P.M. Carpenter

Romney's strategy: Occupy Obama

In a customarily squalid re-advertisement of Republican indifference to intellectual integrity and human decency, John Boehner's spokesman told the NY Times:

Americans expect their elected leaders to work together to boost job creation, even in an election year. Divided government can be challenging, but that’s no excuse for [Obama] to put his presidency on autopilot when so many Americans are looking for work.

That statement, as you might have guessed, was in tailored response to the president's announced re-election strategy of: I've had it with the wretched Republicans. Haven't you?

The Times frames it a bit less colloquially:

President Obama, heading into a grueling re-election campaign, plans to intensify his attacks against an unpopular Congress, concluding that he cannot pass any major legislation in 2012 because of unrelenting Republican hostility to his agenda.

As I've already noted elsewhere and often, I have little doubt as to the actual "re-election" portion of that scenario. The question is the extent of the "grueling" part. Current polling indicates a tight race between Obama and the GOP's eventual nominee, Mitt Romney, but current polling is about as relevant to November 2012 as Sarah Palin's Facebook comments are to the theoretical future of quantum physics.

Yet to come are hundreds of headlines of yet unknown, electoral influences; namely, the vicissitudes of foreign affairs and the economy's health. Republicans are of course doing whatever they can to cast the worst conceivable gloom on the former and poison the latter. But Obama's greatest strategic challenge is less likely to come in defending his record -- and in attacking Romney's as an immense explosion of dazzling flip-flops -- than in battling what appears to be the emerging Romniac strategy: to Occupy Obama, or rather to pre-occupy Obama with unrelenting blitzkriegs of lying monstrosities.

Obama's European socialism, his Marxist "entitlement society" of leveled outcomes, his unAmerican values, his apologetic foreign policy -- these are but the beginning salvos of a Romney assault designed to deflect the incoming shells of his own flip-floppery, as well of course to entice the media into a bloody indulgence and, it goes without saying, to delight the hooligan base.  

I'm betting it won't work. Nearly a year of this humbug will undoubtedly thrill the core Obama-haters, and for a while it will unsettle the independently clueless; but 10 unremitting months of such brazen bullshit are several months too many. On the stump Obama will cast that cool smile, he'll look about to comedically confirm that he's indeed surrounded by reality and realists, and then, having done both, he'll chuckle. And the crowd will chuckle. And in short order Romney will appear, to the many, to be precisely what he is: desperate and foolish. 

Two other items: the no little matter of a probable Ron Paul third-party run, which will drain Romney of vital votes in essential states; and then there's the GOP base's disaffection with the unreliable Romney, which should score some quantifiable effect on GOP turnout.

A "grueling" re-election campaign? Notwithstanding present polling, I'd label that assessment gratuitous.

Only Politico's Maggie Haberman and Michele never saw it coming?

Is Maggie serious?

For a time, [Michele Bachmann] looked like the real deal — a candidate who would be a viable conservative alternative to Mitt Romney....

Instead, her campaign slowly disintegrated. There was a bitter split with a coterie of top advisers, a slew of campaign trail missteps and claims of unfair treatment. Contributions dried up and the candidate herself never quite developed a message.

Yes, who could have ever predicted Bachmann's calamities -- given merely that this dreadful flake of a congresswoman once, on national television, casually accused her colleagues of 'anti-Americanism,' repeatedly presented 'Obamacare' as America's greatest menace, lost congressional staffers like car keys, and only excelled in early campaign debates when she chanted, "Obama ... is ... a ... one ... term ... president!"

Geez, the clues to her demise, so infernally well hidden.

Ron Paul's staggering obliviousness

It's top-down ahistorical hornswoggling like Ron Paul's, or, in his case, just historical ignorance, that so often feeds, perpetuates and I daresay even consecrates America's bottom-up stupidity. Paul's is the dullard's choice of demagogic sincerity: It is important to note that not all demagoguery comes in the form of deliberate misrepresentation; some, like Paul's, is populist quackery straight from the uninformed heart -- and to the broadly unenlightened, nothing appeals like the clean, radiant integrity of the alarmingly unenlightened.

