Month: December 2011

Frum is upset with my endorsement:

Some see [Paul] as a corrective to militaristic nationalism. Or as a principled champion of limited government. Or as a leader who can curb the excessive influence of social conservatives.Those perceptions are not very realistic, but leave that pass for now. More to the point–even if true, which they are not, these are not the correctives present-day Republicanism most needs.  The thing most wrong with present-day Republicanism is its passivity in the face of the economic crisis, its indifference to the economic troubles of the huge majority of the American population, and its blithe insistence that everything was fine for the typical American worker up until Inauguration Day 2009 or (at the outer bound of the thinkable) the financial crisis of the fall 2008.

It is the lack of concern to the travails of middle-class America that “reform Republicans” should most centrally be concerned with. And no candidate in this race–ok, except maybe the defunct Herman Cain–has been more persistently, aggressively, and forcefully heedless of those travails than Ron Paul.

Paul's riposte would be that the current long recession was perpetuated by federal intervention, because it did not allow the market to clear more quickly (Thatcher's position in 1981, by the way). I don't buy this, because the extremity of the crisis was so great, passivity in 2008 could have galvanized a crippling global depression and ended our financial system entirely.

But Paul is not internally inconsistent; and he is radical in his libertarian absolutism. My endorsement was not of all his proposals but in part to expose the fallacy of these abstractions in our current context, by airing them openly. An electoral defeat on pure Tea Party grounds would advance the kind of reforms David and I want. We would get a real debate about limited government. And, of course, I regard steep cuts in defense as indispensable to generating the revenues necessary to cushion the socially dangerous inequality that is the singular mark of the last thirty years. A Romney presidency would muddy those waters. And David is still wedded to a neoconservaive foreign policy, which is where another deep difference resides.

William Jacobson defends Gingrich's counter-attack on Romney, which Krauthammer criticized as "socialist" and George Will has called a "capital crime": 

While Gingrich’s comments were ill-advised on a number of levels, it was not an attack on capitalism or socialist to criticize certain types of predatory takeover practices which were epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. What we saw then, in a number of cases, were not true turn-around situations, but stripping companies of assets both explicitly and through extraordinary management fees, leaving a shell of a company and unemployed workers. It may not have been illegal, but it certainly was not something to praise. I don’t know if Bain under Mitt Romney’s tutelage engaged in such practices. Certainly many people have made the case that it did, and it was used to great effect against Romney in his loss to Ted Kennedy. 

Steven Bainbridge defends Romney and points to research finding that private equity firms usually boost employment:

Job losses are concentrated in takeovers that are visible to the media and therefore to the public. The public doesn't see the vastly larger number of acquisitions of privately held companies, which "exhibit large employment gains." In sum, employment losses as a result of private equity transactions are modest and a consequence of the creative destruction process by which capitalism periodically shakes up firms that have become inefficient dinosaurs.

Above is an ad that Ted Kennedy chose not to run against Romney in '94. Here is an ad along similar lines that Kennedy went with instead.

“Over 4,000 brave young Americans gave their lives in this conflict. I pray that their sacrifice is not in vain. I hope that their families will not mourn the day that their sons and daughters went out to fight for freedom for the Iraqi people. Unfortunately, it is clear that this decision of a complete pullout of United States troops from Iraq was dictated by politics, and not our national security interests. I believe that history will judge this president’s leadership with the scorn and disdain it deserves," – John McCain.

Yes, it was determined by politics: Iraqi politics and the 2008 SOFA. Does McCain believe the US has a right to occupy a sovereign democratic country against its explicit wishes for as long as he believes it to be in America's interests? That isn't neo-imperialism. It's imperialism.

A reader writes:

You're right, Mr Wallace. We should probably not waste our time having people vote.  It's obvious that Ron Paul will not be the Republican nominee, so let's just skip over the primaries and go straight to the general. 

Come to think of it, why bother with the election at all?  We know Obama is beating Romney and Gingrich in all the polls, so why not just give him a second term right now and be done with it?  I mean, it would really discredit American voters if the result were different than polls and talking heads predicted. 

Another reader sends the above screenshot from Fox News making the rounds on Facebook.

As I've said before, Rasmussen is the pollster I look to most for Republican base mood, because of their skewed sample. And their latest poll shows Romney ahead in Iowa by 3 points over Gingrich. Romney has barely budged since the summer, but Gingrich has lost altitude very quickly. Since August, Romney has gained a statistically insignificant two points. Gingrich has gone from 5 percent to 32 percent and now back to 20. Paul is in the top three, with 18 percent, up from 10 percent a month ago. Given the difficulty of polling caucuses, I'd say all three have a shot. But the momentum is with Paul, not Gingrich.

