The Iowa Caucuses Are Un-American
Maybe it’s the fact that it’s in Iowa that the first presidential caucuses are charming. Iowa doesn’t feel like a place where big money and fancy suits win electoral contests (and it’s not; one of the most endearing characteristics about former Republican Rep. Jim Leach was that he wore sweaters under his suitcoats). But without the down-home nature of Midwestern Iowa setting the mood, the caucuses by very definition feel disturbingly un-American.
Caucuses aren’t really free elections. They’re meetings at which group dynamics and peer (or nonpeer) pressure is present and can have an impact on who wins the day. There is no privacy, no secret vote. Friends or married couples who might have deceived each other about whom they were voting for won’t be able to keep the lie alive in a caucus. That might be laudable on some Dr. Phil meter of honesty, but it’s not good for the electoral system. Free and fair elections demand secret ballots.
Watching a caucus can be fascinating to the outsider, and can provide insights to observers and campaign workers alike about who has what constituency group. At the Nevada caucuses in 2008–one of them held, appropriate, at a casino hotel ballroom in Las Vegas–the division was stark. The housekeepers, many of them Latina, huddled on one side of the room, cheering for Hillary Clinton. The showgirls and other younger casino workers gathered in smaller clusters for Barack Obama. It provided an interesting visual, and one that backed the polls: Clinton had a loyal following among Hispanics, and had earned support from those female wage-earners, despite official support for Obama from the casino workers’ union. But there was something very creepy about the public display of individual support, especially since it wasn’t voluntary. There is no opportunity, in a presidential caucus, to give a private endorsement of any candidate.
Iowans have been doing this a long time, and are no doubt used to giving up the opportunity to cast a secret ballot. Will it make some voters feel pressured to support one candidate or another? Will some feel isolated, casting a ballot for a Jon Huntsman or even a falling Michele Bachmann, fearful of looking silly for backing a candidate now seen as having little chance of winning the GOP nomination? Public protest and free speech are honorable, and are American rights. But so is choosing to be quiet about one’s political views.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, January 2, 2012
“Bain Capitalist”: Mitt Romney Haunted By His Victims
During Mitt Romney’s Senate campaign 17 years ago, the Republican politician was faring quite well against Ted Kennedy, right up until voters started hearing from some of Romney’s victims.
To briefly review, Romney got very rich running a private-equity firm, Bain Capital, which broke up companies and laid off American workers. He had considerable success orchestrating leveraged buyouts, seeking taxpayer subsidies, flipping companies quickly for large profits, and making money for investors, even when the employees of those companies were deemed collateral damage.
In the 1994 campaign, this mattered. Many of Romney’s victims drove to Massachusetts to protest the Republican’s campaign, and Democrats put together a half-dozen ads featuring laid-off workers who said they suffered while Romney lined his pockets at their expense.
It proved effective in 1994, and Dems hope it will work again in 2012.
A former employee of Bain Capital, GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney’s former company, said Sunday that Romney’s decisions cost him and many others their jobs.
Randy Johnson said Sunday that the former Massachusetts governor’s decisions as Bain’s CEO put him out of work.
Romney was the chief executive officer of Bain Capital in 1992 when the company purchased American Pad & Paper, or Ampad, and oversaw the management of that company and others.
Ampad went bankrupt in 2000, and investors netted over $100 million from the deal, according to the Boston Globe.
Johnson told reporters yesterday, “I really feel that he didn’t care about the workers. It was all about profit over people.”
For its part, the Romney campaign recently began arguing that critics of Bain Capital’s layoffs are borderline communists, trying to “put free enterprise on trial.”
