South Carolina (curse you, Newt Gingrich!  You have once again proven that I simply cannot predict what Republican voters are likely to do.)

In no particular order, below the fold are some random observations about last night’s GOP debate:

One Last Iowa Thought . . .

I spend a lot of time complaining about the sheer inanity of the US political press.  But after the Iowa caucus results last night, I think it may have hit a new low.

Until last night, Rick Santorum was a joke candidate.  Best known for the result one pulls up on Google when running a search on his last name, this is a man who has recently declared that the government should prohibit US citizens from using any form of contraception, and that no one should be having sex unless it is for the purposes of procreation.

You get that?  His official presidential policy is:  No Americans Are Allowed to Have Sex Just For Fun.

None of that has changed.  And yet . . . I've been scanning the political punditry all day, and I've yet to see anybody claim other than that Rick "Frothy" Santorum is a credible candidate for the US presidency.

Are.  You.  Fucking.  Kidding.  Me?

Either the world's gone insane or I have, but there is just no way in hell a guy whose presidential platforms is:  The proper role of the government is to regulate your sex lives, Americans is anything other than a joke. I don't care if he did only lose the Iowa caucuses by 8 votes.

It simply boggles my mind that under the modern rules of political punditry they actually have to take this guy seriously.

Instant Iowa Analysis

UPDATED BELOW:


I’ve been biting my tongue the past few weeks while being told repeatedly not only by the TeeVee Talking Heads (who do little but spew Conventional Wisdom) but also by most of the independent political bloggers whom I respect, that Newt Gingrich’s campaign to snag the Republican nomination is over and done with.  Looking at the Iowa results, I still can’t see that.

Here’s my fast-n-loose assessment of what went down last night and yet more shameless speculation about "what it all means" going forward:

Toward a Woldview-Centric Assessment of Politicians

A few days ago Taryn Hart over at Plutocracy Files had an excellent piece up titled “Glenn Greenwald on Ron Paul:  Why Worldview Matters.”  Essentially, Hart critiqued Greenwald’s reductionist evaluation of Ron Paul in which he looked only at Paul’s asserted positions on isolated issues, and argued that a better means of evaluating political candidates is to try and suss out their overall worldview:

[I]t’s not just a candidate’s positions on individual issues that are important, what’s also important (in most instances more important) is the candidate’s worldview.  A President’s worldview will determine the outcome of thousands of decisions the President will make, almost all of which will not be campaign issues and many of which are unforeseeable.

Thus, it matters to me that Ron Paul doesn’t believe in evolution, not because I think teaching evolution in schools should be prioritized above the lives of Muslim children, but because it’s proof that Paul rejects science, evidence and rationality, which tells us a good deal about how Paul could be expected to approach the thousands of decisions he would have to make as President.  Similarly, it matters to me that Ron Paul is anti-choice and claims to be a libertarian, as it suggests to me his defense of freedom is disingenuous and that his positions are likely motivated by a defense of hierarchy and patriarchy.  (footnote deleted).

I think this assessment of Ron Paul is spot-on.  For too long Paul has gotten a pass for on his “libertarianism” because he opposes current practices that he feels violates individual rights.  For example, he opposes the federal government’s War on Drugs.  But it is important to understand exactly why Paul opposes the War on Drugs – because it is federal in nature. 

On every single issue in which Ron Paul claims the government has overstepped its bounds he always devolves to the same position:  the federal government has no right to proscribe personal conduct, but the states do.  This is why Paul can justify attacking the Voting Rights Act or the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – not necessarily because he is a bigot, but because they are (in his mind) examples of federal government overreach. 

According to Paul, each of the 50 states has the authority to define the rights and freedoms of its citizens.  He isn’t angry that Texans now have to treat black people equally, he’s angry that Texans have to treat black people equally because a majority of US citizens from outside of Texas told them they had to – Paul thinks Texans should still be free to discriminate against black people if that’s what they want to do.  His overriding belief is not in the sanctity of personal freedom but in the supremacy of state law.

But this, of course, is insane and is in no way reflective of actual Libertarian principles.  A Libertarian, for example, holds that “adults have the right to put whatever they want into their own bodies, and therefore criminalizing drug use is wrong.”  Ron Paul holds that “adults have the right to put whatever they want into their own bodies, unless their state government tells them otherwise.”  As many others have pointed out elsewhere, Ron Paul isn’t fighting for the Constitution, he’s fighting for the Articles of Confederation. 

