Romney's Vulnerability vs Obama--And How He's Trying to Cover It Up

In his victory speech in Florida on Tuesday night Mitt Romney gave us the clearest preview yet of his general election strategy. He displayed magnanimity toward Newt Gingrich -- without naming him of course -- and his other vanquished GOP opponents, and then proceeded to deliver his familiar broadside against Barack Obama in the usual over-the-top-way.

Romney's attack on Obama, predictable by now, was so extreme--he's weak, he's incompetent, he's a European socialist (though the Europeans are now pursuing a Romney-esque austerity) -- that all it did was to make you wonder: Is he protesting too much? Is he worried? Everyone knows by now what Romney's biggest general-election challenge will be. This problem has been clearly and consistently articulated by his GOP primary opponents--and none better than the hapless Rick Santorum, who has argued that contrary to Romney's assertions the similarities between him and Barack Obama are so legion that voters will simply decide: why change?

Hence Romney began his remarks by asserting that he and Obama have "very different visions of government," and resorted to his usual slash-and-burn bromides, no matter how erroneous they have been shown to be. He declared that Obama wants to hand over health care to government bureaucrats, in contrast to Romney's plan (even though the president specifically dropped the "public option"--government-provided insurance -- and the health care law creates private-sector exchanges instead). He said more jobs have been lost and more foreclosures have occurred under Obama than any other president, when it's clear that many of those were set in train under George W. Bush. And on and on.

All this works for the primaries, perhaps. But will it really fly in the general, when the Obama camp points out the obvious similarities between so many Romney and Obama policies, starting with Romneycare? Or will Romney come across once again, as he has so often in the past, as inauthentic?

Obama's Eleven-Year Presidency

Whatever the GOP field looks like after the Florida results come in tonight, one thing is certain, the Republican race will continue to be haunted by Two Missing Republicans. One of them, of course, is George W. Bush. H.G. Wells couldn't have invented a man as invisible as W. this GOP primary season.  The idea that Barack Obama could have wrecked the nation as totally as Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich say he did in just three years is pretty hard for even the worst Obama-phobes to digest. So for all intents and purposes, Romney and Gingrich are running against eleven years of fiscal and foreign-policy disaster but targeting only one president. Apparently Obama is not only pushing the limits of the Constitution in dealing with terrorists and federal appointments --as his critics allege-- but also appears to be completely ignoring the twenty-second amendment, which limits a president to two terms. (Obama, of course, is running on the opposite conceit, pretending that, at least when it comes to fixing the economy, he is just getting started.)  


The other Missing Republican in this race is the mythical Candidate of the Base. No, I'm not talking the succession of pretenders who sought to pull the sword from the stone of conservatism and are now gone, having failed to show they are the True Heir (Bachmann, Perry, Cain), nor the two who continue to tug away at it without luck (Gingrich, Santorum).  Nor am I talking about Tim Pawlenty or Mitch Daniels or Chris Christie, all of whom would have been credible alternatives to Romney had they run or stayed in

I mean the Republican who does not appear to exist--and never did. Even as Gingrich drags Michael Reagan, the former president's (once somewhat alienated) son, around Florida with him to prove that he, Newt, is the Anointed One, any fiery tea partier who has the intellectual energy to actually take a close look at both Gingrich's //and// Reagan's record will find that both of them were mostly failed conservatives. As my colleagues Naureen Khan and Julia Edwards show today, a Gingrich presidency would probably be further evidence of what a Big Government guy Newt really is. As for Reagan, well, here we go again. It's not just that we have to deep-six the once-famous revelations made by David Stockman. It's also that, although there has been a heated dispute in recent weeks over a chart released by Nancy Pelosi's office purporting to show how little Obama has actually added to the debt, one fact is largely undisputed: ol' Ron added more to the debt than any recent president.


So.... we're talking endlessly about Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. But not about two more significant Republicans who aren't running--the one who's never mentioned, and the one who never really existed, Mr. Reality and Mr. Fantasy.

How Obama Plans to Win: the "3 a.m. strategy"

Irony of ironies: the very quality that Hillary Clinton raised fundamental doubts about in 2008--Obama's readiness to be commander-in-chief-- is now going to be a key element of his re-election campaign. And why not? After all, Obama really can't run on the economy....

From the opening to my cover story this week:

You can almost read the script back to them before they say it. (It’s a hackneyed script, after all.) Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich slam President Obama for his weakness on foreign policy. Democrats are, we know, always weenies. Republicans are always tough guys. National security is our issue: GOP, sole proprietor. The lines come naturally: “If we reelect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon. If you elect me … Iran will not,” Romney declared at one of the early debates. He has called Obama an appeaser who apologizes for America, saying that it’s wrong for the president to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan. He denounced Obama’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq as “a naked political calculation or simply sheer ineptitude in negotiations.” Gingrich, meanwhile, has declared that Obama is “so weak that he makes Jimmy Carter look strong.” The former House speaker has castigated the president for postponing military exercises with the Israelis (even though it was the Israelis who asked for the delay). And, deploying his usual apocalyptic rhetoric, he regularly calls Obama “the most dangerous president in our lifetime.”

No one expects foreign policy to be a major issue in a campaign that hinges mainly on the fate of America’s beleaguered economy (unless something really big, like a war with Iran, happens between now and November). Nonetheless, in an election expected to be very close, the public’s perception of who makes a better commander in chief could be the difference. The “3 a.m.” test—that emergency phone call—helps voters decide whom they want to depend on in a crisis. (Ironically, it was Hillary Rodham Clinton who raised this question as a criticism of Obama in 2008.) That’s especially true considering what Republicans have said they’ll do overseas if elected: confront Iran even more aggressively, refuse to leave Afghanistan, return to Iraq. Romney even suggested that the United States should attack Iran to destroy a captured drone; Rick Santorum has called outright for war against that Islamic republic.

Accordingly, the Obama camp spies a big electoral opportunity. With only a middling case that the president’s economic record qualifies him for a second term, the White House and Obama’s Chicago-based campaign staff are preparing a careful effort to cast him as the most impressive Democratic president on national security in decades, National Journal has learned. They are eager to restore Democrats to a time before the Vietnam War, when Americans viewed the party as relatively strong on foreign policy and national security. And more, harking back to Lyndon Johnson’s effective 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater as a warmonger, they will try to use the extreme GOP rhetoric to remind the electorate of another Republican whom the GOP would prefer to forget: George W. Bush.

Despite the GOP candidates’ derision, many Republican foreign-policy professionals—some of whom worked for Bush 43—agree that the 44th president has been impressive on these issues overall. They say that he should get credit in areas that go well beyond the takedown of Osama bin Laden (and most of his top lieutenants). They cite Obama’s effort to squeeze Iran in the last year. And the way the president has refocused diplomatic and military resources to constrain—but not “contain,” which sounds a beat too aggressive—China. And the dexterous way he has used force to fight terrorism. And the way he helped oust Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi without a single American casualty. (With cover from NATO and the Arab League, it might have been the least costly and most internationally supported policy of regime change in U.S. history.) “I would regard this as the most capable and purposeful Democratic administration in foreign policy since John F. Kennedy’s,” says Philip Zelikow, a senior counselor to Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s secretary of State.

