Tuesday, May 8, 2012
THE LOST ART OF MUD-SLINGING
H.N. Burdett When 19th century British statesman Benjamin Disraeli excoriated his chief rival, William Gladstone, as "inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity," he was referring to a real condition, journalist/author Gerald White Johnson once told me. Not only is it possible to become drunk on words, he explained, but anyone in that condition can become as plastered as having over-indulged "in the rawest busthead that ever dripped from a moonshine still." Nowhere is Johnson's supposition more evident than in the overheated realm of politics where rhetorical intoxication transpires well beyond candidates and their spokespersons, spilling over and into precincts far and wide from polite dinner party conversation to robust neighborhood gin mill give-and-take. The current quadrennial presidential race is widely touted as certain to erupt into the most vituperous ever waged. If an eyebrow or two is raised here among those who have delved into American history beyond the standard lifeless textbooks, that reflex emanates from recollections that the nation's most revered founding fathers were once targets of more than their share of verbal arrows. Alexander Hamilton was accused of embezzling public funds, George Washington of plotting the subversion of the republic. Nearly 60 years ago, the aforementioned Professor Johnson, writing in The New Republic, noted that the allegations against Hamilton and Washington were leveled not by politicians but rather by "merely newspaper editors, so it is questionable that their mouthings should be compared with public utterances." Johnson lamented the lost art of mud-slinging of which he deemed John Randolph of Roanoke and the virulent abolitionist Charles Sumner, both "learned and witty," as "the greatest master." As examples, Randolph's characterization of Stephen A. Douglas, who was both undersized in physical stature and possessed of ringing rhetoric, as "a noisome, squat and nameless animal" and of Senator A.P. Butler's defense of "the harlot slavery" as "though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his eyes." And there was Randolph's description of Edward Livingston, trusted adviser and Secretary of State to President Andrew Jackson: "He is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. Like rotten mackerel by moonlight, he both shines and stinks." Johnson compared Randolph and Sumner with far clumsier purveyors of calumny, leading mid-20th century right wing Senators William Jenner of Indiana and Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin. Jenner lambasted General George C. Marshall,
THE LOST ART OF MUD-SLINGING
H.N. Burdett
When British statesman Benjamin Disraeli excoriated his chief rival, William Gladstone, as "inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity," he was referring to a real condition, journalist/author Gerald White Johnson once told me.
Not only is it possible to become drunk on words, he said, but someone in that state can get as plastered as anyone who has over-indulged in "the rawest busthead that ever dripped from a moonshine still."
Nowhere is Johnson's supposition more evident than in the overheated realm of politics where rhetorical intoxication transpires well beyond the candidates and their spokespersons, spills over and into precincts far and wide, from polite dinner party conversation to the robust corner neighborhood gin mill give-and-take.
The current United States presidential race is touted as certain to erupt into the most vituperous ever waged. If an eyebrow or two is raised here among those who have delved into American history somewhat deeper than the standard lifeless textbook versions, that reflex emanates from recollections that some of the nation's most revered founding fathers were once targets of more than their share of verbal arrows. Alexander Hamilton was accused of embezzling public funds, George Washington of plotting the subversion of the republic.
Nearly 60 years ago, Professor Johnson, writing in The New Republic, noted that the allegations against Hamilton and Washington came not from politicians but rather from "merely newspaper editors, so it is questionable that their mouthings should be compared with public utterances."
In that same article, he lamented the lost art of mud-slinging of which he deemed John Randolph of Roanoke and Charles Sumner, the virulent Massachusetts abolition leader, its "greatest masters."
Johnson cited Sumner's characterization of slavery advocates Senators Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of South Carolina. He called Douglas, who was short, plump and possessed of a propensity for shrill rhetoric, "a noisome, squat and nameless animal" and compared Butler's defense of "the harlot slavery" with a mistress "although ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight. . ."
And Randolph described Edward Livingston, close adviser to President Andrew Jackson for whom he served as Secretary of State: "He is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. Like mackerel by moonlight, he both shines and stinks."
Johnson contrasted Randolph and Sumner with clumsier purveyors of calumny, two mid-20th century conservative extremist U.S. Senators: Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin and William Jenner of Indiana. McCarthy charged five Democratic administrations with "twenty years of treason." Jenner lambasted General George C. Marshall, architect of the allied victory in World War II as well as the post-war European Recovery Program, as "an eager front man for traitors" and "a living lie."
Johnson wrote: "So while it is true that American political debate wallowed in the gutter (in the early days of the republic). . .it is also true that the worst of the guttersnipes were private individuals, not representatives of any constituency. And while it is true that debate was as fully venomous as it is today, it is also true that the most venomous of the debates sparkled, and sparkling slander is less offensive than stupid slander, even when it is uttered by a man in official position."
"It is regrettable, but true that this world will forgive a great deal to a man who amuses it," Johnson stressed.
As candidates gear up for the quadrennial national campaign, they might do well to heed the sage advice of Johnson, characterized by his friend and mutual admirer, Adlai Stevenson, thus: "When it comes to piercing stuffed shirts, when there are slobs to be speared and poisonous balloons to burst. . .without Gerald Johnson there are but pygmies to bend the bow of Ulysses. He is the critic and conscience of our time." ###
When British statesman Benjamin Disraeli excoriated his chief rival, William Gladstone, as "inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity," he was referring to a real condition, journalist/author Gerald White Johnson once told me.
Not only is it possible to become drunk on words, he said, but someone in that state can get as plastered as anyone who has over-indulged in "the rawest busthead that ever dripped from a moonshine still."
Nowhere is Johnson's supposition more evident than in the overheated realm of politics where rhetorical intoxication transpires well beyond the candidates and their spokespersons, spills over and into precincts far and wide, from polite dinner party conversation to the robust corner neighborhood gin mill give-and-take.
The current United States presidential race is touted as certain to erupt into the most vituperous ever waged. If an eyebrow or two is raised here among those who have delved into American history somewhat deeper than the standard lifeless textbook versions, that reflex emanates from recollections that some of the nation's most revered founding fathers were once targets of more than their share of verbal arrows. Alexander Hamilton was accused of embezzling public funds, George Washington of plotting the subversion of the republic.
Nearly 60 years ago, Professor Johnson, writing in The New Republic, noted that the allegations against Hamilton and Washington came not from politicians but rather from "merely newspaper editors, so it is questionable that their mouthings should be compared with public utterances."
In that same article, he lamented the lost art of mud-slinging of which he deemed John Randolph of Roanoke and Charles Sumner, the virulent Massachusetts abolition leader, its "greatest masters."
Johnson cited Sumner's characterization of slavery advocates Senators Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of South Carolina. He called Douglas, who was short, plump and possessed of a propensity for shrill rhetoric, "a noisome, squat and nameless animal" and compared Butler's defense of "the harlot slavery" with a mistress "although ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight. . ."
And Randolph described Edward Livingston, close adviser to President Andrew Jackson for whom he served as Secretary of State: "He is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. Like mackerel by moonlight, he both shines and stinks."
Johnson contrasted Randolph and Sumner with clumsier purveyors of calumny, two mid-20th century conservative extremist U.S. Senators: Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin and William Jenner of Indiana. McCarthy charged five Democratic administrations with "twenty years of treason." Jenner lambasted General George C. Marshall, architect of the allied victory in World War II as well as the post-war European Recovery Program, as "an eager front man for traitors" and "a living lie."
Johnson wrote: "So while it is true that American political debate wallowed in the gutter (in the early days of the republic). . .it is also true that the worst of the guttersnipes were private individuals, not representatives of any constituency. And while it is true that debate was as fully venomous as it is today, it is also true that the most venomous of the debates sparkled, and sparkling slander is less offensive than stupid slander, even when it is uttered by a man in official position."
"It is regrettable, but true that this world will forgive a great deal to a man who amuses it," Johnson stressed.
As candidates gear up for the quadrennial national campaign, they might do well to heed the sage advice of Johnson, characterized by his friend and mutual admirer, Adlai Stevenson, thus: "When it comes to piercing stuffed shirts, when there are slobs to be speared and poisonous balloons to burst. . .without Gerald Johnson there are but pygmies to bend the bow of Ulysses. He is the critic and conscience of our time." ###
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
THE PATH TO THE PRESIDENCY
H. N. Burdett
Issues and indicators in a presidential campaign seven months before election day can become blurred and even radically changed before ballots are finally cast. Unknown and unforeseeable events can and inevitably will erupt in the interim that could go a long way toward determining the outcome. Nonetheless, while perhaps not yet engraved in stone, battle lines have certainly been scratched in sand. Clearly, both President Obama and his presumptive Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, know all too well what they have to do.
In what a consensus of the punditocracy insists will be the most unsavory and most expensive election in modern national campaign annals, Romney's most demanding tasks are to: (1) Persuade voters that, despite his solid position on the pedestal of privilege, he understands their pain even if he does not actually share it; (2) Bend over backwards - and even stand on his head - to prove he is emphatically not declaring war on women.
Conversely, Obama must convince the electorate that his continuing stewardship is the best tonic for accelerating the pace of a gradually improving but far from acceptable economy - no cinch sell at a time of $4-a-gallon and rising gasoline that translates into just getting to and from work, as well as concomitant soaring costs of food, clothing and shelter.
During his first term, the president utilized his extraordinary oratorical skills to justifiably blame his predecessor for passing to him the worst mess since Hercules was challenged to sweep the Augean stables - two wars and a precariously collapsing economy. But this familiar litany is unlikely to resonate for entrusting him with four more years in the White House.
Obama had to be heartened by a recent Washington Post-ABC poll showing his double-digit advantages over Romney on matters ranging from handling of international affairs to addressing women's issues. The president was also somewhat comfortably, though less impressively, ahead of Romney on handling terrorism, social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, and a clearer vision for the future.
While the poll verified the perception that Romney has an uphill battle, it further reflected chinks in Obama's armor for the challenger and his super-PAC allies to exploit. The probable GOP nominee held slim but telling advantages over the incumbent in the areas of handling both the economy and energy policy. Romney's only double-digit lead over Obama was an eye-popping 51 to 38 percent in handling the federal budget deficit.
Conducted between April 5-8, the poll indicated that 15 percent more registered voters felt that "unfairness in the economic system that favors the wealthy" is a greater problem than "over-regulation of the free market that interferes with growth and prosperity." Though the poll revealed that voters prefer Romney over Obama on dealing with the economy, energy policy and the federal budget deficit, the president held a 10-point lead over his probable challenger in "protecting the middle class" and 12-point advantage in understanding people's economic problems.
Seven months may appear to be time enough for Romney to build on his advantages and re-boot where he has fallen short. But he must simultaneously coalesce his own divided party, particularly the alienated evangelical Christian and tea party factions. The distrust of these two principal segments of the GOP prevented Romney from nailing down the nomination much earlier on, despite his decided advantages in campaign funds, organization and key endorsements.
The hard-core conservative Republican base has been unwavering in its conviction that Romney is a Massachusetts moderate who will flip-flip on any issue - from abortion to gun control - to get elected, but that he shares neither its values nor its ideology.
Even should Romney successfully navigate the minefield of concerns of the disaffected elements within his own party, he must somehow evaporate Obama's robust 19-point lead among women voters so that it more closely aligns with his eight-point advantage over the president with male voters. If the election were held during the first week of this month, women voters would have fueled the Obama victory over Romney by 51 to 44 percent, the poll reveals. But it will be held in November. In the interim, hearts and minds have been known to change and, often enough, quite dramatically.
