Newt Gingrich: He Does Scorn And Disgust Better Than Anyone
How did a hypocritical, erratic leader—a cosseted lobbyist masquerading as a scrappy insurgent—win in South Carolina? It’s all about Newt’s disdain.
Speaking to a packed house at Mutt’s BBQ in South Carolina’s Pickens County on Wednesday, Newt Gingrich encapsulated the conviction underlying his campaign. “[W]e frankly disdain the internationalist, secular socialists who would like to change our country,” he said, to applause and hoots of thrilled agreement.
Last night was a resounding victory for disdain. Gingrich may be a sexual hypocrite, an erratic leader, and a cosseted lobbyist masquerading as a scrappy insurgent, but he is an absolute maestro of contempt, and that is what South Carolina wanted.
Look at what turned his electoral fortunes around. It had little to do with his attack on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital. I didn’t meet anyone in South Carolina, including Gingrich supporters, who had anything negative to say about Romney’s business record. Instead, the race turned in Gingrich’s favor during the debate on Monday, when Juan Williams asked him whether it might be “insulting” to black Americans to say they should demand jobs and not food stamps, and that poor kids should be put to work as janitors. Gingrich, puffed up with righteousness, went on the offensive. To the crowd, he seemed to be putting Williams in his place. No doubt their hearts pulsed as they imagined him doing the same to Obama.
“Only the elites despise earning money,” Gingrich retorted. When Williams pressed him on his references to Obama as the “food-stamp president,” the audience booed. Gingrich’s sneering, forceful response about not bowing to the forces of political correctness earned him a standing ovation. After that, his rallies started getting mobbed and his poll numbers soared. Gingrich trounced Romney on Saturday because of how effectively he channeled the Republican base’s apparent conviction that whining racial minorities are enjoying unearned privileges in the benighted Obama age.
Gingrich’s victory is a humiliating defeat for the self-appointed leaders of the Christian right who made a last-minute effort to coalesce behind Rick Santorum. But it’s a victory for the movement as a whole, which forgave Gingrich his marital trespasses because of how effectively he channels its grievances and resentments.
He faithfully champions the notion, central to the religious right, that conservative Christians constitute an oppressed minority. “One of the key issues is the growing anti-religious bigotry of our elites,” he said in his victory speech, revising a frequent theme from his campaign. Conservative evangelicals rallied around the thrice-married moralist: according to a CBS News exit poll, he won 44 percent of the born-again vote, compared with 21 percent each for Romney and Santorum. Fifty percent of voters said that having a candidate who shared their religious beliefs mattered either “somewhat” or a “great deal”—suggesting a disinclination to vote for a Mormon—and they preferred Gingrich overwhelmingly. Unlike in 2008, Christian conservatives proved themselves able to deny the victory to a moderate Republican they distrusted. In doing so, they showed what it is they value most, and it’s not family values. It’s scorn and disgust, which Gingrich does better than anyone.
By: Michele Goldberg, The Daily Beast, January 21, 2012
Newt Gingrich Exploits Politics Of Class And Culture
Conservatives may denounce class warfare, yet by shrewdly combining the politics of class with the politics of culture, Newt Gingrich won his first election in 14 years, humbled Mitt Romney and upended the Republican Party.
He also exposed profound frailties in Romney as a candidate, throwing him badly off-balance on questions related to his personal wealth, business career and income taxes. Unless Romney finds a comfortable and genuine way of talking about his money, he will present President Obama’s team a weakness that they’ll exploit mercilessly. The country is thinking more skeptically about wealth and privilege in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Romney has not adjusted.
Gingrich skillfully set up his opponent to step on the landmine of class by transforming Romney from his self-cast role as a successful businessman into a heartless financier more interested in profits than in job creation.
The conventional view is that Gingrich’s critique of Bain Capital, Romney’s old company, didn’t work because Republicans dislike assaults on “free enterprise,” a phrase Romney still hopes to use as a self-protective mantra. But while Gingrich softened his attacks on Bain, he did so only after creating the context in which Romney was forced to answer query after query about his financial status, and he repeatedly fumbled questions about releasing his tax returns. Romney finally announced Sunday he’d make public his 2010 return and a 2011 estimate this week.
All this allowed Gingrich to draw a class line across South Carolina. Exit polls showed Romney carrying only one income group, voters earning more than $200,000 a year. Voters earning less than $100,000 a year went strongly for Gingrich.
Yet conservative class politics is always inflected by culture and ideology, the potent mix that Pat Buchanan brought to Richard Nixon’s attention four decades ago. South Carolina’s two debates offered Gingrich a showcase for his war on those elites whom the conservative rank-and-file despise.
