The Rich Really Are Different
January 24th, 2012


A look at Mitt Romney’s speaking fees and what, exactly, he did to create 89,000 jobs at Staples Inc.

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Romney. Bain. Vanity Fair.
January 20th, 2012


Amidst the attempted hit job is a story which, if accurate, is an interesting lens through which to view Romney’s political career.

P.S. On Laura Ingraham’s show this morning, Romney said the following about Gingrich:

“[Gingrich] has a message that he’ll carry,” Romney said. “I think the great difference between the two of us is that he spent the last 30 or 40 years either being an elected official in Washington or being a person that connects people in Washington—a lobbyist, if you will. And I just can’t imagine that the United States of American is going to replace a Washington politician with another Washington politician.”

It’s completely fair to characterize Gingrich as a “Washington politician,” but it’s much less accurate to label Obama as the same. Obama is actually a counter-example of what can happen when you drop a true political outsider into the presidency.

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How Many Cheers for Bain?
January 10th, 2012


Turns out that I’m not only a squish on immigration, but I’m a Saul Alinsky radical socialist, too.

Who knew?

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The Siege of Newt
January 8th, 2012


Mos Eisley, Jabba’s palace, and Helm’s Deep–all in one piece.

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Let’s Play Two
January 8th, 2012


A recap of the second New Hampshire debate. Now, with more blood!

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Romney in the Morning
January 7th, 2012


Experience the excitement of a Mitt Romney rally at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday–without having to be there.

It’s called “service journalism.”

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In Honor of the Late, Great, Reginald Howard White . . .
January 5th, 2012


Here comes Jesus!

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Finally, the Rick has come BACK to New Hampshire!
January 5th, 2012


Rick Santorum arrives in the Granite State.

(And yes, I would have killed to have gotten that headline into the Standard.)

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Romney and McCain in New Hampshire
January 4th, 2012


Mitt and McCain, together again for the very first time.

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A Tale of Two Ricks
January 2nd, 2012


More from Iowa, a couple days old at this point, though.

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Report from Iowa
December 30th, 2011


A long, long day.

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Rick Perry. Rick Ankiel. Abortion.
November 10th, 2011


Was that ugly, or what? I’ve been trying to think of a worse debate moment and the only thing that comes close is Bentsen-Quayle. There’s no telling what structural damage it inflicted, but my guess would be more rather than less.

That said, the entire episode is instructive of how unpredictable electoral politics can be. A few thoughts:

(1) There were plenty of Perry skeptics from the beginning. (I was not one of them.) But it turned out that none of the weaknesses they noticed actually hurt him. Remember, the argument against Perry was that he was prone to shooting from the hip; too bible-thumpin’ conservative; and would remind voters too much of W.

But what really damaged Perry was (a) He was too liberal on immigration; and (b) He had two debate moments (his attempted flip-flop attack on Romney and the Lost Third Agency) in which he looked old and doddering and lost.

The other thing that hurt Perry is that he emerged prepared to counter attacks from Romney, but was totally blind-sided when Santorum, Paul, Bachmann, et al took after him like he was a spliced hybrid of Nelson Rockefeller and Saul Alinsky. (This was not an unreasonable assumption on his part, since this group had given Romney a pass for several months.)

(2) Debates have never played as important a role in the primaries as they have this cycle. It’s unclear whether this is an aberration or a new reality. But try to remember a single moment from any primary debates since 1999. The only thing I come up with is “You’re likable enough, Hillary.” The gang-tackle of Perry in his early debates clearly crippled his candidacy–I’d argue more so than his one-on-one jousts with Romney.

(3) Is it fair that Herman Cain gets to say that China doesn’t have nuclear weapons and that he’s for-and-against abortion and that he’d trade hostages with terrorists, but that Perry doesn’t get to have a couple of brain blanks? Nope.

But fair’s got nothing to do with it.

(4) Unless the conversation changes between now and the convention, it would seem that immigration has replaced abortion as the key ideological litmus test in the Republican party. Now, maybe that’s just a function of the candidates needing a club to beat Perry with and immigration being the best-available weapon. But maybe it’s a more foundational shift. If the latter is the case, then this is a real tragedy for conservatism. A few reasons:

* Illegal immigration causes very real problems, but those problems tend to be economic. (Though some of them certainly have a cultural aspect.) Economic problems can be fixed more easily than cultural problems.

* The argument over abortion is–at least to pro-abortion forces–about a lot more than just the killing of babies. It’s about an absolute, iron-clad right to consequence-free sex. Which is, if you think about it, probably the single biggest legacy of the 1960s. If the left holds to anything at all, it’s that sex must never have negative consequences–no unwanted pregnancies, no diseases, no moral disapproval from third parties. That’s why the AIDS campaign was such a vital left-wing cause in the ’80s and ’90s. It’s the root of liberal support for same-sex marriage. It’s behind the idiotic claims that “love can never be wrong.”

All of this is why the only liberal cause Bill Clinton wasn’t willing to sell out for political gain was abortion. He vetoed the partial-birth ban at some real cost. But ingrained in liberal boomers is that this first principle is the cornerstone for the entire structure of sexual “freedom.” Admit that abortion (even in some cases) is wrong and you undermine a continent-sized chunk of liberal ideology and a huge portion of what has become our dominant cultural mores.

* For a host of complicated reasons (I go into this at some length in the book), illegal immigration is likely to significantly decrease in America during the next 20 years–no matter what policies we pursue. (Short version: As fertility rates go sub-replacement, a country’s outmigration dries up, as it has, for example, with Puerto Rico. Nearly all of Central and South America will be sub-replacement within 20 years.)

So debates over, say, building a fence or giving in-state tuition to illegals are more about ideological purity than actual consequence. Unlike abortion, where 50 million lives have been taken since 1973, with no end in sight.

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