Month: January 2012

Steve Schmidt looks to Florida: 

[I]f Newt Gingrich is able to win the Florida primary, you will see a panic and a meltdown of the Republican establishment that is beyond my ability to articulate in the English language. People will go crazy…[T]here are 33 House Republicans in districts that Barack Obama won. What is the impact in terms of Republicans being able to keep the House of Representatives in majority control if Newt Gingrich was the nominee of the party? What is the impact in the United State Senate races where Republicans have a great chance of taking majority control of the United States Senate. With Newt Gingrich as the nominee of the party, that is, perhaps, all up in the air.

Erick Erickson adds: 

[T]he Republican Establishment fears Gingrich will cause them to lose the House and not get the Senate. Put another way, the current Republican leadership fears that the man who helped the GOP take back the House for the first time in 40 years and his allies in the tea party who helped take back the House in 2010 will cause the GOP to now lose.

Tim Carney sounds the death knell for the "Republican Establishment":

Given his record, it may be implausible that Gingrich can pose as anti-establishment. But the establishment is certainly anti-Newt. And for South Carolina's voters, that was an endorsement enough.

(Image via Facebook user Van Allen Plexico.) 

A brilliant mash-up of Romney's most unlikeable moments:

Noah Millman gives some free advice to Mitt:

[T]he big problem with Mitt Romney’s “Romneyness” is that he seems like a manager rather than a leader. To put it very crudely, he just doesn’t seem like an alpha male. Gingrich, by contrast, is a walking catalog of everything that is wrong with alpha-maleness. But for better or worse, Americans want to believe that their President is a leader, captain of his own ship, commander of his own destiny. Romney is an organization man. Having the organization come in and try to muscle him to the top will only provoke a greater rebellion, which in turn will damage the organization more than it will help Romney.

If Romney wants to win this, he has to win it. Himself. By making the case for himself. This isn’t about having a “vision” for the future of America or of the GOP – what on earth is Gingrich’s vision? And it certainly isn’t about comparing resumes – and, in the end, that’s all talk about “electability” is. It’s about him.

Havana, Cuba, 8 am.

Ask Andrew Anything will be back very soon.

"The right-wing coalition government of Israel is trying to secure support, with the help of an American party in an election year, for an act of war that it could not hope to accomplish unassisted; while an American opposition party complies with the demand of support by a foreign power, in an election year, to gain financial backing and popular leverage that it could not acquire unassisted," - David Bromwich.

I've written a lot of cover-stories in my day and some that had an immediate impact, positive and negative. But what's new these days is that you can actually quantify how many people read it online. There are 1.6 million Newsweek print subscribers – but you can never know for sure how many of them read the cover-story. Online, we can. The piece was read by just under a million individual people, 904,000 to be precise, in a week. It had 2 million pageviews.

Ezra Klein goes in search of Gingrich's "big ideas." Among them:

On Saturday’s edition of “Up With Chris Hayes,” Gary Johnson brought up an old Newt Gingrich idea I hadn’t heard before: Putting individuals who brought more than two ounces of marijuana into the United States to death. That sounded extreme, even for Gingrich. So I looked it up. And sure enough, there it is: “The Drug Importer Death Penalty Act of 1996.”

What makes the bill even more amazing is that Gingrich himself is a confessed pot smoker. When he was young, he said, experimenting with drugs “was a sign we were alive and in graduate school in that era.”

Mark Steyn unloads marvelously on the Romney candidacy: 

Why is the stump speech so awful? “I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.” Mitt paid some guy to write this insipid pap. And he paid others to approve it. … Mitt’s generalities are awfully condescending: The finely calibrated inoffensiveness is kind of offensive. And what’s with the wind up? The “shining city on the hill”? That’s another guy’s line – a guy with whom you have had hitherto little connection other than your public repudiation of him back in the Nineties. Can’t any of his highly paid honchos write him a campaign slogan that’s his own and doesn’t sound in his mouth so cheesily anodyne, as if some guy ran a focus-group and this phrase came up with the lowest negatives?

This is so enjoyable, innit?

(Photo: Alex Wong/Getty.)

… he grew a beard? I'd love to see it fight with Callista's pointy helmet.

Hot Air's second criticism of my essay on Obama's record is on taxes. I note that, despite Republican rhetoric, Obama has lowered taxes quite dramatically – by cutting the payroll tax cut, by extending the Bush tax cuts past their scheduled expiration, by the stimulus. Hot Air counters:

Obama’s signature healthcare law raises $813 billion from 2012 to 2021. Almost half of the “stimulus tax cuts” were actually spending. The House GOP voted for a year-long extension of the payroll tax cut, while Obama demanded an unworkable short-term cut to be offset by… a tax increase.

Well, the first number is not yet in the record of Obama's first term, but let's measure it anyway: Politifact says the healthcare law does indeed have a variety of fees and taxes that will amount to $104 billion in 2019. Since Karl doesn't provide a source for his $813 billion, I can't explain the discrepancy. As for the notion that tax credits for the working poor are not tax cuts, we're talking semantics here. As for the payroll tax cut, he's playing partisan spin. It's big and Obama has backed it from the beginning and wants it extended throughout next year. The stimulus tax cuts, according to the WaPo's fact-checker, amounted to around half of GWB's tax cuts, while exempting the very wealthy. I'd say that a Democrat cutting taxes in his first term by half as much as Bush did does not make such a Democrat a Saul Alinsky radical.

As for the proposed future Obamacare tax hikes, they amount to around one-third of the tax hikes signed by Ronald Reagan in 1982, according to Bloomberg. Reagan also doubled the gas tax. So I think I win that round. Obama's first term was marked by tax reductions, not increases, even as revenues sank to 50-year lows. If he were what Romney and Gingrich now say he is, that simply would not have happened.

Our live-blog of the South Carolina results is here; our reax to the earthquake here; the new landscape explored here.