p m carpenter's commentary

Could it be?

If the latest Pew poll is grounded in anything even remotely resembling statistical reality, if it's anything but the product of 50 chimps at tabulating keyboards, if it's anything but a cruel joke from the political gods, then 2012 is destined to replace 1964 as the presidential year that defines the electoral relationship between extreme ideology and party calamity.

In a head-to-head matchup between the president and Mitt Romney, the former leads by a game-over 12 points. Leads of fewer points than that (generally about 10) are unbeatable, considering the voting preferences from even unfavorable electoral-college states required to amass such a nationally comprehensive number.

Charles Blow of the Times is struck by Obama's 20-point lead over Romney among women, as well as a powerful lead among the young and even a tie among the 65+ demographic. "And," notes Blow, "he outperforms Romney in every region of the country and among every income group."

That "every region" is no typo. It does in fact include the South (Obama, 52; Romney, 44), which is what impels one to intense dubiousness about the Pew poll. The same goes for "every income group," in that Pew shows Obama leading by 26 points among voters with a family income of $30,000 or less. In addition, Obama is reckoned to hold a 7-point lead among the high school-only (or less) educated.

Obama also possesses a 3-point lead among men, which, if true, would offer absolute, even Inhofe-convincing proof of Darwinian evolution and resolve any questions as to the whereabouts of the missing link. It is here, though, that my Humean skepticism violently kicks in, with an exceptionally reasonable doubt that approaches the damning.

As Blow concedes, in so many and other words, the latest NY Times/CBS News and Washington Post/ABC News polls, for instance, aren't nearly as promising, overall, to the "Rational" demographic. But if Pew is on to something, however skewed for the moment, then 2012 shall be historic indeed.

The recycling of Newt

Chris Cillizza refutes his own argument:

Regardless of whether Newt knows it or not, his chances of remaining a major player in this race effectively ended with his second place finishes in Mississippi and Alabama....

Santorum started with leads [in Michigan and Ohio] and watched them evaporate amid a series of unforced errors and heavy spending from Romney and his Restore Our Future super PAC. If that pattern repeats itself in Illinois in six days time, Santorum’s last, best chance will disappear.

As would any anti-Romney resistance movement, should Gingrich have absented himself.

Mitt's precision bombing campaign has been well underway in Illinois for days now, and it's my understanding that Santorum has yet to spend a dime. If the Romney war machine dispatches Santorum to the point of humiliation, the latter's future, as Cillizza notes, would darken considerably. What, then, is the next logical step? Exactly. The recycling of Newt Gingrich, again.

But he can't recycle himself if he withdraws from the race. So, like Newt, I just don't see the benefit of his slithering into the night. Not yet.

The GOP primaries: a tonic or toxin?

Last night, in a brief overview of the GOP's latest, whacky sitcom episode, E.J. Dionne wrote:

For those who like to watch election nights, the Alabama and Mississippi results are a tonic. They’ll keep things going in the Republican race for some time.

For me, there's an element of the bittersweet in those lines. In my love of election nights, I bow to no man, and this year's offerings of them are proving livelier than most primary seasons. Yet rather than a tonic, they are proving more of a toxin.

It's true that at long last the Republican Party must endure -- as must we all, unfortunately -- this wrenching, not to mention wretched, self-sorting out. For 30 years, conservatism has undergone a self-betrayal and consequently an identity crisis which were destined to come to a pustular head. It has traveled from pragmatism and empiricism to rigid ideology, it has raped and battered Edmund Burke, it has embraced the worst sort of opportunism and cheap demagoguery. When, for instance, it sits in the seat of power, "deficits don't matter"; yet when it passes its debt on to the competition, debt becomes a nation-destroying sin. Contemporary conservatism stands for small government, and yet practices the much bigger sort; it advocates civil libertarianism, yet it sneaks under your bed; it brays about economic libertarianism, too, and yet statutorily rewards its fat-cat funders; it boasts of humble American values, and yet brutalizes the world.

In a word, contemporary conservatism is a mess -- and its least attribute is conservatism. Indeed, I'm not even sure what one should affirmatively call it, except perhaps some species of a bumbling, Nietzschean will-to-power. But "conservative" it most definitely is not, no matter how often or severely Mitt and Rick and Newt and the entire supporting cast of circus clowns utter their sacred word.

"Catharsis" possesses an authentically profound meaning -- one of real import -- though it has also become something of a cliche, in that catharses are not infrequently faked, cosmetically. Whatever it is the GOP is experiencing at the moment does evince a cathartic tinge, but my worry is that it's merely of the cliche-ish variety. For who among its still relatively responsible voices is standing athwart his or her party and yelling "Stop!"?

Some, such as Olympia Snowe, are merely quitting the game, while the others remain uncourageously mute. Meanwhile, the party's clownish toxicity just gets worse. And it's downright painful to watch.

Another morning after

On mornings after, amid the murky-colored memories of the previous evenings' squalor, it has become my customary penitence is to scour Jennifer Rubin's latest stenographic puff for Mitt Romney. Jennifer is ferociously toadish in her conservatively commentating independence, hence by reading her we weekly embark anew on this -- our awesome, wondrous journey with Mitt.

OK, so who won last night? In checking with Jen, that's not entirely clear, which is why I love her stuff. She writes that "Santorum ... fail[ed] to gain significant ground in the delegate race," thereby suggesting his double victories were little more than practical defeats; but she really earns her Mitt money by slamming Santorum for delivering a "speech [that] lacked a clear message, as he rambled on about his travels in Mississippi, the Constitution, gas prices," and so on.

