P.M. Carpenter

Santorum is no Goldwater

Rick Santorum, yesterday, in Ohio, circumambulating from bigotry and ignorance and incoherence to bigotry and ignorance and incohence and, finally, back to bigotry and ignorance and incoherence: 

[The president's agenda is] ... about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology, but no less a theology....

The Catholic church has a theology that says this is wrong, and he’s saying no I’ve got a different ... you may want to call it a theology, you may want to call it secular values, whatever you want to call it, it’s a different moral values....

[T]hat’s not a new low.... I should go back, it is a new low. The president has reached a new low in this country’s history of oppressing religious freedom that we have never seen before.

We are forever being "reassured" by Rick Santorum himself and Santorum's staff and Santorum's party allies and Santorum's press contingent and the media at large that Rick Santorum is a different kind of political threat to Mitt Romney (not to mention Barack Obama), in that Rick Santorum actually believes the vile crap that spews so habitually from his bigoted, shockingly ignorant and often incoherent mouth. This "authenticity," we are further assured, is what makes Santorum so appealing to so many of the few who have with great pluck remained in the disintegrating Grand Old Party.

At long last, (we are also informed), Rick Santorum is a man who genuinely represents the core values of today's movement conservatism, itself set in motion some half-century ago, by Goldwaterism.

With considerably greater freedom of rhetorical movement than Mitt Romney, I protest, on Mr. Romney's behalf. For the very last thing that movement conservatism's first man ever genuinely embraced was the topic of "moral values." It made his thinning, libertarian hair stand on end; he was viscerally repulsed by it; he had always viewed politics and policy as public, but religion and morality as properly private; he was nonetheless ensnared into the maelstrom of cultural morality by desperate advisers (with an irresistible assist from Walter Jenkins).

But movement conservatism -- today, Santorumism -- as true Goldwaterism? No way. There is simply no ideological lineage there; in fact, there is only remarkable hostility.

Mitt, I know you can't say that, because a) your party's primary base is overrepresented by hallucinatory buffoons who b) have never read objective history and c) are contemptuous of all things even remotely related to actual enlightenment, but I can.

Buchanan's firing is everyone's loss

I've got to say it. I shall miss Pat Buchanan from MSNBC's airwaves.

Was Buchanan most of the contemptible things his critics charged? Almost to a tee. There's no way around that. He was also one of the few, hardcore ideologues-as-political-commentator who could step back from his own delusions (Sarah Palin was his one true blind spot) and offer up some of the keenest, most incisive analysis of the national scene to be heard anywhere.

One doesn't rise to the highest levels of Machiavellian-Nixonian politics by being a Howdy Doody candyass about one's own vulnerabilities and the opposition's grit; Buchanan, accordingly, could, and often did, surgically skewer the right's and praise the left's evolving tactics and strategies, just as a conscientious, battlefield general would openly acknowledge his own troops' weaknesses and the enemy's strengths. It's what Buchanan got paid by MSNBC to do, and he did it well -- indeed, far better than any of the network's insufferably predictable, one-note cheerleaders.

The Beast's (I prefer Evelyn Waugh's original version) Howard Kurtz nailed it:

To hear Pat Buchanan tell it, he was booted off MSNBC because of a vast left-wing conspiracy.

The reality is a bit more mundane: The network moved sharply left, Buchanan’s boss felt uncomfortable with him, and he was road kill....

[His latest] book does contain some inflammatory passages about race and immigration. But Buchanan has been saying this sort of thing for three decades. He hasn’t changed, it’s MSNBC that now has Rachel Maddow anchoring on primary nights.

I suppose the loss of Buchanan's analysis would be more endurable if MSNBC had replaced this often offensive Patton with an Omar Bradley, but instead the network delivered unto us ... Michael Steele -- an "analyst" with an intolerable penchant for uttering insights such as, I think Romney is in trouble, I think Santorum is making a move on Romney, I think the sky is frequently fucking blue.

With the exception of "Hardball" and "The Last Word," MSNBC's daily rotational schedule of undifferentiated boosterism from the left and second-string banalities from the right should come with a Thorazine prescription. Every time I hear, for instance, Ed Schultz crack smugly wise about Fox News' pitiable bias, I feel an irresistible urge to pump my veins full of a nerve-deadening something. I'll give him credit for this much, though: he has vastly increased my evening reading.

