January 6, 2012: The People will Speak, Wrong-Ward Drift, Santorum on the Outside

In Iowa the party activists spoke, in New Hampshire the people will speak for in the Granite State the nation will observe the first presidential primary election of the season.  

The primary, sampling as it does a much broader cross-section of the electorate, will favor the more moderate Mitt Romney the former governor of Massachusetts who is campaigning here in his ‘back yard’. 

New Hampshire is to Boston what New Jersey is to New York City, that is the media markets of these cities dominate the landscape heavily influencing neighboring states.  Accordingly the Boston media market  is important not only in the Massachusetts primary held later in the year but in the New Hampshire primary as well.  It is significant to note that four years ago the Boston Globe endorsed John McCain over Romney and McCain emerged victorious.  This year the Globe endorsed John Huntsman, former Utah Governor, over Romney citing Mitt’s penchant for changing his stripes in an effort to appeal to the ultra-conservative base of the party.  Romney’s wrong-ward drift has been well documented and need not be repeated here, and Mitt’s efforts ring just as hollow as those of ‘Baby Huey” who is being rejected by the very ideological purists he recruited into the party, because he proved not stalwart enough for their liking. 

Be that as it may, Romney’s efforts have not been hollow enough for the Boston Globe.  The editorial chiding by the Globe may, in the end, prove beneficial to the Romney campaign. The Boston Globe may have unwittingly given Romney the bona fides needed to help convince the unwashed that he is acceptable to them. The wrath of the editorial board of the major organ of the ‘liberal East’, may have been just the tonic needed to immunize Romney from rejection by a sizable portion of ideological conservatives, if not it’s fundamentalist purists.  That remains to be seen, in the meantime Santorum is gaining

January 4, 2012: Romney by a whisker, A Party Divided, On to New Hampshire

After years on the hustings, countless campaign appearances and many millions of dollars later, Willard “Mitt” Romney ended with just a fraction fewer votes than he received 4 years ago.  Last night Mitt Romney was able to eek out an 8 vote victory over the surging Sanitorium primarily because the Rescumlican field proved, on balance, less convincing than the last time around.  With a lower turnout than in 2008, Romney was able to finish just ahead of Rick Santorum for the bragging rights to Iowa.

 The results produced by the ‘retail’ politics of Iowa reflect the huge divisions that lurk just beneath the surface of the Rescumlican Party.  Divided between the so-called “moderates”, that is the marginally sane candidates represented by Romney and Huntsman, and the “ideologues” represented by the likes of Ron Paul and, to some extent Baby Huey, the base of the wrong is further subdivided by the emergence of ultra-conservatives who pander openly to the crypto-fascist brown shirts so evident in the 2009 shenanigans over the Health-Care fiasco.  This base element was represented most markedly by Michelle Bachman and Rick Perry who pandered shamelessly to the likes of Dick Armey and Rush Limbaugh embracing every cracker-headed idea from ‘Birther’ to ‘death panels’ to repeal of the 14^th amendment and the direct election of the Senate.  Not since the days of John C. Calhoun has the politics of ‘nullification’ been so openly advocated.  The idiot wrong has moved to obstruct, delay and otherwise impede the efforts in the waning days of the last Republican administration as well as President Obama to right the ship of state before it flounders on the rocks.

 What we have here, then, is a race between the relative voices of reason with the voices of intolerance and greed.  The results showed that among hard-core activists the latter hold the majority within the Rescumlican party but are divided concerning who should carry their standard.  As long as those divisions hold and the ‘anybody but Romney’ movement cannot come together behind the standard of a single alternative then the voices of ‘reason’ and ‘moderation’--always in short supply within the Rescumlican ranks--will win out.

To date the fundamentalist base of the party has been unable get behind a consensus candidate.  It remains to be seen if the emergence of Santorum as the latest ‘I-am-not-Romney’ candidate will prove to be more than a mere 15 minutes in the spotlight.  It will depend on if he can now turn this performance into a compelling candidacy by raising enough money and building the organization needed for the long haul ahead.  Both time and money are in short-supply. If he doesn’t act or the base of the party does not move to his assistance quickly enough Santorum will go the way of Michelle Bachman who won the straw-poll in Iowa last summer and withdrew from the race today saying that the people had spoken.  And so they have, and now it’s on to New Hampshire.

