January 16, 2012 -- Out of the mist came the combatants after the conflict was over to praise their followers, to express their pride in their own performance, to rally for the next big engagement in South Carolina. The New Hampshire primary was history, there were speeches to be made. No one dropped out of the fray, not even Rick Perry whose percentage of the votes cast resembled the needle on your automobile gas gauge just before it registers empty. He seems to believe it ain’t over until the Rubensque diva vocalizes. Or maybe he just likes the national attention and does not want to come back to Texas and face the mess he’s made.
In ascending order Rick Santorum, a smidgeon above Perry, continued to proclaim himself the one true conservative in the race. At fourth place in New Hampshire after finishing in fourth place in Iowa Jon Huntsman proclaimed victory, leading Jon Stewart on The Daily Show to ask, victory? Of Fourthland?
A somewhat dyspeptic Newt Gingrich congratulated the winning Mitt Romney while still conveying the notion that he himself is still a better man for the job. Ron Paul seems happy that his continued second place showings indicate that voters are coming around to his primitive way of thinking. With an air of self satisfaction the man who came away with most of the marbles, Mitt Romney, lost no time in using the occasion to severely assault President Obama.
The irony here is that he began by snidely pointing out that in the last primary in 2008 Obama came to New Hampshire and made promises of change, promises to pull the nation together to make change possible, and then Mitt proceeded to make the same promises he was criticizing Obama for making.
Actually, many observers felt this was the best speech Romney has made to date, and I would agree. He pushed all of the conservative buttons very well but I have to ask – where are the specifics? Just how are you going to get Democrats and Republicans to work with each other? Won’t Republicans be just as intractable? How much do you expect Democrats to give without any take? What programs to create jobs? Are you going to blow a whistle like a referee starting a game and all of corporate America will suddenly hire people even though they have no work for them to do until business grows enough to warrant it? Great rhetoric though. Kind of like eating a hamburger with nothing between the buns.
Buns? Speaking of which, a Leno gag on the Tonight Show was that campaign slogan of anti-gay Rick Santorum should be “think outside the buns.” If you care to invest the time you can listen to the post-primary speeches of the candidates which, in all honesty I have to say puts each one in their best light, click on:
No matter what he does Romney continues to be the Rodney Dangerfield of Republican candidates: he don’t get no respect. People just don’t warm up to him, not even the people who endorse him. He is just not likeable. After events like the debates, caucuses, and primaries interesting and entertaining commentary always surfaces. At random what follows are some quotes from this week on Romney and other candidates.
Dana Milbank in the Washington Post offered this observation; “Mitt Romney is fast becoming the Scrooge McDuck” of what he describes as “the Plutocrat Progress Party.” He was referring to Romney saying “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” Way to go you old job creator, you.
Gail Collins in the NYT wrote about the way Romney is seen as a “venture capital vultures that, in the inimitable words of Rick Perry, are ‘sitting out there on a tree limb, waiting for the company to get sick, and then they sweep in, they eat the carcass, they leave with that, and they leave the skeleton.’ ” Brings up an image of Perry leaving his blown away coyote carcass out for the buzzards to eat, unless he mounted it to hang in his den with a plaque reading “This could be Ben Bernanke.”
NYT columnist David Brooks on Huntsman: “He began this campaign as the king of banality and ended it as the emperor of banality. Did he say one new or interesting thing the entire race?”
NYT columnist Charles Blow gets his dander up when Mitt Romney characterizes those who speak out about the growing inequality between haves and have nots as “Just envy.” Blow writes the: “rich and their handmaidens on the political right have consolidated America’s wealth on the ever-narrowing peak of a steep hill and greased the slope.” Nice metaphor.
“And they want to cast everyone at the bottom as lazy or jealous, without acknowledging the accident of birth and collusion of policies that helped grant them their perch.” Romney considers expressed concerns about growing inequality “class warfare” and un-American in an imperialistic sort of let them eat cake.
Brooks again, this time on the Republican primary season: “A friend of mine compared it to that old joke about the food in the Catskills. Terrible and the portions are too small.” Rim shot, please.
So it is on to South Carolina where, a jaded Brooks told Collins in their weekly chats: “I plan on being there this weekend. I’m sure we’ll cross paths at one of the 9,876 Waffle Houses.”
