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
Mitt’s “Hunger Games”: The GOP’s “Career Tribute” Seeks His Inner Katniss
Mitt Romney’s outing last weekend to watch The Hunger Games with his grandkids spurred snickering among the political media. In a Tuesday interview, Wolf Blitzer ribbed the governor about whether the violent flick was appropriate for such young children. Wednesday, Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski proclaimed Romney a “nerd,” while Scarborough flatly refused to believe the candidate had either seen the flick or read the book (“He did not!”), likening Mitt’s claims to his previously professed love of varmint hunting.
I get where Joe’s coming from, but come on: how could Romney not love the wildly popular tale of teens fighting to the death for the amusement of a blood-thirsty public? That’s basically been his life for the past several months. And at this point, the governor must be wondering whether it’s time to break out his bow and go all Katniss Everdeen on Newt and Rick.
Everyone knows the HG basics, right? In a post-apocalyptic society, a despotic central government forces teen “tributes” from 12 outlying districts to do battle in a sprawling, nightmarish biosphere of sorts. Twenty-four go in. One comes out—but only after the rest are slaughtered either by fellow combatants or by the lethal traps sprinkled about by Gamemakers to keep things interesting: mutated beasts, fireballs, poison vegetation, blizzards … There are no rules, and the carnage is, of course, televised.
You can see why the story naturally brings to mind the primary. Multiple combatants enter. Only one can emerge the victor. Along the way, candidates face hazards that include gaffes (Perry, Bachmann), scandal (Cain), staff upheaval (Bachmann, Gingrich), money shortages (Santorum, Gingrich), congenital blandness (Pawlenty), perceived nuttiness (Bachmann, Paul), and a complete inability to get anyone to notice they are in the game at all (Roemer, McCotter, Karger).
Once the battle proper begins (Cue Iowa!), most players don’t last long. But there are generally one or two scrappers who, no matter how badly wounded, refuse to die. This cycle, Santorum and, even more so, Gingrich have made clear their intent to limp along, inflicting as much damage as possible on what they see as an unworthy tribute.
How exactly to end this spectacle has proved a thorny question not just for Team Romney but also for a Republican leadership that’s grown weary of the public bloodbath.
The recent flood of pro-Romney endorsements by party elders hasn’t worked. Nor has high-minded talk about the need for unity. Various carrots and sticks are presumably being brandished behind the scenes (for instance, at Newt and Mitten’s secret sit-down Saturday), thus far to no avail. Unless you count Gingrich’s announcement Tuesday that he is shifting to a “big-choice convention” strategy. Tell me that doesn’t have trouble written all over it.
Some candidates might be able to pull off an above-the-fray statesman’s repose while their final opponents expire. Romney isn’t one of them. His position is too weak, his support too tenuous. Nobody liked him much to begin with, and all this slap-fighting has made him look even more unctuous and ineffectual. At this point, the Tribute from Massachusetts needs to take a breath, aim well, and—zing—put one through the enemy’s brainpan.
Not literally, of course. (Although, how awesome would it be to see Mittens decked out in leather hunting gear, shimmying up trees with a quiver of arrows strapped to his back?) But a figurative kill is in the party’s best interest as well as Mitt’s. Besting Santorum in Pennsylvania might take care of Rick, but Newt is beyond shaming and will need to be hit where he lives. You know the kind of thinly veiled brutality I’m talking about: nice little consulting business you’ve got there, shame if anything happened to it.
Of course, any Hunger Games fantasies Romney may harbor contain a fatal flaw: no way he’s Katniss. More than any of the combatants this cycle, the governor has “career tribute” written all over him—one of the privileged killing machines that hail from the rich, well-connected districts and train for battle their whole lives. Think Cato from District 2, only with more money and better hair.
Indeed, if anyone had a shot at the Katniss role, it would be Santorum: the scrappy underdog who entered the arena heavily outgunned and wound up charming the audience with his passion, ingenuity, and fierce will to survive. This is precisely the sort of inspirational, irresistible against-all-odds victory from which blockbuster fiction is made.
