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.
###
Thursday, February 9, 2012
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.
###
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.
###
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
RON PAUL: DISENGAGED OR CLOSET BIGOT?
By H. N. Burdett
Over her far too brief lifetime, Molly Ivins proved time and again that she had more bite in her inkwell than a pack of hounds chasing the scent of a nearby sausage factory. During the reign of Bush the Younger, she dropped this stunning pearl: "Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be President of the United States, please pay attention."
Never mind that the advice of this heir to American iconoclasts Twain and Mencken would have disqualified her friend Ann Richards, the onetime Lone Star state governor some of us felt was most worthy of one day occupying the White House. The point is that two Texans are vying for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. And, despite their denials, they are both vulnerable to the charge of racism.
First it was the revelation about the name painted on a big old rock at the entrance of Texas Governor Rick Perry's hunting camp. That name - "Niggerhead" - was so off-putting that it all but negated the accomplishments Governor Perry has managed in order to either prove that he is genuinely color blind, or is interested in attracting African American voters. These include appointing Wallace Jefferson, the state's first black state supreme court justice and later appointing him chief justice, and appointing more minorities to statewide positions than any governor in Texas history.
Perry claimed that the racial epithet had been painted on the boulder before his family acquired the property. Besides, he insists, he had the offensive title of the camp removed. Much later, his detractors retort.
Now it is libertarian Ron Paul's turn to get his buns singed - by the light shed on all of those newsletters bearing his name when the voters in his congressional district temporarily retired him from Congress. He allows as how he was just too busy making a living practicing medicine to read, much less edit, those bile-filled publications.
But, according to Reason magazine, Paul and his wife were not too busy to serve as officers of Ron Paul and Associates, the corporation that published the newsletters and which earned an income of nearly $1 million in 1993 alone. James Kirchick, writing in the neoconservative Weekly Standard, said, "If this figure is reliable, Paul must have earned multiple millions of dollars over the two decades plus of the publication's existence. . ."
By this time, millions of potential voters in next year's presidential election have read excerpts from the unmitigated tripe contained in the Ron Paul publications he was too preoccupied to write, edit, or even read:
EXHIBIT 1: "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for blacks to pick up their welfare checks."
EXHIBIT 2: "Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 per cent of all black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."
EXHIBIT 3: An article on disturbances in Washington's Adams Morgan neighborhood was entitled, "Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo."
EXHIBIT 4: Martin Luther King Jr. was characterized as a "world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours" and "seduced underage boys and girls."
EXHIBIT 5: After Ronald Reagan signed legislation to declare Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday, the newsletter said: "We can thank him (Reagan) for our annual Hate Whitey Day."
EXHIBIT 6: One of the Paul newsletter's reported that "gangs of black girls between the ages 12 and 14" roamed the streets of New York injecting white women with syringes that were possibly HIV-infected. Another argued that AIDS patients should not be allowed to eat in restaurants because "AIDS can be transmitted through saliva." (Editor's Note: It cannot.)
EXHIBIT 7: A 1990 newsletter speaks of "tens of thousands of well-placed friends of Israel in all countries who are willing to work for the Mossad (the Israeli secret service) in their area of expertise."
EXHIBIT 8: Commenting on the World Trade Center attack, a Paul newsletter said: "Whether it was a setup by the Israeli Mossad. . .or was truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters little."
In response, Ron Paul has stated: "The quotations. . .are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. When I was out of Congress and practicing medicine full-time, a newsletter was published under my name that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. For over a decade, I have publicly taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name."
A response to an article on the Paul publications in Washington Monthly had it on target by noting: Three choices: (1) Ron Paul is or was a racist; (2) Ron Paul published racist rants which he didn't believe for political or financial advantage; (3) Ron Paul published a newsletter named after himself for decades, but didn't bother to find out what was in it.
Paul's defense is not much helped by the fact that he was the only member of Congress in 1999 to oppose the issuance of a Congressional Gold Medal to Rosa Parks, and only last May said in an interview that he opposes the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Ron Paul is now running third in the national polls of GOP presidential candidates. Whether he sinks or rises in these snapshots of Republican opinion in the wake of the exposure of what appeared in his newsletters may expose the dark underside of the nation.