Between this and Romney’s agenda — take away health care coverage from millions, tax breaks for the wealthy, free reign for Wall Street, more foreclosures — the “man of the people” routine may prove to be a tough sell.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 2, 2011
Republican Presidential Primary: A Quiz for All Seasons
What a big week coming up! New Year’s Day and then the Iowa caucuses! Doesn’t get any better than that. And, in honor of this double-whammy of exciting events, here’s the End-of-the-Year Republican Presidential Primary Quiz:
I. Which of the following has Rick Perry not gotten wrong, so far, during his presidential campaign:
A) Number of Supreme Court justices
B) Legal voting age in the United States
C) Date of the election
D) Whether New Hampshire has a primary or caucuses
E) Number of stars on the Texas state flag
F) Name of the late leader of North Korea
G) Century in which the American Revolution was fought
II. “I was born free!/Born free!/Free, like a river raging. … Wild, like an untamed stallion” is a quote from:
A) The opening of Rick Perry’s biography
B) Newt Gingrich’s third wedding vows
C) Mitt Romney’s campaign theme song
D) Ron Paul poem entitled “World Without Fed”
III. Match the speaker:
1) “She was hot and got ratings.”
2) “He’s a big cereal hound.”
3) “I had dinner last night with Jim Perry. I was impressed with him.”
4) “He’s on the battlefield right now fighting the battles God wants him to fight. The only way I get through it is daily Mass and keeping my prayer life in order.”
5) “She hates Muslims. She hates them. She wants to go get ’em.”
6) “… He really wants my endorsement. I mean, he wants it very badly.”
A) Ann Romney on husband Mitt
B) Donald Trump on Mitt Romney
C) Donald Trump on Rick Perry
D) Karen Santorum on husband Rick
E) Roger Ailes on Sarah Palin
F) Ron Paul on Michele Bachmann
IV. Finish the quote:
1. Rick Perry: “Maybe it’s time to have some provocative language in this country and say things like”:
A) “Yippee Ki Yay.”
B) “Nobody likes Mitt Romney. Face it.”
C) “Close the Departments of Education, Commerce and, yes, Energy!”
D) “Let’s get America working again”
2. Ron Paul on border security: “Every time you think of a fence, keeping all those bad people out, think about maybe those fences being used”:
A) “To keep in those alligators Herman Cain talks about.”
B) “As building materials.”
C) “Against us. Keeping us in.”
D) “For 2,000 miles worth of graffiti.”
3. Michele Bachmann: “There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe”:
A) “In intelligent design.”
B) “That vaccines cause mental retardation.”
C) “That the founding fathers eliminated slavery.”
D) “That I should be president of the United States.”
V. Match the money:
1) Said mortgage giant Freddie Mac paid him $300,000 for his advice “as a historian.”
2) Double-dipping gets him a quarter-million in state salary and pension combined.
3) Got $68,000 for appearing at the International Franchise Association convention in Las Vegas.
4) Although he appears sort of unemployed, he actually made $970,000 last year.
A) Rick Santorum
B) Newt Gingrich
C) Mitt Romney
D) Rick Perry
VI. Match the candidate with a high point from his book:
1) Mitt Romney
2) Herman Cain
3) Rick Perry
4) Ron Paul
5) Newt Gingrich
A) He’s “the kind of guy who goes jogging in the morning, packing a Ruger .380 with laser sights and loaded with hollow-point bullets and shoots a coyote that is threatening his daughter’s dog.”
B) Tells the reader how to become the C.E.O. of Self.
C) “Chicken-hawks are individuals who dodged the draft when their numbers came up but who later became champions of senseless and undeclared wars when they were influencing foreign policy. Former Vice President Cheney is the best example of this disgraceful behavior.”
D) His daughter and co-author tells about the time she averted a meltdown during a TV makeup session by begging her father to “Close your eyes and go to a happy place.”
E) “I love jokes and I love laughing.”
ANSWERS:
I-E; II-C; III: 1-E, 2-A, 3-C, 4-D, 5-F, 6-B; IV: 1-D, 2-C, 3-A; V: 1-B, 2-D; 3-C; 4-A; VI: 1-E, 2-B, 3-A, 4-C, 5-D.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 30, 2011
Iowa Caucuses Are As Distorted As A Funhouse Mirror
When the Iowa caucus results trickle in Tuesday night, the usual rules of mathematics may be suspended.
In normal elections, the candidate who garners the most votes is the undisputed winner. But the caucuses are anything but normal.
