Month: August 2012

Ann Takes The Stage

GT_ANN-ROMNEY_120828

Ann Romney is scheduled to speak tonight. David Von Drehle suspects that the potential first lady, who has battled MS, won't connect her disease to political policies:

MS drug therapy is a touchy subject in countries around the world because the medicines are extremely expensive—starting above $3,000 per month and rising steeply for drugs that must be infused intravenously. And they only slow the disease; they don’t cure it. As a result, access is uneven. Single-payer systems, like Britain’s National Health Service, have been resistant to covering the treatments, and some U.S. insurers put a lifetime cap on the amount that patients can spend on the drugs. In a 2011 interview with Parade, Romney advised her fellow MS patients "to get on medications because the medications now are so effective in reducing symptoms." A more explicit discussion could entangle her in the thorny debate over health care spending.

Alyssa Rosenberg finds little reason to cover Ann's speech:

It's hard to imagine that Mrs. Romney is going to attempt to sell audiences on a significantly revised portrait of her husband, or make any news. Given that the conventions are staged campaign events rather than places where events are actually decided, it makes sense that the networks (and the rest of the media, for that matter) should exert judgment. 

(Photo: Ann Romney, wife of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, stands on stage during a walk through at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, on Tuesday, Augugst 28. Her challenge today at the RNC in Tampa – her biggest stage yet – will be to humanize her husband for Americans who haven’t so far found him very likable.  By Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A Guide To The Proper Usage Of “Asshole”

James Parker reviews Dr. Geoffrey Nunberg's new book:

Hitler, Stalin, Osama bin Laden — these, Dr. Nunberg explains by way of easing us into the subject, were not assholes. Their offenses were too terrible, the scope of their wrongdoing too vast and alien. Your idiot boss is an asshole, as is your annoying brother-in-law, your ungrateful upstairs neighbor, and the cop who gave you a ticket this morning. Asshole is "a word we reserve for members of our own tribe… It signals indignation, with an undercurrent of contempt, an emotion you can only feel towards those you feel both superior to and familiar with."

The Receding Republican Majority

Chait sees this campaign as the GOP's "last, best chance to win an election in the party’s current demographic and ideological form":

A Republican strategist said something interesting and revealing on Friday, though it largely escaped attention in the howling gusts of punditry over Mitt Romney’s birth certificate crack and a potential convention-altering hurricane. The subject was a Ron Brownstein story outlining the demographic hit rates each party requires to win in November. To squeak out a majority, Mitt Romney probably needs to win at least 61 percent of the white vote — a figure exceeding what George H.W. Bush commanded over Michael Dukakis in 1988. The Republican strategist told Brownstein, “This is the last time anyone will try to do this” — “this” being a near total reliance on white votes to win a presidential election.

John Judis is on the same page:

Romney’s strategy is largely a reprise of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election strategy, minus Reagan’s public show of amiability and his support among Hispanics. With his recent ads on welfare, Romney is playing on the racial resentments of the white working class the same way Reagan did. Meanwhile, Republicans—perhaps with Romney’s support—are attempting to reduce the Democrats’ support among minorities by keeping them from the polls by passing new voting regulations. The Romney-Republican strategy is the dark side of the older Republican strategy: the Reagan of hardline conservative Pat Buchanan rather than of public relations man Michael Deaver. It could still work in November 2012—because of Obama’s weakness among the electorate. But it won’t lay the basis for a new Republican majority. If anything, it will guarantee the Republicans’ defeat in the decade to come.

A Conservative Who Asks: Why Not?

In his farewell post on David Frum's wonderful blog, Noah Kristula Green gives us a taste of what American conservatism might be if it were not tied to its current extremism. It's a great list – and note where it starts:

Why couldn't the Republicans and conservatives…

-Embrace gay marriage with the same enthusiasm as David Cameron? ("I don’t support gay marriage in spite of being a conservative. I support gay marriage becaBurkeuse I am a conservative.") 

-Have a Values Voter Summit be about all voters of faith and not merely be an Evangelical Christian convention?

-Would it really be so hard for the GOP to renounce Austrian economics and support monetary stimulus in an emergency? (As Milton Friedman would have done.)

-Could the pro-life movement change priorities from criminalizing abortion to working to find effective ways to disincentivize it?

-Can Republicans acknowledge that a Tax Credit is just as bad a subsidy?

-Can Republicans learn how to do the effective ethnic outreach needed to win minority groups in elections? If even Canadians could learn how to do this…

-And is it so hard to admit that Fox News is clearly produced with an eye towards the geriatric population and that it doesn't do a good job of speaking to Americans who are not yet 50?

At some point, the GOP will have to do all these things if it wants to survive as a national party. The reason it can't? Religious and political fundamentalism. I remain of the view that the core conservative problem in America is that conservatives have become their own nemesis: ideological rather than pragmatic, pursuers of the perfect as opposed to the good, deeply uncomfortable with the modern world, and more at ease with the politics of resentment and radicalism than the politics of inclusion and moderation.

