Those “Unspeakable Newsletters”: A Question Rand Paul Refuses To Answer About Dad
Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) turned his back to me. Why? Because I asked a question he really didn’t want to answer.
On Saturday night, during the first of the back-to-back New Hampshire debates, ABC News moderator George Stephanopoulos asked Rep. Ron Paul, who’d been running second in the New Hampshire polls before the first GOP presidential primary, about racist remarks that appeared in his newsletters during the 1980s and 1990s: “Can you…explain to everybody what happened there, how it was possible that those kind of comments went out under your name without you knowing about it?”
Paul said he did not write those passages, but he declined to explain how such swill had ended up in a newsletter bearing his name. He dismissed the 20-plus-year-old matter as “diverting the attention from most of the important issues.” But then he jumped back in time himself, saying, “You ought to ask me what my relationship is for racial relationships. And one of my heroes is Martin Luther King [Jr.] because he practiced the libertarian principle of peaceful resistance and peaceful civil disobedience.”
After the debate, I found Rand Paul in the Spin Room, where representatives of the candidates had gathered to explain to the gaggle of reporters why their particular man had won the debate and was now firmly on the path to victory. I asked him if he could point to any specific times in his life—as a child or young adult—when his father had expressed admiration for King. He replied:
Through the years, I’ve not only heard him say that, but that he has admiration for Gandhi. He has admiration for people who have led mass and nonviolent protests against government unjustness. There’s one quote I can remember him using, saying that ‘any unjust law is a law a majority passes upon a minority but doesn’t make binding on themselves.’ And that was the whole nature of segregation in the South… That’s something that’s been consistent through his career.
That was not so specific, but Rand Paul did at least note that his pop could cite MLK. (The real quote: “An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself.”)
Next, I asked, “Then can you explain why in the newsletter that came out under his name, they called Martin Luther King a communist and a philanderer?”
“Yeah,” he replied, “he didn’t write that.”
“But how did that come to be?” I inquired.
This was when Rand Paul turned his back to me—and said, “Anybody else?”
“You’re turning your back on me,” I remarked. “Can you just explain? Is he responsible for that?”
“Anybody else?”
“You’re not going to answer that question?”
Another reporter jumped in: “Did you ever read the newsletters when you were growing up?”
“Anybody got any current events?” Paul said. “Are there a couple more current events? Then I got to go.”
His back was still toward me. I moved off to listen to pointless spin from others.
Though Sen. Paul had not displayed the best manners, I decided to give him another chance. After the second New Hampshire debate on Sunday morning, I saw him entering the Spin Room and trailed him to his designated spot. I first asked how he thought his father had done this morning. “He did great,” he said. Then I returned to the previous evening’s topic:
“Last night I asked you a question and you turned your back on me.”
“I’ll probably do the same.”
“Your father last night brought up the issue of Martin Luther King… He talked about history. Why won’t you talk about the newsletter and say how—”
“If you want to talk about current events.”
“Your father talks about history all the time. Why can’t you talk about this newsletter.”
“Anybody else? Anybody else?”
“Why can’t you talk about who wrote this?”
“Asked and answered yesterday.”
“But you didn’t answer it. That’s the thing. Why can’t you answer this?”
Another reporter then interrupted: “What do you think of Romney?” Paul happily fielded that query: “I think he did very well in the debate… I think he presents himself very well. He shows great leadership.”
Ron and Rand Paul truly do not want to talk about those newsletters. Is it conceivable that Ron Paul doesn’t know who wrote the garbage that appeared under his imprimatur—and helped him make money? Not really. This is a cover-up. They are stonewalling. And it appears the Pauls will do almost anything to avoid explaining the origins of these and other racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and conspiratorial claims.
By: David Corn, Mother Jones, January 8, 2012
The Grating Santorum: A Student’s Worst Nightmare
Rick Santorum was locking down the youth vote.
The man who fondly recalls nuns rapping his knuckles with rulers did some verbal knuckle-rapping of his own on Thursday with students at a forum in Concord hosted by New England College.