Instead, the raw totals will be put through a Cuisinart of spin and obfuscation as the campaigns, the operatives, and the pundits try to whip up their desired electoral concoction.
All this unfolds against the backdrop of an expectations game that isn’t unlike the Wall Street casino, where beating the analysts’ consensus each quarter is more important than earnings per share.
Take Mitt Romney, surely the most maligned front-runner of modern times. The former governor spent the year fostering the notion that he wasn’t really playing in Iowa, where he got trounced in 2008, but had to abandon that charade when Newt Gingrich started coming on strong. That’s why Romney spent New Year’s weekend racing through the cornfields.
If Romney prevails at the caucuses, he is the undisputed winner, gets a slingshot into New Hampshire, the quasi-home state where he’s already favored, and could all but wrap this thing up within a week.
But if Romney finishes second, he could still be declared the winner—that is, if Ron Paul finishes first. The logic is that nobody outside the congressman’s inner circle sees him as a serious threat to win the Republican nomination. So a Paul victory will be immediately discounted by the press as a fluke—but good news for Romney because it prevents a more viable rival such as Gingrich from getting an Iowa bounce. Paul, meanwhile, loses by winning. Got that?
Rick Santorum was virtually ignored by the media until he blipped up to 15 or 16 percent in three polls last week and triggered the promiscuous use of the S-word, surge. Suddenly he was everywhere, including the Today show. If Santorum finishes third, he will be crowned a winner simply because he had been so far back in the pack.
For Newt, the situation is reversed. Six weeks ago, the media would have treated word that he might place third in the caucuses as a stunning comeback, given that the former speaker was widely written off after his campaign imploded last summer. Then Gingrich rocketed into first place in the polls and expectations soared; he might actually win Iowa! Romney would be mortally wounded! Uh, not so fast. That was before a super PAC with close ties to Romney unleashed a barrage of nearly $3 million in anti-Newt attack ads, which amounted to nearly half of all political commercials aired in the Hawkeye State.
Suddenly, Gingrich was saying he’d be happy to finish in the top four, and his campaign manager said fifth place would be just fine—not a particularly effective attempt to move the goalposts. If Gingrich does somehow make it to the top three, he can do a victory dance.
(Think this stuff doesn’t matter? Bill Clinton effectively won the 1992 New Hampshire primary by declaring himself the “Comeback Kid,” even though he finished second, because he clawed his way back from womanizing and draft-dodging allegations. But the trick got old. When Joe Lieberman in 2004 exulted over being in “a three-way split decision for third place,” despite being mired in single digits in New Hampshire, everyone scoffed.)
Finishing out of the “top tier,” as defined by the media-politico complex, would be bad news for Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, both of whom briefly led the Iowa polls. Every time they turn around, reporters will be asking whether they plan to drop out. In such an environment, fundraising tends to dry up, a vicious cycle that forces most candidates to the sidelines.
To underscore the absurdity of the process further, 119,000 Republicans turned out four years ago, so these distinctions about who grabbed a ticket out of Iowa and who didn’t often turn on one candidate pulling a thousand votes more than the next one. And these aren’t just ordinary voters, but people willing to sit through a community meeting at 7 p.m. on a cold January night. What’s more, no delegates are awarded on caucus night, which simply starts a long and complicated process.
Why, then, does Iowa—a state far whiter and more rural than most of America—get to play such an outsize role? Well, it performs more of a winnowing function in GOP contests, where the evangelical vote can be as high as 40 percent. Mike Huckabee went nowhere after winning the caucuses in 2008, while John McCain, who finished fourth, wound up as the nominee. Iowa is in some ways a funhouse mirror, distorting the process as everyone else suspends disbelief and plays along.
State officials, such as Gov. Terry Branstad, tell me Iowa deserves its kickoff spot because the well-informed citizenry peppers the candidates with tough questions. But even they had to admit there was far less of that this year, when the candidates spent much of their time in TV studios and at network-sponsored debates rather than pressing the flesh in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids.
