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Mitt Romney's Problem Isn't Being Rich. It's Being Mean.

Ah, the "Bain Story". It's the campaign narrative that simply refuses to die, no matter how Republicans try to wish it away. Mitt Romney's experience as the head of Bain Capital are both his attempt to prove his business savvy, and his opponents' attempt to paint him as the evil example of the 1%.

I'm not sure a lot of people - even the people who are trying to use Mitt's Bain experience as a cudgel against him - entirely understand why the attacks are working. And working they are. As much as "pro-business" types would like to turn Romney's business acumen into a net plus, as much as some private sector types want to paint Obama as an anti-Capitalist at least (or "socialist" at worst)... the protestations about "demonizing Mitt Romney" tend to underline that the attacks are working and something is sticking, though no one, exactly, can seem to say what it is.

One obvious point is that criticism of Romney, or of Bain more generally, is not, by itself, anti-business. One investment firm's choices are not some stand-in for the entire field private equity, and if there are aspects of the private equity world that trouble people... well, that's probably an ancillary benefit - possibly the only good thing - to come out of this debate. Private equity could stand more scrutiny, and certain practices deserve more consideration, both from a business perspective, and a more human one.

 

It's that "human perspective" that's probably the real story here, and why these stories of Bain's business practices are resonating with the voting public. It's not that Bain's key stakeholders made millions that really gets people down (bringing me back to an old, and apparently upsetting point for others that being rich and making money, by themselves, ae not bad things, necessarily), but it's the practices they employed to get that money. Specifically, what I think is resonating about these stories is simple and human.... it's the part about the layoffs. And the fact that laying people off seems mean.

One of Mitt Romney's main flaws as a candidate - and there are, after all, so many - is that he seems intent on a cerebral, logical argument for his election. He seems awkward and uncomfortable with direct emotional appeals to voters; he comes off, often, as cold. I'm not even sure these perceptions are accurate, yet they do seem to prevail.

And really, Romeny would be in worse shape if President Obama himself had a real strength in emotional appeal, but really, he lkind of doesn't. As we've all observed on the left... he's no Bill Clinton, in ways good and bad. And one of the bad is that, unlike Clinton, he doesn't establish the kind of immediate emotional connection that Clinton still does, almost effortlessly. 

I don't think elections should be won or lost on emotional appeals... but these are difficult, emotional times, filled with uncertainty. Appealing to people's logic and clear thinking isprobably a waste of time. Across Europe, across North Africa and into the Middle East (the "Arab Spring"), it's clear that emotions are driving a lot of people's political judgments. Out with the old. Out with the insensitive. And out with the people who insist we have to think practically, above all else.

 

Bain's business decisions may, in the B-School sense, make perfectly logical sense. And I don't think "capitalism" is under any threat as a result of ads against Mitt Romney about Bain. Lots of people, even lower level workers, understand that business leaders make hard decisions when it comes to growing and sustaining a business. In practical terms, what's best "for the business" at a particular moment may include retrenchment, closings, firings. But on a personal level, those deciions are, almost always, painful ones. People will be hurt. Lives will be up-ended. There will be pain and suffering.

Mitt Romney isn't suffering bad perceptions about his work at Bain Capital because he seems like a bad businessman or not smart; rather, he's been hurt by these ads because he seems mean, unconcerned with the real-life consequences of firings and reversals and how they affect ordinary workers. And he's lousy at expressing empathy; he continues to talk about life changes and reversals with the distance of abstraction, and the cavalier superiority of someone who has, most likely, never known one. President Obama, no, doesn't do mcuh better; but when the focus is on Bain and Romney's business decisions, the quesiton isn't whether Obama can empathize more. It's whether Mitt Romney can empathize at all.

Conservatives are lousy with this stuff; they see Democrats and liberals as little more than sensitive wet rags, crying for trees, yelling about the poor, hugging the downtrodden and disdaining those who are normal, successful. Conservatives look to emotional appeals as a last resort, and even then, the emotions thay appeal to tend to be anger and superiority. You're better than they are. Be a winner. Let people in need learn to take care of themselves.

Liberalism, too, could probably stand to learn to be tougher, and rely less on these soggy emotional appeals. But by keeping the "Bain story" focused on the sense of bewilderment and loss, the suggestion that we can't turn our government over to someone so incapable of understanding the actual, practical impacts of layoffs and bottom line thinking... Democrats are on to something. It's something that can win this election. The problem of course is... once they win, there's no indication that these Democrats, however sensitive, will be any more help than those useless, cold business types.

