January 9, 2012 -- “And Then There Were None.” The Republican process of choosing their candidate for the presidency feels a little like that Agatha Christie mystery novel based on a Ten Little Indians idea, although that title would lead us to believe at the end there will be none, and no such luck. After the Iowa caucus the field is reduced to five, no make that perhaps six if Rick Perry really didn’t mean it when he said he was reassessing his campaign and going back to Texas, but then seems to have come back (if memory serves me right, the character who disappeared then came back in the Christie novel, the bestselling novel of all times, was the one who was murdering the other guests) and is counting on South Carolina to pull him up. South Carolina evangelicals are so much like the East Texas evangelicals that prop up Perry he may have something there.
Two debates this week in New Hampshire as a prelude to the primary in that state on Tuesday. Will anyone else drop out after that one? Probably not. The dynamics are Romney is pretty smug about being sure he will win in the end, Santorum counts on a surge from his neck-and-neck with Mitt showing in Iowa, Gingrich is licking his wounds after being buried beneath an avalanche of dirty-pool negative attack ads by the Romney forces, Huntsman is counting heavily on this state to jump-start his popularity portraying the dignified, sane candidate among a group of zanies, Paul is forever Paul, and Perry? Who knows? Maybe he just revels in the national attention. And of course they all had parts to play on the two debates. NYT columnist Gail Collins looked at it this way: “Perry suspended his campaign but then tweeted, ‘Here we come, South Carolina.’ Newt Gingrich, who appears to be running mainly on rancor, the candidate of the I Want to Eat Mitt’s Liver Party.”
The Iowa caucus seems like old hat now but it did shake up things a bit with the surprising showing of Rick Santorum in a virtual dead heat with Romney. With a win over Santorum Mitt has a right to claim a soboquet bestowed on LBJ after winning his first race for Congress, a close one, as “Landside Johnson.” Well it’s Landslide Romney today after coming in eight votes out of over 120,000 ahead of Santorum. They each got approximately 24.6 percent of the ballots cast, Paul was third with 21.5 percent, and though leading the polls only a few weeks ago, Gingrich placed a dismal fourth.
Perry came in so badly at10 percent he turned tail for Texas, leaving everyone to believe he was cashing out, briefly as it turned out. Bachmann, coming in at 5 percent folded, saying: “There are many more paths to be written on the path to the nomination.” I don’t believe I know what that means, writing on paths? It did mean she was no longer in the race so there are now six, no five, no six little Indians.
According to Derek Thompson of The Atlantic, “if you combine the Republican presidential candidates' total direct spending on media with SuperPAC outlays and other television ad buys from outside groups, you come out to about $15.6 million spent on TV ads in an Iowa caucus with about 120,000 total voters.” Total expenditures are not yet official but it is clear that Rick Perry spent far more per vote, his campaign money and money spent by PACs on his behalf, well over $200 as much as $480 per vote while Santorum spent about 99¢ of his money per vote, add PAC money and it goes up to $10-20 per vote. What Perry spent versus Santorum: Sort of Ruth Chris Steak House versus Taco Bell.
The debate Saturday night seemed to have a different tone to it, a little more dignified, a little more like there were adults present, or else I am just getting numb from watching these things. After the Iowa results the professional soothsayers all expected the trailing candidates to bare their fangs and tear into Mitt Romney (Gingrich had called Romney a liar whose conservative credentials could not be trusted, for example) but basically that did not happen. Post debate talkers expressed surprise at that and generally agreed that Romney came out still looking like top dog (a good moment to remember Romney’s family trip to Canada with this dog strapped to the top of his station wagon) and everybody looked pretty good, no one screwed up. No one threw a flag and called a foul.
Moderators tried to use their own words against each other but they all handled it rather smoothly. Ron Paul explained how he wasn’t a racist because he was a fan of Martin Luther King and how unfair the criminal justice system was to African Americans never really answering how those racist newsletters went out under is name for which he was paid did so without him reading them. Newt said he was not a “chicken hawk” who dodged military service and was the son of military parents. Huntsman blew off working for a Democratic Administration as Ambassador to China by stressing how important it was for a president to understand China. Perry is ready to send troops back to Iraq if they don’t get their act together. Santorum made a pitch for energy independence by developing all of our resources come what may, including dirty coal, and stay away from the evil cap and trade idea. Romney turned my stomach by praising Supreme Court Justices Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito making it clear what kind of appointment he will make as president, and the next president will have an appointment to make. Another lifetime appointment like one of those will set the court firmly in hard-right cement for at least twenty, more likely thirty years. Big money will win again. And again. And again. Decision by decision.
