“Hallucinations” And “Requisite Experience”: Why Does Mitt Romney Want To Be President?
When the empire strikes back, it hits hard. The Republican establishment is deploying every weapon and every soldier — even Bob Dole — in an increasingly desperate attempt to pulverize the Newt Gingrich rebellion. Eventually, the shock-and-awe campaign may work.
But then what? In the establishment’s best-case scenario, the party is left with Mitt Romney, a candidate whose core message, as far as I can tell, seems to be: “Yes, I made a ton of money. You got a problem with that?”
It is remarkable that the well-orchestrated blitzkrieg to save Florida for Romney was designed solely to raise doubts about Gingrich’s character and electability — rather than convince voters that Romney, on the merits, should be president. It makes you wonder whether the GOP luminaries supporting this guy really believe in him.
A statement issued last week by elder statesman Dole began by arguing that “if Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state and federal offices.” Dole went on to criticize Gingrich as highhanded and erratic, before ending his brief missive with another dose of realpolitik.
“In my opinion if we want to avoid an Obama landslide in November, Republicans should nominate Governor Romney as our standard-bearer,” Dole wrote. “He has the requisite experience in the public and private sectors. He would be a president we could have confidence in.”
“Requisite experience” isn’t much of a hallelujah, yet it’s typical of the pro-Romney chorus that has been singing so loudly since Gingrich won the South Carolina primary. Meanwhile, the voices of some key potential choristers haven’t been heard at all: Two of the most prominent Republicans in Florida, former governor Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio, have declined to endorse anyone for the nomination.
But what has Romney given his supporters to work with? Yes, he served as governor of Massachusetts and implemented health insurance reforms that became the model for President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Yes, he earned a quarter of a billion dollars as a private-equity mogul. These résuméitems are supposed to be a compelling reason to send him to the White House?
Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul have all laid out bold visions — more properly, hallucinations — of where they would take the country. But where is Romney’s shining city on a hill? What’s his “compassionate conservatism,” his “hope and change”? What is it that Mitt Romney, deep in his heart or down in his gut, really believes in?
“Free enterprise” seems to be what he’s most passionate about, but that’s not really an answer to the question of core beliefs. Who doesn’t believe in free enterprise? Obama would advocate a bit more regulation of markets than Romney would; Santorum and Paul, less. Gingrich, of course, wants free-market spaceships to fly us to the moon.
Obama wants to rearrange our priorities to make the nation more prosperous, competitive and humane. Gingrich basically has the same goal, except he would do it in a completely different way — and there would be a much bigger role for space travel. Santorum’s policy positions add up to a return to “compassionate conservatism” and, perhaps, a war with Iran. Paul wants to decimate the federal government and force the few remaining workers to surrender their computers and use quill pens.
And Romney? Well, he has a 160-page economic plan. What he doesn’t seem to have is a compelling narrative about the kind of America he envisions and the road he will take to get us there.
This is not to say that he is necessarily incapable of developing such a narrative — or, for that matter, that he is incapable of beating Obama. The president and his advisers have at times done a mediocre job of telling the administration’s story. They need to better explain how individual decisions, such as delaying the controversial Keystone pipeline, fit into a coherent Big Picture of where the country needs to go.
Romney has become a very good debater, and his attack lines about Obama are honed and barbed. The only reason he still has a fight on his hands for the nomination, really, is that he let his opponents reduce his argument for the presidency to a defense of how he earned and manages his great wealth.
No matter how much he claims otherwise, the fact is that few people are envious of Romney’s business success. We just want to know if that’s all he has to offer.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 30, 2012
The “Truths” Mitt Romney Is Willing to Tell
The great German filmmaker Werner Herzog has an illuminating formulation to describe his unorthodox way of making documentaries. There is, Herzog says, an “accountant’s truth,” and there is an “ecstatic truth.”
