The “Inevitability” Challenge: Mitt Romney Has No Base
There was nothing inevitable about Mitt Romney on Tuesday night. And should he lose any other significant primary contests in the weeks to come, he won’t be the most electable, either. Indeed, Romney’s humiliating defeats in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado this week have blown a potentially fatal hole in the argument that the least-conservative candidate would be embraced by the GOP’s conservative base because they simply have no choice.
What Rick Santorum’s upset victories proved this week has been true all along — that the former Massachusetts governor has no base of loyal supporters in the party, and that the most conservative voters are desperate for another choice. It was true when the party flirted with Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich. It is still true now. Though as the nominating contests began, Romney’s impressive organization and considerable resources began to pay dividends, he has failed to excite conservatives even where he wins. While turnout increased slightly in New Hampshire, it decreased in Nevada and Florida from totals in 2008.
Such weaknesses are hardly building blocks of a nomination, and are liabilities Romney must mitigate to win the nomination and then win in the fall. Without adequate conservative support and energy behind his candidacy, Romney would lose to President Obama — just ask John McCain. The most active and enthusiastic conservatives, who will be critical to voter turnout in the general election, rejected Romney’s inevitability this week and sent the message Santorum declared as he started his victory speech, that “conservatism is alive and well.”
Romney’s campaign writes off the non-binding caucuses and primaries Santorum won and notes that the delegate count, with Romney ahead 3 to 1, remains unchanged. Missouri’s primary was a straw poll, or “beauty contest,” and along with Minnesota and Colorado is a non-binding contest that doesn’t award delegates the states will choose at a later date. True. But Romney was supposed to win in Colorado, where he beat McCain 60 percent to 18 percent in 2008. And he lost to Santorum, 55 percent to 25 percent in Missouri. Having nearly 138,000 voters turn out for Santorum in the bellwether state of Missouri for a primary that didn’t matter clearly matters. After all, the entire vote total in Nevada was only 33,000. Santorum has now won more states than Romney — and, with the exception of Florida, the critical battleground states the party needs to win in November.
A Romney campaign official asserted Wednesday that only Romney has the “organization, resources and stamina” to win the nomination. Santorum isn’t disputing that: His pitch to conservatives is that a compromised nominee will be defeated. Neither Gingrich nor Romney can lead the GOP to victory this fall with the support they have expressed for TARP, cap-and-trade proposals and mandates for healthcare insurance, Santorum maintains.
But it isn’t just the mandate that makes Romney “unqualified” to debate Obama on healthcare, Santorum said this week. Even on the most potent new issue the GOP has against the Obama healthcare plan — the administration’s new regulations requiring religious institutions to provide birth control in their healthcare coverage — Romney is vulnerable. Though he decried this “violation of conscience,” it was the same “abortion pills” Romney now condemns that he supported as governor of Massachusetts, when he stated his belief that all rape victims should have access to such “emergency contraception.”
Romney should ready his money and organization for the coming contests, because he won’t be electable if he doesn’t get elected. And conservatives will try mightily to challenge whether inevitability is inevitable after all.
By: A. B. Stoddard, Associate Editor, The Hill, February 8, 2012
Get Ready For Buyer’s Remorse, Rick Santorum Edition
We’ve had two—or is it three?—helpings of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, more iterations of former Gov. Mitt Romney than you can shake $10,000 at, so should anyone be surprised that we’re getting a second dose of Rick Santorum? The former Pennsylvania senator scored a political hat trick with convincing victories in Colorado, Missouri, and Minnesota last night. Sure Missouri was a beauty contest and Colorado and Minnesota didn’t actually select delegates, but neither did Iowa and no one said that set of caucuses was meritless.
Now Santorum must accomplish the 2012 political equivalent of defying gravity. For if there has been one rule in this chaotic nomination race, it is that what goes up must come down.
As I wrote in my column this week:
In the wake of Mitt Romney’s convincing victories in Florida on Tuesday and Nevada on Saturday, perhaps the GOP will rally to the former Massachusetts governor and embrace him in a manner which they have resisted thus far.
