The Success Of Mitt Romney’s Health-Care Pander
Last year, at the University of Michigan, Mitt Romney gave a speech on health care to address his prior support for the individual mandate—the linchpin for the Affordable Care Act and Romneycare in Massachusetts. The core of his speech—and of his message on health care since then—was that it’s unacceptable for the federal government to require health insurance for its citizens. As he said:
Our plan was a state solution to a state problem. And his is a power grab by the federal government to put in place a one size fits all plan across the nation.
Of course, this isn’t true. The Affordable Care Act maintains the private health-insurance market and requires people to buy into it if they don’t have insurance or qualify for Medicaid. If the ACA is a “one size fits all” plan, than by dint of similarity, Romneycare is the same.
It’s for that reason that, at the time, I was skeptical of this whole maneuver. There was no way that conservatives could really believe Romney when he made the bogus distinction between his plan and the administration’s. In the same way that discrimination is discrimination, whether it’s practiced by local, state, or federal authorities, if the requirement to purchase health insurance is tyranny, then it’s tyranny everywhere, regardless of how it’s implemented.
As it turns out, I was completely wrong. Not only has Romney escaped any serious harm for his (huge) role in setting the template for “Obamacare” but his constant denunciations of the law have given him credibility with actual conservatives, who now endorse the former Massachusetts governor’s logic on Romneycare. Here’s Ann Coulter, for example:
As The New York Times put it, “Mr. Romney’s bellicose opposition to ‘Obamacare’ is an almost comical contradiction to his support for the same idea in Massachusetts when he was governor there.” This is like saying state school-choice plans are “the same idea” as the Department of Education. […]
As Rick Santorum has pointed out, states can enact all sorts of laws—including laws banning contraception—without violating the Constitution. That document places strict limits on what Congress can do, not what the states can do. Romney, incidentally, has always said his plan would be a bad idea nationally. [Emphasis mine]
It should be said that, before he flipped to the right in preparation for a presidential run, Romney insisted that his plan would make a good model for the country.
That aside, it’s simply incredible to me that conservatives would buy Romney’s ridiculous logic. But it seems that they trust Romney enough on health-care repeal to let the issue slide. Which should put a damper on liberal hopes that, if elected, Romney won’t try to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. For as much as the public is skeptical of politicians—especially presidential aspirants—students of the presidency have found that presidents genuinely try to fulfill the promises they made as candidates.
If you want to know how Mitt Romney will govern, all you have to do is listen to him. And in that case, a President Romney would cater to the rich, return to the bellicose foreign policy of George W. Bush, and dismantle the social safety net, Obamacare included.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, February 2, 2012
“A Monster Of GOP Creation”: Now Newt May Get Even Nastier
Thirty-four years ago, Newt Gingrich summed it up. In a speech to College Republicans—shortly before he would win his first election to Congress—the future speaker had a piece of fundamental advice for the young and impressionable GOPers: “I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful and all those Boy Scout words.”
Nasty—that was a critical component of Gingrich’s formula for political success. And through the 1980s and 1990s, as Gingrich wielded his nastiness to overturn the Democratic order in Congress and seize the people’s House for the GOP, he was hailed by Republicans. Now, following his 47 to 32 percent loss to Mitt Romney in the Florida presidential primary and Gingrich’s promise—make that, threat—to pursue this nasty nomination contest all the way to the convention in sweltering Tampa in August, the Republican Party has a monster-of-its-own-creation in its china shop. (Imagine a Tasmanian devil in Tiffany & Co.) Despite Romney’s 15-point comeback victory, it seems that the GOP will still be burdened and discombobulated by the Wrath of Gingrich. During his concession speech Tuesday night—which was light on the concession—Gingrich vowed to contest every primary and caucus, as his supporters held up signs that said, “46 STATES TO GO.”
It’s not uncommon for political losers to hang on longer than they should. (See Rick Perry.) So Gingrich’s vow to ignore the play-nice-and-get-out pleas of the Republican establishment and battle all the way to the summer is not surprising. But if he is serious about vengeance, he will have to cling on for longer than a week or two. February’s primaries—Nevada and Maine (February 4); Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri (February 7); and Arizona and Michigan (February 28)—hold few opportunities for the goblin of Georgia. These states are Romney-friendly and not well-suited for Gingrich’s fire-breathing and not-so-coded rants against food stamps and Saul Alinsky. If he wants Romney’s blood, he will have to stay in the hunt until at least Super Tuesday, where he can try to work his dark magic on his home state of Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Idaho. Alabama and Mississippi come a week later.
