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“Only one thing is certain,” CNN’s opening montage declares. “Expect the unexpected.” That hits the spot. We need false hope at a time like this. It’s the 19th Republican debate. Everything that can happen probably already has. The screen flickers with a Romney video clip from the campaign trail. “We’re not choosing a talk show host,” he says. This will need to be fact checked.
It’s no secret that passing health care reform was a balancing act from beginning to end. For President Obama, keeping the legislation alive meant making sure congressional Democrats stayed happy, along with for-profit industries like insurers and Big Pharma and powerful non-profit interest groups like the AARP and the American Medical Association. Through health reform’s most contentious year of negotiation, 2009, the interests of these groups collided again and again. Democratic Senators and Representatives hated the political price they would all pay for the White House’s backroom dealings with Big Pharma, but that industry’s cuts to drug prices kept the AARP happy. Balancing the desires of doctors, through the AMA, was just as crucial. If there is any group Americans trust when it comes to health care, it’s their own doctors.
The emergence of a debate about colonizing the moon might be the goofiest-sounding idea in Republican primaries since Herman Cain proposed an electrified fence along the southern border. The difference is that returning to the moon is an idea that reasonable people take seriously.
I wonder if all those neoconservatives and assorted heroes who also style themselves as American patriots will tolerate this sort of rhetoric from Newt Gingrich, who is clearly groveling for Sheldon Adelson’s continued support. It seems to me that accusing the President of the United States of clearing the way for a “second holocaust” is a bit much. I should add that in Thursday night’s debate both Gingrich and Romney continued their outrageous, inaccurate attacks on the President with regard to Israel. Gingrich claimed the President had not said a word about the rockets pummeling Israel from Gaza. Wrong. Obama actually went to Sderot, the town most pummeled, and expressed his outrage, with an array of spent Hamas rocket casings behind him. Romney once again claimed that Obama “threw Israel under the bus” by proposing the 1967 borders as the “basis for negotiations.” Obama has done no such thing: he favors the 1967 borders with mutually agreed-upon land swaps–which is precisely the position that every President since Nixon has taken (and which is the not-so-tacit position of the Netanyahu government). The willingness of Gingrich and Romney to promulgate these lies in order to win Jewish votes in Florida, and Jewish money from Las Vegas, is disgraceful.
The American political lexicon is always evolving, and during campaign season, new phrases are as common as retirees in Boca Raton. Here are some of the words that have worked their way into the conversations this week.
On Friday, the President added a new line to his regular “fair share” repertoire on tax burdens and wealth distribution. “We do not begrudge wealth in this country. We aspire to financial success,” he said in a Michigan speech on college tuition, as he has countless times before. “But we also understand that we’re not successful just by ourselves. We’re successful because somebody started the University of Michigan. We’re successful because somebody made an investment in all the federal research labs that created the Internet. We’re successful because we have an outstanding military. That costs money. We’re successful because somebody built roads and bridges and laid broadband lines. And these things didn’t just happen on their own,” he said before returning to his pro-forma lines: “And if we all understand that we’ve got to pay for this stuff, it makes sense for those of us who’ve done best to do our fair share.”
In 1964, Dan Angel became a participant observer of Michigan Governor George Romney’s re-election campaign. He served as Lenore Romney’s escort and drove the governor’s press vehicle in order to gather research for a Ph.D dissertation at Purdue University on Romney’s bid. He was a frequent guest at the Romney residence and conducted six extensive interviews with the governor. He published his book, Romney, A Political Biography, in 1967, the year before Romney’s ill fated-presidential bid. Before pursuing his career as a college administrator, Angel served three terms in the Michigan legislature as a Republican representative of the 49th district. He is now president of Golden Gate University in San Francisco, California. In an interview with TIME, Angel reflected on his relationship with Romney and what Mitt might have learned from his father’s career.
One of the wonderful things about our bloated, endless, tedious, miraculous presidential campaigns is that sooner or later you find out just exactly who these pretenders are. Thursday night in Jacksonville, after 18 debates in which his bluster camouflaged a myriad of flaws, Newt Gingrich’s deficits–the sloppiness, the hyperbole, the demagoguery–were made plain. There were many difficult moments for Gingrich, mostly at the hand of a deft Mitt Romney. Let’s look at a few of them:
The heavyweight tussle in Florida is quickly devolving into a very expensive slap fight. On one side is Mitt Romney, whose aides, having spent days tagging Newt Gingrich with labels like “erratic” and unreliable,” are now upping the ante by recasting Gingrich as a full-on crazy person. “UNHINGED!” read a Romney press release Thursday afternoon. The money quote, from Romney communications director Gail Gitcho, by way of lampooning Gingrich’s lunar aspirations and attacks on Bain: “Wow.” A half hour later, Romney’s team blasted out a missive from Bob Dole that, apropos of nothing in particular, recalls Gingrich’s alleged habit of showing up at Dole’s presidential campaign headquarters in 1996 toting an empty ice bucket. “That was a symbol of some sort for him—and I never did know what he was doing or why he was doing it,” writes Dole, who has endorsed Romney. Why, the man must be unhinged!