Maybe I'm odd duck, but here's the thing. As an instinctive democratic socialist and by necessity passable Democrat, I'm already quite familiar with the left-leaning, Peter Finch-like angry prophets' denunciations of the hypocrisies of our time. What I want to hear -- what I need to hear -- is whatever incisive stuff the other guys are thinking. And Pat Buchanan, on MSNBC, was that lone voice. Now, even he is gone, which only further exacerbates cable networks' mindless polarization and further weakens mutual enlightenment.

Long, Coughlin, Romney, Santorum, and the Polish cavalry

In September 1939, as Germany's mechanized war machine rumbled across Poland's offended terrain, Colonel Mastalerz of the imminently counterattacking Polish cavalry scolded an objecting junior officer: "Young man, I'm quite aware what it is like to carry out an impossible order."

Observes British military historian Max Hastings: "Within minutes half the attackers were dead, including Colonel Mastalerz. The survivors fell back in confusion, flotsam of an earlier age."

In America's "industrial heartland" this week, as Politico's Alexander Burns editorializes, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum "are competing less over who has a superior plan for the future than over who can more compellingly play upon Michiganders' nostalgia." Romney croons his "the-way-we-were message" and Santorum "answers Romney’s personal reminiscences" with "fond memories of a happier time in the Rust Belt — a time, he says, when families were strong and work had dignity."

The junior officer, you might say, is Republican Senate candidate Clark Durant, who nervously told Burns, "The focus has to be: lay out your vision and how you’re going to get there." Romney and Santorum, added Durant, should "stop focusing on yesterday and start focusing on tomorrow" -- because at present they're but the flotsam of an earlier age. 

Yet who can really blame these two political cavalrymen of the 21st century? As the NY Times' Timothy Egan reminds us this morning:

[T]he small fraction of Americans who are trying to pick the Republican nominee are old, white, uniformly Christian and unrepresentative of the nation at large.

The GOP, America's 19th-century -- or at best, 1930s -- horse-and-buggy party, which itself guarantees the very kind of seemingly bewildering demagoguery we've come to expect from Republican pols. And by that, I mean this:

In one of the most insightful works (in my opinion) of American political history ever written, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression, Alan Brinkley argues that what made Long and Coughlin such splendid demagogues was their "dissident ideology" that, principally, affirmed values and institutions which their target audience (older, white, uniformly Christian) saw as threatened, and that helpfully identified the villains at the epicenter of a changing and complicated world.

Long and Coughlin were, rather simply put, ideological revanchists -- but their time had irreversibly passed; they were the flotsam of an earlier age, horse-and-buggy men in an 8-cylinder era.

Still, that's all they had to work with. Their troops may have been numerically insufficient and their counterattacks useless, but demagoguery founded on wistful desperation is rarely discouraged.

Just misfits and cutthroats, again

From The Hill:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi slammed Republicans for holding a nearly all-male hearing Thursday about the White House’s birth-control mandate while Democratic women on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee staged a walk-out.

I'm sorry, but I just can't appreciate or enjoy the outrage. Not any longer. These GOP congressional clowns, not to mention their stumblebum doppelgangers on the presidential trail, have been so tone deaf and so tuned out and so completely ideologically insulated and so thoroughly removed from mainstream America for so long, they have quite simply escaped the orbit of my general notice or punctuated concern.

They are now in their fourth year of full-time, professional disingenuity and adolescent antics. They have lied, dissembled, conspired, obstructed, delayed, shot their mouths off and closed their minds so often I have utterly lost the news value -- and certainly the shock value -- of their inexpressible improprieties and just plain lack of decency.     

I realize that my withered withdrawal from these blogospheric explosions of outrage is, in a way, a surrender. I suppose each time (meaning daily, or hourly) the GOP again displays its diseased infantilism, I should add my voice of alarmed disbelief and thundering disapproval to all the others. But I look at it this way: If the American electorate has not by now comprehended that this once Grand Old Party is but a hopeless collection of cretinous misfits and moronic cutthroats, then the American electorate never will.

