I am not a big football fan, but you can’t live in New England without knowing about Bill Belichick, the Patriots coach, and his monosyllabic style. Here is it captured perfectly by Dan Wasserman.
The Pats lost yesterday as we know here in Boston, but one of these guys will be the next President.
South Carolina is over and Newt Gingrich is the winner – the big winner. Some are predicting that Mitt Romney can’t come back from this self-inflicted near death experience, that he doesn’t have the personal or political skills to fix the way he has handled the non-release of his tax returns. (Note to Mitt: So your 2011 returns aren’t ready yet. Just release the last 5 or 6 years.) Romney’s saving grace may be Florida where there has been early voting and a lot of Republicans (this is a closed primary) and many have voted before all this drama. Since Romney has been working to get his folks out, maybe that will save him, but if it is Newt who ends up the nominee, is it bad for the President’s reelection?
My husband thinks that Newt is dangerous and could get enough people to buy into what he is saying to prevail. I think it will be a hard election no matter who the Republican nominee is but one thing is for certain – if it is Obama and Gingrich the contract in styles will be stark. Gingrich is a bomb-thrower while the President is calm and methodical. Roger Simon writing in Politico this morning says “Anger, umbrage and bitterness are so much a part of Gingrich’s public persona that he likes to attack the very concept of happiness.” In contrast you have the President playing what Andrew Sullivan calls “the long game.” (Sullivan’s long article for Newsweek is well worth reading no matter which side you are on.)
Simon goes on to say
Gingrich, like other candidates for the Republican nomination, has a fondness for quoting the Founding Fathers, but he now says that when they wrote “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence, it did not mean what we think it means.
“Happiness in the 18th century meant wisdom and virtue, not hedonism,” Gingrich says without a scintilla of embarrassment, even though he, himself, has pursued a fair amount of hedonism in his lifetime.
And they promised us the right to pursue,” Gingrich continues. “There is no provision for a Department of Happiness. They issued no happiness stamps. And if you said that you were going to take happiness from some and distribute it to others, the Founding Fathers would have asked by what right?”
So if we don’t have happiness to look forward to, what does Gingrich offer?
Work. Effort. Struggle.
“Work is something you need,” Gingrich says. “I don’t think it’s inappropriate for a 12- or 13-year-old to push a mop.
…Americans don’t want sunshine, lollipops and rainbows. They want blood, toil, tears and sweat. They want a dependably gloomy man in the Oval Office. They want Newt!
it remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb. Their short-term outbursts have missed Obama’s long game—and why his reelection remains, in my view, as essential for this country’s future as his original election in 2008.
What liberals have never understood about Obama is that he practices a show-don’t-tell, long-game form of domestic politics. What matters to him is what he can get done, not what he can immediately take credit for. And so I railed against him for the better part of two years for dragging his feet on gay issues. But what he was doing was getting his Republican defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to move before he did. The man who made the case for repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” was, in the end, Adm. Mike Mullen. This took time—as did his painstaking change in the rule barring HIV-positive immigrants and tourists—but the slow and deliberate and unprovocative manner in which it was accomplished made the changes more durable. Not for the first time, I realized that to understand Obama, you have to take the long view. Because he does.
And last week we got another example of the President’s style in the proposed reorganization of the six agencies that deal with business. Joe Davidson had an interesting piece in his Federal Diary column in the Washington Post.
When President Obama detailed proposals to reorganize and streamline certain government functions last week, some folks wanted to know why it took nearly a year to develop the plan.
One reason is the involvement of federal employees.
No, they didn’t gum up the bureaucracy or sit on their hands or hinder progress, as is too often the unfair and inaccurate caricature of government workers.
Instead, they were a valuable part of a long process leading to Obama’s announcement that six agencies dealing with business and trade would be consolidated into what is now the Commerce Department. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which takes the largest part of Commerce’s budget and includes the National Weather Service, would move to the Interior Department.
The reorganization proposal, which must be approved by Congress, took time, Jeffrey D. Zients, the administration’s chief performance officer, told reporters last week. “We talked to hundreds of businesses, reached out to federal employees,” he said. “This is very rigorous work, and we wanted to make sure we got it right.”
So now, the employees of the agencies concerned have a stake in what happens. It is all about buy in.
If November is Gingrich v. Obama we will have a clear contrast in styles. I wonder if Gingrich sings.
The President at the Apollo Theater
Photo: Shahar Azran/WireImage
Obama sings. Maybe that is the President’s secret weapon.
Here is the new Dan Wasserman cartoon commentary on the Republican primary race.
Question for Rick Santorum: Why are you so obsessed with kinky sex, polygamy, and other people’s sex lives anyway? Is there something you aren’t telling us?
