“Five Contests, Lots Of Media, Zero Drama”: The Great Republican Primary Pretense
It has all the trappings of a big election night: five primaries, live television coverage, pundits telling us what it all means.
But what if it doesn’t mean squat?
Let’s face it: The GOP presidential race ended weeks ago. You know it, I know it, and every working journalist knows it. Maybe not Newt, but most other sentient beings. If this were a boxing match, the refs would have stopped it long ago.
So why cover contests with about as much excitement as a Politburo election?
There was a time, of course, when this particular Tuesday loomed large on the calendar. Could Rick Santorum win his home state of Pennsylvania? But then Santorum dropped out, leaving Mitt Romney a clear path to the prize.
So those of us who cover politics are left with thin gruel indeed: What would Romney’s margins be in what proved to be a five-state sweep? Would there be a protest vote? How does Mitt do in key counties he’ll need in the fall?
If there was a frisson of drama, it came when Gingrich spoke after Romney was projected to win Delaware. There was some press buzz that Newt, who spent time there, might stay in the race if he carried the tiny state, even though that would have made absolutely no difference in the inevitable outcome. (Nice going, gang, Newt was buried by 30 points.) And Santorum indeed lost Pennsylvania, but then again, he is no longer an active candidate.
Fox and CNN carried Romney’s speech; MSNBC blew it off, with Ed Schultz attacking Sean Hannity instead.
Piers Morgan tried hard to prod Santorum into endorsing Romney, but Rick wouldn’t quite go there, saying the two were going to meet first. So real news was averted once again.
We can’t just call off the remaining primaries: all those congressional and local candidates need to be nominated. And even at the presidential level, the voting often determines which delegates go to the conventions. But that’s inside baseball. We already know the final score.
The cable coverage has been somewhat restrained compared to, say, the night of the Iowa caucuses. In the 8 p.m. hour, Fox stayed with a taped Bill O’Reilly show. Schultz didn’t pause during an interview, even as MSNBC threw up a breaking-news banner projecting Romney the winner in Connecticut and Rhode Island. When I first saw John King hit CNN’s Magic Wall, he was counting how the candidates could get to 270. Mitt didn’t even bother to show up in any of the five states, spending the day instead in New Hampshire.
The truth is that journalists switched to general election mode even while the primaries were still competitive. As a Project for Excellence in Journalism study noted this week, the media essentially pronounced the race over after Romney won the Michigan primary on Feb. 28, even though Santorum would go on to win several more states.
This sort of thing has happened before. Jerry Brown won a couple of late primaries in 1992, after it was obvious that Bill Clinton would be the nominee, but nobody took it very seriously.
So perhaps the events of Tuesday were more of a time-out from the endless general election slog, a last look back at a crazy season stretching back to Donald Trump and Herman Cain. That is, until the crucial North Carolina primary on May 8.
By: Howard Kurtz, The Daily Beast, April 24, 2012
“Lying Isn’t A Sin, It’s A Business Plan”: Mitt Romney, In The Land Of Many Falsehoods
Among the attributes I most envy in a public man (or woman) is the ability to lie. If that ability is coupled with no sense of humor, you have the sort of man who can be a successful football coach, a CEO or, when you come right down to it, a presidential candidate. Such a man is Mitt Romney.
Time and time again, Romney has been called a liar during this campaign. (The various fact-checking organizations have had to work overtime on him alone.) A significant moment, sure to surface in the general election campaign, came during a debate held in New Hampshire in January. David Gregory, the host of “Meet the Press,” turned to Newt Gingrich and said, “You have agreed with the characterization that Governor Romney is a liar. Look at him now. Do you stand by that claim?”
Gingrich did not flinch. “Sure, governor,” he started off, and then accused Romney of running ads that were not true and, moreover, pretending he knew nothing about them. “It is your millionaire friends giving to the PAC. And you know some of the ads aren’t true. Just say that straightforward.”
Me, I would have confessed and begged for forgiveness. Not Romney, though — and herein is the reason he will be such a formidable general-election candidate. He concedes nothing. He had seen none of the ads, he said. They were done by others, he added. Of course, they are his supporters, but he had no control over them. All this time he was saying this rubbish, he seemed calm, sincere — matter of fact.