Articles We Never Finished Reading: The Myth Of Mr. Nice Guy

From the beginning, the president's reelection campaign has taken a brutal, no-holds-barred approach that's sharply at odds with the conciliatory image that was the central predicate of Obama's entire pre-presidential political career. Whether or not the specific issue of Bain Capital ought to be off limits -- Booker has taken pains to clarify he doesn't think it should be -- there's no denying that Obama's 2012 campaign has seized every opportunity to turn the campaign toward sharply personal attacks of a type that the 2008-vintage Obama would surely have recoiled from. From Romney's treatment of his onetime pet dog to his high-school pranks to his income-tax rate, from the "war on women" to the "war on caterpillars," from "I like being able to fire people" to "I'm not concerned about the very poor," no potential controversy has been too petty, too rhetorically overblown or too out-of-context to be exploited to the hilt.

None of this is shocking -- it's how the game is played. But Obama once ostentatiously refused to play it. In June 2007, for example, when Obama's primary campaign distributed a memo titled "Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)" detailing Clinton's connections to India, Obama publicly upbraided his staff, calling it "a dumb mistake" and "unnecessarily caustic." As the New York Times put it at the time, "The memo...raised quesitons about Obama's claims that he is above attack politics, which are epitomized by secretly distributing opposition research about a rival."

 - Molly Ball "The New, Nasty Obama Campaign," at The Atlantic Online.

It may be nasty... but there's nothing "new" about the Obama campaign running vigorously against its opponents. If anything, Democrats are a bit relieved that a primary challenge never materialized, and that Mitt Romney is rising to every expectation of being the lousy campaigner we knew him to be.

This notion of that "hope and change" meant "nice and kind" is a fantasy that played mostly in the heads of Obama's most youthful, or most ardent, believers in 2008. The "can't we all just get along" arguments, the "he's the only one that can bring us together" notes of the pro-Obama hymn, were pretty (and about an inch deep), but they belied the reality that the Obama campaign's approach to beating Hillary Clinton was often brutal and desperate. And while his supporters moutheed words of Kumbayah and World Peace, privately they tended to gripe that Obama should be even rougher and tougher... hardly the notion of gentle niceness that was meant to be projected.

The "India memo" cited above (which is news to me, all these years later), is really more of a prime example of the hamhandedness and neophyte campaign mistakes of the Obama team, lessons they only seem to have partially learned and dealt with since. There is still the inordinate faith in his speeches, still the part where they get caught flat footed when news breaks that's out of their control, and still a kind of amateur quality to their attempts to go hard and mean against opponents. It's not that Mitt Romney's "Bain problem" should be off liits, it's that the message of that Bain problem needs to be spelled out correctly. As far as I can tell, the Obama people get it about half right (and then seem skittish when suggestions arise that they "go too far"). Still, they suffer from the liberal anxiety of being seen as actually believing the things they claim to find important.

The President would be in much rougher shape if Republicans had fielded a candidate - arguably Rick Santorum was closest - who actually appealed to a wide swath of voters who are actually indifferent to the President's record thus far. These are largely the sorts of people who found Hillary Clinton interesting as well - working class people, often white, but also many of color, as well as other distinct minorities, like gay men and lesbians. Instead, because he and Romney are fighting over a fairly narrow percentage of a small part of the overall electorate - educated, but non partisan voters in the middle and iupper middle class - things are bound to be ugly, and charges thrown around. 

It's worth remembering that the 2008 campaign, against McCain had an undercurrent of ugliness that never entirely went away; it's mainly that it was so clear, early in October, that McCain was doomed that the Obama team was much better positioned to stay on the high road, and did so most of the time. It's clear that many conservatives, still, think that they lost because McCain didn't go harder and uglier; but at the same time, they are also the ones who complain, still, that Sarah Palin was subjected to all kinds of ugliness, from the press and from the Obama team. True or not, both ideas miss the point that McCain failed mainly because he was a lousy candidate, and Sarah Palin's selection was Example A (or possibly B after McCain flopped on the economic meltdown in the fall of 2008) of the kind of bad decision making that did him in. The obama didn't so much "play nice" as they simply ignored him, for close to a month. And this year, they may indeed get a similarly luxury option towards the middle of October as well. That won't be a win for "niceness", merely an expression of the reality that Republicans remain in spectacular disarray. There's nothing "new" about the Obama team's "meanness"; and still, nastiness may not define his presidential victories. Either of them.

Articles We - Yup - Never Finished Reading: Rich Man's Burden

If you want to appreciate what Barack Obama is up against in 2012, forget about the front man who is his nominal opponent and look instead at the Republican billionaires buying the ammunition for the battles ahead. A representative example is Harold Simmons, an 80-year-old Texan who dumped some $15 million into the campaign before primary season had ended. Reminiscing about 2008, when he bankrolled an ad blitz to tar the Democrats with the former radical Bill Ayers, Simmons told The Wall Street Journal, “If we had run more ads, we could have killed Obama.” It is not a mistake he intends to make a second time. The $15 million Simmons had spent by late February dwarfs the $2.8 million he allotted to the Ayers takedown and the $3 million he contributed to the Swift Boat Veterans demolition of John Kerry four years before that. Imagine the cash that will flow now that the GOP sideshows are over and the president is firmly in Simmons’s crosshairs.

