Marching To Pretoria

The country moved a little bit closer to apartheid-era South African-style fascism with Rick Santorum's twin primary victories in Alabama and Mississippi, forcing Mitt Romney - who still leads in the delegate count for the GOP presidential nomination - to become more reactionary in his sociopolitical views. The former supporter of Planned Parenthood now thinks we should stop supporting it. To respond to the inevitable insistence that a President Romney would moderate his views and go back to where he was as governor of Massachusetts once he's in the White House, it should be remembered that the senior George Bush held on to his adopted ultraconservative social views once he was elected President in 1988 . . . because he still had to please the right in 1992.

Liberals and moderate Democrats may be eagerly awaiting the prospect of President Obama facing either Romney or Santorum will full confidence in his ability to clean either of their clocks, but they should check Obama's own timepiece first. It turns out that Obama's approval rating is down to 41 percent in one poll taken this month, and he's only four points ahead of Santorum - yes, Santorum - in a hypothetical matchup, just outside the margin of error. Obama is getting blame for the high gas prices - which Republicans are helping to cause by talking about war with Iran, spooking commodity speculators - that even recent good news about the job market can't seem to neutralize. In an ideal world - France - people would be driving smaller cars and have plausible mass transit options, so maybe gasoline prices wouldn't be such a big deal. Or, at least people would be smart enough to understand that high gas prices are not Obama's fault.

Because of all that - and because of the fact that Republicans hold 29 state governorships, hold the most state legislature majorities since 1928, and are working to make sure fewer Democratic Party-friendly demographic groups vote in November - the sun may be setting on American progressivism (what there is of it) for years, maybe even decades. The GOP has the mechanism and the money to see to that.

And even though female voters in the Democratic party may be energized by the Republican war or women, the battle over contraception has energized Republican women like TV actress Patricia Heaton. By now you may know about her nasty, snide Twitter comments about Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke's testimony on birth control coverage. Referring to Fluke as "G-Town Gal" and addressing her in the second person, Heaton wrote comments on her Twitter page like: "Hey G-Town Gal: If your parents have to pay for your birth control, maybe they should get a say in who [sic] you sleep with! Instant birth control!"

How many of you who remember Heaton's performance as the caustic Debra on "Everybody Loves Raymond" got the feeling that she wasn't acting?

Though Heaton apologized for her tone, she's been known to offer nasty right-wing comments for years. She once declared Obama to be "completely wrong" for the Presidency and said she wanted a Republican presidential debate that would include Rush Limbaugh and Michael Medved asking "tough and intelligent" questions. The pro-life Heaton also insisted that women who may seek an abortion should give birth instead, regardless, commenting: "A woman experiencing an unplanned pregnancy also deserves to experience unplanned joy."

And yet, in spite of all this, no one has called for a boycott of her current ABC sitcom "The Middle." I myself watched it last week after having heard of Heaton's comments about Ms. Fluke, even though that particular episode was a rerun. But then everyone knows that there's a difference between Limbaugh and Patricia Heaton.

Heaton is just an entertainer.

Santorum Rising

Is Rick Santorum for real? I think he is.

Ricko the Sicko has statistically insignificant leads over Mitt Romney in national polls for the Republican presidential nomination, but the fact that they're leads just the same has given Mitt Romney cause for concern. Romney is coming off as more of a phony as he tries to tighten what had once been thought to be a secure grip on the nomination, all the while coming across as an out-of-touch spoiled rich kid who doesn't seem angry about the perceived decline of the American middle class. Rick Santorum seems more authentic as an angry working-class-rooted conservative warrior going against the powerful economic elites, despite the unpleasant truth that the policies he espouses - which would make such economic interests more powerful and elitist - aren't that different from the ones Romney supports. But he has an obvious appeal to blue-collar "Reagan Democrats" who are inclined to vote Republican in presidential elections on cultural issues.

