Gene Lyons: "You know things are crazy when Ann Coulter starts making sense"

That's what he said in Why Gingrich Might Be Good For America National Memo 01/25/2012. The title refers to Gene's calculation on Newt's weakness as a candidate:

I think even the perception that Newt could get under Obama’s skin is badly mistaken. In a presidential debate, the guy sweating and glowering is the guy losing. The sorehead right, however, won’t believe it until they’ve lost the visceral confrontation they so crave.

In that sense, a Gingrich nomination could end up being very good for the country.

But he also looks unsentimentally at Newt's base in South Carolina during that primary:

Judging by the whooping and hollering of the CNN debate audience, the GOP’s neo-Confederate wing wishes for nothing less than an electoral replay of Pickett’s charge—the doomed infantry attack at Gettysburg most historians believe marked the beginning of the end of the Civil War. A sizeable proportion of South Carolinians have yearned for a rematch ever since.

And they don’t think they're going to get it with Mitt Romney, a Yankee’s Yankee who goes around babbling passionless truisms like this gem unearthed from his standard stump speech by the National Review’s Mark Steyn:

"I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.”

My favorite line comes immediately following: "Do what? (That’s Southern for what the hell?)"

Willard Romney clearly looks like a better candidate than Newt in the horse-race sense. Whether or not that's true, that rabid Republican base will almost certainly find themselves just as interested in getting Willard elected as they would be for Newt. Because he's going to be running against the guy they consider to be a Muslim Kenyan Marxist America-hating atheist.

Tags: 2012 election, gene lyons, newt gingrich

Newt and the protest against the 1%

Joe Conason made an important point a few weeks ago about Newt Gingrich that reminds us of the surprising ways in which popular movement like Occupy Wall Street can affect mainstream politics, The True Importance Of Being Newt National Memo 01/21/2012.

Whether Newt Gingrich ever wins another primary after South Carolina or not, he has performed an important service to American voters in this election. Not in the self-important way that he imagines, of course. But Gingrich's mocking assault on Mitt Romney, his career at Bain Capital and reluctance to disclose his tax returns has driven a national discussion of economic unfairness, tax avoidance, and abuse of financial power that might never have occurred without the Gingrich intervention. The angry intensity of the former Speaker has overcome the usual timidity of the mainstream media - which hesitate to address such matters forthrightly or to offend Republican sensibilities -- forcing the salient questions about Romney into the spotlight.

Newt's campaign even made "vulture capitalist" as momentarily familiar term.

Newt is as staunch a defender of the 1% at the expense of everyone else. He certainly wasn't the one that made inequality and predatory capitalism and current issue in the Presidential campaign. But in the current climate, Willard Romney's has a vulnerable spot in his lord-of-the-manor mentality. And I'm glad that the Republican primary has exposed it early.

Tags: 2012 election, joe conason, mitt romney, newt gingrich

Gingrichism and the Republican Party

The conventional wisdom, in this case one with some firm base in reality, is that Willard "Mitt" Romney will win the Republican nomination for the Presidency.

The general election will almost certainly be a tough, competitive one. This is the first Presidential election in the "Citizen's United" era. That disgraceful Supreme Court decision vastly increases the means for the wealthy to buy control of the political process, even as democratic forms are maintained. Not that Republicans are sticking with strict democratic forms. The various voter-suppression laws and tactics that have become standard operating procedure for the Republicans will also be widespread. The Southern segregation system was heavily based on voter-suppression tactics. This stuff is straight out of the segregationist playbook. The segregated South maintained democratic forms, as well, though the substance was very different.

Charlie Pierce reminds us how much Newt Gingrich has influenced the Republican Part of today, even though it's unlikely to crown him with a Presidential nomination, in Gingrichism Will Go Down with Gingrich, Damnit! Esquire Politics Blog 01/31/2012:

Over the past couple of days, Gingrich has been haring chaotically all over Florida, his attacks on Willard Romney becoming more and more virulent. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) Just yesterday, he ripped Romney for once vetoing funds that would have been used to provide kosher meals to Jewish nursing-home residents in Massachusetts (Really, Willard? What a putz.) and for not allowing Catholic hospitals the "conscience" parachute to deny rape victims emergency contraception. These actions, said Gingrich, evinced "a lack of concern for religious liberty." (Translation: mormonmormonmormonmormon....) The spokesman for the Gingrich super-PAC called Romney "a disgraceful and despicable candidate," which at least proves that the spokesman has learned well from the master.