January 2, 2012: Caucus in Iowa, Field Divided, How Well He Runs

The nation will tomorrow witness the beginning of the all-too-shortened process of selecting the nominees for the major parties’ presidential nominations.  On the Democratic side there will be no contest with the incumbent Barack Obama running unopposed in his bid for re-nomination by the Democratic Party.  On the Rescumlican side of the ledger, however, the past, and momentarily at least, front-runner Mitt Romney is being opposed by at least half a dozen lesser lights in his latest bid to become the presidential nominee of the party of greed. 

Deep in the heart of the plains lies Iowa, the first contest in this election year.  As noted previously the process of selecting delegates for the respective parties conventions is a rather convoluted one in the ‘Hawkeye” State.  Of the 1.3 million or so eligible voters in the state, some 120,000 or so will gather in at some 17,000 caucus sites throughout the state.  These sites range from churches and school auditoriums to citizens living rooms and barns where the faithful of each candidate will gather, listen to some speeches and then cast ballots.   Those groups representing candidates that fail to reach a “threshold” level of strength, around 15%, will then either leave or be asked to switch their votes to another candidate, much like what would occur at a state or national conclave if we ever get to witness another convention go past the first ballot.  In this way a ‘dark-horse’ candidate can gain strength, move up into the top tier or perhaps pull an upset much as the “Huckster” Mike Hucklebee did four years ago in upsetting the plans of Mitt Romney. 

It is an odd way to begin such an important undertaking, restricting as it does participation to a miniscule fraction of the electorate.  It favors candidates who are ‘one issue’ or

‘ideologically pure’ as well as those candidates who have built an organization in the state.  For in the final analysis, the outcome depends more than anything on the ability of your campaign to identify ardent supporters and insure that they get out into the cold night, show up at the caucus, and fight for the candidacy.  While lacking the ideological support of the idiot-wrong, Romney has built a respectable organization which, hopefully, will have learned a lesson or two since the set-back four years ago. 

 Romney is also favored by having the fundamentalist base of the party fractured in it’s divided support of the candidacies of Ron Paul and the up-and-coming Rick Santorum, former Senator from Pennsylvania and darling of the supply-siders who the good people of Pennsylvania had the sense to expel from the Senate some years ago.  Nevertheless with the nosedive taken by ‘Baby Huey” in recent weeks, as Romney and others began a telling series of negative ads simply citing Gingrich’s record and behavior when he was last a player in Washington, the brain-dead base of the party has moved toward Santorum seeking a less flamboyant and more suitable substitute.  While Santorum is polling ahead of all others among the fundamentalist base of the party, his lead is only a few points ahead of Ron Paul with Gingrich trailing a not-so-distant third. 

 What one must keep in mind about this process is that on the Rescumlican side of the ledger most of these contests are winner-take-all, meaning that one can claim all the delegates with a mere plurality rather than a majority of the return.  As long as Romney is opposed by two or three contenders on his political right, he can carry the day and claim the lion’s share.  It is in his interest to keep the candidacies of at least two, possibly three, such ultra-conservatives alive at least until the process has wound it’s way through the Southern states. 

 The exercise in Iowa will not necessarily determine the nominee.  What it will do will be to  define who has emerged as a ‘top-tier’ candidate, with the top three or four--depending on how closely they poll together--receiving the boost they need by way of media attention and subsequent campaign donations.  From this perspective it appears that Romney, Paul, Santorum and, perhaps, Gingrich will survive Iowa.  The candidacies of Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, Huntsman will take a serious body blow.  The question for Romney is holding it together thru New Hampshire and then finding a way to survive the Southern primaries.  If he can hang on in the South, he has the inside track to the nomination.  The Question for the conservative wrong is whether they can decide which candidate to rally around in order to deny the Mormon the nomination.  Given the divided opposition it appears that Romney has some open field, how fast it closes on him will depend on how well he runs.

December 19, 2011: Adults in the Sandbox, Ron Paul as 'Spoiler', Precious Little Time Left.