It is for that reason alone that Santorum should be no less underestimated than Newt Gingrich has been. (We can't rule out Newt yet either.) President Obama is presiding over an economy that seems to be on the mend, but we could reach a particular threshold, at which the economy has improved to the point where it's good enough to let people focus more on social issues (the kind of social issues that were resolved decades, if not centuries, ago in other Western countries) but not good enough to be neutralized as an issue in and of itself. A condition like that could make a Republican presidential candidate like Santorum very attractive.

Do not imagine for one moment that a rabidly conservative and intellectually bankrupt politician like Santorum could never make it to the White House. I've said it before and I'll say it again (an annoying habit on this blog, I know, but what the heck, history has been repeating itself a lot lately): Back in the 1990s, everyone knew that the idea of "President George Walker Bush" was ridiculous.

Much Ado About Nothing

Rick Santorum - also known by his Lakota name, "Sleeps With Dead Babies" - is the man of the hour in the Republican presidential nomination contest, having swept the caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota and won a primary in Missouri, a state considered a microcosm of America at large. He's shaken up the Republican race by winning 28 convention delegates for a total of 45 so far, putting him ahead of Newt Gingrich and damaging Mitt Romney's aura of inevitability as the Republican nominee. Gingrich has to find a way to keep his campaign going in the month leading up to Super Tuesday on March 6, when many Southern states with voters friendly to his proposals are holding primaries and caucuses, while Romney has to avoid freaking out.

But wait a minute! Isn't the focus on this Santorum sweep just a lot of hype from a mainstream media eager to keep the GOP race alive? I think so. As someone who wants to see those Grand Old Partisans go down this autumn, I hope this does keep the race alive. But how can it be anything other than hype when the caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado are in fact the first step in a complicated process to award delegates to the Republican convention, and the delegates Santorum won last night are not bound by the caucus results? And shouldn't it matter that Missouri didn't matter? Missouri's primary was nonbinding; the state Republican party chooses its convention delegates through a series of caucuses and state conventions starting next month. Why have a primary that doesn't count? And why should Santorum brag about winning it? This would be like Jon Cryer bragging about winning a best TV actor poll on Facebook - or, for that matter, a People's Choice award.

Holding nonbinding primaries is a useless gesture, it wastes taxpayers' money, and it gives Chris Matthews way too much to talk about. Besides, we already have political contests in this country that don't count. They're called general elections. :-p

Who Won?!?

Newt won the South Carolina primary?

This cancels out what I said about him a week and a half ago.

And Santorum actually won the Iowa caucuses?

This cancels out everything I've said about Mitt Romney since the year began.

Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride.  

Countdown To Exiting

It's about a year from Inauguration Day. Could this be Barack Obama's last year in office?

The campaign for the South Carolina Republican presidential primary, taking place today, has taken numerous twists and turns. Newt Gingrich had turned the tide against Mitt Romney only to face new questions about his fidelity in his previous marriage - and then turned it into an asset by throwing the issue back at CNN's John King during a debate after King brought it up. Mitt Romney still won't release his tax returns, thinking that Republican voters don't care about how much money he makes and confusing that with their interest in how much money he pays. President Obama must be watching this with glee, hoping that the Republicans protract their nomination fight to the point where the eventual nominee is so weakened and bloodied, it will be an easy victory for the Democrats in November.

No, it won't. And the Democrats could still lose. Some pundits have noted that the eventual winner of the Republican presidential nomination could be toughened up enough to take the fight to Obama hard, just as Obama was toughened up by his long fight against Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. A more apt comparison might be the internecine warfare between Walter Mondale and Gary Hart in the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination contest that eventually weakened Mondale in his campaign against President Reagan that fall, as both Mondale did and the eventual 2012 Republican presidential nominee will go against an incumbent. But even that comparison has problems. Reagan was overseeing an improvement in the economy and renewed faith in the country's standing in 1984. Obama is currently overseeing little of either, and his mealy-mouthed campaign commercial touting his clean energy initiatives in response to a Koch brothers-funded onslaught is the textbook example of starting off on the wrong foot.