This is the loud, clattering end of the Gingrich style in American politics — a technique of attack politics in which you can say almost anything about almost anyone today, and it doesn't matter if you said something different yesterday, and it doesn't matter if you are stone guilty of exactly the same thing of which you are accusing the other person, and it doesn't matter if what you're saying is even remotely tethered to the truth. All that matters is that you are saying it. Today. With all the contemptuous brio you can muster. This is what Newt Gingrich taught a generation of Republican politicians.

One of the interesting symptoms of today's Republican culture warriors is that their images of the dirty hippies antiwar protesters of the 1960s. Some of their images of the same bear some superficial relation to actual history. Others are more in the category of urban folklore, perhaps treasured all the more because of that. One of the favorite in the latter category is the tale of hippie girls spitting on soldiers and protesters calling veterans "baby-killers". So far as anyone has been able to determine, the spitting story is purely imagined. And the "baby-killer" epithet was normally directed at policy-makers when it was used, as in the chant, "Hey, hey, LBJ/How many kids did you kill today?" Except of course for someone like war criminal Lt. William Calley, who Nixon turned into a hero for hardcore culture warriors of the time by commuting his sentence, which was based on his deliberate, systematic murder of unarmed men, women and children - yes, including babies - at My Lai/Sơn Mỹ village.

But "baby killer" has become a routine accusation of abortion opponents, not only against staff at abortion clinics but at policymakers, as well. Pierce caught Newt in an ugly version of this in Florida:

Gingrich stated his opposition to all forms of embryonic stem-cell research, calling for a re-instatement of a ban that was lifted by the Obama administration. He also expressed some doubts about certain practices involved in in vitro fertilization. So far, so wingnut. ... So far, so campaign. But what sent the speech spiraling into an intellectual no-fly zone was the motive ascribed by Gingrich to the scientists who developed, and who currently practice, stem-cell research.

In working with stem-cells, Gingrich said, these scientists were enabling "the use of science to desensitize society over the killing of babies."

Breathtaking.

You could argue that stem-cell research represents hubristic overreach on the part of the scientists. You could argue that those scientists are fundamentally amoral and that they are only in it for the pot of gold that waits for whoever finds a way to use stem cells to cure some horrendous disease. ...

But consider, for a moment, what Gingrich said. He accused these scientists not of hubris or cupidity, and he did not accuse them of idly casting aside the philosophical considerations of their work. He is saying that these scientists, and their work, are deliberately engaged in a campaign to make the "killing of babies" easier in American society, that their grand design is not fame and fortune, nor ridding the world of terrible illness, but, rather, that they are in service to a dark agenda to turn America into some kind of futuristic child-killing dystopia. I'm sorry, but this is just nuts. I mean, I've heard the argument that climate scientists have invented the "hoax" of global climate change in order to get rich, but that's a nursery rhyme compared to what Gingrich is dealing out here.

This is your Republican Party on Oxycontin (aka, hillbilly heroin, chief Party ideologue Rush Limbaugh's one-time drug of choice).

Tags: newt gingrich, radical right, republican party

Michelle Goldberg on the Presidential race

Michelle Goldberg has a good understanding for the patterns of Christian Right thinking. Which means she also has a good insight into Republican base voter thinking, because they are basically identical with the Christian Right, which is largely the same as the Tea Party. So her commentary on the President election could be particularly interesting this year.

She looks at the Newt's culture-war campaign in South Carolina in Newt’s Winning Formula: He Does Scorn and Disgust Better Than Anyone Daily Beast 01/210/2012. She writes:

Last night was a resounding victory for disdain. Gingrich may be a sexual hypocrite, an erratic leader, and a cosseted lobbyist masquerading as a scrappy insurgent, but he is an absolute maestro of contempt, and that is what South Carolina wanted.

