PMC Commentary

The Who Cares? primary

From exit polling, this riveting indicator from that cliffhanger in Florida, which might, just might explain the overall outcome:

Romney beat Gingrich among women -- and men.

Uhhhh ...

My levity doesn't imply a lack of caring about the Florida primary, although it should. This is small ball, a mere trifle, a negligible nothing compared to that which actually matters in the much longer run; which is, simply, the extent of damage and division that Newt Gingrich is willing to inflict on his own party. That's the only story here.

The primaries are over, just as they were over a month ago. They're only formalities. Romney's the nominee, he's always been the nominee, he shall be the nominee. Romney isn't the story. Gingrich and his accompanying carnage are.

Finally!

Finally.

A bill that GOP leaders are bringing to the House floor Wednesday would require states to prevent welfare recipients from accessing or spending their benefits at strip clubs, casinos and liquor stores.

This, however, is bittersweet indeed. For subsequent to this measure passing, can there be any national challenges left to meet?

Time to retire the 'narrative' narrative

Prevailing liberal sentiment, conventional commentariat wisdom, cable-news' chronic diagnosis, the blogosphere's ruthlessly jackhammered cliche -- you may call it whatever you will, you may run from it, you are even free to dread its alarming (and alarmed) repetition, but by God you can never entirely escape it: 

The president and his advisers have at times done a mediocre job of telling the administration’s story. They need to better explain how individual decisions, such as delaying the controversial Keystone pipeline, fit into a coherent Big Picture of where the country needs to go.

That's from Eugene Robinson's latest column, although it could have come from most anyone who sits center-left of a keyboard with an Internet connection. Such musings have become a de rigueur paragraph of the modern major generalist. He no longer screams Get me rewrite! Now, it's Where's the Big Picture?

I can sympathize with this sentiment, but my sympathy rests on an increasingly steep and downward trajectory. I, too, back in 2009 and 2010, roughly, was of the wistful choir: the Obama administration could do a better job of Big Picture-painting and Grand Narrative-telling, especially on the shell-shocked battlefield of healthcare. It might be observed that the rather more important point to be made was that the Obama administration accomplished healthcare; but, then again, I'm a hopelessly incurable pragmatist. At any rate, the commentariat's narrative on Obama's lack of one soon became the chic, alternative observation. My tolerance for it began to diminish, however, when Congressional Democrats -- many of whom had also been pushing the "no narrative" narrative -- themselves refused to nationalize the 2010 elections within a coherent narrative, contrary to the Obama administration's urgings.

What's more, the 2012 election soon loomed, which, reasonably enough, meant Obama's 2012 campaign loomed. And what's a campaign? It's a Grand Narrative. But kick-starting it in 2011 -- that annus horribilis awash in GOP apoplexies, in which the cable networks were investing the mother lode of their voyeuristic airtime -- would have eclipsed any emphatic narrative of 2012.

Better to bide one's time; better to wait for a better journalistic reception -- one not quite so saturated in the coverage of a Republican Party unhinged.   

In sum, Obama's been playing the long game. Which has worked, to the best of my recollection, most every time. One would think that prevailing liberal sentiment and conventional commentariat wisdom, etc., etc., would have caught on to this staggeringly manifest and strikingly successful presidential strategy by now. But, I guess that's not how they play their game.

Correction

A few days back I speculated that Newt Gingrich's historical model of politics was Georgia's notoriously racist demagogue, Tom Watson. I was so wrong. According to the Washington Post, Gingrich's historical model of politics was Georgia's notoriously racist demagogue, Eugene Talmadge.

There must be blood

I love the smell of internecine napalm in the winter:

Even as they breathe a sigh of relief about Romney’s apparent Florida turnaround, some party establishment types are nonetheless bracing for a protracted and ugly fight between factions that the GOP hasn’t seen for decades.

