Month: January 2012

Paul’s Failed “Rockwell Strategy”

TNC goes there:

As surely as Ron Paul speaks to a real issue–the state's broad use of violence and surveillance–which the America's political leadership has failed to address, Farrakhan spoke to something real, something unsullied, which black America's political leadership failed to address, Both Paul and Farrakhan, in their glamour, inspired the young, the disaffected, the disillusioned. 

I see TNC's point, but really, substantively, Paul is no Farrakhan. Here's another take on how Paul's 2012 campaign has revealed the ugly hopelessness of the Rockwell strategy for libertarianism:

Look at each group where Paul did well and you see a consistent pattern. They were not the kind of bigoted voters that Lew Rockwell was trying to appeal to with this paleolibertarian strategy. Ron’s support came from voters who were most like the libertarians that Rockwell has consistently slandered.

The very kind of voters that Rockwell would dismiss as “hippies”—the young, independents, liberals and moderates—were the people who made up the majority of Ron Paul's supporters. The people that Rockwell tried to appeal to were far more likely to vote for Santorum.

The flaw in the paleolibertarian strategy was that the people they tried to win over like big government. They are not libertarians. The very kind of people that Rockwell and Rothbard attacked in those newsletters, and in other places, were the ones willing to vote for Ron Paul.

In the end, Maybe the flaws in the candidate can help us build a better set of arguments or even find a less baggage-laden candidate to advance the ideas of freedom in a multicultural world. Unwinding this behemoth of an entitlement-military-Christianist state is the cause of the next generation.

Limping Out Of The Starting Gate

Romney_Iowa_Winners

Weigel asks:

Four years ago, a depressed GOP went to the precinct caucuses, very well aware that Democrats had all the energy. The total GOP vote: 119,188. This year, Republicans should be psyched about the chance to uproot Barack Obama. There will be something above 122,000 total votes. An improvement, right? Well… in 2008, 86 percent of the people who chose the GOP caucuses were Republicans. This year, 75 percent of the electorate was Republican, with the rest of the vote coming from independents and Democrats. What the hell happened?

Well, you had an awful field, and no Democratic caucus contest to compete with it. But the underlying dynamics are a party electorate literally dying and the one infusion of new voters, Ron Paul, dissed as "disgusting" by Santorum and "indecent" by Gingrich. Philip Klein worries: 

[E]ven if Romney wins the nomination, the Iowa results don't bode well for when it comes to assessing the Republican Party's chances of beating President Obama in November. Though turnout was up from the 2008 caucuses, it was only up by a few thousand votes, even as GOP voter registration grew and more candidates were contesting the state. Romney actually got six fewer votes this time than he did four years ago, but it was enough because nobody matched Mike Huckabee's appeal. Four years ago, Democrats were frothing at the mouth to win back the White House after two terms of President Bush. Starting from Iowa, the enthusiasm they felt was palpable — and they would have been ready to fight for whoever emerged as the nominee. The night he won the caucuses, Obama addressed a crowd with thousands of supporters going wild. We haven't seen any of the GOP candidates attract that sort of affection. And the entrance polls suggest conservatives still have major doubts about Romney.

When the right wakes up from its fevered anti-Obamam dreams, they willl begin to realize who has truly shifted the political landscape these past four years. Erick Erickson adds: 

[T]he media would have you believe that the 123,000 people who turned out for the Hawkeye Caucii was a record. This is simply not true except superficially. If you take out the non-Republicans who came into the caucuses last night for Ron Paul, the Republican turn out was less than 2008 — even considering the ratio of independents to Republicans who turned out in 2008. At its best, this turn out does not signal core enthusiasm with the field as it is presently constituted …

Yep. Chart from Keith Humphreys:

Romney “surpassed” Bob Dole to earn the distinction of having the lowest winning share of the vote in the history of the Iowa caucuses. Never has support in a political party been so tepid for its “favorite”. Romney not only set a record by being the first Iowa winner to convince more than three quarters of voters to choose someone else, but also managed to do even worse than he himself did last time around despite four intervening years of hard, expensive campaigning.

Meep, meep?

A Newt-Rick Anti-Mitt Alliance?

Who knows? But Gingrich is pissed:

Ingraham: Can you see a scenario under which the two of you would align together to try to defeat the establishment candidate, Mitt Romney?

Gingrich: Absolutely. Of course. I mean Rick and I have a 20-year friendship, we are both rebels, we both came into this business as reformers, we both dislike deeply the degree to which the establishment sells out the American people. We both think Washington has to be changed in very fundamental ways, and we have lots of things that fit together. And the thing that's interesting is if you take the votes, you add to that Perry and Bachmann, you begin to see the size of the conservative vote compared to Romney…if you take, you know, Santorum and Perry and Bachmann and Gingrich you get some sense of what a small minority Romney really represents.

Repeating The Lie

I dinged Glenn Reynolds recently for using a highly misleading graph. He claims it shows that the stimulus didn't work as promised. But the reason for the faulty projections in the graph – made before Obama even took office by those working off transition data – is that it under-estimated the collapse in growth in the fourth quarter of 2008. It assumed a drop of around 3 percent of GDP when the actual fall, subsequently revealed, was more like 9 percent. So of course if you're starting far lower on a graph than you think you are, the predictions of the future will be way off. All we learn from the graph is the quality of the input data, which the original report notes was subject to sizable margins of error. So the report even contained its own caveat. 