Having “missed it by that much” in Iowa Santorum is now under the microscope of all of the political prophets who paint a picture of a somewhat different than the sensible looking guy standing there at the debate. Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post writes: “Before there was the Tea Party to define the phrase ‘far-right fringe,’ there was Rick Santorum. He’s a nice-guy zealot who should never be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office.” He takes positions like this: “The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness.” Rush Limbaugh must be proud. His 2006 book “It Takes a Family” took issue with Hilary Clinton’s “It Takes a Village” concept deprecating the idea of village cooperation. Blogs and columns are full of his past controversial quotes. Like in a ribald joke sent to me if you stood to the right of Santorum you would have to stand on one foot on the edge of the cliff, no room to plant both.
With candidates like Santorum becoming popular with the Republican base some party leaders are reluctantly beginning to give Romney their support. It is a generality to say they don’t like him but in the case of Senator John McCain there is no question of it. However, this week McCain bit his lip, damning with faint praise, gave Romney his endorsement: “You can’t hide from your record of making this country bankrupt, from destroying our national security and making this nation one that we have to restore with Mitt Romney as president of the United States of America!”
Couple of things about that statement. It sounds as if he is saying Good Lord, we have to do it with Romney. Two, who made the country bankrupt? Weren’t you, sir, sitting in the Senate aiding and abetting the Bush Administration while they gaily went about bankrupting the country? You want to restored it to what … the Bush years?
That old chestnut “gay marriage” took up a fair amount of time in the Saturday debate. I was surprised that it seemed to me that all candidates would go for civil unions, even those eager to support a constitutional amendment defining “marriage” as being between a man and a woman. So all we have here is a semantics problem like I have been contending blog after blog. The only difference between a civil union and a religious blessing of the that union is the word “marriage.” So outlaw the use of the word marriages. Let people have civil unions and if they want a religious ceremony call it something else, maybe “Entwined” (“welded” is too harsh sounding, too mechanical, unromantic).
Comments on the Republican field run the gamut. In the right-wing Weekly Standard Jonathan Last pointed out Romney has run in 22 campaigns in his life. His record is 5-17. “That’s not stellar” said Last. Columnist Gail Collins: “And even if you don’t believe Ron Paul is racist or anti-Semitic, he has a really disturbing indifference to the opinions of people who hang around and write for his newsletters.” “Paul was doing his cheerful old coot act.” David Brooks also in the Times: “As for Gingrich, he is delightfully consistent in his inconstancy.”
N.Y.T. columnist Maureen Dowd has been following Rick Santorum around New Hampshire and reports that some of his rhetoric “as a masterpiece of antediluvian abrasiveness — slapping gays and Mormons at the same time. Santorum is an unexpected revival of Bushian uncompassionate conservatism.” As Tony Soprano told Meadow, “Out there it’s the 1990s, but in this house, it’s 1954.”
By my reckoning, the Sunday morning debate was the most satisfactory of the fifteen held to date. E. J. Dionne Jr. of the Washington Post, in the role of post-debate commentator, agrees with me (well, not personally). The questions were tough and on target. The answers were substantive. Viewers came away from it with a good idea of what kind of people the contestants are, and what they stand for. The attacks on Romney that were expected on Saturday night finally came, and consensus is that it hurt him. The question asked, then, will it matter enough to help his opponents here just two days before the primary on Tuesday?
At random, here are some notes I made during the event. Mitt and Newt had at each other pretty heavily over negative ads run by PACs, Romney disavowing anything to do with their creation by his former aide now running the PAC, claiming he had not seen the ads but failed to disavow untrue content then quoting from them chapter and verse.
Santorum made, I thought, a telling remark by damning a “secular” government (we need separation of Santorum Church and State). Gingrich wants to get rid of the EPA and replace it with a different bureau of his own design. Perry wants a part-time legislature who have to have real jobs in their own community and not draw a meaningful government salary (sort of like 11th Century England where when you have a problem you call the guys in off the farms to meet).
