June 27, 2011 - Last week in the aftermath of the first serious debate among Republican contenders for the nomination of their party for president, NYT columnist David Brooks wistfully wrote that it was his job to spend the next 16 months covering the upcoming election but his heart wasn’t really in it. He is not alone. After enumerating the condition in which we find the country in he couldn’t see it getting any better in the short run no matter how the election turned out. Very pessimistic for a conservative.
Our hearts may not be in it but there is so much at stake for how we will live our lives, the quality of life for most ordinary Americans, it isn’t a good idea to just blow it off. We are their participants through the election process. We should try to keep up and know what we are doing. The race is on. News just broke that Crossroads, one of Karl Rove’s shadowy outside groups, is purchasing millions in advertising attacking President Obama this summer.
Like reindeer on the roof the Republican candidates to date are:
Come Herman, Michele, come Newt and come Ron
Come Tim, come Rick, come Mitt and now Jon
(Cain, Bachmann, Gingrich, Paul, Pawlenty, Santorum, Romney, Huntsman)
Jon M. Huntsman Jr., former Utah governor and ambassador to China, announced his candidacy for president on Tuesday. That he is a major player is evidenced by the way he closed his first day as an official candidate by collecting $1.2 million for his campaign at a New York fundraiser. While the day ended well, it got off to a rocky beginning. His aides distributed press releases with his name spelled as “John” rather than “Jon” before taking them back (it's nice to know who you are working for, oh yes, old what's his name), got the location wrong as New York rather than New Jersey ad afterward reporters and campaign staff were directed toward a charter flight to Saudi Arabia rather than New Hampshire (different laces but equally exotic to anyone from Utah). He also only got brief live coverage from networks and cable. Yet there was that 1.2 mil to make up for it. Many Republicans see him as an alternative to unlikable Mitt Romney; many Democrats see him as a real threat with appeal to Independents. And he is taking an unusual approach in campaign rhetoric whether by design or not that might just appeal to people who are turned off by the strident, hateful kind of political blather they hear every day from other candidates.
He made a plea for “civility, humanity and respect.” “We will conduct this campaign on the high road,” vowed the candidate. “I respect the president of the United States. He and I have a difference of opinion on how to help a country we both love. But the question each of us wants the voters to answer is who will be the better president, not who’s the better American.” If I am skeptical it is because that reminiscent of another candidate in the year 2000 who called himself a “compassionate conservative” and we all know how that worked out.
Let us then vet the new candidate who, like Mitt Romney, is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, very popular in his home state of Utah, where in the 2008 race for governor 36 percent of Utah voters who identified themselves as Democrats voted for him according to an Edison-Mitofsky exit poll. Though a Mormon, a political necessity in Utah, he was quoted in Fortune Magazine as saying: “I get satisfaction from many different types of religions and philosophies.” And no doubt he also gets satisfaction at being scion of a family of extreme wealth.
If we use as a source Travis Waldron of Think Progress we learn that Huntsman would “… cut taxes, gut popular social welfare programs, and pursue economic policies that would do nothing to restore the American economy.” As governor of Utah he turned a $173 million deficit to $1 billion deficit (but isn’t that a given for Republicans in the last decade?).
Huntsman instituted a flat tax which sharply reduced taxes on the state’s richest residents.” He wants to slash corporate taxes and tried to eliminate them completely in Utah. By coincidence his family business is one of the nation’s largest chemical corporations. No corporate taxes? Imagine that. Of course he adheres to the conservative plan to rid of us of that pesky Medicare, replacing it with coupons.
Now he does believe in climate change, just not to doing anything about it. According to Waldron, Huntsman is for a “radical Balanced Budget Amendment.” Just think of this: this man is the “moderate” candidate in the race.
While conservatives continue to trash Obama in the harshest terms imaginable (Mitt Romney’s “worst President ever” is mild stuff) people in what may be broadly termed the media continue to research and report on the history and stances taken y the candidates. Rolling Stone has a long and astounding account of the life of Michele Bachmann. (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/michele-bachmanns-holy-war-20110622) I already knew most of the facts by going on Google but the Stone piece really lays out every detail, particularly on how God tells her how to make every move, who to marry, what courses to take in college, and what legislation to support (she doesn’t generally bother to introduce bills, she just passes judgment on them). This is not just the word of Rolling Stone, but taken from her own statements.