That’s a telling comparison. Kennedy looms larger in myth than in actual achievement, but he gets credit for standing down Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis, and he was assassinated before he could make a decision on whether to ramp up in Vietnam. Most important, however, he was the last Democratic president before his party’s reputation in foreign policy suffered a long-term blow in Vietnam. That quagmire helped persuade President Johnson not to run for reelection in 1968. President Carter also suffered from a fatal perception of weakness that culminated in the Iran hostage crisis and the disastrous Desert One rescue mission. President Clinton fares better in posterity, and he grew more comfortable with using power toward the end of his second term, especially after his early misfire in Somalia, where 18 Army Rangers were killed in another failed rescue attempt. But Republicans saw Clinton’s cautious air attacks on Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as squeamish and criticized his reluctance to go after bin Laden in Afghanistan.

Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, told National Journal that the administration will seek to portray the president as a dependable and confidence-inspiring commander in chief. “In so far as character is an issue, many ways in which he’s excelled speak to this issue: the ability to make tough decisions; to show grace under pressure,” Rhodes said. 

How Davos Promotes Income Inequality

I haven't been to Davos in years, but I used to go regularly for Newsweek in the 1990s and early 2000s, and reading David Ignatius's latest about the "disconnected elites" who gather every year at that isolated Swiss ski resort  reminded me of the horrified fascination I used to feel upon mingling with them. What's especially odd, as Ignatius puts it, is "the way in which the elite networking [Davos] represents has unintentionally worked to undermine social cohesion in the larger world." Over the years it became clear that it was because of in-bred forums like this that globalization proceeded in such a deluded way, chock full of Pollyannish promises a la Thomas L. Friedman, and the emerging problems of inequality of both income and opportunity were not given enough weight. On his TV show today, against the snowy backdrop of Davos, Fareed Zakaria termed the little berg where he and his fellow super-elites bathe and jacuzzi themselves in mutual love and admiration a "global public square," but that too is pretty silly and clueless. For one thing, we don't normally get nude protests in most public squares. Davos is a public square for billionaires and the intellectuals who feed off of them, and little more. From a piece I wrote from Davos in 2001:

Bill Gates, perhaps the most iconic capitalist of our times, began to get disillusioned in the late ‘90s. Ten years earlier, Gates had been one of the hard, glittery men of capitalism. When asked what he would do with his billions in the early ‘90s, the boy wonder of Redmond used to shrug off the question, saying his long work days didn’t leave time for charity and that, in any case, all people needed to prosper were the right skills. But by 2001 he and his wife Melinda were running the world’s largest charitable foundation, sending billions of dollars to Africa to provide vaccines in impoverished villages, and Gates was contemptuously dismissing the idea that exporting his beloved computer culture might make a difference in such down-and-out places.

In an interview, I asked Gates whether the systemic failures that began jutting forth in the late ‘90s, like rocks from a draining lake, had changed his confidence in the system. First he gave a Churchillian response, saying that he couldn’t think of any good alternatives to capitalsm. But then he expressed exasperation with his fellow elites, and by implication with “Washington Consensus” policy-makers. "The thing that’s most surprised me is why aren’t more people  exposed to the gross inequalities that exist,” he said. “If they were exposed they would act politically and financially.”

Gates had it right. This walled-off tendency, which for free-marketers began in the ivory towers of academe and then extended to the sequestered offices of the Treasury and Fed and the trading pits of Wall Street, reached a kind of symbolic climax in the ‘90s with the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

For years, the annual meeting in the tiny Swiss mountain village--the inspiration of an obscure Swiss professor named Klaus Schwab-- has been a living monument to globalization. Or what its elites thought of as globalization. The Davos crowd is an odd, dazzling collection of sober central bankers, rising and falling political stars, of big brains and big-pocketed billionaires, who formed an elite club circling like a star belt around the planet. During the annual meeting, they gather at the  Congress Center, a sprawling, gray-cement structure at the center of town, whose every staircase and hallway is an artery for schmoozing. Networkers set up power trysts by email, attend a barrage of parties and dinners, and enjoy the snow, skiing and spartan Swiss aesthetic. Above all, Davosians love the planned serendipity you can  get only from drawing A-listers together from around the world.

It is quite the power trip. But I would argue that it was because of self-absorbed forums like this—not Davos alone, but the idea of Davos--that globalization became so inbred, so one-dimensional. It is because of the Davos mindset that the elite of the Washington Consensus never saw the backlash against globalization until it was upon them. It is because of mutually reinforcing discussions at forums like Davos, with their mild dissents uttered diplomatically at dinner, that economists so confidently imposed a one-size-fits-all standard on transitioning economies.

At the 2001 meeting, hundreds of anti-globalization protesters ascended the magic mountain. Swiss police hosed them down and blocked roads into and out of Davos — at one point even shutting down the ski funicular to avert an attack from the mountains — while in Switzerland’s major cities, anti-globalist protesters ran amok in the streets, doing millions of dollars in damage to store windows and cars. Yet inside the Congress Center the schmoozing and networking went on, unmolested. I remember marveling that here, in one of the famously cut-off countries in the world, there existed a separate bubble world, itself wholly isolated. One doesn’t get much more divorced from reality than that.

Bottom line: Almost nothing has changed in the decade since then.

---

That's One Small Step for Mitt, One Giant Fall for Newt-kind

After the onslaught against Newt Gingrich in recent days from GOP establishment figures revealing how hated he really is, and then last night's debate, I'd say Newt  has a better chance of being elected governor of America's 51^st state--the Moon, presumably--than he does of getting to the White House.

In the Florida debate on CNN, it wasn't just that a tanned and confident Mitt Romney got the better of every exchange with Newt, at a time when Romney had begun surging ahead in the polls. (OMG, that's far too journalistically polite: he tore him to pieces!) Or that an inordinate amount of time was spent on Gingrich's loony idea of setting up a moon colony in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, reminding one and all of a trait that Gingrich was boasting about earlier today but which he didn't seem eager to bring up again: his "grandiosity."

The main problem for Gingrich was the complete absence of the fiery, base-rallying Newt that got him here in the first place. You can't take on the establishment of your own party if people are constantly being reminded -- by Mitt Romney, Bob Dole and most of your former House allies who despise you -- that you were part of the establishment yourself. It's just that they rejected you.