Should the election come right down to the wire, which most pundits predict it will, independent voters will be the key. And here, Romney holds a slim 48 to 46 percent edge over the president. While it is a statistical wash, these numbers will be well worth watching ever more closely in future polls as the months roll by.
###
Issues and indicators in a presidential campaign seven months before election day can become blurred and even radically changed before ballots are finally cast. Unknown and unforeseeable events can and inevitably will erupt in the interim that could go a long way toward determining the outcome. Nonetheless, while perhaps not yet engraved in stone, battle lines have certainly been scratched in sand. Clearly, both President Obama and his presumptive Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, know all too well what they have to do.
In what a consensus of the punditocracy insists will be the most unsavory and most expensive election in modern national campaign annals, Romney's most demanding tasks are to: (1) Persuade voters that, despite his solid position on the pedestal of privilege, he understands their pain even if he does not actually share it; (2) Bend over backwards - and even stand on his head - to prove he is emphatically not declaring war on women.
Conversely, Obama must convince the electorate that his continuing stewardship is the best tonic for accelerating the pace of a gradually improving but far from acceptable economy - no cinch sell at a time of $4-a-gallon and rising gasoline that translates into just getting to and from work, as well as concomitant soaring costs of food, clothing and shelter.
During his first term, the president utilized his extraordinary oratorical skills to justifiably blame his predecessor for passing to him the worst mess since Hercules was challenged to sweep the Augean stables - two wars and a precariously collapsing economy. But this familiar litany is unlikely to resonate for entrusting him with four more years in the White House.
Obama had to be heartened by a recent Washington Post-ABC poll showing his double-digit advantages over Romney on matters ranging from handling of international affairs to addressing women's issues. The president was also somewhat comfortably, though less impressively, ahead of Romney on handling terrorism, social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, and a clearer vision for the future.
While the poll verified the perception that Romney has an uphill battle, it further reflected chinks in Obama's armor for the challenger and his super-PAC allies to exploit. The probable GOP nominee held slim but telling advantages over the incumbent in the areas of handling both the economy and energy policy. Romney's only double-digit lead over Obama was an eye-popping 51 to 38 percent in handling the federal budget deficit.
Conducted between April 5-8, the poll indicated that 15 percent more registered voters felt that "unfairness in the economic system that favors the wealthy" is a greater problem than "over-regulation of the free market that interferes with growth and prosperity." Though the poll revealed that voters prefer Romney over Obama on dealing with the economy, energy policy and the federal budget deficit, the president held a 10-point lead over his probable challenger in "protecting the middle class" and 12-point advantage in understanding people's economic problems.
Seven months may appear to be time enough for Romney to build on his advantages and re-boot where he has fallen short. But he must simultaneously coalesce his own divided party, particularly the alienated evangelical Christian and tea party factions. The distrust of these two principal segments of the GOP prevented Romney from nailing down the nomination much earlier on, despite his decided advantages in campaign funds, organization and key endorsements.
The hard-core conservative Republican base has been unwavering in its conviction that Romney is a Massachusetts moderate who will flip-flip on any issue - from abortion to gun control - to get elected, but that he shares neither its values nor its ideology.
Even should Romney successfully navigate the minefield of concerns of the disaffected elements within his own party, he must somehow evaporate Obama's robust 19-point lead among women voters so that it more closely aligns with his eight-point advantage over the president with male voters. If the election were held during the first week of this month, women voters would have fueled the Obama victory over Romney by 51 to 44 percent, the poll reveals. But it will be held in November. In the interim, hearts and minds have been known to change and, often enough, quite dramatically.
Should the election come right down to the wire, which most pundits predict it will, independent voters will be the key. And here, Romney holds a slim 48 to 46 percent edge over the president. While it is a statistical wash, these numbers will be well worth watching ever more closely in future polls as the months roll by.
###
Friday, March 16, 2012
THE 'GAME CHANGE' BLAME GAME
H. N. Burdett
The HBO presentation of "Game Change" probably will not change the thinking of those who write and produce docu-dramas hereafter, but it should.
In preparation for watching it, I re-read the chapters of the book on which the movie focused. I was impressed by how faithful the film was to the 2008 presidential campaign page-turner by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, among the best of that genre.
The television version is necessarily limited in scope and the behind-the-scenes John McCain-Sarah Palin portion of the Heilemann-Halperin opus was dramatized to near perfection. One critic has correctly noted that the tranformative campaign of four years ago could have become an eminently watchable mini-series. The book covers the runs for the Democratic presidential nomination that year by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as the McCain-Palin saga.
Both Palin and McCain have dismissed the television production without actually viewing it, which can only mean that they were less than thrilled with the book on which it was based. That's too bad because Ed Harris's portrayal of McCain, if anything, enhances the senator's image as a politician who flatly refuses to play mudball politics. And Julianne Moore, in the role of Palin, at times poignantly reveals a side of Palin that would give pause to at least a few entrenched liberal Democrats who see the erstwhile Alaska governor as the personification of everything they detest.
Though no self-respecting progressive watching "Game Change" could be converted to Palin's politics, there might be at least a dollop of empathy for her as a human being going through emotions shared by all of those who have ever confronted a challenge that was simply over their heads.
Palin is revealed in both the book and the movie as a successful Alaska politician who was clearly out of her depth once she was elevated to the national stage. Stephen Schmidt, the senior McCain campaign strategist played by Woody Harrelson, freely admits that the Palin vetting process was shoddy at best. Nicolle Wallace, Palin's "handler" during the campaign, was understandably frustrated and ultimately distraught in feeling that Palin was a detached prima donna.
But both Schmidt and Wallace also seem to be shifting the entire blame, which in reality both shared, to those who checked out Palin and gave her their enthusiastic approval. Though not mentioned in either the book or the movie, the latter included neo-conservative intellectuals William Kristol and Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard, who went up to Juneau to meet Palin personally. My guess is that they came back believing they could easily mold and manipulate her into a spirited advocate for their fatally-flawed foreign policy views. That Kristol and Barnes later turned their spineless backs on the Alaska governor speaks volumes about their paltry principles, something McCain, a congenital hawk, would never have done and indeed did not.
In the end, McCain's feeling completely comfortable with Palin was what led to the decision that ultimately sank any hope at all he had of winning the presidency. Whatever else one might feel about the Arizona senator, there can be no disagreement regarding his unwavering loyalty, which is generally lauded as a commendably courageous trait but can also be a crippling weakness.
Reasonable questions arise as to why, when Palin's insurmountable shortcomings were recognized, she was not cut loose from the ticket. If this was ever suggested to McCain, he almost certainly would have rejected it - not necessarily because of his refusal to admit that he was wrong, but rather because, as a maverick politician as well as a onetime purposeless youth who had himself undergone an incredible transformation, he could identify with her plight in ways his campaign staff could not.
Furthermore, abandoning her might have been even a greater political risk than keeping her on the ticket. There was the case of George McGovern, who as the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, dropped his running mate, Tom Eagleton, in mid-campaign. Eagleton had not revealed to McGovern his long earlier nervous breakdown, and it was the very reason the vetting process became more exhaustive in subsequent national campaigns, at least until 2008. After Eagleton was dumped and replaced by Sargent Shriver, questions arose regarding McGovern's initial judgment in making his vice presidential choice and later about his loyalty when he declined to stand by his running mate. While this may not fully explain why the Democratic national ticket was crushed in that election year, it most certainly did not help.
One need not be a Palin die-hard to wonder why even a marginally competent staff could have been so clueless about the need to take special pains to prepare a state governor with absolutely no foreign policy experience, much less expertise, for a national campaign.
When Schmidt finally presented Palin with 25 talking points and four "attack lines," and reiterated the necessity to pivot away from certain questions, she did well enough. But this was a textbook case of too little, too late. More recently, Mitt Romney clumsily executed such a pivot in a television interview. When the reporter repeated the original query, Romney told the interviewer he was free to ask his questions and he, the candidate, was equally free to respond the way he chose. Rather than finding himself mired in yet another swamp of vilification for that graceless riposte, as Palin doubtless would have been, the incident was all but ignored by the media.
The larger and unresolved question is why Palin was not presented with the talking points to memorize well before her bungled interview with Katie Couric revealed that the Alaska governor was a foreign policy featherweight. Was there really no one in McCain's seasoned inner circle to suggest that she learn talking points and how to bob and weave around and away from an interviewer's grilling? Palin's ability to deliver rousing red-meat speeches, both at Wright State University in Ohio and at the GOP National Convention, had convinced McCain's campaign staff that all would come up roses if they just let Sarah be Sarah.
Next to an inexplicably incompetent job of vetting, McCain's people flubbed the preparation process that would be fundamental in running the campaign of the town dogcatcher. That savvy professionals like Schmidt, Wallace and Mark Salter allowed crucial slips through the cracks proliferate beyond damage control is, in a word, inexcusable.
No two campaigns are exactly alike. There are pitfalls around every corner. While it is not always apparent when or where they may occur, the one certainty is that they will. The job of the campaign strategist is to expect them to pop up, be able to respond quickly when they do happen, know the candidate's strengths and deficiencies, know how to emphasize the former and be as thoroughly prepared as possible for the latter. The best possible preparation cannot avoid or retaliate against every potential slip-up, but the bottom line was that the Palin debacle, which many blame for McCain's defeat, was as much the campaign team's fault as it was her own.
None of this, however, should be a distraction from the glaring fact that the process for selecting vice presidential candidates is long overdue for closer examination.
Running mates have been selected less on their ability to serve as president than on how they can help the ticket win. That assistance is generally sought to compensate for an obvious shortcoming at the top of the ticket, which can range from the perception that the vice presidential choice might bring a key state, or even entire regions of the country, into the fold, to filling an experience or ideological gap in the presidential nominee's makeup.
For example, John F. Kennedy, then a Massachusetts senator, selected Texan Lyndon Johnson as much for the probability that the latter could carry his electoral vote-rich home state as for his mastery of the United States Senate. At the other end of the spectrum, George H. W. Bush was perceived to have chosen Indiana Senator Dan Quayle, less for his legislative acumen than to ensure that Bush, a bland and colorless presidential nominee, would not be upstaged by someone more vibrant and colorful.
In McCain's case, there were three decisive factors for choosing Palin: (1) She could deliver hardball rhetoric likely to woo the GOP's conservative base that had not been enamored of McCain's ideological transgressions as a member of Congress;(2) She just might resonate with women who felt Hillary Clinton was the victim of a raw deal by Democratic primary voters who preferred a relatively inexperienced, freshman senator merely because Hillary happens to be a woman, and (3) McCain saw her in his own image as a maverick unafraid to buck the party line when the occasion called for it.
The apparent very last consideration in a national campaign is whether the vice presidential nominee will be able to immediately assume the role of leader of the nation and the free world. The most significant decision the top of the ticket must make is who will be next in line of succession should the unthinkable happen. If "Game Change" should somehow finally lead to a serious re-thinking of this vital question, it will have become a truly unique entity - something unlike anything the realm of art and entertainment has ever before achieved.
###
The HBO presentation of "Game Change" probably will not change the thinking of those who write and produce docu-dramas hereafter, but it should.
In preparation for watching it, I re-read the chapters of the book on which the movie focused. I was impressed by how faithful the film was to the 2008 presidential campaign page-turner by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, among the best of that genre.
The television version is necessarily limited in scope and the behind-the-scenes John McCain-Sarah Palin portion of the Heilemann-Halperin opus was dramatized to near perfection. One critic has correctly noted that the tranformative campaign of four years ago could have become an eminently watchable mini-series. The book covers the runs for the Democratic presidential nomination that year by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as the McCain-Palin saga.