Republican nominees, not so much.
By: Michelle Cottle, The Daily Beast, March 30. 2012
“No Nutritional Value”: A Farewell To Newt
It’s not easy letting him go. Not easy at all. Sort of like swearing off bedtime Ben & Jerry’s: there’s valor and the promise of self-improvement in the sacrifice, but also the sad awareness that the world just got a little less naughty. A little less fun.
No matter. It’s time to cut Newt out of our diets.
He has no nutritional value, certainly not at this point, as he peddles his ludicrous guarantee of $2.50-a-gallon gasoline, a promise that would be made only by someone with his own bottomless strategic reserve of crude. Doubly oily entendre intended.
There were calls for him to desist two weeks ago, after he lost Alabama, which abuts his home state of Georgia. But they fell on a deaf Newt.
There were fresh appeals last week, when he failed to wring even one measly delegate from Illinois on Tuesday and then Louisiana on Saturday. But Newt doesn’t need anything as prosaic as delegates, so long as there’s still pocket lint from Sheldon Adelson and the warmth of Callista’s frozen smile.
If he refuses to quit, we in the news media must quit him. Starve him of his very sustenance: attention. Exert a kind of willpower that we’ve lacked in this primary, which we turned into too much of a circus by encouraging too many clowns.
We’ve begun. As the weekend came to a close, The Times’s Trip Gabriel reported that Gingrich’s “full-time traveling press corps is down to a handful of embedded television reporters.” The Associated Press, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and even Politico had packed up their bags. I envision Newt as a larger, grayer, windier version of the little boy at the end of “Shane,” watching the last of these stubborn scribes recede into the horizon, begging them for one last sweet tweet, promising a tasty sound bite about Trayvon Martin or Robert De Niro or … “The Hunger Games!” There must be some harbinger of cultural decline to rail about there! Do “Hunger Games” contestants use food stamps? Those are always good for a diatribe or three.
I implore Fox News to pull up its drawbridge, CNN to bolt its doors. If a Newt falls in the forest and not a single news anchor listens, can he really hang around?
He says he’s propelled by a desire to promote “big ideas,” but his candidacy has devolved into ever smaller talk and ever more desperate sideshows that drag an already undistinguished debate ever lower. Late last week he actually resurrected the Obama-as-Muslim bile, saying the president’s policies raise legitimate suspicion in voters’ minds.
In truth Newt 2012 has never been a lofty enterprise. Although he loves to tout his intellectualism, he got what brief traction he did for visceral and theatrical reasons, with fits of rage and flights of fancy.
He took off when he lashed out at “the elites,” pretending not to be one of them. He soared when he savaged the news media. He rocketed to a colony on the moon.
And he illustrated a dynamic that will survive this campaign season and that we should all think about: how much the profusion of cable channels, Web outlets, other news platforms and commentary of all kinds (including this column) rewards flamboyance, histrionics and a crowded field. A brash candidate is never more than a bellow away from three minutes of air time or two paragraphs somewhere. The beast is ravenous, and I don’t mean Newt.
Yes, the serial surges of the Republican contest since August had grounding in a fickle electorate and changeable polls. But we eagerly abetted them. En route to our beige destiny of Mitt, we craved color. And showcased it.
Newt is one of the few surviving peacocks, especially if you discount Ron Paul, who’s less peacock than emaciated ostrich — never airborne, head in the sand — and so consistently discounted that no one even bothers to implore him to fold his tent. No one can remember that he pitched one.
It’s time to forget Newt as well. His delegate count is closer to Paul’s than to Rick Santorum’s. His strategy — a generous noun — hinges on a replay of the 1920 Republican convention, which picked Warren G. Harding on the 10th ballot.
The 10th ballot? That’d really send the Republican nominee into the general election with a head of steam. I can see the bumper stickers now. Newt: Battle ready. Ballot hardened.