There was also the matter of race. Gingrich is no racist, but neither is he naive about the meaning of words. When Fox News’ Juan Williams, an African-American journalist, directly challenged Gingrich about the racial overtones of Gingrich’s staple reference to Obama as “the food-stamp president,” the former House speaker verbally pummeled him, to raucous cheers. As if to remind everyone of the power of coded language, a supporter later praised Gingrich for putting Williams “in his place.”
Then came the rebuke to CNN’s John King, who asked about the claim from Gingrich’s second wife that her former husband had requested an “open marriage.” By exploding at King and the contemporary journalism, Gingrich turned a dangerous allegation into a rallying point. Past sexual conduct mattered far less to conservatives than a chance to admonish the supposedly liberal media. Gingrich won evangelicals by 2-1, suggesting, perhaps, a rather elastic definition of “family values” — or a touching faith in Gingrich’s repentance.
With unremitting attacks on Romney as a “Massachusetts moderate,” Gingrich created yet another link between his opponent and elite Yankees loathed by the Southern right. He reaped landslide margins among conservative groups, marginalizing the buttoned-down, less electric Rick Santorum.
There were also hints in exit polling that hostility to Romney’s Mormon’s faith may have added to his troubles, without help from Gingrich. About a quarter of South Carolina’s voters said a candidate’s religious beliefs mattered a “great deal” to them, and Romney secured a scant 10 percent of their ballots.
If there is solace for Romney, it is in the experience of an earlier front-runner. In late March 1992, the day before the Connecticut primary, I found myself standing with a colleague next to Bill Clinton in a coffee shop in Groton. Clinton surprised us by suggesting he would lose the next day to Jerry Brown, now California’s governor. Voters were in an ornery mood, he said, and many of them wanted to declare: “I don’t want this to be over.”
Clinton was right. He lost Connecticut. Yet two weeks later, he swept a series of primaries, including a decisive contest in New York.
Florida, which votes next on Jan. 31, is Romney’s New York. But there is a difference. Clinton was a master campaigner with what has quaintly been called the common touch. Romney has so far proved himself to be more a master of discomfort and unease, especially with his own wealth. Unless he learns how to navigate the country’s new etiquette about financial privilege, Romney will continue to be plagued by the now twice-resurrected Gingrich — and, if he survives Gingrich’s challenge, by a freshly minted populist named Barack Obama.
By: E. J. Dionne, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 22, 2012
Why Newt Gingrich’s “Open Marriage” Request Matters
Here’s the problem with yet another men-behaving-badly story that came out Thursday, the one in which former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne Gingrich, told ABC and the Washington Post that he asked her for permission to have an affair, or as she put it, an “open marriage.” When she refused, he divorced her and hasn’t spoken to her since. And this was after he asked his first wife for a divorce when she was suffering from uterine cancer, in order to marry his second wife. Gingrich said at last night’s debate that the “open marriage” story is false, but given his history of affairs and divorces, Marianne Gingrich’s allegations strike me as credible. Who knows what the truth really is between two people, but if I had to pick, I’d believe Marianne Gingrich’s version over Newt’s version. Her allegations fits with the track record he’s got: you just never know what’s going to come out of his mouth—including asking for an “open marriage.”
Anyway, here’s the problem: most voters don’t think divorce is a deal-breaker when it comes to voting for a candidate. We all know people whose lives have fallen apart and whose marriages have collapsed, for any number of understandable reasons. And frankly, most of us really don’t care about candidates’ personal lives or dating habits. But what voters do object to in an elected official is an attitude of “the rules don’t apply to me.” That’s why we don’t like politicians who don’t pay their taxes, or who hire illegal workers, or who use official funds for personal expenses. It explains the lingering resentment many people had for late Sen. Ted Kennedy after Chappaquidick, for example. And while many misbehaving politicians eventually get caught and punished for their deeds, it’s that arrogance that started it all that gets people so mad.
This also explains why so many people are uncomfortable with the latest revelations about Newt Gingrich’s past. Clearly he doesn’t think the rules apply to him at all. Being a rule-breaker may be a good thing—in terms of innovative solutions, policy proposals, and even campaign decisions that defy conventional wisdom—and Gingrich is certainly that way. But when it comes to questions of character and integrity and doing the right thing, the rules are there for a reason. Too many people in Washington these days put themselves ahead of all else. The number of times Gingrich uses the word “I” is remarkable, and there’s a reason he’s constantly comparing himself to great figures in history. He’s got a grandiosity, an arrogance about him, that is striking. His ego is huge.
If it’s true, there’s a sentence in the Post story that says volumes: “He said the problem with me was I wanted him all to myself,” Marianne Gingrich said. “I said, ‘That’s what marriage is.'” On so many levels, Newt Gingrich doesn’t think the rules apply to him. He’s big, too important, too historic a figure in his own mind, to live by the rules the rest of us do. In that sense, Newt Gingrich will never be one of us.