Both Palin and McCain have dismissed the television production without actually viewing it, which can only mean that they were less than thrilled with the book on which it was based. That's too bad because Ed Harris's portrayal of McCain, if anything, enhances the senator's image as a politician who flatly refuses to play mudball politics. And Julianne Moore, in the role of Palin, at times poignantly reveals a side of Palin that would give pause to at least a few entrenched liberal Democrats who see the erstwhile Alaska governor as the personification of everything they detest.
Though no self-respecting progressive watching "Game Change" could be converted to Palin's politics, there might be at least a dollop of empathy for her as a human being going through emotions shared by all of those who have ever confronted a challenge that was simply over their heads.
Palin is revealed in both the book and the movie as a successful Alaska politician who was clearly out of her depth once she was elevated to the national stage. Stephen Schmidt, the senior McCain campaign strategist played by Woody Harrelson, freely admits that the Palin vetting process was shoddy at best. Nicolle Wallace, Palin's "handler" during the campaign, was understandably frustrated and ultimately distraught in feeling that Palin was a detached prima donna.
But both Schmidt and Wallace also seem to be shifting the entire blame, which in reality both shared, to those who checked out Palin and gave her their enthusiastic approval. Though not mentioned in either the book or the movie, the latter included neo-conservative intellectuals William Kristol and Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard, who went up to Juneau to meet Palin personally. My guess is that they came back believing they could easily mold and manipulate her into a spirited advocate for their fatally-flawed foreign policy views. That Kristol and Barnes later turned their spineless backs on the Alaska governor speaks volumes about their paltry principles, something McCain, a congenital hawk, would never have done and indeed did not.
In the end, McCain's feeling completely comfortable with Palin was what led to the decision that ultimately sank any hope at all he had of winning the presidency. Whatever else one might feel about the Arizona senator, there can be no disagreement regarding his unwavering loyalty, which is generally lauded as a commendably courageous trait but can also be a crippling weakness.
Reasonable questions arise as to why, when Palin's insurmountable shortcomings were recognized, she was not cut loose from the ticket. If this was ever suggested to McCain, he almost certainly would have rejected it - not necessarily because of his refusal to admit that he was wrong, but rather because, as a maverick politician as well as a onetime purposeless youth who had himself undergone an incredible transformation, he could identify with her plight in ways his campaign staff could not.
Furthermore, abandoning her might have been even a greater political risk than keeping her on the ticket. There was the case of George McGovern, who as the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, dropped his running mate, Tom Eagleton, in mid-campaign. Eagleton had not revealed to McGovern his long earlier nervous breakdown, and it was the very reason the vetting process became more exhaustive in subsequent national campaigns, at least until 2008. After Eagleton was dumped and replaced by Sargent Shriver, questions arose regarding McGovern's initial judgment in making his vice presidential choice and later about his loyalty when he declined to stand by his running mate. While this may not fully explain why the Democratic national ticket was crushed in that election year, it most certainly did not help.
One need not be a Palin die-hard to wonder why even a marginally competent staff could have been so clueless about the need to take special pains to prepare a state governor with absolutely no foreign policy experience, much less expertise, for a national campaign.
When Schmidt finally presented Palin with 25 talking points and four "attack lines," and reiterated the necessity to pivot away from certain questions, she did well enough. But this was a textbook case of too little, too late. More recently, Mitt Romney clumsily executed such a pivot in a television interview. When the reporter repeated the original query, Romney told the interviewer he was free to ask his questions and he, the candidate, was equally free to respond the way he chose. Rather than finding himself mired in yet another swamp of vilification for that graceless riposte, as Palin doubtless would have been, the incident was all but ignored by the media.
The larger and unresolved question is why Palin was not presented with the talking points to memorize well before her bungled interview with Katie Couric revealed that the Alaska governor was a foreign policy featherweight. Was there really no one in McCain's seasoned inner circle to suggest that she learn talking points and how to bob and weave around and away from an interviewer's grilling? Palin's ability to deliver rousing red-meat speeches, both at Wright State University in Ohio and at the GOP National Convention, had convinced McCain's campaign staff that all would come up roses if they just let Sarah be Sarah.
Next to an inexplicably incompetent job of vetting, McCain's people flubbed the preparation process that would be fundamental in running the campaign of the town dogcatcher. That savvy professionals like Schmidt, Wallace and Mark Salter allowed crucial slips through the cracks proliferate beyond damage control is, in a word, inexcusable.
No two campaigns are exactly alike. There are pitfalls around every corner. While it is not always apparent when or where they may occur, the one certainty is that they will. The job of the campaign strategist is to expect them to pop up, be able to respond quickly when they do happen, know the candidate's strengths and deficiencies, know how to emphasize the former and be as thoroughly prepared as possible for the latter. The best possible preparation cannot avoid or retaliate against every potential slip-up, but the bottom line was that the Palin debacle, which many blame for McCain's defeat, was as much the campaign team's fault as it was her own.
None of this, however, should be a distraction from the glaring fact that the process for selecting vice presidential candidates is long overdue for closer examination.
Running mates have been selected less on their ability to serve as president than on how they can help the ticket win. That assistance is generally sought to compensate for an obvious shortcoming at the top of the ticket, which can range from the perception that the vice presidential choice might bring a key state, or even entire regions of the country, into the fold, to filling an experience or ideological gap in the presidential nominee's makeup.
For example, John F. Kennedy, then a Massachusetts senator, selected Texan Lyndon Johnson as much for the probability that the latter could carry his electoral vote-rich home state as for his mastery of the United States Senate. At the other end of the spectrum, George H. W. Bush was perceived to have chosen Indiana Senator Dan Quayle, less for his legislative acumen than to ensure that Bush, a bland and colorless presidential nominee, would not be upstaged by someone more vibrant and colorful.
In McCain's case, there were three decisive factors for choosing Palin: (1) She could deliver hardball rhetoric likely to woo the GOP's conservative base that had not been enamored of McCain's ideological transgressions as a member of Congress;(2) She just might resonate with women who felt Hillary Clinton was the victim of a raw deal by Democratic primary voters who preferred a relatively inexperienced, freshman senator merely because Hillary happens to be a woman, and (3) McCain saw her in his own image as a maverick unafraid to buck the party line when the occasion called for it.
The apparent very last consideration in a national campaign is whether the vice presidential nominee will be able to immediately assume the role of leader of the nation and the free world. The most significant decision the top of the ticket must make is who will be next in line of succession should the unthinkable happen. If "Game Change" should somehow finally lead to a serious re-thinking of this vital question, it will have become a truly unique entity - something unlike anything the realm of art and entertainment has ever before achieved.
###
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
THE FAULT LINE IN COMMON GROUND
H. N. Burdett
While recent polls show that 82.5 percent of the American public disapprove of the job the United States Congress is doing, one would be hard pressed to find anyone professing to be among the 11.3 percent who approve. The polls do not reveal how the media stands on our representatives in Washington. But the legendary Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen pointed out some seven decades back that Congress-bashing has been a time-honored pastime of the media.
In July 1942, Dirksen read to his colleagues a litany of newspaper and magazine criticism of national lawmakers, including:
(1837) "A more weak, bigoted, persecuting and intolerant set of instruments of malice and every hateful passion, were never assembled in a legislative capacity in any age or any land."
(1873) "We are not certain that it is not possible to make the situation worse and Congress would probably speedily reach that result if that were possible."
(1908) "If God had made Congress, he would not boast of it."
(1942) "It is true that for collective brains, guts, vision and leadership, the Seventy-seventh would stand pretty close to the bottom in any ranking of the seventy-seven Congresses that have assembled...since 1789."
Polarization of the two major U.S. political parties has virtually stagnated the current Congress on virtually every major issue confronting it. National lawmakers' perpetual legislative treadmill has assigned to the realm of limbo priorities ranging from the budget to possible remedies for a swifter recovery from the worst economy since the 1929 stock market crash.
Neither of the two parties is blameless. President Obama turning his back on the report of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (Simpson-Bowles), which he himself had appointed to draw up a blueprint for compromise, must be counted as a major disappointment of his presidency. The report placed on the table entitlements dear to Democrats, as well as taxes that are anathema to Republicans, draining any interest a significant segment of either party had in pursuing it.
Future historians would do well to examine closely the results of two ideology-fueled blunders of the present era: The congressional overturning of the Glass-Steagall Act and the Supreme Court's overruling of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act.
The calculated collapse of Glass-Steagall, which in 1932 legislated a firewall between commercial and investment banks, contributed substantially to the evidence that capitalism - a vital underpinning of American democracy - is unsustainable without reasonable regulations that are actually enforced.
Though Glass-Steagall did not assure foolproof protection against the chicanery of the least scrupulous of Wall Street operatives, for nearly 70 years it at least prevented wholesale conflicts of interest by prohibiting commercial banks from peddling securities - including those that were deceptively risky and others that were blatantly worthless.
Three Republican lawmakers - Senator Phil Gramm of Texas and Representatives Jim Leach of Iowa and Tom Blilely of Virginia - introduced legislation in the Senate and House of Representatives to end Glass-Steagall. This pried the lid from the Wall Street cookie jar and the crumbs could be followed down the path of economic disaster.
Polarization further led to the brazen distortion of the U.S. Constitution by those charged with dispensing justice from the nation's pinnacle of jurisprudence: the Supreme Court.
Conservative Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Anthony Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy voted to overturn McCain-Feingold in the Court's 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case on grounds that the law violated corporations' right of freedom of speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution. Their 5-4 decision opened the door for unlimited sums from undisclosed sources to influence elections.
The cornerstone of Justice John Paul Stevens's 90-age dissent was that the Constitution protects individual rather than corporate rights. For conservatives who had railed long and loud against political activist jurists to deny that their ruling was anything but judicial activism is the very definition of intellectual dishonesty if not outright hypocrisy.
Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, among the few remaining GOP moderates in the U.S. Senate, not only voted for McCain-Feingold, she was also one of the fewer still members of her party to denounce the Court's Citizens United ruling. In her words, the decision was "a great disservice to American democracy."
Sen. Snowe recently announced that she will not seek a fourth term in the Senate. In a Washington Post op-ed explaining her decision, Senator Snowe wrote: "The great challenge is to create a system that gives our elected officials reason to look past their differences and find common ground if their initial party positions fail to garner sufficient support. In a politically diverse nation, only by finding that common ground can we achieve results for the common good. That is not happening today and, frankly, I do not see it happening in the near future."
The 1963 Civil Rights Act, which has been characterized as the completion of the "second American Revolution," was dependent upon the earlier mentioned Senator Dirksen rallying sufficient Republican votes to ensure its passage. Were that same decision left up to the present U.S. Congress, that landmark legislation would languish in the desert of irresponsible inaction. Inability by the major political parties to locate common ground is without doubt the greatest and continuing threat to American democracy.
###
C
o
While recent polls show that 82.5 percent of the American public disapprove of the job the United States Congress is doing, one would be hard pressed to find anyone professing to be among the 11.3 percent who approve. The polls do not reveal how the media stands on our representatives in Washington. But the legendary Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen pointed out some seven decades back that Congress-bashing has been a time-honored pastime of the media.
In July 1942, Dirksen read to his colleagues a litany of newspaper and magazine criticism of national lawmakers, including:
(1837) "A more weak, bigoted, persecuting and intolerant set of instruments of malice and every hateful passion, were never assembled in a legislative capacity in any age or any land."