Great politicians are memorialized with holidays, monuments, libraries. For Newt I think an ice cream flavor is in order, something in the clogged vein of Chubby Hubby or Chunky Monkey, although not so physique-focused. Nutty Professor is too obvious a suggestion, though it opens the door to pralines, aptly Southern.
Maybe Peaches ’n’ Scream? That would honor the state he comes from while acknowledging the state he’s been in — unsubtle, overwrought. Not qualifying for the Virginia primary was a blow akin to Pearl Harbor. The Palestinians are “an invented” people.
Newt is empty calories. A pointless pint of them.
By: Frank Bruni, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 26, 2012
“An Irreducibly Tangible Question”: What Happens To The Uninsured If Health-Care Reform Is Dismantled?
When the Republican presidential candidates talk about health care, the discussion usually moves quickly toward the philosophical and the abstract.
Take Rick Santorum’s appearance at the Christian Liberty Academy last weekend in this Chicago suburb. Before a raucous crowd, the former senator from Pennsylvania portrayed President Obama’s health-care-reform law as an “affront to freedom.” In Santorum’s telling, the plan is not so much an attempt to reshape the health care system as the worm on a line meant to hook Americans on Big Government. “What tribute won’t you pay to the government if they can promise that if you give them more they will … take care of you?” he asked dramatically.
There’s no question that an ideological chasm over Washington’s proper role in health care separates Democrats and Republicans. And there’s no doubt that some Democratic strategists believe that average Americans will grow more tolerant of activist government if they see it providing them more direct benefits, such as health insurance.
But the debate over health care reform — which will intensify again next week as the Supreme Court hears oral arguments on challenges to the law’s mandate on individuals to buy insurance — involves more than competing philosophies or political strategies. At its core, it raises an irreducibly tangible question: what, if anything, to do about the nearly 50 million Americans who today lack health insurance.
Those millions of uninsured rarely intrude into the promises from GOP congressional leaders and the party’s presidential field to defend liberty by repealing Obama’s plan. But ignoring them doesn’t make them go away. If the 2012 election rewards Republicans with enough leverage in Washington to erase Obama’s initiative, they will face the choice of finding an alternative means to expand coverage or allowing the number of those without insurance to grow, with far-reaching consequences not only for the uninsured but for those with insurance as well.
Without some policy intervention, there’s little question that access to health insurance will continue to decline. Since 2000, the number of the uninsured has jumped from 36.6 million to 49.9 million, about one-sixth of all Americans.
That number would have been even higher if an additional 20 million people over that period had not obtained coverage through Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. This growth partially offset the unrelenting erosion in employer-based care: The share of Americans obtaining coverage from their employer has declined every year since 2000, in good times and bad.
Earlier this month, the Congressional Budget Office forecast that, absent the new health-care law, the number of uninsured would rise to 60 million by 2020. That large a pool of uncovered Americans would create enormous strain for the health-care system.
The uninsured themselves would feel the most immediate effect, of course — studies show they are much more likely than those with coverage to defer or entirely forego needed care. But such an increase would also produce upward pressure on premiums for the insured as providers, especially hospitals, raise prices for those with coverage to offset the cost of uncompensated care to those without it. “The idea that repeal [of health-care reform] is somehow going to lower your premium is folly,” says Len Nichols, director of George Mason University’s Center for Health Policy Research and Ethics. More likely, he argues, repeal would increase premiums.
Obama’s health-care law, whatever its other virtues or flaws, represents a serious effort to break this cycle. CBO, echoing earlier projections, estimated last week that it would cover 33 million of the uninsured. No Republican has offered a plan to cover anywhere near so many. In 2009, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the principal House Republican alternative to Obama’s proposal would cover only 3 million of the uninsured.
