Will be following the 2012 election season, and tracking the Republican delegate count.
Romney
Gingrich
Paul
Santorum ?
And do not forget Huntsman, stand-in for Vice President.
See also the Obama is Stupid meme deconstructed, and Obama Will Win the Long Game.
Furthermore, he has an unconservative faith in his own innocence. The crossroads where government meets enterprise can be an exciting crossroads. It can also be a corrupt crossroads. It requires moral rectitude to separate public service from private gain. Gingrich was perfectly content to belly up to the Freddie Mac trough and then invent a Hamiltonian rationale to justify his own greed.
Then there is his rhetorical style. He seems to have understood that a moderate Republican like himself can win so long as he adopts a bombastic style when taking on the liberal elites. Most people just want somebody who can articulate their hatreds, and Gingrich is demagogically happy to play the role.
Most important, there is temperament and character. As Yuval Levin noted in a post for National Review, the two Republican front-runners, Gingrich and Mitt Romney are both "very wonky Rockefeller Republicans who moved to the right over time as their party moved right."
But they have very different temperaments. Romney, Levin observes, has an executive temperament -- organization, discipline, calm and restraint. Gingrich has a revolutionary temperament -- intensity, energy, disorganization and a tendency to see everything as a cataclysmic clash requiring a radical response.
I'd make a slightly similar point more rudely. In the two main Republican contenders, we have one man, Romney, who seems to have walked straight out of the 1950s, and another, Gingrich, who seems to have walked straight out of the 1960s. He has every negative character trait that conservatives associate with '60s excess: narcissism, self-righteousness, self-indulgence and intemperance. He just has those traits in Republican form.
How ably Romney the nominee will defend himself, given the kid-gloves treatment by his current competition and the campaign's avoidance of large segments of his own life story, is difficult to say just yet. In early November I watched Romney return to Iowa for only the fourth time. He stopped in Dubuque and Davenport and, before decent-size crowds, essentially regurgitated his address on the economy from the week before. In both cases he spoke for less than 20 minutes and did not take questions from the audience. Far more of his ground time was devoted to filming promotional material in a Dubuque sheet-metal factory, where the footage would capture the candidate seeming engaged in the kind of heart-to-heart dialogues with working-class Americans that the campaign had otherwise left off his schedule that day.
Once again America faced a crossroads, though the word itself wasn't used. "There is virtually no middle ground," Gingrich wrote. He later concluded: "To renew or to decay. At no time in the history of our great nation has the choice been clearer." To avert disaster, Gingrich had no choice but to present many numbered lists. In addition to the Six Challenges Facing America -- similar to the challenges we faced 11 years before -- and the "five basic principles that I believe form the heart of our civilization," there were the five forces moving us toward worldwide medicine, a seven-step program to reduce drug use, the nine steps we can take immediately to advance the three revolutions in health care and more. The futurism was still there, too: "Honeymoons in space will be the vogue by 2020."
Meanwhile, his polemics had hardened. "For some psychological reason, liberals are antigun but not anti-violent criminal," was a typically dubious example. As a former professor (an unpublished one, at West Georgia College), Gingrich wrote about university leftism with all the bitterness of an ex-academic: "Most successful [alumni] get an annual letter saying, in effect, 'Please give us money so we can hire someone who despises your occupation and will teach your children to have contempt for you.' What is amazing is the overwhelming meekness of the alumni in accepting this hijacking of their alma mater."
This is sharp and funny and nearly true, but it's not a formulation designed to coax the undecided into agreement. "To Renew America" marks the moment that persuasion faded as a primary purpose of political talk and preaching to the choir took over. Having won at last, and confident that the future was safely in his pocket, Gingrich by 1995 no longer saw a reason to persuade anyone and didn't try. It's the victor's prerogative, but it doesn't give you practice in constructing arguments. And it's catching. Hence talk radio, and in a few years the blogs; hence Fox News and MSNBC.