Look at what turned his electoral fortunes around. It had little to do with his attack on Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital. I didn't meet anyone in South Carolina, including Gingrich supporters, who had anything negative to say about Romney's business record. Instead, the race turned in Gingrich’s favor during the debate on Monday, when Juan Williams asked him whether it might be "insulting" to black Americans to say they should demand jobs and not food stamps, and that poor kids should be put to work as janitors. Gingrich, puffed up with righteousness, went on the offensive. To the crowd, he seemed to be putting Williams in his place. No doubt their hearts pulsed as they imagined him doing the same to Obama. [my emphasis]

Reporting on her encounters with staff and supporters in South Carolina is anecdotal, of course. But Michelle actually knows what to listen for, as she showed in her book Kingdom Comin: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (2006). She's not like Tom Friedman running into cab drivers all over the world who happen to agree with exactly what Tommy Friedman is thinking about a particular subject at the moment.

I haven't seen any polling that gets at the subject. But I suspect that the attack on Willard's business practices may reinforce Newt's segregationist culture-war message more than Michelle's interviews are indicating. Because to make the white victimization theme work in connection with economic policies that are intended to give one-percenters like Willard even more wealth and more latitude to do what they do, no matter how damaging it is to the community at large, the Republicans need to cast the enemy of the moment as a wealthy, out-of-touch elitist. One of the services neoconservatives provided to building the current Republican coalition was to articulate and create images that substituted academics, gubment "bureaucrats" and liberal politicians for the image of the fat-and-happy plutocrat feeding on the misery of the people.

But since Newt has an actual plutocrat like Willard to run against, his campaign is using some of the same political imagery the plutocrat George W. Bush, part of one of the richest and most influential families in the United States, used in 2004 against John Kerry.

In other words, it difficult to disentangle negative class images of the wealthy from the culture-war appeals. After all, the entire Republican political project is about getting large number of working people to vote for economic policies that damage their own interests. And to exploit the opportunity the depression and Obama's relatively tepid response to it, the Republicans need to find a way to exploit class frustrations to win votes for an agenda that is entirely directed at comforting the already very comfortable.

Here's a video she did recently, basically warning against third-party illusions on the part of progressives. It's slickly produced, although the way they have her looking off to the side is unfortunately a bit reminiscent of Michele Bachmann's notorious response to last year's State of the Union address - though definitely without the Faraway Eyes:



This appeared at the Daily Beast's controversial Andrew Sullivan article How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics 01/16/2012. The first minute and a half has a bit too much blame-the-hippies outlook for my taste. But then she goes into a useful reflection about how the Christian Right got the power within the Republican Party that they came to enjoy.

Tags: 2012 election, michelle goldberg, newt gingrich, segregation, white racism

Newt takes South Carolina with culture war campaign

Here's Newt Gingrich's South Carolina Primary Victory Speech, the whole thing from PBS Newshour 01/21/2012:



He strikes a real culture war posture here.

Ben Adler writes about this emphasis in his campaign Cultural Populism Catapults Gingrich to South Carolina Victory The Nation 01/21/2012

The moment that most struck me in Newt's speech is just after 7:55 when he praises Ron "Papa Doc" Paul, who, said Newt, "on the issue of money and the Federal Reserve has been right for 25 years." Say what?! Does Newt want to put the US back on the gold standard? Does he want to abolish the Federal Reserve? Is he making a full embrace of John Birch Society economics here? Newt even used the goldbug term "fiat money", a legitimate term around which the Bircher types like to wrap all kinds of bizarre notions. I figured when I saw Charles Krauthammer's column normalizing Papa Doc that overt Bircherism is more acceptable in the Republican Party tha n it ever has been. I'd be happy to see it turn out like 1964. But overt Bircherism wasn't welcome in the Republican Party in 1964. And FOX News wasn't even yet a gleam in Roger Ailes' eye.

Michael Tomasky describes some of how Newt's segregationist/culture-war talk resonated with the South Carolina Republicans, still angrily carrying on the political tradition of John Calhoun (Newt’s Fury Triumphs in South Carolina Primary Daily Beast 01/21/2012):

How and why? Simply, the debates. Even more simply, the two Moments in the debates: the smackdown of Juan Williams, and the smackdown of John King for starting the second debate by asking about his ex-wife's allegations. There is no question that Gingrich rode those two moments to victory.