But Reynolds doesn't address this point – my only point – at all. Here's his attempt:

The Obama central planners spent nearly a trillion dollars based on their projections, and now we’re supposed to ignore their wildly erroneous forecasts because they just didn’t realize how bad the Bush economy was?

Well, yes. And we know this for a fact because the false data they used is in the public domain and explains the entire errors in the projections. (As for those "central planners" does Reynolds acknowledge that over a third of the stimulus was in tax cuts?) Then Reynolds throws in a Trig dig, and excerpts a post saying I have not attacked Obama's spending, while I did Bush's. But as any reader knows, I gave Obama a pass for the first two years because cutting spending when you are in danger of triggering a global depression is about the only time I don't think spending should be cut. I favor short term stimulus and long-term entitlement reform and serious defense cuts, along Bowles-Simpson lines. I gave Obama hell for ignoring the commission at the time.

But yesterday Reynolds reprinted the graph with the same bullshit analysis. Proof of an out-and-proud propagandist, who cannot even address the single point of a criticism.

Iowa Reax

 

Nate Silver sizes up Romney's eight-vote victory:

[E]ven if Mr. Santorum catches fire, or even if Jon M. Huntsman Jr. surges in the polls, or even if (perhaps less plausibly) Newt Gingrich somehow resurrects himself yet again, Mr. Romney will have a lot of second and third chances. Mr. Romney could lose South Carolina but win Florida. He could lose South Carolina and Florida but rebound in the caucus states of February, or on Super Tuesday. He could be engaged in a more-or-less even delegate battle with someone like Mr. Santorum for a long while — but emerge with the most delegates at the end.

Peter Beinart thinks Romney did well:

Republican presidential history is littered with moderate frontrunners who got creamed in Iowa—George H.W. Bush in 1988, John McCain in 2008—and still won the nomination. In 2008, Mitt Romney invested heavily there and lost by 9 points. This year, he kept expectations low and managed a tie for first place with two candidates who almost certainly can’t beat him. That may be boring, but it’s pretty darn good.

Ramesh Ponnuru differs: 

For weeks, the Romney campaign had tried not even to whisper that it could win Iowa. Then in the last days of the campaign Romney decided to indulge in bizarre bravado. His political instincts do not seem to be finely tuned. This tie is going to go to Santorum: When you have to explain a victory, you haven’t won one. (See Buchanan-Bush in the ‘92 New Hampshire primary.) It is only his lack of money and organization that has prevented Santorum’s political victory from being a fiasco for Romney.

Josh Marshall expects the GOP establishment to close ranks:

[T]he entire Republican establishment is going to be coming out in the next couple days to shut this down and say it’s Romney. … The avalanche of attempted GOP establishment coronation will be one of the big things to watch over the coming days. Can they pull it off? Probably so. But now it’s from a footing of relative weakness.

Ezra Klein wonders when Romney will become the center of attention:

Romney has arguably been the frontrunner through the entire election. But he's never gotten the sort of scrutiny a frontrunner tends to attract. … Soon enough, it's just going to be Romney out there. And he's going to start getting hammered with questions about why he won't release his tax returns and where exactly his claim to have created 100,000 jobs at Bain Capital comes from and why, when he was at Bain, he fired this nice-seeming guy being interviewed on the television.

Radley Balko praises Paul:

The GOP establishment wants none of [Ron Paul]. But now they have to deal with him, and they have to deal with his arguments. They can’t just assume perpetual war as a given. There’s a small but emerging faction in the party that finds the idea offensive. That’s largely because of Ron Paul. And that’s a healthy thing.

Brian Doherty talked to Paul voters:

I ran into a few people who were surprised, given how roundly Paul won their precinct, surprised enough to want to see the specific per-precinct figure breakdown before they were sure the results were legit. But that seemed more frustration than conspiracy theory. One Paul dude made the case–which I concur with–that the past 24 hours of Fox News amounted to a free half-million attack ad buy against Paul from his enemies.

Kevin Drum has a theory about Santorum's strong showing:

[H]e surged because there were no debates in the final three weeks before Iowa. Santorum is possibly the whiniest, least appealing debate candidate I've ever seen in my life, and I figure he lost a few thousand votes every time he went on the air. So the calendar helped him a lot. Unfortunately, there's a debate coming up this Saturday, which should be perfectly positioned to allow the voters of New Hampshire to remind themselves that they really don't want to see this guy on their TV for the next four years. That's bad luck for Santorum, but them's the breaks.

Grover Norquist doesn't sound like he has a whole lot of faith in either Santorum or Romney:

The candidate who wins the GOP nomination and then the presidency will be signing bills passed by Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Leadership will flow from the Hill, not the White House. I feel better about that every day.

Daniel Horowitz likewise isn't jumping on the Romney bandwagon:

It appears that Romney’s base of support is limited to rich secular voters.  That’s not exactly the appeal you want to have going into this election.  There is very little overlap between Romney’s 2008 voters and his current supporters.  In other words, he is last cycle’s McCain.