This means another five or six weeks at least of Gingrich’s not-so-creative destruction, with him hurling his patented nastiness at Romney—and Romney both firing back and, more important, trying to keep up with Gingrich’s extreme anti-Obamaism.
The latter may be more of the problem for Romney than Gingrich’s direct slams on him. Candidates often pound at party comrades during hard-fought nomination contests, and the winner, even though dinged, usually ends up able to compete effectively in the general. (Barack Obama survived Hillary Clinton’s barbs.) But Gingrich is dragging Romney to the right in terms of, yes, nastiness. (During his victory speech in Tampa, Romney declared that Obama represents “the worst of what Europe has become”—of course, without explaining what that meant.)
The GOP primary electorate is in a foul mood. Many of these voters seem to want a candidate who feels their hatred for the president. (See Rick Santorum’s exchange with that lady who maintained Obama is a Muslim.) This whole primary campaign has been a game of revolving Obama-loathers. While Romney has tried to come across as not a hater—he’s disappointed in Obama; he doesn’t despise him—one by one, fire-breathing Obama-bashers who represent the dark and angry mood of their party’s base have risen to be the non-Romney of the GOP race, only to fall down due to their own limitations. And Gingrich is the last of these. (Ron Paul is essentially operating in an alternative universe; Rick Santorum is running on the fumes of Iowa.)
With his mean-spirited and extreme rhetoric, the former House speaker does embody the soul of his party at this point. Though Gingrich is burdened with a ton of baggage that obviously undermines his chances to win a general election—and many Republican voters do care about that—Romney still has to ensure that Gingrich does not run away with the hearts of GOP voters. Consequently, he has to keep the meanness/Obama-hatred gap that exists between him and the former Freddie Mac historian/consultant/strategic adviser from becoming too wide. Yet doing so makes Romney less acceptable to those fickle independent voters who yearn for candidates who can solve problems in Washington without partisan fighting. If Romney has to engage in such Newt-neutralization for weeks, if not months, he will further define himself in a manner likely to alienate independents and middle-of-the-road voters.
There’s an old-saying: Don’t get into a fight with a skunk; you’ll only come out smelling. Romney cannot remain in combat with Gingrich—even if he continues to win delegates—without being tainted by the stench of this skirmish.
Gingrich’s nastiness—now aimed at Romney—is an accurate reflection of the Republican Party. In recent years, Gingrich-style extremism has become its norm. Sarah Palin (who has been egging on Gingrich) claimed during the 2008 race that Obama had been “palling around” with terrorists. When the Democrats were poised to pass a health care reform bill in the House, GOP leaders of that body sponsored a Tea Party rally, where demonstrators chanted “Nazis, Nazis” in reference to the Dems. Donald Trump made GOP voters swoon with his birther talk. Gingrich himself claimed that Obama could only be understood as a fellow who holds a Kenyan, anti-colonialist view of the West. Death panels, a government takeover of the health care system, socialism—it’s been nasty for years in GOPland. Romney’s challenge is to win over these people, without fully endorsing the malice. (Thus, Obama=Europe.)
Now on the receiving end of vicious blasts, Gingrich has taken to whining that he’s the victim of lies and extreme attacks. After all his years of practicing gangster politics, he hardly warrants sympathy. (And many of Romney’s assaults on him have been accurate.) But he also has been trying mightily in recent days to depict himself as the personification of the conservative movement, arguing that an attack on him (by Romney, the Republican establishment, or the media) is an attack on the tea party. (This is a right-wing version of identity politics.) And he’s been saying that the conservative movement simply won’t stand for a “Massachusetts moderate”—or a “liberal” who supports abortion rights and gun control, as he dubbed Romney this week—as the Republican Party nominee.
It’s his last play—to try to ignite a civil war within the GOP. At the moment, with the smell of his Florida defeat still in the air, he seems rather serious about this endeavor. With his own record of flip-flops and his less-than-inspiring personal history, he’s certainly not the perfect leader for such a crusade. But if the dissatisfaction on the right is deep enough, perhaps he can be a sufficient vehicle.