A shameful segment of American society still does indeed exhale what Gerald White Johnson some 70 years ago called "the moldy breath of bigotry." Just how large this portion is cannot be known. Nor can it be reasonably argued that everyone casting a vote for either Ron Paul or Rick Perry is a bigot. What can be said without fear of contradiction is that if either Paul or Perry is the Republican nominee running against an incumbent African American president, it will be the ugliest, most chilling election in the history of the United States.
###
Over her far too brief lifetime, Molly Ivins proved time and again that she had more bite in her inkwell than a pack of hounds chasing the scent of a nearby sausage factory. During the reign of Bush the Younger, she dropped this stunning pearl: "Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be President of the United States, please pay attention."
Never mind that the advice of this heir to American iconoclasts Twain and Mencken would have disqualified her friend Ann Richards, the onetime Lone Star state governor some of us felt was most worthy of one day occupying the White House. The point is that two Texans are vying for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. And, despite their denials, they are both vulnerable to the charge of racism.
First it was the revelation about the name painted on a big old rock at the entrance of Texas Governor Rick Perry's hunting camp. That name - "Niggerhead" - was so off-putting that it all but negated the accomplishments Governor Perry has managed in order to either prove that he is genuinely color blind, or is interested in attracting African American voters. These include appointing Wallace Jefferson, the state's first black state supreme court justice and later appointing him chief justice, and appointing more minorities to statewide positions than any governor in Texas history.
Perry claimed that the racial epithet had been painted on the boulder before his family acquired the property. Besides, he insists, he had the offensive title of the camp removed. Much later, his detractors retort.
Now it is libertarian Ron Paul's turn to get his buns singed - by the light shed on all of those newsletters bearing his name when the voters in his congressional district temporarily retired him from Congress. He allows as how he was just too busy making a living practicing medicine to read, much less edit, those bile-filled publications.
But, according to Reason magazine, Paul and his wife were not too busy to serve as officers of Ron Paul and Associates, the corporation that published the newsletters and which earned an income of nearly $1 million in 1993 alone. James Kirchick, writing in the neoconservative Weekly Standard, said, "If this figure is reliable, Paul must have earned multiple millions of dollars over the two decades plus of the publication's existence. . ."
By this time, millions of potential voters in next year's presidential election have read excerpts from the unmitigated tripe contained in the Ron Paul publications he was too preoccupied to write, edit, or even read:
EXHIBIT 1: "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for blacks to pick up their welfare checks."
EXHIBIT 2: "Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 per cent of all black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."
EXHIBIT 3: An article on disturbances in Washington's Adams Morgan neighborhood was entitled, "Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo."
EXHIBIT 4: Martin Luther King Jr. was characterized as a "world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours" and "seduced underage boys and girls."
EXHIBIT 5: After Ronald Reagan signed legislation to declare Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday, the newsletter said: "We can thank him (Reagan) for our annual Hate Whitey Day."
EXHIBIT 6: One of the Paul newsletter's reported that "gangs of black girls between the ages 12 and 14" roamed the streets of New York injecting white women with syringes that were possibly HIV-infected. Another argued that AIDS patients should not be allowed to eat in restaurants because "AIDS can be transmitted through saliva." (Editor's Note: It cannot.)
EXHIBIT 7: A 1990 newsletter speaks of "tens of thousands of well-placed friends of Israel in all countries who are willing to work for the Mossad (the Israeli secret service) in their area of expertise."
EXHIBIT 8: Commenting on the World Trade Center attack, a Paul newsletter said: "Whether it was a setup by the Israeli Mossad. . .or was truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters little."
In response, Ron Paul has stated: "The quotations. . .are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. When I was out of Congress and practicing medicine full-time, a newsletter was published under my name that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. For over a decade, I have publicly taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name."
A response to an article on the Paul publications in Washington Monthly had it on target by noting: Three choices: (1) Ron Paul is or was a racist; (2) Ron Paul published racist rants which he didn't believe for political or financial advantage; (3) Ron Paul published a newsletter named after himself for decades, but didn't bother to find out what was in it.