Santorum's dance

As a miscellany of GOP pols have moved from a jealous protection of religious liberties to a madcap imposition of theocratic fanaticism, the unrighteous burlesque of "cherry-picking" -- rarely heard from since the last Bush administration, which exalted it as the leading principle of unprincipled governance -- has staged a roaring comeback as contemporary conservatism's beau ideal of Tartuffian hypocrisy.

Plain, everyday, garden-variety political hypocrisy we often excuse, and often for good or at least acceptable reasons. Evolving circumstances and shifting alliances and that most fundamental of human drives -- self-survival -- tend to dictate a certain, how should I say, flexibility. Let's call it hypocrisy-as-dexterity. There's no real harm done, since we didn't much believe the pols in the first place; and sometimes necessary experimentation, such as FDR's assortments throughout the New Deal, is mistaken for a hypocritical violation of principle. In sum, political hypocrisy is a tricky business, but one perfectly, admissibly suitable to the vicissitudes of secular practicalities.

But then there's the Republican variety, resplendently wrapped in God. Republicans don't merely adjust their political positions; they adjust their dail set to God's Word, which, ever since the Supreme Being filed His voter registration, only Republicans are capable of receiving. For this I suppose we should be, quite literally, eternally thankful.

Yet the GOP's mysterious signals too often seem mysteriously wayward, in the sense of having been cherry-picked. Are they? Has anyone among the Fourth Estate bothered to ask? To this purpose, the Post's James Downie submits that "In the three debates between now and Super Tuesday, moderators should challenge Santorum and Gingrich on whether they agree with these church doctrines, and if not, why not": the death penalty, a liveable wage, unionization, wealth redistribution, universal health care and social safety nets.

As Downie further notes:

When an audience member asked Santorum about why he disagrees with the church on universal health care, Santorum gave a rambling response that bore little resemblance to his surity on many other issues.

Shocking, no?

Look, as already conceded, political hypocrisy is one thing. If Santorum, say, vows to shrink government yet once begged for taxpayer funds to erect a Madagascan rodent museum for Pittsburgh's mammalian-intrigued, brass-pot class or some such idiotic thing, who really cares? Political hypocrisy is, almost by definition, particular. But pontificating about God's Word and Christ's Vicar's interpretation of It is as universally grounded as pontification can come. If the former senator devoutly believes that Church doctrine on abortion or contraception is infallible and unassailable, then surely Church doctrine on wealth redistribution or health care is as divinely inspired and just as infallible and unassailable.

Right?

Yes, 'some folks' do that

For the "Gotta love it" file, from Mitt, on Detroit radio today:

The Santorum campaign went negative against me in South Carolina, my guess is they’ll do the same thing in Michigan. And you know that’s the nature of politics, you have some folks who distort and twist and you’ve got to be able to respond effectively and let people know the truth ...

That's our boy, out there fighting the good fight against the wicked forces of twist and distortion.

You know, if this presidential thing doesn't work out for Romney, my understanding is that Baghdad Bob left a huge vacancy in the Iraq government, which doubtless could again use a man of Mitt's rhetorical ingenuity.

Quick, get me the Inquisition

In his Newsweek column, Andrew Sullivan launches a chivalrous attempt at defending the indefensible:

There was a time not so long ago when Catholics and other Christians weighed various moral claims to find a balance. Sometimes, the lesser of two evils was preferable. For centuries, for example, Catholic theologians, including the greatest, Thomas Aquinas, argued that human life begins not at conception but at some point in the second trimester.

It almost goes without saying that Thomas Aquinas possessed not a clue as to when human life begins. He was merely regurgitating whatever Aristotle guessed at, from which evolved a Western intellectual system of oppressive philosophical theocracy that retarded real advances in human thought and human welfare for centuries.

But, let us grant Sullivan his point. What, then, does the modern Church say? Well for Heaven's sake let us also proceed to Catholic.com, which rather helpfully publishes a metaphysical "Answers" page (and I kid you not):

How does [Thomas] square with current Catholic teaching against abortion from the time of conception?

Notwithstanding his belief in delayed animation and ensoulment, Aquinas still taught that abortion was wrong from the moment of conception. He believed it to be a mortal sin expressive of a homicidal will, even if in the early stages of pregnancy, as he thought, homicide isn't actually committed.