 

- Frank Rich "Sugar Daddies," New York Magazine Apr 22

 

...Except that, if you check out the informative graphic attached as a sidebar to Rich's article, Simmons is hardly "representative": His 15.4 million in contributions is second only to Sheldon Adelson's 20 million plus, and the tqo of them are 10-15 times ahead of far more "representative" contributions that range from about 1-2 million, generally. That's not a huge discrepancy (though the dollar figures ought to count for something), but it's indicative Rich's generally bombastic approach to the whole topic. There are prefectly good reasons to be concerned about the role of a small, but significant, number of wealthy contributors to both political parties, but Rich's fashionable hair-raised (or as Lucianne used to put it "dress up over head") screed is more about repeating familiar tropes with little real insight, overstating both the rxtent of the problem and properly identifying its more troubling aspects.

Rich does concede that a number of donors to Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, the Karl Rove "Super PAC" that most liberals fixate on most, are secret and that, in part, there are another couple of "anonymous" $10 million donors yet to be identified. Fair enough; but even then, the number of truly "enoromous donors" over five million seems to number roughly less than ten. Moreover, Simmons is also a pretty "representative" example of throwing enormous amounts of money at a problem without seeing much in the way in the way of results. Simmons acknowledges having dumped similarly large sums into the 2008 election, to no particularly good end, and there's no real indication (despite Rich's panting and pointing) that his largesse this year will have any more effect; that doesn't make him "dangerous," that makes him a "patsy" to what I woud call some "unscrupulous" operators promising the moon and delivering a lot less. In just a few sentences, Rich goes a long way towards making Simmons seem like an old man frittering his fortune rather than a political genius - which is not exactly strengenthing Rich's point about fearing these people.

The thing which deserves far more examination than we've made in our society, is that, while "money equals speech" may be the Supreme Court's greatest error, it's not clear that "money equals success" in elections. The 2008 election - along with the two previous ones - are noted for the enormous sums raised, but the outcomes of the last few elections seem less determined by funds than by other factors about when to vote for change and when to affirm the status quo. John Kerry didn't just lose in 2004 over money issues; his failure to inspire voters, even (especially) those in his own party played an enormous role in his loss. Similarly, Obama's fundraising abilities were in many ways a subset of the real qualities that pushed him into the White House: charisma, personal appeal, and the promise of a fresh start. John McCain could have spent a small fortune - and in fact noth he and the GOP did - and still have lost as drmatically as he did.

A lot of this has to do with assumptions about the power of advertising that rarely get properly questioned, challenged or examined in more than a surface way. In a culture where we are bombarded by marketing messages from morning to night, we rarely consider what advertising really moves us to do, why, and how to realistically asses ts reach. We assume, because it is asserted repeatedly, that "negative" advertising on politicians will "ruin" candidates' electoral chances, even when, privately, many of us admit that we find these ads less than useful, often ignore tham, and seek out other, more useful information to make a choice. Yes, that's what separates "informed" voters from a group that probably is more easily swayed; even so, it's hard to know that the enormous sums spent by Crossroads is really buying any kind of real success for conservative ideas or candidates - the successes of 2010 for the GOP, surely, are a lot more about a national mood than a lot of negative ads, however Rove wants to dress up his power as a "mood alterer". Mostly, the millions backing Rove's organization seem meant, mostly, to prop up Rove as a political celebrity whose "power" as a broker is more assumed than proven (a role, I've observed, that traces back to his supposed "genius" in supporting George W. Bush, a similarly dubious proposition).

None of this is to dismiss legitimate concerns about the power of enormous wealth to buy political access, influence electoral outcomes, or suggest that I think "money equals speech" or support the current role of "Super PACs"... but I do think that a lot of the noise about the terror of "all this money" from the left is, well, just noise, mosty meant to try and lmit the actual success of the spending of conservatives, and try and ignore the large spending by groups (say, unions, anyone?) supporting the left. And, as always, I feel compelled to point out that many of these critics ought to clarify their arguments - if this is about simply being personally wealthy (and Rich is not one for distinctions), that's a different issue than the politics of spending said wealth. And as I keep trying to gently say... I think it's probably a waste of time to hate wealth. That's not going to go away. The political ads, hopefully, will.

(Also, much like "Worst Song Ever," I think I may need Ground Rules. But really, I don't hate all of Frank Rich's writing.)

Let's Talk About Sex, Baby

Rush Limbaugh beat me to it.