Jennifer then implicitly endorses Mitt's characteristic stiffness, unoriginality, and robotic mind: "In [Santorum's speech], too, was a line about free markets and the 'centrality of faith in our lives.' He apparently feels compelled to wing these things and thereby fails to maximize his moments."

But we haven't yet arrived at Ms. Rubin's apocalyptic warning of woe to all ye who would enter Rick's wicked web of temptation: "He declared that he 'will win the nomination before the convention.' In light of [the] delegate gap, that strained credulity, and moreover, cast him in the role of the party-wrecker and chaos-maker."

Yes, you can take it from Jen: With Santorum in the race, GOP chaos looms as a possibility.

Tonight's primaries: The left's CW may be wrong

The polls have now closed in Mississippi and Alabama and I'm watching MSNBC's coverage, which means once again I'm listening to Chris Matthews join the MSNBC chorus of "Newt Should Quit," so that we can all enjoy a real stemwinder of a two-man race.

I have some sympathy for this view, however what it ignores is that a two-man race could quite quickly reduce to a one-man blowout. This could be accomplished by either Romney or Santorum; either candidate could acquire the Big Mo in reasonably short order, since the GOP base is by now finding this elimination process a rather tedious one.

With Newt hanging in there, though, the base retains a third way -- and for the rest of us that happily translates, perhaps, into the needlessly, insensibly prolonged way. And that is the principal goal for anyone interested in seeing these Republican primaries become their own doom, just as Mitt Romney correctly fears.

Santorum's Alabama mailer

I'll give him this much: Rick Santorum knows his market pretty well.

Santorum's Alabama mailer features upbeat quotes about him from Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin.

Misogyny, vicious bile, religious bigotry, and the profoundest ignorance ever introduced to American politics -- these are Rick's benefactors meant to twang the taste buds of Alabama voters.

I can understand Santorum's decision to include the last three -- Malkin, Huckabee, and Palin -- among the worst angels smiling upon his nature. Dixie Republicans take intense pride in their aggressive disregard of good taste. But for Santorum to include Rush Limbaugh? Now? That's just stupid; a Romney-style serving of geopolitical pandering that would haunt Santorum, as though he doesn't have enough skeletons already, well into the general.

Just bile, bigotry, and ignorance would have sufficed.

MissouREE

I see Mitt's pandering is taking place today in the state of my birth, where he asked a crowd if it's pronounced MissouRAH or MissouREE. It's the latter. There is absolutely no debate about this, because I say so, but of course following the crowd's agreement, Mitt said he'd be going to MissouRAH later.

It's true. There is simply no pandering that is beneath this plutocratic yokel.

Frustrating, isn't it?

Steve Benen, at MaddowBlog:

When reporters get so inured to Romney's dishonesty that it no longer seems interesting or noteworthy, it sends a signal to the political world that facts and honesty simply don't matter anymore.

There's a reason for that, Mr. Benen. They don't. And the reason for that is partisanship, or what has come to be villainized, rightly or wrongly, as America's polarization.

You, Mr. Benen, note that "reporters" are in danger of becoming "inured" to Mitt Romney's phantasmagoric untruthiness, yet you're a reporter, even if one who makes no secret of his political preferences. And a mere three days before your above declaration, you reported, in "Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. IX," that Romney, within the preceding week alone, had lied about the intent of his Massachusetts healthcare bill, had lied about Obama's spending on veterans, had lied about Obama's debt and deficit concerns, and had lied about Obama's Iran policy and about Obama's loss of "our AAA credit rating" and about Obama's fiscal policy and about Social Security and Medicare in general.

And who read your reporting, which, by the way, was quite good? Readers of MaddowBlog, of course; readers who had already counted the ways in which Mitt Romney is an incurable liar, or don't much care about the specifics, since they'll never vote for Mitt Romney anyway -- in other words, unpersuadable, even redundant readers who should have been reading, say, National Review Online, whose unpersuadable, redundant readers should have been reading you, at MaddowBlog.

You get my drift. Our polarization has us oppositely cornered into lazy comfort zones, the breaking out of which would require alternative exposures, brutally repeated. Naturally, that's not going to happen. People watch Fox or MSNBC not to be informed, but to have their political prejudices reinforced; and for the same reason they read either MaddowBlog or RedState.com.

It's not that there aren't reporters, such as you, Mr. Benen, out there fighting the good fight and attempting the enlightenment of the great and independently unwashed: it's that the unwashed only give much of a presidential quadrennial damn around late October, and their numbers are relatively small. All the others? You, and Erick Erickson, already have their tickets punched and their ballots marked.

This may seem like a digression, Mr. Benen, but it's not. Reinhold Niebuhr, in Moral Man and Immoral Society, had this to say about the American electorate and the general thrust of Mitt Romney, whom Niebuhr never met, because Mitt hadn't been born yet:

[A] laissez faire economic theory is maintained in an industrial era through the ignorant belief that the general welfare is best served by placing the least possible political restraints upon economic activity. The history of the past hundred years is a refutation of the theory; but it is still maintained, or is dying a too lingering death, particularly in nations as politically incompetent as our own.