Liberals may not have liked this new aggressive tone from conservatives, but they had it coming. At least since the Red Scare of the 1950s, mainstream institutions had viewed ideological conservatism with condescension or contempt, as either a joke or a personality disorder -- a series of "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas," in Lionel Trilling's excellent summary. Gingrich's rhetoric had the ferocity of a backlash. The liberal revulsion toward him obscured how unorthodox -- occasionally, how liberal -- his conservatism was. The books then and now are full of heresy. He showed a willingness to criticize other Republicans, even Reagan at the height of his popularity. He advocated a health tax on alcohol to discourage drinking -- social engineering, it's called -- and imagined government-issued credit cards that would allow citizens to order goods and services directly from the feds. He thought the government should run nutritional programs at grocery stores and give away some foodstuffs free. He was pushing cuts in the defense budget in 1984 and a prototype of President Obama's cash-for-clunkers program in 1995.
This doesn't mean that the Tea Party influence will be positive for Republicans over the long haul. The movement carries viruses that may infect the G.O.P. in the years ahead. Its members seek traditional, conservative ends, but they use radical means. Along the way, the movement has picked up some of the worst excesses of modern American culture: a narcissistic sense of victimization, an egomaniacal belief in one's own rightness and purity, a willingness to distort the truth so that every conflict becomes a contest of pure good versus pure evil.
-- David Brooks
An inability to pay one's college tuition bills or a struggle with taxes is a rare sign of moral turpitude:
One thing that Christine O'Donnell is going to have answer is her own checkered background . . . . These serious questions: how does she make her living? Why did she mislead voters about her college education? How come it took nearly two decades to pay her college tuition? How does she make a living? Why did she sue a well-known conservative think tank? . . . . questions about why she had a problem for five years paying her federal income taxes, why her house was foreclosed and put up for a sheriff's sale, why it took 16 years for her to settle her college debt and get her diploma after she went around for years claiming she was a college graduate. . . . when it turns out she just got her degree because she had unpaid college bills that they had to sue her over.
We all hate suburban sprawl, right? "Wrong." So says libertarian John Stossel as he attempts to debunk the sprawl-is-bad argument in his Myths, Lies and Nasty Behavior series on ABC.
If Stossel wants to to expand Americans' lifestyle choices, he should attack the very thing he was defending," says Austin Bramwell: "For the 101st time: sprawl--an umbrella term for the pattern of development seen virtually everywhere in the United States--is not caused by the free market." Instead, government regulations, zoning laws, building codes, and street design regulations actually "mandate" it. Bramwell is perplexed: "You would think that libertarians would instinctively grasp the deeply statist nature of suburban development."
- Austin Bramwell of the American Conservative
Continue reading "Conservatives should blame the state for sprawl" »
One set are free-enterprise champions who argue that politicizing consumption distorts prices and spurs overproduction while imposing arbitrary conditions on producers -- like insisting that developing-world farmers enroll their children in school -- that might sound good to Westerners but ignore complex local realities.
Insisting on the noblest production methods conflicts, these critics say, with the very function of markets: to bring the most goods to the most people as cheaply as possible.
Another group of critics doesn't deny political consumption's power. Rather, they bemoan that citizenship has come to this.
Citizenship, for them, is about voting, marching, writing -- about being involved. In the modern age, they say, we have begun to turn inward, bowl alone, shirk our public duties. And now comes this cheap (in the moral, if not economic, sense) way to participate just a little, assuage guilt just a little, involve ourselves just a little in AIDS and trade, feel just a little of activism's thrill.
In an article last year in The Lancet, the British medical journal, the scholars Colleen O'Manique and Ronald Labonte strongly condemned RED, the marketing campaign for iPods and other products whose purchase helps to finance the battle against H.I.V./AIDS in Africa.
"Be wary of the 21st century's new noblesse oblige that replaces the efficiency of tax-funded programs and transfers in improving health equity with a consumption-driven 'charitainment' model," they wrote.
Republican neighborhoods are going to fall next. Why? Because they're broke. Ever listen to the ads on conservative talk radio? Talk about targeting a demographic.
Continue reading "Falling home prices, to continue falling ?" »
Steele was right: his power is not based on politics, it's based on entertainment. Great entertainers like Winchell and Limbaugh manage to simplify politics, to find ways of making it "us against them," to find ways to dramatize, to demonize, to villainize, to narrativize.
Sam Kazman on the 'benefits' on mandated change:
Continue reading "Sam Kazman Debates Obama's Car Mileage Regulations" »
"Kent Hance was a down-home boy, real homey, and George W. wasn't homey like Kent," recalled Johnnye Davis, a Republican leader in Odessa. "He didn't come across to the voters as well as Kent did, with the little jokes that Kent told."