Of course, devolving authority downward – away from the federal level and onto more local levels – is exactly the “defense of hierarchy and patriarchy” that Hart argues one should expect to see from a man who rejects science in favor of ideology and who claims at once to be for freedom but not for the freedom of a woman to control her own reproduction. 

The utility of a “worldview-centric” assessment of candidates is that it allows you to think about and predict what a candidate’s position is likely to be on issues about which he or she hasn’t been asked.  I don’t know, for example, whether Ron Paul believes that wives are supposed to be subordinate to their husbands because I don’t know that he’s ever been asked that question.  But in light of Paul’s belief in local authority and his general policy of strict non-interference, I suspect he still adheres to the old phrase “every man is a king in his own home” – and that’s the kind of thinking that stripped women of their individual rights once they got married. 

It seems to me that these are the kinds of things people should be thinking about when they consider political candidates, and the “worldview-centric” way of considering candidates is really the only way to do so.

Americans Elect: Using “Bipartisanship” to Advance the 1%

If you’re not familiar with “Americans Elect,” this post by Dante Atkins at DKos yesterday will help bring you up to speed.  Essentially, AE is an online group that intends to field its own presidential candidate in this year’s election.  Supposedly, its nominee will be selected by successive online votes by everybody who joins AE, culminating with a final “election” in June.  That nominee would then select a running mate who must be from a political party other than the nominee’s own.

The more I find out about this organization, the more it sounds like nothing so much as a front group working to advance the interests of the 1%.

Republicans Playing Calvinball

One of the maddening things about being a rational person following today's politics is that sane people just aren't prepared to grapple 24/7 with the weird Calvinball that the modern-day GOP plays.

Just yesterday I suggested that the Democrats could make hay at Romney's expense by hammering him about his refusal to produce his tax records. However, I also suggested that Obama should not personally be the one calling for their production because he shouldn't open himself up to the possibility of getting pwned if Romney suddenly decided to release the records, the way that Donald Trump got pwned when Obama released his long-form birth certificate right before the Washington Correspondents' Dinner.

And today I see that Craig Romney is suggesting that his dad will release his tax records when Obama releases his birth certificate. Huh? Haven't we already covered this?

Apparently not. Apparently for the Crazies now running the GOP asylum the very Structure of the Universe means that it is impossible for Obama ever to have released his birth certificate, even though he now has done so on multiple occassions (including his very public humiliation of Donald Trump with it at that Correspondents' Dinner).

This is what I mean by Calvinball. Today's Republicans really will tell you that the sky is green if they think saying so will get them an extra political point. They really will change the rules two seconds after telling you what the rules are, if they think they can get away with it.

Canada: The Northernmost State

About a month ago I penned a little rant about "independent voters," arguing as I always do that "independent" is just a functional euphemism for "low-information" (i.e., "bog stupid"). The cause of that rant was a poll asking Mississippi voters for whom they would vote today if they had the choice: Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis? Lincoln was the clear winner among both Democrats and Republicans, but self-identified "Independents" were split evenly at 44% each.

I suggested that this was only further evidence that people who self-identify as "independent" are really just so damned ignorant that they don't even know who either Lincoln or Davis were. In an attempt to bolster my claim that there are Americans alive today who don't know who Abraham Lincoln was, I pointed out that "[t]hese are people who think Canada is the northernmost state."

Well . . . lest anybody think I exaggerate the depth of ignorance that exists in the simple American electorate, let's just take a gander at how the Iowa Republican caucuses are wrapping up. Here is Texas Governor Rick Perry explaining to Iowans why we should be eager to get our hands on Canada's tar sands oil:

"Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don't have to buy from a foreign source," Mr. Perry said in Clarinda, earning a round of enthusiastic applause.

Later, the audience reacted again to Mr. Perry's assertion that buying so much energy from foreign countries is "not good policy, it's not good politics and frankly it's un-American." (emphasis added)

And you thought I was exaggerating last month about how bog stupid Americans can be? What cracks me up about all this is not just that Perry just naturally considers Canada's oil to be part of the United States' domestic production, but that when he made these ridiculous statements his Republican audience burst into "enthusiastic applause." Apparently, the sheer ridiculousness of claiming Canada's oil as our own escaped them all.