Thus writes Politico, whose last several words leave one groping for clarity. Which decade would that be? When has the GOP ever experienced such an internal brawl? The H.W. Bush-Buchanan spat was a Sunday garden party compared to the current blowout, and Goldwater was but a desperate shot in the dark against an altogether unbeatable incumbent.

No, this time, for the GOP, these are, potentially, the End Times.

Although some tea partiers will no doubt scandalously support Mitt the Inevitable out of partisan reflex, an appreciable number will not. And if we've learned anything about the vintage Tea Party Personality, it is this: it is absolutist, it is nihilistic, it is motivated and it is hideously outsized. Roll those first two destructive features into the last two of insurgent mobilization, and you get quite the bloody purge -- or at least a fanatical, even suicidal attempt at a bloody purge. The tea party is the atavistic, "Better Dead than Red" faction that will never bow to the pragmatic, nor will it ever -- that most detestable of words -- moderate, nor will it ever settle for anything less than how it sees itself now: as the GOP's Final Solution to Ideological Purity.

Deprive the tea partiers of their way, and there will be blood. Which means there must be blood, soon, and lots of it, since "some party establishment types" comprehend that they will never survive these lunatics as one of the two major parties.

Real ideology or fivolous demagoguery?

Krugman commits an intrinsic contradiction; and if that's too strong of an interpretation, then we should at least call it an unresolved tension. There's Exhibit A:

[I]nfluential people on both sides of the Atlantic heaped praise on the prophets of austerity ... because the doctrine of expansionary austerity dovetailed with their ideological agendas.

Versus Exhibit B:

[P]olicy makers, pundits and, I’m sorry to say, many economists decided, largely for political reasons, to forget what they used to know.

Krugman is not alone in blurring these vitally distinct propositions: Conservative (I would say "pseudoconservative"), anti-Keynesian Western pols are genuinely entrenched in "their ideological agendas," yet they simultaneously, and with aforethought, have deployed these agendas "largely for political reasons"? Either the former negates the latter, or the latter -- as the term "for political reasons" is generally understood -- obliterates the former. Which is to say, either these pols sincerely believe in their agendas, or they are merely opportunistic, pandering windbags.   

I mentioned that Krugman isn't alone in this blurring, since I've committed the selfsame ambiguity countless times. So this isn't a criticism of Krugman, but an honest puzzlement. Are these anti-Keynesian pols of "expansionary austerity" really that ideologically dimwitted? -- as Krugman notes, "any economist ... or for that matter any undergraduate who had read Paul Samuelson’s textbook 'Economics' ... could have told you that austerity in the face of depression was a very bad idea" -- or are they just playing to the dimwitted crowd, understanding, as they do, that the simplicity of Cut spending! is, compared to perhaps complicated macroeconomics, a stirring comprehensibility.

I don't know. It's unanswerable -- or at least with any real and final authority, it's unanswerable. My native cynicism, however, compels the suspicion that, say, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, or Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, aren't really so dumb as to believe that slashing federal spending while in the powerful gusts of economic headwinds is a smart idea. Even the most rudimentary of empirical economics belies such an opinion. Still, such an opinion can be a humdinger of a crowd-pleaser, assuming the crowd itself has for years meticulously evaded all enlightenment while languishing in its Platonic cave -- e.g., has been boobtube-glued to nothing but Fox News' glittering disinformation.

Such a suspicion suggests nothing less than the politically sociopathic on the part of Messrs. Boehner et al. My apologies if that's rhetorically strident -- but maybe, just maybe, profoundly true.

Please don't fib to Newt

For a politician who claims to possess a cosmic superiority in debating skills, with which he would crush the diabolically devious Kenyan imposter in the presidential square-offs, Newt Gingrich has offered the most peculiar excuse for his poor debate performances last week.

Asked, simply, "What happened?" by ABC's Jake Tapper, the former speaker threw up this defensive, explanatory barrier: "I was amazed."