See? There's no conflict with Thomas, so gotcha -- which the Church always will, for the Church, you see, is infallible, as indeed virtually all churches and all formal belief systems and all doctrine always are. For they remain akin to medieval Aristotelianism as enfolded in Belief: they don't really want you asking questions, even if they've already the answers ... Every last one.

Which is why I viscerally rebel not against faith, for Reason can underlie Faith (as Thomas also believed) -- but against organized religion ... Every last one.

I'll send you a bill, Mitt

Ross Douthat's rather dubious advice:

What Romney needs ... is a message that hangs Bush-era spending, Bush-era deficits, and K Street excess around Santorum’s neck – but that does so, crucially, without implying that the former Pennsylvania senator was personally corrupt....

This strategy, though, will require a kind of finesse that Romney’s campaign hasn’t demonstrated to date. The howitzer worked to dispatch Gingrich, but it won’t work a second time. Instead, to beat Santorum and close out the nomination contest, Romney will need to learn how to campaign with a stiletto.

Good God, Mr. Douthat. At this Stalingrad moment "finesse" is the last thing that Romney should demonstrate; he needs instead to blast away at Santorum like there's no tomorrow -- because for Romney there may not be -- however a radical substitution of his rhetorical arsenal is, as you suggest, both urgent and vital.

Another howitzer? Agreed: no. What Romney needs is a bunker-buster; he must go big and bold and above all he must go the route of the utterly unexpected (which itself would be big and bold for Mitt Romney). And in this instance that means, unRovean-like, hitting Santorum not at his strongest but at his weakest point. That is, to essentially tell Michigan primary voters (among whom -- and this is critical -- will be independents) that "No Republican nominee to the right of Thomas Aquinas will have a hope in Hell or Limbo of beating Barack Obama. Period. You nominate this guy, it's over. Period. Santorum is a guaranteed loser. Period ... And I'm not."

Actually Mitt Romney is also, especially after this bloodbath. But that's a tale for another day. For now, Romney needs to emphasize Santorum's unique and in fact staggering unelectability. He can safely thread his own socially conservative message into his anti-Santorum screed, but a cinematic screed it must be -- featuring Rick Santorum as the absolutely unelectable freak he is.

The no-longer sanitized Santorum; and Gingrich's opening?

The Santorum campaign's new 30-second assault, which commences in Michigan today, finishes with an interpretable admonition: "[I]n the end, Mitt Romney’s ugly attacks are going to backfire."

On the one hand, no future tense is required. A wide assortment of polling data not only suggests, but positively bellows that Romney's favorables among independents are precipitously down and his negatives are uniformly up. No pounding has softened Mitt Romney for Santorum's offensive like Mitt Romney's. In less than two months he's become the dark and reigning prince of tactical assassinations; he is splattered grotesquely with his victims' blood.

On the other hand -- and one can hear the self-satisfied throat-clearing in the Romney camp -- assassinations do kill. In politics, a year translates into the unthinkable, one month into an eternity, a week into the barely conceivable, and this very day into essential survival. High negatives? Pshaw. We'll fix that tomorrow. Today it's carnage and chaos and slaughter and mayhem. (Cue Mitt's 'America the Beautiful.')  

And that of course is precisely what Rick Santorum is also now casting across Michigan's landscape. (One huge caveat, however: "A Santorum aide wouldn’t give the size of the buy" -- an unmistakable sign of weakness -- while Politico reports that his campaign has reserved "just $42,000 in Fox News ad time," versus Romney's super PAC-buy of "nearly $600,000 in ad time on Michigan television over the next week, as well as $99,000 in radio ads there.") "Ugly attacks" indeed engender their own splendid karma, Rick, and there's no reason to think your "Machine-Gun Mitt" ad, assuming you can kick its airtime up close to Romney's pollution levels, will prove an exception.

All of which leads to this potential -- i.e., the point of this post. In 2004, Howard Dean was leading in Iowa, whereupon he and Dick Gephardt got into a bloody brawl. Voters, or in that instance caucus-goers, condemned both political houses out of pointed disgust with the twofold squalor, which thereupon permitted John Kerry to slip through to a clean victory. And this, I'm sure, is an object lesson well studied by Newt Gingrich.