The good news is that Romney's embrace of Ryan means that a defeat this November, if it happens, will not be able to be coherently blamed on Romney's being a squish. He is putting the most radical agenda of any party in the West on the table. That may either heighten this country's cultural contradictions and economic decline and lead to a wider global religious war (my fear in a supply-side, Christianist presidency allied with Israel against the entire Muslim world). Or it may help speed the recovery of the conservative mind and temperament. Which is why every sane conservative should vote for Obama this November. It's the GOP's only medium-term hope.

Sex With Cancer

A brutally honest testimonial:

When I told him I had cancer a few dates in, he claimed he wasn’t surprised. "I can kind of tell when people have had hardships in their lives," he said earnestly. "They’re just deep and more real." I repaid his sensitivity by using his body for sex. I became barbaric, like an animal. After losing all control of my body to cancer, I just wanted to be the boss of something. I had so much pent-up stress and I just wanted to let loose. I had to be on top and I refused to do it from behind, because I was terrified my wig would shift. (It’s very nerve-wracking to have sex in a wig.)

Nico was blown away — until I started getting out of bed at 7 a.m. and watching TV in the living room instead of snuggling with him, like I normally would. Physically, I could not lay there with him. It was painful. Cancer made me more like a stereotypical dude in that I just wanted to get out of there. I wasn't looking to make a real connection with somebody because I didn't know what my fate would be.

The View From Your Window Contest: Winner #117

Vfyw-8-25

A reader writes:

I was thinking Midwest because the cement building looks like some kind of grain elevator.  My daughter thinks the foreground looks like a recent Taylor Swift video that supposedly was filmed in Memphis.  So we'll go with Memphis.

Another writes:

Brugge, Belgium?  Wild guess.  Just am impulse really.  The houses, chimney, weather, small port, lace curtains.  Have never been there, just in the area.

Another:

If it weren't for the big building in the distance I'd say it was Tunbridge Wells, England, from one of the Hotel du Vin's rear-looking rooms – but likely a world away.

Another:

Grimsby, England. Taken in 1965.

Another:

I thought Ireland first, but the presence of the Offshore Supply Vessel in the center of the shot suggested somewhere bordering on the North Sea.  It looks rather flat in the background, so that sort of rules out Aberdeen and the other Scottish North Sea bases for offshore supply, so I'm going with somewhere on the River Tees. 15 minutes of searching – bollocks, no way, but fascinating anyway – plenty of evidence of an industrial landscape past – ghost slipways for a shipyard, the outline of a roundhouse for locomotives in a railyard.

Another:

Tough one this week.

Thought about Switzerland, until I saw the large ship on the left. And, since it looks a little too hilly to be the Netherlands, I'm going to go with Hamburg, Germany. Probably wrong, but oh well.

Another:

This had to be in the British Isles, from the rows of terraced houses and the greyness of the sky! I could just about make out some lettering on the large silo, and (after a detour through the R & B Hall of Fame!), I found out that R & H Hall is a supplier of animal feeds in Ireland. They have only a few locations so the Cork one was not hard to find. The view is from the marked window of a house on Wellington Road. I figure it has to be the upper window because of the crossbars, the white stucco visible to the right outside the window, and the fact that the top of the window seems to be visible. The 2nd and 3rd-floor windows are quite tall and it seems unlikely the submitter was standing on a ladder! I can't find a street number but the other photo with the red door appears to be the street entrance:

VFYW20120825a

Cork, Ireland it is. Another:

It's Ireland! Finally, you feature Ireland! I knew it from the minute I saw it, the damp concrete path to the street, the weird ugly yellow bush in next door's garden (why do we grow it everywhere I don't know; it's hideous), the chimneys, the grey roofs, grey sky, grey everything.

Another:

One look at the lace curtain and mock-Georgian PVC window frame and I knew this was modern Ireland.  I believe the picture was taken from Summerhill Terrace, overlooking the river Lee and the city's docks. Cork has its charms, unfortunately, none of them are obvious from the photo. It looks grim!

An aerial view:

View_from_window01

Another reader:

This one was easy for any Cork natives. The R&H Hall building is right on Kennedy Quay on the south side of the River Lee in the Port of Cork, just before the river splits to create the island that is downtown Cork. The picture is taken from one of the terraces above the Lower Glanmire Road on the north side of the river. A little snooping around google maps suggests it may be number 6 Summerhill North because of the windows, the garden, and the back of the white house in the row in front with black railing.This is my first entry and I can't get into drawing maps*.

As a Cork man who has been in the US for eight years, this has brightened my day no end. Cork people are very proud of their hometown – some of the most accurate maps of Ireland depict the country as Cork and not-Cork.

I'll be heading home for a visit in October for my brother's wedding. My siblings have been trying to bankrupt me with their annual sequence of weddings. But we wouldn't miss it for the world. And I have a two-and-a-half month old daughter* who has yet to meet her clan, with her grandmother especially counting down the days til she gets her mitts on her. It's going to be absolutely brilliant. Thanks for the view.