It’s not just those weird things she says like how the Chinese are plotting to replace the dollar bill, and that light bulbs are killing our dogs and cats. It’s that “God personally chose her to do things like become an IRS attorney who would spend years hounding taxpayers.”
The Rolling Stone article considers her: “grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.” … a rare breed of “political psychopath, equal parts crazed Divine Wind kamikaze-for-Jesus and calculating, six-faced Machiavellian prevaricator. God-speaks-directly-to-me fundamentalism mixed with pathological, relentless, conscienceless lying … born bullshit artist and a religious fanatic, for whom lying to the infidel is a kind of holy duty.” It’s as though God sent us his only begotten daughter … no, I won’t go there. And yet he report is that no one can raise campaign money like she can. The revivalist’s touch.
Actually, Bachmann has found that money flows in when she makes some outrageous remark. For example, on a cable news show she accused Obama of having “anti-American views” and thought impeachment might be a good idea she took in nearly one million bucks. This is called in the trade a “money-blurt,” or “money-bomb.” When Michele accused Obama of “infantilism” and “turning our country into a nation of slaves.” She raked in more than $5 million in contributions. She blurts, her followers send money.
Looks like fellow candidate Newt Gingrich could take lessons, although it seems to me he blurts all of the time. As widely reported, the rest of his team left him, his top fundraisers. That leaves him with no real campaign operation, no financial resources, no work ethic, and no popularity. Personally, I don’t think he cares. He is smart enough to know the voters are not going to buy him as a president but as long as he maintains that high profile, turning up on every talk show, making personal appearances where ever they’ll have him he can continue to make a lot of money from books and giving speeches. Maybe even enough for those quarter million to a million dollar credit lines at Tiffany’s.
Of course the candidates who know how to make a lot of money in business are Mitt Romney and Herman Cain. The Cain story is a phenomenal one of an African-American rising from the very bottom to the top, turning around not just one pizza company but several big corporations, and Romney was no slouch at playing the investment game. (Cain established “Hermanator's Intelligent Thinkers Movement” or HITM which means, I assume, that he is the most intelligent thinker). While these achievements are admirable it would indicate to me that their thinking goes to making the top tier successful without regard for those below. Empathy in a successful corporate CEO is an impediment.
Charles Blow, writing in the New York Times Saturday, is concerned that lawmakers, at a time with the “economy on the verge of atrophy” can’t grasp the terrible state of poverty. He has been there. But according to the Center for Responsive Politics, “nearly half of all members of Congress are millionaires, and between 2008 and 2009, when most Americans were feeling the brunt of the recession, the personal wealth of members of Congress collectively increased by more than 16 percent.” Mother’s don’t let your sons grow up to be cowboys. Get them into politics instead.
There is no sign at there is movement toward some common ground. On Thursday Rep. Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, walked out on the budget negations and Republicans said they would not give in to Democrats efforts to find any new revenue (by the way the Bush tax cuts have meant the loss of somewhere around $39 billion so far in the seven months since their extension). August 2nd looms large.
Columnist Ross Douthat, a conservative voice at the New York Times, viewed the Republican debate this way: On domestic policy, the Republican candidates “seemed to speak with one voice: Cut taxes, cut spending, repeal Obamacare, declare victory.”
When Obama made his address on the drawdown of troops in Afghanistan Republicans labeled it a “campaign speech” rather than a “war report.” What was he supposed to do, “Twitter a Tweet” Everything in the next sixteen months that gets proposed or done will be skewed by how it effects the election. Republican strategy is set to say Yes, Obama inherited a mess, but made it much worse. Said by the folks who made the mess he inherited.
Not all of us feel the mess. Corporate America has seen profits at or near record levels of an annualized $1.7 trillion in the last two quarters. Bully. But businesses have yet to spend their piles of cash on anything that would put Americans back to work. Do Republicans really believe that doling out more money to cash laden businesses will create more jobs?
The Obama Administration released 30 million barrels of oil from the reserve stores in an effort to relieve prices at the pump, but big questions involving action by all parties remain. Thomas Geoghegan, labor lawyer and author writing in the New York Times, had an interesting tale on Social Security which is high on the worry list of many conservatives.
