Michele Bachmann’s Last Stand: Will Campaign End In Iowa?
She’s in last place in the polls in the state where she was born, but you wouldn’t know it by watching the relentlessly upbeat Michele Bachmann campaigning on Monday—the last day before Iowans go to the caucuses and, possibly, her last day as a presidential candidate.
Along with her husband, Marcus, Bachmann waded into packed shops and restaurants on a side street in West Des Moines to gamely sign autographs, chat up patrons, and pose for quick iPhone pictures with anyone who asked.
“We’re having a ball!” she said as she led a swarm of reporters and photographers from Paula’s Café across the street to the Diggity Dog pet bakery and on to the Floral Touch florist on the corner, where dozens of people had gone to escape the howling January wind. “This is what the Iowa Riviera feels like!” Bachmann joked.
But unlike her rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, who conducted a virtual siege of undecided voters across Iowa with last-minute “whistle-stop tours” and get-out-the-vote rallies, Bachmann’s only public events for the crucial last day were the impromptu lunchtime visit to West Des Moines and a 9 p.m. event at her headquarters in Urbandale.
Between her sparse schedule, the results of the recent Des Moines Register poll, which showed her solidly in last place, and an anemic $7,600 ad buy (her first and only television ads in the state), there was little doubt Monday that Bachmann was a happy warrior atop a campaign in its last throes of existence.
“I don’t think she has a chance,” said Charlie Freund, a Monday regular at Paula’s Café. “I think she’s a nice person, but she doesn’t have a chance.”
It’s a painfully inauspicious place for the Bachmann campaign to be after launching with fanfare amid a tide of Tea Party enthusiasm six months ago. As Sarah Palin sat on the sidelines, Bachmann jumped into the arena. She hired a top-tier campaign manager, used her Tea Party connections to raise millions of dollars, and rocketed to the front of the pack in early states like Iowa on the power of her personality and the novelty of her mom/lawyer/Obama-is-a-socialist message.
She peaked in August when she became the first woman ever to win the Ames Straw Poll, an early victory that the media downplayed as a fluke, but was at least real enough to send Tim Pawlenty scrambling from the race.
But several verbal gaffes and failed fact-checks later, Bachmann found herself struggling to raise money or her position in the standings, which cratered as skittish GOP voters dashed from one favorite candidate to another and dumped Bachmann in favor of the swashbuckling Texan Rick Perry just days after she won the straw poll. She also had serial staff problems, as Ed Rollins, her campaign manager, left the campaign as quickly as he had joined it, right up through the day she watched her Iowa campaign chairman defect to Ron Paul at a televised rally just days before the caucuses.
Voters who initially felt they had connected with her backed away as they judged her not ready for primetime.
“She lost it in the debates for me,” said Mark Lundberg, the chairman of the Sioux County Republican Party, who remains undecided about whom he’ll caucus for, but knows it won’t be Bachmann.
Larry Steele, from Knoxville, Iowa, said he went to see Bachmann at Floral Touch, but is planning to caucus for Rick Santorum because he seems the most like Mike Huckabee, whom he supported in 2008. “Santorum seems to share my values,” he said.
Despite the ominous signs all around her, Bachmann has refused to show any outward indications of panic, or even concern, right until the very end.
“I will fearlessly stand on the stage and take on Barack Obama, defeat him in the debates, and go on to win and be the next president of the United States,” Bachmann said in front of her hulking campaign bus Monday, likening herself to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in her closing campaign argument. “My goal is to be America’s Iron Lady, and that’s what I intend to do.”
As a part of a specific pitch to women voters, Bachmann’s Iowa ad also makes the connection to Thatcher’s strong-woman, “Iron Lady” persona. “I am women’s best candidate,” she told me in the flower shop. “They need to vote for Michele Bachmann.”
She also insisted that no matter the results in Iowa, her campaign will go on. “We already bought and paid for our tickets to South Carolina and we already have events scheduled, so we’re on our way,” she said. She also promised to go to New Hampshire and build a 50-state campaign operation, a promise made more difficult to keep amid rumors of a poor fourth quarter of fundraising.
But the news wasn’t all bad for Bachmann on Monday. Just mostly bad.
The Des Moines Register reported that she had won the “Coffee Bean Caucus” at the Hamburg Inn, a diner in Iowa City that famously invites patrons to drop a coffee bean into a canister for their favorite candidate. Bachmann won with 28.8 percent of the GOP vote, beating out Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, and Newt Gingrich, in that order. The only cloud over Bachmann’s victory was Barack Obama’s bean count, which was six times more than hers and more than all of the GOP beans combined.
One person who would have dropped a bean for Bachmann if he had been there was Caleb Sisson, an 18-year-old student and Bachmann convert who was thrilled after meeting her in West Des Moines. “It’s really cool to see her come into town and try to meet everybody,” Caleb said. “I’d absolutely vote for her.” One catch, though. Caleb was in Des Moines on a school trip … from Ohio.
By: Patricia Murphy, The Daily Beast, January 3, 2011
Why Mitt Romney’s Opportunity Tack Won’t Work
So Mitt Romney, writes Thomas Edsall in The New York Times, wants to make the election about entitlements vs. opportunity. He warns darkly against a government that “provides every citizen the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to innovate, pioneer or take risk.” This is the sort of thing that used to scare the bejesus out of Democrats and still does frighten some of them, but it needn’t. Romney’s error in this framing is one Republicans often make—assuming that they are the “real Americans,” and Democrats are in some way fake Americans, and therefore all of middle America must agree with them.