(1873) "We are not certain that it is not possible to make the situation worse and Congress would probably speedily reach that result if that were possible."
(1908) "If God had made Congress, he would not boast of it."
(1942) "It is true that for collective brains, guts, vision and leadership, the Seventy-seventh would stand pretty close to the bottom in any ranking of the seventy-seven Congresses that have assembled...since 1789."
Polarization of the two major U.S. political parties has virtually stagnated the current Congress on virtually every major issue confronting it. National lawmakers' perpetual legislative treadmill has assigned to the realm of limbo priorities ranging from the budget to possible remedies for a swifter recovery from the worst economy since the 1929 stock market crash.
Neither of the two parties is blameless. President Obama turning his back on the report of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (Simpson-Bowles), which he himself had appointed to draw up a blueprint for compromise, must be counted as a major disappointment of his presidency. The report placed on the table entitlements dear to Democrats, as well as taxes that are anathema to Republicans, draining any interest a significant segment of either party had in pursuing it.
Future historians would do well to examine closely the results of two ideology-fueled blunders of the present era: The congressional overturning of the Glass-Steagall Act and the Supreme Court's overruling of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act.
The calculated collapse of Glass-Steagall, which in 1932 legislated a firewall between commercial and investment banks, contributed substantially to the evidence that capitalism - a vital underpinning of American democracy - is unsustainable without reasonable regulations that are actually enforced.
Though Glass-Steagall did not assure foolproof protection against the chicanery of the least scrupulous of Wall Street operatives, for nearly 70 years it at least prevented wholesale conflicts of interest by prohibiting commercial banks from peddling securities - including those that were deceptively risky and others that were blatantly worthless.
Three Republican lawmakers - Senator Phil Gramm of Texas and Representatives Jim Leach of Iowa and Tom Blilely of Virginia - introduced legislation in the Senate and House of Representatives to end Glass-Steagall. This pried the lid from the Wall Street cookie jar and the crumbs could be followed down the path of economic disaster.
Polarization further led to the brazen distortion of the U.S. Constitution by those charged with dispensing justice from the nation's pinnacle of jurisprudence: the Supreme Court.
Conservative Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Anthony Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy voted to overturn McCain-Feingold in the Court's 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case on grounds that the law violated corporations' right of freedom of speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution. Their 5-4 decision opened the door for unlimited sums from undisclosed sources to influence elections.
The cornerstone of Justice John Paul Stevens's 90-age dissent was that the Constitution protects individual rather than corporate rights. For conservatives who had railed long and loud against political activist jurists to deny that their ruling was anything but judicial activism is the very definition of intellectual dishonesty if not outright hypocrisy.
Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, among the few remaining GOP moderates in the U.S. Senate, not only voted for McCain-Feingold, she was also one of the fewer still members of her party to denounce the Court's Citizens United ruling. In her words, the decision was "a great disservice to American democracy."
Sen. Snowe recently announced that she will not seek a fourth term in the Senate. In a Washington Post op-ed explaining her decision, Senator Snowe wrote: "The great challenge is to create a system that gives our elected officials reason to look past their differences and find common ground if their initial party positions fail to garner sufficient support. In a politically diverse nation, only by finding that common ground can we achieve results for the common good. That is not happening today and, frankly, I do not see it happening in the near future."
The 1963 Civil Rights Act, which has been characterized as the completion of the "second American Revolution," was dependent upon the earlier mentioned Senator Dirksen rallying sufficient Republican votes to ensure its passage. Were that same decision left up to the present U.S. Congress, that landmark legislation would languish in the desert of irresponsible inaction. Inability by the major political parties to locate common ground is without doubt the greatest and continuing threat to American democracy.
###
C
o
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Corporate Political Access and Free Speech
H. N. Burdett
"A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold," wrote Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens in his 90-page dissent from the court's 5-4 decision in the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission case. That ruling swung open the door for super political action committees to pour unlimited funds from undisclosed sources into election campaigns.
Citing data to reveal that 80% of the American public feel unfair legislative access is what corporations receive in return for generously contributing to a candidate's campaign war chest, Justice Stevens predicted that corporate domination of elections would lead to disaffected voters ceasing to participate in elections.
Stevens challenged the contention of the court's conservative majority, which voted solidly in favor of Citizens United, that restricting corporate spending on political campaigns was a denial of free speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution. He argued that the First Amendment protects individual self-expression, self-realization and the communication of ideas and that corporations are not entitled to the same constitutional protections as individuals.
Stevens concluded that the court's majority opinion was "a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government. . .and have fought the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. . .While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of the Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."
Along with a number of Democrats, Republican Senators John McCain and Olympia Snowe spoke out against the Citizens United ruling. McCain predicted "a backlash. . .when you see the amounts of union and corporate money that's going into political campaigns." Senator Snowe characterized the Court's decision as a "serious disservice to our country."
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who placed third in the last three presidential elections, said, "With this decision, corporations can now directly pour vast amounts of cororate money, through independent expenditures, into the electoral swamp already flooded with corporate campaign PAC contribution dollars."
Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and columnist George Will, staunchly defend Citizens United, arguably the worst Supreme Court decision since the 1857 Dred Scott ruling which upheld the abominable argument equating human beings with property. Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, has introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.
Two years ago, the DISCLOSE act was introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland, and in the Senate by Charles Schumer, D-New York. The legislation would not have overturned Citizens United. But it would have required transparency, including timely disclosure of funds corporations donate to super PACS that spend money on campaign advertisements. It further required lobbyists to disclose campaign expenditures to contributing corporations' shareholders. The measure would have forced super PACS to reveal their five largest donors in each political ad and further compel heads of these groups to approve an ad's message at the end of each ad. This would have at least identified corporations and organizations with at least 500,000 members that were exercising their dubious freedom of speech right by seeking to buy elections.
The initial DISCLOSE act of 2010 was approved in the House of Representatives by a 219-206 vote. Only two Republicans - Mike Castle of Delaware and Joseph Cao of Louisiana - voted for it. Neither is still in Congress. The bill failed in the Senate by a single vote. All 59 Democratic senators voted in favor of the measure, but no Republicans offered support.
Rep. Van Hollen re-introduced the bill earlier this year, stating: "We need to restore accountability in our elections. The American people have a right to know the source of the money that is being spent to influence the outcome of our elections. They should be told who is behind the millions of dollars in campaign ads and they should receive this information in a timely fashion."
Citizens United gives labor unions, which traditionally support Democratic candidates, the same First Amendment right as corporations, which historically back Republican candidates. Why then is the Republican National Committee pursuing its current state-by-state union-busting campaigns? Which, of course, has nothing to do with the unions' empowerment under Citizens United, right?
That odor one detects emanating from the conservative establishment's rabid support of the Supreme Court's cynical Citizens United decision is the stench of the defense of political corruption once an opening to advantageously tilt the playing field is recognized.
###
"A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold," wrote Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens in his 90-page dissent from the court's 5-4 decision in the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission case. That ruling swung open the door for super political action committees to pour unlimited funds from undisclosed sources into election campaigns.
Citing data to reveal that 80% of the American public feel unfair legislative access is what corporations receive in return for generously contributing to a candidate's campaign war chest, Justice Stevens predicted that corporate domination of elections would lead to disaffected voters ceasing to participate in elections.
Stevens challenged the contention of the court's conservative majority, which voted solidly in favor of Citizens United, that restricting corporate spending on political campaigns was a denial of free speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution. He argued that the First Amendment protects individual self-expression, self-realization and the communication of ideas and that corporations are not entitled to the same constitutional protections as individuals.
Stevens concluded that the court's majority opinion was "a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government. . .and have fought the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. . .While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of the Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."
Along with a number of Democrats, Republican Senators John McCain and Olympia Snowe spoke out against the Citizens United ruling. McCain predicted "a backlash. . .when you see the amounts of union and corporate money that's going into political campaigns." Senator Snowe characterized the Court's decision as a "serious disservice to our country."
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who placed third in the last three presidential elections, said, "With this decision, corporations can now directly pour vast amounts of cororate money, through independent expenditures, into the electoral swamp already flooded with corporate campaign PAC contribution dollars."
Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and columnist George Will, staunchly defend Citizens United, arguably the worst Supreme Court decision since the 1857 Dred Scott ruling which upheld the abominable argument equating human beings with property. Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, has introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.
Two years ago, the DISCLOSE act was introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland, and in the Senate by Charles Schumer, D-New York. The legislation would not have overturned Citizens United. But it would have required transparency, including timely disclosure of funds corporations donate to super PACS that spend money on campaign advertisements. It further required lobbyists to disclose campaign expenditures to contributing corporations' shareholders. The measure would have forced super PACS to reveal their five largest donors in each political ad and further compel heads of these groups to approve an ad's message at the end of each ad. This would have at least identified corporations and organizations with at least 500,000 members that were exercising their dubious freedom of speech right by seeking to buy elections.
The initial DISCLOSE act of 2010 was approved in the House of Representatives by a 219-206 vote. Only two Republicans - Mike Castle of Delaware and Joseph Cao of Louisiana - voted for it. Neither is still in Congress. The bill failed in the Senate by a single vote. All 59 Democratic senators voted in favor of the measure, but no Republicans offered support.
Rep. Van Hollen re-introduced the bill earlier this year, stating: "We need to restore accountability in our elections. The American people have a right to know the source of the money that is being spent to influence the outcome of our elections. They should be told who is behind the millions of dollars in campaign ads and they should receive this information in a timely fashion."
Citizens United gives labor unions, which traditionally support Democratic candidates, the same First Amendment right as corporations, which historically back Republican candidates. Why then is the Republican National Committee pursuing its current state-by-state union-busting campaigns? Which, of course, has nothing to do with the unions' empowerment under Citizens United, right?
That odor one detects emanating from the conservative establishment's rabid support of the Supreme Court's cynical Citizens United decision is the stench of the defense of political corruption once an opening to advantageously tilt the playing field is recognized.
###
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Crunching the GOP's Nomination Numbers
H. N. BURDETT
Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted. Albert Einstein's maxim certainly applies to the Byzantine thicket of primaries and caucuses that comprise the current Republican presidential nominating process.
At the end of the day, the actual number of states won by a candidate is inconsequential compared with the total of delegates within the state a candidate can manage to scoop up. In some states, the prize for winning the most votes is all of its delegates. In other states, delegates are divided in proportion to the votes garnered by the individual contenders. Some caucuses and primaries are closed to only Republicans; others are open, allowing for malicious mischief by Democrats and independents with absolutely no intention of voting for the GOP candidate in the November presidential election.
Four years ago in the Iowa Democratic caucuses, freshman Illinois Senator Barack Obama upset the far better known and financed Hillary Clinton. Ballistic over the fact that his wife's campaign had poured $29 million into Iowa for a mere 70,000 votes, Bill Clinton was convinced that the Obama campaign had rigged the outcome by importing supporters from Illinois. The Clinton strategy had depended on a low turnout. But 239,000 caucus voters participated, almost twice as many as four years earlier.
With 1,144 delegates required to secure the nomination and after 20 debates, Mitt Romney now leads the remaining field of four with a scant 105 delegates, followed by Rick Santorum (71), Newt Gingrich (29), and Ron Paul (18). Even should Romney sweep the table, winning all the delegates in both Michigan and Arizona on Tuesday, he would have a cumulative total of only 164. There is some conjecture that Romney could win the popular vote in Michigan and still be left with fewer delegates there than Santorum.
