Has Mitt Romney’s Hit Job On Newt Gingrich Gone Too Far?
After South Carolina, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s campaign decided it was time to change their strategy toward former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. It was time to take him out, similar to what they did in Iowa. Take no prisoners, forget Obama for the moment, and direct their fire at Gingrich. Smart strategy? Of course. The only strategy, really, since back-to-back victories in South Carolina and Florida would have been devastating to Romney, certainly in the short term.
But has the Romney camp gone too far?
Now, I am not going to defend Newt Gingrich in the slightest—I am talking tactics here.
Let me first make the argument for the strategy they have adopted. Gingrich is like the Jason character from the Friday the 13th horror movies. He keeps coming back!
He grabs the attention of Tea Party voters and hard-core conservatives and he has shown he can mobilize them. He is colorful and a press magnet. Left unchecked, he has shown that he can move poll numbers in his favor with his debate appearances. Also, he has raised serious money after his victories and rising poll blips, and he has the Adelsons—casino moguls from Nevada—who have put over $10 million into his campaign and can give more out of their petty cash fund. He even eclipsed Romney in national polls.
In short, you ignore Newt at your peril. A failure to engage would have been a disastrous strategy.
Nevertheless, Romney and his Super-PACs have spent $15 million and counting to tear into Gingrich like a pit bull on steroids. They have decided that they will not let up until he is crushed in Florida. This all-or-nothing strategy has a few problems. First, Romney’s negative poll numbers have skyrocketed to very damaging levels. He may take Newt out in Florida, but it is costing him big time. Only Sen. John Kerry had net negative numbers at this point in the race and it certainly affected his candidacy. Second, Gingrich is furious and is pulling out all the stops to take on Romney. He has nothing to lose. This is his last campaign and he is all in. It seems Newt wants Mitt’s hide almost as much as Obama’s.
Finally, though no debates are scheduled until late February, these are moneymakers for the networks, and my guess is someone will attempt to pull several together next month. Gingrich will go back to his plan of fighting Romney with the press and appearances. He has been enraged by Romney’s surrogates tailing him and engaging reporters, and he is very likely to adopt the same tactic(as he promised to do against Obama).
Newt sees this as a long slog and he wants to grab as many delegates as he can in these non winner-take-all states, challenge Romney everywhere he is able, and hope that he can secure the nomination in the end. Through all this, former Sen. Rick Santorum hangs in and hopes that he can somehow come up the side, as these two engage in hand-to-hand combat.
The question really is not whether Romney should have taken on Gingrich. He had to, of course. But, given Gingrich’s personality and where he is as a candidate, should he have pulled some of the ads and mixed more positive spots in this last week in Florida? Would it have made any difference? Has he bought himself a drubbing of Gingrich and will this either force Newt out or embolden him to fight on? That’s hard to know. But my guess is that the over-the-top negative strategy may well come back to haunt Romney. It certainly provides plenty of material for the Obama campaign to use leading up to November.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, January 30, 2012
“Moon Dreams”: Newt Gingrich Redecorates The Oval Office
Not only has the former speaker of the House banked on winning a second term; he has his first day in office planned.
Newt Gingrich has been roundly mocked by both the media and his opponents for his preposterous proposal to build a moon base by 2020. As outlandish as that claim may be, it’s nothing compared to the promises Gingrich offered yesterday during a campaign stop at The Villages, a planned retirement community in central Florida.
A huge crowd of seniors—numbering possibly in the thousands—packed into a parking lot outside a Barnes & Noble on a warm and sunny afternoon. A hot-dog stand held a steady line throughout the event, and its neighbor stand offered a full bar of beer and liquors. Golf carts—the apparent vehicle of choice in the area—whizzed by, fighting with SUVs for parking spots.
It was a bizarre scene, but nowhere near as ridiculous as the tail end of Gingrich’s speech. Overall, it was mostly his standard stump, with a few extra zingers directed at Mitt Romney. Then, near the end, he offered a laundry list of promised accomplishments. This wasn’t the typical first 100 days agenda; the proposals were all things Gingrich promised to achieve by his very first day in the White House:
- “I will ask the new Congress to stay in session on January 3, and I will ask them first to repeal Obamacare. I can ask them to repeal Obamacare, because I haven’t passed something that resembles it.”
- “I will also ask them in the same session to repeal the Dodd-Frank bill, which is killing banks.”
- “I will ask them to repeal the Sarbanes-Oxley bill.”