Lord, Lord . . . give me the strength tomorrow night to drink enough to expunge all of 2011 from my head, and to steel me to endure the year to come.

Playing With the Pundits – How a Bad Economy Might Help Obama

Heading into Election Year 2012, I expect we’re going to start seeing even more attempts to extrapolate from past elections in order to predict what will happen next November.  Such is Susan Milligan’s U.S. News and World Report column, “2012 Republicans Risk Repeating John Kerry’s 2004 Mistakes.”

I certainly don’t have any problem with such columns.  I’m fond of political speculation myself, and whenever I think I’ve come up with something worthwhile I make sure to post it here so we can all go back and laugh at it when I am proved to be terribly, terribly wrong.  But there are two things about Milligan’s column – one bad, one good – to which I want to draw attention.

Making Hay at Plutocrat Romney's Expense

A good deal already has been written about Mitt Romney’s categorical refusal to release his tax statements.  The conventional wisdom is that Romney’s refusal arises out of his desire to avoid telling the American public that he makes millions every year – in part because he still collects a paycheck from Bain Capital, a company he left 12 years ago – but thanks to the “carried interest” loophole and the capital gains tax rate, he pays a lower federal income tax than do most working and middle class Americans.

If Romney does indeed turn out to be the Republican nominee, it’ll be interesting to see how much hay the Democrats can make of this.  I would hope that at a time more and more Americans are becoming concerned with the inherent unfairness of our economic system, the answer to that would be “a lot of hay.”  Personally, I think the Democrats should run political ad after political ad after political ad calling on Romney to do what every other presidential candidate has always done, each ad strongly suggesting that Romney doesn’t want to admit that – as a member of the 1% -- he is trying to hide from the American public just how skewed in his favor our current system is.

Of course, Obama himself shouldn’t run these ads.  The last thing Obama needs is to have Romney finally produce his tax returns and have them show something other than that Romney is taking advantage of a tax break.  It’d be like what Obama did to Donald Trump with his long-form birth certificate, except in reverse.

No, the ads should be run either by the Democratic Party or – even better – by an anonymous Super PAC.  So long as Obama himself cannot be tied to the charges, then it won’t make any difference whether the charges can be disproved.  And politically speaking, the damage would already have been done.  Accuse Romney over and over again of being a plutocrat who wants to enshrine the plutocracy, and low-information voters will come to internalize that message.  If it goes on long enough then no amount of information afterward will actually be able to correct that impression.

Clarification:  I don’t think that what I am suggesting here amounts to the same kind of outright falsehoods in which the Romney campaign itself already is engaged.  I certainly would not suggest that Obama lower himself to Romney’s own stygian depths in order to win an election.

And I do think there is a vast difference between asserting something that you believe to be true and that almost certainly is true (even if you don’t have absolutely conclusive evidence to back up that assertion), and flat-out making statement after statement that you know to be false – which is what Romney is doing.  

Radical Republicans Update

UPDATED BELOW:

Just before the Christmas weekend I threw up a post decrying our political press’s unwillingness to acknowledge that the Crazy Wing of the Republican Party still is committed to destroying the great political and economic consensus under which both parties operated from the end of WWII until about the age of Reagan – the consensus that allowed us to build an affluent middle class society in the first place.  This wing traces its lineage directly back to the John Birch Society and the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964.

So I was extremely gratified to read E.J. Dionne’s column raising the same essential point:  “For the first time since Barry Goldwater made the effort in 1964, the Republican Party is taking a run at overturning the consensus that has governed U.S. political life since the Progressive era.”  Dionne argues that the Republican presidential candidates’ uniform embrace of the view that government is an oppressive force, with no legitimate role to play in Americans’ lives, makes them the truly radical candidates and Barack Obama the real “conservative” in 2012 in the truest sense of that word.

While it’s heartening to see someone with a national platform trying to draw attention to a situation that should be self-evident, it also must be pointed out that “Conservativism” – as that word has come to be used in modern American politics – always have been deeply radicalized.  Indeed, this is one of the themes underlying Corey Robin’s recent book The Reactionary Mind:  Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, in which Robin argues: 

Far from being “traditionalists,” or advocates for continuity and only small, incremental changes to existing social structures, Conservatives are – in fact – fairly radical thinkers who can define themselves only in relation to some past or imminent attempt (real or imagined) by others to wrest power, wealth or privilege away from them. . . .