Niebuhr wrote that about free-market economics in the depression depths of 1932; Mitt Romney is still selling it in the near depression-recovering year of 2012; and, as Niebuhr lamented 80 years ago, its essence had already been discredited for about a century. But the old prejudices are hard to kill -- and we still find them in the same old polarization. Niebuhr wasn't "exposing" the lies of Herbert Hoover. The latter merely had his base, and no political analyst and no reporter and no reality was going to convince them otherwise.

Indeed, they didn't read Niebuhr.

Theroux-ly off base

Novelist Paul Theroux launches a spirited defense of Rush Limbaugh on behalf of satire, or maybe it's a spirited defense of satire on behalf of Rush Limbaugh, but, whichever, he makes an admissible point in asserting that "You have to give Limbaugh a pass, otherwise you lose the right to go on calling Gingrich and Eric Cantor pimps for Israel, and Rick Santorum a mental midget."

Admissible, perhaps, but not altogether valid or convincing. Gingrich, for example, really is a pimp for Israel, as are many U.S. politicians, but Gingrich has corrupted the ethics of political whoring to a once-unimaginable low; and as for Santorum's mental acuity, well, any pol so colossally stupid as to attack the virtually canonized JFK deserves all the opprobrium he gets. In other words, our right to abuse the likes of Gingrich and Cantor and Santorum is not merely constitutionally unalienable, it is humanly irrepressible.

Theroux's more grievous misdemeanor, though, comes in the old familiar bugaboo of: How can the left, what with its rowdy stable of Michael Moores, cast stones? But look, even though I'm no fan of Michael Moore, I am a reasonably good judge of character, I think, and in Moore I just don't see the putrid, pestiferous bile of a Rush Limbaugh. Moore practices a crude ridicule of those who would and do in fact oppress, while Limbaugh happily practices a crude ridicule of the oppressed themselves. If Theroux can't appreciate the distinction, so much the pity for Theroux.

None of this, however, should be interpreted as an attenuation of my passionate hope that Rush Limbaugh stays on the air. The right and its party deserve him and all the inexhaustible harm he's doing them both.

And now, I must be going, for I'm late -- "If you believe that a cracker like Rush with a radio show is the 'virtual leader' of the Republican Party," writes Theroux, "you need a good proctologist to reposition your head" -- for some rectal work.

A solid prediction

From The Hill:

In the 2008 Republican primaries, exit polls showed that 77 percent of voters in Alabama and 69 percent in Mississippi described themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians.

From this we may safely extrapolate that the Mormon Mitt Romney will register 23 percent support in Alabama tomorrow and 31 percent in Mississippi, because tea-partying thumpers are just as selectively discriminating about the U.S. Constitution -- e.g., Article VI and its regrettable "no religious test" section -- as they are about the Golden Rule, the Sermon on the Mount, the Ten Commandments, and pretty much the entire thrust of the New Testament.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

All that Sputnik-inspired money poured into American education, all that pride in American literacy, all those American cable and satellite connections to the Information Superhighway -- and yet at least half the country still stumbles through its medieval day believing that the cock's crowing caused the sun to rise.

From the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll:

Fifty percent of Americans see the Obama administration as having the power to do something about the cost of a gallon of gasoline ... [and] Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they disapprove of the way the president is handling the situation.

I, for one, would prefer that Obama do something ameliorative about this windy weather in March before he pauses from his despotic meddling in our already perfect healthcare system to order home deliveries of $2.50-a-gallon gasoline, as well as free eggs, nickel beer, and ponies for everybody. Yet my seething, not-really-threatening, thrice-daily letters to the White House about our neglected meteorological needs have yielded nothing but presidential indifference (and, possibly, 24/7 FBI surveillance).

Tin-foilers of the world, unite!

A chilling interview

I just watched Henry Kissinger on Fareed Zakaria's "GPS," and his appearance (transcript here) only compounded my bafflement about this former presidential adviser's historic stature as a modern Metternich. His brilliance somehow escapes me, just as it did when ending our suicidal involvement in Vietnam's civil war essentially entailed bombing the bejesus out of North Vietnam until this primitive, stone-aged, third-world country agreed to sign a piece of paper of Kissinger's imagination which was utterly void of any enduring content.

At any rate, today Mr. Kissinger assures us, in so many elliptical words, that we may trust that the GOP's presidential candidates don't mean so much as one syllable of their foreign policy drivel, drooled daily on the campaign trail. Why, just look at Ronald Reagan's performances as right-wing candidate and then presidential realist, said Kissinger. What Kissinger omitted from that little history was that Reagan, bowing to pressure from his party's hard-liners, postponed what we might call a successfully realistic foreign policy, especially vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, until his second term.

Show of hands. How many believe the influence of the Republican Party's hard-right, neoconservative wing has declined since 1981? Indeed, is there, any longer, even a legitimate comparison to be made? -- between, that is, what Reagan countenanced and what a President Romney would have to cope with?

For a far more astute analysis of where Republican neocon radicalism may lead us, rather than the Metternichian Kissinger we should look to scholars such as the Kennan-like Peter Beinart, who in Jaunary, following one of the GOP debates, dashed off this insight -- "Republicans' Incoherent Foreign Policy" -- for the Daily Beast:

"Radical Islam" is to American foreign policy today what "communism" was in the 1960s, when American policymakers lumped together the Soviet Union and Mainland China.... It is exactly the kind of analytically incoherent, ideologically overblown concept that produces foreign-policy ends that vastly exceed national means.

And it is precisely where a Republican president would take us, whether he would actually want to or not. Because the neocon radicals control his party -- in fact, the very heart, soul, and zeitgeist of his party.