Amazed, that is, in the sense of being stunned, stupefied, staggered. Amazed in the sense of a speechlessness rendered. Amazed in the sense of being stopped, shut down, swept savagely into a crippling silence.

The Great(est) Debater amplified his sense of helplessness:  

I'm standing next to a guy who is [giving] the most blatantly dishonest answers I can remember in any presidential race in -- in my lifetime.... And, you know, he would say things that were just plain not true.

Well, that left me stupefied. Isn't exposing an opponent's blatantly dishonest answers -- utterances that are "just plain not true" -- a rather elementary, or, as Newt would put it, fundamental part of live, on-stage debating? The world's great(est) debater actually confessed that his Achilles' heel consists of ... being fibbed to? Just lie to Newt and watch his rhetorical offensive crumble?

So it would seem. And that's according not to me, but to Newt.

Oh, the world's great(est) debater also mentioned this little tidbit of political insight: "You cannot be president of the United States if you can't be honest and candid with the American people."

Ergo, Barack Obama would have never become president of the United States had he not all along been honest and candid with the American people. Ergo II, Barack Obama could not possibly be the diabolically devious Kenyan imposter that the world's great(est) debater says he is.

Or so it would seem. And that's according not to me, but to Newt.

OWS: A squandered opportunity

When a conservative scholar leads his think piece with a gentle ridicule of, rather than an uneasy defensiveness against, liberalism's principal propaganda campaign, you know the latter has probably squandered an excellent political opportunity -- again. 

Such is the frame of political scientist James Q. Wilson's op-ed, "Angry about inequality? Don’t blame the rich," which opens with this mild mock of a yawning ho-hum:

There is no doubt that incomes are unequal in the United States — far more so than in most European nations. This fact is part of the impulse behind the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose members claim to represent the 99 percent of us against the wealthiest 1 percent [italics mine, ridicule his].

From there we enter an argumentation minefield of obscure statistical bloodshed -- did you know the Swedes' "Gini index" is much lower than America’s; or that Greece's "went from 0.413 in the 1970s to 0.307 in the late 2000s"? -- chiefly because OWS was foolish enough to slap a specific (not to mention far too narrow) percentage on the target of its justified anger (much as Mitt Romney was foolish enough to conjure a specific numerical creation of jobs). That is, by limiting its valid indignation to the huge incomes of the 1 percent, OWS necessarily disregarded the grossly inequitable structural advantages among the 99th percentile, the 98th percentile, the 97th, and so on.

In other words, in favoring the "income inequality" argument over exposing the much deeper injustice of wealth's far broader maldistribution, OWS let the intellectual quarry slip away. The movement also allowed this sort of easy counterpoint to be made, as Prof. Wilson easily does: 

The "rich" in America are not a monolithic, unchanging class. A study by Thomas A. Garrett, economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, found that less than half of people in the top 1 percent in 1996 were still there in 2005.

In yet other words, much of the physical quarry -- not merely the intellectual -- slips away. Again, had OWS not restricted its volleys to the 1 percent, the above point would have been rendered utterly pointless.

Of course we can always ask, But what have the practical results of OWS's propaganda been? (Note: I am not using "propaganda" pejoratively here.) Wilson gleefully answers:

[A] December Gallup poll showed that 52 percent of Americans say inequality is "an acceptable part" of the nation’s economic system, compared with 45 percent who deemed it a "problem that needs to be fixed."

Shortly after that poll's release, a rather stunned and definitely disconcerted Charles Blow, of the NY Times, noted the results with an infinite dreariness:

A Gallup poll released on Thursday found that, after rising rather steadily for the past two decades, the percentage of Americans who said that the country is divided into "haves" and "have-nots" took the largest drop since the question was asked.

A squandered opportunity. No one of any thoughtfulness is questioning the sentimental nobility behind OWS's efforts; Wilson, certainly, does not, nor do I. It's just that the organized left, disorganized as it is, always seems to hit its target with so little strategic effectiveness.