- “On the inauguration day, about two hours after the inaugural address, I will sign a series of executive orders. All of them will have been published by October 1, everyone in America will know what is coming.”
- “The very first executive order will eliminate all of the White House czars.”
- “My goal would be, by the end of that first day—about the time that President Obama arrives back in Chicago—that we will have dismantled about 40 percent of his government on the opening day.”
“I think this is doable,” Gingrich said. The former speaker expects each of the bills to have already passed and be ready for him to sign on the first day of his hypothetical presidency. “On January 20, I will sign all three as a sign of our seriousness about changing Washington,” he said.
By: Patrick Caldwell, The American Prospect, January 30, 2012
Why Mitch McConnell Should Avoid Discussing The Debt
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was asked about an extension of the payroll tax break yesterday, but instead of answering the question, the Republican changed the subject. The subject on McConnell’s mind was the debt.
“We have this problem at the risk of being repetitious, because we spend way too much. We now have a debt the size of our economy. We look a lot like Greece. We’re heading toward western Europe. If you want to see what happens, just look across the Atlantic. That’s the direction we’re headed in.
“Under this administration, we’ve run the national debt up 43 percent in just three years.”
McConnell first started equating the U.S. and Greece last summer, and the argument is not improving with age.
In every meaningful way, the comparison is just silly. The U.S. has extremely low interest rates and foreign investors are happy to loan us money; Greece has extremely high interest rates and no one is eager to loan the country money. The U.S. has its own currency; Greece has the euro. We have a manageable debt; Greece has a debt crisis. We’re a large country with an enormous economy; Greece is a small country with a small economy. We have one of the world’s most stable systems of government (at least for now); Greece’s government structure is suspect.
For a leading senator to tell a national television audience that the United States looks “a lot like Greece” is a clear reminder: McConnell is not to be taken seriously on these issues.
Incidentally, there’s also the matter of McConnell’s credibility on fiscal issues, or in his case, the lack thereof. The Republican leader voted for the Bush tax cuts, and added the costs to the national debt. He voted to finance the war in Afghanistan by adding the costs to the national debt. McConnell voted to put the costs of the war in Iraq onto the national debt. He supported a massive expansion of the government’s role in health care (Medicare Part D) and voted to pile all of its costs right onto the national debt. The GOP leader even backed the Wall Street bailout and added the bill to the national debt.
Perhaps Mitch McConnell should choose something else to complain about.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 30, 2012
Plaintiffs Challenging Affordable Care Act In The Supreme Court Admit That The Law Is Constitutional
One of the oddest arguments made by the plaintiffs now challenging the Affordable Care Act before the Supreme Court is a claim that, if just one small part of the law is declared unconstitutional, the whole law must fall with it. The overwhelming majority of judges who have heard ACA cases rejected the ridiculous claim that any part of the law is unconstitutional. And, of the handful of judges to strike part of the law down, only one — the guy who included an explicit shout-out to the Tea Partyin his opinion — accepted the legally indefensible position that the whole law must fall.
In their attempt to see the entire Affordable Care Act fall, however, several of the plaintiffs challenging the law committed what should be a fatal blunder — they effectively admit that their entire constitutional challenge to the law is garbage.
The primary attack on the ACA targets its provision requiring most Americans to either carry health insurance or pay slightly more income taxes — the so-called “individual mandate.” This insurance coverage provision exists because without it, the law’s other provisions ensuring that people with preexisting conditions can obtain insurance cannot be implemented. If patients can wait until they get sick to buy insurance, they will drain all the money out of an insurance plan that they have not previously paid into, massively driving up costs for the rest of the plan’s consumers.
This problem doesn’t just make the insurance coverage requirement good policy, it also makes it constitutional. The Constitution doesn’t just give Congress sweeping authority to regulate the national economy, it also authorizes it “[t]o make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution” regulations of interstate commerce. As conservative Justice Antonin Scalia explains, this means that, “where Congress has the authority to enact a regulation of interstate commerce, it possesses every power needed to make that regulation effective.”
So, with this background in mind, consider the following passage from the private plaintiffs’ brief arguing that the entire law must fall if the insurance coverage rule goes down:
The mandate was intended to be a direct subsidy to insurance companies, as compensation for requiring them (in the guaranteed-issue provision) to insure against “risks” that have already come to pass and forbidding them (in the community-rating provision) from using actuarially sound insurance premiums. The mandate thus works to counteract the powerful inflationary impacts of these other provisions, which would otherwise make premiums in the individual insurance market prohibitively expensive, thereby frustrating Congress’ goal of affordable health insurance. And Congress further viewed the mandate as necessary to prevent “adverse selection” to “game” the new insurance rules, which proponents warned would spark a “death spiral” in insurance.
