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."
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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 31, 2012
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.
###
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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