The Thin Man

From the NY Times, the anatomy of a Republican Chernobyl:

I expected him to have the guts to stand up and say what Rush did was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong in every sense of the word wrong.

--Mary Russell, Republican, evangelical Christian, and former Romney supporter

This has really energized me, that I need to get more involved with the Obama campaign.

--Jessica Lopez, registered independent, voted for George W. Bush

A lot of my younger friends are Democrats, and it’s hard for them to understand how, as a woman, you can be a member of the Republican Party.

--Meredith Warren, a Republican strategist for Pete's sake

Had Mitt Romney heretofore demonstrated any human capacity for empathy as epiphany, or for pragmatic course correction, or for simply recognizing that any unexamined political campaign is a campaign not worth waging, one might conclude that eight months is more than abundant time for him to turn things around. Yet the man has been presidentially hungering for years -- and as a candidate he just keeps getting thinner.

It's really quite remarkable. I would say "astonishing," but that reaction is no longer genuinely possible.

"A[nother] Breach of Trust"

From the NY Times:

Democrats say they are furious that the [budget] agreement could be undercut. "If House Republicans walk away from the agreement their own speaker made less than a year ago, then they will show that a deal with them isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on," said Senator Patty Murray, who led the Democrats on the budget "supercommittee" last year.

Which attitude is but slightly more self-aware than Joe Stalin's in 1941, on the eve of Hitler's treachery. From Max Hasting's Inferno:

Stalin ... rejected explicit intelligence about [Operation] Barbarossa from Soviet agents in Berlin and Tokyo, scrawling across one such report from Beria: "You can go tell your 'source' from the German Air Headquarters that he can go and fuck his mother.... I.St."

Or this, from Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War:

Soviet [military] dispositions are all the more inexplicable considering that Barbarossa was the worst-kept secret of the Second World War, and Stalin received no fewer than eighty warnings of Hitler's intentions over the previous eight months.

Sen. Murray says "If"? -- by that, meaning that House Republicans might show untrustworthiness?

These clowns are the most egregious ideological thugs ever known to American politics. They've no honor. None. A "deal" means nothing to them except breathing room, or, if you will, "living space."

I'm normally not one for historical hysterics, but sometimes the empirical evidence of incurable perfidy is so plainly before you, there's just no "if" about it.

Romney's Biggest Problem

On its main opinion page this week, the Washington Post promoted Michael Gerson's column with this intriguing tease: "One problem remains after [Romney's] nomination." Now, we average bears could easily think of dozens of post-nomination problems for Romney, hence the tantalizing promise of Gerson's discovered "one" that hauled in the readers, like me.

So I opened the column page and saw his One Problem, in the column's actual headline: "Romney must solve his stereotype problem." Ah, so that's it. The One and Only Mitt Romney has Only the One Problem of being stereotyped. Got it. But wait. What does that mean? -- being stereotyped. Is Romney doing the stereotyping, or are others? And, of course, just what is this wretched stereotype?

In the column itself we sort of learn the answers.

Romney is stuck in a stereotype. During occasional gaffes, he sounds not just like your boss but like your boss’s boss. The main problem, however, is the message. In addition to talking about reducing taxes and cutting government, Romney needs to present a vision of social mobility and set out the egalitarian appeal of opportunity. He needs to emphasize policies — on education, job skills and wealth accumulation — that encourage aspiration.

Oops. This seems to be getting out of control. Just like that, we soared from the one problem of class "stereotype" to Romney's additional, assorted problems of accumulated gaffes and of giving the appearance of some heartless boss from a scalding hell. And Gerson's not done yet; he goes on to note that Romney lacks a coherent "message," in that he has no "vision" or inspiring "policies."

OK. Surely, Gerson is through, right? I mean, we started with the premise of a One-Problem Romney and suddenly he's a hydraheaded, message-less nightmare of no political program whatsoever. So Gerson's done?

Au contraire. For Romney, you see, also ...

is not a natural fit for the GOP nomination.

is an ideological mismatch for the current iteration of the GOP.

is consistently losing very conservative voters.

[is losing] voters making less than $100,000 a year, as well as voters without a college degree.

Oh my. We've gone from One Problem to enumerating problems in the double digits. And we haven't even got to Romney's One Really Big Problem, which Gerson just sort of drops in as a kind of filler, or afterthought:

In a nation with a fairly even ideological divide, any successful presidential candidate wins by both motivating his party’s base and appealing to independents.

Ding-ding-ding! Among the ocean of sprawling problems spilled in Gerson's column, we finally have a winner -- the winner: Mitt Romney's ultimate and insurmountable predicament. In the general campaign he'll need to appeal to independents, yet reasonable appeals will cost him support among the unreasonable GOP base; and in the general campaign he'll need to appeal to the base, yet unreasonable appeals will cost him support among reasonable independents.

And that's a big problem.

The real 'Others'

I enjoyed this modest satire from WaPo's Jonathan Bernstein:

Is the economy still stuck in a rut thanks to the socialist in the White House? Or is it an economic boom — and if so, was it caused by the Bush tax cuts or by the anticipation of Romney tax cuts?

It’s on days like this that Republican operatives and GOP-aligned hack economists really earn their pay.

Bernstein goes on to say, "To be more serious for a moment ..." -- but his presumed absurdity is serious. It's what they -- the operatives and hack economists -- do. It's their universe, their world, their own special kind of desperate derangement that calls for ever-higher planes of otherworldliness.