One year from now, the winner of the November election will be sworn in, and don't be surprised if Obama is an outgoing President swearing under his breath. His approval rating is at 44 percent, the economy isn't growing fast enough in 2012, like it was in 1984, the chances of Democrats regaining the House and holding onto the Senate are statistically difficult, and one of these Republican candidates could indeed very well be in a strong position going into the fall campaign. The clearest evidence that Obama could (will?) still lose is that his opponents obviously want to get rid of him more than his supporters (just as obviously) want to keep him.

Solid As Granite

Mitt Romney's commanding victory in yesterday's New Hampshire primary - winning 39 percent of the vote - makes him the one to beat . . . for President Obama. It's become obvious that there really is no conservative alternative to a "moderate" Romney; Romney is the conservative alternative to the centrist incumbent President. Romney is opposed to an agenda that would impose a European-style social democratic system on America, but then, so is Obama.

With libertarian Ron Paul finishing a distant second in New Hampshire with 23 percent of the vote, mainstream arch-conservatives like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum hope instead to make inroads in South Carolina, where the unemployment rate and the intolerance for gays are both higher than in New Hampshire. Jon Huntsman's respectable third-place showing at 17 percent gives him reason to carry on. But Romney's ability to do better than expected in the Granite State- even after all of his recent gaffes marking him as a clueless CEO type - puts him on a clear path to the Republican presidential nomination and gives him more of an opportunity to hit the President south of the suspenders.

Romney can thank Florida for this victory, as Florida voted to have its primary on January 31, before the Iowa and New Hampshire contests scheduled for February - forcing both states to move their contests up to early January. Florida thus spared Romney of spending more time campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire and possibly seeing his numbers go down more over a longer period. Now he can spend more time than ever before focusing squarely on Obama and swat away the GOP also-rans like so many mosquitoes.

My advice to the Obama team: Start working on your Romney counterpunch.

Ricko The Sicko

I'm sorry I never got to comment on Newt Gingrich while he was the right-wing white ring's flavor of the month, but fortunately (for the sake of having someone to bash), Richard John Santorum has stepped in to fill the void and is widely expected to by the main conservative alternative to Mitt Romney in the Republican presidential nomination contest.

Before you start thinking that a nice, upstanding family man like Santorum can't possibly be as horrid as Rick Perry or as dumb as Michele Bachmann, here are some things you ought to know about the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania hoping to become the nation's 45th President, some of which I may have mentioned in earlier posts:

 Rick Santorum told a crowd at a Christian college, in response to a student's suggestion that maybe God doesn't appreciate the fact that Americans die because they have no health insurance, that he rejected such a suggestion. "People die in America because people die in America. And people make poor decisions with respect to their health and their health care. And they don’t go to the emergency room or they don’t go to the doctor when they need to," he said. "And it’s not the fault of the government for not providing some sort of universal benefit." In fact, a 2009 Harvard Medical School study found that 45,000 deaths in the U.S. are attributed to lack of health insurance every year.

He complained about regulations forcing states like Iowa to sign more people up for Medicaid, which he saw as an expansion of the welfare state. He also added that the last thing he wanted to do was give black people welfare when he wanted to incentivize them to work, as if everyone on welfare were black.

He not only advocates the re-instatement of "Don't ask, don't tell" in the military, he supports a constitutional amendment that would invalidate same-sex marriages. Santorum supports an anti-abortion policy that would throw abortionists in jail for murder. He also likened homosexuality to "man-on-dog" sex.

