Month: January 2012

"[W]e must acknowledge that when Israel takes an action against the Palestinians — whether we agree with that action or not — the action may, and often does, reverberate elsewhere. But we cannot call those who acknowledge these things anti-Semitic. We can call that an uncomfortable truth. And when Haredi men and women put their children in striped pajamas and place a yellow star emblazoned with the word 'Jude' on their chests and parade in the streets of Jerusalem to protest the secular world, we can call that spitting on the graves of our ancestors. And we can weep that we have lost all perspective," - Sarah Wildman.

As David Cameron takes on executive pay, Boris Johnson reflects on Margaret Thatcher’s contempt for “complacent men”:  

Thatcher wasn’t against money, and she wasn’t against pay as an incentive to real exertion and real talent. But … she would have been totally opposed to all that now whiffs of a male-dominated cartel, a you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours conspiracy against the shareholders and the wider interests of the company. Thatcher was brought up a Methodist, with a deep attachment to the values of the Protestant work ethic.

She would have been against any kind of crony capitalism, and as for the solution – well, she would not have wanted pay set by politicians, and she would not have gone for any kind of continental-style socialism. But I reckon she would certainly have gone for any kind of poujadiste revolt that gave shareholders a simple way of voting down pay awards they thought were excessive. In tackling boardroom greed, David Cameron is not bucking the market. He is acting in the true Thatcherite tradition of the Conservative Party, because male clubbiness, jobbery, idleness and complacency were the very things Margaret Thatcher fought against all her political career.

"[My mother] taught me to be grateful for my life regardless of what that entailed, and that’s directly related to the image of Christ on the cross and the example of sacrifice that he gave us. What she taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain — it’s that the pain is actually a gift," – Stephen Colbert [NYT].

Colbert is one of the most hope-inspiring public Catholics in America.

I wondered whether he would have cultural traction outside his Pennsylvania, Northeast/Midwestern roots. It appears that ideology/theology counts more than region:

A poll released Saturday showed Romney at 30 percent in South Carolina with Gingrich in second place with 23 percent. Santorum was third with 19 percent. But the polling firm, Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling company, noted that "the candidate with the best chance of beating Romney in South Carolina is Santorum" because "he edges out Romney as the candidate with the best favorability rating."

Chip Felkel, a Greenville-based political consultant who is not working for any presidential campaign, agreed. "This guy (Santorum) is the only guy who has any momentum, any enthusiasm — at least to the scale to possibly upset the apple cart," he said. "The rest of them have just dug too deep of a hole."

A reader adds:

Not to forget: Rick Santorum was raised in rural Berkeley Co., West Virginia and in equally rural Butler Co., PA. And James Carville's old comment about Pennsylvania is so true: "it's got Philadelphia on one end and Pittsburgh on the other, and a whole lot of Alabama in between."

It's always disconcerting when the Dish finds itself backed up by, er … well … whatsername.

James Joyner expects demographic trends to eventually transform the GOP. In the near term:

Whether someone like Huntsman will be the Republican nominee in 2016 depends almost entirely on what happens these next ten months. If Romney wins the nomination and loses to Obama–both of which seem likely right now–then we’ll likely see a swing to the right in 2016, as it would reinforce in the nominating electorate the notion that nominating moderates is a recipe for disaster.

If Romney wins the nomination and beats Obama, he will, barring tragedy, be the nominee in 2016 and 2020 will proceed along something like the current path, with no lessons being learned. The only real way to speed up the learning curve–and it might take two presidential cycles even then–would be if Santorum were to get the nomination and then lose in an Electoral College landslide to Obama despite a down economy. Were that to happen, it would be hard for the base to tell themselves that they got beaten because they didn’t get behind a Real Conservative. 

… Salt Lake City?? Already-composed gay anthem above.

Jim Antle worries that the race for the nomination has turned into a meaningless struggle for the silver medal: 

The entire contest has focused on becoming the anti-Romney more than beating Romney himself. So you have Perry campaigning in South Carolina, hoping that Romney will defeat Rick Santorum in a landslide so that he can claim to be the viable alternative again. You have Newt Gingrich seeming to bow out of a rumored non-agression pact with Santorum and engaging in an argument over who is more responsible for 1994. You have Ron Paul going negative against Gingrich and Santorum, with Gingrich and Santorum responding in kind. That's how you end up with a candidate who can't seem to reliably get much more than 25 percent of the vote outside of New Hampshire looking like an unstoppable juggernaut. The fight to be the anti-Romney has driven down the numbers of each conservative aspirant, with Santorum likely to be the next target.