While Mr. Bush now is sometimes mocked for an ignorance of policy details, back then people thought he had the opposite problem: a tendency to drop references in his speeches that baffled audiences, like a discussion of anti-inflationary economic policy.
"He was quick, a bit too quick, so that people didn't always get it," Mrs. Davis said. "He was so darn intelligent that a lot of what he said went over people's heads. He's learned to explain things a little better since then."
Another problem was that while Mr. Bush never really had a clear campaign strategy, Mr. Hance did: he focused his campaign on emphasizing local ties and on casting Mr. Bush as a carpet-bagger from the East. One of Mr. Hance's most effective radio spots was this one, read by an announcer:
"In 1961, when Kent Hance graduated from Dimmitt High School in the 19th congressional district, his opponent George W. Bush was attending Andover Academy in Massachusetts. In 1965, when Kent Hance graduated from Texas Tech, his opponent was at Yale University. And while Kent Hance graduated from University of Texas Law School, his opponent" -- the announcer's voice plunged -- "get this, folks, was attending Harvard. We don't need someone from the Northeast telling us what our problems are."
Continue reading "Bush in 1978: before playing country cowboy" »
We must how the planet that you're tiny and we're not.
America is strong so long as its culture is strong and manly;
in order to keep America strong, neocons and religious
conservative attack internal movements or forces which
seem to threaten to weaken America's manly, violent resolve.
Americans who dissent or who "abuse" personal freedom
threaten the nation's unity. Those who criticize the war are
helping America's enemies by attacking America's willingness
to use violence to humiliate others.
-- Patriotboy
Reasonable JulianSanchez notes the prophecy of Max Headroom,
Crunch-Con humble conservatives ? Example: Pelos movie on evangelical culture.
"Culture war" is the right's version of the left's "class war."
Division of Labour econ blog finds Milton Friedman week,
with market conservative leanings.
Freeper's homosexualagenda is a (inadvertently) great source for queer news.
Stein Report covers immigration law, visa rules and
enforcement in Drudge Report style.
See also house immigration caucus.
Stylish Coloradoan VodkaPundit's serious thinking or linking.
Bonus points for recommending I’m An Adult Now by
The Pursuit of Happiness.
--
If you like TPOH, you'd like Jerry Jerry & Sons Of Rhythm Orchestra's
Battle Hymn of the Apartment.
Club for Growth is pro growth and proud of it.
Debbie Schlussel, Ann Coulter lite.
Often supports Israel against Islamic Jihad.
Patrick Crozier, more linker than thinker, points
to many good quotes.
In a comparison of a 1973 algebra textbook and a 1998
“contemporary mathematics” textbook, Williamson Evers
and Paul Clopton found a dramatic change in topics.
In the 1973 book, for example, the index for the letter “F”
included “factors, factoring, fallacies, finite decimal,
finite set, formulas, fractions, and functions.”
In the 1998 book, the index listed “families (in poverty data),
fast food nutrition data, fat in fast food, feasibility study,
feeding tours, ferris wheel, fish, fishing, flags, flight, floor plan,
flower beds, food, football, Ford Mustang, franchises, and
fund-raising carnival."
It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are
proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives
that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.
-- Ronald Reagan, inauguration speech 2001.
Reagan was stupid, Reagan did what he was told, Reagan was
a tool of capital, Reagan was such a wuss that some unemployed
filthy termagants on Greenham Common scared him into
changing the foreign policy of the most powerful nation on earth.
This Republican Theme Park from America is My Girlfriend by Jasik.
Tim Blair / Spleenville, lively and colourfull blogger from Australia has a new blog.
Tim Lee / binarybits, free marketer sometimes politial blog.
samizdata, libertarian leaning.
What makes dictators dictators is not that they
don't believe in the power of the majority but
that they don't believe in the rights of the individual.
Belgravia Dispatch, longer articles, internationally minded.
Daniel Drezner, political theory and longer posts, and the
restful life of an academic.
Andrew Sullivan, Daily Dish.
Literate non-hating conservative writer.
Belmont Club. History and history in the making. (archives).