There I was, trying to explain to my Mom last weekend about the sense that the "insured contraception mandate" discussion was not, as Republicans claimed, about religion, but indeed about contraception, I also said, as a follow-on, that I thought the subtext of the "debate" - and the reason Republicans got some traction on it - was because the real issue was sex, and Americans are uncomfortable with talking about that.

And then Rush Limbaugh took the subtext and made it text.

If there's something heartening about the latest Rush furor, I think it may be that feminism finally had a clear example of "slut shaming" that made an often abstract discussion very literal. Slut Shaming is trying to marginalize voices, especially women's voices, in political discussions by calling people things like sluts and whores, implications that are negative, sexual, and promiscuous. Sandra Fluke, a law student at Georgetown, was offering a reasonable, thoughtful take one the issues of contraceptive cost and availability, and there was Rush, to call her a slut and a whore.

Unfortunately, I suspect that raising awareness about Slut Shaming is about as good as it gets; what's really problematic here is that conservatives will continue to get truck out of the contraceptive debate because liberals, even as they defended and praised Sandra Fluke, tended to run away from the uncomfortable aspect of the contraception debate that is  the reality of our American cuture: that is, that we are nation at once obsessed about sex and deeply conflicted about the issues around it. And the idea of people having sex, especially a great deal of it, tends to raise flags about morality that cloud reasonable policy discussions.

Which is to say... it's fine if you want contraception, ladies... just don't be all sexed up about it.

Andrew Breitbart... And the Angry Legacy

I was thinking just today that writing about people who passed for me can seem like an exercise in actresses and diva singers, and that's not really all I'm about.

Of course, that doesn't mean I had a lot of thoughts on the passing of Davy Jones, either.

But Andrew Breitbart just died. Which seems odd, and sudden, and somehow too soon. 

Breitbart will be known as the "conservative firebrand" who launched James O'Keefe, him of the "outlaw journalism" of exposing liberal "conspiracies" like ACORN... and the census. Even after O'Keefe was arrested (and pled guilty to) pranking the New Orleans office of Senator Mary Landrieu, Breitbart didn't quite give up on O'Keefe... though, in the long run, he seemed to put a little more distance between them.

I kept up with Breitbart because he seemed terribly energentic... and terribly angry. And I was never entirely sure as to why. 

Conservatives - many of whom seem to have known him, but not well - talk about him as kind and generous in private. He benefitted tremendously from being in the right place at the right time, working with Matt Drudge on a very thorough approach to news aggregation that pointed to the real power of the internet, not as a vehicle for conservatism, but the real possibilities in sharing information on a global, massive scale. His most succesful follow up was a similarly thorough aggregation of news wire feeds at his own site, combining the AP and Reuters and others into a super news service. For a news junkie generalist like me, those things were indeed admirtable, even brilliant.

His politics, though, were odd: he gave voice to the kind of "muscular conservatism" that rose with talk radio, and he shared a lot of their biases and myopia; from Whitewater on, he seemd determined to expose liberal frauds with every breath. But he could be defensive when conservatives were challenged (never mind himself), and nowhere near as rigid, or thorough. He claimed a role as a serious "conservative journalist", yet couldn't seem to either define it well, or make of it more than angry screeds and trumped up exposes into the seedier aspects of people's private lives.  If those he exposed were, some of them, no saints, Breitbart was never made more virtuous exposing them, either.

Ultimately, I tend to think that you get back what you give in the world; and the bitterness, anger, divisiveness and unhappy responses Breitbart generated (and which, despite claims to a thick skin, seemed to eternally annoy him), seemed evenly matched by what he put out. His "Big" websites - Big Journalism, Big Hollywood, etc - seemed small, cranky, eccentric exercises in shallow putdowns and knee jerk explosions of contempt. In some way, I think Breitbart knew that he could, and should, try to do better, be better, stuck in a dilemma of perpetual notoriety, lobbing grenades from the fringe. Anger, like any emotion, can be the fuse to light a fire which leads to political action. But as I keep saying, anger alone probably won't get you much in the way of results.

Breitbart will be remembered, I suspect, for all those angry things; all that he opposed, all that he disliked, all that he tried to discredit and deny. I personally can't think of a thing, not one, that I ever heard him focus on positively. And that's conservatism as it currently stands, isn't it? Not what you are for, but what you are against, what you can dislike, and demean, and dismiss. In his place will surely come others, with more of the same. More Shirley Sherrods! More Anthony Weiners, more scandals, small and mean spirited, one and all!  And that's like a legacy, kind of... just not a good one.

By All Means, Let's Make The Election About Domesticated Fags And Loose Living Tramps (Thanks, Newt!)

I have to admit I pretty much figured this year's Presidential election was foreordained as a Romney vs. Obama slugfest over the economy, with a predictable, if dismal, win for President Obama. And that's probably what we're still going to get. But how we get there, apparently, still matters.