Who votes for such otherworldliness? The real "Others" -- the toothless hayseeds, the tricorned Obama-haters, the ideologically committed, no matter what.

And that "otherness" is the real irony of Bernstein's modest satire.

The GOP's anti-intellectualism

David Frum, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," in FrumForum, April 2009:

Question: Could Richard Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize winning book "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" possibly have been rendered obsolete?

Paul Krugman, "Ignorance Is Strength," in the NY Times, today:

[O]ne of our two major political parties has taken a hard right turn against education.... Remarkably, this new hostility to education is shared by the social conservative and economic conservative wings of the Republican coalition, now embodied in the persons of Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney.

Even more remarkable is the rather instant resurrection of Republicans' anti-intellectualism. On the crushing heels of an electoral humiliation contributed by the aggressively ignorant Sarah Palin, Frum not unreasonably speculated in 2009 that

politicians who appear unequal to the task of managing the government will not be entrusted with high responsibilities. Who knows? Voter aversion to gut-playing [i.e., anti-intellectual] politicians may prove one of the more enduring legacies of the Bush years.

How much of what Frum anticipated was personal projection, how much was republican hope, and how much was shocked recoil I have no way of knowing. Nonetheless Frum's motivation was of less significance than his prognosis: a kind of a priori pronunciamento that no post-industrial, two-party liberal democracy can survive, let alone thrive, with cretinous blank slates like Palin at the helm, even if just potentially. For the cognitive health of both parties in any two-party system is necessarily assumed, for reasons covered in this space and elsewhere on endless occasions.

Frum, however, was, as we all were, to be grievously disappointed. Because from Palin we went straight to Michele Bachmann, to Herman Cain, to Rick Perry and then to the pseudointellectual Newt Gingrich and the "good-luck-with-that-education-thing" Mitt Romney and the obscurantist Rick Santorum. And I'm not sure which is more dangerous: an anti-intellectualism sputtered as rabble-rousing resentment by an inarticulate harpy like Palin, or an anti-intellectualism gussied up as national policy by smooth-talking demagogues like Santorum.

Frum closed with characteristic reflectiveness, tinged by the wistful:

Hofstadter's magnum opus may deserve attention more as an epitaph for a bygone era than as an analysis of the culture in which contemporary Americans still live.

I'm skeptical of carrying Hofstadter's classic analysis to a purely America-centric one. This keenest of American historians was instinctively dubious about the much-ballyhooed merits of unfettered democracy; from ancient Athens to Cleveland, Ohio last Tuesday, its manifestations are often nothing less than frightful. But, be that as it may, I would emend Frum's closing by only one word: "the culture in which contemporary Americans must live" -- if, that is, liberal democracy is indeed to thrive.

Joe the Plumber's downhill flow

Sam Wurzelbacher, a.k.a. Joe the Plumber, another rabidly anti-government tea partier who desperately wants to depart the bliss of private enterprise and land on a cushy, benefits-laden government payroll, may not be quite up to the challenge of professional campaigning.

When asked this morning on CNN why he considers himself qualified to be a United States congressman -- a job that entails dealing with our most complex issues, ranging from further bloating the U.S. tax code to maintaining D.C. cab fares as the artificially lowest in urban America -- Mr. Wurzelbacher answered that that "seems like a silly question."

To be fair to Sam, though, he did in fact expand on his answer: "One, I’m an American citizen. Two, I’m very much involved in the process of what’s going on," whatever the hell that means. My border collie was also born in this here great nation and he, too, pisses on a lot of its scenery, but that doesn't qualify him for the city council.

It is in times like this that I find myself in the profoundest support of a return to literacy tests -- not to vote, but to run.

Plato, updated

Here's how Plato (The Republic) put it:

The better sort of philosophers are placed in such a cruel position in relation to their country that there is no one thing in nature to be compared to it.

And here's how Politico puts it, speaking for those contemporary philosophers in Congress, who are fleeing to the sanity of retirement or some alternative vocation: "This job sucks."

True, Plato did his philosophizing in what many of us might consider an entirely different political universe. But if we confine ourselves to Plato's thought, we must also recall that his highest belief was that of eternal universals ("Forms," or "Ideals," such as Beauty and Justice and the Good), and in that sense (to which I, at least, happen to fundamentally subscribe), the polis of ancient Athens and the hamlet of Washington, D.C. are essentially undifferentiated in their timeless struggles with how to best grapple with overarching issues of war and peace, taxes, and the economy.

For starters, which is where I'll pretty much finish, Plato believed that wise statesmen are -- and should be -- trained in wise statesmanship from an early age; that whatever Good they have to offer to the people is the result of a lifetime of devotion to society's betterment. In America's Founding era, we came closest to this Ideal.

What's our tack today? To make true statesmanship a near impossibility (see Politico article) -- and what's more, as many are all too willing to advocate, to term-limit any poor schmuck who manages to accumulate at least adequate experience in his or her political office. In effect we're entering a pre-Platonic, perhaps, you might say, even barbaric, age.

Pataki's comical endorsement

Former NY governor George Pataki only hurts the ones he sorta cares about. Plus, he has studied and refined the metaphysically nuanced endorsement techniques of former U.S. senator John Danforth, who last month included his personal choice to lead the free world, Mitt Romney, among the many "characters who are seeking the nomination," none of whom "appears to most Republicans to be absolute standouts."