Paul's defense is not much helped by the fact that he was the only member of Congress in 1999 to oppose the issuance of a Congressional Gold Medal to Rosa Parks, and only last May said in an interview that he opposes the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Ron Paul is now running third in the national polls of GOP presidential candidates. Whether he sinks or rises in these snapshots of Republican opinion in the wake of the exposure of what appeared in his newsletters may expose the dark underside of the nation.
A shameful segment of American society still does indeed exhale what Gerald White Johnson some 70 years ago called "the moldy breath of bigotry." Just how large this portion is cannot be known. Nor can it be reasonably argued that everyone casting a vote for either Ron Paul or Rick Perry is a bigot. What can be said without fear of contradiction is that if either Paul or Perry is the Republican nominee running against an incumbent African American president, it will be the ugliest, most chilling election in the history of the United States.
###
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
TWEEDLEDEE, TWEEDLEDUM LOCK HORNS
By H. N. Burdett
With a tip of my 80% wool cap to that sultan of satire, Mort Sahl: George Washington could not tell a lie, Richard Nixon could not tell the truth, and Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich cannot tell the difference.
After Herman Cain departed the primary arena, Gingrich shot past his Republican opponents in the polls like Silky Sullivan, the legendary little horse that could. Back in the late 1950s, Silky ran from 25 to 30 lengths behind in race after race to garner comeback triumphs. Previously mired in single digit perdition in the polls, the former House of Representatives Speaker whizzed by second-place Romney and landed some 20 points in front of him. But the apparent endless volatility of Republican voters has once again surfaced. The latest Washington Post/CBS poll shows Gingrich and Romney running neck-and-neck.
The wonder of the Gingrich surge is that repeatedly mentioning his association with Ronald Reagan, which the current GOP flavor of the month does with monotonous regularity, continues to carry weight among the party's conservative faithful.
Distracted from his focus on the January 10 New Hampshire primary by the down-draft of Gingrich's resurrection from dead in the water to front-runner, Romney dug into his deep pockets to pour $3 million into the Jan. 3 Iowa caucus, which he had previously written off with the nonchalance of a Sunday church-goer shaking free from all vestiges of sanctimony on Monday morning. Four years ago, the Iowa caucus winner was Mike Huckabee, who by Super Tuesday of 2008 became the political equivalent of the proverbial golf ball lost in the tall grass.
On the next Super Tuesday, March 6, 2012, eight states - Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia -- will hold presidential primaries, and two - Alaska and North Dakota - will stage caucuses. Barring a photo finish, the GOP will have unofficially nominated its candidate for president.
For all of his posturing as a "consistent conservative" - forgetting that he held contrary positions on virtually every core Republican anathema, from government health insurance to gun control and a woman's right to have an abortion, while winning the governorship of the Bay State - amnesiac Romney has openly observed that whenever he travels around Iowa, he keeps running into loyal Ron Paul supporters.
Though Romney now finds himself, lo and behold, with an unlikely fighting chance to win the Iowa caucus, he recognizes that a victory for him in the Hawkeye state would be nothing short of a miracle on par with the parting of the Red Sea and the virgin birth combined. But he further believes it is prudent to shell out three Very Big Ones not so much to win there, but to prevent his current nemesis from doing so. Should Gingrich capture the Iowa caucus and, after Romney's expected victory in New Hampshire, also carry South Carolina on January 21 and Florida on January 31, he would gain formidable traction for Super Tuesday on March 6. And only last summer, the campaign staff of the nation's most prominent unregistered lobbyist was bailing out in droves.
Concluding that Ron Paul has nowhere to go after Iowa, Romney would welcome a victory there by the libertarian Texas congressman who has little faith in government solving anything but continues to claim himself to be the only GOP candidate who truly reveres the United States Constitution, which, oh by the way, just happens to be the blueprint for U.S. government.