“A Republic does not recognize unorganized opinion”
                                        ---from the 'Quotations of Chairman Joe'

It was announced over the weekend that the Des Moines Register, Iowa’s most prominent and influential newspaper, has endorsed Mitt Romney in the upcoming Republican contest. Citing ‘Baby Huey’s’ record of rabid partisanship and calling him a ‘divider’ and not a ‘uniter’ the paper’s editorial board chose Romney instead because of his record at not only cleaning up the failing winter Olympics held in the 1990’s in Utah, but his ability to work across party lines to move the state of Massachusetts forward on several important issues.

Today, was announced that Bob Dole, former Senate Majority Leader and 1996 Republican Presidential Candidate also announced his support of Mitt Romney for the Presidential nomination.


It has been my experience that there is almost an inverse correlation between a press endorsement and winning an election. Most of the candidates I have worked for over the years, including myself as a candidate for County Commissioner, have received, sometimes reluctantly as in my case, the endorsement of the local paper only to see office slip from our grasp albeit by the narrowest of margins. Conversely, I have worked in and managed campaigns were we did not get such endorsements and walked to victory. It is as if the public takes perverse pleasure in thumbing their collective nose at the megaphone of the elite.

Be that as it may, it is refreshing to see the adults in the playground begin to pass judgment, for it is clear that several of the Rescumlican wannabees are completely devoid of the maturity and judgment, not to mention native intelligence and political organization, to be serious Presidential contenders.

Still, one must remember, the Iowa contest will not be decided by primary vote, or even a closed primary vote, where only registered party members cast ballots. Instead delegates to the national convention will be chosen at causes held in living rooms and school gymnasiums all across the state. Only those candidates who reach a certain ‘threshold’ of support will be considered, meaning that those supporting say a lightweight like Michelle Bachmann will soon discover that she has insufficient support and will then throw their weight behind another candidate, say Rick Santorum or Ron Paul. This is the reason Bachmann has taken on Ron Paul in the latest debate, not only has Paul perhaps the best organization in the state, but his pre-caucus polling numbers suggest that many of Bachmann’s and Santorum’s supporters are looking for a place to go after the first ballot and they would rather have Paul be in the position of having his supports desert him and come to them instead of the scenario that now seems likely. Clearly, this system, being so closed and involving such a low percentage of the qualified voters, gives immense advantage to those who have spent the time and the resources to build an organization and are now among the front-runners. As with Obama’s victory in Iowa four years ago (see previous posts), often the winner becomes every one else’s second choice.


This scenario favors Ron Paul, inasmuch as he has the national exposure and, like a stopped clock, is right twice a day. In his case he managed to parlay his opposition to the war in Iraq into a great deal of campus support in 2008 building a national organization and name recognition in the process. His ideas on spending and taxes are deplorably regressive and reactionary and will do material damage to the middle class should he prevail, but his early emergence on the war issue blinded many in the upcoming generation as to his domestic agendas. As a consequence he now stands before us as a first-tier contender who has the campaign experience and the organization to be a real spoiler in the race.

Recently the polls were showing ‘Baby Huey’ in the lead, Romney second, Paul Third. Bachmann and Santorum have been maneuvering to try to replace Paul so as to survive the Caucus and head to New Hampshire. To this observer, that seems unlikely. Neither have the organization to sustain them and their increasingly shrill campaigning will not suffice in this non-primary setting. From here it looks as if Paul may be the spoiler as Gingrich’s support begins to wane. Romney, I think will hold, but the party is still looking for some kind of viable alternative to the Mormon, and is now torn as it looks to alternatives. Gingrich, with all his baggage and his inability to organize, will struggle to win this contest. For Romney, despite his religion, has the inside track. That’s why the voices of influence are beginning to jump on his bandwagon. The issue will be decided at the South, the question being will the party be able to ‘organize’ around an alternative in time to grab the prize from the Mormon’s grasp. Not in Iowa, not in New Hampshire. Romney will hold his own in Iowa, win New Hampshire and then the real contest begins.


What the ‘tea baggers’ and the idiot wrong have to understand is what George Wallace did not. It is not enough to campaign and get crowds, one has to organize and for that there is precious little time.

December 10, 2011: Sold, Exile on K Street, The Gingrich That Stole Christmas.