Notwithstanding the loss in Florida—and with only 5 percent of the GOP delegates selected—Gingrich is still positioned to inconvenience, if not undermine, Romney. And he has choices. Will he try to rally conservative foot soldiers and lead a Pickett’s Charge against the front-runner, hoping to do better than Lt. General James Longstreet? Or will he go the way of a suicide bomber and become the doomsday device of the GOP?
With his Florida success, Romney is back on that path to the nomination. But Gingrich is a problem for the front-runner and the entire GOP establishment—and that’s because he’s following the scorched-earth playbook that he long ago developed for the party and that the party has embraced for years.
By: Davis Corn, Washington Bureau Chief, Mother Jones, January 31, 2012
Rick Santorum’s Cynicism: A Fine Day To Discuss The Value Of The Affordable Care Act
This morning brings some sad news, that Rick Santorum’s daughter, Bella, has been hospitalized in Philadelphia. The child has Trisomy 18, a particularly heartbreaking genetic condition.
I do not share the opinion that it is distasteful to discuss the political issues surrounding a tragedy, that there should be some kind of grace period. If you want to argue for or against gun control in the wake of a school shooting, have at it. Why should the very day an issue gets maximum media saturation be the one day we can’t discuss its political contours?
Point being, I think it’s okay to point out that under the Affordable Care Act, insurers can’t deny coverage to children with a preexisting condition or disability.
[T]he law actually prevents insurance carriers from denying coverage to individuals with pre-existing conditions (and disabilities), prohibits health plans from putting a lifetime dollar limit on benefits and offers new options for long-term care. This is why groups like the American Association of People with Disabilities, National Organization For Rare Disorders, and The Arc of the United States not only support the law, but have filed an amicus brief in its defense.
And it’s equally okay to remind voters that Santorum, in an act of startling cynicism, continues to equate the ACA with socialism, even suggesting that it would lead to the death of his daughter. His claim that he’s “fighting for Bella and other children like her” — and, by extension, proponents of the ACA are not — is spurious.
By all accounts, Santorum’s daughter has beaten the odds. She’s gotten marvelous healthcare. I have yet to encounter a decent justification from either Santorum or his fellow candidates for denying the nation’s children the same opportunity.
By: Elon Green, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 29, 2012
The Current Crop Of GOP Liars
The wackiest candidates have dropped out but Newt, Mitt and Ron have made some outrageous claims of their own.
Americans are still struggling to come to terms with the loss they felt as the wackier GOP candidates fell by the wayside. For pure entertainment value, the mendacity they offered on the campaign trail couldn’t be beat.
Who can forget Herman Cain worrying about how China, a member of the club for almost a half-century, is now “trying to develop nuclear capability”? How can one top the convincing specificity of Michele Bachmann’s claim that on “page 92” of the healthcare reform bill, it says “people can’t purchase private health insurance after a date certain, which means people will ultimately go into a single-payer plan”? We have to admit that we’ll miss Rick Perry telling us wild tales of Obama’s totalitarianism extending to “telling us what kind of light bulb we can use.”
Those kind of bizarre untruths were like a series of small gifts for political watchers and late-night comedy writers alike. But just because some of its more colorful wheels have come flying off, that doesn’t mean the GOP clown car isn’t still moving down the road toward the November elections.
We thought we’d take a look at some of the brazen falsehoods offered up by the candidates who remain standing today.
1. Mitt Romney: No Apologies
Mitt Romney wrote a book called “No Apology,” and has repeatedly said on the campaign trail that Obama took a world tour at the beginning of his presidency to issue mea culpas to dastardly foreigners everywhere. This lie is so brazen not only because it never happened, but also because Romney uses the talking-point in speech after speech.
Ironically, as James Taub noted in the New York Times, “In a major speech in Cairo in 2005, Condoleezza Rice, then Mr. Bush’s secretary of state, said that ‘for 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East — and we achieved neither.’ What was she doing if not apologizing on behalf of the United States — and vowing to put an end to a pattern of misguided policy?”
2. Newt Gingrich: Christmas Warrior
Why should the nutjobs at Fox News have all the fun? In Davenport, Iowa, on December 19, Gingrich revealed the results of something he said he’d “been investigating … for the last three days.” What was it?