Not satisfied with mentioning homosexuality in the same breath as bestiality and pedophilia, as he did in 2003, Santorum tried to win over the kids by equating homosexuality with polygamy.
Even for Santorum, it was a masterpiece of antediluvian abrasiveness — slapping gays and Mormons at the same time.
When 17-year-old Rhiannon Pyle, visiting with her civics class from Newburyport, Mass., pressed Santorum on how he could believe that all men are created equal and still object to two men in love marrying, he began nonsensically frothing.
“So if everybody has the right to be happy, so if you’re not happy unless you’re married to five other people, is that O.K.?” he said, adding, “Well, what about three men?”
The grating Santorum was their worst nightmare of a bad teacher. He merely got booed; he’s lucky the kids didn’t TP his car or soap the windows.
In a campaign where W. is an unmentionable, Santorum is an unexpected revival of Bushian uncompassionate conservatism.
He got more scattered boos on Friday at a library in Keene and a private high school in Dublin. In Keene, he was asked if he would protect gay rights, since gays are “children of God” too.
“Serving in the military is not an unalienable right, it’s a privilege, you’re selected,” replied the candidate, who wants to restore “don’t ask, don’t tell.” He also called marriage “a privilege, not a right,” for the purpose is procreation.
Rick Perry baits gays because it’s good politics; Santorum sincerely means it. His political philosophy is infused with his über-Catholicism but lacks humanity.
At the Dublin event, 16-year-old Jessica Scharf asked Santorum how her handicapped brother could be cared for without help from the federal government. He replied, as The Times’s Katharine Q. Seelye reported, that he and his wife “bear the cost” of a handicapped daughter; he said family, friends, neighbors and the church could help, and that caring for someone would knit them closer. Scharf told Seelye later that such a group was not equipped to handle her brother, who has multiple handicaps.
New Hampshire’s feisty voters don’t seem as enraptured with Santorum’s rigid conservatism and sweater vests as evangelical voters in Iowa were. Many are pushing back on the wacky worldview of Senator Slash, as Santorum was once known for his vicious attacks on Bill Clinton and other Democrats.
He bashes President Obama as a European-style socialist and preaches fiscal conservatism. Yet in the Senate, he made sure dollars from the socialistic Medicare program went to Puerto Rico on behalf of a hometown firm — United Health Services — that later gave him nearly $400,000 in director’s fees and stock options.
He was among the pay-for-play Republicans who tried to strong-arm lobbyists and say that if you wanted to have influence you had to cough up campaign money.
While Karen Santorum was home-schooling their seven children in Virginia, Santorum soaked the Pennsylvania taxpayers to the tune of $100,000 by enrolling the children in a Pennsylvania cyber charter school.
The preface to Mrs. Santorum’s 2003 book of moral parables teaching children good manners was written by Joe Paterno, who warns against “a decline of civility and a coarsening of society.” And he knows how that goes.
In his 2005 book, “It Takes a Family,” Santorum goes off on “radical feminists” poisoning society: “What happened in America so that mothers and fathers who leave their children in the care of someone else — or worse yet, home alone after school between three and six in the afternoon — find themselves more affirmed by society?”
In Iowa, he tossed out a line about food stamps that NPR reported this way: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” He later told CNN that he was “pretty confident” that he didn’t say “black.” The only alternative, watching the video clip, is that he said “blah.” He doesn’t want to make blah people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money?
Santorum’s hot politics of aggrievement have competed with Mitt Romney’s cold politics of convenience. But soon Santorum will be gone and Mittens will reign as the calculating consultant type, unpersuasive in premium denim mom jeans, his hair slicked and gray, a lead in a ’50s B movie.
Santorum thinks he’s a bold color and Romney’s a pastel. But the whole Republican field seems ensconced in a black-and-white ’50s diorama. It’s like they’re running for president of Leave It to Beaverland.