But through the first month of primary contests, Republican voters haven’t been much about embracing. They’ve been too busy running away from candidates. Romney’s New Hampshire victory, for example, sparked pronouncements that with two wins under his belt (the Iowa caucuses not yet having been retroactively awarded to Rick Santorum), he was marching to the nomination. This prompted a scramble away from Romney, right into the waiting arms of Newt Gingrich.
The former House speaker then easily won South Carolina and gave Republicans another acute case of buyer’s remorse. …
So now maybe GOP voters will settle in with Romney for the long haul. Or maybe they’ll look again at Romney and see a transparently inauthentic conservative of convenience with a propensity for mind-boggling gaffes (“I’m also unemployed,” and “Corporations are people, my friend,” and “Well, the banks aren’t bad people,” and so on.)
And as surely as Mitt Romney rose, bringing new pronouncements of his inevitability, he fell. Conservatives still don’t like him.
But can Santorum avoid a buyer’s remorse come-down? There are a number of factors weighing against him, starting with money and organization. It seems likely that Team Romney will turn its focus on Santorum the way it did on Gingrich after South Carolina (though as of this morning, Gingrich remained in the Mitt-bot’s sights). As Santorum noted Tuesday night, “Tonight we had an opportunity to see what a campaign looks like when one candidate isn’t outspent five- or ten-to-one by negative ads impugning their integrity and distorting their record.” Does anyone think that Santorum will get another clear shot where he isn’t heavily outspent and drilled with negative ads?
As National Journal’s Alex Roarty writes:
Romney won’t have to look hard for way[s] to attack Santorum, whose 16-year career in Washington provides an array of easy targets. The former governor has already criticized his support for congressional earmarks, and Santorum will also be forced to explain his 2004 endorsement of then moderate Republican Sen. Arlen Specter against a Republican challenger (Specter later switched into the Democratic Party).
More broadly, Romney can argue his business background makes him better suited to turn around the country than a career politician–a tactic that helped him overcome Gingrich.
We might also be reminded that Santorum’s last act in public life before running for president was receiving a historic drubbing from the voters of Pennsylvania, losing his seat by 18 points.
As for Romney, he must feel rather like Michael Corleone in the otherwise forgettable Godfather: Part III, who laments, “Just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in.” No pivot to the center and the general election for Mitt. He’ll need to turn his focus back to figuring out how to placate his own party, possibly with a hard tack to the right on the social issues which (a) have been Santorum’s bread and butter and (b) are suddenly at the heart of the national political conversation (birth control and gay marriage). This is not the stuff of which winning general election candidates are made.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, February 8, 2012
Super PAC “Unilateral Disarmament”?: Using The System To Fight The System
The phrase “unilateral disarmament” has been used, in a negative sense, to justify a lot of unjustifiable behavior. But President Obama’s argument against unilateral disarmament in the super PAC war seems totally persuasive. The Republican party gained a large advantage in the 2010 elections, and appears poised to seize an even more dramatic edge during this campaign, by channeling vast sums of their campaign donations into third-party organizations, which can raise unlimited sums from undisclosed donors.
The problem with Obama’s decision, as I have been reading from numerous reporters, is that it’s “hypocritical.” MSNBC’s First Read insists that blessing super PACs “looks hypocritical no matter how you try and rationalize it.” Making the charge as a matter of appearance rather than substance – it looks hypocritical — allows you to throw out an accusation without justifying it. But how is it hypocritical? I haven’t seen anybody attempt to actually explain it.
To me, the ethics are pretty simple. Obama opposes the current campaign-finance system. His position is that the Citizens United ruling is wrong on the legal merits, it’s bad policy to allow unregulated independent election spending, Congress should pass legislation (previously blocked by Republicans) requiring greater disclosure from such groups, and that he favors a constitutional amendment to allow greater campaign-finance restrictions.
I fail to see what about these positions implies that Obama should also hold the following position: Given that the campaign-finance system is going to allow unlimited election spending by individual donors to technically independent groups, it is better to have a system where Republican donors exert these high levels of political influence but Democratic donors do not. Isn’t it perfectly reasonable to believe that the best outcome is a system where millionaires can’t spend unlimited sums on electioneering, and a system in which both parties have millionaires counterbalancing each other is better than a system in which only one party has millionaires spending unlimited sums?