If Romney has failed to exactly inspire the Republican base, the last couple of weeks haven't been entirely about him. What's changed, I thnk, is that Rconservatives have decided that they can't win on economic issues... and so they unpacked their favorite old trunk, the thing we often call "social issues."

Maybe it's age, maybe it's the sense that I've heard this song before, but my patience for euphemisms is pretty much gone. And so, I am tired of hearing about "social issues" when what people mean is "let's say awful things about blacks, gays and other minorities and see if Americans will give in to their worst instincts."

"Social Issues" is supposed to be about abortion, gay marriage, "family values" and the like, but really, it's about dressing up age-old prejudices and judgements about others without saying the ugly words. What's wrong with gay marriage? Something about men, women, tradition and procreation... since marriage equality opponents insist, all the time, that they don't hate gays. And what's behind the spate of new restrictive abortion laws and the brouhaha over Catholic charities and insurance coverage for contraception? Concern for life and religious freedom, not hatred of women or opposition to contraception, since that's what they keep telling us.

If there's a reason American conservatism has utterly failed to broaden its appeal, certainly in the past thirty years, it has a lot to do with just how negatve and unappealing their pitch has been. There's been virtually nothing positive that conservatives have had to offer, nothing but anti-this and opposition to that. Immigration, in fact, is a perfectly sensible issue that really does need reform, but it's become a "social issue" about the Mexican border and a specific group of undocumented immigrants because... well, "anti-Hispanic" isn't attractive, either. 

It's not surprising, really, that conservatives have drifted back into this corner; an actual election about economic injustice and issues like health care would have been an interesting discussion, especially if the right had something to offer groups of people - especially in the working class - who have really been shafted, left and right, over time. But of course, Republicans have nothing to offer on jobs, housing, financial reform, or health care. All they have is an intense dislike for President Obama and anything he's done on those issues. 

I'm not sure Mitt Romney really does have anything to offer, but to his credit, he's studiously avoided reverting to the social issues morass unless heavily pushed; it's not really the Mormon way (Orrin Hatch is a good example of this), and it's not Romney's style to appeal to people's worse instincts. So perhaps it's understandable that the "not-Romneys" of the primary season have found themselves forced to resort to the basest appeals to the base.

Of all of them, though, I suspect the real turning point  was South Carolina and Newt Gingrich's win; Gingrich really had nothing to offer except boilerplate rhetoric built on right wing talk radio bromides, the familiar litany of how things are terrible and liberals are to blame for it.  It's Gingrich who, rather skillfully, re-introduced the sham issue of insurance coverage for contraception. And Gingrich offered the kind of rhetorical cover that conservatives need to revert to "social issues" as their driving force - we're not clased-minded bigots... we're decent people looking out for America, and the Constitution.

Of course, Gingrich himself is a twice divorced Catholic convert who would, literally, say just about anything to win an election, and the dissonance between who he is and what he says just got more pronounced as his prominence grew. Rick Santorum, on the other hand, doesn't have quite that problem. Unlike almost any of the other conservatives who got big and flamed out, Santorum doesn't have to go to some of the ugliest places to sell his fealty to "social issues"; he's already been there (remember "man on dog"?). And so Santorum pitches himself as the populist voice of the unheard working (white) man (and we do mean men), and all of the "social" issues are covered as well.

I don't know if Santorum can actually ride this wave all the way to the Republican nopmination; it would be frankly hilarious if he pulls it off, but we (and he) can't possibly be that lucky. It's telling, though, that Romney and his team are, yet again, flummoxed by Santorum's success. He's the one thing they don't quite have an argument against: a true believer who thinks moderation is for wimps.

Either way, an election that revolves around the angry right renewing its worst calls against gays, pushing familiar virgin/whore/mommy lines about women's roles in society, selling familiar prejudices about blacks and hispanics... is an election held on familiar ground that they really can't win. There's too many of us, too few of them, and too many like me who are tired of listening to carefully chosen words meant to mask really hateful ideas and prejudices. None of it makes President Obama a better President, but it certainly makes clear the starkness of the choice. Which is a much easier election than the one about those pesky problems with jobs and housing and health care and such. 

Euphemisms And Political Math... And Birth Control

Abortion is a form of birth control.

If I have to explain the obviousness of that statement, then we both have a problem... and a good explanation of the wild politics of the past week.

Nothing was stranger, and yet more American, than all the men - and it was almost always a man - who said, piously, that the discussion we were having "was not about contraception" as if it were true. It's about freedom of religiion, it's about government coercion, it's about the rights of the Catholic Church...

Most obviously, this debate is all about contraception, and the fact that abortion is a form of contraception.

Lots of people said this "controversy" - and it's not "controversial" when the vast majority of women, Catholics and, in fact, most Americans favor coverage for contraception - started last November, but the seeds of this debate go back to the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Remember when they tried to strip provisions to cover abortion out of the bill? That was the warning shot for this. And then, as now, a big problem is the muddle of euphemistic words like "pro-choice" and "women's health" when we discuss contraception, and more pointedly, abortion.