I would feel remiss if I did not pass on a quote left over from last week about the Iowa caucus when David Letterman on his show said to guest Brian Williams, “the results are not binding, are they?” to which Williams replied: “No, but some dairy products are.” Well, I would say some candidate comments sick in the craw, or somewhere. Following are a couple at random.
Mitt Romney: “I was happy he had to take out a mortgage to ultimately defeat me” speaking about his losing race for the Senate against Ted Kennedy. That’s a little cold, isn’t it? I may not have won but at least I managed to reduce his assets? What sportsmanship.
“I mean the hubris of this president to think that he knows what’s best for you.” Rick Santorum objecting to President Obama saying “under my administration, every child should go to college.”
Santorum doesn’t leave it there. “Who are you? Who are you to say that every child in America go to college?” Apparently he doesn’t care whether any of his six kids are encouraged to seek higher education. After all, their great grandfather was a coal miner. Was that what he had in mind?
“My first day in office, I will give a health care waiver to South Carolina and any other state that needs it, and I will start to repeal Obamacare immediately.” Thank you, Romney. Now cough.
Saturday afternoon there was a “Forum” for the Republican want-a- bes, rather than a debate. I confess. I was remiss. Didn’t watch it. But in shopping around from all I can tell The Daily Beast summed it up simply and succinctly. There seemed to be no particular ramifications. In case you want to know how it went here is the Beast’s account:
“The rules of Saturday’s Mike Huckabee forum in South Carolina explicitly prohibited GOP candidates from attacking—or even mentioning—each other, but many went ahead and attacked Mitt Romney anyway. “I have always been pro-life,” Jon Huntsman said—alluding to the criticism that Romney supported abortion before he flip-flopped. Rick Santorum also said: “What [voters] want to know is that you believe what you believe.” Newt Gingrich didn't even bother with the rules, and went after Romney by name. “Gov. Romney ran saying he created 100,000 jobs,” Gingrich said, implying that Romney was lying, before he defended his controversial attack of the frontrunner’s time at Bain Capital. ‘To ask questions about a particular company is not the same as attacking capitalism.’ ”
While the Republican champions of the upper crust were gathered before Mike Huckabee in South Carolina there was a meeting of another sort in of all places Brenham, Texas, and it wasn’t even watermelon season (in my pre-WWII youth my family always made it a rule to stop at one of many roadside stands around Brenham for watermelons, the international capital of big, juicy ones, full of big black seeds to spit out and loaded with refreshing flavor. The watermelon is rated as the second most nutritious of all fruit). The visitors this week were more about spitting out seeds of social conservative dogma and flavor of ultra conservative religousosity than satisfying a craving for a seasonal treat. There were over a hundred influential evangelicals.
Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council was the key God-figure in charge, explaining “There is a hope and an expectation that this will have an impact on South Carolina.” They spent the day discussing the candidates as alternatives to Mitt Romney, taking into consideration not only who best represented their views but how electable they were against President Obama yet still gave their endorsement to Rick Santorum, far and away as socially conservative as any human in the United States. How much influence will it have over their clones in South Carolina where some sixty percent of voters claim to be “born again” will have to wait until the primary on the 31st?
The big kafuffle of the week was the video paid for by a Super PAC devoted to Newt Gingrich that brutally depicts Mitt Romney as evil incarnate over his time as head of Bain Capital. It just couldn’t get any nastier than this. Various fact checks have found it full of distortions and misleading statements although the underlining premise is true. Bain Capital were corporate raiders under the guidance of Mitt Romney, and very good ones at that. In a way Romney gets what he deserves. His Super PAC, “Restore Our Future,” as opposed to the Gingrich Super PAC “Win Our Future,” savaged Gingrich in Iowa with a video thought at the time to be as low as it gets, but we had not yet seen this one. The Super PAC is run by an old Romney aide, as is Gingrich’s, but Romney hid behind the law which refrains direct contact with the PAC but did not call for its withdrawal. He also shamelessly uses his Bain experience to claim creation of thousands of jobs which is nonsense. Gingrich reversed is original Romney-like position saying “I’m calling on them to either edit out every single mistake or to pull the entire film.” Win or Restore this is all ugly stuff.