If Santorum finishes strongly—and he’s largely escaped media scrutiny because his rise began in the final week—it will partially vindicate the old-fashioned shoe-leather approach. He conducted more than 300 events in the state. Now he’s talking about making a stand in New Hampshire, knowing full well the way the press scores these things. “We just have to exceed expectations, which right now are pretty low,” Santorum told Politico.
But that in turn depends on whether Santorum’s Iowa vote is deemed better than expected, worse than expected, or somewhere in the muddled middle. Within a day or two the press will be obsessing about New Hampshire, and except for those left behind as roadkill, Iowa may well prove not to have mattered very much.
By: Howard Kurtz, The Daily Beast, January 2, 2012
How Ron Paul’s Libertarian Principles Support Racism
The furor over the racist newsletters published by Ron Paul in the nineties is, in some ways, more revealing than the newsletters themselves. In a series of responses by Paul and his supporters ranging from anguished essays to angry dismissals to crazed conspiracy diagrams (check out page seven), the basic shape of the Paul response has emerged. Paul argues that he was completely unaware that, for many years, the newsletter purporting to express his worldview consistently expressed vicious racism.
This is wildly implausible, but let’s grant the premise, because it sets up the more interesting argument. Paul’s admirers have tried to paint the racist newsletters as largely separate from his broader worldview, an ungainly appendage that could be easily removed without substantially altering the rest. Tim Carney argues:
Paul’s indiscretions — such as abiding 9/11 conspiracy theorists and allowing racist material in a newsletter published under his name — will be blown up to paint a scary caricature. His belief in state’s rights and property rights will be distorted into support for Jim Crow and racism.
The stronger version of this argument, advanced by Paul himself, is that racism is not irrelevant to his ideology, but that his ideology absolves him of racism. “Libertarians are incapable of being racist,” he has said, “because racism is a collectivist idea, you see people in groups.” Most libertarians may not take the argument quite as far as Paul does – many probably acknowledge that it is possible for a libertarian to hold racist views – but it does help explain their belief that racism simply has no relation to the rest of Paul’s beliefs. They genuinely see racism as a belief system that expresses itself only in the form of coercive government power. In Paul’s world, state-enforced discrimination is the only kind of discrimination. A libertarian by definition opposes discrimination because libertarians oppose the state. He cannot imagine social power exerting itself through any other form.
You can see this premise at work in Paul’s statements about civil rights. In a 2004 statement condemning the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Paul laid out his doctrinaire libertarian opposition. “[T]he forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty,” he wrote. “The federal government has no legitimate authority to infringe on the rights of private property owners to use their property as they please and to form (or not form) contracts with terms mutually agreeable to all parties.”
Paul views every individual as completely autonomous, and he is incapable of imagining any force other than government power that could infringe upon their actual liberty. White people won’t hire you? Then go form a contract with somebody else. Government intervention can only make things worse.
The same holds true of Paul’s view of sexual harassment. In his 1987 book, he wrote that women who suffer sexual harassment should simply go work somewhere else: “Employee rights are said to be valid when employers pressure employees into sexual activity. Why don’t they quit once the so-called harassment starts?” This reaction also colored his son Rand Paul’s response to sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain, which was to rally around Cain and grouse that he can’t even tell jokes around women any more.
This is an analysis that makes sense only within the airtight confines of libertarian doctrine. It dissipates with even the slightest whiff of exposure to external reality. The entire premise rests upon ignoring the social power that dominant social groups are able to wield outside of the channels of the state. Yet in the absence of government protection, white males, acting solely through their exercise of freedom of contract and association, have historically proven quite capable of erecting what any sane observer would recognize as actual impediments to the freedom of minorities and women.
The most fevered opponents of civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s – and, for that matter, the most fervent defenders of slavery a century before – also usually made their case in in process terms rather than racist ones. They stood for the rights of the individual, or the rights of the states, against the federal Goliath. I am sure Paul’s motives derive from ideological fervor rather than a conscious desire to oppress minorities. But the relationship between the abstract principles of his worldview and the ugly racism with which it has so frequently been expressed is hardly coincidental.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, January 2, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 