I didn't want to bring this up again - even though this is primarily why I call him Ricko the Sicko - but he and his wife slept with a dead baby between them. After their son Gabriel was born prematurely and lived only two hours, the Santorums - the Santora? - slept in a hospital bed, separated by the corpse of their infant son. They brought his lifeless body home to present them to their children. Two of their children, Elizabeth and Johnny, held the baby "with so much love and tenderness," Mrs. Santorum later wrote, addressing her deceased son in the second person. "Elizabeth proudly announced to everyone as she cuddled you, 'This is my baby brother, Gabriel; he is an angel.'"

Mitt Romney, as a Mormon, believes in magic underwear, eternal marriage, and, speaking of angels, an angel named Moroni who will announce the return of Christ just before the world ends. Frankly, I don't see him to be nearly as daffy as Santorum.

Single Digits

So let me get this straight . . ..  Out of sixty thousand votes cast between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum at the Iowa caucuses yesterday, Romney won by eight.  I'm sure Romney would have preferred to win by more than eight thousand votes.  But when I say eight, I don't mean eight thousand.  I mean . . . eight.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . eight.

Romney won 30,015 votes in Iowa last night.  He would have had to win 36,000 votes to get at least 30 percent and pull out of the 25 percent bracket he'd been in through various opinion polls for months.  As it was, he couldn't win 36,000 votes.  In fact, compared to his 2008 total in Iowa, Romney was off by six.  

Not six thousand.  Six.  One, two, three, four, five . . . six.

That's right, Romney won six fewer votes in Iowa in 2012 than the 30,021 votes he won in 2008.

So, not only did 75 percent of all Iowa Republicans vote against Romney, those that did vote for him gave him a Pyrrhic victory with a margin in single digits over Santorum.  And after all the time and money he spent in Iowa, his vote total was smaller than when he lost the Iowa contest to Mike Huckabee in 2008 - by single digits.  

Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann - a woman whose intelligence quotient is likely measured in single digits - dropped out of the race.  The number of people who will miss her can be counted with a single digit - 0. 

Ha Ha Herman!

That Herman Cain - what a sense of humor.  He somehow managed to become the rarest of birds - a black front runner for the Republican presidential nomination - and now he's joking about putting up an electric fence on the Mexican border to discourage and possibly electrocute illegal immigrants.  Here's a man whose father who worked at three jobs to own his own house and whose mother was a cleaning woman, and he's telling the unemployed and underemployed Wall Street occupiers that it's their fault, not the fault of greedy banks, if they're not well-off or gainfully employed.  Even Ron Paul was aghast at Cain's remarks. (Cain is a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Missouri, something you don't hear about because the media keep playing up the fact that he was the chairman of a pizza parlor chain.)

Cain has shot up to the top of the Republican field for the same reason Michele Bachmann  and Rick Perry did - he's seen as a "conservative" alternative to the likely nominee, Mitt Romney, who's seen as more "moderate" (until you look at his record).  His "9-9-9 plan" - a nine percent national sales tax, a nine percent flat tax, and a nine percent business flat tax - seems reasonable enough until you realize that it will raise taxes on 95 percent of Americans making an average of 35,000 a year while lowering taxes on those with an a average annual income of $350,000.

But he's sure to do some damage to the body politic while he's around.  Cain is getting the bulk of his economic ideas from the greedy Koch brothers, who hope to turn America into one big strip mine, and his effect could force Romney, as the nominee, to move so far to the right that the Tea Party will be able to write the entire 2012 Republican platform.

Oh yeah, I didn't want to bring it up, but Cain was instrumental in sabotaging President Bill Clinton's 1993 health care reform plan when he challenged the President at a town hall meeting in Kansas City.  Cain told Clinton that a proposed employer mandate would hurt small businesses, and that subsidies to help such businesses guarantee health insurance to workers were inaccurately calculated.  Cain, according to Bob Cohn of Newsweek, "transformed the debate" on health care reform, which went down in flames for Clinton in 1994 and was never revisited in the remainder of his Presidency.

So how much do Republican voters like Cain? They love him.  At a Republican debate, they applauded his assertion that the unemployed have only themselves to blame for their plight, just as they cheered Rick Perry's executions in Texas and booed at a gay soldier in earlier debates.             