Apparently if the president sends out Christmas cards, they are paid for the Democratic or Republican National Committees because no federal official at any level is currently allowed to say ‘Merry Christmas.’ And the idea, I think, is that the government should be neutral. … I’m going to go back and find out how was this law written, when was it passed. We’ve had this whole — in my mind — very destructive attitude in the last 50 years that we have to drive religion out of public life.
Guess what? Yup – he just pulled that one out of… perhaps one of those mass emails your crazy right-wing uncle keeps forwarding you.
3. Ron Paul: New Poll Shows That Everyone Agrees With Me!
We’d guess that most Americans haven’t given much thought to Ron Paul’s quixotic quest to return the United States to the gold standard and the regular cycle of booms and crushing busts that long accompanied it.
But on January 3, Paul told his supporters, “today there was a national poll that came out and they were talking about how many people supported the gold standard. How long has it been since they’ve taken a national poll on the gold standard? And guess what? The majority of the American people believe we should have a gold standard and not a paper standard!”
Politifact asked Paul’s campaign to provide some documentation, and they were pointed to a column that referenced three polls showing slim majorities of respondents holding a favorable view of the idea, but they were polls of only Republicans and Republican leaners, and they were conducted in just three states. A real national poll, meanwhile, found that the gold standard is on the wish-list of a minority of Americans.
4. Santorum: A Dingo Is Eating Your Baby! (Or Something)
Rick Santorum is obviously a man who is fascinated with dead babies and inflammatory rhetoric.
Last March, he married the two in an attack on Obama at the Iowa Faith and Freedom conference. Speaking of a wingnutty bill that would require doctors to treat fetuses after “botched abortions,” Santorum said that Obama had opposed the measure when he was in the Illinois state senate, which was true, but then went on to claim that Obama had “said in fact that any child, prior to nine months of gestation would be able to be killed.” He added: “Think about that: any child born prematurely, according to the president, in his own words, can be killed. Now, who’s the extremist in this abortion debate?”
There are some things that shouldn’t even need to be debunked. Obviously, no politician would ever go on record saying something so crazy – that’s just common sense.
But if you really need to verify that Obama never suggested anything of the sort, here’s the fact check.
5. Romney’s Tax Fairytales
Mitt Romney said he wouldn’t release his returns, then he said he’d release them in April and then Newt Gingrich gave him a hard time and he folded. It’s courage like that which makes one wonder how he’d deal with North Korea.
Anyway, the returns show that the “unemployed” candidate made over $40 million in 2010 and 2011, and paid 13.9 percent in taxes on those sums. A paltry figure, and Romney is responding to the criticism he’s received on the topic with two age-old and wholly dishonest conservative talking-points, and an additional sleight-of-hand, all rolled into one juicy bundle of mendacity.
Via Think Progress, this is what he told Univision’s Jorge Ramos in an interview this week:
ROMNEY: One of the reasons why we have a lower tax rate on capital gains is because capital gains are also being taxed at the corporate level. So as businesses earn profits, that’s taxed at 35 percent, then as they distribute those profits as dividends, that’s taxed at 15 percent more. So, all total, the tax rate is really closer to 45 or 50 percent.
RAMOS: But is it fair what you pay, 13 percent, while most pay much more than that?
ROMNEY: Well, again, I go back to the point that the, that the funds are being taxed twice at two different levels.
Mendacious talking point, the first: “double-taxation.” We don’t tax “funds” in this country, we tax transactions. If a company turns a profit on its transactions, it pays taxes on that profit. When it pays money out to investors as dividends, or when investors sell stock at a profit, those transactions are also taxed. No transaction is taxed twice.
Mendacious talking point, the second: that 35 percent tax rate. That’s the top corporate tax rate on the books, but because businesses take advantage of all manner of loopholes, the effective rate – what they actually pay — is actually far lower. It’s a classic conservative talking-point that we have the highest corporate tax rate in the world, but the reality is that we collect less in corporate taxes than most developed countries. Studies of some of the biggest companies have shown their effective tax rates to be, on average, less than half of what’s on the books.