Gingrich's delusional self-esteem audaciously permits him to wager his candidacy on the shaky premise that he can convince voters he is a historian rather than the lobbyist that he obviously is. And Romney banks on his patrician countenance, even when he is garbed in real-folks flannel shirt and blue jeans, to enable him to lock eyes with voters and enunciate scripted nonsense about being a consistent conservative. Both have daringly shrugged off the timeless wisdom of Abraham Lincoln's celebrated observation: You can fool all of the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
Even George W. Bush, who won the presidency in 2000, then proceeded to wage two off-the-books pre-emptive invasions and occupations of Middle Eastern countries yet still managed to win re-election, has ultimately learned Lincoln's lesson. Disengaged though he may be, Bush 43 must still wince some in his realization that scant few Republicans would defend him against being flung into the dung pile precinct of history, where James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson currently reside, as among easily the three worst U.S. presidents.
Gingrich stretches beyond hubris in his claim that he was hired by Freddie Mac - the same entity he felt Barney Frank should be jailed for supporting - and collected $1.6 million for his services as a historian rather than the lobbyist he was. Romney promptly challenged Gingrich to return the money that made him the highest paid historian ever.
"There are two kinds of light," James Thurber once observed, "the glow that illuminates and the glare that obscures." While politicians too often rely on the latter to blind consituents from their various misdeeds and other embarrassments, once they reach the top of the polls they are, thankfully, exposed by the former. Romney and Gingrich are learning the humorist's theory of light the hard way.
This, of course, does not dissuade historian Ginrich one iota. He goes right on trying to sound professorial, which apparently works some with less educated voters, though the polls reveal that more educated Republicans tend to be more skeptical about his shameless, self-styled pedantry. As one pundit observed, whenever Gingrich freely peppers virtually every sentence he utters whenever any cockamamie thought pops into his head with four-syllable words, like "fundamental," supporters confuse his shoot-from-the-lip rhetoric with erudition.
As for Gingrich's claim to consistency on conservative values, he is on record as favoring amnesty for undocumented immigrants, as well as single-payer health insurance and he believes, or once believed, climatologists whose research shows that the planet is actually becoming dangerously warmer - positions diametrically opposed to GOP anti-science orthodoxy.
Romney has also mastered politics as the art of the preposterous by robotically staring down the television camera and declaring himself to be the only "job creator" among the GOP candidates. His claim harks back to his days as the manager of Bain Capital, Bain & Company's private equity operation.
Though Romney did not invent the high stakes game of leveraged buyouts, he was certainly among its more masterful practitioners. Bain Capital acquired or heavily invested in such companies as KB Toys, Domino's Pizza and Sealy Mattress. "Job creator" Romney would just as soon forget the 3,400 jobs lost before KB Toys declared for bankruptcy reorganization, the 2,500 jobs lost after Bain Capital's buyout of Clear Channel Communications, or the hundreds of jobs lost after its buyout of Sensata Technology and the 700 workers fired in the wake of the merger of steel companies Bain Capital arranged to form GSI Industries.
The thousands of people who lost jobs as the result of Romney's wheeling and dealing in the legal larceny of leveraged buyouts and sundry other manipulations will not be much cheered by the recent New York Times revelation that Romney is financing his current presidential campaign - as he did his last one four years ago - with the millions he continues to rake in annually from Bain for a job well done years back.
Marc B. Walpow, who as a managing partner at Bain worked closely with Romney for nine years, says, "I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation. The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for its investors." Indeed Romney deserves high marks in accomplishing the goal described by Walpow.
Gingrich's boasts of consistent conservatism and Romney's "job creator" claims bring to mind H. L. Mencken's observation that a politician, upon learning that he has cannibals for constituents, will offer them missionaries for dinner. Amen.
###
With a tip of my 80% wool cap to that sultan of satire, Mort Sahl: George Washington could not tell a lie, Richard Nixon could not tell the truth, and Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich cannot tell the difference.
After Herman Cain departed the primary arena, Gingrich shot past his Republican opponents in the polls like Silky Sullivan, the legendary little horse that could. Back in the late 1950s, Silky ran from 25 to 30 lengths behind in race after race to garner comeback triumphs. Previously mired in single digit perdition in the polls, the former House of Representatives Speaker whizzed by second-place Romney and landed some 20 points in front of him. But the apparent endless volatility of Republican voters has once again surfaced. The latest Washington Post/CBS poll shows Gingrich and Romney running neck-and-neck.
The wonder of the Gingrich surge is that repeatedly mentioning his association with Ronald Reagan, which the current GOP flavor of the month does with monotonous regularity, continues to carry weight among the party's conservative faithful.
