Month: January 2012

Today on the Dish, Andrew assessed the post-Iowa GOP freakout (hint: there's a meep, meep involved), defended Paul's against TNC's Farrakhan comparison, praised the candidate's moral imagination, noted Santorum's "neoconservatism on steroids," mocked the GOP's Iran paranoia, and kept the heat on Glenn Reynolds for being a shameless propagandist. We corralled a big Iowa reax, a reader brilliantly diagnosed the implications of the results for the party, Bachmann called it quits, Paul wasn't done and may actually get the most delegates,  Jay Rosen blasted the whole affair, and readers dinged our coverage for overusing the Santorum puns (though Dan Savage won Iowa).

Santorum's day in the sun got extra scrutiny – we looked at his odious views on Palestine, documented his craziness and argued it made him unelectable, demanded proof that his gay supporters existed, and found an awkward choice of mascot. Newt said something stupid (it is a day ending in Y), but also intriguingly geared up to help Santorum bash Romney. Writers guessed at Romney's strategy for the general, debated Paul's effect on belief in non-interventionism, wondered if Pawlenty should have stayed in, and found Huntsman generally deaf to tone.

The Syrian opposition may have called for intervention, readers discussed airport security, and the military thought about technology that could Eternal Sunshine you, and Charles Taylor posed a challenge for liberal democracy. Bloggers had the Sullivan look, Netflix tried to do everything, and horror blurred the reality/fiction line. Buffet psychology made some of us eat more, America was fat, and eating snot was a real thing.

VFYW here, Cool Ad here, Hathos (Red) Alert here, Malkin nominee here, AAA here, Face of the Day here, and MHB here.

– Z.B.

It's hard for me to put it better than this reader:

I have to say, setting aside the drama of who won, and the fact that it is silly to read too much into an under-attended caucus of 100,000 Iowans, there is something very crystallizing about the Iowa results. Could the GOP be any more divided into three clear camps?

You have your hardcore Christianists, who think of every issues in the prism of Jesus and the Bible, who are incensed at gay marriage and abortion and general secularism. That's your Santorum third. Then you have your old-school wealthier Republicans, who like a foreign policy with a big dick and want to make some damn money, regardless of the state of the economy, and who could really care less about what a candidate really believes as long as he says the right words … boom, Romney. And then you have your purists, your libertarians, who probably have no beef with gays or blacks per se, but don't mind a candidate who certainly makes no effort to pander to those minority groups. so long as the big bad awful government just goes away. Paul.

I dont see how these three groups – and all three are alive and well in the modern GOP – can come together under one candidate, no matter how pretzely he or she may be. It's a fractious party that simply cannot match Barack Obama and his knack for universal, inclusive rhetoric. The nominee will be a well-funded Romney (a Romney battered by months of hostility from Santorum and Gingrich), and I just cannot see the Republican base rallying around this guy.

(Image: As eries of shifting Des Moines Register front-pages from Charles Apple, via Ben Smith)

Noah Millman thinks Pawlenty was wrong to drop out:

I’m not a Pawlenty nostalgist – I’m overwhelmingly likely to be supporting President Obama in November, and no Republican actually running was likely to change my mind about that – but let’s look at the handful of things Santorum has going for him that the other "Not Romneys" didn’t. Everybody in the party doesn’t hate him, the way they hate Gingrich. He’s capable of at least remembering his own talking points, unlike Rick Perry, apparently. He’s not an obvious amateur, like Herman Cain, or an obvious crazy person, like Michele Bachmann. He’s not challenging core GOP positions, like Ron Paul is (on foreign policy, the drug war, civil liberties, etc.). His blue collar roots lend credibility to his economic message, whatever it is. He’s a Midwesterner, not a Southerner or a Texan. Every one of these attributes applies to Tim Pawlenty as well.

He said "nobody cares" about McCain's endorsement of Romney. Allahpundit sees this as part of a pattern:

Why [Huntsman] persists in insulting Iowa and now the sort of establishment Republicans whose help he’d need in the general election, I simply don’t know. Either he’s written off his chances of going all the way and is now aiming for a moral victory over Romney in New Hampshire or he’s arrogantly dismissive of his political opponents as a rule. Doesn’t bode well for any eleventh-hour reconciliation between him and the conservative base before South Carolina and Florida, does it?