Building on Danforth's exotically clever, push-pull seduction of Taoist-like inscrutability, Master Pataki said in support of Mitt yesterday:

[H]e has a number of problems. It's hard for blue-collar families like mine to identify with him. It's hard for economic conservatives to identify with him. He needs to do more to reach out to Latinos.

Or, to put all that in another way, as Pataki proceeded to do, Romney "has the breadth of support that warrants our rallying around to him."

Come again?

Pataki has always been a bit of a doofus. But to try, as one might, to write off Pataki's inelegance on Fox yesterday as just more Patakiesque bumbling would be intellectually dissatisfying, in that it would be intrinsically dishonest, or simply mistaken. For Pataki was merely emulating another NY pol of superior political instincts, Robert Kennedy, who always urged the hanging of a lantern on one's problem -- in Romney's case, problems.

Still, George Pataki has a way of making even the smartly advisable look a trifle goofy.

It-ain't-over-till-he-says-it's-over Newt

I disagree with Chait, who is overthinking Newt Gingrich's "devious" persistence:

[I]f you’re Gingrich, don’t you approach somebody close to Romney and discuss a trade? A post in his administration, some help from his donor network, maybe some customers for your lobbying historical business?

It is, I think, simpler than that.

With Gingrich, the entire cosmos can be reduced to the specific, one dimension of how well it accommodates his immense ego. Gingrich begins with ego and Gingrich ends with ego; he devours ego for breakfast, lunch and dinner; he pisses ego, he fondles it in bed at night. Newt Gingrich lives to satisfy his ego, for it is the universal leviathan that rightly yearns for ultimate fulfillment.

Therefore: Gingrich, not unjustifiably, envisions a GOP convention that Mitt Romney enters short; one ballot and he's negotiable -- the nomination is negotiable. And who is the cosmos' unparalleled negotiator, unsurpassed master of language and most exceptional leader ever? Who, then, becomes the convention delegates' most natural choice and truest savior, after being wowed by the certain and absolute brilliance of One particularly enormous ego?

President and Generalissimo Newt Gingrich, that's who, of course.

For the megalomaniacal, the game is never over until the megalomaniac says it's over.

Stunning

Romney on his unbeatable tax plan:

I think it’s kind of interesting for [nonpartisan] groups to try and score it, because frankly it can’t be scored, because those kinds of details will have to be worked out with Congress, and we have a wide array of options.

Those groups that have indeed scored the elusive thing have "estimated it would add more than $3 trillion to the federal deficit." Yet Romney's straightforward defense to that is that his tax plan is in fact utterly meaningless, empty of any real content and void of all substance.

Stunning.

For Romney, a tangled web

This morning, slouched over his breakfast table of Bloody Marys and multicolored amphetamines, Mitt Romney, with his hair looking a fright, is surely pounding said table and angrily demanding: Will no one rid me of these turbulent pricks?

I sympathize. Mitt paid good money -- well, his friends did -- to buy this thing fair and square (plus it's his turn!) only to watch Rick Santorum and the even peskier (prickier?) Newt Gingrich prolong a rather ill-advised siege.

It's got so bad, ordinarily prudent analysts such as Ezra Klein have been reduced to asking, "Is Romney stronger than he looks?" and Ross Douthat suggests the preposterous theory that Santorum's "overall strategy might offer a blueprint for winning a future Republican primary campaign" -- the "overall strategy" being one that includes appealing to hootin'-'n-hollerin' snake-handlers who look disparagingly on primitive religions like Romney's.

In brief answer to Mr. Klein: No. And in response to Douthat: You go out there, Mr. Custer; yes Sir, you go out there and forge ahead with the dying demographic of snarling, dyspeptic, aging bigoted white folk who are culturally isolated and economically ignorant; uh-huh, that's the ticket for the GOP's revamped future -- a Father Coughlin-George Wallace coalition of medievalist hayseeds who fret less about the GDP and the global economy than gays in uniform, or in wedding tuxedos.

In somewhat longer answer to Mr. Klein, Politico summarizes Romney's longest-term weakness: "[H]e continues to have trouble in the South, traditional Republican territory." That is to say, tea-partying Bible-belters, who are also peppered throughout the West and Midwest and who traditionally have provided the margin of GOP victory in swing states. And this November, how likely are they to creak out of their overstuffed La-Z-Boys and go cast a vote for a Satanic cultist who enslaved the blue but nonetheless good people of Massachusetts with Leninist RomneyCare?

A tangled web, Mr. Romney. It's quite the tangled web you've got there.

The Scarborough-Schmidt smackdown

Joe Scarborough and Steve Schmidt just appeared on "Hardball" and together they delivered a eulogy for Mitt Romney. It was brutal. In effect, they said Romney's got nothin' -- nothin' at all to work with.

Scarborough called him "an incredibly flawed candidate" for whom it is "going to be hard to put this party back together." By that he meant, what GOP faction does Romney rule? He hasn't the libertarians (see RomneyCare) or the social conservatives (see Mormonism, although Scarborough didn't say that, since he didn't need to); then Schmidt graced the show by declaring that candidates like Romney need "more circumspection" when it comes to foreign policy -- in other words, neoconservatism (Romney's latest personification) should shut the hell up. Ouch.

So there you have it. All three major factions standing in some form of alienation from Establishment opinion -- which Romney represents. Thus Romney is actually alienated from his own shrinking and marginalized faction. It's one thumper of a paradox.