And then he brought up an ad he said he did see. It was about Gingrich’s heretical support for a climate-change bill. He dropped the name of the extremely evil Nancy Pelosi. He accused Gingrich of criticizing Paul Ryan’s first budget plan, an Ayn Randish document whose great virtue is a terrible honesty. (We are indeed going broke.) He added that Gingrich had been in ethics trouble in the House and ended with a promise to make sure his ads were as truthful as could be. Pow! Pow! Pow! Gingrich was on the canvas.
I watched, impressed. I admire a smooth liar, and Romney is among the best. His technique is to explain — that bit about not knowing what was in the ads — and then counterattack. He maintains the bulletproof demeanor of a man who is barely suffering fools, in this case Gingrich. His message is not so much what he says, but what he is: You cannot touch me. I have the organization and the money. Especially the money. (Even the hair.) You’re a loser.
There are those who maintain that President Obama, too, is a liar. The president’s recent attack on Ryan’s new budget proposal sent countless critics scurrying to their thesauruses for ways to say lie — “comprehensively misrepresenting” is the way George F. Will put it. (He also said Obama “is not nearly as well educated as many thought.”) Obama does indeed sometimes play politics with the truth, as when he declared that a Supreme Court reversal of his health care law would be unprecedented. He then backed down. Not what he meant, he said.
But where Romney is different is that he is not honest about himself. He could, as he did just recently, stand before the National Rifle Association as if he were, in spirit as well as membership, one of them. In body language, in the blinking of the eyes, in the nonexistent pounding pulse, there was not the tiniest suggestion that here was a man who just as confidently once embodied the anti-gun ethic of Massachusetts, the distant land he once governed. Instead, he tore into Obama for the (nonexistent) threat the president posed to Second Amendment rights — a false accusation from a false champion.
A marathon of debates and an eon of campaigning have toughened and honed Romney. He commands the heights of great assurance, and he knows, as some of us learn too late in life, that the truth is not always a moral obligation but sometimes merely what works.
He often cites his business background as commending him for the presidency. That’s his forgivable absurdity. Instead, what his career has given him is the businessman’s concept of self — that what he does is not who he is. This is what enables the slumlord to be a charitable man. This is what enables the corporate raider to endow his university. Business is business. It’s what you do. It is not who you are. Lying isn’t a sin. It’s a business plan.
By: Richard Cohen, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 17, 2012
“Daydreams And Irrelevent Truths”: Republican Women in Denial
You have to feel just a little sad for Callista Gingrich. When she began having an affair with Newt Gingrich, he was House minority leader and on his way to becoming Speaker. He later told his soon-to-be-ex-wife Marianne that Callista would “help me become president.” And, remarkably enough, there was a moment or two in recent months where that seemed possible. Gingrich surged to the top of the national polls in early December, and he won a dramatic victory in the South Carolina primary. Callista, a former Congressional staffer, has surely entertained a few daydreams of being first lady.
Not anymore. On Tuesday afternoon Callista Gingrich appeared at the Republican Women’s Club in New York, an imposing gray, seven-story townhouse across the street from Rockefeller Center. The venue was impressive, but the event was not. The entire press delegation consisted of a producer from ABC News and a two-person team from a Chinese television station. The club apparently struggled to pull together its attendance of roughly sixty people. (One attendee told me she was called by the club and asked to come.)
The demographics didn’t augur well for the future of the GOP. The average age at the luncheon tables appeared to be around 75. I counted more women in pearl necklaces, more women in purple suits and more women with platinum blonde dyed hair (including Gingrich on all counts), than women who aren’t white.
Not a single woman I interviewed—of those who would let me, they were surprisingly hostile and generally unwilling to divulge basic information, such as their names—intends to vote for Newt Gingrich in New York’s upcoming primary.
You might expect this to be a depressing event for Gingrich for other reasons as well. The Republican war on women has severely damaged the GOP’s brand among women. Consequently, were the election held today women voters would provide Obama with his margin of victory, and a healthy one at that.