At this all too obvious point in the prolonged, blood-curdling pratfall known as the Republican presidential contest, slamming Ron Paul with further evidence may seem superfluous. But what the hell. Here he is, speaking to an Iowa audience on Wednesday, observing that "In many ways, I identify with both groups" -- the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street -- which "are just tired of it all":

I think it makes my point. There’s a lot of people unhappy, and they’re not so happy with the two-party system because we have had people go in and out of office, congress changes, the presidency changes, they run on one thing, they do something else. Nothing ever changes.

That string of stunning fatuities, indeed, makes my point.

Ronald Reagan's reign of kindergarten ideology changed nothing? It didn't plant the pathogenic seed in the body politic's developing worldview that government is the common enemy? The subsequent, logically inexorable Gingrich Revolution of '94 didn't fundamentally coarsen our discourse and poison our politics? The concomitant prosperity of Bill Clinton's era, notwithstanding his imposition of higher taxes on higher incomes, meant nothing at all? The vulgar, one-two punches of a George W. Bush and the retention of a Gingrichlike Congress didn't careen us into fiscal implosions, bellicose nightmares and mass unemployment? And President Obama -- who, by the way, has done pretty much precisely what he promised -- hasn't decisively turned those sinister tides? 

Nothing ever changes? My dear Mr. Paul, in the past three decades America has undergone the gut-wrenching horrors and forced edification of a sort of national primal scream; the twoscore period of 1980-2020 likely will be chaptered in 22nd-century American history books as either the era of irreversible decline or anguished rebirth. And you, Mr. Paul, while standing right in the thick of it, have somehow mistaken this whirlwind for the doldrums.

I'd be less discontented with the ahistorical garbage you're selling, Mr. Paul, if I believed your salesmanship to be disingenuous -- something, say, more along the demagogic lines of a blustering Huey Long. But of course it isn't. You actually believe the insipid claptrap you're hustling -- to the insipid, hook-line-and-sinker hordes.

The upside? These overtures of yours, Mr. Paul, to the gullibly overwrought Tea Party/Occupy Wall Street crowd "fuel speculation that [you] will make a third-party bid."

Gingrich, now among the nouveau riche

Delightful news, in that Newt can torment Mitt for weeks longer:

Newt Gingrich has raised $9.2 million with three days to go before the end of the financial quarter ... allow[ing] him to stay in the race even if he doesn't have a strong finish in Iowa.

Lately I've watched political pros on various cable-news shows venture their studied opinion that Newt has run out of options in his anti-Mitt campaign; that about all he can do is fuss and fidget over Mitt's woefully unfair, anti-Newt attacks. The above cash helps to correct these pros, of course, but in terms of a short-term strategy I haven't yet figured out why Gingrich doesn't do to Romney what Romney is presently doing to President Obama: simply lie in the most outrageous manner about the former governor's record.

I don't mean merely distort, or twist, or exaggerate whatever Romney did as a chief executive. I mean, just entirely make stuff up -- which is, after all, about as characteristically GOP as it gets.

A pinprick of a coup de grace

One stretches to grasp the profound insignificance of Michele Bachmann's Iowa state chairman having jumped ship because he now "believes" in Ron Paul.

Kinda flaky, no? But so was Michele Bachmann's state chairman's decision to ever become Michele Bachmann's state chairman.

One is also tempted to stretch tongue into cheek and historically compare the chairman's flight to more than a few's roundly judicious switch from Ernst Rohm to A. Hitler -- just in the nick of time -- or to the prudent self-survivalism of falling out of love with Leon Trotsky in order to take up with the intensely jealous Uncle Joe, but such analogies would of course be aggressively incautious: not because Michele Bachmann is no E. Rohm or L. Trotsky, or because Ron Paul is far from the powerful personalities of Hitler and Stalin, but because only four of the preceding six will ever matter in history.

Doing the Iowa Mistake

Gail Collins bookends her humor column today with sobering solemnities. In reverse order:

On Tuesday, there will be a contest to select the preferred candidate of a small group of people who are older, wealthier and whiter than American voters in general, and more politically extreme than the average Iowa Republican.

And,

Perhaps this would be a good time to point out that the Iowa caucuses are really ridiculous.

Some might counter that general opinion has generally dismissed Iowa's ridiculousness for some time. Yet that perhaps dominant opinion is scarcely unearthed in cable news shows like "Hardball," or in the spectrum of Politico's headlines, or in the thousands of commentaries (insert mea culpa here) and comments generated daily online. On the GOP side this Midwestern spectacle of unrepresentative absurdity is covered all agog as though ... well, as though it means something penetratingly deeper than what a bevy of older, wealthier, extremist white people happen to think.