I may be stretching the “holiday” a bit, but since Congress is still on vacation, I will use the term to talk about my tally of his most recent almost 10 days.
First, the pluses. The recess appointments, the cuts to the defense budget and his continuing feisty attitude. The negative is the signing of the National Defense Authorization Act.
The negative first. Alexander Cockburn’s analysis in the Nation is the best I’ve seen. He explains
The change came with the whisper of Barack Obama’s pen, as he signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the annual ratification of military Keynesianism—$662 billion this time—which has been our national policy since World War II bailed out the New Deal.
Sacrificial offerings to the Pentagon aren’t news. But this time, snugly ensconced in the NDAA came ratification by legal statute of the exposure of US citizens to arbitrary arrest without subsequent benefit of counsel, and to possible torture and imprisonment sine die. Goodbye, habeas corpus.
We’re talking here about citizens within the borders of the United States, not sitting in a hotel or out driving in some foreign land. In the latter case, as the late Anwar al-Awlaki’s incineration in Yemen bore witness a few months ago, the well-being or summary demise of a US citizen is contingent upon a secret determination of the president as to whether the aforementioned citizen is waging a war of terror on the United States. If the answer is in the affirmative, the citizen can be killed on the president’s say-so without further ado.
This is the latest disappointment on civil liberties. I had such high hopes for a reversal of the Bush II trend after we elected a Constitutional expert. In the sum, Obama has been almost worse. ratifying decisions made by W and going further.
The President at Shaker Height HS
On the positive side, the New York Times says
On Wednesday, after waiting until the dust in Iowa had settled, clearing out space in newspapers and on television, Mr. Obama delivered another jab, announcing four recess appointments, including that of Richard Cordray as head of a new consumer protection agency, despite Republican opposition. On Thursday, the president went to the Pentagon and outlined a new military strategy that embraces hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to what is a Republican sacred cow, and made it clear that American ground forces would no longer be large enough to conduct prolonged, large-scale counterinsurgency campaigns like those in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The cuts in the defense budget are a welcome change. I have thought since the days when I demonstrated at the Pentagon against the War in Vietnam. Let’s face it, the last 3 groundwars we have engaged in have been disasters. Maybe the Bush I war to repel Iraq from the invasion os Kuwait can be counted as a success. But Bush 1 knew when to stop.
In an unusual appearance at the Pentagon briefing room on Thursday, Mr. Obama outlined a new national defense strategy driven by three realities: the winding down of a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, a fiscal crisis demanding hundreds of billions of dollars in Pentagon budget cuts and a rising threat from China and Iran.
A fourth reality, not mentioned in the briefing room, was Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign and the chorus of Republican presidential candidates who have sought to portray him as decimating the Pentagon budget and being weak in his response to Iran.
Mr. Obama, who spoke surrounded by a tableau of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in dress uniforms and with chests full of medals, underscored the national security successes of his administration — the ending of the Iraq war, the killing of Osama bin Laden and the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya — before declaring that the United States would downsize to a smaller ground force, get rid of “outdated cold war-era systems” and step up investments in intelligence-gathering and cyberwarfare.
…
The new strategy document finally defines away the Defense Department’s historic requirement to have the ability to fight and win two wars at once — a measure that one official said “has been on life-support for years.”
The strategy released under Mr. Obama in 2010 said the military was responsible for “maintaining the ability to prevail against two capable nation-state aggressors.”
In contrast, the strategy released Thursday said the military must be able to fight one war, but is responsible only for “denying the objectives of — or imposing unacceptable costs on — an opportunistic aggressor in a second region.”
Senior Pentagon officials said that viewing military requirements through something as static as the two-war model had become outdated, and that the true measurement was whether the Pentagon could field a force capable of carrying out a wide range of military actions to protect the nation’s interests.
Pentagon officials made it clear that the department’s priorities in coming years would be financing for defense and offense in cyberspace, for Special Operations forces and for the broad area of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
I have never agreed with 100% of what any politician does, but this scorecard isn’t bad. It will be interesting to see what the impact of all this is on the President’s re-election.
Mitt Romney won the Republican Caucus by 8 votes over Rick Santorum. They both got just under 25% of the vote followed closely by Ron Paul. You can read this as 75% of the vote went to other Republicans with the two closest rivals representing extreme positions. Two interesting comments I heard on the MSNBC coverage last night. First, former Republican Congressman J.C. Watts noted that he thinks Mitt’s 25% is about what his support is. Not clear if he was talking about Iowa or generally amoung Republicans. Second, Rev. Al Sharpton who hoped that Santorum and/or Paul stayed in the race for a while so that Mitt had to keep moving right to get the nomination.