If front-runner Romney were able to win every single delegate up for grabs through March 6 Super Tuesday when 10 states hold primaries or caucuses - mathematically possible but astronomically improbable - he would still fall 502 delegates short of clinching the nomination.
Thus Super Tuesday is less likely to be the defining moment for the eventual GOP presidential candidate than two perhaps critical Tuesdays in April. Among the four states voting on April 3 is Texas, which alone has 155 delegates. On April 24, New York's 95 delegates and Pennsylvania's 72 will be determined along with those of three other states with a total of 64 delegates. And the labyrinthian minefield to the nomination could continue even through June 5, when California, with 172 delegates, and New Jersey, with 50, are among the five states voting.
Still, when asked about chances that the GOP nominee will be ultimately decided by powerbrokers at the party's August 27-30 national convention in Tampa, no less an authority than Karl Rove, the contemporary incarnation of Machiavelli, opined that this was as about as likely as discovering life on Pluto, the outermost planet of the solar system.
Meanwhile, Barack (No Drama) Obama's campaign builds its war chest, speculating on whom it will be used in November. The curtain remains tightly drawn on the GOP's final act in this theater of the absurd season. If money and organization retain their traditional significance, when it is lifted Romney will be standing atop the scrap heap into which the Republican party, with its irreparably collapsed center, has fallen.
Whenever the footlights illuminate the GOP nominee, today's odds remain where they were at the beginning: On former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney to be the party's standard-bearer. As the farce has unfolded, each of the hopefuls - remember Cain, Bachmann, Huntsman and Perry? - have been tested and found to be untrustworthy or merely unworthy.
Should the script play out, the Republican party will strive to coalesce around Romney, a candidate more comfortable in corporate boardrooms than on campaign rostrums where he tends to spout nonsense about the height of trees and his preference for bankruptcy over bailouts, then in a less than grand finale croaks a few bars of "America The Beautiful." All crudely crafted smoke and mirrors to distract the party faithful from the former one-term Bay State governor's flipflops on virtually every Republican core issue. It is as though Romney has taken his cue from Groucho's memorable quip: "Those are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others."
More than a few Republicans will be reduced to daydreaming that the underdog they are stuck with will be strapped to the top of one of his wife's two Cadillacs and sped into the sunset. Only then would Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels or some other reluctant savior emerge from the GOP ashes, quixotically clutch the party's shredded banner, and march valiantly into the autumn of his discontent.
###
Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted. Albert Einstein's maxim certainly applies to the Byzantine thicket of primaries and caucuses that comprise the current Republican presidential nominating process.
At the end of the day, the actual number of states won by a candidate is inconsequential compared with the total of delegates within the state a candidate can manage to scoop up. In some states, the prize for winning the most votes is all of its delegates. In other states, delegates are divided in proportion to the votes garnered by the individual contenders. Some caucuses and primaries are closed to only Republicans; others are open, allowing for malicious mischief by Democrats and independents with absolutely no intention of voting for the GOP candidate in the November presidential election.
Four years ago in the Iowa Democratic caucuses, freshman Illinois Senator Barack Obama upset the far better known and financed Hillary Clinton. Ballistic over the fact that his wife's campaign had poured $29 million into Iowa for a mere 70,000 votes, Bill Clinton was convinced that the Obama campaign had rigged the outcome by importing supporters from Illinois. The Clinton strategy had depended on a low turnout. But 239,000 caucus voters participated, almost twice as many as four years earlier.
With 1,144 delegates required to secure the nomination and after 20 debates, Mitt Romney now leads the remaining field of four with a scant 105 delegates, followed by Rick Santorum (71), Newt Gingrich (29), and Ron Paul (18). Even should Romney sweep the table, winning all the delegates in both Michigan and Arizona on Tuesday, he would have a cumulative total of only 164. There is some conjecture that Romney could win the popular vote in Michigan and still be left with fewer delegates there than Santorum.
If front-runner Romney were able to win every single delegate up for grabs through March 6 Super Tuesday when 10 states hold primaries or caucuses - mathematically possible but astronomically improbable - he would still fall 502 delegates short of clinching the nomination.
Thus Super Tuesday is less likely to be the defining moment for the eventual GOP presidential candidate than two perhaps critical Tuesdays in April. Among the four states voting on April 3 is Texas, which alone has 155 delegates. On April 24, New York's 95 delegates and Pennsylvania's 72 will be determined along with those of three other states with a total of 64 delegates. And the labyrinthian minefield to the nomination could continue even through June 5, when California, with 172 delegates, and New Jersey, with 50, are among the five states voting.
Still, when asked about chances that the GOP nominee will be ultimately decided by powerbrokers at the party's August 27-30 national convention in Tampa, no less an authority than Karl Rove, the contemporary incarnation of Machiavelli, opined that this was as about as likely as discovering life on Pluto, the outermost planet of the solar system.
Meanwhile, Barack (No Drama) Obama's campaign builds its war chest, speculating on whom it will be used in November. The curtain remains tightly drawn on the GOP's final act in this theater of the absurd season. If money and organization retain their traditional significance, when it is lifted Romney will be standing atop the scrap heap into which the Republican party, with its irreparably collapsed center, has fallen.
Whenever the footlights illuminate the GOP nominee, today's odds remain where they were at the beginning: On former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney to be the party's standard-bearer. As the farce has unfolded, each of the hopefuls - remember Cain, Bachmann, Huntsman and Perry? - have been tested and found to be untrustworthy or merely unworthy.
Should the script play out, the Republican party will strive to coalesce around Romney, a candidate more comfortable in corporate boardrooms than on campaign rostrums where he tends to spout nonsense about the height of trees and his preference for bankruptcy over bailouts, then in a less than grand finale croaks a few bars of "America The Beautiful." All crudely crafted smoke and mirrors to distract the party faithful from the former one-term Bay State governor's flipflops on virtually every Republican core issue. It is as though Romney has taken his cue from Groucho's memorable quip: "Those are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others."
More than a few Republicans will be reduced to daydreaming that the underdog they are stuck with will be strapped to the top of one of his wife's two Cadillacs and sped into the sunset. Only then would Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels or some other reluctant savior emerge from the GOP ashes, quixotically clutch the party's shredded banner, and march valiantly into the autumn of his discontent.
###
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Campaign 2012: Election or Auction?
By H. N. Burdett
The rationale for President Obama's recently announced acceptance of political action committee funds to grease the skids for his re-election bid is all too understandable. That it fails the sniff test is regrettable. That it almost certainly further prolongs the restoration of any semblance of decency to political campaign financing is deplorable.
"With so much at stake," Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina said in his announcement of the sell-out to special interests, "we can't allow for two sets of rules in this election whereby the Republican nominee is the beneficiary of unlimited spending and Democrats unilaterally disarm."
In his 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama lambasted the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision - one that is among the more abominable in American judiciary annals - as a ruling that "reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests...to spend without limits in our elections." The president added that he did not feel "elections should be bankrolled by...special interests."
Bill Burton, a co-founder of Priorities USA, a super PAC supporting Obama, asserted, "We're committed to providing a balance to Karl Rove and the Koch brothers, who have pledged more than half a billion dollars to their effort (to defeat Obama)."
Ironically, on the day after the Obama campaign capitulated to fighting-fire-with-fire mentality, Rick Santorum's pitifully under-funded drive to win the Republican presidential nomination made a laughingstock of the well-oiled, all-but-inevitable effort of Mitt Romney to be so anointed by whipping the front-runner in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota.
In the great game of politics, pragmatism regularly trumps principle. But the line between pragmatism and cynicism is blurred at best. The cynicism of the American electorate at least partially explains the abysmal turnouts at U.S. elections, whereas at this very moment throughout the world men and women defy bullets and bayonets to replace despotic tyrants with their own voices in free elections.
Former Wisconsin Democratic U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, co-author of the campaign finance reform law that the Supreme Court's conservative majority shredded in its Citizens United ruling, characterized the Obama campaign green light to special interests as "dancing with the devil."
Feingold said that this "dumb approach...guts the president's message and the Democratic party's message...people will see this as phony, that Democrats start playing by Republican rules. People will see us as weak and not being a true alternative and just being the same as the other guy."
Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause, issued a statement asserting, "If President Obama had fixed presidential public financing, as he pledged to do in 2008, and seriously gone to bat for more transparency in campaign spending, our political system would be healthier and this would be less of an issue."
Though Edgar said that super PACs would not be abolished by strengthening the presidential campaign financial system, he claimed that "by helping presidential candidates run competitive campaigns from a base of small donors and matching public funds, we would have made it possible for candidates, including the president, to make good on their stated desire to succeed without the aid of super PACS."
The president's determination to outspend which ever opponent the Republican party finally settles upon was announced only three days prior to a report that in 2011 he was outpacing his record-setting contributions four years ago from donors of an aggregated $200 or less.
In 2008, 22 percent of Obama's $96.7 million war chest was pulled from small donations. But lower-end donors contributed 48 percent of the $56.7 million he raised in 2011, according to the Campaign Finance Institute, which tracks money in politics.
The CFI reports that contributors of $200 or less accounted for a mere 9 percent of the $56.3 million Mitt Romney's campaign raised last year. Two-thirds of the Romney contributions came from donors of $2,500, the maximum allowed by an individual to a candidate under Federal Election Commission rules. By comparison with other contenders for the GOP presidential nomination, small contributions made up 49 percent of the funds raised by Newt Gingrich, 48 percent of those raised by Ron Paul and 32 percent by Rick Santorum in 2011.
The Obama campaign decision to take advantage of the Citizen United ruling's "floodgates" of unlimited funds from undisclosed sources contributing to super PACs that support the president will reveal the most admired nation in the world as, at its very core, the moral equivalent of a banana republic.
President Obama's only saving grace is that his misguided submission to playing by rules that thoroughly distort democracy is that he has no viable opponent with the courage to stand up to forces relentlessly seeking the best chief executive money can buy leading a government of, by and for the wealthy.
There must be a redoubling of efforts to seal the coffin of the Citizens United travesty. Small donors truly concerned about their sacred trust and the sanctity of the ballot box who had intended to contribute to the Obama campaign might be better advised to send their checks instead to organizations in the trenches of the battle for campaign finance reform, like Common Cause, Progressives United and Public Citizen. Let the Big Boys duke this one out, while the rest of us dedicate ourselves to ensuring that November will see the very last U.S. presidential auction.
###
The rationale for President Obama's recently announced acceptance of political action committee funds to grease the skids for his re-election bid is all too understandable. That it fails the sniff test is regrettable. That it almost certainly further prolongs the restoration of any semblance of decency to political campaign financing is deplorable.
"With so much at stake," Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina said in his announcement of the sell-out to special interests, "we can't allow for two sets of rules in this election whereby the Republican nominee is the beneficiary of unlimited spending and Democrats unilaterally disarm."
In his 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama lambasted the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision - one that is among the more abominable in American judiciary annals - as a ruling that "reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests...to spend without limits in our elections." The president added that he did not feel "elections should be bankrolled by...special interests."
Bill Burton, a co-founder of Priorities USA, a super PAC supporting Obama, asserted, "We're committed to providing a balance to Karl Rove and the Koch brothers, who have pledged more than half a billion dollars to their effort (to defeat Obama)."
Ironically, on the day after the Obama campaign capitulated to fighting-fire-with-fire mentality, Rick Santorum's pitifully under-funded drive to win the Republican presidential nomination made a laughingstock of the well-oiled, all-but-inevitable effort of Mitt Romney to be so anointed by whipping the front-runner in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota.