For instance last night, just to beat up on "Hardball" again, Chris Matthews sat with HuffPost's Howard Fineman and New York Magazine's John Heilemann, this threesome industriously thrashing out who's on first and what's on second and so on. Yet it occurred that Iowa's GOP caucus is rather less like an Abbott and Costello analogy than a rolling allegory of Mel Brooks's blazing dance scene, "The French Mistake": fists flying in a laughably choreographed, farcical melee which signifies little to nothing, really. This is the democracy, the republicanism, the civic elan that neoconservatives not only believe we should export, but that others, of a sadly arrested developed nature, should be interested in buying.

Predictions are as hot an item as Rick Santorum at the moment, so I'll make another -- this one, for something way down the road. In 2013, after the Republican presidential nominee has had his Iowa-contributed radicalized butt handed to him by an exceedingly wary general electorate, the smoldering GOP establishment will radically revamp this whole Iowa thing.

A baffling moment with Rick Perry

Rick Perry, prattling in Iowa today:

It really disturbs me that nearly after nine years of war in Iraq that this president wouldn’t welcome home our many heroes with a simple parade in their honor. Maybe it’s because this war is unpopular with the Democrats.... Give them that parade. Give them that pat on the back. Tell them thank you for the freedom that we have.

You know what? Even cheap demagoguery doesn't excuse the failure -- in this case, a twofold failure -- to avoid the "non" of non sequiturs.

In the first place, Mr. Perry, "this war" that is no more became nearly as unpopular with Republicans. And second, please inform as to precisely what freedoms we have that that unAmerican war protected?

Mitt Romney on comedy

One feels compelled to requote Political Wire's "Quote of the Day":

"I'm not going to change my positions by virtue of being in a presidential campaign."

-- Mitt Romney, in an interview on Fox News.

That is of course riotously funny of Mitt. Still, I positively dread the certain prospect of nearly a year of unremittingly identical commentary about Mitt Romney's changing positions. Column after column after column, in the Post, the Times, rampant throughout the blogosphere, etc., etc., etc., will devote itself to Romney's rather peculiar shape-shifts; and each commentary will be equally devoted to the muted suggestion that its jackhammering point is somehow original. 

Egads. Months of it. Months and months of it, the same bloody "insight," over and over, drilled into our tender little psyches as the Big Truth, which is of course as riotously true as Mitt Romney is funny. And, I know: message repetition and party discipline(!) and all that -- this is all quite necessary to soften and ready the electorate's brain for voting the alternative. Nonetheless my own brain balks at that certain and ghastly prospect: nearly an entire year of this stupefying sameness.

The GOP's base ingredient

Throughout last fall's several thousand Republican presidential debates the candidates would on occasion be asked to compliment one of their competitors, at which point an almost singular admiration would erupt for Ron Paul. Mitt loved him, Newt loved him, the Ricks loved him and so on, although it cannot be denied that much of this public adoration was privately pragmatic: Warm to the Paulites, because when their avatar flames out -- which Paul and only Paul is absolutely sure to do -- they and their mass organizational skills will have to go somewhere.

Yet that pragmatic choice to cozy up to Paul went deeper; it went also to the historical and psychological core of the contemporary GOP. The University of California's Jeffrey Stewart, in Politico's "Arena," does a nice job of summarizing:

That [Paul] is so popular and will remain popular despite these newsletters reveals how much an anti-black motivation underlies the frenzy of the Republican presidential campaign....

Paul is not atypical--he was just impolitic enough to put in print what the Republican rank and file still believes.

Whether presidential-candidate Paul is or isn't a racist is essentially immaterial. The same holds true for the others. For their political reality is that they, notwithstanding whatever their private views, must pay tribute to the coded malice of states' rights and the implied, oppressive anarchy of a shackled central authority in the federal government. That this professed ideology of inflated local power and limited federal authority is more personal and opportunistic than conceptual and genuine becomes apparent when the GOP base advocates for a U.S. marshal stationed in every bedroom, as well as over the shoulder of every gynecologist.