Flashback: it is 1994 and the Rescumlicans have taken control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. At the head of the Rescumlican delegation was a brash young Congressman from Georgia who, after recruiting a bunch of right-wing ideologues and fashioning his so-called “contract on America”, ran a national campaign designed to gain control of the House. The campaign while proving successful produced an agenda that was not so successful. Only one of the ten planks in the platform that was the “contract” ever passed the house, none became law. For instance, the part calling for term limits became an almost immediate casualty.


Gingrich, having engineered the electoral upheaval, became the new incoming speaker. Not only did he prove brash, arrogant, and a bit uninformed, but--in what proved to be an early version of “unitary theory of government” immediately upon taking hold of the speaker’s gavel began to behave as if he were the center of government, as if he were in London and was now, as titular head of the house, serving as Prime Minister. It got so bad that at one news conference President Clinton had to remind the assembled reporters, if not the nation, that “I am still relevant”.

In a prophetic gesture, on an early January morning in 1994, as Gingrich was about to take the Gavel former Congresswoman Pat Schroeder of Colorado led a small band of Democratic members up the steep steps leading to the upper reaches of the capital dome, stepped outside and over the dome of the capitol building stretched a huge “sold” sign. It was a telling if brief demonstration in protest of what was surely to come.

Within hours a certain reprobate named Tom Delay would be elevated to the position of majority Whip of the house and would assist the speaker in forging alliances and otherwise selling the interests of the people to the lobbyists of K street. For 12 long years ’we the people’ were sent into exile as the k-street lobbyists took control of the national government.. What followed was not only massive rounds of deregulation, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which allowed the banks to re-enter the stock market, but the shutdown of the federal government over Baby Huey’s attempt to gut Medicare, massive cuts in domestic spending, ending with the Jack Abramoff scandals. In fact, in the waning hours of Rescumlican control in 2006, long after Baby Huey was driven from office by his own party, one of the last acts of the malignant majority was an attempt to do away with the 40 hour work week.


In the weeks following the election of 1994 leading up to the holidays, as the shadow of Baby Huey stood over Washington and about to assume power, I entitled an entry to my journal “The Gingrich that Stole Christmas”, referring to what he was about to do to the already tattered social safety net. I remember one of the national journals had a similar revelation and stole my headline. It was, like Congresswoman Schroeder’s gesture, prophetic.

In fact Baby Huey, in his short stint as Speaker, had embroiled himself in so many confrontations, so many unpopular legislative initiatives and so much scandal (his book deal with Rupert Murdock being one of them) that he had by the late 1990’s become a poster child for Democratic Party fundraising. The mere thought of giving “le infant terrible” any additional leverage proved so repugnant and the Rescumlican majority had dwindled to such narrow margins that the leadership of the House--Bob Michaels of Illinois and a young John Boner of Ohio among them--approached the speaker after the 1998 elections and informed him that they would vote with the Democrats if he stood again for Speaker. Gingrich, by then perhaps the most reviled politician in America, promptly resigned not only his position as Speaker of the House, but his seat in congress. From there he assumed new roles as professor, writer, and yes, lobbyist.

Much has been made of Gingrich’s marital difficulties and the circumstances surrounding his separations and divorces but, like Herman Cain, much of this fixation obscures the greater point. Gingrich, for all his professorial manner, all of his attempts to portray himself as a “policy Wonk” in the mold of Bill Clinton, is pure façade, for underneath the image lurks an agenda of pure greed. It is this greed, symbolized by congresswoman Schroeder’s trek up those steep stairs to the roof of the capitol, that is the real point. Under Gingrich, the House became a cesspool of corporate greed on the make with the House serving as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Corporate Cartels. It wasn’t so much the hypocrisy of Gingrich presiding over the votes to impeach President Clinton over an affair with a White House intern while the Speaker was having his own affair with his own intern, as much as the hypocrisy of presenting a Rescumlican agenda of economic opportunity while in the process selling the people’s government to the very forces that will bring the end of such opportunity.


Like Nixon, Gingrich is banking on the half-life of the collective memory of the country and is busy out and about refurbishing his “image”. But like the “new Nixon” this represents simply another Madison avenue make-over in service of the larger agenda which is to service the interests of the national and international cartels at the expense of the larger national interests and, perhaps, the republic itself.