Obama, after all, isn’t arguing that a millionaire cutting a $10 million check to buy a slew of political ads is an inherently immoral act, like driving a car through a crowd of pedestrians. He’s arguing that it’s a bad system, like allowing Warren Buffett to pay a lower tax rate than his secretary. He wants to change the system. But that wouldn’t make it hypocritical for Buffett to operate within the system that exists, as opposed to the alternate system he advocates.
Indeed, if you want to change the system, unilateral disarmament seems like a pretty bad way to go about it. Republicans are already pretty strongly opposed to campaign-finance reform. If keeping the current system means preserving a system in which their side gets unlimited outside spending and Democrats abstain, then the GOP is never going to agree to change it. Not that matching their money will force them to agree to reform, but eliminating the GOP’s partisan self-interest in the status quo seems like, at minimum, a necessary step toward reform.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, February 7, 2012
Right Wing Will Stop At Nothing To Get Its Way
In a perfect world, advocates for women’s health who believe human life begins at the instant of fertilization, and advocates of women’s health who believe in a women’s right to choose, ought to be able to find common ground in their shared mission of finding a cure for cancer.
Liberals were at least willing to give it try. Out of respect for the ethical misgivings of religious conservatives, liberals agreed all funds raised for cancer research and screenings ought to be carefully segregated from the financial support given for abortion services so that no one morally opposed to abortion would feel compelled to lend support to the procedure, however indirectly.
But conservatives were having none of it. In their mind abortion is a sin and a crime and that was that. Any organization connected with the procedure was irredeemably unclean. This was true even if the organization in question performed many other life-saving works and if abortion constituted just 3% of the overall health services the organization provided.
And so, the life-giving alliance between two of the nation’s most prominent organizations in the fight against breast cancer – Planned Parenthood and the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation — may forever be ruined after Komen leaders temporarily pulled funding for Planned Parenthood in deference to the demands of anti-abortion contributors who have long targeted Planned Parenthood for extinction.
The estrangement of these two long-time allies could very well set back the cause of finding a cure for breast cancer, a disease that killed an estimated 39,500 women in 2011 with more than 230,000 new cases reported. But fighting breast cancer seems less important in the minds of anti-abortion militants than destroying an organization they detest as evil.
Even within the Komen organization itself the decision by Komen’s brass to sever all ties with Planned Parenthood seemed to come out of nowhere. That may help explain the angry letters written by those at Komen’s local affiliates who announced they would defy their bosses and continue doing business with Planned Parenthood no matter what the organization’s new policy may have been.
Nonetheless, conservatives were quick to blame liberals for the rift, saying liberals should have been more sensitive to the concerns of abortion opponents in the first place by recognizing that associating in any way with any organization that provides abortions was, for the religiously devout, utterly impossible.
In a column harshly critical of the media’s portrayal of Komen’s leadership as betraying the health needs of women, New York Times conservative Ross Douthat said the decision by Komen to disassociate itself “from the nation’s largest abortion provider” was no more “political” than was the decision by liberals to enlist Planned Parenthood in the fight against cancer in the first place.
For every American who greeted Komen’s decision with outrage and derision, says Douthat, “there was probably an American who was relieved and gratified” by the funding cut for Planned Parenthood, since there are “millions of Americans, including millions of American women” who loath the organization for the 300,000-plus abortions it performs every year and for its “tireless opposition to even modest limits on abortion.”
Maybe. But after conceding that the fight against breast cancer should be “unifying and completely uncontroversial,” Douthat then attacked the media for suggesting the fight against breast cancer should take priority over the objections of abortion opponents, as well as for what he called the “wave of frankly brutal coverage” against anyone seen as sabotaging the fight against cancer with their ideologically-motivated objections.
That the fight to save lives could actually be undermined by those who advertise themselves as “pro-life” is further proof that the most important contribution the Founding Fathers made to democratic thought was to separate religious commitments from governing ones.
The whole point of politics, writes professor Theodore Lowi, is in fact to “trivialize all manner of beliefs drawn from private life” – including religious belief — so as to put them into a form where they can dealt with politically, meaning where compromise is possible.
