“Totally Unleashed”: Newt Gingrich, Agent of Chaos
Liberated from the fiction of actually trying to become president, Gingrich has become his truest self — a gleeful saboteur.
If there’s one thing we know about Newt Gingrich, it’s that he is a visionary. We know this because he tells us so, over and over again.
Even Gingrich, however, cannot quite envision a future in which he becomes the 2012 Republican nominee by securing a majority of delegates in advance of the convention this August. Instead, he has an altogether more revolutionary plan, as he told Greta Van Susteren on Wednesday:
I think it’s very possible we’re going to be at the end of all the primaries on June 26 and have nobody at 1,144.
And then we’re going to have a conversation about who would be the best person to defeat Barack Obama, and equally important, who’d be the best person to solve America’s problems and to move us in the right direction.
So next week in Louisiana is only half-time. We literally have half of all the delegates left to come. And I think we’ll keep picking up delegates. It’s a three-way race, I think, at the present time. I’m third among the three, but we’re continuing to campaign, continuing to develop ideas. And I have a hunch that just as has happened in the past, the more we watch Romney and Santorum fight, the more attractive I’ll look and the more I will regain strength as people look at my solutions, rather than politics as usual.
I don’t pretend to be a traditional politician. I’m somebody who wants to really have very large-scale change in Washington.
In various reports, Gingrich and his supporters continue to insist that he has no plans to quit the race. “I don’t care,” he said in another Fox interview Tuesday, in response to the question of whether he felt pressure to leave.
There has been much analysis of whether Gingrich remaining in the race helps Mitt Romney (by taking votes away from Rick Santorum) or, rather, helps Santorum (by taking delegates off the table and making it harder for Romney to get to the magic number of 1,144). I am agnostic on that question, though I tend to think Santorum overestimates his chances in a one-on-one with Romney.
But there is something frankly delightful, to coin a phrase, about seeing Gingrich totally unleashed in this way. No longer must he maintain the thin fiction of running a campaign with the actual, realistic goal of becoming president. He is free to act as a pure agent of chaos.
By: Molly Ball, The Atlantic, March 15, 2012
“Going Off The Cliff Together”: Why The GOP Should Pick Rick Santorum
A cleansing bout of craziness in 2012 could be just what the GOP needs.
I’m talking about a nominee so far to the right that conservative populists get their fondest wish—and the Republican Party is forced to learn from the result. Namely, that there is such a thing as too extreme.
The dangerous groupthink delusion being pushed in conservative circles over the last few years is that ideological purity and electability are one and the same. It is an idea more rooted in faith than reason.
If Mitt Romney does finally wrestle the nomination to the ground, and then loses to Obama, conservatives will blame the loss on his alleged moderation. The right wing take-away will be to try to nominate a true ideologue in 2016.
But if someone like Rick Santorum gets the nomination in an upset, the party faithful will get to experience the adrenaline rush of going off a cliff together, like Thelma and Louise—elation followed by an electoral thud.
This could be educational. After all, sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you recognize your problems.
Giving a self-identified “full-spectrum conservative” theo-con like Santorum the nomination would mean we’d really have a “choice, not an echo” election in November. Republicans would be forced to confront the fact that talk about Satan attacking America, negative obsessions with homosexuality, contraception and opposition to abortion even in cases of rape and incest alienates far more people than they attract.
Our politics are looking more and more like a cult because of unprecedented polarization—any issue where there is deviation from accepted orthodoxy leads to an attempted purge. It is absurd that clownish conservative caricatures like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain were briefly elevated to the top of the polls while more sober-minded presidential candidates with executive experience like Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman Jr. failed to gain any traction. The result is the weakest Republican field in living memory.
That the conservative favorite from 2008 is now derided as a RINO says more about the rightward lurch of the Republican Party than it does about Romney. You reap what you sow.
The Tea Party driven win of 2010 seems to have taught some in the GOP that firing up the base with extreme anti-Obama rhetoric leads to victories, and so candidates like Gingrich happily comply with talk about “Kenyan anti-colonial” mindsets and “secular socialist machines.” The obvious fact that this works better in comparatively low-turnout, high-intensity midterm elections than in the broader, more representative turnout of presidential years has been ignored, willfully or otherwise.
Likewise, it’s been scrubbed from many conservative’s memories that the Tea Party in 2010 used libertarian appeals to attract independents—avoiding more polarizing social issues and instead keeping a tight focus on fiscal ones like reducing the deficit and debt.
But in the wake of 2010, we’ve seen the social-conservative agenda reemerge with a vengeance, because Republican legislators in statehouses and Congress made it a priority. Not surprisingly, this has alienated independents, women, and young voters outside the conservative tribe.