By: Mary Kate Cary, U. S. News and World Report, January 20, 2012
Mitt Romney Has Signed Paul Ryan’s Suicide Note
Suddenly Republicans are wondering: is Mitt Romney really so electable after all?
Turns out Rick Santorum won Iowa. Newt Gingrich’s attacks on Romney’s record at Bain have drawn blood. More blood has flowed from Romney’s own admission this week that he pays a tax rate of only about 15 percent on his ample income. Then there’s Romney’s offhand dismissal of the $374,000 he earned in speaking fees in 2011—enough in itself to qualify Romney for the top 1 percent—as “not very much.” All of which has led political analyst Jeff Greenfield to quip, “Only way for Mitt to look more like embodiment of wealth is to wear a top hat and monocle (thank God he doesn’t smoke cigars!)”.
Yet in itself, great personal wealth need not be an obstacle to the presidency. John F. Kennedy was wealthier than Mitt Romney, and Lyndon Johnson not a lot less so. The two Roosevelts were likewise far from poor; ditto the two Bushes.
Romney, however, seems already type-cast as a dangerously out-of-touch Richie Rich.
The journalists and commentators who watch his campaign tend to blame Romney personally for the disconnect. Little gaffes get magnified into campaign-wrecking disasters, like describing $374,000 in speaking fees as “not much.”
But when a campaign is connecting, it can ride out gaffes. Bill Clinton reached the White House despite Hillary Clinton dismissing at-home moms as “staying home to bake cookies,” and Obama rode out the fuss triggered by a tape recording of his description of rural white voters “clinging to their guns and religion.”
Romney’s trouble is not his too-pressed shirts or his too-coiffed hair or even his tax returns. Bill and Hillary Clinton also had a tax return problem in 1992: it was revealed that they had claimed a tax deduction for donating used socks and underwear to Goodwill. It looked petty and grasping. They won anyway.
Romney’s problem is not his wealth. It is his apparent lack of concern for others’ nonwealth. But that lack of concern has been sharpened to a dangerous point, not by Romney himself, but by the missteps of his party.
Why would the typical voter care whether Romney is rich or not? From the point of view of the typical voter at the median household income of $49,500, all the presidential candidates look rich. They almost always do.
The question of utmost concern to the voter is, what will these rich politicians do for me? Or to me?
And here’s where Romney faces his real challenge—2012 will be a tough re-elect for Barack Obama. When Democrats face tough elections, there is one thing they can always be counted on to do: accuse Republicans of having a secret plan to eliminate Medicare. Jimmy Carter did it in the presidential debate of 1980: “Governor Reagan, as a matter of fact, began his political career campaigning around this nation against Medicare.” Bill Clinton did it in his duel against Newt Gingrich in 1995-96: “Yesterday [congressional Republicans] sent me legislation that said—we will only keep the government going, and we will only let it pay its debts if and only if we accept their cuts in Medicare, their cuts in education, their cuts in the environment, and their repeal of 25 years of bipartisan commitments to protect the environment and public health.”
President Obama would dearly like to do it again in 2012. But this time, Republicans made it easy for him. Obama does not have to accuse them of having a secret plan to eliminate Medicare. In 2011, all but four House Republicans and all but five Senate Republicans voted for a very public plan to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from Americans younger than age 55.
The Paul Ryan plan would instead offer future retirees support to buy a private insurance plan—with the amount of the support rising at the rate of general inflation. If health care costs continue to rise during the next three decades at the same pace as in the past three decades, then—under this proposal—today’s 30-somethings would receive support sufficient to cover about 25 percent of their Medicare costs, leaving them to find the other 75 percent themselves. The money saved would be applied to balance the budget and finance a big tax cut, reducing the top income-tax rate to 28 percent from the otherwise scheduled 39.6 percent.
Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer at the time expressed worry that the Ryan plan might prove a “suicide note.”
And at first Mitt Romney shrewdly kept his distance. “I appreciate what Paul Ryan has done,” Romney said on May 27, 2011, and cautiously added, “I’m going to have my own plan.” Asked whether he’d sign the plan, Romney demurred: “That’s the kind of speculation that is getting the cart ahead of the horse.”
A week later, Romney’s resistance was weakening. Asked June 2, 2011, whether he would sign the Ryan plan if it comes to him, he said yes, but added again, “I’m going to have my own plan.”
Through the fall, Romney yielded more and more ground to pressure from congressional Republicans entranced by Ryan’s vision.
In November, Romney did at last release that Medicare plan of his own. Structurally, the Romney plan resembled Ryan’s. But it remained vague on the key feature: how much premium support would future seniors get?