[snip]

Thus, Robin argues, Conservatism – properly understood – is never about maintaining things the way they now are; it is always about reintroducing the “proper” balance to society, which previously had been upset by some illegitimate reformation.

This is why I find the rise of the radical right within the Republican Party so potentially terrifying.  These people aren’t concerned with “preserving” American society but about fundamentally re-writing the way the federal government’s role in that society.  Specifically, they want to eliminate the government’s ability to rein in abuse by rich and powerful private actors, and they want to eliminate even the minimal safety net the government provides for the least fortunate among us. 

These aren’t small goals, and I truly believe that the people voting for this agenda don’t fully realize what it is they are empowering:  a dystopia in which anyone already rich and powerful can essentially do whatever they please, and everybody else will just have to get use to being abused.

UPDATE:  Turns out the Frank Rich is also thinking along these lines, as he explains in his latest article in NY Magazine, "The Molotov Party."

Shameless Speculation Update!

Sigh.  Another beautiful theory slain by an ugly fact.  (Thomas Huxley, via Bloom County’s Oliver Wendell Jones)

As confirmed by this AP Story, it turns out that Newt Gingrich also failed to provide the necessary signatures to appear on Virginia’s Super Tuesday ballot.  (So did Rick Perry but nobody cares about Rick Perry.)  Newt failed despite a last-minute rally in Arlington at which his campaign volunteers asked everyone attending to sign petitions to get him on the ballot.

I still believe that Newt will win the nomination, assuming he has the organization to do so – but that may well be a pretty shaky assumption.  I suppose this is what one gets when one launches a book tour and profile-enhancement operation disguised as a presidential campaign, and then takes off for two weeks to cruise the Greek Isles.

Still . . . how deliciously satisfying it would be to see Newt – he of the big head and outsized ego – fail to obtain the nomination that would so clearly cement for him his own image as a visionary and GOP elder, not because he couldn’t actually win the nomination but because not even he took his chances of success seriously when he launched his bid.

Which brings to mind another comic strip quote, this time from Dilbert:

               Dilbert:            Is it wrong we can only find joy in other people’s pain?

               Wally:             There’s another source?

Shameless GOP Primary Speculation – Part II

I just saw this story regarding Virginia’s primary on Super Tuesday, March 6^th.  It turns out that neither Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, nor Jon Huntsman submitted the necessary paper work in time to qualify for Virginia’s primary – they will not appear on the Virginia ballot.

I find this interesting because it seems to me that failing to file the requisite paperwork to appear on any of the Super Tuesday states is tantamount to admitting that your campaign for the presidency is not something you take particularly seriously.  Whether it’s the sheer inability to collect the necessary signatures or the simple unwillingness to expend the resources necessary to do so, failing to appear on a Super Tuesday state’s ballot pretty much announces to the world you do not think you have a serious shot at snagging your party’s nomination.

Assuming that’s the case, I am beginning to wonder what thought these three non-candidates have given to whom they will endorse for the Republican nomination once they officially bow out of the running.  So . . . I’m gonna indulge myself by making some more entirely unsubstantiated, wildly speculative, political horserace predictions.

Obama Should Take the Payroll Tax Cut/Keystone Pipeline Deal . . .

. . . and then double-cross the Republicans.  Forget about playing “hardball” or “softball” with the congressional Republicans.  It’s time for President Obama to start playing Sharpball.  It’s time that Democrats started playing by the same sharp-edged, elbows out rules that the GOP and the last homunculus they were able to get installed in the Oval Office play by. 

Newt: Giving Iowans What They Want

There is a theory being espoused by conservative and liberal pundits alike that one of the factors powering Newt Gingrich in the polls is the idea among Republicans that “the Professor” could wipe the floor with Barack Obama in a debate.  Paul Waldman explains the idea here:

If you aren’t tuned in to conservative media – the radio shows, television shows, and websites where the base Republican voter lives – you might not be aware of how powerful this impulse is.  Many conservatives are positively obsessed with the idea that contrary to all appearances, Barack Obama is kind of a dolt.  There’s lots of talk about how Obama only got into Columbia and Harvard Law School because of affirmative action (you may remember noted highbrow intellectual Donald Trump making this claim), and endless jokes about Obama overusing teleprompters, with the idea that he’s too dumb to give an extemporaneous speech sometimes implied and sometimes stated outright.