Gingrich sounded peevish and defensive the whole night and barely landed a punch on Romney as the latter floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee. Whether the subject was Romney's taxes, his conservatism or even Romneycare--all badly tender spots for Mitt in past debates--Gingrich passed up chances to attack. (Rick Santorum, by contrast, was brutally effective once again in making the case that in an Obama-vs.-Romney race, Mitt would not be able to sufficiently distinguish himself as an alternative, that the president could simply turn to Mitt and say, "You say your plan worked in Massachusetts. So why not for the country?")

Romney's best line, perhaps, came over the lunar -- and loony -- portion of the debate. If one of his subordinates proposed spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a moon colony in the midst of all the needs "down here," Romney said, "I'd fire him." Gingrich mainly smiled a lot, shifted uncomfortably, whined about tough Romney ads (as he once did in Iowa before getting trounced there), and trotted out his familiar "repeal, repeal, repeal" spiel.

Gingrich's few counterattacks were feeble, barely noticed and easily parried. He often didn't make sense at all. When asked about his attacks on Romney's taxes and wealth, he responded that he was happy to say that on TV in an interview, but not in a national debate. Huh? When he sought to sully Romney over his investment links to Goldman Sachs and its foreclosures, Romney's retort that his investments were "blind trusts," while Newt's were not, went unanswered.

Maybe the best evidence that Romney sees himself as back on top was that, midway through the debate, he became the first one to attack Obama's State of the Union speech on Tuesday, saying if he's elected all those "promises" will be kept. His closing peroration--why he's the one person to be beat Obama--at least had a clear theme: to fix Washington, you've got to bring someone in "who's been on the outside."

Gingrich has had an extraordinary yo-yo-like spell as candidate--and he looks like he may be down at the end of his string once again. I'd be surprised if he makes it back up again.

Newt Goes Grandiose--And We Get Even More Scared

There is something quintessentially Newtish about Gingrich's gleeful embrace of the word "grandiose" on the campaign trail in Florida today. On one hand it is evidence of one of Newt's great strengths, that debater's agility at taking a criticism and redirecting it at his questioner. BAM! In this case it was Rick Santorum who, at the Jan. 19 debate in South Carolina, declared that "grandiosity has never been a problem with Newt Gingrich" and went on to question whether he was reality-based and stable enough to be president. Newt just smiled and said, "You're right, I think grandiose thoughts .... I spent 16 years on a grandiose project called creating a Republican majority in the House."

Then he trounced Santorum in the primary.

Vying for the lead a week later in Florida, Gingrich has decided to paste the word across his ample abdomen. Now, apparently, he's the G-Man. At Cocoa, on Florida's "Space Coast," he declared: "I accept the charge--I am American and Americans are instinctively grandiose."  Gingrich then proposed a permanent moon base by 2020 (without saying how he would pay for it, of course, at a time when he and his fellow Republicans want to cut education and public services here on Earth).

Even more grandiosely, he compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, Orville and Wilbur Wright, and John F. Kennedy.

But in running with the word, Gingrich is also willfully ignoring its pejorative sense --which has gradually come to be the more accepted connotation, says Ben Zimmer, a linguist who formerly authored the "On Language" column at the New York Times and chairs the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. That is to say, to be "grandiose" means one is delusional about one's importance, and exhibits behavior "characterized by affectation of grandeur or splendor or by absurd exaggeration," according to Merriam-Webster.

The word, says Zimmer, "has swung towards the negative [meaning] because grandiosity now has a specific meaning in the mental health literature." According to the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, grandiosity is a disorder indicating "an unrealistic sense of superiority, a sustained view of oneself as better than others that causes the narcissist to view others with disdain or as inferior. It also refers to a sense of uniqueness, the belief that few others have anything in common with oneself and that one can only be understood by a few or very special people."

The term grandiose first appeared in the 1994 edition of the manual to describe a "narcissistic personality disorder."

Isn't there something quintessentially Newtish about that too?

Nancy Friedman, a linguistic blogger, noted recently that "when grandiosity and grandiose entered English dictionaries, around 1840, the words already had both positive and negative connotations. As time went on, the disparaging meanings prevailed. George Eliot wrote in Daniel Deronda (1876) of a character's "grandiose air.'"

Now we have a new character on the scene with a grandiose air. As Zimmer says, Gingrich's unabashed use of the word to describe himself "is in itself a kind of grandiosity."

Uh huh. Just the kind of guy we want to be president, after the neocons. After a decade of economic hubris and pretensions of power that hurled the nation into the worst crisis since the 1930s and cost the blood of tens of thousands of Americans wounded, maimed and killed.

Uh huh.

Obama Discovers the Skills Mismatch Problem

I was snoozing politely through the State of the Union--a speech that has become so broad-brushed over the years it ought to be called  the State of the Known Universe--when I abruptly heard Obama mention a place and a company I'd written about last summer: Charlotte, N.C., where Siemens has started up a German-style apprenticeship program as a way of addressing the acute "skills mismatch" problem that has dragged down recovery.

Noting casually that he hears "from many business leaders who want to hire in the United States but can’t find workers with the right skills," Obama introduced Jackie Bray,  "a single mom from North Carolina who was laid off from her job as a mechanic.  Then Siemens opened a gas turbine factory in Charlotte, and formed a partnership with Central Piedmont Community College.  The company helped the college design courses in laser and robotics training.  It paid Jackie’s tuition, then hired her to help operate their plant."

What he didn't say was that Siemens did this on its own initiative, without any federal money or help, and was taking its cue from its parent company in Germany. Just imagine if Obama--under fire from Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich for wanting to turn America into Europe--had mentioned that. As Fawn Johnson and I reported in that Aug. 3 story in National Journal,

"Siemens is launching a new strategy that draws on a very old practice from its parent company in Germany: apprenticeships. In Charlotte, N.C., where Siemens is building the nation’s largest gas-turbine plant and hopes to hire some 800 people next year, the company is opening a pilot program that will pluck non-college-track seniors from nearby Olympic High School; Siemens will pay them an hourly wage to work part-time and will also pay their way through a two-year college program at nearby Central Piedmont Community College."

Three years into a nonrecovery recovery, Obama is asking Congress to "join me in a national commitment to train 2 million Americans with skills that will lead directly to a job." A Congress committed to stymieing every new program.


Maybe there is something to European-style economics after all. 

Contemplating a President Gingrich

Here's why Barack Obama really needs to nail his State of the Union speech tonight--and every other speech he delivers for the next ten months. Because he may be going up against one of the Great Talkers of our Time.

Almost anyone who's covered Newt Gingrich for any number of years--I have since the '90s--has found it  difficult to imagine that the country is so pathologically bent out of shape that Newt could end up as president. Not when we can often hardly believe our ears at some of the things that come out of his often eloquent but almost always ungoverned mouth. Not when even some of his closest aides and GOP allies from the time of his Speakership -- Dick Armey, Tom Delay, among others -- have joined his ex-wife Marianne in suggesting that Newt doesn't have the character for the job, that he is too unstable and "volatile" (wasn't that Rick Santorum's term, he of the even-handed world view?).