The Scarborough-Schmidt duo gave quite a performance. Here were two lifetime, professionally partisan Republicans essentially saying what I wrote this morning: that "There are no absolutes, therefore anything is possible, even a President Mitt Romney. But, seriously ..."

Obama's presser

President Obama's response to a question about the potential of war with Iran -- an unthinkable calamity which utterly reckless GOP presidential candidates are promoting -- decisively put to rest any thoughts of presidential misapprehensions.

The "casualness" of Republican irresponsibility was the president's judicious word of the day: "The casualness with which some of these folks talk about war," said Obama, is a unfortunate matter of their confusing the vast loss of human life and a further squandering of the public treasury with a mere political "game."

That was Obama's thrust, and it was dead on.

The economy promises to be the central issue of the general campaign, and that's understandable. But frankly, Mitt Romney's horrifying neoconservatism and his frightful intimations of a return to Bush-Cheneyism should be enough for voters to oppose, entirely on their own.

Romney's odds

Michael Gerson appears to be back to writing inspiring speeches, rather than providing analysis: "[C]onfident predictions of Romney’s defeat [in the general election] are not only premature. They are seriously frivolous."

Seriously frivolous? Politics obeys the laws of physics. There are no absolutes, therefore anything is possible, even a President Mitt Romney. But, seriously ...

Gerson rattles off Obama's political imperfections and professional handicaps (most of which have emerged from the right's massive disinformation campaigns, against which Obama has yet, really, to strike, which happens to loop back to his political imperfections), and that's all very well and good. But just what are Romney's game-changing, game-winning positives?

Let's see, most recently he insulted 53 percent of the American electorate with his imbecilic "It's not the language I would have used." As for the fastest growing minority in the U.S.? -- and the deciding vote in the Southwest? Grandma can stay and the others can "self-deport." How about African Americans? Centuries of oppression and discrimination have produced disproportionate numbers of poor blacks, yet Romney isn't concerned about the poor -- be they black, or white or brown. So write them off, just as one should all blue-collar workers, since Romney has made it clear that government intervention into manufacturing America will be verboten. Union workers? They're only the stooges of union bosses, according to Mitt. So there goes that vote. Gays and lesbians? Also gone.

Bigoted right-wing, evangelical Christians -- voting for a Mormon? Kiss them goodbye, or least a damn sizable portion of them. And then there's the 'RomneyCare' headache that the candidate must suffer through, and which many a libertarian will simply never overcome.

The list expands from there, but that's enough for now. The most peculiar part of Gerson's piece, though, is that in which he notes with a seemingly optimistic tone that "the presidential election is eight months away." Yes, that's true. Most of us, however, see those eight months as just 240 more daily opportunities for Mitt Romney to commit yet more unforced errors worthy of endless video replays.

Bruni is too tough on his own

The Times' Frank Bruni slips into an advanced state of clinical brooding this morning in his recap of "how frequently we’ve erred" on the campaign trail; that is, how "most political analysts ... grossly miscalculated the ardor, the stubbornness, the spleens of a great many conservative voters, who ... would not be wooed by Romney."

Now that's a fine kettle of brooding as brooding goes. On the other hand, it's a bit much, isn't it? I mean, isn't Bruni being excessively hard on his profession? And by that I mean, what deliberative political analyst failed to appreciate "the spleens of a great many conservative voters" and failed to believe as well that Romney & War Machine would prevail? I can think of only one prominent example: James C. Moore's declaratively blundering, resplendently wrong-headed "Why Rick Perry is headed to the White House," from August 2011.

Think back. Did anyone ever take Donald Trump seriously? We all took him as a right-wing send-up to guttersniping offensiveness, yes. But seriously? No. Herman Cain? The huckster wasn't even on most state ballots, nor did he possess the ground organization to get there. Michele Bachmann? Enough said. Rick Perry? His campaign's inaugural embarrassment -- in which, as I recall, he drooled over his nubile teenage love and waxed sententiously about Texas prairies and their golden waves of wheat and other such silliness -- was a brutal alarm about his utter unpreparedness for the big stage, which he immediately followed up by threatening the Fed chairman's life. Americans may be a trifle nuts, but we don't yet celebrate the "humorous" assassination of high officials.

Jon Huntsman? Well now that was just sad. Ron Paul? He ain't even in the same race. Newt Gingrich? Entertainment -- mere torture for Mitt, nothing more. Rick Santorum? Right. Rick Santorum.

Best I can make out, Bruni is confusing analysts' ardent hopes for the second tier's longest political lifespan imaginable with never-implied possibilities or probabilities of actual success, the latter of which never hovered above Nate Silver's margin of error. Put another way, political analysts have not, perhaps, exactly been sporting about this contest -- in terms of only wanting a good clean kill. They have preferred, instead, a primary season that most closely resembles in atmospheric comfort a proctology exam. But, what the hell. You can take the professional observer of politicus ignoramus out on the campaign trail, but can't take the anal out of the analyst.

No, this farce has been Mitt Romney's to lose all along -- and let's face it, he damn well would have lost it, had he had any splenetically plausible competition. All of that, though, scurried early on like furry, neurotic little mammals to the protective underbrush of ... 2016. Romney is now engaged in a mop-up campaign, as he has been ab initio, really. And, barring Mr. Moore, what noted analysts have seriously speculated on anything but?

Heaven in an hour and a half

How long does it take to go from abject despair to a spring in one's step and a sunny smile?