Adam Curtis connects the rise of supernatural-based shows in the UK to reality television today, focusing on a forerunner to the Blair Witch Project (1999):

Ghostwatch was transmitted on Halloween 1992. It was quite obvious from both the introduction and the titles that it was a work of fiction. But the reaction was astonishing – thousands of people rang in – either terrified or angry or to report that they were experiencing paranormal activity in their house at that very moment.

The next day there was a media storm – and the BBC reacted in its normal courageous way by burying the programme and disowning it. The Radio Times was apparently told never to mention it ever again. And [Ghostwatch creator Stephen] Volk has described how it was like being airbrushed out of a photograph in Stalinist Russia. But the extraordinary reaction rather proved the central aim of the drama.

It demonstrated the truth about modern television – that we all know that increasingly the line between fiction and non-fiction is blurred on TV. But far from making us distrust television this actually makes it more powerful. It possesses our imagination more powerfully precisely because we don't know what is real and what is not.

Hopefully this represents the start of a trend:

In one largish ballroom, a different sort of panel was happening. It featured the Dish’s Andrew Sullivan and two other men who looked like Andrew Sullivan — pleasant, bearded, round-faced men, which is a chic sub-style among many of the attendees here, optionally accessorized with square glasses and male-pattern baldness. The panel was called 'From Philosophical Training to Professional Blogging.'

And I just buzzed mine down to scruff.

Bryce Covert breaks down the demographics of our recent economic "upturn":

Since the recovery officially began in 2009, women have actually been losing jobs. They saw 46,000 disappear, while at the same time men made some gains, getting back 1.26 million. Women’s unemployment rate has also inched up while men saw a decline. And a large part of that trend is that women were big losers in public sector layoffs, losing 374,000 jobs. A lot of those came from public education jobs — elementary and high school teachers like [Lynette] Paudel. 

That’s not the whole story, however. Men have also been making gains in the public sector while women lost, driven by huge job losses for administrative and secretarial positions. Men are even gaining in the traditionally female-dominated retail industry.

Charles Taylor considers international voting patterns:

[Western European countries] had higher participation during periods when a sort of class war was being fought: Labour and Conservatives in Britain; Socialists and Gaullists in France, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in Germany, and so on. So there was a struggle of a people, a demos: peasants and workers against the others, and these others mobilized themselves too. This led to the posing of clear alternatives, a high level of participation. The same thing is happening in India today. Among the Dalits – the lowest strata of the Indian caste system – there's this tremendous sense that democracy is a chance for them to make this very inegalitarian society less so.

In the West, the more rich and educated you are, the more you vote; in India, the less you have, the less educated you are, the more you vote: Dalits and women vote more than other social groups. So the challenge for liberal democracy is to remain liberal democracy – particularly with regard to participation – when it has passed beyond the phase of struggle against the various kinds of structures that benefit the elites. Most Western democracies are at this stage and the level of participation is falling. 

Kevin Drum's guess, provided Romney gets the nomination:

[T]he flip-flopper charge probably won't get much traction. It's mostly a problem for conservatives, who don't fully trust that Romney is one of them, but by the time summer rolls around they're going to be his most fire-breathing supporters. They'll have long since decided to forgive and forget, and independents won't care that much in the first place as long as Romney seems halfway reasonable in his current incarnation. It's possible that Obama can do both — Romney is a flip flopper and a right-wing nutcase! — but if he has to choose, my guess is that he should forget about the flip flopping and simply do everything he can to force Romney into the wingnut conservative camp.

Joe Klein wonders whether the GOP base will turn out for Romney:

[Romney's] handlers have to be worried now that a certain number of evangelical conservatives simply won’t show up when election day rolls around. It may be his slickness, his CEO style, his mormonism, his flip-flops–who knows? But, suddenly, the Republicans have a passion gap to match the waning of enthusiasm for the President among Democrats.

My extemporaneous thoughts on how Romney will run against Obama here.