All the other candidates have seen a mild lift since October – also largely at Gingrich's expense. Mickey Kaus's theory that everything goes faster every electoral cycle may be true again. But the attacks on Gingrich – especially from Paul's brilliant ads – seem to have taken a toll. And Republicans will surely note the following result as well:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely Voters finds Obama earning 49% of the vote, while Gingrich receives 39% support.

And that's Rasmussen. Gingrich would mean a Goldwater-style defeat in the fall. Hence the panic in Washington.

Question? askandrew@thedailybeast.com Video archive here.

My endorsement of Ron Paul for the GOP nomination here.

A reader writes:

Ron Paul "would never disown Reagan"? He resigned from the Republican Party over Reagan's policies.

Another points to a December 2007 exchange between Paul and Tim Russert over the matter:

MR. RUSSERT:  You're running as a Republican.  In your–on your Web site, in your brochures, you make this claim:  "Principled Leadership.  Ron was also one of only four Republican Congressmen to endorse Ronald Reagan for president against Gerald Ford in" '76.  There's a photograph of you, Ronald Reagan on the right, heralding your support of Ronald Reagan.  And yet you divorced yourself from Ronald Reagan.  You said this:  "Although he was once an ardent supporter of President Reagan, Paul now speaks of him as a traitor leading the country into debt and conflicts around the world.  "I want to totally disassociate myself from the Reagan Administration." And you go on to The Dallas Morning News:  "Paul now calls Reagan a `dramatic failure.'"

REP. PAUL:  Well, I'll bet you any money I didn't use the word traitor.  I'll bet you that's somebody else, so I think that's misleading.  But a failure, yes, in, in many ways.  The government didn't shrink.  Ultimately, after he got in office, he said, "All I want to do is reduce the rate of increase in size of government." That's not my goal.  My goal is to reduce our government to a constitutional size.  Completely different.  I think that–matter of fact, he admitted in his memoirs that he had a total failure in Lebanon, and he said he relearned the Middle East because of that failure.  And so there–he–you know, he…

MR. RUSSERT:  But if he's a total failure, why are you using, using his picture in your brochure?

REP. PAUL:  Well, because he, he ran on a good program, and his, his idea was a limited government.  Get rid of the Department of Education, a strong national defense.

I stand corrected.

The latest piece of propaganda:

His abandonment of the promised veto of the military bill that threatened to unleash the military in the homeland to capture, and detain indefinitely without charges, anyone suspected of being a member of al Qaeda or of “substantially supporting” them is another sign that his campaign pledge to be vigilant about civil liberties in the war on terror was a lie. Yes, a radical part has been removed – and the civilian criminal law system will not be actually prevented by law from being used to capture and prosecute al Qaeda suspects within the US. So complete militarization of domestic law enforcement – when anyone in authority screams the word “enemy combatant” – has been avoided. But not because Obama opposed the idea in principle, but because he opposed its encroachment on executive power. As Charlie Savage noted this morning,

The White House said in a statement that adjustments made by a House-Senate conference committee had sufficiently addressed its concerns. “As a result of these changes, we have concluded that the language does not challenge or constrain the president’s ability to collect intelligence, incapacitate dangerous terrorists, and protect the American people, and the president’s senior advisors will not recommend a veto,” it said.

Notice not a whit of concern for civil liberties at all. So the very worst is avoided – for the wrong reasons. As one caustic Greenwald commentator put it,

Concerns about freedoms have been addressed. Presidential freedoms.

And something else much more damaging will be done: Obama will sign a bill that enshrines in law the previously merely alleged executive power of indefinite detention without trial of terror suspects. Greenwald is right that Obama has never explicitly rejected such a power in all cases, but until now, he has not actually gone so far as to put his signature behind its codification. That matters. Just as torture was reversible until John McCain caved and signed it into law in 2006, so the executive power of indefinite detention within America’s prison system might have been quarantined to the Bush-Cheney years. No longer. This soon-to-be-legislated power will also apply to American civilians. It is a legal and indefinite abolition of habeas corpus. And you will find every so-called liberty-lover in the GOP (with Ron Paul as the exception) rushing to vote for it.

Compare Obama with Truman, as Greenwald notes:

This is the first time indefinite detention has been enshrined in law since the McCarthy era of the 1950s, when — as the ACLU put it — “President Truman had the courage to veto” the Internal Security Act of 1950 on the ground that it “would make a mockery of our Bill of Rights” and then watched Congress override the veto. That Act authorized the imprisonment of Communists and other “subversives” without the necessity of full trials or due process (many of the most egregious provisions of that bill were repealed by the 1971 Non-Detention Act, and are now being rejuvenated by these War on Terror policies of indefinite detention). President Obama, needless to say, is not Harry Truman.

He’ll just play the part for re-election.