But maybe we really should think about the prospect of a Gingrich presidency, simply by default. The first reason was the appearance of Calm, Reasonable Newt at last night's debate in Florida. Obviously Gingrich and his handlers have agreed he will need to suppress his true extreme self if he's to get to the White House. Expect to see Calm, Reasonable Newt vying with Real Newt for control of his mouth for the rest of the race.

The second reason is that it's no longer deniable that Mitt Romney has a political tin ear for the ages, and that what once seemed a golden resume has turned toxic. Especially with his tax returns revealing that he's not just one of the "1 percent," but one of the one-one-hundredth of one percent, the chief beneficiary of what Warren Buffett called our "billionaire-friendly Congress." Among his fellow patricians, Mitt is so out of touch he makes George H.W. Bush look like a man who really did eat pork rinds and knew what it was like to stand on supermarket checkout lines.

Think about it: with his candidacy seemingly on the line last night in Florida--poll numbers show Newt in the lead--and facing a must-do challenge to set to rest suspicions that he is "insufficiently conservative," Romney could only bring himself to declare, "I have a record," before immediately tearing off on a wild tangent that showed mainly that he doesn't seem to understand the question. Romney responded that he had "the fun of running against Ted Kennedy," who "had to take a mortgage out on his house to make sure he could defeat me."

Uhh, that was supposed to be a joke, I think, a throwaway witticism. But it does seem to demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that Romney, who thinks Americans can "fire" their health care providers, and who just wants to let "the market" work itself out from historically unprecedented underwater mortgage debt induced by massive securities fraud, does not really dwell among his fellow Americans.

At a time when more than ten million homeowners remain unable to get out from underneath mortgages that have more value than their homes, following a devastating Wall Street-induced housing bubble that remains a vast dead weight on the economy, this proud Wall Streeter is now saying: "I'm so wonderfully rich and possess so much untaxed wealth to spend on getting myself elected that even a wealthy Kennedy had to join common Americans and put himself into debt to take me on."

"And //that's// why I'm sufficiently conservative."

From a reasonable "Massachusetts moderate" who could appeal to the center and to independents, Mitt is turning into a somewhat addled Herbert Hoover Republican. Which is making Gingrich, old 35-percent-taxable Newt, look like the people's choice by comparison.

Just playing out the possibilities here. There is still a lot of race to go, Romney still has to be seen as the favorite despite everything because of money and organization, and it's hard to imagine that Gingrich will not blow himself up in his usual manner, by uttering some piece of apocalyptic rhetoric that reveals, yet again, that he thinks the Moon is made of Green Cheese.  (He did slip back into his true Newtness for a moment last night when he declared that Americans want "someone who is prepared to be controversial." No, actually, Americans want someone who will keep them safe, free and prosperous.)

But we do need to start wondering seriously whether we could end up with a President Gingrich. The economic numbers, while improving, remain so grim that one must still think that Barack Obama is going up against election odds that have not favored incumbents in the past, no matter who is the opposing party nominee.

OMG.

Mitt's About to Become Newt Romney

By prolonging the GOP primary season with a strong come-from-behind win in South Carolina -- one that exposed new and serious doubts about Mitt Romney -- Newt Gingrich has almost certainly increased the general-election chances of the man he calls "the most dangerous president of our lifetime," Barack Obama. 

That's because, as my colleague Reid Wilson has argued, Romney must still be considered the "overwhelming front-runner" for the Republican nomination. But the former governor is fumbling badly in the race. Now, to counter Gingrich's surge and frontal assault against him as a  "Massachusetts moderate," Romney has no choice but to lurch even further rightward (something he'll need to do also to sell his record at Bain Capital more effectively).

Taken together with a new set of GOP primary rules that allocate delegates proportionally rather than in a winner-takes-all distribution until April -- except for Florida -- this means Romney will need to stake out positions that are far more Gingrich-like and thus less appealing to centrists and independents in the general election.

And Romney is already pushing the envelope on that trend, sowing doubt among those in the center who were considering him as an alternative to Obama.

He has virtually threatened war with Iran, and suggested that he would keep troops indefinitely in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He has continued run away at full speed from his signature achievement in Massachusetts, health care reform, and to insist, contrary to the facts, that Obama "thinks the best way to get health-care costs down is to have the federal government take it over" and run it like "Amtrak and the post office," even though Obama gave up on the public option very early.

His rhetoric, in other words, was already getting more and more Newtonian, and now you can expect it to go even further to the right. 

That spells trouble in November. Gingrich still has very low favorability ratings and the mistrust of the general public -- worse numbers, in fact, than Obama. As Romney strives to become more like Newt, he may end up looking a lot less like a president.

Newt Is Clearly Debater-in-Chief, But President? Please....

OK, let's stipulate the obvious: Newt is everything he said he was. He's a superb debater. He really could take on Barack Obama in a "Lincoln-Douglas debate," and he might even win. Gingrich's preemptive assault last night on John King, CNN and the media in general over his ex-wife Marianne's salacious allegations was nothing short of brilliant. It was a classic Gingrichian descent into rhetorical overreach -- King's decision to make Newt's second marriage the first question in the 17th GOP debate was "as close to despicable as anything I can imagine," Newt declared (Anything? Really, Newt?) -- but, man, was it effective.

"I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country harder to attract decent people to run for office," Gingrich said to cheers from the rabidly right crowd. "I'm appalled you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that."

His attack neutralized the issue as effectively as could be done--at least for the night. We'll find out Saturday whether South Carolina Republican voters hate the news media even more than than they do Newt's infidelities, and his surge in the polls continues.

But let's face it: the ex-wife allegations are just another addition to a mountain of "baggage" that Gingrich brings with him (as that  Romney Super PAC ad  in Iowa put it).  Debating skills may keep you in the game (or disqualify you if you lack them, like Rick Perry), but they have little to do with the requirements of character and temperament  in a president.   There is a reason why the people who are most fearful of a Gingrich presidency are not just an ex-wife like Marianne, who says he lacks the moral character to be in the White House, but some of his closest aides and Republican confederates from the past, who whisper that he is capable of doing or saying almost anything, and shifting position without a moment's self-doubt.

At the debate last night, Gingrich's former colleague in the Republican caucus, Rick Santorum, was not whispering this stuff. Santorum, desperate to catch up with conservative voters, was suggesting out loud what those who know Newt best say behind his back: he's just not stable. With Gingrich, said Santorum, you never know when you're going to reach "that worrisome moment" when "something's going to pop."  "I don't want a nominee that I have to worry about going out and looking at the paper the next day and figuring out what is he -- worrying about what he's going to say next," Santorum said.

Almost no one noticed when Gingrich closed the debate by calling Obama "the most dangerous president of our lifetime." It was just so typically Newtonian, completely over the top. Again, one must say, "Really, Newt?"