Dear athiests: Mitt has your back

Irresistibly -- Gawker, via Political Wire:

"Two readers have sent us confirmation that Edward Davies, Mitt Romney's militantly atheist father-in-law, was indeed posthumously converted to Mormonism by his family, despite the fact that when he was alive he regarded all religions as 'hogwash.' "

Getting one's ticket punched after the heretical fact would, I should think, present an insoluble problem for the heavenly Gate Keepers.

It's this sort of superstitious mumbo-jumbo that has always deterred me from any spiritual alliance with the officially Saved. And, while not allying myself with the thumpers, even a little, I should also think the fundamentalist Christian right would be extraordinarily distressed in imagining a pagan-rescuer in the Oval Office, reversing the heavenly decreed fate of the properly doomed.

I just double checked. Yep, this is the 21st century.

The High Noon II I'd love to see

Professor of government John Pitney Jr. imagines the unlikelier of coming presidential debates -- those between the incumbent and Newt Gingrich -- and predicts that while "Obama might botch a name here or a fact there," the former Speaker would make "radioactive comments" alienating to all but the most ardent right winger:

The more time he gets to talk, the more likely he is to say something outrageous. Throughout his career, his speeches and extended interviews have been spawning grounds for odd or even grotesque Gingrichisms.

It's a pity these Obama-Gingrich showdowns of a high-noon farce -- one can, as well, imagine the numerous holes that Gingrich would blast in his foot -- will never materialize. If the faking Dudley-Do-Righting Mitt Romney doesn't put the Black Bart of Georgia away in Florida next week, then the dry gulch of February will; its intervening drought of non-debating dullness will bequeath Gingrich only the useless and arid wind.

But here's the unlikeliest of presidential debates that I'd like to see: an Obama-Gingrich-Romney showdown. Now that's the ticket.

Throughout the GOP's gang warfare of a primary season, Obama, whenever asked which of these dueling hooligans he expects to take on, has answered quite sensibly that it makes no difference. A Gingrich is indistinguishable from a Romney, and a Romney is as extremist as a Gingrich, (Santorum, I think we can all agree, is merely gunning for the VP selection). Obama's plan of counterattack awaits only for the name of the last man standing to be filled in -- for there is absolutely no guessing about the bloodied survivor's sick, reality-twisting, diabolically underhanded bushwhackings to come.

And there ain't no doubt in my Western-justice, Hollywood-nostalgic mind that the cool, white-hatted, imperturbably righteous Will Kane could plug two Frank Millers as thoroughly as one. Why, one of the Millers might even plug the other on stage in a desperate, double-crossing struggle to out-fanaticize his equally ornery hombre.

I am of course just daydreaming. Such things aren't done; presidents don't fight down or invite gang-tackles like that, and the divided opposition never unites until it has drunk-punched itself into a staggering, bloodied stupor. But the farce of both Romney and Gingrich trying to out-right-wing each other -- revealing, in the horrifying process, that there really is no de facto difference between them -- in the face of Obama's center-left Reason would decisively hammer an early nail in the formers' inevitable coffins.

Over the rainbow

With increasing frequency I find myself distressed whenever I ponder the time, however limited, that I've just invested in reading the political press.

"I think it’s the most blatantly dishonest performance by a presidential candidate I’ve ever seen," says Newt Gingrich about Mitt Romney to the Washington Post in one story just perused; and "It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product ... He would proof it," says a former secretary for Ron Paul's newsletters, in another story scoured.

Reading both pieces in full, I don't know ... maybe two or three minutes of my life transpired? And in what way was my knowledge of current events enriched? How was the world about me thrown into a more enlightened relief? Simply put, what did I learn?

I "learned" that Newt Gingrich is a wretched liar, and that a publisher of political newsletters read his own newsletters.