Liberals often seem confused by anti-abortion, pro-life rhetoric; I think part of the mistake is that many of the "reasonable", pro-choice people see two separate issues: a dispute over abortion, that may also extend to contraceptives. The truth, I think, is that many people have it backwards: truly Pro-lifers oppose contraception, birth "control" of any kind. Abortion is just the most extreme example.

Morning after pills, "Plan B", tubal ligation, the pill, IUD... there's scientifically little difference to what these approaches do to prevent pregnancy. And it's problematic to try and separate them, to try and draw some sort of "contraceptive line" where some of these are better/different/more reasonable than others. Yet, that's the "muddy middle" of the pro-choice moderates, the ones who say "safe legal and rare" and genuinely mean that abortion shouldn't really happen all that much. If at all.

There's a tacit agreement among many professional Democrats that abortion politics are in fact too loaded to touch; that while pro-life conservatives are wrong on the specifics, they're right on the emotional impact of opposing abortion and calling it baby killing. It's safer to talk about "women's health" (as if we don't know that the main differential here is... pregnancy), it's safer to try and set artificial distinctions for liberals than to take on the whole stupid, brutal underlying argument: that, at heart, conservative pro-lifers don't want women to exert control over the sexual reproductive process.

This issue - the one where we try, at a very basic level, to do something based on common sense that helps women - is a "loser" for the left because the left is terrified about being seen as favoring infanticide. And basically, my point is, we can't turn this around until liberals are willing to try harder and own it. That is, until someone can stand up and make the basic point that the breadth of contraception, from condoms to abortions, are all on a continuum, all practical and all useful, we're kind of doomed. We wind up wilting the closer conservatives get to calling us baby killers.

In that context, I'm not surprised that the President - and his men - invented a fig leaf of compromise that might, maybe, survive close scrutiny: most women will be able to get coverage for contraception. Those who work for certain charitable organizations will also get coverage, just as a paid add-on absorbed by the insurer.

The real news here, though, is probably that the thin shreds of obfuscation that the euphemisms provide really broke down this week; as with Susan Komen and Planned Parenthood, the real action here was how many women, especially younger professional women, made it clear that the euphemisms were silly and that access to conraception, women's health care, and, yes, abortion, is not up for grabs. Or up for debate. That, in itself, is a big step towards reframing the discussion of women and pregnancy and who decides to be not pregnant, and when. But the problematic math remains: as long as conservatives are more comfortable linking abortion to other methods of contraception, as a way to stop all of them, lefties are in the weaker position. We can't win defending half a position, no matter how artfully we try to word it.

Like Death And Taxes... And The South Will Rise Again

All right, yes, I couldn't have anticipated quite so much going quite so wrong for Mitt Romney in one week - and my point about the Iowa GOP and the New Hampshire GOP actually having problems with each other still stands, more emphatically - but the attempts to manufacture lots of "Mitt might fail" drama after South Carolina's primary seems like a stretch. I don't know if Mitt Romney can win this fall or not (though I'm more convinced not), but two things I do know are that our next President will not be Newt Gingrich. Or Rick Santorum.

The past week is a reminder that Mitt Romney is well set up for losing if only for this: five years, millions of dollars, lots of preparation... and this is as good as he got. And what he's got is, well, nothing. His campaign team apparently couldn't imagine winning New Hampshire and losing South Carolina. He wasn't prepared to talk about Bain in detail, his personal income, or his taxes. And still, he offers little more in the way of a campaign than "I'm not a loser like Barack Obama, and I've run a business. QED, bitches."

If there's a reason this year's election looks so dismal - and most emphatically is not, as Mitt likes to suggest, the election of our lifetimes - it's because both of the major parties most likely candidates seem unable to rise above inept campaign strategies. Mitt's a lousy candidate surrounded by apparent mediocrity; while the President insists on shouldering this unpleasant task for our own good, surrounded by advisors whose best case appears to be "well... who else is there?" One can't really blame for priary voters in the Republican Party for voting as if screaming for a lifeboat. Anything, anything... but not this.

There's lots of pundit theorizing, but the question of why Newt Gingrich won South Carolina is just not that deep: South Carolina reasserted itself, this week, as the acid test of who is sufficiently seen as Southern and right wing enough to satsfy the most extreme elements of the right wing base. This generally means a Southerner; not - as many northerners like to oversimplify it - because the south is racist. It's more than that. The notions of disdain for other types of existence is about a lot more than race; it's also anti-intellectual, anti-urban, anti-cosmopolitan of any sort. Mitt Romney, probably, never stood a chance in South Carolina, simply because he's an educated northeasterner from a wealthy, patrician family in the most traditional sense. And really, a similar rejection of northern working class success explains why Rick Santorum, as well, probably also never stood a chance to consolidate his bona fides as the conservative alternative. Newt, in the end, was the guy from the state next door (remember how that same logic is supposed to invalidate Mitt's win in NH?), who spoke Southern and right wing talk radio as no one else could... or would want to.  South Carolina's right wing base roared up and delivered a message that scares the national party to death: ignore the South at your peril. 

