“Moses, Moses”: Behold The Power of Newt
Newt Gingrich has publicly pledged to have the single most productive day in presidential history. Gingrich has taken to listing his first-day proposals during recent stump speeches, but he promised to take it a step further when he spoke last night. He promised to release a new Contract With America during his non-concession speech— “a personal one between me and you”—that would detail his plans once he enters office. “We’re going to put this together in a way that you will be able to see in writing with my signature, and you’ll be able to hold me accountable,” Gingrich said.
For Gingrich, it’s not enough to promise voters that you’ll bring change to Washington—you have to bring about that change in the span of a few hours. By my assessment, it seemed like far too ambitious of a plan, just given the taxing schedule of inauguration, what with changing tuxedos between each ball and whatnot. But Gingrich offered a rebuke to my timekeeper’s cynicism last night. “All of this is going to happen about two hours after the inaugural address,” Gingrich said.
Having knocked aside that pesky problem of feasibility, Gingrich added another pledge, “I will sign that day an executive order reinstating Ronald Reagan’s Mexico City Policy, no U.S. money will go anywhere in the world to pay for abortions, period.”
These first day pledges have an almost mystical power in Gingrich’s worldview. It’s not enough to encourage Congress to deconstruct all of the accomplishments of the Obama presidency in a matter of weeks; he’ll also implement every conservative pipe dream with a stroke of his pen. Since the world will be aware of his arrival in the Oval Office, Gingrich thinks the economy will change on a dime. “People say to me ‘how quickly will things turnaround?'” Gingrich told a large rally in The Villages on Sunday. “Let’s talk about jobs. Late on election night when we defeat Barack Obama people will start making decisions to create new jobs.”
With everything planned for that first day, Gingrich will quickly run out of plans to enact. My guess: should Gingrich’s presidency become a reality (a dwindling proposition after last night) he’ll roll out a mission accomplished banner by the start of the second week and send himself on a congratulatory tour of the country—likely hawking a book collecting all of his grand accomplishments.
By: Patrick Caldwell, The American Prospect, February 1, 2012
Mitt Romney Isn’t Too Perfect—He’s Too Phony
Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker has a theory: Former Gov. Mitt Romney doesn’t have a problem connecting with people; rather, people have trouble connecting with him.
Why? Because he’s too perfect:
[H]andsome, rich and successful, he is happily married to a beautiful wife, father to five strapping sons and grandfather to many. At the end of a long day of campaigning, his hair hasn’t moved. His shirt is still unwrinkled and neatly tucked into pressed jeans. He goes to bed the same way he woke up—sober, uncaffeinated, seamless and smiling in spite of the invectives hurled in his direction.
What’s wrong with this guy? Nada. Which is precisely the problem. …
For most everyday Americans, life is less tidy. Half have been or will be divorced. Someone in the family is an alcoholic or a drug user. Most can barely pay their bills, and there’s not much to look forward to. When most Americans of Romney’s vintage look in the mirror, they see an overweight person they don’t recognize.
Great Odin’s raven, I thought I’d heard it all!
I’m not omniscient enough to plumb the psyches of millions of “everyday Americans” and imagine what they see in the mirror. I’ll take my cues from the diverse handful of men who’ve seen up Romney up close. Sen. John McCain, former Gov. Mike Huckabee, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Sen. Fred Thompson campaigned against him in 2008. To varying degrees, each of these men quickly learned to despise Romney.
It’s clear that former Speaker Newt Gingrich and Gov. Rick Perry (and probably Herman Cain) also despise Romney. In the latter pair’s case, one could argue it’s sour grapes. But not in ’08, when Romney flopped badly.
My question to Parker and Jennifer Rubin and David Frum and all the others who are elbowing for room inside the Romney Tank is this: Why do these men fundamentally dislike Mitt Romney? Isn’t it because, on the matter of intellectual honesty, they find Romney all too human? According to John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s Game Change, an insider’s chronicle of the ’08 campaign, McCain said at one point that he preferred former Rep. Tom Tancredo—”because at least he believes the things he says.”
Sure, McCain, Giuliani and Huckabee (as well as former Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Rep. Michele Bachmann) have come out in favor of Romney in this campaign, but they’re doing so out of partisan unity or professional positioning.
Lack of charisma or relatability is not an insurmountable obstacle in American politics. Even former Vice President Al Gore managed to win the popular vote, after all. Romney’s principal problem isn’t a lack of personal connection with people. It’s that he irritates people. He’s a transparent phony who, unlike President Bill Clinton, isn’t even particularly good at being phony.