Then Gingrich began to rise in the polls, the first adversary to seriously worry the Romney campaign. To protect his right flank, Romney in December for the first time expressed unequivocal support for the Ryan plan—and the end of the Medicare guarantee for those now under 55.
Would a President Romney do such a thing? Would Congress really ultimately go along with it? Probably not and certainly not. But can President Obama credibly allege that a President Romney might do it? And will those allegations exact an electoral cost?
If the answers to those questions prove to be “yes,” conservative critics will blame Romney for his “weakness” as a candidate. But the real weakness will be that Romney acceded to those conservatives’ pressure to co-sign Paul Ryan’s suicide note.
By: David Frum, The Daily Beast, January 20, 2012
“Taxes At The Top”: Low Taxes On The Very Rich Are Indefensible
Call me peculiar, but I’m actually enjoying the spectacle of Mitt Romney doing the Dance of the Seven Veils — partly out of voyeurism, of course, but also because it’s about time that we had this discussion.
The theme of his dance, for those who haven’t been paying attention, is taxes — his own taxes. Although disclosure of tax returns is standard practice for political candidates, Mr. Romney has never done so, and, at first, he tried to stonewall the issue even in a presidential race. Then he said that he probably pays only about 15 percent of his income in taxes, and he hinted that he might release his 2011 return.
Even then, however, he will face pressure to release previous returns, too — like his father, who released 12 years of returns back when he made his presidential run. (The elder Romney, by the way, paid 37 percent of his income in taxes).
And the public has a right to see the back years: By 2011, with the campaign looming, Mr. Romney may have rearranged his portfolio to minimize awkward issues like his accounts in the Cayman Islands or his use of the justly reviled “carried interest” tax break.
But the larger question isn’t what Mitt Romney’s tax returns have to say about Mitt Romney; it’s what they have to say about U.S. tax policy. Is there a good reason why the rich should bear a startlingly light tax burden?
For they do. If Mr. Romney is telling the truth about his taxes, he’s actually more or less typical of the very wealthy. Since 1992, the I.R.S. has been releasing income and tax data for the 400 highest-income filers. In 2008, the most recent year available, these filers paid only 18.1 percent of their income in federal income taxes; in 2007, they paid only 16.6 percent. When you bear in mind that the rich pay little either in payroll taxes or in state and local taxes — major burdens on middle-class families — this implies that the top 400 filers faced lower taxes than many ordinary workers.
The main reason the rich pay so little is that most of their income takes the form of capital gains, which are taxed at a maximum rate of 15 percent, far below the maximum on wages and salaries. So the question is whether capital gains — three-quarters of which go to the top 1 percent of the income distribution — warrant such special treatment.
Defenders of low taxes on the rich mainly make two arguments: that low taxes on capital gains are a time-honored principle, and that they are needed to promote economic growth and job creation. Both claims are false.
When you hear about the low, low taxes of people like Mr. Romney, what you need to know is that it wasn’t always thus — and the days when the superrich paid much higher taxes weren’t that long ago. Back in 1986, Ronald Reagan — yes, Ronald Reagan — signed a tax reform equalizing top rates on earned income and capital gains at 28 percent. The rate rose further, to more than 29 percent, during Bill Clinton’s first term.
Low capital gains taxes date only from 1997, when Mr. Clinton struck a deal with Republicans in Congress in which he cut taxes on the rich in return for creation of the Children’s Health Insurance Program. And today’s ultralow rates — the lowest since the days of Herbert Hoover — date only from 2003, when former President George W. Bush rammed both a tax cut on capital gains and a tax cut on dividends through Congress, something he achieved by exploiting the illusion of triumph in Iraq.
Correspondingly, the low-tax status of the very rich is also a recent development. During Mr. Clinton’s first term, the top 400 taxpayers paid close to 30 percent of their income in federal taxes, and even after his tax deal they paid substantially more than they have since the 2003 cut.
So is it essential that the rich receive such a big tax break? There is a theoretical case for according special treatment to capital gains, but there are also theoretical and practical arguments against such special treatment. In particular, the huge gap between taxes on earned income and taxes on unearned income creates a perverse incentive to arrange one’s affairs so as to make income appear in the “right” category.
And the economic record certainly doesn’t support the notion that superlow taxes on the superrich are the key to prosperity. During that first Clinton term, when the very rich paid much higher taxes than they do now, the economy added 11.5 million jobs, dwarfing anything achieved even during the good years of the Bush administration.
So Mr. Romney’s tax dance is doing us all a service by highlighting the unwise, unjust and expensive favors being showered on the upper-upper class. At a time when all the self-proclaimed serious people are telling us that the poor and the middle class must suffer in the name of fiscal probity, such low taxes on the very rich are indefensible.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 19, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 