Category: 2012

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2012 Analysis Election History

Newt Gingrich is an evil man

There is one good thing we can say about Newt Gingrich: he can play to a crowd. This makes him an effective politician. But on the eve of the South Carolina primary, where Gingrich is either beating Romney by 6 (PPP [pdf]), down by 10 (Gallup), or more or less in a dead heat up by 2 (Ramussen), I don’t think we have reason to fear that Gingrich will be the nominee. That’s because he’s evil.

Gingrich became the Speaker of the House after the republican takeover in 1995. He had helped engineer this takeover with the Contract with America and figured centrally, along with President Clinton, over the government shutdown that year, where federal workers were furloughed over budget intransigence. This wasn’t the first government shutdown, but it was the most widely felt and most politicized, and the republicans ended up taking the blame, aiding in costing the republicans the presidency in 1996. Oops! But Gingrich actually broke laws in addition to being a lousy speaker: he was the first speaker in history to be assessed a fine over an ethics probe and eventually was forced to resign the speakership by his own party after poor showings in 1998 election.

Then we have Gingrich’s poisonous racial and anti-poor views: riding the Reagan-esque rhetoric of “welfare queens,” he helped pass the stringent (and reviled) welfare reform of 1996 which obviously targets racial minorities disproportionately, and he recently defended his offensive declaration that black people ought to “demand jobs, not food stamps.” He has repeatedly called Obama a “food stamp president” since about 15% of Americans now use them, but doesn’t acknowledge the role that the economic collapse and rising poverty might have played: for Gingrich, it is enough just to connect Obama to this statistic. But amazingly, Gingrich himself is the welfare queen: in 2003, he played a major role through vocal advocacy in passing Medicare Part D, the expensive prescription drug benefit that helps explain the yawning federal debt. Welfare for old white people is — of course — a fine thing; it’s when the welfare targets young black people that problems arise.

But Gingrich’s most damning behaviour centers around his views on marriage. Newt publicly supports “traditional marriage” between one man and one woman, including support for DOMA, which he helped to pass as Speaker in 1996 (and a constitutional amendment if DOMA is found to be illegal, and condemnation for Obama’s failure to defend it); opposes adoption of children to gay and lesbian couples, citing religious interests; and, famously, lead the charge to investigate President Clinton for his own marital infidelities shortly before resigning the speakership over that aforementioned ethics problem.

That last issue has had a resurgence in the media after the shocking revelation that Newt apparently sought “an open marriage” with his second wife while he was cheating on her with his third and current wife. It’s no secret that Gingrich has had three wives, and even converted to Catholicism to get with Callista, who is 23 years younger than he. He divorced his first wife, Jackie, while she was recovering from cancer after having an affair with his second wife; and he divorced his second wife, Marianne, after failing to get that open marriage thing to cover his affair with Callista. What’s amazing is that, to gain conservative support for his presidential run, Newt now cites his influential support of DOMA while failing to mention he was cheating on Marianne while lobbying for that bill. Furthermore, he is rewriting history about the Clinton impeachment to try and cover the inherent hypocrisy of vilifying the president for virtually the same thing he was doing at the time. His defense for all this: passionate patriotism drove him to base behaviour, which he regrets in retrospect. Lolwut?

Understandably, all this deserves some media attention as Gingrich courts the GOP presidential nod, and it has commanded attention for years even before the revelations of the second wife. The moderator of the most recent republican debate, the last one before the South Carolina primary, thought the same, and opened the debate with a question about this bombshell. The question was perhaps a poor choice though for an opening question, since it allowed Gingrich to reply thus: “I’m appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.” Despite the obvious utility of the question, the relevance of the hypocrisy it exposes, the questions of character it raises, the fact that this is the 20th-or-so debate the GOP has engaged — when can this kind of question be posed if not after hours and hours of televised discussion of the ‘real issues?’ — Newt was able to fire back against the “elite media” in a way that resulted in a majority of conservative pundits calling the debate for him. Look at how skillfully Gingrich can play the crowd!

But my first point, that we have no reason to fear a Gingrich general campaign, is supported by all this. Gingrich has his supporters, but he could not muster a winnable campaign for president. He is too vulnerable to attacks from the GOP on welfare and marital hypocrisy, and from the general electorate on popular issues like gay marriage due to his marital hypocrisy. He is basically unlikable. It seems to me that decent people can only conclude that he is some kind of evil. The republican establishment will not allow him to win the nomination, just as they won’t let Paul win it. The only sober analysis remains, despite ongoing and desperate mainstream media hype trying to suggest otherwise, that Romney is the inevitable candidate. Gingrich might win South Carolina tomorrow, a Southern red state sympathetic to his brand of white racism and male privilege, but I don’t believe it will translate to a mandate for opposing Obama in November.