Rick Perry: Requiem for a Lightweight

There is a sympathetic case to be made for Rick Perry's spectacular flameout along the lines once suggested by my colleague Ron Brownstein: Perry simply never had a chance to learn and grow as a presidential candidate. In the old days, before the internet and social media and 24-hour cable, would-be presidential contenders could make their rookie errors in relative anonymity in town halls in Iowa or New Hampshire, away from the blaze of the national media. Even Mitt Romney had four years to get it right after his error-strewn bid in 2008 (and he's still not quite there yet).

Perry, by contrast, was thrust immediately onto the national stage in the first GOP debate, as the first Great Red Hope alternative to Romney. And not surprisingly, he began failing immediately.

But the larger problem was that Perry never did grow into the role, 16 debates and two primary states later. And as much as GOP voters still hunger for a Not-Mitt-Who's-Not-Newt, even they quickly realized that Perry just wasn't presidential timber. He simply could not recover. Perry's "oops" moment in November--his brain freeze when he tried to remember which federal agencies he planned to cut--will go down with Dan Quayle's misspelling of "potato" as one of the most disastrous disqualifying episodes in modern presidential history.

And he continued to have "oops" moments, each a more embarrassing revelation of his ignorance than the last. At Monday night's debate in South Carolina, Perry declared that Turkey, one of America's most important allies (and a country that will be even more crucial to U.S. national interests in the future; read Zbigniew Brzezinski's forthcoming book, "Strategic Vision," for the reasons why), was governed by "Islamic terrorists." He blundered jingoistically in defending the Marines who had urinated on Taliban bodies, offending even the military. He asserted that the government must get out of the housing market and "free up Wall Street," even as mortgages remain underwater to a record degree, and even as he lambasted Romney for being a "vulture" capitalist.

Nothing seemed to add up, because it was clear that Perry himself wasn't connecting enough dots in his own head to add up to anything like a vision of how the country, or the economy, or the world, works. And let's face it: Perry had a larger burden of proof, considering that he was another Texas governor who was following in the footsteps of one of the most disastrously unready presidents in American history. 

A Perry aide, speaking to my colleague Alex Roarty today, basically conceded that Perry was simply not prepared for the rigors of the campaign trail. "You can run Texas all you want; it doesn't help you prepare to answer questions about Turkish terrorists," he said.

All of which points up, yet again, the central problem facing the Republican Party today: it doesn't much like Romney--and perhaps likes him even less now considering what he didn't pay in taxes--but can't seem to find an alternative who's qualified to be president.

The question now, with Rick Santorum seeming to fade, is whether GOP voters will decide the same thing about Newt. You're on, Marianne. 

A Test of OWS: Who will win the election, the plutocrat (Romney) or the appeaser (Obama)?

Mitt Romney is going to spend a lot of time--much more than he had anticipated--defending himself in the general election over Bain Capital and the freshly acknowledged low-tax rate he's been paying (about 15 percent) while amassing a $250 million fortune. The attacks will come from Obama, who will position himself as the champion of the middle class and the OWS movement. The irony is that, as I've written repeatedly and go into considerable detail about in my book, Capital Offense, Obama has done little but appease Wall Street under the ministrations of Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. But compared to Romney, he's Mother Teresa.

Romney is just too easy a target. Like many Wall Streeters (Jamie Dimon, for example), he doesn't seem to understand why he's so disliked.  At the Tuesday news conference at which he revealed, under pressure, his tax rate, the GOP's presumptive nominee also jovially mentioned that he earns "speaker's fees from time to time, but not very much." The "not very much" turns out to be more than $360,000 in one year, according to USA Today--a sum that by itself would put him in the top income bracket. (Maybe that's why he has $10,000 to stake in casual bets with Rick Perry.) Beyond that, Congress's whole point in granting such low tax rates to investment income like Romney's (through a device called "carried interest") is to create jobs. Yet Romney can't say even now whether Bain created or destroyed more net jobs during his time there, as Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post has pointed out. 

Romney's biggest problem is that, as both the OWS and tea-party movements indicate, much of the country is still incensed over the inequality of income and corruption of capitalism that a bailed-out Wall Street has come to symbolize. The anger against financial plutocrats is perhaps greater than any time since the 1930s. 

It's not so much the kind of activities that Romney and Bain were specifically engaged in. Bain may sometimes destroy jobs, but when it fails at a venture, at least it loses money. Firms like Bain  also go bankrupt. Unlike the coddled Wall Street banks -- the elite among the elite -- who no longer have to follow the rules of capitalism.   

Yet the public may no longer be interested in making the distinction between Wall Street firms that follow the rules and those that don't--and that's what could mean trouble for Mitt. Gingrich and Rick Perry's case against Bain in South Carolina has resonated largely because of Wall Street's offenses over the last decade with subprime mortgage securitization.

The issue here is not really about the ordinary "rough and tumble of market capitalism," as the Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib suggested at the GOP debate Monday night. Most Americans don't have a problem with that. As I've said previously, the issue is really the CORRUPTION of market capitalism represented by the massive fraud that Wall Street banks got away with, for which they were then bailed out by the federal government with no questions asked. All this has aggravated, for average Americans, the frustration they already feel because of the record levels of income inequality that exist in our economy. 

That's why the public is likely to get its dander about  Romney's 15 percent. It is an issue that unites conservatives and liberals, OWS protesters and tea partiers alike. As I wrote in Capital Offense, both the Left and the Right were justifiably offended by the way the American system of capitalism---real capitalism, that is, the way it's supposed to work --- was subverted during the subprime era. Liberals were appalled by the rampant destruction of social equity, and the rigged way so much wealth was amassed in the hands of the 1 percent; conservatives were outraged that the system didn't work the way it was supposed to: in other words, if you fail, you die.

So Romney's biggest problem may not be his robotic campaign style, or the tin ear that lead him to bet Perry $10,000 (presumably at low tax rates) at one point. His biggest problem may be his golden resume. He was clearly part of the problem--as much as Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and some of the other "mechanics" that Obama brought in to fix things--so it stands to reason  that Romney will have a hard time persuading the public he's the solution.  

Is Obama Trying to Out-Romney Romney--Already?

Whatever the real reason for the timing, it's interesting that President Obama decided that this week was the moment--when consensus is gelling that Mitt Romney is the all-but-inevitable GOP nominee--to announce a very Romney-esque cost-cutting plan.


At a White House event complete with business CEOs as props and a slide presentation (the kind Bain Capital once perfected), the president urged Congress to give him the power to merge a plethora of trade and commerce functions that are now dispersed among the Commerce Department, the Small Business Administration, the U.S. Trade Representative, the Export-Import Bank; the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and the Trade and Development Agency. The consolidation would save some $3 billion and 1,000 to 2,000 jobs over ten years, the White House said.