“Right now Social Security pays out 39 percent of the average worker’s preretirement earnings. We could raise that to 50 percent. We’d still be near the bottom of the league of the world’s richest countries. We have a federal tax rate equal to nearly 15 percent of our G.D.P. — far below the take in most wealthy countries.” I will say it is a lead cinch that Geoghegan will never be recruited as a commentator on Fox News.
“Hourly earnings of workers dropped by 8 percent from 1973 to 2005 while productivity shot up 55 percent or more. Workers are routinely cheated of a share in higher productivity. If wages had been paid fairly based on productivity, there would have been enough money subject to the payroll tax to avoid even a modest shortfall.”
The World Economy may be in bad shape, but there is still a lot of extreme wealth out there, as evidenced by the action of new Asian multi-millionaires who are buying up all of the fine wines of Bordeaux, new and old. In a May 17th auction in Hong Kong a bottle dating back to 1863 sold for 48,730 euros. That’s hardly the “plonk” favored by Rumpole of Old Bailey in that British TV series. But that is not the record. Last October at the Hong Kong auction a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild 1869 sold for more than 160,000 euros. Let’s hope it wasn’t corked.
Wine is the food product that probably does not need as much attention as other edibles. If you would like something else to worry about, after the recent assault by vicious bean sprouts from Germany which left 39 dead consider these words from food expert and author Mark Bittman in the New York Times: “No Food Safety in These Numbers” (just another effort in my role to frighten you of the future). Congressional Scissorhands plan heavy cuts to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), “$205 million less than President Obama’s modest request.” As it stands we have 3,000 food-related deaths annually and face an increasing threat of a more robust version of E. coli as were in those lethal sprouts from Germany. Considering this, and the destruction of the WIC, Bittman rails against the “party of ‘family values’ only values wealthy families, we have it now; when these guys say ‘women and children first,’ they mean ‘first to throw overboard.’ ”
My favorite political quote of the week is from James Carville on CNN commenting on Texas Governor Rick Perry. “He talks a lot and he's not very bright. And that's a combination I like in Republicans.”
As a progressive I am supposed to be full of “empathy” and I suppose that has to be extended to radical conservatives too, so in that spirit let us see if we can find positive things to say about the Republican presidential nomination candidates.
Michele Bachmann: the woman who gets all of her marching orders straight from God, who to marry, what courses to take in college, what offices to run for, what legislative bills to support is concerned about our soul, and even though she wants to save it her way whether we like it or not, still that must be a good thing having someone with a direct pipeline to the Almighty trying to save us from an evangelical Hell. Amen and halleluiah.
Newt Gingrich: we should admire the fashion sense and good taste of a man who has had two quarter to a million dollar credit lines with Tiffanys. He has the potential to become the modern day equivalent of nineteenth century figure whose name became part of American folk lore, Diamond Jim Brady. Diamond Newt Gingrich has a certain ring to it.
Mitt Romney: Mitt is going to create jobs, a lot f them, no not like he did as governor of Massachusetts where his state was down at 47th out of 50 in job creation but with some new, magic program yet to be announced. We can count on it as long as he continues to wear his sacred Mormon underwear which wards off bad things. Keep your pants on, Mitt.
Herman Cain: the thick crusted pizza guy, both Cain and his old Godfather’s product is so personable and likeable you tend to gloss over his extreme political positions. I suppose, then, that he could get us to swallow some pretty bad stuff like he convinced u to wallow more of his pizza.
Tim Pawlenty: the former governor of Minnesota must have a keen sense of humor, a great kidder. When he unveiled his idea of a national budget the cries of outrage crossed party lines to the point it was labeled the plan for the end of the world so he must not have been serious. Like the little boy making faces in the classroom he was just trying to get our attention, right? Let’s give him an A for pulling our leg since his plan did not have one to stand on.
Ron Paul: among other things, many other things the congressman is the antidote to a hawkish Joe Lieberman, a kind of one-man anti-war protester so while his policies are killers his feelings about war are not.
Rick Santorum: the former senator from Pennsylvania has been accused of mouthing nothing but platitudes so for in his campaign, but if he has a kind of Saturday Evening Post view of the world while following Weekly Standard positions, who can be against a feel-good Norman Rockwell? If we look on the bright side perhaps he can convince us that despite everything we are leading a Norman Rockwell life. Worth a try.
Yes, we should be able to detect some little bit of good in everybody. Who knows. I might rummage around and even find some sterling quality in me.
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