Perry Pops Off

No one can accuse Rick Perry of being a dark horse for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination after his first week on the campaign trail. In just one short week, he declared that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's idea of printing more money would be an act of treason, he insisted that global warming is made up by scientists, and he professed to a little boy in New Hampshire that Texas schools teaches creation science along with evolution to let students decide for themselves which is the right theory, and he trusts the lad will make the right choice. I guess we all know what that would be.

Oh yeah, creation science is not taught in Texas schools.

Perry might help the Republicans win the 2012 election, but not by winning the nomination. He could slow down Michele Bachmann's momentum and make Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman suddenly seem like reasonable choices.

(Breaking news: It looks like the Libyan Civil War is almost over, with Qaddafi on the verge of losing power. I'll have more to say about that later.)

Mitt Is It?

As Sarah Palin, a plain rash if there ever was one, irritates people along the East Coast with her non-campaign tour, titillating her rabid fans as if she were Lady Gaga, Mitt Romney has officially entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.

The differences between the two politicians could not be any clearer. Palin seeks to appeal to the basest instincts of the American voter, plastering excerpts from the Pledge of Allegiance on her tour bus to, as author James Kunstler says, appeal to voters who are proud to have made it as far as first grade. Romney is a grownup. He plans to talk about the economy - the one issue on which President Obama remains vulnerable - more than on ideology - and he has the bona fides to back himself up, as a successful venture capitalist, the rescuer of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, and governor of Massachusetts.

Romney's biggest liability with the libertarians who now control the Republican party is the health care reform legislation he sired in Massachusetts, because of the mandate that all Massachusetts residents buy health insurance. Except that it's working to bring down health care costs, and Romney has said that, while he opposes doing anything similar on the federal level, each state should do as it sees fit to reform health care on its own - and that his approach happened to be compatible with his state. He won't renounce the Massachusetts health care plan. His Mormon faith may remain a sore spot among the evangelical Protestant voters who dominate the Republican primaries and caucuses. But I don't think many other voters, Republican or otherwise, will fear that a President Romney will take orders from the Mormon Church.

Unfortunately for Romney, one advantage Sarah Palin has over Romney is her ability to generate buzz. He announced his presidential candidacy in New Hampshire at the same time she was in the state, and so she bumped him off the front page of the Manchester Union-Leader. Romney should be glad the Internet's killing print media. He probably isn't thankful, though, that anyone can search the Internet and find video clips of his TV interviews demonstrating that he can't get his position on the auto company bailout straight.

Nevertheless, Romney, like Obama, has the substance. If he's the 2012 nominee, the debate between Romney and Obama on the economy will be most substantial debate on the topic in years - maybe even decades.

An End To Barbourism

Haley Barbour, currently serving the last year of his second term as governor of Mississippi, announced that he would not run for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. The 63-year-old Barbour cited his uneasiness with possibly spending the next ten years of his life running for and being President as too much energy for him to devote, but I think that the biggest reason for his non-candidacy is his baggage. First, he comes from Mississippi, a state known for its racist past and its racist present. Secondly, Barbour is a former Washington lobbyist, and lobbyists aren't very popular with Americans these days. Thirdly, for a smart guy, Barbour has said some stupid things, like when he accused President Obama of encouraging rising gasoline prices to encourage more use of public transit and the sales of smaller cars. Hah, I only wish Obama were that clever and devious!

Barbour's exit from the Republican presidential field makes it easier for Mitt Romney, the one Republican with a realistic chance of defeating Obama, to gain the GOP nomination. But with less serious candidates - this month, it's Donald Trump - sucking up the oxygen, the Republicans could be gasping for air indeed when ol' November says howdy-do late next year.

Mississippi has never produced a President of the United Staes, but it did produce the President of the Confederate States - Jefferson Davis. Yeah, how did that turn out?