Right. Nothing. Two, three minutes -- poof, gone, irretrievable. It rather makes one want to crawl off to a closet -- equipped with only a flashlight and an armful of Shakespeare -- and then forget the whole, monotonous, repetitious scene.

Sarah Palin, badmouthing the GOP, again

Poor Newt, says Sarah, "the establishment" and "the liberal media" and "certainly ... the progressives and the Democrats don’t like" him.

A 3:1 dislike from the center-left. So whose dislike does Sarah cite as representative of all that liberally lopsided and very unpleasant unfairness? Why, former Reagan speechwriter and WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan, of course, who once paused from her Lady Astor routine just long enough to label Mr. Gingrich an "angry little attack muffin."

In Sarah's characteristically stirring tone, and delivered, naturally, with her usual poetic mellifluousness, as well as with keen attention to precision in language, she added:

I’ll articulate that it is hypocritical of the media to subscribe to one candidate and not another, that kind of angry attack muffin verbiage, to one and not the other.

In case you missed it, that would be, to one and not the other. And we assume she meant "ascribe"? Other than that, that, there, is what she articulated, all right.

Prior to singling out Noonan as a typical voice of our liberally twisted, Gingrich-disliking media society, Sarah had also selected one of this nation's favorite Saul Alinsky-like pols, Chris Christie, to criticize for having criticized Newt. It seems the former had got his "panties in a wad."

With all the actual liberals and real Democrats and orthodox progressives out there -- all of them eagerly awaiting another Palin bombardment -- couldn't Sarah, maybe, pick on one of them?

Or could it be that Sarah wishes to concentrate her fire on the GOP establishment only, because she envisions herself, someday soon, as a Tea Party, third-party reigning queen?

It's not 'luck'

Yesterday, former governor Ed Rendell, in all his inimitable, savage affability, repeated an oft-heard sentiment:

The president's going to be in great shape — I think this Republican primary season has been a godsend ... The Republican race for president, so far, has resembled a clown show.

No doubt about that. Indeed, before long, the cliche might flip. Really funny Big Tent clown shows will be said to resemble a Republican race for president. The currently running one is so marvelously bad, so splendidly painful, so hilariously depressing it's setting new lows for groveling politics and new highs for slapstick comedy.

It's true as well that this primary season has been a "godsend" for President Obama. Until the look-alike clowns sprang from their plastic car in fright wigs and floppy shoes, the gathering consensus was that the president was in immense political trouble. I myself subscribed not to this Doomsday issue, nonetheless its theme permeated virtually every political conversation: Election Day will be a squeaker; advantage, Obama's opponent. That cliche, too, is now flipping.

I would, however, quibble with the epithet "godsend," in that it conveys an otherworldly sense of blind luck on Obama's part. To a nearly dismissible extent, this also is true. Yes, he's been lucky in drawing an unprecedented goofiness from among the available cast of clowns. Yet we mustn't neglect the far more significant premise that President Obama is facing this particular batch of clowns largely because the GOP's powerhouses (Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, Haley Barbour -- once) stopped before starting. They surveyed their 2012 prospects against an admittedly beleaguered but vastly popular president, and said No thanks; they appreciated long ago that unseating Obama would essentially be an impossible task.

And that fatalistic appreciation wasn't generated by Obama's "luck." In the president they recognized the administration's accumulated -- and accumulating -- hard-fought successes, which the cranky, incorrigible GOP, to its credibility detriment, insists on either maliciously denying or adolescently disparaging in toto.

In short, the Wise Idlers appreciated that November, 2012 would look much better to the electorate than did November, 2011, just as 2011 looked better than 2010. And all that hasn't come about through presidential luck.

The NINETEENTH GOP debate

Romney was shockingly strong, confident and aggressive in his opening assault on Gingrich. He characterized the Speaker as rhetorically irresponsible -- Gingrich's attack on his immigration proposals was "repulsive," said Romney -- which for unfathomable reasons seemed to leave Gingrich rather dazed. And that, for Gingrich, is politically inexcusable. I understand he's tired -- this sort of mindless gauntlet is of course exhausting -- but Romney has been stump-thumping far longer than Gingrich has, yet he shows no sign of fatigue.