Robert Creamer writes in the Huffington Post today that the Iowa was bad news for the Republican establishment which just wants to nominate Mitt and be done with it.
To maximize their odds of reclaiming their hold on the White House, the Republican establishment believes they need two things:
• To nominate Mitt Romney;
• To effectively end the Republican nominating process as soon as possible.Last night’s results from Iowa lower the odds they will get either.
In fact, what we saw in Iowa last night was the Republican base gagging on the presidential candidate the Republican establishment is trying desperately to cram down their throats.
The problem is that Mitt is not good at displaying human qualities. Brian McGrory wrote in his column in today’s Boston Globe
For not foreseeing his rise from the State House to, potentially, the White House, I shouldn’t, in truth, be so hard on myself. Romney has made a habit of getting in his own way.
First, there was the small matter of that gubernatorial campaign. His very best day was the one right before he declared. On the stump, he was, in a word, terrible – hollow and plastic in speeches and mannerisms. “How are you?’’ he would repeatedly ask, never waiting for a response.
There was one October campaign swing through Boston’s North End with Rudy Giuliani when a burly laborer in a crowded Mike’s Pastry called out “Let me buy you guys a cannoli.’’ Brilliant, I thought. The cameras would capture Romney with ricotta cheese on his strong chin, a man of the people. Then Romney called back, “No thanks, got to run,’’ as he headed for the door. He said it with that nervous smile, which was still frozen on his face when Giuliani said to the guy “Let me buy you the cannoli!’’ The place erupted in cheers.
Mitt and the establishment have other problems. Like the fact that Rick Santorum was able to peak at the right time and become the anti-Mitt. Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul will also continue in the race.
All of which leads me to ask whether Obama actually won Iowa. He had some 25000 people show up to watch a live message, signed up over 7000 new volunteers and has 8 field offices open in Iowa. He had almost as many people at meaningless caucuses as Romney, Santorum and Paul each got as vote totals. Sure maybe people aren’t as excited as in 2008 and everyone – even supporters can name at least one thing he did they don’t like, but I’m with Rev. Al: Let this go on for a while and let Mitt move to the right. Then we shall see what the general election will bring. Even better the Republicans could nominate Santorum. Howard Fineman said in the Huffington Post late last night:
The final Iowa results aren’t in but we already know one big winner: President Barack Obama.
The dismal, nasty campaign here was not good for the Republican Party or the country. There was precious little debate on anything other than who literally was Holier than Thou; the dollars spent on attack ads were, vote for vote, enormous. One GOP top finisher is unpopular with the base; another is too far out of the mainstream to be nominated, let alone elected; the third lost his last Senate race, in Pennsylvania, by 17 points, and is far to the right of the country on social issues.
All of which is good news for a president with a 40 percent job approval rating and a desperate need for a weak opponent next November.
The winner in Iowa.
I’ll leave Richard Viguerie with the last word. In an interview today with the New York Times, Viguerie said
The conservative direct mail pioneer and activist Richard Viguerie predicted that the pack would continue to seek out a more ideologically pure standard-bearer this year than it did in accepting Senator John McCain as the Republican nominee in 2008.
“Romney has just seemed to have gone out of his way to try to get this nomination without giving conservatives anything, and that’s troubling to a lot of conservatives,” he said. “I don’t think they’re going to go away quietly into that long dark nominating fight — I‘d be surprised if the conservatives didn’t mount a serious effort to derail Romney.”
On to New Hampshire!
I know I’ll be writing more about the imact of the “compromise” in the days to come, but for now here a summary. The Atlantic Wire has the best written summary I’ve been able to find.
The basic plan, as explained by The New York Times‘ Carl Hulse and Helene Cooper, Politico’s David Rogers, and The Hill‘s Alexander Bolton, goes something like this:
1. Raise the debt limit by $900 billion and cut spending by the same amount over 10 years. Members of Congress can vote to show they don’t like the increase but Obama can veto their disapproval.2. Create a bipartisan committee with three members of each party from each chamber of Congress to find spending cuts the size of a second debt limit increase of $1.5 trillion. As a special holiday treat, the plan must be presented to colleagues by Thanksgiving and voted on by Christmas.3. If the plan passes, Obama can raise the limit by $1.5 trillion.4. If the cuts committee can’t come up with a plan, Obama can get only a $1.2 trillion debt limit increase, and Congress must either:a. Pass a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, orb. Allow spending cuts the size of the debt limit increase over the next 10 years, with at least half coming from cuts to defense spending. These cuts would be automatic by the end of 2012.
FortLeft 