UPDATE: The always-excellent Charles Blow of the New York Times had a column today that echoes many of these points, and also drives home the point that Gingrich cannot be an effective opponent for Obama in the general election. It is for this reason that Gingrich will not win the nomination; the anxiety he causes his party as a result of his fringe views and tepid personality is simply insurmountable.

Categories
2012 Analysis Election

the GOP primary disaster

It isn’t news that the republican party doesn’t have many hopeful options. Romney, the only major candidate from 2008 to try again, is widely reviled and failed to surge at any time, unlike his fellow candidates, in this incredibly drawn out process. But don’t the republicans realize yet that he must be their guy?

All the other candidates are either unelectably crazy/extreme (Santorum for being too dogmatic about nuclear families and hating gays; Paul for not being a “team player” and towing the neocon imperial line, not to mention his array of crazy ideas that are either unpleasant to the right, or the left, or both at the same time; and Bachmann for being almost certainly insane), or else have the kind of baggage that has either forced them out already (Cain, with his multiple sexual harassment allegations, likely years-long affair, and hilarious policy proposals) or is bound to (Perry’s debate gaffes, HPV vaccine waffling, and general unpopularity with his own state; Gingrich’s own affairs, House ethics violation, racial insensitivity, and suicidal mean streak against Romney). The only halfway decent major republican candidate left is Jon Huntsman, the ‘other’ mormon in the race who bet the farm on New Hampshire and came in a definite but distant third.

So given all this, and as this politico analysis makes clear, Romney is pretty close to tying this thing up. Current polls (Rammussen and PPP [pdf]) have Romney in first in South Carolina with at least a 5 point lead over Gingrich, and he’s probably only doing that well given his status as a good old boy from Georgia. This inevitable development has evangelicals who are afraid of Romney desperately scrambling to get behind a non-Romney candidate, and since Santorum is the latest of the non-Romneys to enjoy a polling surge and did well in Christian hicktown Iowa, he’s their man. In truth, we will need to wait at least until South Carolina is decided to know who is likely to be the republican candidate, since South Carolina has a history of being a violent contest that helps zero in on a winner for the ticket (though this would seem to favour Romney since Wikipedia claims that, while the primary has chosen the eventual nominee every time since 1980, it is also “considered a firewall to protect frontrunners.”)

But let’s remember the function of the primaries! It is to choose a candidate for president that the republicans both want to and think can win in the general election. Even suspending disbelief long enough to suppose that Santorum might win the GOP nod, I leave it to the intrepid reader to consider how much of a chance he will have at unseating Obama, who remains inexplicably popular (hovering around the mid-to-high 40s despite war crimes, an intransigent congress, and sustained economic hardship — more on these in coming posts). Romney, for all his faults, seems like the only candidate with any chance of having broad enough appeal to seriously challenge the sitting president, a fact which his team has been betting on for some time.

But that’s just the problem. Romney is deeply unpopular among republicans for the same reasons he will be unpopular generally. He has flip-flopped shamelessly on important topics like abortion and health care. He is an unlikable millionaire thanks to his prowess at aggressively reorganizing businesses, often by firing people and retaining large payments even when he failed. A sign of desperation among his opponents is that even they are attacking his record at Bain Capital. If republicans think they can get away with attacks like those, surely democrats will be able to. And in the present climate, that sort of attack is likely to resonate with a lot of moderate voters, if not a few out-of-work conservatives. That means the impending Obama-Romney matchup is not going to be the slam dunk for the challenger we’d expect it to be with high unemployment and simmering civil unrest.

All things considered, the republicans have wasted a perfect opportunity to unseat a failed incumbent, and all because no one was available or willing to rise to the occasion. In a nation of 300 million people, is this disaster the best they could offer?