In other words: He won by hatin' on the black guy and the liberal media. He hated on them expertly. He fired synapses in conservatives' brains that they barely knew were there. You knew, anyone knew, watching those two moments, that they were absolutely pivotal. It wasn't Newt's ideas. Raise your hand if you think his plan to create local citizens' boards to confer citizenship designations on undocumented immigrants made Tea Partiers across the state sit down over dinner and say, "You know, darlin', I'm really impressed with Newt’s civic-minded immigration ideas." Hands? Thought so.

The segregationist rhetoric will get the Republican base out to the polls, along with organizational help from the Christian Right's get-out-the-vote network. Newt's hard-edged radicalism is a big reason he has such huge negatives.

But I'm definitely restraining my enthusiasm for seeing Newt surging in Republican race because right now he looks like a weaker candidate than Willard Romney against Obama. Lots of Democrats thought the same thing about Ronald Reagan in 1980 against Jimmy Carter. And it wasn't until fairly late in the race in 1980 that Reagan took a clear lead.

The Republican candidate whether it's Willard or Newt, has some definite advantages. We're in a depression with high unemployment and a real possibility for a new recession. And this is the first Citizen's United Presidential election and corporate political spending is already soaring. For a description of what's happening o the latter, see George Zornick, Eleven Shocking Facts About Campaign Finance The Nation 01/21/2012.

Then there's the Democratic candidate. Obama can't seem to give even an inspiring partisan speech without pepper-spraying his own message by talking about bipartisanship or balancing the budget or cutting "entitlements", i.e., Social Security and Medicare. All major factors, unfortunately. How he frames things in the upcoming State of the Union (SOTU, to political junkies) address will be a good indication of his political strategy. I'm leery of the advance publicity about such events; but this piece by Amanda Terkel - based on an anonymous source for no apparent good reason - reports the pre-speech White House spin: President Obama Previews State Of The Union Speech To State, Local Officials Huffington Post 01/20/2012.

He's pointing to his own speech at Osawatomie last December 6 as a model for the SOTU. That was the one that offered combative rhetoric that was inspiring to the Democratic base. But then at the end came the pepper-spraying: "These are not Democratic values or Republican values. These aren't 1% values, or 99% values. They're American values. And we have to reclaim them." As Charlie Pierce wrote at the time:

More important, in our current political context, these are very much "99 percent values." They are not one percent values. The One Percent could care less if there ever is a thriving middle class in this country again. They'd sell the entire American middle class to the Somali pirates if there was a buck in it. There may be a political calculation at work here — Embrace the energy of the Occupy movement, Mr. President, but stay the hell out of the damn drum circle! — but the fact remains that the effectiveness of the "We Are the 99 Percent" argument is completely dependent upon its independence from the anesthetic stupor brought on by ameliorative political rhetoric.

It's also been part of Obama's pattern to say nice things that sound good to his Democratic base, then go out and whack the base in some way a day or so later. And the White House is already setting up for this: Alexander Bolton, Obama warns left: You won't like budget The Hill 01/17/12.

Obama's political seems to be really wedded to the "punch the hippies" strategy. But they are never going to be able to out-Newt Newt on the culture war rhetoric - or even outdo Willard on it, for that matter. They would be much better advised to align themselves clearly with "99% values" and can the bipartisanship hokum.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, newt gingrich

Boy, I'm glad the Republicans don't promote white racism or anything

Jon Wood, Newt Gingrich Seeks South Carolina Boost From Racially Charged Exchange With Juan Williams Huffington Post 01/17/2012

Tags: newt gingrich, republican party, white racism

Newt at Millsaps

My undergraduate alma mater is a Methodist-affiliated liberal arts college in Jackson MS, Millsaps College, which is a great liberal arts college. But when I saw that they posted this on their Facebook page, Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich Speaks at Millsaps College Millsaps College Website 12/04/09, I couldn't help but poke a little fun at them in the comments there. Millsaps has a reputation in Misissisippi as being a particularly liberal place, for reasons that are not immediately apparent. A lot of the following is from my comments that I left there.