It was, in other words, precisely the kind of government-slashing exercise that Romney, the numbers-whiz-consultant-turned-governor-turned-candidate, has been promising we'll get from him as president. To be fair, Obama had promised such a move in his last State of the Union address, and the next SOTU is fast approaching. But one wonders whether this will be the first in a series of moves intended to convey to voters: you don't need Mitt Romney. You've already got me.


As I've previously posted, Obama and Romney are probably far more alike than different in mindset, and that's about a lot more than common Harvard degrees and a penchant for universal health care (Romneycare was, of course, a model for Obamacare). Obama, despite his image, has sought to placate business and left Wall Street largely intact, and he is taking a far tougher line on foreign policy--one that reflects a traditional GOP "realpolitik" view and a dramatic ratcheting up of covert war-- than is generally acknowledged, even when it comes to China.


Romney, increasingly desperate to win over his base against the onslaught of "Not-Romneys," has allowed his rhetoric to grow more inflamed on the trail, including commitments to a balanced-budget amendment and partially voucherizing Medicare as well as eliminating Obamacare. But based on his history, if he gets the nomination he is unlikely to follow through fully on these overheated pre-primary pledges and do many things dramatically differently, either on the economy or foreign policy. The problems of slow growth, chronic deficits and an overextended military will inevitably lend themselves to similar solutions from either an Obama or a Romney administration.


Now Obama is trying his hand at management consulting, all by way of saying there's no reason to change horses in midstream after all folks.   

Barbarians at the Gate? No, Just Bain Capital

Newt's now-notorious film airing in South Carolina about the predatory practices of Bain Capital is, of course, way over the top (and point him up to be, yet again, the consummate hypocrite, since he inveighed righteously in Iowa against negative Super PAC ads). Bain is, like all private equity firms, a tamer descendant of the barbarians-at-the-gate era, the swashbuckling predators of the leveraged-buyout '80s. Bain does big bad takeovers, and fires people, but make no mistake: Bain is no KKR, and Mitt Romney is no T. Boone Pickens, as Mark Maremont of the WSJ pointed out the other day.

Gingrich and Rick Perry--he of the "vulture" accusations--are as usual fairly clueless about the charges they are making (both still think Fannie and Freddie were to blame for the subprime disaster, and Perry even believes that our troubles would end if only we "free up" Wall Street). Firms like Bain often do destroy companies but that is not the real problem, because when a Bain fails at a venture, at least it pays its dues, or sometimes goes bankrupt.  The more important point is that this is not true of others on Wall Street, especially the biggest banks that got us into this mess. Indeed, the reason that what Gingrich and Perry are saying resonates somewhat--and that they are so tempted to take this populist, anti-Wall Street message to South Carolina -- goes back to the Street's offenses over the last decade with subprime mortgage securitization.

No, the issue here is not really about "the rough and tumble of market capitalism," as the Wall Street Journal wrote today. This is about the CORRUPTION of market capitalism. It is an issue that in fact unites conservatives and liberals, OWS protesters and tea partiers alike. As I wrote in Capital Offense, both the Left and the Right were justifiably offended by the way the American system and capitalism itself---real capitalism, that is, the way it's supposed to work --- were subverted by the institutionalized fraud of the subprime era as well as the no-questions-asked bailout that followed. Liberals were appalled by the rampant destruction of social equity, and the rigged way so much wealth was amassed in the hands of the 1 percent; conservatives were outraged that the system didn't work the way it was supposed to: if you fail, you die.

And that is why the anti-Bain diatribes may gain some traction.

Why Republicans Failed to Find A Not-Mitt

OK, let's stop the pretense. Mitt Romney is going to be the GOP nominee, and the general election has begun. The real question now is: How did an ever-rightward-leaning party that has been searching desperately for the latest incarnation of Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan--an authentic conservative--end up with one of the most inauthentic Republicans in recent memory? One answer is that even GOP voters realized that none of the other candidates was remotely qualified to be president, with the possible exception of the suspiciously moderate (but fatally conflicted, given his service as Obama's ambassador to China) Jon Huntsman, and that Obama would demolish them in the general election. The other answer is that only Romney had the organization and the money to win.


The desperate search of conservatives for one of their own continues. But the more telling reason for the anointing of Mitt Romney is that Republicans don't really know who they want to be, despite the tea party movement and record polarization in the electorate. The party has not settled on a common agenda beyond  the primitivist impulse to roll back government. Polls consistently show that Republicans are mainly interested in cutting //other// people's entitlements, not their own. On  foreign policy, the tensions between the old neocon camp (best manifested by Santorum), the traditionalists (like Romney and Huntsman) and the old GOP libertarian-isolationist view (Paul) remain completely unresolved within the party: have you ever seen a more confused and less united response to any foreign policy than the various debate comments that came out of the GOP candidates about Obama's Libya intervention?


What will make this general election particularly depressing is that Democrats don't really know who they want to be any more either. There is deep suspicion about the moral and practical failings of Big Government, as I've previously posted.  Obama is a left-leaning centrist, and Romney is a right-leaning centrist, but they are probably more alike than different, starting with the similar thinking that went into Romneycare in Massachusetts and Obamacare nationally. Romney's vague victory speech in New Hampshire -- in which he talked absurdly about the difference between Obama the European-style socialist (I defy anyone to find Obama on the record saying he wants to emulate Europe; why would he?) and Romney the freedom-loving Americanist -- gave us no clues whatever about any real differences between them. 

So the rhetoric over the next ten months will be stark; the reality will be stultifying. Neither base--liberal or conservative--has a champion in sight. Which is what will make this election one of the most cynical and money-driven ever. Which means Wall Street and Super PAC money will likely be the decisive factors. The Bain Capital candidate meets the return of the Rubinite president. The vote will be close--but so will the alternative agendas of a Romney presidency or an Obama second term. 

Do Economists Finally Get It? Why Our Labor and Mortgage Markets AREN'T Clearing

If the Wall Street Journal is to be believed, there was a shift in thinking at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in Chicago. America's top economists are coming around to the view that the labor market is not simply going to "clear" this time around; the long-term unemployment problem is probably a lot worse for the country than the high unemployment rate (8.5 percent); and a whole generation of workers, especially older ones, is simply not going to be rehired despite the desperate desire of many of them to get work. According to the WSJ: "The risk, economists say, is that the U.S. will develop an underclass of semipermanently unemployed workers, with severe consequences for productivity, public finances and even social stability."


Now you tell us. This is the problem I described in my article, The Left-Behinds, back in November: created by 30 years of shamanistic thinking about markets--thanks to economists and policymakers alike-- a new American underclass is growing at an alarming rate, built on what’s left of the middle class.  "We just never had this problem before," Betsey Stevenson, until recently the Labor Department's chief economist, told me in an interview Monday. "A problem of millions of people who are potentially quite productive and have been out of work through no fault of their own for a long period of time."


