Tag: Newt Gingrich

Categories
2012 Analysis Election Speculation

why Ron Paul should win the primary

Let’s face it: no republican will become president in 2013.

That’s quite a bold claim, so allow me to defend it. The contentious republican nomination race continues without an obvious winner emerging as yet. There is still talk of a white knight coming to the rescue at the last minute, and this idea isn’t new: popular New Jersey governor Chris Christie was shamelessly pestered despite emphatic refusal to enter the race last summer, but he’s more likely to join the Romney ticket as VP; Indiana governor Mitch Daniels has been the target of speculation to fill this role, but he has also explicitly declined, and his official GOP response to Obama’s State of the Union speech in January, while popular on the far right, was quite frankly horrible in both content and presentation; even former Florida governor Jeb Bush is getting the eye, but it seems inconceivable that the republicans would risk their shot on a third Bush four years after the second one left office with the lowest approval rating in Gallup history. In short, the white knight scenario is not happening.

So four republicans remain in the presidential primary, and one of them will be named at his party’s convention in August for the general election barring some unlikely brokered convention scenario. But whom?

Continue reading “why Ron Paul should win the primary”
Categories
2012 Analysis Election History Speculation

thoughts about third parties

The GOP primary battle continues to rage, but Mitt Romney continues to dominate. Let’s recap: among viable non-Romney candidates, only Newt Gingrich remains in the race. Rick Santorum won in Iowa, but just barely, and has come in third or worst in all the other states to date. Ron Paul has yet to carry a state and admits he doesn’t yet know which ones he might. Newt Gingrich has only won so far in South Carolina, a racist southern state more likely than most to find resonance with “blacks should demand paychecks not food stamps” bullshit; and even then, his victory might well be attributed to a bump from some jabs he managed to get past the inept moderator at the debate held there days before the primary.

With contests in Minnesota and Colorado tomorrow, Romney is well positioned to double his collection of wins: according to PPP, he’s the clear favourite in Colorado and is in a more or less dead heat with Santorum in Minnesota. A win for Santorum there will not breathe life into his dying, unelectable bones, but the obvious loss Gingrich is about to face will surely kill all that remains of his momentum. It seems clearer and clearer that what has been conventional wisdom for months — that Romney will be the nominee — has been right all along.

All this would be considerably less interesting if there were any other uncertainties in the race. But Obama will not be primaried, and with unemployment rates starting to seriously drop, providing cautious optimism for some that a recovery is starting to kick back in, his reelection seems all but certain. Barring some cataclysm, does it seem reasonable to suppose that Romney could beat Obama? The latter is likely to enjoy something close to a repeat of the record black turnout in 2008, and Romney isn’t too popular even among conservatives (hence the unending support for the not-Romney candidate trending up at any moment). Obama is starting to put his toe in the general race now, saying he “deserves a second term” in an interview with NBC ahead of the Super Bowl. That’s a pretty nice time to have the national airwaves, and polls are showing he would do well in a race with Romney.

But all this is very sad! We must choose between a sitting president with a dubious record and a flip-flopping venture capitalist no one really likes. This ‘fact’ was ironically highlighted for me as I was reading Federalist 66 the other day and noticed this choice bit from Hamilton:

The [House of Representatives] will be the umpire in all elections of the President, which do not unite the suffrages of a majority of the whole number of electors; a case which it cannot be doubted will sometimes, if not frequently, happen.

Ha! Of course, this did happen, but only twice out of the 56 presidential elections held so far. In 1800, before the 12th amendment changed the rules of the electoral college, the House deadlocked repeatedly and finally elected Thomas Jefferson after 35 votes. And in 1824, following the dissolution of the Federalist party, four candidates each gained a fairly significant slice of the electoral vote. Andrew Jackson beat his next closest rival, John Quincy Adams, by 10 points in the popular vote and 15 electoral votes, but missed a majority by more than 30 electoral votes. The House eventually selected Adams after Henry Clay, also running, gave the former his support; Clay was eventually named Secretary of State in what was called a ‘corrupt bargain.’

So given the Constitution has baked into it a way to resolve disputes between candidates when none obtains a majority of electors, a mechanism Hamilton thought would be used ‘frequently’, why has it remained unused for nearly two centuries? Even from the earliest days of the republic, the two-party duality has been a potent force in general elections. The Federalists and Anti-federalists were not officially recognized parties like ours today are, but they were responsible for bitter election battles in the late eighteenth century. Parties were more dynamic between that 1824 standoff and the civil war, but the formation of the Republican party in 1854 saw more or less the final manifestation of the two-party system we see today, with only a handful of serious third party bids since.

Modern laws make it harder for third parties. Ballot access usually requires meeting some minimum signature bar in a petition, which means parties need nationwide local coordination, something which requires a large establishment. Debates are basically bi-partisan affairs and usually do not include third parties. Mass defection to a third party might swing the election to the least desirable of all three (consider the charge that Nader lost Gore the election in 2000). States almost always award electors on a winner-take-all basis, so the incentive for voters in each state to make their voices heard on the national stage by picking perceived winners is high.

In that vein, I think the biggest reason that the two-party system persists is inertia. The parties are well-established and can pretty easily either gobble up any fringe third-party platform (or ridicule it as being Unserious, as has been happening to Ron Paul’s candidacy generally). Most issues are binary as far as the average voter is concerned: you’re either mostly for gay rights, or you’re mostly against them; you want increased social programs, or you want to cut them back; you mostly want to drill for oil or you mostly want to research green energy. It doesn’t help that these ideas mostly align with conservative or liberal ideologies very nicely: conservatives tend to want to stick to the ancient ways, while liberals want to change most aspects of society and government.

Then there’s the related issue of bipartisan consensus. Perceived political realities force politicians to cave to certain positions, which then silences debate. Look to Clinton’s welfare reform, “tough on crime” laws which had led to unprecedented incarcerations, the jingoism of the runup to Iraq war that seems to have returned but this time against Iran; and of course, the notion that taxes should not go up except maybe for the other guy. When both parties largely agree on so much, it can be difficult to see what the usefulness of a third party could be. Is there a third major platform in American politics today? Evidently not.

And that is the main problem. The Tea Party was swallowed by the Republicans since they aligned closely enough to allow it. Obama has already begun to adopt of the rhetoric of Occupy and might win several of its less aware and passionate members. But this is too bad. An adversarial third (or fourth, or fifth) party would make this election battle a lot more interesting than the inevitable “lesser of two evils” Obama-vs-Romney scorched earth, no-holds-barred steel cage match. And if more people demanded better at the ballot box, they would get it: that’s a political reality. Consider that before holding your nose for Obama (or Romney if you have no soul) in November.

Categories
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.