And the sleight-of-hand: Bain Capital is a Limited Liability Company. This is what’s known as a “pass-through” structure, meaning that the company pays zero in corporate income taxes – the partners’ shares are taxed as income or losses on their personal returns, and in this case, most of the gains are investment income taxed at 15 percent.
In other words, even if we bought the “double-taxation” nonsense and the 35 percent rate, his talking-point still wouldn’t be true.
6. “Nancy Pelosi May Destroy the Entire Gop With a Single Wave of Her Wand”
That headline is borrowed from Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent, who reports on a dark conspiracy theory Mitt Romney has embraced to argue that Newt Gingrich is unelectable.
Sargent explains:
There seems to be a very persistent belief in some Republican and conservative circles that Nancy Pelosi is in possession of secret and damning information about Newt Gingrich that would immediately cause his presidential campaign to implode if she leaked it.
A little while ago, Pelosi said in an interview that she was familiar with “a thousand pages” of documents related to the ethics probe of Gingrich that got him bounced from Congress. That triggered the first round of right-wing conspiracy-mongering….
But, alas, she was just talking about the House Ethics Committee’s report on Gingrich’s corruption, which is already widely available. In fact, if you want to read Pelosi’s “secret” treasure-trove of damning info, it’s available online right here!
7: Gingrich: Conservative Republicans Are Secret Liberals
Speaking of which, Newt himself is offering a big lie about his ethics troubles. He said this week that he’d been wholly exonerated in the investigation – an odd claim given that he was sanctioned by the House and it fined him $300,000 to cover the costs of the investigation.
Perhaps that’s not as bad as the fib he offered gullible Fox News viewers in December. Gingrich told Greta Van Susteren that the House Ethics Committee (then called the Standards of Official Conduct Committee), “was a very partisan political committee and that the way I was dealt with related more to the politics of the Democratic Party than to ethics. And I think in that sense, [the campaign issue] actually helps me in getting people to understand, this was a Nancy Pelosi-driven effort.”
But, as Politifact noted in awarding Gingrich a “pants on fire” for the claim, three of the four Republicans on the committee voted to recommend that Gingrich be sanctioned, and then the “full House went on to pass the ethics report 395 to 28, with 196 Republicans voting for it and just 26 voting against it.”
8. Newt Lies About Food Stamps
Gingrich lies shamelessly about food stamps – it makes him look hip with the Ayn Rand crowd. He has said, repeatedly, that “more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history.” And while it’s true that the overall number of folks receiving nutritional assistance is at an all-time high, thanks to a crushing recession, Gingrich’s claim is simply false: 444,574 more people were added to the program under Bush than during Obama’s term.
But that one may not be as brazen as a claim he made in November in Council Bluffs, Iowa. “We now give [benefits] away as cash,” he said. “You don’t get food stamps. You get a credit card, and the credit card can be used for anything. We have people who take their food stamp money and use it to go to Hawaii. They give food stamps now to millionaires because, after all, don’t you want to be compassionate?”
This is just silly. According to the USDA’s rules, “households can use benefits to buy groceries or to buy seeds and plants which produce food. (In some places where subsistence fishing is the norm, such as remote areas of Alaska, recipients can also pay for nets, hooks, fishing line, rods, harpoons and knives.) And in some areas, restaurants can be authorized to accept SNAP benefits from qualified homeless, elderly, or disabled people in exchange for low-cost meals.”
As for the millionaires, no again. To be eligible for benefits a family can’t be earning more than 30 percent over the poverty line.
9. How Many Jobs Plans Have the GOP Blocked?
During a January 16 debate, Mitt Romney said of Obama, “Three years into office, he doesn’t have a jobs plan.”
We’re guessing this will be an oft-repeated talking point as the campaign progresses. It’s also a brazen bit of historical revisionism. As the AP notes, “Like them or not, Obama has proposed several plans intended to spur the economy and create jobs.”
From the stimulus to the payroll tax deal, Obama’s offered all sorts of plans that the GOP, eager to go into the election with a sluggish economy, has blocked. The most recent of these, as the AP notes, was offered just a few months ago:
In September, Obama introduced his most recent jobs plan, rolling it out in a speech to the full Congress in which he urged Congress to “pass it right away.” It included $450 billion in tax cuts and new spending, including greater cuts to payroll taxes and tax breaks for companies that hire those who’ve been out of work for six months or more. Almost none of it has been passed into law.