Rich Galen is betting on Romney regardless:

The political reality is that none of the candidates who might win the nomination has the capacity to fully operate in more than one state at a time. They are essentially running a serial campaign. Romney is running a parallel campaign. In fact, his campaign announced a few hours before the caucuses began that it was buying advertising time in Florida. Florida? Hell, that’s four weeks away! 

So is David Frum:

Here’s a contest that by all odds Romney should have lost. The question through the past year was: lose to whom? This was a state designed for Rick Perry to take away from Romney–and thereby launch a powerful national conservative challenge. Instead, Perry is heading home to Texas. Gingrich–another, less plausible, alternative–has collapsed into bitterness and sulk. Romney won by a narrow margin because the remaining conservative alternatives looked unconvincing even to Iowa social conservative voters. A Romney-Santorum contest is not much of a contest at all. If that’s not obvious today, it will be obvious a week from today, after New Hampshire reports.

Douthat wants the campaign to continue for awhile longer:

In an ideal world, Romney’s coronation would be postponed long enough to have a vigorous argument between Romney, Paul and Santorum (with Jon Huntsman getting in on the action as well, perhaps). They would debate foreign policy, domestic policy and the future of conservatism, with the also-rans and their gimmicks cleared off stage. In the real world, some of the also-rans will hang around, and last night’s results probably just set the stage for the swift Romney victory that’s been coming all along.

Dreher looks at Santorum's road ahead:

I believe Santorum, as an unabashed social and religious conservative, will do well in the South, if he can last long enough — and if he can get on enough ballots. The problem is, he’s got a long way to go. Florida is not till January 31. A good showing in South Carolina will boost him there. But after Florida, he has to wait till March 6, and the Georgia vote, to hit a state that should be strong for him. I don’t see how he pulls that off, but then again, nothing seems normal about this year.

And PM Carpenter watches as Republican pundits ignore the broad appeal of Ron Paul's non-interventionism and civil liberties positions:

If … you're a party hack, and a blind one at that, you'd likely respond to last night's observations by writing that, "in any event," Paul's "strength was largely based on independent voters," so, essentially, to hell with any complicating fuss about broadening the party at its promising roots; and that "With the two front-runners both forceful advocates for a strong national defense, talk of the Republican Party dabbling with isolationism should be muted."

You would, in other words, perpetuate among your fellow Republicans that very stagnation of mind which constrains your party's potential growth, while conserving, in any event, its less attractive features.

Iran’s “Photo-Shopped” Existential Threat

The regime that allegedly threatens the survival of America has now backed down from threats to close the Straits of Hormuz as its economy reels from sanctions and the threat of more. Their boasts about their rocket ranges are also, well, a little thin:

The Qhader missile, introduced in September, has a range of just 124 miles. The U.S. Navy's fifth fleet in Bahrain is 150 miles from Iran. Israel is four times farther. "We've seen that they've photoshopped, for example, photographs of missile tests before to make it look more impressive than it actually is, so I would take all this with a grain of salt. I think this is mainly posturing. It's gamesmanship. And it's again meant to send a message that the Iranians aren't simply going to sit back while their oil is sanctioned," said Michael Singh, Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Iran's entire GDP is less than Norway's. Without oil, it's a basket-case. The idea that it can threaten the survival of the US, as Gingrich claims, is loopy. But in the current GOP race, Ron Paul is paranoid, not Newt.

Netflix Originals

Alyssa Rosenberg ponders Netflix's attempt to be all things to all people:

[I]t’s a harder thing to develop consistently excellent programming across a wide variety of genres, tones, and subject-matter tranches. I can understand why the company would prefer to try for that, though: after causing a lot of confusion and doing itself a lot of damage, I’d want a master-stroke to bring in new or disaffected former customers, and to make a lot of my audience very excited. I’m just not entirely sure how it’ll pan out.

Dissecting Snot

The chemistry of the runny nose revealed:

Sugar chains are attached to a protein backbone in mucus cells, with the contraption released out into the open. These glycoprotein molecules rapidly and aggressively suck up water until they are plump, slick, and slimy. To an invader, this is a nightmare to navigate: tangled chains of protein and sugar, with every nook and cranny crammed with water molecules. (Boogers are when these chains become ever more tangled, finally resulting in a rubbery ball of partially dried-out snot. Neat!) The body adds antimicrobial enzymes to this mix, which digest the invading organisms as they slowly attempt to chew through this barrier and reach the thin underlying lining of cells.

Using Maria Jesus Portalatin's book Consuming the Inedible: Neglected Dimensions of Food Choice, Maggie Koerth-Baker examines whether there might be a biological reason for eating boogers:

[N]asal mucus is about 95% water, so there's a possibility that you might expect more mucus eating in arid places. But nobody has ever done the studies necessary to test that hypothesis out. Her main hypothesis—also untested—is that eating mucus might help prime the body's immune system, allowing it to have more contact with weakened forms of potential pathogens so it can better detect and destroy those pathogens later. In other words, she thinks that eating your boogers is sort of like self-immunization.