In the great game of politics, pragmatism regularly trumps principle. But the line between pragmatism and cynicism is blurred at best. The cynicism of the American electorate at least partially explains the abysmal turnouts at U.S. elections, whereas at this very moment throughout the world men and women defy bullets and bayonets to replace despotic tyrants with their own voices in free elections.
Former Wisconsin Democratic U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, co-author of the campaign finance reform law that the Supreme Court's conservative majority shredded in its Citizens United ruling, characterized the Obama campaign green light to special interests as "dancing with the devil."
Feingold said that this "dumb approach...guts the president's message and the Democratic party's message...people will see this as phony, that Democrats start playing by Republican rules. People will see us as weak and not being a true alternative and just being the same as the other guy."
Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause, issued a statement asserting, "If President Obama had fixed presidential public financing, as he pledged to do in 2008, and seriously gone to bat for more transparency in campaign spending, our political system would be healthier and this would be less of an issue."
Though Edgar said that super PACs would not be abolished by strengthening the presidential campaign financial system, he claimed that "by helping presidential candidates run competitive campaigns from a base of small donors and matching public funds, we would have made it possible for candidates, including the president, to make good on their stated desire to succeed without the aid of super PACS."
The president's determination to outspend which ever opponent the Republican party finally settles upon was announced only three days prior to a report that in 2011 he was outpacing his record-setting contributions four years ago from donors of an aggregated $200 or less.
In 2008, 22 percent of Obama's $96.7 million war chest was pulled from small donations. But lower-end donors contributed 48 percent of the $56.7 million he raised in 2011, according to the Campaign Finance Institute, which tracks money in politics.
The CFI reports that contributors of $200 or less accounted for a mere 9 percent of the $56.3 million Mitt Romney's campaign raised last year. Two-thirds of the Romney contributions came from donors of $2,500, the maximum allowed by an individual to a candidate under Federal Election Commission rules. By comparison with other contenders for the GOP presidential nomination, small contributions made up 49 percent of the funds raised by Newt Gingrich, 48 percent of those raised by Ron Paul and 32 percent by Rick Santorum in 2011.
The Obama campaign decision to take advantage of the Citizen United ruling's "floodgates" of unlimited funds from undisclosed sources contributing to super PACs that support the president will reveal the most admired nation in the world as, at its very core, the moral equivalent of a banana republic.
President Obama's only saving grace is that his misguided submission to playing by rules that thoroughly distort democracy is that he has no viable opponent with the courage to stand up to forces relentlessly seeking the best chief executive money can buy leading a government of, by and for the wealthy.
There must be a redoubling of efforts to seal the coffin of the Citizens United travesty. Small donors truly concerned about their sacred trust and the sanctity of the ballot box who had intended to contribute to the Obama campaign might be better advised to send their checks instead to organizations in the trenches of the battle for campaign finance reform, like Common Cause, Progressives United and Public Citizen. Let the Big Boys duke this one out, while the rest of us dedicate ourselves to ensuring that November will see the very last U.S. presidential auction.
###
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
THE DEMONIZATION OF SAUL ALINSKY
H. N. Burdett
Nearly as often as Newt Gingrich boasts of his actual or imagined role as Ronald Reagan's consigliere, the Republican presidential hopeful invokes Saul D. Alinsky as the embodiment of all evil.
On the night he won the South Carolina primary, Gingrich asserted, "The founding fathers of America are the source from which we draw our understanding of America. [Obama] draws his from Saul Alinsky, left-wingers and people who don't like classical America." He went on to claim: "The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky."
Appearing the next morning on NBC's Meet the Press, Gingrich told host David Gregory: "Nobody's ever gone back and looked at what Saul Alinsky stands for. Nobody ever asks what 'neighborhood organizer' meant. [Obama] wasn't organizing boys and girls clubs. He was teaching political radicalism. It explains his entire administration...the objective fact is he believes in a very radical vision of America's future that is fundamentally different from probably 80 per cent of this country."
\
Appearing on CNN's State of the Union, Gingrich added: "The values that [Obama] believes in - the Saul Alinsky radical values that are at the heart of Obama - are a disaster."
Anyone Newt Gingrich, the unregistered lobbyist and only Speaker of the House of Representatives to be found guilty of ethics violations by his congressional colleagues, chooses to demonize is indeed worthy of deeper scrutiny. And that closer look reveals that Alinsky was without doubt radical - but in the same spirit that Thomas Paine, Samuel Adams and Frederick Douglass were radical.
In the 1930s Alinsky was a labor organizer for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). In the 1950s he turned his skills to organizing African American ghettos of Chicago, eventually extending them to Michigan, New York, California and a dozen other trouble spots around the country.
Asked in an interview about the reasoning behind his decision to organize black communities, Alinsky responded, "Negroes were being lynched regularly in the South as the first stirrings of black opposition began to be felt, and many of the white civil rights organizers and labor agitators who had started to work with them were tarred, feathered, castrated - or killed. Most Southern Democrat politicians were members of the Ku Klux Klan and had no compunction about boasting of it."
William F. Buckley, the father of modern American conservatism, said Alinsky was "very close to being an organizational genius." Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, who was twice the Democratic presidential nominee, said Alinsky's aims "most faithfully reflect our ideals of brotherhood, tolerance, charity and the dignity of the individual." Time magazine said that "American democracy is being altered by Alinsky's ideas."
When asked in an interview whether he ever considered joining the Communist party, Alinsky replied: "Not at any time. I've never joined any organization, not even ones I've organized myself. I prize my independence too much. And philosphically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism...if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide."
Among the more intriguing rules for radicals Alinsky espoused was that "the threat is often more effective than the tactic itself, but only if you are so organized that the establishment knows not only that you have the power to execute the tactic but that you definitely will. You can't do much bluffing in this game; if you're ever caught bluffing, forget about ever using threats in the future..."
Alinsky cited the example of a department store that hired blacks only for menial jobs. The store attracted customers on the basis of its labels as well as the quality of its merchandise. Economic boycotts had failed to deter even the black middle class from shopping there. Alinsky came up with a tactic whereby on a busy Saturday shopping date, some 3,000 blacks dressed in "their best churchgoing suits and dresses would be bused downtown."
"When you put 3,000 blacks on the main floor of a store," Alinsky wrote in his book, Rules for Radicals, "even one that covers a square block, suddenly the entire color of the store changes. Any white coming through the revolving doors would take one pop-eyed look and assume that somehow he had stepped into Africa. He would keep right on going out of the store. This would end the white trade for the day.
"For a low-income group, shopping is a time-consuming experience, for economy means everything. This would mean that every counter would be occupied by potential customers, carefully examining the quality of merchandise and asking, say, at the shirt counter, about the material, color, style, cuffs, collars and price. As the group occupying the clerk's attention around the shirt counters moved to the underwear section, those at the underwear section would replace them at the shirt counter, and the personnel of the store would be constantly occupied...It is legal. There is no sit-in or unlawful occupation of the premises. Some thousands of people are in the store 'shopping.' The police are powerless and you are operating within the law.
"This operation would go on until an hour before closing time when the group would begin purchasing everything in sight to be delivered C.O.D.! This would tie up truck-delivery service for at least two days - with obvious further heavy financial costs, since all the merchandise would be refused at the time of delivery."
The threat of the tactic was "leaked" to the department store. The next day Alinsky's group received a call from the store "for a meeting to discuss new personnel policies and an urgent request that the meeting take place within the next two or three days, certainly before Saturday!"
Indeed the personnel policies of the store were changed: 186 new jobs were opened and for the first time, blacks were hired for the sales floor and placed in executive training.
In his repeated denunciations of Alinsky's "radical values," Newt Gingrich insinuates that this legendary hell-raiser was a Marxist. A valid enough characterization. Alinsky vigorously and eloquently denied that he ever supported the ideology of Karl Marx, but there is no escaping the fact of his appreciation for Groucho, Chico and Harpo.
###
Nearly as often as Newt Gingrich boasts of his actual or imagined role as Ronald Reagan's consigliere, the Republican presidential hopeful invokes Saul D. Alinsky as the embodiment of all evil.
On the night he won the South Carolina primary, Gingrich asserted, "The founding fathers of America are the source from which we draw our understanding of America. [Obama] draws his from Saul Alinsky, left-wingers and people who don't like classical America." He went on to claim: "The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky."
Appearing the next morning on NBC's Meet the Press, Gingrich told host David Gregory: "Nobody's ever gone back and looked at what Saul Alinsky stands for. Nobody ever asks what 'neighborhood organizer' meant. [Obama] wasn't organizing boys and girls clubs. He was teaching political radicalism. It explains his entire administration...the objective fact is he believes in a very radical vision of America's future that is fundamentally different from probably 80 per cent of this country."
\
Appearing on CNN's State of the Union, Gingrich added: "The values that [Obama] believes in - the Saul Alinsky radical values that are at the heart of Obama - are a disaster."
Anyone Newt Gingrich, the unregistered lobbyist and only Speaker of the House of Representatives to be found guilty of ethics violations by his congressional colleagues, chooses to demonize is indeed worthy of deeper scrutiny. And that closer look reveals that Alinsky was without doubt radical - but in the same spirit that Thomas Paine, Samuel Adams and Frederick Douglass were radical.
In the 1930s Alinsky was a labor organizer for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). In the 1950s he turned his skills to organizing African American ghettos of Chicago, eventually extending them to Michigan, New York, California and a dozen other trouble spots around the country.
Asked in an interview about the reasoning behind his decision to organize black communities, Alinsky responded, "Negroes were being lynched regularly in the South as the first stirrings of black opposition began to be felt, and many of the white civil rights organizers and labor agitators who had started to work with them were tarred, feathered, castrated - or killed. Most Southern Democrat politicians were members of the Ku Klux Klan and had no compunction about boasting of it."
William F. Buckley, the father of modern American conservatism, said Alinsky was "very close to being an organizational genius." Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, who was twice the Democratic presidential nominee, said Alinsky's aims "most faithfully reflect our ideals of brotherhood, tolerance, charity and the dignity of the individual." Time magazine said that "American democracy is being altered by Alinsky's ideas."
When asked in an interview whether he ever considered joining the Communist party, Alinsky replied: "Not at any time. I've never joined any organization, not even ones I've organized myself. I prize my independence too much. And philosphically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism...if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide."
Among the more intriguing rules for radicals Alinsky espoused was that "the threat is often more effective than the tactic itself, but only if you are so organized that the establishment knows not only that you have the power to execute the tactic but that you definitely will. You can't do much bluffing in this game; if you're ever caught bluffing, forget about ever using threats in the future..."
Alinsky cited the example of a department store that hired blacks only for menial jobs. The store attracted customers on the basis of its labels as well as the quality of its merchandise. Economic boycotts had failed to deter even the black middle class from shopping there. Alinsky came up with a tactic whereby on a busy Saturday shopping date, some 3,000 blacks dressed in "their best churchgoing suits and dresses would be bused downtown."
"When you put 3,000 blacks on the main floor of a store," Alinsky wrote in his book, Rules for Radicals, "even one that covers a square block, suddenly the entire color of the store changes. Any white coming through the revolving doors would take one pop-eyed look and assume that somehow he had stepped into Africa. He would keep right on going out of the store. This would end the white trade for the day.