10. Romney’s Mythical War on Religion
Romney’s got a little problem: many of the evangelicals who have long served as the foot-soldiers in GOP campaigns really, really hate Mormons. So, Mitt’s trying desperately to shore up support by showing that he’s as dedicated to the culture wars as any good American right-winger.
Here’s what he said on a conference call with Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition on Wednesday:
Then of course there’s the assault on religion….now he’s gone forward and said that religious institutions, universities, hospitals and so forth, religious institutions have to provide free contraceptives to all their employees, even if that religious institution is opposed to the use of contraception, as in the case of the Catholic Church. Even in that regard, fighting to eliminate the conscience clause for healthcare workers who wish not to provide abortion services or contraceptives in their workplace, in their hospital for instance. It’s an assault on religion unlike anything we have seen.
There’s been an assault on marriage. I think he is very aggressively trying to pave the path to same-sex marriage.
Two problems here. First, much to the frustration of his LGBT supporters, Obama doesn’t favor gay marriage. Second, as Igor Volsky (who reported Romney’s comments for Think Progress) notes, “Federal regulations contain clear provisions in three separate laws shielding federally funded healthcare providers’ right of conscience.”
For instance, the1976 Church Amendment “prevents the government (as a condition of a federal grant) from requiring healthcare providers or institutions to perform or assist in abortion or sterilization procedures against their moral or religious convictions,” the Coats Amendment of 1996 prohibits the government from “discriminating” against medical residency programs or other entities that lose accreditation because they fail to provide or require training in abortion services” and the Hyde/Weldon Conscience Protection Amendment of 2004 “forbids federal, state and local governments from requiring any individual or institutional provider or payer to perform, provide, refer for, or pay for an abortion.”
These “conscience clauses” are also enshrined in Obama’s signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act. So, thankfully, the Christian majority remains just as un-oppressed today as it has been in the past.
By: Joshua Holland, Alternet, Published in Salon, January 27, 2012
Greater Of Two Evils: Gingrich Vs Santorum
Why did South Carolina’s evangelical voters go for Newt Gingrich rather than Rick Santorum?
What have we learned from the fact that it was Newt Gingrich, not Rick Santorum, who surged past Mitt Romney in Saturday’s South Carolina Republican primary? The voters who turned out, after all, sure fit the profile of Santorum supporters. Fully 65 percent described themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians, and Santorum was the candidate who most stressed the cultural and religious values in which these voters believe, even as Newt’s private life made a mockery of them. Fifty-three percent of the GOP voters had no college degree, and, again, it was Santorum who explicitly defended both the economic interests and cultural importance of blue-collar workers.
But Gingrich won the votes of 44 percent of the born-agains and evangelicals, while Santorum won just 21 percent. And Gingrich got 43 percent of the non-college grads, while Santorum ended up with just 18 percent.
The appeals that Gingrich made mattered far more to these voters than the religious and economic appeals that Santorum offered. What Newt appealed to was these voters’ racism, which he also deliberately wrapped in the belief that the nation’s media elites favor liberal racial policies and look down on people like them. The two incidents that propelled Newt to his victory (other than Romney’s inability to deal with the issue of his taxes) were his assaults on Juan Williams and John King in last week’s debates. When Williams dared to suggest that Gingrich’s labeling of Barack Obama as a “food-stamp president” had racist overtones, Gingrich slapped Williams down almost as though he were a surrogate for Obama—an uppity black in a privileged position complaining of injustices to his own minority group. The impact of this moment on many South Carolina Republicans was little less than cathartic; it was a triumphal outburst of pent-up resentments clearly screaming for release. A few nights later, Gingrich augmented his image as the man who whacks the liberal media with his assault on King.
It’s all straight out of the playbook of George Wallace, who not only slandered and threatened African Americans in his speeches but also took out after the national news media (“Huntley and Chinkley and Walter Contrite,” as he termed them in a burst of almost surreal folk poetry).
The Republican voters of South Carolina may think of themselves as religiously devout and economically embattled, but what they were really looking for in a candidate was a champion who’d slap down pretentious blacks and promise a restoration of white normality. Abnormal as Gingrich may actually be, this was what he offered up in South Carolina, and it went down mighty smooth.
By: Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect, January 23, 2012
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