But in a tribal time, ideological apparatchiks have outsize influence. They come to debates armed with their own facts. In their Kool-Aid-laden retelling of recent political history, unsuccessful GOP nominees like John McCain lost because of his independent center-right profile (rather than a backlash against the excesses of the Bush administration or the nomination of Sarah Palin). Barry Goldwater’s 44-state loss to Lyndon Johnson in 1964 is recast as a triumph because it allegedly led to Reagan’s landslide … 16 years later. Nixon’s 49-state win in 1972 is stripped from the history books as winning candidates with shades of gray in their resume—Ike’s successful center-right two terms, George H.W. Bush’s country-club conservatism, or even W’s 2000 call for “compassionate conservatism”—are ignored as ideologically inconvenient.
Goldwater would be attacked as a RINO today for his rejection of the religious right, his wife’s cofounding of Planned Parenthood in Arizona, or his early support of gays serving in the military. Some conservative activists turned on Reagan during his White House years (the editor of the Conservative Digest memorably wrote in the early ’80s, “Sometimes I wonder how much of a Reaganite Reagan really is”). Almost by definition, absolutists oversimplify, turning everything into a fight between angels and devils.
Giving conservative activists everything they want in a presidential nominee would ultimately be clarifying for the Republican Party. It would break the fever that has afflicted American politics turning fellow citizens against one another. It would restore a sense of balance, recognizing that it is unwise to systemically ignore the 40 percent of American voters who identify themselves as independent or the 35 percent who are centrist. After all, a successful political party requires both wings to fly.
There’s nothing like losing 40 states to refocus the mind.
By: John Avlon, The Daily Beast, March 16, 2012
Arizona’s “20th Century Boss” In 2012: Using Birth Control? You’re Fired!
First, a bill that gives immunity to doctors who lie to couples about the results of their prenatal tests in order to prevent them from getting an abortion. Now, a bill that would give your boss the green light to fire you for using birth control. You think I am kidding? I wish. For a decade now, Arizona insurance companies have been required to provide coverage for contraception just like other prescriptions. But, because they saw an opening to score some political points, some politicians there are suddenly moving to take that coverage away from women and their families.
And we aren’t talking here just about exemptions for religiously affiliated employers like Catholic hospitals and universities. We are talking about authorizing secular, for-profit employers to deny a woman coverage for birth control if the employer doesn’t believe that she and her partner should be allowed to have sex without getting pregnant. Yup, that’s right. If the owner of the Taco Bell where you work opposes birth control, Arizona legislators want to give him a legal right to deny you insurance coverage for your pills.
Sadly, that isn’t even the half of it. You may want to sit down for this one. Arizona legislators know that whether or not her insurance covers it, a woman may get the prescription she needs to prevent an unintended pregnancy. They want to give her boss the right to control that too. The bill they are pushing would not only allow employers to take the insurance coverage away, but it would also make it easier for an employer who finds out that his employee uses birth control to fire her. You heard me right . . . to fire her. And I thought Rush Limbaugh’s comments were as low as you could go on this one.
The Arizona bill has, incredibly, already passed one house, but we can still stop it. We’ve seen what can happen if we make our voices heard. So, if you’ve had enough; if you think the decision about whether to have a child is one for you and your partner, not your boss and your senator, I urge you to speak up now. Tell the legislators in Arizona to stop playing politics with women’s health and put personal and private decisions back in the hands of a woman and her family.
By: Jennifer Dalven, Reproductive Freedom Project, ACLU Blog, March 12, 2012
“No Acclamation For Mitt”: GOP Convention Floor Fight Starting To Look More Likely
Is it time to take the Republican convention seriously as a potential battleground?
Republicans should know better by now. Their still-putative nominee, Mitt Romney, lacks the conservative support to capture the kind of expectations-exceeding primary win necessary to capsize underfunded but motivated rivals Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich.
Romney didn’t do it in South Carolina, Colorado, or Tennessee. He proved unable once again Tuesday to claim victory in a state, Mississippi, that seemed tantalizingly within reach.
The months-long trend makes clear Romney will have to win the GOP nomination with math, not acclamation, steadily accumulating enough delegates in friendly contests until he reaches the nomination-clinching number of 1,144. But that path is fraught with risk. There is always the chance that he’ll fall just short of the magic number, which raises the possibility of a contested convention this August in Tampa.
The notion was mocked by many a month ago but now seems increasingly likely. “After last night, you have to start think it’s possible,'” said Republican political consultant Curt Anderson, a former political director of the Republican National Committee who advised Rick Perry before he quit the race. “It seems more possible than before, that’s for sure.” The Santorum and Gingrich campaigns are each eagerly embracing that very scenario.
In a memo released this week, the Santorum campaign argued that some delegates ostensibly pledged to Romney would switch to the onetime U.S. senator if Romney fails to win on the first ballot at the convention. Combined with a difficult remaining schedule for Romney, that dynamic ensures Romney won’t acquire enough delegates, the Santorum campaign contends.
“The reality is simple: The Romney math doesn’t add up, and he will have a very difficult time ever getting to a majority of the delegates,” the memo said. “The situation is only going to get worse for them and better for Rick Santorum as time passes. Simply put, time is on our side.”