In the early 1960s Barry Goldwater, the actual originator (not Richard Nixon) of the Southern Strategy, pithily metaphorized the essence of capitalizing on white backlash: Republican candidates should "go hunting where the ducks are." If Goldwater, like Paul, hadn't been a libertarian crackpot, he might have had a shot in '64. Today, demographic pressures have thinned the ducks' ranks, thereby leaving Republican candidates to desperately appeal to an ever-shrinking target audience. They just can't quit the racists -- still the base ingredient of the whole goddamn party.

No way out, or over

Dan Balz lays out the GOP's central predicament:

The shifting allegiances of Republican voters suggest not only a vote of no confidence in many of the candidates but also unresolved divisions within the party. The next nominee will have to bridge that divide. Republicans are united on many policy issues, but the tea party’s influence has pushed all the presidential candidates to the right.

To the far and generally unacceptable right, it would seem; and for the GOP, I don't see any way out. Not within a few months, anyway, since the Republican primaries, in what could be prolonged and grueling warfare, will keep the candidates pinned to the far right's wall.

The inevitable Mitt Romney, I'm sure, long ago wished to slip into yet another political metamorphosis, gravely intoning that he never meant to question the human contribution to global warming, and that he never meant to portray corporations in such a Shakespearean way -- Do they not bleed when they're pricked? -- and that he never meant to throw into doubt the historic profundities of his Massachusetts healthcare law.

All of this backpedaling -- and much, much more -- I'm sure Romney has had on the tip of his opportunistic tongue for months, since independent voters will think him quite mad should he persist otherwise. Yet he must persist; indeed he must mutate even madder, if he's to engender any enthusiasm among the GOP's motivated base.

In the process he's filling a vault of imperishable lunacies that President Obama's reelection team is undoubtedly viewing like grade-A porn. Is this as good as it gets? No, no, it's going to get even better, as Mitt Romney panders like a preening gigolo to the bluehairs and mossbacks who've already done bought their tickets for this here far-right freak show.

Can Romney afford to alienate them between now and next November? Nope. He'd then be without a base on which to build, yet he cannot build on the base he hopes to secure, poor devil, since it itself is eerily alienating.

Balz is correct: There's an enormous divide. But no bridge.

The Republican asylum

This statement was recently issued by a Republican presidential campaign, against one of its own. Can you guess to which campaign it exquisitely applies?

[This former staffer] has zero credibility and should not be taken seriously.

That's right. All of them.

True, the wording above in fact came from the Ron Paul campaign, regarding one Eric Dondero, a former congressional aide who now writes that his libertarian-isolationist boss's views roamed from "pure lunacy" to assorted "stupid and whacky things." Yet that other fact -- the fact that Mr. Dondero nonetheless stayed with Paul throughout these chronically acute periods of political dementia -- merely indicates that they were made for each other.

Just like the entire Republican asylum.

Romney, Paul, Perry to win, place and show

This means nothing whatsoever, which therefore means it's a perfect fit for the blogosphere.

My prediction for the order of finishes in Iowa:

Romney
Paul
Perry
Santorum
Bachmann
Gingrich

It seems to me that even Iowa evangelicals will realize that a potentially electable candidate is at least a trifle preferable to guaranteed implosions, hence Romney's first-place finish. Paul's dedicated ground organization and current polling numbers speak for themselves, in that they'll overpower Perry's media bombardment, while those residual evangelicals will coalesce around Santorum and Bachmann to sufficiently abort Gingrich's embryonic joke of a candidacy. 

'Obama and the Communists'

Politico:

According to the latest Gallup tracking poll, more Americans approve of the job that President Obama is doing than disapprove for the first time since this summer....

It's too soon to draw sweeping conclusions, but it seems that the standoff with House Republicans over the payroll tax cut did no damage at all to the president.

No doubt. And since we're all going to draw sweeping conclusions anyway, after judiciously noting it's too soon, here's mine; which, while related to the above, hauls the militant act of sweeping conclusions to a whole new theatre of speculative operations. To wit ...

Over at the NY Times' "Campaign Stops," Harvard's Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, authors of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, relate this desperate gem, gathered up from a Virginia Tea Partier: "We have to get Obama out; Obama and the Communists he’s surrounded himself with."