Distracted from his focus on the January 10 New Hampshire primary by the down-draft of Gingrich's resurrection from dead in the water to front-runner, Romney dug into his deep pockets to pour $3 million into the Jan. 3 Iowa caucus, which he had previously written off with the nonchalance of a Sunday church-goer shaking free from all vestiges of sanctimony on Monday morning. Four years ago, the Iowa caucus winner was Mike Huckabee, who by Super Tuesday of 2008 became the political equivalent of the proverbial golf ball lost in the tall grass.
On the next Super Tuesday, March 6, 2012, eight states - Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia -- will hold presidential primaries, and two - Alaska and North Dakota - will stage caucuses. Barring a photo finish, the GOP will have unofficially nominated its candidate for president.
For all of his posturing as a "consistent conservative" - forgetting that he held contrary positions on virtually every core Republican anathema, from government health insurance to gun control and a woman's right to have an abortion, while winning the governorship of the Bay State - amnesiac Romney has openly observed that whenever he travels around Iowa, he keeps running into loyal Ron Paul supporters.
Though Romney now finds himself, lo and behold, with an unlikely fighting chance to win the Iowa caucus, he recognizes that a victory for him in the Hawkeye state would be nothing short of a miracle on par with the parting of the Red Sea and the virgin birth combined. But he further believes it is prudent to shell out three Very Big Ones not so much to win there, but to prevent his current nemesis from doing so. Should Gingrich capture the Iowa caucus and, after Romney's expected victory in New Hampshire, also carry South Carolina on January 21 and Florida on January 31, he would gain formidable traction for Super Tuesday on March 6. And only last summer, the campaign staff of the nation's most prominent unregistered lobbyist was bailing out in droves.
Concluding that Ron Paul has nowhere to go after Iowa, Romney would welcome a victory there by the libertarian Texas congressman who has little faith in government solving anything but continues to claim himself to be the only GOP candidate who truly reveres the United States Constitution, which, oh by the way, just happens to be the blueprint for U.S. government.
Gingrich's delusional self-esteem audaciously permits him to wager his candidacy on the shaky premise that he can convince voters he is a historian rather than the lobbyist that he obviously is. And Romney banks on his patrician countenance, even when he is garbed in real-folks flannel shirt and blue jeans, to enable him to lock eyes with voters and enunciate scripted nonsense about being a consistent conservative. Both have daringly shrugged off the timeless wisdom of Abraham Lincoln's celebrated observation: You can fool all of the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
Even George W. Bush, who won the presidency in 2000, then proceeded to wage two off-the-books pre-emptive invasions and occupations of Middle Eastern countries yet still managed to win re-election, has ultimately learned Lincoln's lesson. Disengaged though he may be, Bush 43 must still wince some in his realization that scant few Republicans would defend him against being flung into the dung pile precinct of history, where James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson currently reside, as among easily the three worst U.S. presidents.
Gingrich stretches beyond hubris in his claim that he was hired by Freddie Mac - the same entity he felt Barney Frank should be jailed for supporting - and collected $1.6 million for his services as a historian rather than the lobbyist he was. Romney promptly challenged Gingrich to return the money that made him the highest paid historian ever.
"There are two kinds of light," James Thurber once observed, "the glow that illuminates and the glare that obscures." While politicians too often rely on the latter to blind consituents from their various misdeeds and other embarrassments, once they reach the top of the polls they are, thankfully, exposed by the former. Romney and Gingrich are learning the humorist's theory of light the hard way.
This, of course, does not dissuade historian Ginrich one iota. He goes right on trying to sound professorial, which apparently works some with less educated voters, though the polls reveal that more educated Republicans tend to be more skeptical about his shameless, self-styled pedantry. As one pundit observed, whenever Gingrich freely peppers virtually every sentence he utters whenever any cockamamie thought pops into his head with four-syllable words, like "fundamental," supporters confuse his shoot-from-the-lip rhetoric with erudition.
As for Gingrich's claim to consistency on conservative values, he is on record as favoring amnesty for undocumented immigrants, as well as single-payer health insurance and he believes, or once believed, climatologists whose research shows that the planet is actually becoming dangerously warmer - positions diametrically opposed to GOP anti-science orthodoxy.