David Kuo and Patton Dodd look to the quarterback to explain the Catholic's appeal to evangelicals:

Plenty of politicians attempt Tebow-like appeals; remember Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s bravado about his faith? (Perry even compared himself to Tebow at one point this fall.) That is what most people think of when they think of evangelicals and politics — a parading American moralism that uses Jesus as a rallying cry. But what makes Tebow loved by his coaches and teammates is that it isn’t just talk. It is an authentic personal piety that can build qualities essential for football success: courage, coolness under pressure, leadership, servanthood….

It may also be what gave Santorum his breakthrough among evangelicals in Iowa. Quietly, from town hall meeting to pizza joint to pancake house, he shared his vision for the country, but he also told his own story — the blue-collar working family that was his foundation, the wife who is his love, the daily dependence on God, the daughter with the genetic ailment that should have already killed her. He came across more as a pilgrim than a politician.

And the last-ditch victories keep coming.

I should have noted when we ran the clip that it's unfair to infer from this quote that Romney was talking about his time at Bain. He wasn't. He was talking about something else entirely, extolling the benefits of choice in a marketplace. To say or imply otherwise is, well, something Romney would do if Obama said it, but we shouldn't. This was a gaffe simply of presentation. It was how he put it, not what he said. But just as it's true in some sense that "corporations are people," it's still a dumb statement for Mitt Bain Romney to be saying in this climate.

It's also extremely dumb for Romney to say things like this:

“I know what’s it’s like to worry whether you’re going to get fired. There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip.”

And like so many of his other big lies, Romney cannot substantiate it. Each time Romney tries to connect with regular voters ("I'm unemployed too"), you want to curl up onto a little ball of excruciation. Perry picked up on the latest maladroit quote immediately:

“I mean, he actually said this,” Mr. Perry told more than 100 diners at a breakfast gathering here. “Now, I have no doubt Mitt Romney was worried about pink slips — whether he was going to have enough of them to hand out because his company, Bain Capital, of all the jobs that they killed,” Mr. Perry said. “I’m sure he was worried that he would run out of pink slips.”

And that seems to me the most telling quote of all. That Gingrich and Perry are openly using classic Democratic attack lines against Romney, especially with his record at Bain, is a sign to me that they suspect it could work. And if it can work against Romney in a Republican primary, imagine what could be done in a general election. Already, Perry has found a specific example to bring against Romney in South Carolina:

He said that people in nearby Gaffney, S.C., in particular, “would find his comments incredible,” because it is where Mr. Perry said Bain shut down a plant and fired 150 workers. “That didn’t happen until Mitt Romney’s private equity firm, they looted that company with more than $20 million in management fees.”

He also charged that Mr. Romney’s firm took $65 million in management fees out of a steel company in a deal in which 700 steelworkers in Georgetown, S.C., and Kansas City lost their jobs, their health insurance and “large portions” of their pensions.

“There’s nothing wrong with being successful and making money — that’s the American dream,” Mr. Perry said. “But there is something inherently wrong when getting rich off failures and sticking it to someone else is how you do your business. I happen to think that that is indefensible.” “If you are a victim of Bain capital’s downsizing, it’s the ultimate insult for Mitt Romney to come to South Carolina and tell you he feels your pain — because he caused it,” Mr. Perry said.

Jesus. "Looting"? Blaming Romney for unemployment?

Even the hardest of hardcore Republicans, like Perry, realize that this is now a populist election and their likeliest nominee is a plutocrat who stumbles every time he tried to relate to regular folks, and has a record at Bain that is a populist opponent's dream.

Donna Brazile was onto something. Romney is a man actually ill-suited to the temper of the times. If the economy is improving sufficiently, he will also be denied his core argument, that the president has made the Bush recession worse. He's weak. Perhaps the weakest of them all.