As Tony Soprano told Meadow, “Out there it’s the 1990s, but in this house, it’s 1954.”
By: Maureen Dowd, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 7, 2012
Taking The Endorsement Game “To A Whole New Level”: Romney Endorsers Received Contributions First
Money may not be buying Mitt Romney much Republican love, but it’s going a long way toward helping him buy the next best thing: endorsements in the GOP primaries.
Romney’s Free and Strong America PAC and its affiliates states have lavished close to $1.3 million in campaign donations to federal, state and local GOP politicians, almost all since 2010. His recipients include officials in the major upcoming primary states of New Hampshire and South Carolina, and in three southern Super Tuesday states where he was trounced four years ago.
In New Hampshire, a U.S. senator, a congressman, 10 state senators and three executive councilors shared $26,000 in donations from Romney’s Free and Strong America PAC in 2010 and 2011 combined. All 15 have showered Romney with endorsements leading up to Tuesday’s primary
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley came out for Romney last month – a year after his Free and Strong America PACs funneled $36,000 to the Tea Party darling’s 2010 election bid. And 19 state and Washington, D.C., lawmakers in three Super Tuesday states – Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia — are backing Romney after his PAC poured a total of $125,500 into their coffers for elections held in 2009 and 2010.
“This is as old as politics itself,” Edwin Bender, executive director of the National Institute of Money in State Politics. “He’s just taking it to a whole new level.”
Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University political scientist, said Romney’s gambit is a smart strategy for a deep-pocketed candidate. “He’s investing wisely and trying not just to run up the numbers where he’s strong, but trying to build it up where he’s weakest,” Zelizer said.
Nowhere has Romney spent as heavily – and harvested the rewards – as in Tuesday’s must-win state of New Hampshire. Romney’s Free and Strong America PAC and its Granite State affiliate invested some $53,000 to help local officials win races, and another $13,000 for congressional and Senate candidates.
New Hampshire state Sen. Sharon Carson said in a press release that she took the time to examine the “backgrounds and qualifications of each of the candidates” running for president before she backed Romney on Dec. 27. She received $1,000 from Romney’s federal Free and Strong America PAC for her winning 2010 reelection bid.
Kelly Ayotte – a Tea Party Republican who won a U.S. Senate seat – received $5,000 from Romney’s PAC in 2010 for her winning bid and $2,500 from the PAC in 2011, according to federal records. She endorsed Romney in November.
U.S. Rep. Charlie Bass also endorsed Romney in November. He received $3,500 from Romney’s PAC in 2010 and and $2,000 2011 from Romney’s PAC. State Senate President Peter Bragdon endorsed Romney Dec. 1. He received $1,000 from Romney’s Free and Strong America / New Hampshire PAC on Oct. 4, 2010.
Dante Scala, a University of New Hampshire political scientist, said Romney needs 35 to 40 percent of the vote to be viewed as the winner. Romney’s strategy of snatching up local endorsements has resonated with Granite State residents, and that’s reflected in the widening gap in the polls.
“They want to suck all the oxygen out of the primary,” Scala said. “And so far they’ve succeeded.”
After his crushing 2008 campaign defeat, Romney created the Free and Strong America leadership PAC to contribute to local, state and federal officials’ campaigns.
According to the Federal Election Commission and OpenSecrets.org, the PAC donated $890,299 to some 167 congressional and Senate candidates in 2010, while distributing another $404,226 in 2010 to state and local candidates, according to state campaign finance records collected by FollowTheMoney.org.
If Romney’s been chided for being too moderate, he’s shown little moderation when it comes to the mother’s milk of politics: money.
“Clearly, the one thing Mitt Romney has to his advantage is money, and the best way to use it in the early stages is to spread it around to build up a political organization,” said Michael Dennehy an unaligned New Hampshire GOP operative. “Now, it appears he’s reaping the benefits.”
Romney is already earning dividends in states where he suffered embarrassing setbacks in 2008. In South Carolina, for example, Romney placed a distant third behind Mike Huckabee and John McCain.