UPDATE: Hours after posting this entry, Jon Huntsman’s staff leaked that he will be withdrawing tomorrow. This is not surprising given his finish in New Hampshire, but it does make his bizarre enthusiasm on finishing third even more cringe-worthy, and it is quite sad in light of the fact that The State, a South Carolina newspaper, just endorsed Huntsman earlier today. Given that I just named him the only other half-decent candidate, Romney is that much closer to securing the nomination and probably losing the election. Barring further economic decline or some spectacular disaster (imagine an analogue to the gulf oil spill that people might actually care about), it just doesn’t seem possible that Romney could win, unless of course millions of center-left nonpartisans commit suicide out of abject hopelessness.
Categories
2012 Election Speculation

2012 will be interesting times

It seems obvious the 2012 election will be really lousy. No one will primary Obama (I wrote both the national democrats and the democrats of washington state imploring them to consider whether they ought to challenge him and how I could help, to no avail) and it is inconceivable that any non-Romney candidate could win the GOP nod. While a number of dems are up for reelection in the Senate, it seems easy to believe that everyone hates Congress but thinks their congressmen are decent. So are we in for another four years of Hope? Or if the economy doesn’t spring to life, can we expect independents to vote Romney with their wallets?

There are a number of wildcards worth considering, I think. The Tea Party is still alive, and we saw a few dramatic races determined by their influence in 2010. Now we’ll also have whatever influence Occupy manages to express, and it still has half a year to organize in earnest before the legislative races heat up. At the very least, these forces could make things interesting, if not determining races in surprising ways. Consider influential seats won by the Tea Party (Marco Rubio, Rand Paul), as well as prominent losses (Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell). Indeed, O’Donnell beat a popular establishment republican, Michael Castle, in that primary, and he might have given the eventual winner, democrat Chris Coons, a run for his money. I’d expect similar dynamics this year.

Then we have Americans Elect, an online electoral party. While it appears to be run by some shady, monied interests, it does promise to be perhaps the most open and transparent party in history. In all likelihood, nothing will come of it since most folks won’t have heard of it come election day and will throw in with the same tired two-party duopoly, but they do claim to be well on their way to securing ballot access in all 50 states. With the kind of money they have, they might well eventually be perceived as a force to be reckoned with by September, and it is still unclear how the Americans Elect party will even decide its ticket.

But perhaps most significant, there are two important cases pending before the Supreme Court that will be decided before the election. Less important on the national stage is Arizona’s immigration bill, SB-1070, but it will be interesting to hear Obama argue it, and either way the decision is going to piss off a lot of people. More interesting is Obamacare, where the Court will decide on the individual mandate and whether its constitutionality could kill the entire law. No matter what, this issue is bad for Obama. Suppose the bill is upheld. This will further enrage the right-wing and small-government zealots, who might just answer the call to canvas for whomever the GOP finally settles on in order to prevent four more years of creeping Islamic socialism. Suppose the bill is partially or totally killed. Obama already has a problem with his base, and the health bill was virtually the only major legislation he managed to pass. It’s death in a 5-4 decision could be enough to disillusion just enough supporters that their man can get anything done in this climate, and they might just sit at home in November. Either way, Obama has got to be running scared at this point.

And now consider again how lousy the GOP field is. The base has been sailing from one sweetheart non-Romney candidate to the next. Romney should be cleaning up, but he is so reviled that his eight-vote Iowa victory was more like an embarrassing loss to Rick Santorum, the gay-hater, of all people. And there’s virtually no one left. Gingrich seems like he is more bent on revenge, inviting Romney to ‘cut the pious baloney’ at today’s debate, than winning what he must realize is now an unwinnable nod. Perry is too stupid to leave now even though it must be obvious he has no chance even in South Carolina after his loss in Iowa and inevitable rout in New Hampshire, where he has roughly 5% support according to a recent Ramussen poll. He’ll be gone just like Bachmann by February.

What is certain is that Ron Paul will not be allowed the nomination by the republican elite, and he is doing a lot better now than he was four years ago. Many of his supporters are not republicans, and even the ones who are would surely vote for him on a third-party ticket before voting Romney. Paul’s incentive to leave the party once it becomes inescapably obvious that he won’t be their guy at the convention will be high since he could do well as the libertarian nominee. While that would help Obama more than Romney, a number of disaffected progressives would probably sooner vote for Paul, or not at all, than for Obama. After all, Paul says all the right things about civil liberties and wars that made for great talking points against Bush before it became a democrat doing all the same things. But his own racist and anti-choice positions will be disqualifying for many who would otherwise turn to Obama.

If I had to call the election today, I’d say its a nailbiter of a win for Obama. But I think things will look a lot different by the summertime conventions, and it will be interesting to watch events unfold. Santorum’s recent surge is probably not unlike the similar week-long spikes his other minor opponents enjoyed throughout the fall, but the difference now is that the time for fooling around has passed. Momentum he gets from the caucuses and primaries could matter a lot more since there aren’t any non-Romney candidates left (excluding Huntsman, Roemer, and maybe other folks I haven’t even heard of) and there’s no more time to dally. It’s just too soon to tell.