Romney's "base" problem

Peter Beinart ponders Mitt Romney's "base" problem:

[W]hile reviving the economy may be the issue that Americans care about most, it’s not the one that the Republican base cares about most. For conservative activists, the 2012 election isn’t fundamentally about jobs [Romney's presumed speciality], it’s about freedom. The essential question is not how best to use government to restore economic growth. It is how best to keep government from destroying liberty.

Beinart wisely abstains from any precise, definitional battle over "freedom"; his point, rather, and rather simply, is that Romney's calling card of "pragmatic businessman" has failed to catch fire with the already feiry base, yet that card is about all that Romney has to offer. Beinart's argument is by itself inarguable, I think. Still, I also think Romney's problem goes deeper (or perhaps I should say more shallow) than that.

Which is to say, by contrast. Beinart notes Romney's competitors who, by turn and interchangeably, have caught fire with the base -- "From Michele Bachmann to Ron Paul to Newt Gingrich to Rick Santorum" -- and Beinart leaves it to the last of these to summarize their "passion." Here's Santorum, from last week:

[W]e have a president of the United States ... who’s someone who believes he knows better, that we need to accumulate more power in Washington, D.C., for the elite in our country to be able to govern you, because you are incapable of liberty, that you are incapable of freedom.

"Elite" and "knows better" = anti-intellectualism. And that, I think, is what festers at the base of the base's reptilian brain: the right's immutable yearning for extreme simplicity, for simplistic intelligibility, for comprehensible simplification of every resistant complexity. President Obama -- that food stamp president; now there's an easily digestible nugget -- is of course the antithesis of this (oh, and did I mention that he's black?), while Mitt Romney just hasn't the demagogic knack of an anti-intellectual Newt Gingrich or an anti-intellectual Rick Santorum.

But he does have the money to crush all comers. And for now, that's all that really counts.

More than 'cynical'

Mitt Romney:

This week, President Obama will release a budget that won’t take any meaningful steps toward solving our entitlement crisis. The president has failed to offer a single serious idea to save Social Security and is the only president in modern history to cut Medicare benefits for seniors.

Paul Krugman:

Yep, Obama has failed to resolve the problem of excessive entitlement spending; furthermore, he’s cutting entitlement spending!...

Has there ever been a candidacy this cynical?

Sure there has, beginning with the Palinesque squalor of 2008's "palling around with terrorists" and going all the way back to 1796, the first contested presidential election year, in which each side essentially accused the other of treason. Cynicism shadows representative democracy because democracy can also be spelled d-e-m-a-g-o-g-u-e-r-y.

Still, one can erect a quite legitimate defense of Sarah Palin's cynicism. She's stupid. She is pricey makeup and nice boobs and thin waist and within all that there's not a single firing molecule of rudimentary intelligence. As for Jefferson and Adams, well, the Revolution's aftermath was a nervous one indeed, where spooked visions of a monarchy redux or the ultrarevolutionary French were as symptomatic as they were cynical.

Yet Romney's campaign seems to be, as they say, something else. It transcends the merely cynical. It's smart as hell and as rich as Midas and as ethically corrupt as Tony Soprano. I'd call it more demonic than cynical.

That wily Ailes

Feeling a little low? Republican primaries got you down? Thinking you can't tolerate another sermonizing minute of Santorumization? Then get thee anon to Politico's "Fox 'course correction' rankles some," which includes such amusing, uplifting tidbits of distraction as:

"I’ve gone from all Fox to no Fox, and replaced it with CNN, which I think right now is giving me a much fairer analysis of what’s going on. I feel they’ve lost that independent conservative mantra that had drove people like me to them. I used to feel that I got it straight, and I got an independent conservative view. Now, what I get is some wholly owned subsidiary of the RNC."

--conservative talk radio host, John Fredericks

Or even better:

"What happened is they buckled under pressure from George Soros and his operatives to get rid of Glenn Beck."

--"Bring Back Beck"-advocate Cliff Kincaid

Crazy never limits itself. This, Roger Ailes has discovered. 

David Brooks' obsession

The ghostly Karl Marx must have been chasing David Brooks around the Times' editorial offices again, thus compelling the horrified Brooks to compose yet another condemnation of "materialism" -- liberal "economic determinism" -- as though this theoretical crudity remains dispositive in the liberal mind. From his column today:

I don’t care how many factory jobs have been lost, it still doesn’t make sense to drop out of high school.