Romney trumpeted the backing of Haley in December. The pair are touring South Carolina Friday and New Hampshire this weekend. His Free and Strong America PAC raised a lofty $36,000 for her in 2010.
Romney also is bolstering his support in three March 6 Super Tuesday states where his showing was dismal in 2008.
In Georgia, where Romney finished a distant third behind Huckabee and McCain, Free and Strong spent $36,000 in 2010 on 24 state candidates. So far, 11 have endorsed Romney ahead of the primary. Another nine congressmen received $25,052 in 2010 from the PAC, and four are backing Romney.
In Tennessee, another Super Tuesday state where Romney also finished third, Romney netted the backing of U.S. Reps. Diane Black and Jimmy Duncan. They were among GOP state and federal Tennessee candidates who split $17,500 from Romney’s Free and Strong America PAC in 2010.
In 2008, Romney placed fourth behind McCain, Huckabee and Ron Paul in Virginia. But this year he snagged the backing of Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling and Rep. Barbara Comstock, who were among the recipients of some $27,500 donated by the Free and Strong America PAC.
So far, the spending has paid off not just in endorsements but in the development of a campaign infrastructure, experts said. This will help Romney against less well-funded rivals when the primaries are in several states simultaneously and particularly on Super Tuesday, when surrogates are vital in many places at once.
But there’s a risk, Zelizer warned, that over-spending could get Romney painted as an out-of-touch elitist trying to buy his delegates.
“He doesn’t want this to backfire and look like he has so much money, he’s buying an election, he’s buying a nomination,” Zelizer said.
There’s also controversy. For while the practice of contributing to campaigns in exchange for endorsements isn’t new, the New Hampshire and Alabama Democratic Parties have filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission. They charge that the Free and Strong PACS coordinate with the state affiliates to circumvent federal and state campaign laws. The PACs have denied any wrongdoing.
Dennehy, the GOP operative, said that rather than complain, others should wonder why they’re not exerting their political muscle as effectively as Romney.
“He’s the only one who donated a sizable amount of money to dozens of elected officials,” Dennehy added. “Let’s face it. When no one else gives you money, you don’t think long and hard who’ll you’ll give your endorsement to.”
By: Edward Mason, Salon, January 7, 2012
The Missing “Leveling Experience”: Dull Mitt Romney Needs A “Groping” Scandal
Republican front-runner Mitt Romney is so dull that he could benefit from an eye-popping scandal because it would help tear down his plastic image and make him look more normal, according to national pollster John Zogby.
“This is the one instance where a groping incident could help a candidate,” said Zogby, in a reference to the scandal that torpedoed former GOP candidate Herman Cain’s campaign.
He said it could be the missing “leveling experience” for Romney that would make him look more human. Zogby explained that many stiff, rich men have run for office and won, but they typically had a humbling moment that made them more likeable. He gave former President George W. Bush’s alcoholism as an example of that leveling experience.
“His problem is an authenticity problem,” said Zogby of Romney, who today released his New Hampshire tracking poll that has Romney far in front. “He’s the kid who never colored outside the lines,” said the pollster.
Zogby said Romney needs to find a way to connect with an unethusiastic party that wants to vote with its brain and heart. But, he warned, he shouldn’t try to do that with a policy speech or new position. “Likability,” he said, “is a lot more than an issue.”
He echoed charges from competing campaigns and President Obama’s advisor David Axelrod that Romney’s 25 percent finish in the Iowa caucuses was an example of how he’s failed to expand his personal base of voters from the amount he received in the 2008 caucuses.
Romney, Zogby said, spent “a lot of time, money and energy to get where he was already.”
By: Paul Bedard, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, January 5, 2012
I Love A Parade: The March Of The Non-Mitts
“This is the New Hampshire primary! This is a big deal! I can’t even believe I’m standing here!” cried Jon Huntsman, who yearns to be the Rick Santorum of New Hampshire. That’s what it’s come to. Do you think this is what Huntsman told himself when he quit his distinguished post as ambassador to China? (“Diplomacy is all well and good, but I believe I was meant for greater things. Like being the Rick Santorum of New Hampshire.”)