"For a low-income group, shopping is a time-consuming experience, for economy means everything. This would mean that every counter would be occupied by potential customers, carefully examining the quality of merchandise and asking, say, at the shirt counter, about the material, color, style, cuffs, collars and price. As the group occupying the clerk's attention around the shirt counters moved to the underwear section, those at the underwear section would replace them at the shirt counter, and the personnel of the store would be constantly occupied...It is legal. There is no sit-in or unlawful occupation of the premises. Some thousands of people are in the store 'shopping.' The police are powerless and you are operating within the law.
"This operation would go on until an hour before closing time when the group would begin purchasing everything in sight to be delivered C.O.D.! This would tie up truck-delivery service for at least two days - with obvious further heavy financial costs, since all the merchandise would be refused at the time of delivery."
The threat of the tactic was "leaked" to the department store. The next day Alinsky's group received a call from the store "for a meeting to discuss new personnel policies and an urgent request that the meeting take place within the next two or three days, certainly before Saturday!"
Indeed the personnel policies of the store were changed: 186 new jobs were opened and for the first time, blacks were hired for the sales floor and placed in executive training.
In his repeated denunciations of Alinsky's "radical values," Newt Gingrich insinuates that this legendary hell-raiser was a Marxist. A valid enough characterization. Alinsky vigorously and eloquently denied that he ever supported the ideology of Karl Marx, but there is no escaping the fact of his appreciation for Groucho, Chico and Harpo.
###
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
ROMNEY'S CATBIRD SEAT HEATS UP
By H. N. Burdett
More than 50 years back, University of Maryland sprinter Dennis Abdalla was running the 100-yard dash of his life. He was clearly in the lead and streaking toward the finish line. But something was wrong. Duke University's Dave Sime, then the fastest man in America if not the world, was in the race. "I glanced over my left shoulder to see where Dave was," Abdalla later told me. "And he passed me on my right." Abdalla's time of 9.9 seconds was the best of his collegiate career. Sime's time of 9.7 seconds was, for him, just another day on the cinder path.
That long ago race comes to mind as Republican presidential nomination front-runner Mitt Romney desperately strives to nail down the 2012 blessing of his party. The hitch is that rank-and-file conservative Republicans do not trust him. And for good reason.
While seeking to unseat Massachusetts U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy, Romney ran to the left of the Liberal Lion of the Senate. While serving as Governor of the Bay State, Romney became identified with the health care reform program on which so-called "Obama-care" was patterned.
Moreover, Romney's trust level is plunging even among what remains of the moderate contingent within GOP ranks - 25 per cent or less of that shrinking entity, judging from the combined poll numbers registered thus far by Romney and former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman. Huntsman is the only hopeful for the Republican nomination on record as believing, unlike the conservative majority on the United States Supreme Court, that "of course, corporations are not people."
Romney's tightly scripted, expensively organized campaign has until recent days kept him above the serial firing squad that the interminable debates between the Republican presidential aspirants have become.
The former governor of Massachusetts, arguably the most liberal state in the union, has had a nightmarish week as more traditional GOP conservatives - Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry - make their last ditch efforts to head him off at the pass.
Barring the most colossal upset since David's slingshot brought down Goliath, Romney will emerge victorious after the votes are counted in today's New Hampshire primary. The eyebrow raising aspect of Romney's victory in the Iowa caucuses was not so much the fact that he managed to win there, though earlier all but conceding that he could not; it was the the fact that he won by a measly eight votes over the pathetically under-funded Santorum.
Similarly, capturing anything below 40 per cent of the Granite State vote will be further, if not exactly conclusive, evidence that Romney has yet to clear the remaining high hurdle of GOP distrust. Anything less than an overwhelming triumph, where polls showed him only days ago to have a commanding 20-point lead over his nearest rival, will keep the next two primaries - in South Carolina and Florida - interesting.
"Man will occasionally stumble over the truth," Winston Churchill once noted, "but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on."
Romney's hands-down worst day in the current campaign cycle was in the debate last Sunday morning in New Hampshire. After he solemnly denied that he was a career politician, Gingrich countered with: "Can we drop a little bit of the pious baloney?" The former House of Representatives Speaker then proceeded to remind the audience that Romney has been "running consistently for years and years and years... Just level with the American people. You've been running for (office) at least since the 1990s."
Still smarting from the apparent wreckage of his own candidacy, thanks to attack advertisements from political action committees supporting Romney, Gingrich went on to deflate the GOP front-runner's claim as a "job creator." He characterized Romney's role at Bain Capital as that of a predatory capitalist gobbling up companies, stuffing his own pockets with the assets, then dumping jobs and destroying entire communities.
Nor has Romney heard the last of the shots against his past as the leader of Bain and Company's equity arm. Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson has written a $5 million check to Winning the Future - a PAC supporting Gingrich - for attack ads in South Carolina on Romney's record at Bain. The ads will reportedly feature excerpts from a movie featuring interviews with individuals who lost their jobs at firms Bain Capital bought and then sold or sent into bankruptcy.
But Romney's problems in the Sunday morning debate were not limited to Gingrich's pit bull assault.
Romney exposed his weak left flank when he inexplicably jumped on former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, then languishing in the New Hampshire polls at a sickening single digit, for accepting President Obama's appointment as ambassador to China.
"This nation is divided because of attitudes like that," Huntsman said, in what will be perhaps the most memorable riposte of the current primary campaign cycle, along with Gingrich's "pious baloney" line. Huntsman's words seem to have fueled a surge enabling him to challenge libertarian Ron Paul for at least second place in the New Hampshire voting, though perhaps not nearly enough to load the slingshot aimed at felling Goliath.
Unlike the University of Maryland sprinter who looked over his wrong shoulder while a faster man passed him on the other side, there is little to suggest that Mitt Romney is sufficiently vulnerable on either his left or right within his own party. His flip-flopping on core Republican issues, such as gun control and reproductive rights, are relatively negligible when contrasted with his steadfast protection of laissez-faire, winner-take-all capitalism and feathering his own luxuriously comfortable nest at the expense of thousands of lost jobs.
Absent the ability of the Republican party to coalesce around a single candidate who more represents social conservatism, the GOP seems headed, if not exactly with full steam, toward nominating Romney, the candidate it least trusts but who is deemed the potential nominee most likely to deny President Obama a second term.
Should this materialize, the larger question looms as to whether Romney will be sufficiently healed from the bruises and battering inflicted by his primary opponents to vigorously contest the November election which he has called a battle for the heart and soul of America.
When confronted with criticism from Gingrich about the Iowa attack ads, Romney said, "This ain't bean bag." In the end, Romney may very well wish that it were.
###
More than 50 years back, University of Maryland sprinter Dennis Abdalla was running the 100-yard dash of his life. He was clearly in the lead and streaking toward the finish line. But something was wrong. Duke University's Dave Sime, then the fastest man in America if not the world, was in the race. "I glanced over my left shoulder to see where Dave was," Abdalla later told me. "And he passed me on my right." Abdalla's time of 9.9 seconds was the best of his collegiate career. Sime's time of 9.7 seconds was, for him, just another day on the cinder path.
That long ago race comes to mind as Republican presidential nomination front-runner Mitt Romney desperately strives to nail down the 2012 blessing of his party. The hitch is that rank-and-file conservative Republicans do not trust him. And for good reason.
While seeking to unseat Massachusetts U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy, Romney ran to the left of the Liberal Lion of the Senate. While serving as Governor of the Bay State, Romney became identified with the health care reform program on which so-called "Obama-care" was patterned.
Moreover, Romney's trust level is plunging even among what remains of the moderate contingent within GOP ranks - 25 per cent or less of that shrinking entity, judging from the combined poll numbers registered thus far by Romney and former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman. Huntsman is the only hopeful for the Republican nomination on record as believing, unlike the conservative majority on the United States Supreme Court, that "of course, corporations are not people."
Romney's tightly scripted, expensively organized campaign has until recent days kept him above the serial firing squad that the interminable debates between the Republican presidential aspirants have become.
The former governor of Massachusetts, arguably the most liberal state in the union, has had a nightmarish week as more traditional GOP conservatives - Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry - make their last ditch efforts to head him off at the pass.
Barring the most colossal upset since David's slingshot brought down Goliath, Romney will emerge victorious after the votes are counted in today's New Hampshire primary. The eyebrow raising aspect of Romney's victory in the Iowa caucuses was not so much the fact that he managed to win there, though earlier all but conceding that he could not; it was the the fact that he won by a measly eight votes over the pathetically under-funded Santorum.
Similarly, capturing anything below 40 per cent of the Granite State vote will be further, if not exactly conclusive, evidence that Romney has yet to clear the remaining high hurdle of GOP distrust. Anything less than an overwhelming triumph, where polls showed him only days ago to have a commanding 20-point lead over his nearest rival, will keep the next two primaries - in South Carolina and Florida - interesting.
"Man will occasionally stumble over the truth," Winston Churchill once noted, "but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on."
Romney's hands-down worst day in the current campaign cycle was in the debate last Sunday morning in New Hampshire. After he solemnly denied that he was a career politician, Gingrich countered with: "Can we drop a little bit of the pious baloney?" The former House of Representatives Speaker then proceeded to remind the audience that Romney has been "running consistently for years and years and years... Just level with the American people. You've been running for (office) at least since the 1990s."
Still smarting from the apparent wreckage of his own candidacy, thanks to attack advertisements from political action committees supporting Romney, Gingrich went on to deflate the GOP front-runner's claim as a "job creator." He characterized Romney's role at Bain Capital as that of a predatory capitalist gobbling up companies, stuffing his own pockets with the assets, then dumping jobs and destroying entire communities.
Nor has Romney heard the last of the shots against his past as the leader of Bain and Company's equity arm. Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson has written a $5 million check to Winning the Future - a PAC supporting Gingrich - for attack ads in South Carolina on Romney's record at Bain. The ads will reportedly feature excerpts from a movie featuring interviews with individuals who lost their jobs at firms Bain Capital bought and then sold or sent into bankruptcy.
But Romney's problems in the Sunday morning debate were not limited to Gingrich's pit bull assault.
Romney exposed his weak left flank when he inexplicably jumped on former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, then languishing in the New Hampshire polls at a sickening single digit, for accepting President Obama's appointment as ambassador to China.
"This nation is divided because of attitudes like that," Huntsman said, in what will be perhaps the most memorable riposte of the current primary campaign cycle, along with Gingrich's "pious baloney" line. Huntsman's words seem to have fueled a surge enabling him to challenge libertarian Ron Paul for at least second place in the New Hampshire voting, though perhaps not nearly enough to load the slingshot aimed at felling Goliath.
Unlike the University of Maryland sprinter who looked over his wrong shoulder while a faster man passed him on the other side, there is little to suggest that Mitt Romney is sufficiently vulnerable on either his left or right within his own party. His flip-flopping on core Republican issues, such as gun control and reproductive rights, are relatively negligible when contrasted with his steadfast protection of laissez-faire, winner-take-all capitalism and feathering his own luxuriously comfortable nest at the expense of thousands of lost jobs.
Absent the ability of the Republican party to coalesce around a single candidate who more represents social conservatism, the GOP seems headed, if not exactly with full steam, toward nominating Romney, the candidate it least trusts but who is deemed the potential nominee most likely to deny President Obama a second term.
Should this materialize, the larger question looms as to whether Romney will be sufficiently healed from the bruises and battering inflicted by his primary opponents to vigorously contest the November election which he has called a battle for the heart and soul of America.
When confronted with criticism from Gingrich about the Iowa attack ads, Romney said, "This ain't bean bag." In the end, Romney may very well wish that it were.