In truth, long-term unemployment has been like a slowly growing cancer over three decades. It's only now getting noticed. The share of left-behinds has generally ratcheted up with every economic downturn since the early 1980s, when the era of deregulation and globalization--and reduced government support for the job-dispossessed--began under Ronald Reagan. Today, two and a half years after the Great Recession technically ended in June 2009, the number of long-term jobless has continued to climb to record levels. It shot up from 29.3 percent of total unemployed workers in June 2009 and peaked at 44.6 percent as recently as September. The Labor Department has not seen numbers like this since it began tabulating data in 1948.



Did all this have to happen? Was it inevitable? A whole generation of economists and trade experts and policy makers, including both Republican and Democratic presidents, have told us in effect that it was -- that there was little we could do about the advent of globalization and the open-market system, so we might as well get used to it. It was a sense of fatalism, shot through with American hubris that we’d somehow come out on top in the end anyway, without any additional social protections. It infected both political parties, beginning with Bill Clinton. Those who second-guessed this wisdom were branded protectionists and driven from the discussion. 

Washington, dominated by a free-market consensus ever since the Reagan era, has ignored this 30-year pattern. One mistake appeared to lead another. As America lost manufacturing (down to 9 percent of the economy today) and the ability to make things, economists began to talk up the “services economy,” and America’s best “service” was finance. This led to what renegade Republican Kevin Philips, in a series of highly regarded books over the last decade, has described as the the “mega-expansion” of Wall Street, deepening the hold that America’s “plutocracy” has on politics. It was also the beginning of an era of permissiveness to give Wall Street what it wanted, no questions asked. After all, Wall Street was one of our great "export" sectors, as Larry Summers and the other ex-Rubinites never tired of saying.

We have listened to Summers and other economists for three decades as if they were scientists when they have behaved more like shamans.

Now there are millions of workers who are dropping out of the workforce--some 3.9 million have been unemployed for a year or more. And we have almost no programs in place to help them, as my colleague Fawn Johnson and I documented last summer. Republicans are so delusional about the market totem that they actually want to cut Pell grants and other support programs. Democrats just seem clueless.

I'm still waiting for a similar light to go off when it comes to underwater mortgages, and the need for government programs to take large numbers of foreclosed homes off the markets and pressure banks to reduce principal so other homeowners can become active consumers again. Here too, as I previously posted, economists and government have been pretending that this is a natural market condition that markets will cure, when they won't. You need intelligent government intervention, just as you do with the long-term unemployed.

The lesson is the same: the dominant paradigm in Washington must be overturned.

(Picture credit: http://www.politifake.org/image/political/1009/mission-accomplished-trickle-up-poverty-team-update-political-poster-1284666991.jpg)

New Job Numbers Highlight Long-term trend: No Diploma, No Luck

The new jobs report ticking the unemployment rate down to 8.5 percent is pretty good--but as Betsey Stevenson, the Labor Dept's former chief economist, pointed out, it continues a grim long-term trend: almost all the gains came in the college-educated sector of the economy. There was a gain of 301,000 jobs for peole with some college and above, a loss of 204,000 for those only with high school diplomas and below.

As we wrote last August: "Since the start of the recovery, the economy has created something like 1.5 million to 2 million net new jobs, and of these the vast majority have been 'high-skilled,'" says Susan Lund, head of research for the McKinsey Global Institute. The most recent population survey by the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics offered this striking contrast: Since the recovery began producing jobs in January 2010, the United States has suffered a net loss of 500,000 jobs among people with high school diplomas or less, but a net gain of 1.2 million jobs for college grads. "During the entire recession, the unemployment rate for college graduates never exceeded 5 percent, while the unemployment rate for people without a high school degree soared to 15 percent," Lund says. Of the 9.2 percent of Americans who are currently unemployed, 78 percent did not finish high school.


The skills mismatch continues to weigh down the economy, as does the increasing number of "Left-Behinds." So why aren't we talking about a job education and training budget that remains one of the most paltry in the world? Total federal spending for job training adds up to a paltry $15 billion annually--about what it was in 2002, adjusting for inflation, according to Georgetown University professor Harry Holzer. "That's one-tenth of 1 percent of the [gross domestic product]," he says. "That's way less than virtually any country spends on this stuff."

Nailing Wall Street: Will Richard Cordray Be Our Generation's Ferdinand Pecora?

Among others, I have written long and hard about the Too Big to Jail problem--how our federal government, beginning with the Justice Department, the Federal Reserve and the SEC, has failed to prosecute what is almost certainly the biggest fraud in American history: the decade-long confidence game that Wall Street played with the public, as well as investors, in subprime mortgage securitization. There has been little hope until now that Wall Street would get the whipping it deserves from Washington. (On the other hand, some of the better state attorneys general, such as Martha Coakley of Massachusetts, are doing their best, at least in civil court.)  But now President Obama's recess appointment of Richard Cordray, a tough and savvy former attorney general in one of the worst-off underwater-mortgage states, Ohio, to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, opens up new legal possibilities.

Let's sketch out what these legal possibilities are, so an "informed 99 percent" can demand that their government exercise its authority over Wall Street at last.


In his first speech today at the Brookings Institution, Cordray did little but hint at these new legal avenues, saying that " the first time, we can exercise the full authorities granted to us under the new law." Cordray was talking about the Dodd-Frank requirement that the CFPB acquire a director before it can oversee and enforce nonbanks, that is, the vast "shadow banking" sector that was responsible for generating and bundling so many of the fraudulent loans as well as the CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) and other securities that were based on them. What Cordray didn't say was that under the legal theory being used by Coakley and other attorney generals, the CFPB can now hold the big Wall Street banks accountable for the criminal nonbanks they were in bed with, the liability-laden firms that the banks often bought up as the mortgage bubble expanded. And for the first time, the documentation scandal that has cropped up in the last year or so--raising doubts about whether investment trusts ever obtained proper ownership of many of the loans and whether they can foreclose on mortgages--can be used to pin liability on these "vertically integrated" Wall Street giants and cost them some serious money in fines.


That's according to Kathleen Engel of Suffolk University Law School, who in a forthcoming article in the Harvard Business Law Review argues, along with her co-author, Thomas Fitzpatrick, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, that there is a way through the current legal morass. In the paper, they lay out in perhaps the clearest terms yet the legal case for Wall Street liability. “The environment is ripe for consumers, state attorneys general, and federal agencies to pursue claims against entities further up the securitization food chain, especially given increasing evidence that Wall Street failed to observe the formalities that might have insulated arrangers and investors from most consumer claims,” Engel and Fitzpatrick write. “The designers of securitization sought to insulate investors and arrangers by erecting legal structures that would shield them from liability arising from the actions of loan originators.” But “those structures are not as solid as investors and arrangers expected.”