Herzog is all about seeking the latter, as he explained to Slate magazine:
In his own nonfiction films, Herzog wants to tell stories and he doesn’t feel beholden to fact. His approach to documentary is an alternative to cinema vérité, the observational aesthetic that proceeds “as if presenting facts was everything.” Just because something is factually true, he argues, “it does not constitute truth per se.” Herzog likes to respond to and collaborate with his subjects; if he bends fact—by inventing dialogue, for instance—it is to the ends of “truth.” The Manhattan phone directory provides millions of correct entries, he says, “but it doesn’t inspire you”; in the film, he says it doesn’t tell you what Manhattanites dream. Instead of fact, which is the “accountant’s truth,” he is after the kind of “ecstatic truth” available to poetry: “These moments are rare but I’m trying to find them, which is why I have had different goals from some of my colleagues.”
Which “truth” is former Gov. Mitt Romney going to tell about President Barack Obama’s administration: the accountant’s truth or the ecstatic truth?
Romney telling an accountant’s truth would sound something like his interview with radio host Laura Ingraham, wherein President Obama inherited a bad economy that has improved modestly despite, not because of, the efforts of his administration:
The economy always gets better after a recession, there is always a recovery. There’s never been a time anywhere in the world where an economy has never recovered. The question is, has it recovered by virtue of something the president’s done or has he delayed the recovery and made it more painful?
To stick with the Herzog formulation, Romney is here reciting the political equivalent of the Manhattan phone directory—uninspiring, to say the least.
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s success, such as it is, lies in his willingness to tell what conservatives would consider the “ecstatic truth”: that Obama is a radical un-American to his core; that he is anti-work and pro-dependency.
Savvy conservatives know very well that telling the accountant’s truth about Obama is not going to be enough to defeat him, and they’re worried that Romney isn’t mean enough to deliver the necessary payload of ecstasy.
I think this fear is misplaced.
If you had asked me a couple months ago, I would’ve said (actually, I did say) there are places Romney just won’t go in order to get himself elected. I no longer believe that. He was posturing all along—trying to remain above the fray for as long as he could. After South Carolina, that became untenable. The Romney campaign’s self-described “destruction” of Gingrich in Florida is an indication of how much he means business.
We know this: Romney is wildly ambitious and willing to lie.
Whether enough Americans are going to buy the ecstatic truth from an uncharismatic plutocrat with a strange-seeming religion is an open question. But I have no doubt that Romney will try to sell it.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, January 30, 2012
Wisconsin Recall More Popular Than Republican Primaries
America is almost four weeks into the voting stage of the Republican presidential race. The candidates are debating. The media is covering the competition 24/7, and in such minute detail that Rick Perry’s quitting of the contest was treated as news. And Republicans in three states have caucused and voted in numbers that party leaders, pundits and the talk-radio amen corner tell us are significant.
Yet at the same time, those same party leaders, pundits and radio talkers continue to dismiss the movement to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker as a false construct with little real hope of prevailing.
Fair enough, let’s compare.
Since January 3, Republican caucuses have been held in Iowa (with an electorate of 2,231,589), and Republican primaries have been held in New Hampshire (electorate of 998,799) and South Carolina (electorate of 3,385,224).
That adds up to a total electorate of 6,615,612 in the trio of first- (and second- and third-) in-the-nation states.
Turnout for the Iowa caucuses is now pegged at 121,479. Turnout in the New Hampshire primary was 248,448. Turnout in the South Carolina primary was 601,166.
That adds up to a total turnout of 971,093, or about 14.5 percent of the possible voters in the three states.
And what of Wisconsin?
The state has an electorate of 4,170,501.
The United Wisconsin petition drive to recall anti-labor Governor Scott Walker collected significantly more than 1 million signatures.
Rounding to a million, that’s about 23.9 percent of the possible voters in the state.
So here’s what we know:
1. If you add up all the caucus and primary votes that have been cast so far for Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, the former Rick Perry, the former Jon Huntsman, the former Michele Bachmann and the eternal Buddy Roemer, they still have not attracted as much support as has the drive to recall Scott Walker.