Ninety-one minutes -- exactly -- which was the difference in posting time between these two Politico pieces today:

11:46 AM EST Mike Huckabee, speaking on Fox News this morning, says Romney's momentum in Ohio shows the growing sense of GOP consolidation behind him.

and ...

1:27 PM EST Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum (37 percent) leads former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (33 percent) by a narrow margin, according to a Suffolk University poll of likely Republican Primary voters in Ohio.

Damn it, Huckabee, don't spook us like that.

The GOP's spiritual emptiness

From a rather unsatisfying, which is to say, purely strategic point of view, what many of us in the provincial, unBelted backwaters have been writing for years has finally made its way to the eye-opening Conventional Wisdom of WaPo's "The Fix:"

[S]ome within the [Republican Party] have begun to believe that the only way for the GOP to truly heal is to first bottom out.

By "bottom out," Chris Cillizza of course means electorally. The party stands in desperate need of a transcendent repudiation by voters; only then will its authentic Eureka moment come. How this grotesquely belated development could still be essential -- considering that the party's presidential candidates are a national laughingstock and its congressional wing is scarcely more popular than herpes -- is, I suppose, mostly a testament to Newtonian physics, i.e., bodies in motion tend to stay in motion.

But, as I noted in the opening of this post, this is, principally, a strategic consideration, whereas what the Republican Party needs most is a fundamentally spiritual reconsideration. And that is to say, Republicans, by and large, have been on the wrong side of history since the New Deal -- American political history's tipping point at which the GOP began to lose its inner soul. I quote at some length from the late but still-reigning king of American historians, Richard Hofstadter:

Classically ... it has been the strength of conservatives that their appeal to institutional continuities, hard facts, and the limits of possibility is better founded; while it has usually been the strength of reformers that they arouse moral sentiments, denounce injustices, and rally the indignation of the community against intolerable abuses. Such had been the alignment of arguments during the Progressive era. During the New Deal, however, it was the reformers whose appeal to the urgent practical realities was most impressive.... It was the conservatives, on the other hand, who represented the greater moral indignation and rallied behind themselves the inspirational literature of American life; and this not merely because the conservatives were now the party of the opposition, but because things were being done of such drastic novelty that they seemed to breach all the inherited rules, not merely of practicality but of morality itself.

In sum, and very loosely, since the New Deal Democrats have embodied the experimental, can-do, pragmatic spirit of the American people, while Republicans -- at one time, conservatives -- have wandered about in the ideological wilderness but mostly away from their "institutional continuities, hard facts, and the limits of possibility"; they've become merely scolds -- cranky, nagging scolds who possess little but a profound spiritual emptiness and reams of increasingly attenuated platitudes.

Were they ever to rediscover their genuinely conservative, Burkean roots -- again, see Hofstadter -- Republicans would quickly re-form into a strategically, but more importantly spiritually, formidable party.

Glenn Greenwald, legerdemainist extraordinaire

To substantiate his world-weary, despairing opinion that the American electoral process is unendurably exasperating, the (how dare we?) forever-disappointed Glenn Greenwald, writing for the NY Times this morning, goes back in time ... back ... back in time ... your mental screen is hazing and blurring now ... back, back, my little pretties ... back ... Here we are! All the way back to ... 2002!

Mr. Greenwald grandly intones:

When a political party begins to fail competitively, as the G.O.P. is clearly doing now, it ... simply rebrands itself.

Simple as that. You know, as did the Federalists, the Whigs, and the Know-Nothings and the Populists and the Progressives.

The quite reasonable objections will be raised that only two of the immediately preceding parties were "major" or "dominant" or genuinely "competitive" ones; and that, besides, Greenwald makes clear he's addressing only the past decade (he mentions Bill Clinton so as to fashion his history as a 20-year thesis, but one stranded presidential plug-in adds another decadal history not). The responses to these objections are that, nevertheless, those 19th- and early 20th-century parties did not simply rebrand, even though American political parties have been peddling themselves like toothpaste since American political parties have been partying; but more on the nose, I know of no competent political historian who puts much stock in just one mere decade of history, especially the one just concluded.

Why am I being so harsh? Why do I seem so prickly? Because Greenwald is but exploiting the historiographical ignorance of his readers; he likely well comprehends that citing a singular decade of political history as exemplary of an overarching theme is the equivalent of intellectual malpractice. Yet, it's all he's got, so why not pull the old hoodwink?

And what is the overarching theme, the grand narrative, that Greenwald is hustling? He skewers the more thoughtful Mr. Chait with it:

[T]his familiar hubris from Democratic Party loyalists, as epitomized by Jonathan Chait, who last week announced in New York magazine that the G.O.P. was "staring down its own demographic extinction"....

Partisans are naturally eager to believe that their party's victory in one or two elections signals the national acceptance of their views. But American elections aren't determined by such high-minded considerations. They're little more than vacuous reality shows where today's losers, with some slight image retweaking, become tomorrow's winners — and vice versa.

This line of argument, you understand, is what permits Greenwald his world-weariness and superior despair, wrapped tidily in the package of, There's no real difference between the two major parties. Thereupon Greenwald is further permitted to deftly segue from the GOP's manifest "demographic extinction" to sniffing about "President Obama's Wall-Street-friendly, status-quo-perpetuating first three years in office."

Greenwald's magical act of deception, then, is to pull the reader in, only to yank the rabbit out. Voila! Pretty slick, huh?