The guaranteed-issue and community-rating requirements thus cannot operate without the mandate in the manner intended by Congress. Rather, “their associated force—not one or the other but both combined—was deemed by Congress to be necessary to achieve the end sought.” To strike the mandate alone would impermissibly eliminate a central quid pro quo of the Act. If the mandate falls, the guaranteed-issue and community-rating regulations must therefore fall with it, as the Government itself has conceded.
So the plaintiffs admit that, without the insurance coverage requirement, premiums will become “prohibitively expensive” and that the ACA’s provisions protecting people with preexisting conditions or who otherwise are highly likely to need health care (what are known as “guaranteed-issue” and “community-rating” laws in the jargon of health policy) “cannot operate without the mandate in the manner intended by Congress.” This is a flat out admission that the Scalia Rule applies in this case. Guaranteed issue and community rating are regulations of interstate commerce, and thus Congress has “every power needed” to make them effective — including the power to enact the insurance coverage requirement.
I discuss this rather breathtaking admission at greater length in an amicus brief I filed Friday on behalf of several health provider organizations, which also includes some more details about why the plaintiffs’ attempt to take out the entire ACA has no basis in law. Ultimately, however, there is no need whatsoever for the justices to consider how much of the law stands or falls without the coverage requirement. The private plaintiffs already gave away the farm when they admitted that their entire legal challenge rests on a crumbling foundation.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, January 30, 2012
The “Truths” Mitt Romney Is Willing to Tell
The great German filmmaker Werner Herzog has an illuminating formulation to describe his unorthodox way of making documentaries. There is, Herzog says, an “accountant’s truth,” and there is an “ecstatic truth.”
Herzog is all about seeking the latter, as he explained to Slate magazine:
In his own nonfiction films, Herzog wants to tell stories and he doesn’t feel beholden to fact. His approach to documentary is an alternative to cinema vérité, the observational aesthetic that proceeds “as if presenting facts was everything.” Just because something is factually true, he argues, “it does not constitute truth per se.” Herzog likes to respond to and collaborate with his subjects; if he bends fact—by inventing dialogue, for instance—it is to the ends of “truth.” The Manhattan phone directory provides millions of correct entries, he says, “but it doesn’t inspire you”; in the film, he says it doesn’t tell you what Manhattanites dream. Instead of fact, which is the “accountant’s truth,” he is after the kind of “ecstatic truth” available to poetry: “These moments are rare but I’m trying to find them, which is why I have had different goals from some of my colleagues.”
Which “truth” is former Gov. Mitt Romney going to tell about President Barack Obama’s administration: the accountant’s truth or the ecstatic truth?
Romney telling an accountant’s truth would sound something like his interview with radio host Laura Ingraham, wherein President Obama inherited a bad economy that has improved modestly despite, not because of, the efforts of his administration:
The economy always gets better after a recession, there is always a recovery. There’s never been a time anywhere in the world where an economy has never recovered. The question is, has it recovered by virtue of something the president’s done or has he delayed the recovery and made it more painful?
To stick with the Herzog formulation, Romney is here reciting the political equivalent of the Manhattan phone directory—uninspiring, to say the least.
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s success, such as it is, lies in his willingness to tell what conservatives would consider the “ecstatic truth”: that Obama is a radical un-American to his core; that he is anti-work and pro-dependency.
Savvy conservatives know very well that telling the accountant’s truth about Obama is not going to be enough to defeat him, and they’re worried that Romney isn’t mean enough to deliver the necessary payload of ecstasy.
I think this fear is misplaced.
If you had asked me a couple months ago, I would’ve said (actually, I did say) there are places Romney just won’t go in order to get himself elected. I no longer believe that. He was posturing all along—trying to remain above the fray for as long as he could. After South Carolina, that became untenable. The Romney campaign’s self-described “destruction” of Gingrich in Florida is an indication of how much he means business.
We know this: Romney is wildly ambitious and willing to lie.
Whether enough Americans are going to buy the ecstatic truth from an uncharismatic plutocrat with a strange-seeming religion is an open question. But I have no doubt that Romney will try to sell it.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, January 30, 2012
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