At the same time, the impotence of relying, yet again, on a Southern strategy as embodied by Gingrich is all too clear: Gingrich is a lousy candidate, whose own moral failings don't remotely jibe with Evangelical voters. There's lots of discussion, naturally, about how Gingrich's marital failings werre conveniently overlooked on his way to victory, but I'll double down on my thinking that America is in no mood to reward divorce, especially as practiced by someone like Newt Gingrich.  The mess of Gingrich's personal life was saved, really, by the bitter, opportunistic way Marianne Gingrich obviously inserted herself into the political process, and by John King's oblivious, ham-handed attempt to shoehorn a nonexistent "issue" of it into the next debate. "Don't vote for my philandering ex-husband" makes people uncomfortable, even if they agree with the description. And Gingrich, dressing down King, was substantively right - King didn't even try to concoct a question that made any sense, and was trying, mostly, to embarrass Gingrich. And Gingrich, obviously, is beyond shame. 

Romney, on the other hand, isn't: what was fascinating about his tax and salary debacle was how much he betrayed the realities of class, and of his life in the upper class in particular. It's tacky, when you're rich, to talk about just how much money you have. Romney, clearly, isn't comfortable either explaining, or God forbid, justifying his own lavish wealth. He's oblivious to how his own money compares to others - calling his $350,000 plus in one year's speaking fees "small" is probably, comparatively, correct for him. It's just tuneless (and tasteless) when relating to the public as a whole. His tax rate, too, is probably not the biggest deal; it's interesting to note that Romney more or less made the same admission Warren Buffett did about his effective tax rate. Buffett, of course, gets a pass; he favors tax increases. As the more sardonic among us note, me included, nothing precludes Buffett from sending the government more money than he owes. Which is to say... in the end, is Buffett really so superior to Romney, on taxes? So why is Romney's relatively honest admission such a bad thing?

Like John Kerry before him - and more than a few others as well, before them - Romney can't win unless he learns to step out of his own patrician class understandings and expectations. South Carolina was, in no small measure, a reminder of just how and why the Republican base has moved to reject the "Country Club" core of its past; the democratization of wealth and education has up-ended traditional notions of class in our country... but class divisions don't just go away. They are cultural and societal, constructs, not just economic and political ones. Romney's tone-deaf invocation of Class Envy (both in New Hampshire and even after South Carolina) will ruin him in a general election; what's striking is how Republican voters - the ones who piously claim that "class warfare" is a liberal construct - are also, clearly, turned off by that logic. Romney's experience at Bain Capital, it turns out, isn't just an easy target for liberals looking to paint him as Mr. One Percent; appaently even many ordinary Republicans get that a pampered millionaire scion makes a terrible spokeperson for the virtues of American wealth.

The Republican Establishment, really, can't mask the internal dissensions and divisions that are tearing their party apart; what's apparent after three contests, and Florida will likely make more plain, is that there is no one person who can unify and give voice to the conservative right. The wisest Republicans, still, seem to be the ones who decided to flee this year's contest - Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, John Thune... and on and on. They know, as most of us do, that Republicans can't really beat Barack Obama because they don't really have a coherent alternative policy to sell. But South Carolina is a reminder that attempting to find a coherent policy is both impossible in the current climate and can't happen without alientaing some group or another. Newt Gingrich will, most likely, be the voice of the angry Southern conservative at this year's convention, which might be enough to make him the nominee, but I doubt it. Either way, until the Republicans can figure out how to effectively get beyond their Southern base, they've got nothing. And wouldn't nothing be better represented by Mitt Romney, anyway?

Because Everyone Deserved A Surge

Right up until Friday, I was right there with everyone else, pointing out that only Rick Santorum had managed to miss the Republican primary spotlight; everyone else had their moment as the frontrunner, but not him. It made him easy to dismiss.

Slow and steady.... that's what wins the race everytime.

Iowa really confirmed what most political observers already knew - the Republican field is a mess, Republican voters both hate their choices and are flailing to find someone to get behind, and Mitt Romney is by no means a sure thing.

But who knew we'd still have Rick Santorum?

Before I go much further, I should add I wasn't planning to write much about this. Then I read Erick Erickson's trenchant analysis of the Republican problem:

The reason this Republican primary season is so chaotic is because George W. Bush failed to have a successor. Had President Bush had a Vice President to run for President, Bush would have undoubtedly made different policy decisions, but even aside from that there would have been an ascertainable front runner coming from the Bush administration to win or lose.