So you would expect the Republican Women’s Club to be a pretty demoralized crowd, right? Wrong. The table closest to me boisterously toasted the GOP and joked that President Obama had better start working on his presidential library.
When I asked about their party’s unpopularity among women and the reasons for it, I was met with nothing more than blinkered partisan denial. Some people simply denied the math of recent polls showing that Romney’s advantage among men is outweighed by Obama’s far greater advantage among women. For example, a lawyer told me she isn’t worried about Republicans doing poorly among women because “historically, for whatever reasons, Republicans have appealed to men more and Democrats to women.” Others simply denied the numbers, saying it all depends on which polls you look at.
These are irrelevant truths. Obama’s margin varies from poll to poll, but he consistently leads in all of them. And while women have always leaned more Democratic than men, they are currently leaning much more Democratic than men are leaning Republican.
On the substance of the issues that have made the Republicans look so retrograde to so many women, the majority in attendance simply spouted GOP talking points. “The press is making such a big deal out of birth control, which [banning] isn’t Romney’s platform,” said a woman who gave her name only as Delores. “[Insurance coverage] has nothing to do with birth control,” said another. “I’d like to have my eyeglasses covered.”
Even the predicament of a rape victim brought to the nearest hospital, which may happen to be a Catholic institution, generated no sympathy or compromise. According to Romney, Gingrich et al., a woman in such a circumstance should be denied emergency contraception (also known as “the morning-after pill”) and forced to carry her rapist’s fetus. “After you’ve been raped it’s too late for contraception,” Delores offered.
Ironically, the attendee who appeared to be most in touch with political reality, and the most reasonable on the substance of reproductive freedom, was Marilyn Reagan, a distant cousin of former President Reagan. “If you’re going to frown on abortion you need to provide contraception,” she said. “It’s the [Republican] men I’m worried about. They want to preach. Some of it seems religiously motivated.”
When I accosted Gingrich on her way in and asked what she’d be speaking about she said, “American exceptionalism.” I asked whether she would address the Republican war on women. “No,” she said, with a laugh. “Why not?” I asked. “Because I’m here to talk about American exceptionalism,” she said.
Her speech didn’t give anyone a specific reason to vote Republican, much less for her husband. It was a paean to America’s fantastic history. The only nominal connection to contemporary politics was the false assertion she frequently repeated that liberals and “elites” think America to be undistinguished among the nations. (This is strange since she mentioned liberal heroes John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. as having “testified” to America’s greatness.) “Nothing pinpoints you as a conservative more than believing in American exceptionalism,” said Gingrich. Presumably that means she either thinks President Obama is a conservative, or she didn’t listen to either of his two speeches to Democratic National Conventions. (Delores explained that Obama abandoned his belief in American exceptionalism upon taking office, and that he has explicitly proclaimed upon America’s unexceptional nature from the Oval Office, although she couldn’t furnish any offhand examples.)
The Gingrich campaign is not the only one afraid of addressing women’s rights. On Wednesday morning Sam Stein of Huffington Post asked Mitt Romney’s campaign on a conference call with reporters whether Romney supports the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. The answer? Six seconds of silence followed by “We’ll get back to you.” Hours later the Romney campaign made a half-hearted attempt to fight back on the gender front by issuing a statement from Representative Mary Bono Mack (R-CA) saying Obama is to blame for the rate of unemployment among women. Of course, macroeconomic conditions are completely unrelated to the question of whether Romney, like Obama, supports full legal equality for women.
I asked Reagan whether she thought Republican men would wise up on the subject of women’s rights. “It will take a long time,” she said.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, April 11, 2012
The GOP’s “Rear Guard”: Republican Race-Baiting Will Come Back to Haunt Them
On the wonderful night of November 4, 2008, thousands of people, white, black, and Latino, gathered in Grant Park in Chicago to celebrate the election of our first black president. For many Americans, Barack Obama’s election was the beginning of a new era when there would be cooperation not conflict between races. Finally the racial conflict which had plagued America for centuries would come to an end. Fat chance!