This is kind of sad. Surely Millsaps can get more distinguished speakers than a has-been politician who hasn't held any political office of responsibility in over 10 years and whose ideas seem to largely consist of the magic mantra of deregulate, cut taxes and make wars.

The speech itself was pretty thin. He tells a long, dumb story about people who don't know how to grow corn. And about how 2+2=4. He blames the 2007 housing crash was due to a "cultural crisis" because too many dang poor people wanted to buy a house. No word from Newt on the massive fraud committed by lenders, the recklessness of investment bankers creating high-risk derviatives based on subprime mortgages, and the irresponsibility of the Federal Reserve and other federal regulators that led major financial institutions getting way outsides the bounds of responsible lending and investment practices. But he does gripe about administration "czars", whose jobs he says are un-Constitutional. And he recommends Communist China as country we should imitate on promoting investment. Go figure.

And what's with the photo? Everyone there but Newt seems to be in a white robe! And when I watch the video, there is a whole phalanx of people (students?) behind the speaker in "Millsaps" shirts, the ones that look like the white robes in the photo. What's up with that? Are you hoping for donations from Newt Gingrich fans? Anything is possible, I guess.

What's next? Inviting Glenn Beck to enlighten Millsaps students on theology? Rush Limbaugh to instruct them on journalistic ethics?

You know, it's sweet and all that State Auditor Pickering opened with the Pledge of Allegiance - a not particularly spirited version, I notice - and a prayer. A very *Christian* prayer, at that, "in the name of Your Son Jesus Christ who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit forever". I guess Pickering figured that there probably wasn't none of them thar Jews showin' up to hear ole Newt. (You do still admit Jews to Millsaps, don't you?) But I guess it makes sense. Newt impressed everyone with his Christian witness in 1996 when he recommended that his Republican colleagues attack their Democratic opponents with words like "anti-flag", "anti-family", "anti-child", "bizarre", "decay", "radical", "sick", "traitors". Yeah, that Newt, he's a class act.

Gingrich's puerile speech seemed to be aimed to a group of high-school admirers of Ayn Rand. It's pretty darn boring but the video is there so you can watch it if you feel like punishing yourself.

Tags: millsaps college, newt gingrich

Iraq War Critics: Newt Gingrich (?!?) (Corrected)

After I made the last post, I took at look at Amitai Etzioni's Weblog. And, lo and behold, he has this entry posted:

Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, recently told a Washington DC meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations that he fears that the Bush Administration will conduct an election in Iraq in June 2004, declare a victory, and go home "hoping the thing will hold together until [the elections in] November." In the past, Republicans feared that Carter would spring an "October surprise" (getting the hostages out), and later, that Clinton would start a war in order to affect the outcome of the presidential election.

Wait, that means that Newt Gingrich (sort of) agrees with what I said in my last post. That's just too creepy to think about.

[10/11/04 update. I just double-checked this reference at Etzioni's Weblog, and it turns out it was Josephe Nye, Jr., that made that comment, not Gingrich. Here is the revised version of Etzioni's post:

Joseph Nye, Dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, recently told a Washington DC meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations that he fears that the Bush Administration will conduct an election in Iraq in July 2004, declare a victory, and "just make sure it doesn't collapse before the end of November." In the past, Republicans feared that Carter would spring an “October surprise” (getting the hostages out), and later, that Clinton would start a war in order to affect the outcome of the presidential election.(Just another campaign issue? 10/07/04)

The post now provides a link to the transcript of the Council on Foreign Relations meeting in question: The U.S. National Security Strategy: A Debate 09/25/03.

I guess there are no blogosphere standards for making corrections to blog posts. In this case, I'm letting the original post stand as it is (though I corrected a weird thing that was happening in the text with quotation marks showing up as boxes). Etzioni didn't indicate that he had made a correction; I can't say for sure whether the original Etzioni post had a link to the transcript. Normally, I check the actual transcript if it's available. Etzioni is a scholar with a solid reputation; but even the most careful researchers make mistakes sometimes.

But it seems my surprise at Gingrich saying such a thing was justified.]

Tags: amitai etzioni, iraq war, joseph nye jr, newt gingrich