Santorum, of course, was the man of the hour when he sort-of-almost-nearly came in first in the Iowa caucuses on Tuesday. Actually, Mitt Romney won. (Eight Republicans can’t be wrong!) But Santorum has the momentum. His strategy of spending his entire life going from one Iowa Pizza Ranch to another paid off.
After campaigning only in New Hampshire, with 150 events in the bag, Huntsman hopes for a similar triumph. It’s the famous one-state strategy that worked so well in 2008 for Rudy Giuliani.
“I’d thought we’d never get here, but here we are!” he told an audience in the Peterborough town hall. Actually, getting to the Peterborough town hall is not all that remarkable. I have personally been there several times, but, of course, that is because I have a glamorous career in journalism, which allows me to have elite access to events like the one headlined: “Tom Ridge Introduces Jon Huntsman.” You may remember Ridge from his stint as chief of the Department of Homeland Security. He was the one with the yellow-orange-red terror colors. Huntsman is incredibly buoyant, to the point of appearing to be just a little bit goofy. (“Last night in Dover I was met by a goat! The same goat that bit my kneecap when I was there three months ago!”) He has a large, attractive family, but large attractive families are a dime a dozen this year. Michele Bachmann had 23 foster children, and she’s already out of the race.
Jon Huntsman is the Republican that the White House most feared, possibly because the White House is full of Democrats. He is way behind in the New Hampshire polls, and he lacks the loony streak that primary voters seem to find so attractive this time around. Really, he is toast unless he does something remarkable over the next week. Not remarkable in the sense of making a good point in the next debate. Remarkable as in saving a baby from being run over by stopping a speeding car with one hand.
There are still plenty of other Republican options. After his fifth-place finish in Iowa, Rick Perry suspended his campaign but then tweeted, “Here we come, South Carolina.” This appeared to surprise some of his staff, who seemed to feel as if their long political nightmare had ended in Des Moines. But it turned out that Perry had jogged his way back into the race.
“I was out on the trail when it kind of came to me,” he said.
Quite a lot comes to the governor of Texas when he’s jogging. You will remember the coyote he killed with his laser-sighted Ruger. No word on whether a pistol was involved in this latest revelation.
Ron Paul is still in competition, as is Newt Gingrich, who appears to be running mainly on rancor, the candidate of the I Want to Eat Mitt’s Liver Party. And Rick Santorum, who continued the excitement of Iowa by flying into New Hampshire for a rally at a nursing home.
Mitt Romney himself was greeted in Manchester by a group of people cordoned off into half a high school auditorium. This helped disguise the crowd’s small size but not the fact that it appeared to be made up mainly of Ron Paul supporters, dragooned teenagers and refugees from Occupy Wall Street. The highlight of the event was supposed to be an endorsement from John McCain, whose innermost thoughts we would love to be privy to. Or maybe not.
McCain’s old loathing of Romney has now been totally overshadowed by his hatred of President Obama. “You can’t hide from your record of making this country bankrupt, from destroying our national security and making this nation one that we have to restore with Mitt Romney as president of the United States of America!” McCain snarled into the mic. It was an endorsement, but not the feel-good moment we were sort of looking for. Fortunately, they did play the new Kid Rock theme song that implicitly compares Romney to a wild stallion.
Can’t wait to see what the Republicans do next. You have to admit they’re desperate. Rick Santorum. Geesh.
Did I ever mention that Romney once drove to Canada with the family Irish setter strapped to the roof of the car? The dog’s name was Seamus. New Hampshire Republicans, if you can’t think of anybody to vote for on Tuesday, consider writing in the name Seamus when you go to the polls. Maybe we can start a boomlet.
Makes as much sense as the Newt Gingrich moment.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 4, 2012
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