The truth is that racial relations now seem to be even worse than they were before election day in 2008. The ugly truth is that Barack Obama’s election brought the bigots and haters out in full force.
The dream ended for me when I watched a Tea Party rally in Washington where several of the protestors carried posters that pictured the president of the United States as a witch doctor with a bone through his nose. Then there was the infamous incident when white Tea Party protesters at the Capitol hurled racial epithets at black members of Congress.
The Republican candidates for president have made overt and covert racial appeals. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a smart man who should know better, once said President Obama’s views on foreign policy were shaped during his childhood in Africa. During this year’s presidential campaign, Gingrich and former Sen. Rick Santorum both urged black Americans to end their dependence on federal entitlement programs. Pointedly, neither candidate offered the same advice to the millions of white Americans who receive federal benefits. Former Gov. Mitt Romney criticized his primary opponents for just about every reason under the sun, but he never called his opponents out for their racism.
The Republican race baiting filtered down through the ranks. An official of the Orange County Republican Party in California sent out an E-mail that showed the president of the United States as the child of chimpanzees. A Republican mayor in California sent an E-mail that depicted the White House lawn as a watermelon patch.
The final straw was the tragic death of Trayvon Martin.
It’s hard for me to see how Martin could have been a threat to George Zimmerman. Zimmerman had a gun and Martin was armed with a bag of Skittles. Not really a fair fight. My kids used to eat Skittles and fortunately no one shot them. But my kids are white and Trayvon Martin was black. The Republican indifference to Martin’s murder is shocking. The Pew Center released a national poll on Tuesday that indicated that a majority of Republicans believed the media had paid too much attention to the Martin tragedy. They would not think that way if the victim had been a white kid.
The question facing America is whether racial hatred is getting worse or whether it is a rear guard action by people trying to hold back the racial changes in America. I think it’s the last gasp of a dying breed of racial dinosaurs. In their book Millennial Makeover Morley Winograd and Mike Hais demonstrate that the millennial generation of young Americans, who will set the course for American politics for the next generation, is remarkably free of racial basis. And there’s a good reason for this according to the authors. Four out of every 10 Americans between the ages of 18 and 30 are black, Latino, Asian, or Arab. Many young white Americans have black and Latino friends, a situation that has created a generation almost free of racial hate.
If Republicans do win this year, it would be a classic example of winning ugly. But if they win ugly in 2012, they will pay a political price in a few years when millennials replace baby boomers as the dominant force in American politics. Don’t say I didn’t warn them.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, April 5, 2012
A “Star Wars Bar Scene”: Mitt Romney’s Troubles Will Follow Him to the Convention
The train has left the station. The fat lady is about to sing. It is all over but the cheering. Any more trite phrases, as former Gov. Mitt Romney is about to wrap this nomination up?
On Tuesday, he should win Maryland, D.C., and Wisconsin. And some say former Sen. Rick Santorum is behind in the April 24 Pennsylvania primary.
But think about this: How does Romney manage the convention in Tampa with the likes of Rick Santorum, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Rep. Ron Paul, not to mention Rep. Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain wanting their moment in the sun?
Can you see this crowd clearing their speeches with the Romney high command?
Or imagine this, former Gov. Sarah Palin, fresh off the Today show and more time as Fox News diva, begins to insist on a prime time slot. She got shoved off the stage on election night 2008, you don’t think she’ll let it happen again do you?
This could be one rough convention, one strange cast of characters. Bar scene from Star Wars, anyone?
Clearly, Mitt Romney needs to unite the party, play to the hard conservatives, make sure his base is smiling and happy. But, at what cost? By showcasing this crowd? Reminding voters of all those lovely debates? Bringing up Newt Gingrich or Sarah Palin to the stage to infuriate the undecided voters and the independents? Letting Santorum further alienate women and give a culture war speech?
My guess is that Romney would rather pretend that the last year never happened or at least that he put this away by New Hampshire. Sorry, you may have to play it again, Mitt!
Sure, he will have to figure out the vice presidential pick first but this convention could be one “really big show!”
By: Peter Fenn, U. s. News and World report, April 4, 2012
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