Romney has also mastered politics as the art of the preposterous by robotically staring down the television camera and declaring himself to be the only "job creator" among the GOP candidates. His claim harks back to his days as the manager of Bain Capital, Bain & Company's private equity operation.
Though Romney did not invent the high stakes game of leveraged buyouts, he was certainly among its more masterful practitioners. Bain Capital acquired or heavily invested in such companies as KB Toys, Domino's Pizza and Sealy Mattress. "Job creator" Romney would just as soon forget the 3,400 jobs lost before KB Toys declared for bankruptcy reorganization, the 2,500 jobs lost after Bain Capital's buyout of Clear Channel Communications, or the hundreds of jobs lost after its buyout of Sensata Technology and the 700 workers fired in the wake of the merger of steel companies Bain Capital arranged to form GSI Industries.
The thousands of people who lost jobs as the result of Romney's wheeling and dealing in the legal larceny of leveraged buyouts and sundry other manipulations will not be much cheered by the recent New York Times revelation that Romney is financing his current presidential campaign - as he did his last one four years ago - with the millions he continues to rake in annually from Bain for a job well done years back.
Marc B. Walpow, who as a managing partner at Bain worked closely with Romney for nine years, says, "I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation. The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for its investors." Indeed Romney deserves high marks in accomplishing the goal described by Walpow.
Gingrich's boasts of consistent conservatism and Romney's "job creator" claims bring to mind H. L. Mencken's observation that a politician, upon learning that he has cannibals for constituents, will offer them missionaries for dinner. Amen.
###
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
THE NARCISSIST VS. THE WAFFLE KING
By H. N. Burdett
Albert Einstein's definition of insanity was to do the same thing the same way over and over and expect different results. The Einstein maxim applies to the rigid insistence by Congressional Republicans to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
By framing the one percent of Americans at the top of the economic ladder as "job creators" - rather than the job outsourcers and job killers they have been in recent years - GOP lawmakers have closed their minds to the fact that, despite a decade of the tax cuts they hold inviolable, unemployment has risen to near double digits.
Contrarily, when the wealthiest were paying something somewhat closer to their fair share, during the Clinton administration, 23 million jobs were created. As President Obama said in his recent major economic address: "That is not politics. That's just math." That he happens to preside over one of the more math deficient countries in the western world probably discounts the probability that he will adopt those lines as a campaign slogan.
While Republicans stand firm - even on the fault line of economic collapse - when it comes to party orthodoxy, they appear to have narrowed their 2012 presidential nominee choice to one between a pair of political meteorologists, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, who can re-position themselves in an eye blink whenever the winds shift. Both are endowed with sufficient ideological cynicism to vow their allegiance to conservative purity.
The Hobson's choice confronting Republican voters - at least this month - is one between Romney, who has made more waffles than the entire Denny's restaurant chain, and Gingrich, who makes Narcissus, the Greek mythological figure hopelessly in love with his own reflection, look like the Elephant Man.
Despite his well-advertised turnarounds on core right-wing issues, from gun control to abortion to same-sex marriage, Romney shows up in polls as the candidate most likely to give President Obama a run for his money.
Should Romney emerge as his party's standard-bearer, the health care program adopted when he was governor of Massachusetts and was the model for the national health care restructuring Republicans revile as socialized medicine, is likely to give the GOP faithful some pause. Equally interesting would be Romney's defense of the reversal of his position on the federal bailout that rescued the automobile industry from near extinction. In Michigan, America's automotive capital and a swing state where his father served as the chairman and CEO of the American Motors Corporation before he was elected governor of that state, voters may have a problem with Mitt Romney lambasting the Obama bailout.
Gingrich, the poster boy for unregistered Capitol Hill lobbyists, marital infidelity and egomania, has a flipflop problem of his own, on top of his habit of saying anything that pops into his mind at the precise moment when he should say nothing at all. Gingrich's inability to suppress his obsession with the microphone and the television camera may be particularly difficult for Republican voters to digest whenever they view those playbacks of his sitdown with Nancy Pelosi warning of the inconvenient truth of climate change - another Republican ideological no-no. He, incidentally, calls that abandonment of the GOP reservation the "dumbest" thing he ever did. But he might want to reassess that judgment after he has felt the full impact of the fallout from his proposal that students living in poverty be given school janitorial duties to learn lessons in the American work ethic.