That is because when private beliefs are pursued without full appreciation of their public consequences, “Act I of the tragedy of the true believer has begun,” he says.
The price we pay for living in a diverse and modern world is that there can be few, if any, non-negotiable demands. The price we pay for securing “domestic tranquility,” in other words, is that we must be governed by politics and not by rote application of rigid religious dogmas or political ideologies where life’s complexities are resolved by reference to 10 easily memorized talking points – or commandments.
Predictably, those who oppose Planned Parenthood and the good-faith compromises that have been made to keep the focus on breast cancer prevention have framed their dispute as an extension of their Constitutionally-guaranteed right to freedom of “worship.”
It’s a trump “People of Faith” have been playing a lot.
Just this Sunday, the letter from our own Cardinal that was distributed at Mass began peacefully enough with a greeting to all his “dear brothers and sisters in Christ.” But then, sparing no words, the Cardinal took out after President Obama like Thomas Jefferson against George III as our Cardinal inveighed against a decision by the President on birth control the Cardinal said “strikes at the fundamental right to religious liberty of all citizens of any faith.”
I’ll make a deal with the Cardinal: He can have his waiver from the government’s new requirement to provide birth control if the Church puts its objections up for a vote with its employees. Since we’re talking religious liberty here, let’s see if Catholic workers think their religious freedoms are being imperiled by having access to health insurance that pays for birth control.
If workers vote to deny themselves coverage for contraception because their religious convictions forbid it, then I for one agree we should honor that. I’d also be willing to grant the Church a waiver if it agrees to first divest itself of all those benefits it gets from the government and from We the People. But otherwise, the Church must pay to play.
Let’s keep things in perspective here. The Catholic Church maintains schools, hospitals and charitable organizations to fulfill its mission of service to the community. But it also supports these institutions in order to enhance its political power and its ability to use those institutions to shape American culture generally.
It’s in disputes just like these that the Church’s true political nature is revealed to us as the Church flexes its political muscle and shows just how elastic its definitions of “religious worship” really are.
We’re not talking about penitents singing psalms in their pews. In the present dispute, to “worship” means to advance the Church’s anti-contraception agenda by denying contraception coverage to even those non-Catholics who work for the Church, using the premiums it pays as leverage to re-frame the nature of its disagreement with President Obama as one over “religious freedom.”
In the debate over “Obamacare,” “worship” meant pressing for further restrictions on abortion by using as leverage the fact that taxpayer dollars were being used to subsidize the coverage of 50 million uninsured Americans.
But the Church hardly needs provocation or pretexts like these to advance a political agenda or to hide that agenda behind the First Amendment and glittering generalities about religious liberty.
For the Catholic hierarchy, freedom of worship means the right to prevail politically and on any matter Church leaders decide is important.
I remember very well working for Massachusetts Governor Paul Cellucci when then Boston Cardinal Bernard Law made a special trip to the State House to fight us on the Governor’s nomination of Margaret Marshall to be the first woman chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The Cardinal opposed Justice Marshall because she had ruled in favor of abortion rights in the past. And despite the Cardinal’s objection, she was confirmed anyway.
Law, who was later forced to step down in disgrace over his shocking mishandling of the Church’s child abuse scandal in Boston, continued a long tradition of politically promiscuous Bay State Catholic leaders dating back to Cardinal William O’Connell, who towered over Boston politics from 1908 to 1944.
“Authoritarian in temper, medieval in outlook, Cardinal O’Connell sought to remake Boston’s Catholics as soldiers of a modern day Counter Reformation,” wrote Jack Beatty, senior editor of the Boston-based Atlantic Monthly.
Among O’Connell’s political dark horrors, Massachusetts killed a proposed amendment banning child labor that the Cardinal called “socialistic” because it put “the State above the Parents” – presumably preventing those parents from hiring out their children as indentured servants if they so wished.
Along with the rest of the Catholic hierarchy, O’Connell also fought liberalization efforts to legalize the sale and distribution of contraceptives – even for non-Catholics – fueling a controversy that wasn’t resolved until the Supreme Court finally ruled anti-contraceptive laws unconstitutional in 1965.