I’d have far more respect for Mitt Romney if he had the guts to say what he really thinks, which is this.
According to Frum, this is akin to asking Romney to be a political martyr.
That’s silly.
Romney had two options besides committing harakiri.
He could’ve stayed in the private sector (where I hear that created thousands of jobs!), or if his thirst for power and influence could not be denied, he could’ve run as a moderate Democrat.
But Romney chose door. No. 3—to run as a belief-beggaring conservative Republican.
Sorry, Kathleen; I’m pretty happy when I look in the mirror and at my beautiful wife and children. And I still think Mitt Romney is a rancid impostor.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, February 1, 2012
“Rich American Exceptionalism”: Whose Swiss Bank Account Hedges Against The American Dollar?
No, that’s not a trick question. Yes, the answer is that easy. Of course, it’s Mitt Romney.
According to the manager of his trust, Mitt Romney’s Swiss bank account wasn’t an exercise in tax avoidance—rather, it was a hedge against a decline in the dollar. I’m not qualified to say whether or not his explanation is the full truth, but it certainly doesn’t provide evidence that Mitt Romney hates America. Obviously, an investment that bets on the decline of the dollar might not sound good, but when you have as much money as he does, you’re going to end up placing bets that might not be great soundbites for a campaign. In substantive terms, Romney is going to have a much bigger problem explaining why Bain profited from destroying companies than he will have explaining this.
But while the mere existence of the Swiss bank account doesn’t by itself raise questions about Mitt Romney’s loyalty to America, it provides one hell of a way to respond to Romney when he engages his his now-familiar attacks on President Obama’s loyalty. Despite all the attention paid to Newt Gingrich’s “food-stamp” line, Mitt Romney himself is no stranger to the hate card. His preferred formulation: that President Obama doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism, that he seeks to “poison the American spirit”, and that he wants to turn America into Europe and “keep us from being one nation under God.”
Of course, Mitt Romney is nothing like that at all. He’s just the kind of guy who bets on America’s decline to protect his own ass.
The Winds Of Racism On The GOP Campaign Trail
Here are some things you could learn about black Americans from the recent statements and insinuations of Republican presidential candidates, Republican congressmen and Republican-friendly radio personalities:
Black people have lost the desire to perform a day’s work. Black people rely on food stamps provided to them by white taxpayers. Black people, including Barack and Michelle Obama, believe that the U.S. owes them somethingbecause they are black. Black children should work as janitors in their high schools as a way to keep them from becoming pimps. And the pathologies afflicting black Americans are caused partly by the Democratic Party, which has created in them a dependency on government not dissimilar to the forced dependency of slaves on their owners.
Judging by these claims, all of which have actually been put forward recently, here is a modest prediction: This presidential election will be one of the most race-soaked in recent history. It is already more race-soaked than the 2008 election, which, of course, marked the first time that a black man became a major-party candidate.
I don’t know why this is. Perhaps because Senator John McCain, the Republican contender in 2008, generally and admirably refused to race-bait. But the Republican candidates in today’s contest aren’t so meticulous about avoiding the temptation to dog-whistle their way to the nomination.
A Dark Art
Dog-whistling — the use of coded, ambiguous language to appeal to the prejudices of certain subsets of voters –is one of the darkest political arts. In this race, Newt Gingrich is streets ahead of his nearest competitor in its use. In addition to his comments about black children working as janitors, he has repeatedly referred to Obama as the country’s “food-stamp president.”
Food stamps have been fixed in the minds of many white voters as a government subsidy misused by blacks at leastsince 1976, when Ronald Reagan complained of “strapping young bucks” who used public assistance to buy “T-bone steaks.” (It is distressing to remember, in light of Reagan’s subsequent beatification, that he was to racial dog-whistling what Pat Buchanan has been to Jew-baiting; it was Reagan who also introduced the “welfare queen” into public discourse.)
The genius of dog-whistling is its deniability. It would be difficult for a figure such as Rush Limbaugh to run for public office, given his record of fairly straightforward race-baiting. (Limbaugh, who in the words of Harvard Law School’s Randall Kennedy is an “excellent entrepreneur of racial resentment,” has been on a tear lately. He has accused Obama — who he says “talks honky”around white people — and the first lady of abusing public funds as payback for the ill-treatment afforded their ancestors.)