Huntsman wants term limits. Perry branded Obama as a socialist. Romney wants to send programs back to the states to let them each take care of problems in their own way, giving us a kind of hodge-podge governing system where you can or can’t do something in one state versus another. Newt came up with the phrase “pious baloney” and if anyone ought to recognize pious baloney it should be the three-time-baptized Newt Gingrich. I have to constantly remind myself that ludicrous as it may seem one of these people could very well become the next president.
What’s next? New Hampshire caucus on Tuesday. Next debate, January 16th. The South Carolina primary is January 21st then Florida follows on the 31st. Which and when will the next Indian fall?
As Republican candidates and party leaders blast away at Obama and his administration it sometimes seems the rule rather than the exception to distort and fabricate data. Take all of this business about “job creation.” Republicans will have you believe that Administration policies have cost millions of jobs, and few new jobs have been added. Mitt Romney has been particularly bad about this stating over and over again what you can only call falsehoods. He should be ashamed of himself. Look at the data.
Obama was sworn in on January 2009. Between that January and June, before the new Administration had time to make any impact, the economy lost 3.1 million jobs which you can hardly blame on Obama. Since then the economy has gained 1.2 million jobs, not enough but gaining at least as opposed to the Romney claims.
And here’s more interesting statistics compiled by Progress Report.
“In either of the past two years alone, President Obama created more private sector jobs than President Bush did during the entirety of his eight-year presidency. While today’s jobs numbers are a promising sign, it’s no time to get complacent when 14 million Americans are still out of work.”
1,080,000…the number of net jobs created during the entirety of the eight-year Bush presidency.
1,600,000…the net number of jobs created during 2011, after accounting for job losses in the public sector.
1,900,000…the number of private sector jobs created during 2011.
Keep in mind that Romney’s chief financial adviser was on the Bush staff during part of that period. Romney is, as they say, Bush Light.
Another topic subject to false claims in this case with racist overtones is much of the talk of entitlements. Newt Gingrich has labeled Obama as the “greatest food stamp president.” In actuality, “the number of recipients rose by a cumulative 63 percent during Bush’s eight-year presidency.”
Who are the largest groups receiving food stamps? By far non-Hispanic whites. But Gingrich said: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.” So food stamp participants are African-Americans who don’t want to work for food. But according to columnist Charles Blow and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, most food stamp “participants are either too old or too young to work. Forty-seven percent were under age 18, and 8 percent were 60 or older. Second, ‘nearly 30 percent of those households had earnings in 2010, and 41 percent of all participants lived in a household with earnings.’ ” They just don’t take in enough to make it.
Blow believes after finishing fourth in Iowa Gingrich turned to the technique Reagan used when he moved to New Hampshire after a poor showing in Iowa. Reagan created the bogus “welfare queen.” Blow reminds us of this one. “Reagan explained at nearly every stop that there was a woman in Chicago who ‘has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four nonexisting deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.’ ” She was African-American of course.
Perhaps progressives could fabricate a Fat Cat Financial King, a C.E.O. who gets a pay package for joining a company including stock grants worth about $22.5 million to go with his base annual salary of $1 million. Oh wait, we don’t have to fabricate him. He is Scott Thompson, the new chief executive at Yahoo.
As a last word on the economy, this line from a Jay Leno monologue: “The economy is so bad, God is now calling Rick Perry and Michele Bachman collect.”
Now a final personal note on social conservatism. I am intrigued by the concept of “personhood,” that at the moment the human egg is fertilized we are a person, with all of the rights and privileges thereof. So “conception” takes the place of “birth.” In which case it seems to me some adjustments in common cultural are in order to accommodate this concept, which has been endorsed by a pledge signed by most of the Republican candidates for the presidency.
Changes are in order even in such trivial things as song lyrics. “Born Free, as free as the wind blows” updated to “Conceived Free, as free as the wind blows.” Or “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy, Conceived on the Fourth of July.” And “Conceived to be Wild.” When I go to pick up my prescription pills will the pharmacist ask “date of conception, please?” Will the date of our conception go on a driver’s license? Passport? I do consider myself a native conceived citizen. I can see one plus in this; it adds about nine months to our longevity and at this point I will take everything I can get.
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