So many conservatives have a fantasy that if they nominate their own smart guy, he’ll show the world that they’ve been right all along, that Obama is really a numbskull whom people only believe is smart because the liberal media sing his praises . . . .

. . . . [T]o many Republicans, Newt offers the opportunity not just to defeat Obama but to expose him as a fraud.

It makes sense to me that a sizeable chunk of the Republican base would believe this about President Obama, and that it would be important to them to win the election by humiliating Obama and the Liberals as much as possible.  Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that these voters care more about humiliating Obama and the Liberals than about actually winning the election in the first place.  As mentioned here, and here Republicans don’t debate political ideas, Republicans wage war against political demons.

(Bonus Romney quote from last night’s debate:  “There are Democrats who love America.”  This should not go unremarked.  Romney delivered that line like he was saying something revelatory, like it would surprise his audience to learn that there are at least some Democrats who are not actively working to destroy the United States of America.  I tell you, the entire GOP is barking, staring mad.)

And for those Republican voters looking for assurances that Newt Gingrich might just make their dreams of domination and humiliation come true . . . well, Newt turned in a pretty good performance last night.  I’m sure that any doubts such voters may have been harboring on that score were put to rest.

Shameless Iowa Speculation

According to this PPP poll, Ron Paul is making a big move in Iowa at the expense of New Gingrich, who leads Paul now only by a single point:

Upon reflection, I think this actually understates the difficulty Newt is going to have in Iowa, which is a caucus state.  Newt has surged to frontrunner status in recent months almost entirely because everybody else the rabid Republican base could love has imploded.  And that would be fine if Iowa were a primary.  But the fact Iowa is a caucus state means Newt’s people actually have to get caucus goers out to vote for him, and that usually requires a good ground game.

Rick Perry's Ad Signals Republican Ragnarok

Surely by now you’ve seen the Rick Perry YouTube ad that is the latest faceplant his campaign has engineered for him.  The rocket scientists in charge of his run at the Oval Office forgot to turn off the YouTube “like/dislike” button, and so far the odious thing’s received the second most “dislikes” YouTube ever has recorded. The only thing the American public hates more than this Perry ad is Justin Bieber’s video for “Baby.”

(In all honesty . . . I think that is the correct call.)

The ad features Perry, all saddle-faced and aw-shucksin’ it in an outdoor scene shot somewhere in Deutschland, explaining that he loves him some Baby Jeebus and he hates him some gays.  He especially hates them military gays that volunteer to fight and risk their lives for America.  Just thinkin’ ‘bout them gays makes him shudder and feel all icky inside.  The thing might almost be a Stephen Colbert parody but Perry apparently intended for it to be taken seriously, so others have been forced to provide the parody for which the thing so desperately cries out.  The meta-parody, as it were:

Still Calling it For Newt

A week and a half ago I publicly called the Republican nomination in favor of Newt Gingrich.  Today I’m reading Ezra Klein, who has “21 Reasons Newt Gingrich Won’t Be the Republican Nominee for President.”  I find Klein’s argument fascinating, mostly because it reveals what I think is a real disconnect between professional punditry and the realities of the modern Republican Party.

Before I get to that disconnect, I do want to address one thing.  In my post predicting Newt would get the nomination I only ran the upcoming Republican contests through Nevada’s February 4^th caucus.  I pretty much argued that by then Newt would have the nomination locked up after racking up wins in Iowa, South Carolina, and Florida, and after coming in at least a close second in New Hampshire.  I suggested that all Newt had to do now was not blow himself up before the Iowa caucuses on January 3^rd – when the actual voting begins – and then the next month would be a relative cakewalk as his campaign just snowballed with consecutive state victories.

But Ezra makes a good logistical argument:

There are eight weeks between the New Hampshire primary and Super Tuesday, and almost six months between Super Tuesday and the Republican National Convention.  Gingrich might generate sufficient momentum to win a few primaries.  But he can’t survive seven months as the frontrunner.