That is precisely the kind of oppositional crazy that most presidents only dream of. Lyndon Johnson had it, FDR had it -- phonetically, agane and agane -- and Richard Nixon manufactured it. But however the occasional president can get it, that president cherishes it, since it vastly moderates any presidential failings by contrast. What likely benefited George W. Bush in 2004 more than John Kerry's unpardonable campaign mismanagement? Well-meaning but hypersalivating lefty bloggers and activists denouncing "Bush and the Nazis he's surrounded himself with." Such rhetoric persuades no one but the already persuaded, so not even them; meanwhile its radical influence on orthodox swing voters is only off-putting.

And in 2012, Barack Obama will be blessed by right-wing crazies like we haven't witnessed since 1964. To their insular, paranoid minds they'll be trumpeting The Truth to the commie-enslaved masses, while the latter will hear but an unhinged, extremist alternative.

Indeed, the multitudes have already heard just that, and as a bonus warning they've seen its actual materialization in the U.S. House. So, to them, Obama and those communists he surrounds himself with are looking better and better every day.

How did we (they) get here?

An excellent synopsis from Norm Ornstein:

Today’s Tea Partiers recognize that they share a similar governing philosophy with their forebears [of 1994], but they believe almost uniformly that the Gingrichites sold out too quickly, blinking unnecessarily when the political heat got turned up.

To which Jonathan Bernstein adds two other excellent points:

The first is the conservative closed-information loop: It’s very likely that Tea Partyers in Congress really don’t realize how unpopular many conservative ideas are with swing voters because the news sources they’ve listened to for years never happen to mention it. The other key factor was the 2010 elections, and in particular the primary challenges to incumbents such as Lisa Murkowski and Bob Bennett. Normally, the reality check on fantasies about the popularity of fringe partisan ideas comes when politicians start thinking of Election Day. However, when the Election Day that looms largest in the imaginations of those politicians is the primary, then they’re pushed toward those fringe positions, not away from them.

To which I'd add yet a third point: The GOP's creeping institutionalization of rank amateurism in American politics.

This Everyman mania started faintly with the GOP's temper-tantrumed 22nd Amendment, which limited U.S. presidents to two terms; heaven forfend we should ever be oppressed by another FDR, whose prolonged political and professional splendor in the Oval Office put every Republican president since Lincoln to ineffable shame. Later came the Barry Goldwater squalor about the need for simplicity to trump complexity in the politico-policy arena: an unmistakable call for right-winging rubes void of analytical backgrounds to join electoral battle, which is precisely what the subsequent New Right -- father of the contemporary Tea Partying Right -- did.

Dionne nails it

For sheer precision in what is too often a wholesale muddle of political definitions, E.J. Dionne this morning is indispensable:

Obama will ... be the conservative in 2012, in the truest sense of that word. He is the candidate defending the modestly redistributive and regulatory government the country has relied on since the New Deal, and that neither Ronald Reagan nor George W. Bush dismantled. The rhetoric of the 2012 Republicans suggests they want to go far beyond where Reagan or Bush ever went.

I argued a similar case in the run-up to the 2010 congressional elections; I argued that Democrats, in this incontrovertibly center-right nation, should exploit the majority's professed preference for a philosophical conservatism by declaring themselves the true conservatives (in that they were merely "defending the modestly redistributive and regulatory government the country has relied on since the New Deal").

I about got my head handed to me by a progressive community that, I discovered, preferred lofty labels to pragmatic victories.

Why, Democrats, I was informed -- rather, had stridently screamed at me -- should never ever recoil from their sacred duty to advance the noble Progressive Cause as progressives; even if their cause, at that painful moment of late 2010, entailed little more than "defending the modestly redistributive and regulatory government the country has relied on since the New Deal" -- that is, an essentially conservative cause.

My sense of the righteous was that if keeping the tea-sipping barbarians at the electoral gates meant expropriating the enemy's bragging rights to "true conservatism," then by all means expropriate with a passionate cunning, especially if one's progressive ass is running in an organically conservative swing district. It wasn't as though these Democratic candidates would have been lying; indeed, they were campaigning as the true conservatives -- see conservation of Social Security, Medicare ... -- in a minor epic of sweeping radicalism on a fevered rampage.

Our traditional labels have entered a fluid state of subtle transformation; and if Democrats are to protect their cause, they'll need to explain the profound conservatism underlying today's progressivism. 

And with that, I'm taking my daughter to the mall so she can go 'tweenly radical with her assorted gift cards. God help me.