Both Santorum and Mitt Romney have proposed unspecified tax credits to cover some of those without coverage. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum, notes that Republicans believe that allowing interstate sale of insurance plans that offer more bare-bones coverage will reduce premium costs and expand access. Even so, he acknowledges, because so many of the uninsured have meager incomes, any tax credit big enough to meaningfully expand coverage still requires “a lot of money.”
But Republicans are proposing to shrink, not increase, federal health-care spending. Both Romney and House Republicans want to convert Medicaid into a block grant and cut federal spending on the program about in half by 2030. Even if those cuts provoked greater efficiency, the Urban Institute has estimated they could swell the number of uninsured by 14 million to 27 million beyond the effect of repealing Obama’s coverage expansion.
Leading Republicans almost all portray the health-care debate as a philosophical turning point between a limited central government and one they see as overweening and even tyrannical. But the debate also represents a much more practical turning point, between a society that attempts to approach universal health coverage and one that accepts millions of people living without insurance — with unavoidable costs for the uninsured and the insured alike.
By: Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic, March 23, 2012
“You Don’t Need To Know Anything Else”: It’s Okay If You’re Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney, blaming Rick Santorum for the passage of Obamacare because Santorum endorsed Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey (Feb. 22, 2012):
The reason we have Obama Care — the reason we have Obama Care is because the Senator you supported over Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, Arlen Specter, the pro- choice Senator of Pennsylvania that you supported and endorsed in a race over Pat Toomey, he voted for Obama Care. If you had not supported him, if we had said, no to Arlen Specter, we would not have Obama Care. So don’t look at me. Take a look in the mirror.
Despite the ridiculousness of that argument (and it is especially ludicrous given Romney’s own failure to support Toomey), the next day Mitt Romney kept up the attack, this time slamming Santorum for having supported Specter’s 1996 presidential bid:
“There was also in 1996 when he supported Arlen Specter . . . He supported the pro-choice candidate, Arlen Specter,” Romney said, against a pro-life candidate, Bob Dole. “This taking one for the team, that’s business as usual in Washington.”
And on Monday, Romney’s campaign once again leveled the same attack on Rick Santorum, questioning his conservative credentials for having supported the moderate Specter.
Santorum says he endorsed Specter out of friendship because Specter was a colleague from Pennsylvania. And as HuffPost’s Sam Stein reminds us, that’s the same defense offered by Mitt Romney for his own support of Democrats:
“I don’t think they’re mortal sins for Republicans to make contributions to good people and to their friends, irrespective of their party,” he told reporters upon announcing his Senate bid, according to a February 3, 1994 Boston Herald article.”I place my friendship above politics. I have not been intent on plotting a political resume,” he declared elsewhere, according to a Boston Globe report from the day before.
The difference between what Romney was doing and what Santorum was doing is that Santorum was supporting a Republican while Romney was supporting a Democrat. Which brings us to a new acronym: IOKIYAMR. It’s okay if you are Mitt Romney, the concept that no matter what you do, it’s wrong … unless you are Mitt Romney.
So if you support a guy who later becomes a Democrat, it’s terrible, but if you support a Democrat, it’s okay, because IOKIYAMR.
If your name is Barack Obama and you sign into law health care reform plan that includes health care exchanges and an individual mandate, you’re an America-hating socialist, but if you do the exact same thing in Massachusetts and then support it at the federal level, it’s okay, because IOKIYAMR.
It’s the same reason that President Obama’s Iran policy is wrong (even though Mitt Romney shares the key substantive points) and it’s the same reason President Obama’s stimulus plan was bad (even though Mitt Romney called for a similar one). It’s the same reason it was wrong to vote for Rick Santorum in Michigan if you were a Democrat to screw with Republicans even though Mitt Romney voted across party lines in Massachusetts to screw with Democrats. If you’re Mitt Romney’s opponent, whatever you did was wrong, and whatever he did was right. IOKIYAMR. You don’t need to know anything else.
By: Jed Lewison, Daily Kos, March 20, 2012
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