But “food-stamp president” is just indirect enough that Gingrich is protected from detrimental blowback, at least during the largely white Republican primaries.
Kennedy, who studies the role of race in national elections, told me last week of a rule he uses to measure whether a candidate’s appeal to prejudice will succeed: If it takes more than two sentences for a critic to explain why a dog-whistle is a dog-whistle, the whistler wins. Gingrich seems to understand this, and so, despite criticism from blacks, has made the term “food-stamppresident” a staple of his stump speeches.
New Realization
Kennedy offers the theory that this campaign’s dog-whistling may be prompted by a realization by right-leaning provocateurs that voters have become inured to charges of racism. I suspect another phenomenon has hastened this realization: A handful of black Republicans have abetted dog-whistling by making their own bombastic statements about the degraded moral health of the black community, the putative foreignness of the Obamas and the Democratic Party’s plantation-like qualities.
The former presidential candidate Herman Cain, who last week endorsed Gingrich, told me in an interview last year that Obama was more “international” than American. He also said that, unlike Obama, he rejects the label“African-American” because he feels “more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa.”
Representative Allen West of Florida, one of two black Republican House members, recently called the Democratic Party a “21st-century plantation” and compared himself to Harriet Tubman. In August, he said, “Today in the black community, we see individuals who are either wedded to a subsistence check or an employment check. Democrat physical enslavement has now become liberal economic enslavement, which is just as horrible.”
How far in intent is West’s message from this one, recently delivered by Rick Santorum in Sioux City, Iowa: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.” (Santorum laterdenied that he said the word “black,” arguing that what he actually said was “blah.” The denial is not credible.)
The writer Gary Younge has noted that in Woodbury County, which includes Sioux City, nine times more whites use food stamps than blacks do. But it doesn’t matter: Santorum wasn’t driven from the race for making such a blatant appeal to white resentment — instead, he won the Iowa caucus.
An Odd Video
Recently, I watched an educational children’s video produced by a company part-owned by Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate (and current Fox News host). The video series, called “Learn Our History,” is meant as a corrective to a left-wing interpretation of the American story.
In one episode, a group of children are transported to Washington, in the late 1970s, a time when, we are told,“people are out of work and some of their morals are just gone.” The group, walking down a cartoon version of a street from “The Wire,” is confronted by a black mugger in a tank-top emblazoned with the word “Disco.” (Yes,“Disco.”) The mugger says to the time-travelers, “Gimme yo money!”
I asked Huckabee why the video advanced this particular stereotype. We had been speaking about the rationale for the video series, and he had just finished telling me that the project was meant to encourage moral leadership. Then he told me he had nothing to do with writing the show’s scripts, but it was his impression that the mugger wasn’t meant to be black. In any case, we were talking about a cartoon, he said, and cartoons traffic in“caricature.”
This is something cartoons share with many of today’s leading Republicans.
By: Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, January 31, 2012
“The Agony Of Suppressed Contempt”: Why Mitt Romney Hates Republicans
The Republican primary campaign has highlighted the barely concealed contempt in which Mitt Romney holds the electorate, especially the Republican electorate. One adviser has expressed his astonishment that GOP voters fall for clowns like Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich:
“They like preachers,” the adviser said of the tea party demographic. “If you take them to a tent meeting, they’ll get whipped into a frenzy. That’s how people like Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich get women to fall into bed with them.”
That is an insult putatively directed at Romney’s rivals, but which reflects heavily on the voters themselves. Another fresh insult comes today, by way of John Dickerson, who reports that Gingrich’s assault on Juan Williams worked because “‘Williams was a stand-in for Barack Obama in people’s minds,’ said one Romney adviser.”
Gee, whatever could Williams and Obama have in common? Can this be interpreted as meaning anything other than that South Carolina Republicans are a pack of racist buffoons?
Romney’s disdain for the electorate is one of his more deeply rooted traits. During his father’s 1968 presidential campaign, Romney wrote, “how can the American public like such muttonheads?”
I find that contempt pretty well-founded, and it is a relief that Romney does not believe the nonsense he spouts during the campaign. But the persistent awkwardness of Romney’s campaign style reflects this basic tension. It’s easy to try to persuade somebody for whom you have basic respect. It’s persuading somebody whom you consider stupid — while you must conceal any trace of your disdain — that’s excruciatingly difficult. Romney’s awkward manner on the trail is the agony of suppressed contempt.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, February 1, 2012
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