The best chance Republicans have for evicting Obama from the White House is to demonize the president for his inability in only three years to clean up the mess of the two off-the-books preemptive invasions/occupations and the economic castrophe he inherited from George W. Bush, the hands-down worst president in U.S. history who held that lease for a full eight years.
Considering that Romney and Gingrich have more baggage than the RMS Queen Mary hauled during its trans-Atlantic voyages, either of these potential GOP presidential candidates would be destined to enter the race from a defensive posture. Even the immortal Sugar Ray Robinson, the greatest counter-puncher ever, would be strongly tested were he placed at that disadvantage.
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Albert Einstein's definition of insanity was to do the same thing the same way over and over and expect different results. The Einstein maxim applies to the rigid insistence by Congressional Republicans to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
By framing the one percent of Americans at the top of the economic ladder as "job creators" - rather than the job outsourcers and job killers they have been in recent years - GOP lawmakers have closed their minds to the fact that, despite a decade of the tax cuts they hold inviolable, unemployment has risen to near double digits.
Contrarily, when the wealthiest were paying something somewhat closer to their fair share, during the Clinton administration, 23 million jobs were created. As President Obama said in his recent major economic address: "That is not politics. That's just math." That he happens to preside over one of the more math deficient countries in the western world probably discounts the probability that he will adopt those lines as a campaign slogan.
While Republicans stand firm - even on the fault line of economic collapse - when it comes to party orthodoxy, they appear to have narrowed their 2012 presidential nominee choice to one between a pair of political meteorologists, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, who can re-position themselves in an eye blink whenever the winds shift. Both are endowed with sufficient ideological cynicism to vow their allegiance to conservative purity.
The Hobson's choice confronting Republican voters - at least this month - is one between Romney, who has made more waffles than the entire Denny's restaurant chain, and Gingrich, who makes Narcissus, the Greek mythological figure hopelessly in love with his own reflection, look like the Elephant Man.
Despite his well-advertised turnarounds on core right-wing issues, from gun control to abortion to same-sex marriage, Romney shows up in polls as the candidate most likely to give President Obama a run for his money.
Should Romney emerge as his party's standard-bearer, the health care program adopted when he was governor of Massachusetts and was the model for the national health care restructuring Republicans revile as socialized medicine, is likely to give the GOP faithful some pause. Equally interesting would be Romney's defense of the reversal of his position on the federal bailout that rescued the automobile industry from near extinction. In Michigan, America's automotive capital and a swing state where his father served as the chairman and CEO of the American Motors Corporation before he was elected governor of that state, voters may have a problem with Mitt Romney lambasting the Obama bailout.
Gingrich, the poster boy for unregistered Capitol Hill lobbyists, marital infidelity and egomania, has a flipflop problem of his own, on top of his habit of saying anything that pops into his mind at the precise moment when he should say nothing at all. Gingrich's inability to suppress his obsession with the microphone and the television camera may be particularly difficult for Republican voters to digest whenever they view those playbacks of his sitdown with Nancy Pelosi warning of the inconvenient truth of climate change - another Republican ideological no-no. He, incidentally, calls that abandonment of the GOP reservation the "dumbest" thing he ever did. But he might want to reassess that judgment after he has felt the full impact of the fallout from his proposal that students living in poverty be given school janitorial duties to learn lessons in the American work ethic.
The best chance Republicans have for evicting Obama from the White House is to demonize the president for his inability in only three years to clean up the mess of the two off-the-books preemptive invasions/occupations and the economic castrophe he inherited from George W. Bush, the hands-down worst president in U.S. history who held that lease for a full eight years.
Considering that Romney and Gingrich have more baggage than the RMS Queen Mary hauled during its trans-Atlantic voyages, either of these potential GOP presidential candidates would be destined to enter the race from a defensive posture. Even the immortal Sugar Ray Robinson, the greatest counter-puncher ever, would be strongly tested were he placed at that disadvantage.
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