Well of course not. The pure joy of learning and the human potential it cultivates stand on their own. Yet one could also reasonably posit: I don't care how many high school diplomas are earned, it still doesn't make sense if only forced idleness then prevails, leading to privation, family disorder and community disruption.

So what did Brooks' negative proposition affirm? No more than my reversal of it.

Naturally, Brooks never cares to concede reductionism, but I always get the feeling when reading him that at the root of all Brooksism is that nasty old Marx, still haunting and chasing him. The bugbear of materialism -- economic determinism -- must have been introduced to Brooks at an early age by neurotic Babbitts who saw savage Bolsheviks lurking behind every bourgeois bush, leaving the unfortunate adult, sociological Brooks to disparage cultural assumptions about money (materialism) and happiness, while nevertheless essentially defending those with all the loot.

One would think that if money really doesn't buy happiness (and, quasi-materialist though I may be, I don't believe it does), then Brooks would be rampaging to confiscate all superfluous money from the excessively wealthy, so that they, too, could be happy.

Brooks concludes, "public debate is dominated by people who stopped thinking in 1975." Yet, however delightful I find so many of his columns, it could be that Brooks never got beyond 1848.

The seminars may be cancelled

All the talk of a new frontrunner is a bit premature, I'd say, since Rick Santorum is about to be heavily strafed by Romney's Luftwaffle:

The pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future is ... pumping new money into Michigan ahead of its Feb. 28 primary.... ROF has already spent $232,640 in Michigan during the period between Jan. 25 and Feb. 13. But the week-to-week spending there dropped to less than $15,000 last week.

And, there's this:

[M]ore than half of Michigan voters -- a full 53 percent -- say they're open to changing their minds in the next two weeks, so the race in Michigan could still see big shifts in either direction.

It's a pity, actually. I was looking forward to a spring season of Rick lecturing us on medieval Catholicism.

Amending Krugman

Earlier I cited Krugman's column this morning as a journalistic model of political precision -- i.e., he diagnoses the GOP as nuts -- yet alas, his model is not faultless. Indeed, it stands indicted and condemned of a glaringly sinful omission. To wit ...

In noting that "something has clearly gone very wrong with modern American conservatism," Krugman painstakingly proceeds to identify the somebodies on whom this tragic wrongness has befallen. He begins (and ends) with Mitt Romney, whose "severe" conservatism is aptly deconstructed, via an alert linguistics professor and force of logic, as thus either "disabled" or "depressed" or "ill" or "limited" or "injured." As Krugman writes, "Indeed."

He then ponders Rick Santorum, whose once-creeping fanaticism has now lurched to a full-blown dementia: last year, for example, Rick "defend[ed] the medieval Crusades against the 'American left who hates Christendom.' " OK, let's move along everyone, no need to stare, help will arrive soon.

Next up, Ron Paul, whose "racist (and conspiracy-minded) newsletters" of yesteryear would, in those yesteryears, have been enough to eliminate him from GOP seriousdom. Not today, though. Today Paul is hailed as a courageous tribune of civil liberties -- and based on emails I've received from some of his hailers, they do so with straight arms, at an upward, 45 degree angle.

Krugman then wraps it.

Hey! What gives? We got cheated. For there was no mention of Newt Gingrich. And this omission I interpret as a severely wrongheaded dismissal of a Newtonian comeback.

A few days I wrote that Gingrich is the story -- not Romney, since he's inevitable, and not Santorum, of sanitorium inevitability -- and it's the story to which I'm sticking. Why, his CPAC performance alone was a marvel of that which has "clearly gone very wrong with modern American conservatism": On Day One or shortly after President Gingrich will "put [our] embassy in Jerusalem," he'll "repeal every act of religious bigotry by the Obama administration," he'll "eliminate the capital gains tax," he'll "eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency," he'll fight for a "12-and-a-half percent corporate tax rate" (why? because "That is the Irish tax rate," that's why), and he'll "balance the federal budget" as he did under Bill Clinton -- you know, by vigorously opposing the tax hikes that actually balanced the budget.  

Newt, he's our boy. If he's severely crazy enough to have proudly earned the endorsements of Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Todd Palin and Chuck Norris, then by God he's crazy enough for the GOP base, one more time. He'll be back, in March.