###
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
THE VIEW FROM THE $2 WINDOW
By H. N. Burdett
After more debates than none but the most incurable of political junkies can calculate, after the roller coaster ride where only one passenger fell off and two or three others held on by their fingertips, the candidates are finally in the starting gate of the marathon for-real race to determine the 2012 Republican presidential nominee.
Before the wagering windows shut down at today's Iowa GOP caucuses, I'm putting my two bucks on a late entry - the pesky pony who a short while back preferred to bail out of this one and test his mettle on tracks more to his liking in New Hampshire and Florida.
Figuring that the Hawkeye State would be less hospitable to a flip-flopping erstwhile governor of Massachusetts than a more traditional conservative, Mitt Romney initially concluded that it made more sense to focus his time, his energy and his cash on venues where he has a reasonable chance rather than where history suggests he has less than a prayer.
When Herman Cain dropped out of the race, there was an opening in the Iowa caucuses for someone closer to a bona fide conservative to gain ground on Romney, who always topped out at between 23-25 per cent in the post-debate polls - a number approximating what remains of moderate strength in the Republican Party.
Surprisingly, in this season of surprises, the candidate around which former Cain supporters circled their wagons was former U.S. House of Representatives Speaker, history professor, unregistered lobbyist and serial monogamist, Newt Gingrich.
Gingrich's checkered past apparently caught up with him with a hard shove from the 45 percent of campaign advertising dollars spent in Iowa on revealing what he would as soon wish caucus voters to forget.
Heartland America family values and fiscal conservatism have been the most consistent traits of the Iowa GOP electorate. And Gingrich, despite invoking ad nauseam both his authorship of the Contract with (or on) America and Ronald Reagan's name at each and every opportunity, strikes out on both counts. His steadfast stand on amnesty for undocumented immigrants is another fault line that had those aforementioned circled wagons scrambling elsewhere.
Virtually every candidate in today's Iowa caucuses represents family values better than Gingrich, fueling his precipitous fall from grace. The beneficiary of these mass defections has been Rick Santorum, whose choir boy charm somehow provides veneer for the reality that his politics are so far to the right as to perhaps cause even Attila the Hun to wince. Santorum, prior to the Cain fall, had been even-money along with Michele Bachmann and Jon Huntsman as the triumvirate most likely to become toast by March 6, the Super Tuesday sweepstakes when eight states hold primaries and two others engage in caucuses.
Santorum's under-funded campaign was suddenly resuscitated. The former U.S. senator from Pennysylvania seized the moment with an astounding demonstration of retail politics. As one pundit characterized the feat: "He's bought everyone in Iowa at least one cup of coffee."
The Santorum candidacy has been magically endowed with fresh legs that should hold up and perhaps even enable him to cross the finish line ahead of the pack in Iowa. But the most loyal supporters in the race - a fact which even Romney has conceded - are backing the libertarian congressman from Texas, Ron Paul. How much a re-emergence of those embarrassing racist and anti-semitic newsletters once published under Paul's name will hurt his chances in Iowa remains to be seen. To say nothing of the fact that his well-established isolationism, inviting as it is to anti-war protesters, might have kept the United States out of World War II.
Should either Santorum or Paul win the Iowa caucuses, it remains problematic whether they will have the endurance to wage competitive campaigns prior to Super Tuesday. As of today, only Romney and Texas Governor Rick Perry appear to have the wherewithal to go the distance.
Among the candidates still standing, Perry is the reputed master of retail politics. Despite the weird absence of any semblance of debating skills for a seasoned politician, his combination of personality and pursestrings seem to make him Romney's last hurdle for capturing the party's nomination.
The irony is that Romney was initially prepared to ignore Iowa and stake his claim for the nomination in New Hampshire and Florida, where his chances for victory were viewed as far rosier. But when former Cain supporters coalesced around Gingrich, Romney's campaign picked up the unmistakable odor of big trouble. The Romney aim shifted to Iowa. More specifically, to make absolutely certain that Gingrich would not win today's caucuses.
A victory by either Santorum or Paul would have been easier for Romney to digest. Romney's money and organization are presumably better equipped to deal with either. But Gingrich is an altogether different kind of fish.
What gave Romney pause is Gingrich's ideology - about as easy to grasp as mercury, but which knee-jerk conservatives bought because it all seems to be coming from the smartest guy in the room. Considering those who are in that room, Gingrich's quirky utterances, often sprung from the top of his head and which he often enough later dismisses as a "mistake" or even "stupid," qualify him as a certifiable genius.
So Romney got into the Iowa hunt and soon learned that GOP caucus voters, in their resolve to deny President Obama a second term, just may be sufficiently pragmatic to vote for the one candidate in the GOP field whom the polls claim might have this capability.
"When voters actually start voting," says the Washington Post's David Ignatius, "they will be looking for the Republican who can fix the mess in Washington through strong management, as opposed to ideological fervor. And that person looks increasingly like Mr. Bland Competence himself, Mitt Romney. Republicans have been a flirtatious, fickle lot, but I would be surprised if they didn't settle on the only person in this field who has consistently looked and talked like someone who could be president."
Columnist Kathleen Parker opines that the economy is the first priority of conservative America in this election year. She adds that "most believe that Romney has the best skills for turning things around. In the hierarchy of Oz, he is the GOP's best brain."
Even the best prepared analyst would end up with a throbbing headache trying to gauge Ron Santorum's eleventh-hour momentum against the enthusiasm of Ron Paul loyalists, the estimated 350 to 500 Texans converging upon Iowa to tout Governor Perry, and Mitt Romney's organizational strength and dollars.
I feel comfortable enough in Romney's appeal to Iowans' pragmatism over ideology to manage a feat which only a few days back I compared to a miracle comparable to the parting of the Red Sea and the virgin birth combined, to put down a pair of singles on his patrician nose. But not comfortable enough to risk more than two.
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After more debates than none but the most incurable of political junkies can calculate, after the roller coaster ride where only one passenger fell off and two or three others held on by their fingertips, the candidates are finally in the starting gate of the marathon for-real race to determine the 2012 Republican presidential nominee.
Before the wagering windows shut down at today's Iowa GOP caucuses, I'm putting my two bucks on a late entry - the pesky pony who a short while back preferred to bail out of this one and test his mettle on tracks more to his liking in New Hampshire and Florida.
Figuring that the Hawkeye State would be less hospitable to a flip-flopping erstwhile governor of Massachusetts than a more traditional conservative, Mitt Romney initially concluded that it made more sense to focus his time, his energy and his cash on venues where he has a reasonable chance rather than where history suggests he has less than a prayer.
When Herman Cain dropped out of the race, there was an opening in the Iowa caucuses for someone closer to a bona fide conservative to gain ground on Romney, who always topped out at between 23-25 per cent in the post-debate polls - a number approximating what remains of moderate strength in the Republican Party.
Surprisingly, in this season of surprises, the candidate around which former Cain supporters circled their wagons was former U.S. House of Representatives Speaker, history professor, unregistered lobbyist and serial monogamist, Newt Gingrich.
Gingrich's checkered past apparently caught up with him with a hard shove from the 45 percent of campaign advertising dollars spent in Iowa on revealing what he would as soon wish caucus voters to forget.
Heartland America family values and fiscal conservatism have been the most consistent traits of the Iowa GOP electorate. And Gingrich, despite invoking ad nauseam both his authorship of the Contract with (or on) America and Ronald Reagan's name at each and every opportunity, strikes out on both counts. His steadfast stand on amnesty for undocumented immigrants is another fault line that had those aforementioned circled wagons scrambling elsewhere.
Virtually every candidate in today's Iowa caucuses represents family values better than Gingrich, fueling his precipitous fall from grace. The beneficiary of these mass defections has been Rick Santorum, whose choir boy charm somehow provides veneer for the reality that his politics are so far to the right as to perhaps cause even Attila the Hun to wince. Santorum, prior to the Cain fall, had been even-money along with Michele Bachmann and Jon Huntsman as the triumvirate most likely to become toast by March 6, the Super Tuesday sweepstakes when eight states hold primaries and two others engage in caucuses.
Santorum's under-funded campaign was suddenly resuscitated. The former U.S. senator from Pennysylvania seized the moment with an astounding demonstration of retail politics. As one pundit characterized the feat: "He's bought everyone in Iowa at least one cup of coffee."
The Santorum candidacy has been magically endowed with fresh legs that should hold up and perhaps even enable him to cross the finish line ahead of the pack in Iowa. But the most loyal supporters in the race - a fact which even Romney has conceded - are backing the libertarian congressman from Texas, Ron Paul. How much a re-emergence of those embarrassing racist and anti-semitic newsletters once published under Paul's name will hurt his chances in Iowa remains to be seen. To say nothing of the fact that his well-established isolationism, inviting as it is to anti-war protesters, might have kept the United States out of World War II.
Should either Santorum or Paul win the Iowa caucuses, it remains problematic whether they will have the endurance to wage competitive campaigns prior to Super Tuesday. As of today, only Romney and Texas Governor Rick Perry appear to have the wherewithal to go the distance.
Among the candidates still standing, Perry is the reputed master of retail politics. Despite the weird absence of any semblance of debating skills for a seasoned politician, his combination of personality and pursestrings seem to make him Romney's last hurdle for capturing the party's nomination.
The irony is that Romney was initially prepared to ignore Iowa and stake his claim for the nomination in New Hampshire and Florida, where his chances for victory were viewed as far rosier. But when former Cain supporters coalesced around Gingrich, Romney's campaign picked up the unmistakable odor of big trouble. The Romney aim shifted to Iowa. More specifically, to make absolutely certain that Gingrich would not win today's caucuses.
A victory by either Santorum or Paul would have been easier for Romney to digest. Romney's money and organization are presumably better equipped to deal with either. But Gingrich is an altogether different kind of fish.
What gave Romney pause is Gingrich's ideology - about as easy to grasp as mercury, but which knee-jerk conservatives bought because it all seems to be coming from the smartest guy in the room. Considering those who are in that room, Gingrich's quirky utterances, often sprung from the top of his head and which he often enough later dismisses as a "mistake" or even "stupid," qualify him as a certifiable genius.
So Romney got into the Iowa hunt and soon learned that GOP caucus voters, in their resolve to deny President Obama a second term, just may be sufficiently pragmatic to vote for the one candidate in the GOP field whom the polls claim might have this capability.
"When voters actually start voting," says the Washington Post's David Ignatius, "they will be looking for the Republican who can fix the mess in Washington through strong management, as opposed to ideological fervor. And that person looks increasingly like Mr. Bland Competence himself, Mitt Romney. Republicans have been a flirtatious, fickle lot, but I would be surprised if they didn't settle on the only person in this field who has consistently looked and talked like someone who could be president."
Columnist Kathleen Parker opines that the economy is the first priority of conservative America in this election year. She adds that "most believe that Romney has the best skills for turning things around. In the hierarchy of Oz, he is the GOP's best brain."
Even the best prepared analyst would end up with a throbbing headache trying to gauge Ron Santorum's eleventh-hour momentum against the enthusiasm of Ron Paul loyalists, the estimated 350 to 500 Texans converging upon Iowa to tout Governor Perry, and Mitt Romney's organizational strength and dollars.
I feel comfortable enough in Romney's appeal to Iowans' pragmatism over ideology to manage a feat which only a few days back I compared to a miracle comparable to the parting of the Red Sea and the virgin birth combined, to put down a pair of singles on his patrician nose. But not comfortable enough to risk more than two.
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