That sentiment was echoed by Gingrich supporters, including Rick Tyler, an official with the Gingrich-allied super PAC Winning Our Future. “We’re in a position now where convention delegates are going to decide who nominee is,” Tyler told National Journal.
Whether Gingrich will be at the convention seems like more of an open question, even as the candidate himself vowed Tuesday night to make his case all the way to Tampa. “Because this is proportional representation, we’re going to leave Alabama and Mississippi with a substantial number of delegates, increasing our total going towards Tampa,” he said. “We’re going to take a much bigger delegation than we had yesterday.”
The former House speaker’s political base was supposed to reside in the Deep South, but the twin disappointments of Alabama and Mississippi will increase calls from some conservatives for him to step aside to let Santorum battle Romney one-on-one.
Gingrich’s viability could depend on his super PAC, which, with the benefit of multimillion dollar donations from casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, has kept him visible on TV and radio. Whether those funds will continue to flow to and from the outside group remains unclear — Tyler declined to comment. He did concede, however, that Gingrich had missed a chance Tuesday to “change the narrative.” He added, “That doesn’t mean it won’t change tomorrow.”
Tyler said Santorum, whose campaign has urged Gingrich to quit the race, actually would benefit from Gingrich sticking with it — that way, the two men can work together to gobble up enough delegates to prevent Romney from reaching 1,144 of them. As Gingrich put it Tuesday night, “the conservative candidates” (meaning himself and Santorum) “got nearly 70 percent of the vote” in Alabama and Mississippi.
The Romney campaign pointed out that despite the disappointing returns in the South, it still increased its delegate lead thanks to victories in Hawaii and American Samoa. The Associated Press delegate count Wednesday put Romney at 495. Santorum had 252 and Gingrich had 131 — well behind Romney even when added together.
“Our goal was to come in, take a third of the delegates,” Romney senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom said in an interview with CNN. “We’ll do that, and once the dust clears, you’ll be able to look and see that there really will be no ground that our opponents have made up against Mitt Romney, and as you look at the upcoming contest on the calendar, there are no opportunities for them to have significant wins that allow them to accumulate large numbers of delegates so they can close the gap with Mitt Romney.”
It may not be inspirational, and it may not prevent drama at the convention, but it’s a plan.
By: Alex Roarty, The Atlantic, March 14, 2012
Today’s Republican Party: “Grand, Old And Anti-Woman”
Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska got it half right on Tuesday when she told her Republican colleagues that their party was at risk of being painted as anti-woman. It would be more accurate to remove the hedges and say flat out that the G.O.P. is anti-woman.
There’s really no other conclusion to reach from the positions Republican lawmakers, and the contenders for the party’s presidential nomination, have taken on contraception, abortion and reproductive health services, including their obsession with putting Planned Parenthood out of business.
Republican opposition to reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act certainly won’t help the party’s reputation. That law, which provides federal money to investigate and prosecute domestic violence, has had broad bipartisan support since it was enacted in 1994. Congress renewed it in 2000 and 2005 without struggle.
Senate Democrats have revised the law to include LGBT victims of domestic violence, dating violence and sexual assault. New provisions would also allow more immigrant victims to claim temporary visas. The latest version has five Republican co-sponsors, but it failed to garner a single Republican vote in the Judiciary Committee last month.
Despite what Republicans might say to the press, the Democrats did not dream up these changes to infuriate their opponents—they were responding to calls from groups that help victims of domestic violence. A 2010 report from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs detailed a woeful shortage of services for LGBT violence victims – including scarce access to shelters. An expanded Violence Against Women Act would reflect the reality of American life in the 21st century – when gay men and lesbians actually get married and illegal immigrants cannot merely be deported or wished away.
Naturally, certain out-of-control right-wingers are eager to fight over this bill. Phyllis Schlafly said last month that it promoted “divorce, breakup of marriage and hatred of men.” Because, I guess, women whose husbands are beating them should stay in those relationships and just try to work it out. Or maybe because if we provide assistance to lesbian women whose girlfriends beat them up, straight women will hate their boyfriends. (Honestly, what is the logic here?)
But Congressional Republicans are scared of another tussle. They are bleating that it’s not fair to attach these provisions in an election year, because voting them down would make Republicans look bad. Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, put it this way: “I favor the Violence Against Women Act and have supported it at various points over the years, but there are matters put on that bill that almost seem to invite opposition,” he said.
They only invite opposition if you are ant-immigrant or homophobic.
Including same-sex couples in domestic violence programs would not diminish their value for couples of opposite genders in any conceivable way. And giving a battered illegal immigrant woman a temporary visa is not a threat to national security.
The real agenda here is obvious: If a federal bill recognizes that there is such a thing as domestic violence in same-sex families, then that implicitly recognizes the legitimacy of those couples and that could lead – gasp – to giving them actual rights.
By: Andrew Rosenthal, The Loyal Opposition, The New York Times, March 15, 2012
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