Why? In an interview, Engel, who while at Cleveland State wrote some of the earliest and most prescient articles on predatory lending, explained that bit by bit, the sheer greed of the Wall Street firms opened them up to more consumer and investor liability. "When they were completely separate entities, and the investment banks were just buying loans that had already been made, it was easy for them to maintain they had no involvement" in fraud, she said. "But over time what happened was that the investment banks, as market makers, would go to the investors and ask them what kind of products they were looking for. They even made loans to the [loan] originators so that the originators would be able to make more loans. And then the originators would pay off those loans [to Wall Street] with their loans." Finally the Wall Streeters began to buy up the originators altogether.
  

The attorneys-general lawsuits are just beginning to test the extent of this liability. But what has been missing until now has been a fearless national champion, this generation's Ferdinand Pecora, the scourge of Wall Street in the 1930s. If he survives the latest Republican onslaught, Cordray could be that person.

Like others, Engel suggests there has been a conspiracy of silence among Wall Street firms about the depth of their liability, through forcing confidentiality agreements on ex-employees and other tactics. Meanwhile, she says, the weak sisters in the federal regulatory agencies have "forgotten the age-old tactic" of pursuing lower-level operatives to negotiate plea-deals that would implicate their superiors.

But all evidence is that Cordray is no weak sister. Indeed, in one his last acts as Ohio attorney general Cordray went after robo-signing and demanded that major Wall Street banks halt foreclosure. And the CFPB--thanks to one of the Obama administration's few moments of real toughness, securing an independent funding stream for the bureau--is less susceptible  to industry lobbying. Engel says she's hopeful that with a director, the CFPB will be more aggressive. Cordray only hinted at that today. "We took over a number of investigations from other agencies in July, and we are pursuing some investigations jointly with them," he said.  "We have also started our own investigations."

There is, for the first time in many months, hope that Wall Street will face some small measure of justice.

Waiting for Go-Romney

IT'S NOT GONNA BE THIS GUY

(Picture credit: http://thumpandwhip.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/santorum-3.jpg

Here we go again. Rick Santorum’s virtual dead-heat finish with Mitt Romney in Iowa will give rise to a whole new round of speculation that he is the GOP base’s Great Red Hope, following (in order) the yo-yo-like presidential careers of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich. The punditocracy who need to fill up all that dead air time on cable TV will disseminate the new mythology, glibly parsing the votes to come in New Hampshire and South Carolina.

And pretty much all that will be accomplished is to put off the main event we know is on the horizon--one of the most vicious and probably closest presidential contests ever, between Romney and Barack Obama.

So let’s briefly play out the pretense of the coming days. Gingrich, who along with Santorum remains Romney’s only viable competitor, will huff and puff about the negative ads that Romney’s super PAC ran about him in Iowa. (Actually, all those ads did was point out accurately that Gingrich bears the “baggage” of two decades of expediency, hypocrisy, and flip-flopping in Washington.) Then Newt, who is among the most negative politicians in modern memory, will permit his own super PAC to attack the former Massachusetts governor over his less-than-conservative record.

All of which will do little to help Gingrich achieve what is almost certainly already beyond him, the Republican nomination, and will only boost Romney with the independent and centrist voters he needs to win in the general election, as will the inevitable attacks by Santorum.

And let’s get one thing straight about this latest Red Knight anointed by the churlish Republican base. Santorum, whose views on sexual morality are close to medieval and whose neocon foreign policy (e.g., bomb Iran) won’t fly after a decade of disastrous wars—and who, on top of that, was once considered one of America’s dumbest senators by his peers on Capitol Hill—has very, very little chance of getting close to the nomination. He doesn’t have the money, the infrastructure, or the appeal beyond the hard right. The pundits will talk about his history as a blue-state senator, but the fact is that when Pennsylvania voters learned how truly right-wing Santorum was, he lost by 18 points in 2006 (he hasn’t held office for five years)—which, as Molly Ball of The Atlantic points out, “was the biggest loss ever by an incumbent Pennsylvania Republican senator.”


Yes, Romney will come into the general election with a very unenthusiastic base, but let’s not forget that so will Obama. That’s why some liberals, having grown as leery of the morality of Big Government as libertarians, are now openly flirting with support for Ron Paul, even though he is opposed heart and soul to their central belief: using government to promote social equity. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, in a powerful broadside this week, observed that progressives are flirting with Paul for the simple reason that Obama "has done heinous things with the power he has been vested," including waging covert wars with both Islamist extremists and with Iran. Greenwald accused progressives of not conducting an honest debate with themselves in which they admit the real trade-offs of this Democratic administration: We'll accept unchecked executive power in which Muslim children are killed as collateral damage in drone strikes and bankers are secretly bailed out, as long as we can have fewer cuts to entitlements and a more progressive Supreme Court. Said Greenwald: "It is the classic lesser-of-two-evils rationale, the key being that it explicitly recognizes that both sides are 'evil': meaning it is not a Good versus Evil contest but a More Evil versus Less Evil contest."

And this, inevitably, will be what the general election will be about as well. It will be less about conservatism versus liberalism than about least-worstism. Fueled by super PAC money—the one true imponderable of this election—the campaign between Obama and Romney will be savage, but it’s not likely to be a campaign over high principle, or what Romney calls the “soul” of America.

This, too, has been the subject of much myth-making in this political season.

The pundits are, as usual, going overboard about the significance of this election. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne even concluded in recent days that that “the 2012 election will be a turning point involving one of the most momentous choices in American history." Dionne wrote: "For the first time since Barry Goldwater made the effort in 1964, the Republican Party is taking a run at overturning the consensus that has governed U.S. political life since the Progressive era." To wit: Republicans want to remove government from American life, and Obama wants to impose it.

The problem with this analysis is we've been hearing it since the Reagan era, and the reality is nothing like the rhetoric. Reagan launched a deregulatory era but did not cut the size of government; he increased it. So did the two Bushes. The tea party-driven GOP rhetoric we're hearing now is an angry reaction to that, but let's not overreact ourselves.

In truth, as I've previously posted, Obama and Romney are far closer in mindset and philosophy than anyone is willing to acknowledge just now. Obama, despite his image, has sought to placate business and left Wall Street largely intact, and he is taking a far tougher line on foreign policy--one that reflects a traditional GOP "realpolitik" view and a dramatic ratcheting up of covert war-- than is generally acknowledged, even when it comes to China.

Romney, increasingly desperate to win over his base against the onslaught of "Not-Romneys," has allowed his rhetoric to grow more inflamed on the trail, including commitments to a balanced-budget amendment and partially voucherizing Medicare as well as eliminating Obamacare. But based on his history, if he gets the nomination he is unlikely to follow through fully on these overheated pre-primary pledges and do many things dramatically differently, either on the economy or foreign policy. The problems of slow growth, chronic deficits and an overextended military will inevitably lend themselves to similar solutions from either an Obama or a Romney administration.

So let the general begin already. And let’s not deceive ourselves over what it’s about: power far more than principle.
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