Essentially, what Ezra is arguing is that a slate of early wins by Gingrich will not necessarily turn the nomination into a rout, as I had pretty much supposed; if Romney digs in, goes on the offensive, and is supported by the Republican establishment and its house organs, then the contest really does turn into a marathon.  “Super Tuesday” takes place on March 6^th – a whole month after I ended my speculative analysis – which means that Newt will have 30 more days to self-destruct . . . something a lot of people are betting he can’t help but do.

I do think this part of Ezra’s argument is well-founded.  I agree that the longer the nomination process drags on, the worse for Gingrich.  He has way too much baggage and is way too thin-skinned and emotionally uneven to maintain the kind of unflappability that, say, Barack Obama demonstrated in 2008.  I can definitely see Gingrich blowing his own self up.

But what I don’t understand is Klein’s belief that the 21 specific things that he identifies as problems for Gingrich are in any way going to hurt him with Republican voters.  A lot of that stuff is inside-baseball, the kind of stuff that the political cognoscenti pays attention to but about which regular voters don’t know and won’t care.  Some of it is stuff that the Republican base can easily forgive.  (He cheated on his wife(ves)?  Hell, son, we’re all only human, did he truly repent?  He did?  Well great then! – He’s found Jesus!  That’s the guy I wanna vote for!)  And a lot of it is flaky stuff that comes out of Newt’s mouth 18 times a day but that he has the perfect confidence to walk back and explain his way out of later.

Of course, Newt’s confidence in his ability to deflect attacks that he is a flake was in large part gifted to him by the very GOP Establishment that now seems horrified by the idea Newt might actually snag the nomination.  These people have been telling the base for years that Newt was a “serious” person.  The Republican base has watched Newt on the TeeVee, almost continually, since he left office in disgrace.  For years they’ve watched him being asked by other Very Serious People to tell them what is what in the political sphere – that automatically makes Newt a Very Serious Person too.  Thanks to the GOP Establishment’s desire for an attack dog about whom they could always have plausible deniability, Newt’s got built-in credibility with Republican voters.

So for all the 21 specific things Ezra cites, I don’t see a one of ‘em that can really damage Gingrich.  The base knows who Gingrich is:  he’s the firebrand willing to outshout a Democratic president and shut down the government in order to get his way.  That is a stupid, stupid thing to do from a policy perspective, but it is an awesome thing to do if – like the GOP base – you think the most important thing in a candidate is his ability to stick it to the hippies.

The Crazies know who Gingrich is – he’s one of them.  And the Republican Establishment can try to paint him as a loon, but they’ve invested too many years already convincing their voters that he really is not.  They created him, now they’re stuck with him.

Newt Gingrich might lose the nomination simply because he cracks under the pressure of months and months of campaigning, but he won’t lose the nomination because the Republican base suddenly thinks that he is too “flaky” or too “liberal” or too “big-government.”  Newt is the meanest attack dog the Republican party can field, and that is still really the only criterion by which most Republicans decide who to vote for.

DC pundits might think the GOP stands for things like “small government,” “sober government,” “cool-headedness” . . . but it doesn’t.  It stands for sticking it to the hippies, every time, all the time – anything other than that is pure gravy.  Newt promises to stick it to the hippies every day, and none of the other candidates do.  This is why the only person who can prevent Newt Gingrich from grabbing the Republican nomination is Newt Gingrich.

“Demonization”: A Fundamental Political Difference

I’ve been focusing a lot more on the Republican primary over the past few days, which means that I’ve been trying to get inside the collective head of Republican base voters – whom John Rogers, aka Kung Fu Monkey, so hilariously (and, as would later turn out time and again, accurately) named “the Crazy 27%."

In expressing my views, analyses, and speculations, I’ve used terms like “the Crazies,” “the Orderlies,” and “the Asylum.”  And I’ve suggested that a lot of these voters are motivated by sheer meanness, a desire to be the biggest, baddest, toughest prick on the block.  But I have also made the claim that neither I nor anyone on the Left that I can think of actually demonizes Republican base voters.

It occurred to me that some of my characterizations might be seen as undermining my assertion “we don’t demonize Republican voters,” so I thought I’d try to explain a little more fully (i) who I’m actually talking about, (ii) what I mean by my “non-demonization” claim, and (iii) why this is a fundamental difference between the Liberal base and the Conservative base.