I am going to weigh in on this and take the unusual position of agreeing somewhat with a conservative columnist with whom I am usually at odds, Ross Douthat of The New York Times. Yes Bain Capital is a corporate raider, identifying companies ripe for acquiring, downsizing, combining, doing whatever it takes to create efficiency and create wealth for its partners and investors and in the process people lose jobs, lives are negatively impacted, jobs are sent overseas and in the case of Bain 22 percent went bankrupt But boys and girls that is both the good and the bad side of the free market system. The free market is without a doubt the best way to function, but there is often a price to pay in terms of human pain. Speaking of Bain, Howard Addison, professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management said: “The goal here was to create wealth. Jobs were the byproduct, not the product.”
As Douthat writes, “The Benefits of Bain Capitalism” are important. The private equity revolution of Mitt Romney and others helped keep America competitive, but the human costs must be acknowledged, too. And that’s the rub. The film, as full of inaccuracies as it may be, does depict what can happen to good people through no fault of their own and I say should be an object lesson to those wow would deny assistance to people who find themselves in need under the assumption that people out of work don’t want to work, would rather live on the dole, or are being coddled if given help. Giving such help is the price that should be paid for being able to enjoy a free market system.
A personal note: There was a time when I was interviewing for the next job up the corporate ladder, the very top management job in my field. One such interview was with a company in the Midwest that was on the brink of expansion. It had a big downtown flagship store that time was passing by as was happening in so many cities in the country grew, but it had thriving branch stores. The CEO and I hit it off remarkably well. We were remarkably enthused about working together. I talked to some of the merchants in the company I knew from working with them in other markets and they were excited about the prospects. At the end of the day-long interview the CEO said you are my guy, you’ve got the job, I have to review everything on Monday with the owners but you will get confirmation from the personnel department on Tuesday.
The company was not owned by retailers, it had been bought by an investment company like Bain. They had it up for sale and were negotiating with Marshall Fields, an association that would have done wonders for the business. Much excitement about it.
Tuesday came and I heard nothing, nor on Wednesday. On Friday I called my head hunter and learned that the company had been sold to local competition rather than Fields and the CEO had a storewide meeting on Tuesday to announce the closing of the business, the demise of the downtown store. Hundreds of people lost their jobs, some in the lower ranks who had spent their working lives there, many at ages difficult to find work. It was a reasonable business decision, but there was human cost.
Two points: a claim from Romney that his experience would lead to the creation of many new jobs is bogus. I don’t see that his Bain experience translate one way or another into how he would be as a president, especially since he comes off as cold, uncaring giving lip service to the needs of ordinary people.
If you care to invest 28 minutes of your time you can watch the notorious video here. Try not to shed tears.
http://www.webcasts.com/kingofbain/
Let’s face it, many Republicans just do not want to vote for Mitt Romney, even though he is the front runner. To help them make a decision, here are some things they might consider, a list of:
10 reasons Republicans should vote for Mitt Romney
10. “Mitt” is such a cool name.
9. He loved his dog so much he strapped him to the roof of his station wagon for a good view and took him on a scenic vacation to Canada.
8. While, unlike Rick Perry, he didn’t have a coyote to shoot but he did hunt “small varmints” showing a willingness to rid the world of undesirables that believe in entitlements.
7. He is very much a “people person,” as long as the “people” are corporations.
6. If you admired the character “Sky” in the musical Guys and Dolls you’ll appreciate Romney being willing to place a ten grand bet at the drop of a cowboy hat.
5. If you are a little tired of the bold eagle as our national bird you might want to replace it with the vulture since Mitt is the personification of a “venture capitalist vulture” as Gingrich described him.
4. Eager to draw out all of your Social Security funds and play the market or to take a voucher and bargain with health insurance companies? Mitt’s your guy.
3. In his spare time perhaps he can be persuaded to host another version of “Homes of the Rich and Famous” and take us on a tour of the four mansions he owns.
2. Since he has said he enjoys firing people perhaps with presidential authority he could fire Donald Trump.
1. And the number one reason Republicans should vote for Willard Mitt Romney is that he is not Newt Gingrich.
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