2. If you compare the percentage of the electorate in the three caucus and primary states that has expressed support for all the Republicans who would be president, it is dramatically lower than the percentage of the Wisconsin electorate that wants to recall Scott Walker.
3. If you add the total number of names on petitions filed January 17 to recall other Republicans in Wisconsin—Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, state Senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald and three of Fitzgerald’s colleagues—the total number of signatures filed in support of the recall of Walker and his cronies is close to 1,940,000. That figure is just about double the number of votes cast in all the Republican presidential contests for all the Republican presidential candidates so far this year.
Conclusion: if the Republican presidential race is a serious endeavor, the Wisconsin drive to recall Scott Walker, Rebecca Kleefisch, Scott Fitzgerald and their compatriots is doubly serious. And far, far more popular with the available electorate.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, January 28, 2012
Newt Gingrich And South Carolina Were Made For Each Other
Hot-headed South Carolina and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich are made for each other. The state first to secede from the Union about 150 years ago remains defiant, mischievous, and unreconstructed. Not all states are created equal.
South Carolina, shall we say, made its name early as the troublemaker. To this day, it doesn’t like to fall in line and sends elected representatives to Washington cut from that cloth. Down home in Charleston, men especially still brag on the firing on Fort Sumter, the shots and blockade that started the Civil War. Very nice.
So natch Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina Republican presidential primary over the front-runner, former Gov. Mitt Romney. There was no way the most viciously verbose and confrontational politician in our time was not going to win over the weekend. Just like the confident, beautiful people of the New England Patriots were going to see their football team beat the sincere, scrappy Baltimore Ravens, any which way. Gingrich’s victory was destined by the order of the political court.
The 243,398 Republicans who voted for Gingrich in the Palmetto State gave him the first statewide win of his life. Remember, the former speaker only ever faced voters in a congressional district in Georgia. He is not necessarily a man of the people, no matter what the South Carolina verdict. Not that I care, but Romney does not need to fear the writing on the wall yet.
Gingrich, like his new best friend state, is an outsider of the establishment. Gingrich, like South Carolina, home to the the Citadel, likes starting the political equivalent of war, although he never did military service. Gingrich, like South Carolina, is steeped in history which each are capable of entirely misreading and handing down like lore.
A few facts on Gingrich’s own history. As House speaker, he was awed by President Clinton’s political prowess and brilliance, as Washington Post associate editor David Maraniss pointed out on Sunday’s Post op-ed page. He knew he had met more than his match. Later in Clinton’s presidency, he masterminded the House impeachment strategy, carried out by then-Rep. Henry Hyde, that nearly doomed Clinton’s fate. The Monica Lewinsky affair was only a vehicle. No moral umbrage was involved, as we now know Gingrich was then having an affair with an aide on the Hill, now his third wife Callista Gingrich.
Vengeful hypocrisy still cuts deep. If Gingrich had his way, Clinton would be as gone as the good King Duncan in Macbeth. Sen. Lindsay Graham, then a South Carolina congressman, was one of Hyde’s dozen helpers. This was only over a dozen years ago, but it seems like “history” we have forgotten. That’s what Gingrich is counting on when he talks about God’s forgiveness and “despicable” debate queries. That’s what columnists forget when they write that Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr was solely responsible for the whole tragic circus.
Some more history on South Carolina. When the greats gathered in a room to invent the Republic and its rules, South Carolina’s men were most adamant about protecting slavery as an institution. That was formative fruit on the tree since. A South Carolina congressman caned a Massachusetts senator for his abolitionist views on the Senate floor before the Civil War broke out. As noted, they were first to fight “the Yankees” and call themselves another country. Over much of the 20th century, the stubborn Strom Thurmond of South Carolina made an indelible mark as an arch-segregationist, a senator, and a presidential candidate. Former Sen. Ernest Hollings, the bright and capable junior senator with the low country in his voice, was thankfully a reminder of the good men and women from that state.
The Confederate flag has flown over South Carolina for too long. Not only up in the air but in the hearts of men. Gingrich won in a state that is, in a sense, another country.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, January 23, 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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