***

Surprise. Gingrich reduced himself to pitiable pettiness in defending against Romney's near K.O.-ing of him on his own Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae investments. Romney's charge appeared to come to Gingrich as news, which Gingrich then tried to swat away as his financial "mouse" to Romney's "elephant." Gingrich was stunned. Poor oppo-research -- on himself.

***

I'm as stunned by Romney's vitality and aggressiveness as Gingrich is. I thought Romney would coast tonight as best he could, given his upward movement -- i.e., Gingrich's downward movement -- in Florida polls. But Romney clearly believes he is now fighting for his political life, and that Florida might be his firewall after all.

***

Romney pretty much decked Gingrich for living politically off the land -- for going from state to state, pandering as he went to each state's special interests. In Florida's case, it's the space industry and its chops-licking over Moon travel and colonization. Romney was devastating as the fiscal adult.

***

Another surprise. Rick Santorum made an ass of himself on the Romneyesque wickedness of mandated healthcare. Rick now implies that even states shouldn't experiment, contra his own party's traditional ideological approach. His position was somewhat befuddling, but then again, Santorum is one befuddling guy, in so many ways.

***

Finally, Gingrich opted for the old chestnut of the "secular elite" and the "academic media" (whatever that means) having declared war against Christianity, which is undergoing the "religious oppression of the state." Now that's the Newt we were all waiting for.

***

Romney stole Gingrich's debate-skills thunder tonight. That's the top takeaway -- and the only takeaway that counts, since Gingrich has been peddling his candidacy chiefly on the premise that he and only he can, well, debate. Whichever of these two proves himself the fitter in this nasty, brutish, GOP survivalist state of nature, though, President Obama will make mincemeat of. The verbal games they played tonight were mere child's play compared to the coming, profoundly substantive battles of the actual presidential debates.

Good night, and, to any Republicans who might be reading this, good luck. Because you sure as hell are going to need it.

"It would be a disaster" -- a necessary one

An anonymous "conservative media figure" summarizes the GOP's panic:

It could happen, and it would be a disaster. All of us who were around and saw how he operated as speaker — there’s no one who’s not appalled by the prospect of what could happen.... He could win the presidency if there’s a way to win with 45 percent — a second recession or a third-party candidate. The immediate worry is him winning the nomination and losing the election, tanking candidates down-ballot.

The nonsense of Gingrich's winning the White House is immeasurable, while the prospect of his losing and felling down-ballot candidates is incontrovertible -- and yet this near catastrophic option would be the healthiest for the GOP.

If Republicans nominate Romney, as is likely, the far right, subsequent to Romney's annihilation in the general election, will instantly begin agitating for a "true conservative" to run in 2016. And that means another batch of Cains, Bachmanns, Perrys, Palins, and so on. Their party will suffer through another dreadful four years of moving farther and farther right, while the electorate moves farther and farther away from what should be an authentically conservative party -- which a healthy, two-party American democracy requires.

If, however, the party nominates Gingrich, the right, post-2012, will be deprived of its now-incessant complaint that the party too often nominates a losing "moderate." It's true that Gingrich has flipped or wobbled on several issues of key interest to the far right, but no one among the pseudo- or ultra-conservative ranks will be able to convincingly deny that the party's 2012 candidate was himself, in the personage of Newt Gingrich, in so many primal ways, an ultraconservative. And with Gingrich's resounding defeat, that brand of ultraconservatism will have proven itself to be altogether electorally unviable.

The result: a GOP campaign of ideological cleansing, a heaving of Tea-Party misfits, a distancing by what remains of the establishment from far-right media jackals. The predicament will present itself as a rather simple matter of political survival. Either the party divests itself of its extremism, or there will be no Republican Party of national scope.