Because there was not such a thing and because the GOP likes orderly processes, we had to go back to 2000 and dredge up John McCain.

The Republican field was unable to reboot because we had no logical successor coming out of the White House to either win or lose. We went back to McCain and have had to work our way back through unresolved issues from 2000. And now, when the field should be rebooted, we’re having to deal with Mitt Romney who should have been displaced by an heir in 2008 and instead, because the 2008 season did not reboot the crop of candidates, is now the guy three quarters of the GOP does not want who is about to be the nominee.

Like some of the other candidates, I didn't write about Rick Santorum because there isn't much to say. There's no rational reason Santorum, who was never entirely in step with his state when he was a Senator, should somehow look more plausible as a Presidential candidate (can he even win Pennsylvania?). As always, he's the candidate who appeals most and best to the sliver of the right who think "social issues" matter most: abortion, "family values," antigay extremism of the worst sort. Even if Santorum could ride that appeal to the nomination - something Iowa doesn't prove - even a campaign as inept as the Obama team can marginalize him enough to win.

But I think Erickson - who's been pretty gloom and doom for montghs about the GOP's national prospects - has the larger point that probably matters most, something similar to what I've said all along: Republicans can't fix what ails them until someone manages to fully examine (and repudiate) the failure of the last Bush presidency. There's no rational "either/or" choice between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum; they don't represent some "sensible" set of differences between two wings of a thoughtful political party. Rather, they are two terrible, extreme examples of how badly Republicans are struggling to offer an alternative to Barack Obama. And, in the end, having failed to pick anyone who can be "not Romney", social conservatives wound up at Santorum. Because everyone deserves a surge. Rick Santorum deserves credit for surging when it really mattered. Beyond that... his success in Iowa means very little.

The Payroll Tax Break Is Kind Of Dumb. And So Is Not Extending It.

So a while back, the Democrats wanted to pass a tax break for "working families" (I'm sorry, I am a lifelong Democrat and I will stand up and cheer when someone, someday, kills off the phrase "working families". It just makes my teeth grate), and they came up with this kind of silly idea: they would lower the payroll tax.

It's a dumb idea because, first, the payroll tax is the funding mechanism for Social Security. This is the same Social Security that politicians like to claim is in "danger" when it isn't- though funding Social Security payouts long term has some fiscal problems... in any case, the way to keep Social Security solvent does not involve underfunding it.

That's okay, one can reply, because the Payroll Tax Cut had a funding mechanism in which the lost revenues are replaced by "general funds". This is usually called Robbing Peter To Pay Paul, or in this case, using tax receipts collected for one purpose to pay for other tax receipts that should have been collected but weren't, while borrowing money to make up for the shortfall.

This is really dumb. This is why department stores won't let you buy gift certificates, and then use the gift certificates to pay off your department store credit card bill.

Anyway, it's also a dumb idea to cut the payroll tax by a small amount because the small windfall most taxpayers receive is a) largely unnoticed, and b) probably not used to do things like pay down debt or improve savings. Because our economy is consumer driven, what they want people to do is shop. Which means buying things you don't need and probably can't afford. As opposed to taking some of your paycheck, and paying it into a savings plan that will pay out when you retire.

Oh, never mind.

The problem is that the payroll tax rteduction was put in place for a year, and it's now set to expire, and when it does, everyone will notice that their taxes went up. And Democrats - or more specifically, the President's reelection team - is worried that less money in people's paychecks will make them grumpy and grumpy people vote for Newt Gingrich. Or Rick Santorum. Or something.

Naturally, Republicans are in no mood to extend a tax break that makes the President look good (cue the natural segue into how Republicans Hate Working Families), and also are kind of mad about several other things, notably this plan to build a pipeline across the country north to south so that Canadian oil shale can be efficiently delivered to refineries in Texas. Oil shale is also a pretty dumb idea (slightly less dumb than fracking, but still), and the pipeline could probably be rerouted, but mostly, this "debate" is a lot of the smae thing we get these days of terrible, useless Washington politics. One dumb idea in exchange for another. None of which really addresses the problems we actually face.

I don't really care about any of this - which is why I don't write daily about the dramatic brinksmanship going on in DC - and frankly, I'd be fine if the payroll tax went back to normal and someone actually took brinksmanship over, and past, the brink. Perhaps then, something might change, a bit. I know, it's a foool's notion. But I remain optimistically foolish. Just for spite.

In any case, the payroll tax break is a dumb idea, but extending it is probably better than not extending it... but frankly, it's the fact that we're all standing around talking about this stupidity that just floors me. And also why I'd probably rather eat Christmas cookies, watch reruns of SVU, and hope the whole thing just goes away. Who's with me?