And, until the 1960’s when these laws were finally repealed, women who taught in the Massachusetts public schools were compelled to resign once they became pregnant because of the Church’s objections to women with small children who worked.
Across the board in American politics today — and not only in matters of religion – right wing interests have been undermining America’s democratic institutions and conventions by insisting we bow down to their demands that they get to re-shape America entirely to their liking.
Politically, we’ve seen this manifested in the institutionalization in the US Senate of minority rule by mostly Southern reactionaries.
Culturally, we’ve seen it in the resurgence of talk about state’s rights for sub-groups, like white conservative Christians, who are dominant at the local level and hope to resist national standards on such things as gender, racial and religious equality.
Even in economics, demands by Republicans that public policy be geared almost exclusively toward assuaging investor “uncertainty” can be seen as a massive redistribution of political sovereignty away from the public and toward the rich who ultimately gain whenever the public interest is subordinated to the arbitrary and subjective whims of the “job creating” investor class.
The larger danger we are talking about here goes by an old-fashioned name that the Founding Fathers used a lot: “Faction.”
The friend of democratic government never finds himself so alarmed for their character and fate “as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice,” writes James Madison in his famous Federalist 10.
And it’s the “instability, injustice and confusion” of factions like a Catholic Church that equates politics with Constitutionally-protected “worship,” or the financial backers who pressured the Komen foundation to compromise its own life-saving mission to advance an extreme pro-life agenda, that Madison said has always been “the mortal disease under which popular governments have everywhere perished.”
Like the leaders of most faction, the Catholic bishops say they are not running a democracy here. And they are right. But the bigger question is whether they will let us have one at all.
By: Ted Frier, OpenSalon, February 7, 2012
Many Catholic Universities, Hospitals Already Cover Contraception In Health Insurance Plans
Catholic leaders and the GOP presidential candidates have intentionally distorted the Obama administration’s new rule requiring employers and insurers to provide reproductive health benefits at no additional cost sharing. Conservatives are seeking a way to politically unite Republican voters around a social issue and portray the regulation as a big government intrusion into religious liberties. In reality, the mandate is modeled on existing rules in six states, exempts houses of worship and other religious nonprofits that primarily employ and serve people of faith, and offers employers a transitional period of one year to determine how best to comply with the rule.
It’s also nothing new. Twenty-eight states already require organizations that offer prescription insurance to cover contraception and since 98 percent of Catholic women use birth control, many Catholic institutions offer the benefit to their employees. For instance, a Georgetown University spokesperson told ThinkProgress yesterday that employees “have access to health insurance plans offered and designed by national providers to a national pool. These plans include coverage for birth control.”
Similarly, an informal survey conducted by Our Sunday Visitor found that many Catholic colleges have purchased insurance plans that provide contraception benefits:
University of Scranton, for example, appears to specifically cover contraception. The University of San Francisco offers employees two health plans, both of which cover abortion, contraception and sterilization…Also problematic is the Jesuit University of Scranton. One of its health insurance plans, the First Priority HMO, lists a benefit of “contraceptives when used for the purpose of birth control.”
DePaul University in Chicago covers birth control in both its fully insured HMO plan and its self-insured PPO plan and excludes “elective abortion,” said spokesman John Holden, adding that the 1,800 employee-university responded to a complaint from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission several years ago and added artificial contraception as a benefit to its Blue Cross PPO.
Christian Brothers University in Memphis, Tenn., offers employee health insurance via the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association, a consortium of Christian Bible and other private college and universities. Its plan excludes abortion, but probably covers artificial contraception as a prescription drug, said C. Gregg Conroy, the executive director of the TICUA Benefit Consortium.
Boston College, the six former Caritas Christi Catholic hospitals in Massachusetts, and other Catholic organizations that are located in one of the 28 states that already require employers to provide contraception benefits could have self-insured or stopped offering prescription drug coverage to avoid the mandate — but didn’t do so. Instead, they — like many Catholic hospitals and health care insurers around the country — chose to meet the needs of the overwhelming majority of Catholic women and offer these much needed services.
By: Igor Volsky, Think Progress, February 7, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