Another:

I'd have been ashamed of myself if I didn't get this view of the my favourite city in Ireland (I'm a Limerick man myself but while in college, I spent 6 months working in Cork and the building I worked in is actually in that photo (if you look on the middle ground on the right hand side, you'll see a row of grey buildings behind the lamppost which is close to where the photographer was and behind those buildings is a lighter grey building which is Navigation House, former home of the Planning Dept. of Cork City Council where I worked in 2004 and loved every day of it).

Details from the submitter:

The photo was taken from a building located between Wellington Road and Summerhill North on Cork's northside – the address is Summerhill Terrace, Wellington Road, a couple of doors down from the Ardara Bed & Breakfast. The view is from a south-facing window looking across Summerhill North and the River Lee (hidden) to Cork's south docks, where you can see the large R&H Hall building slightly to the left. Here's the exact location on Google Maps. You can see pretty much the same view by going to the Street View at the placemark I've left on Summerhill North for you.

He follows up in response to a reader's image that had a red circle in the top right corner of the building in question:

The photo was taken from the ground floor window on the left of the building as you face it – basically, move your red circle to the window to the left, and then down three times and you've got it!

Two readers guessed that exact window. The first sends an image:

Vfyw1(1)

And the second:

OK, third time lucky I hope. I got the right answers for the Edinburgh and Cornwall VFYW contests, give or a take a window in either direction, but now we're in my homeland, so that has to be a triumphant omen. This is definitely Cork, Ireland, and I'm fairly sure the photograph is taken from Summerhill Terrace, a group of apartments on Summerhill North Road (although technically I think the postal address might be Wellington Road, on the other side). I've highlighted the window I think the picture is taken from in the attached photo. Don't hold it against me that I'm a Dub!

Too close for a tie-breaker, as both readers correctly guessed windows in the past without winning, so we'll just have to award two books this week. By the way, the other readers who guessed adjacent windows have been put on the "Correct Guessers" list, which will give them an edge in future close contests.

(Archive)

Last Call For The Race Card – And Bill Clinton’s Opportunity

129335757

There are two toxic possibilities for the fall campaign focused on two aspects of each candidate's life. The first is race; the second is Mormonism. Romney has now firmly grasped the race weapon, while I doubt very much that Obama will touch the LDS church. That shows you who's still got the edge at the moment: Obama. I try not to jump to conclusions about racial appeals – but the two-pronged campaign assault by Romney, on Medicare and welfare, does not rise to the level, in my view, of plausible deniability.

The key to both is the classic notion that unworthy blacks are taking from worthy whites. And so the Medicare ad uses white old faces expressing shock at the notion that Obama would transfer money from their retirement healthcare for health insurance for those without, i.e. the poor, who tend to be more minority than the rich. It's basically a lie – Ryan would cut the same from Medicare as Obama would, and there is no direct quid pro quo between the two policies. It's also dishonest: Ryan and Romney are promising to cut Medicare spending and yet are running against Obama for doing exactly that.

Then there's the simple bald lie that Obama is allowing welfare recipients to escape work requirements. I don't remember a campaign in my lifetime which based an entire line of attack on a total fabrication, in fact a reverse of the truth. The welfare waivers are designed exclusively to experiment with how to increase the effectiveness of the work requirement for welfare, and waivers have been granted to Republican governors as well. And yet we get this from the Romney campaign:

"Our most effective ad is our welfare ad," a top television advertising strategist for Romney, Ashley O'Connor, said at a forum Tuesday hosted by ABCNews and Yahoo! News. "It's new information."

It's not. It's new disinformation. It's Orwellian propaganda. Chris Matthews was righteously indignant yesterday about the revival of Atwaterism – but the real scandal is that a major campaign is running a race-baiting ad based on nothing. And it's their most effective. 

The subtext to this is pretty obvious. James Bennet notes the following unguarded aside by Karl Rove to the Washington elite's stenographer, Mike Allen. Rove was unsurprisingly comfortable enough to say the following about a chat with Mitch Daniels:

And I said, 'Mitch, is there a white Democrat south of Indianapolis who's supporting Obama who's not a college professor in Bloomington?' [Laughter] And he stopped for a minute over his green beans and says, 'Not that I can think of.'

You know, Indiana's gone.

The simple assumption of racial politics as the driver of campaigns is what's striking. Karl Rove became what he is – a persistent whitehead on the face of American politics – because he learned the art of race-baiting politics in the South. Romney – having given up on Latinos and blacks and gays – is now betting the bank on the white resentment that has been fast losing potency since the 1990s. Which is where Bill Clinton comes in. He is used in that ad. His speech at the DNC should take on this lie aggressively, call Romney personally on it, and demand that the lie end. No one has more cred on this than Clinton. He should punch hard.

In many ways, this is the biggest moment in Bill Clinton's post-presidential life. Killing racial wedge politics would be a fitting finale to his life's work on that subject.

(Photo: Robyn Beck/Getty.)

Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Get Back In The Water

You discover that the mystery speaker for Thursday night might be … the Immaculate Misconception. Geraghty thinks a Palin barn-burner would fire up the base. My thought is that the more independent voters associate Romney’s candidacy with Palin, the less likely they are to vote for him. But this may simply be a chance to get a few older white Republican voters out.