Romney’s approach is clever up to a point. It does successfully blend more traditional Republicanism with Tea Party resentment (reflecting, perhaps, the way in which this supposedly “new” Tea Party is really just the same old anger at poor people and nonwhite people, outfitted anew in culottes). He uses the lie Republicans have used for many, many elections, that liberals and Democrats insist not on equality of opportunity but equality of result. And he invokes “government dependency”—a well-turned locution I must confess, those being two pretty unappealing words to most people. If he becomes the nominee, and if he can get most Americans to see the election as a choice between the candidate who wants Big Daddy government to look after every aspect of your life and the candidate who insists on your freedom to pursue wealth and liberate yourself from any obligation to those below you, then he’ll be in pretty good shape.
But there exist mountains of evidence that most Americans don’t think the way Republicans want them to. As Edsall notes: “The American public is highly conflicted on the subject of providing aid to people in need. While strongly opposed to ‘welfare,’ decisive majorities support more spending in key public policy areas. Polls conducted since 1972 by the General Social Survey show that by margins of two to one, voters consistently say too little is spent on the poor, on education, on health care, on drug treatment—the list is long.”
And that’s just spending on the poor. Spending on the middle class enjoys far greater support. “Welfare” as we once knew it being largely off the table as a divisive political issue, the Republicans really don’t have much material to work with here. In one sense, the entire GOP approach on these issues since Ronald Reagan’s time has been to hide the actual agenda because Republicans know most people don’t agree with them. A famous memo from Paul O’Neill’s Treasury Department in early 2001 to the Bush White House told the new president and others to be careful about juxtaposing tax cuts with spending because “the public prefers spending on things like health and education over cutting taxes.”
So Republicans know that Americans like much of the spending that government does. And yet, like the true believers that they are, they really end up spending more of their time persuading themselves that the public agrees with them. And they do this because they genuinely believe that on some basic level they are real and good and patriotic Americans while liberals and Democrats are fake and bad and weak Americans. This is a core conviction, and it has a corollary: that we (the Republicans) represent and speak to middle America, while the Democrats represent and speak to Cambridge and Berkeley, and surely what we have to say about these matters resonates deeply in flyover country.
It’s just not nearly as true as Republicans persuade themselves it is. Middle-of-the-road voters in Iowa aren’t any more right wing than they are left wing. A tautological sentence, perhaps, but one that nevertheless needs to be repeated and understood. Republicans always assume America is behind them: on removing the reprobate Bill Clinton from office, on wanting to dismantle Medicare and Social Security, on sharing various paranoid and absurd convictions about who Barack Obama is, Republicans enter the fray certain that Middle America will agree with them. But then Middle America does not. They really liked Clinton and recognized what was going in 1998 as a time-wasting witch hunt, they love their Social Security and Medicare, and they elected Obama over a genuine war hero by (for such an evenly divided country) a pretty massive margin.
So back we come to Romney. His chosen words are pretty good. But this isn’t the mid-1980s. Majorities of average Americans no longer think the Democratic Party is in essence stealing from them. And majorities of average Americans pretty much like Obama personally. If they didn’t, his approval rating would have dipped down into the 30s when unemployment was north of 10 percent. It never did. Most Americans are pulling for the guy. Another fact that drives wingers nuts, and that I chuckle about at least four or five times a week.
Romney has been drinking tea-infused water for months now, trying to appease those to his right. I’m sure he thinks that at the same time, he’s talking sense to the rest of America. But the rest of America isn’t as intoxicated by those hairy-chested nostrums about self-reliance as conservatives think they are.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 27, 2011
Election Day Registration, No Photo ID Requirement Will Help Boost Turnout In Tomorrow’s Iowa Caucuses
Tomorrow, when Iowa Republicans gather across the state to vote on their party’s presidential nominee, one important tool will be available to boost turnout: election day voter registration.
Though Iowa, unlike most states, permits those who haven’t registered (or just need to update their file after a move, for instance) before election day to do so when they show up at their precinct during regular elections, the Huffington Post notes that the Iowa GOP is in charge of setting the rules for its own caucuses.
Despite nationwide efforts to make voting more difficult, the Republican Party of Iowa decided to buck the trend and allow for on-site registration. In doing so, however, they necessarily undercut the argument being made by GOPers in many other states that election day registration (EDR) invites fraud. (Of course, voters are 39 times more likely to be struck by lightning than commit fraud at the polls, and EDR actually helps prevent already-miniscule levels of fraud.)
Residents of just nine states currently enjoy EDR: Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. However, in a number of these states, the GOP-led war on voting has targeted EDR for repeal, most notably in Maine. Republicans in the Maine legislature passed a bill ridding the state of EDR, only to see the popular program reinstated by referendum in November by an overwhelming 61%-39% margin.
Election day registration will certainly help boost participation in tomorrow’s Iowa caucuses. A 2001 study found that states which employ election day registration (EDR) boost their voter turnout rate by 7 percentage points, without partisan gain for either side. The study found that poorer and less educated voters benefited the most from EDR. ThinkProgress spoke with a number of Maine voters who also lauded the ability to update their registration if they’ve recently moved, particularly because most residents are at work during the day and unable to visit the election clerk during normal business hours.
Had the Iowa GOP followed the lead of their brethren in Maine and elsewhere, thousands of Iowans who will cast their vote tomorrow with the help of election day registration could have been turned away from the polls.
Update
Brad Friedman also points out that the Republican caucuses will not require voters to present a photo ID in order to cast their ballot, a requirement GOPers around the country pushed vigorously in 2011.
By: Scott Keyes, Think Progress, January 1, 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
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
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