The second weekend in January and the political world was consumed with politics, and out here in Hollywood, down the street at the Beverly Hills Hilton, it was the Golden Globes – so this town was trying to figure out who, by winning those, would win the Oscars next month, as if anyone really cares anymore. Hollywood isn’t what it used to be. Every year fewer and fewer folks get off their ass and actually go to a movie, in a theater. It’s expensive and whatever high definition gizmos you have in your living room does the job well enough. And what’s in the theaters pops up on cable soon enough. And even then it’s not that compelling. So this weekend, out here, the stretch limos rolled by – a parade of low squat dinosaurs. The age of glamour is over. Glamour became ironic kitsch. Blame Paris Hilton and the hip-hop pretend-thugs. Cary Grant is ancient history, or from another world entirely.
And the weekend was about professional football. San Francisco upset New Orleans, the Giants upset the Packers, the Baltimore Ravens – who actually are thugs – beat the crap out of some hapless team from Texas, and then there was the game that fascinated all of America – the highly-disciplined and expert New England Patriots, who win almost all the time, faced the upstart and unconventional Denver Broncos, who can’t seem to do anything right but pulled off enough unconventional miracle-comeback wins to squeak into the playoffs, and win their first playoff game by sheer dumb luck. Or maybe God was on their side, as they were led by their evangelical born-again praise-Jesus quarterback, Tim Tebow. And he was the talk of America. Every other word he says is Praise Jesus – like a jihadist praises Allah (blessed be His name) at the end of most every statement about anything. Tebow thanks Jesus a lot. He prays on the sideline, and sings those Contemporary Christian soft rock songs to himself. And a recent poll showed that a full forty-three percent of Americans thought God helped Tim Tebow win football games – by direct intervention one presumes. We are, after all, a deeply religious country. And apparently God takes sides in NFL games. God works in mysterious ways of course. That’s what they say.
And then New England destroyed Denver in the Saturday night game – a total rout. New England’s quarterback, Tom Brady, who says nothing about religion, ever, knows how to play football. Tebow relies on his faith. And the rest is history, or sports history, which isn’t history at all of course. And America has its faith shaken once again. But of course all the evangelicals met and decided their man was Rick Santorum – and the polling shows he’s going nowhere, as likely to be our next president as, say, Tim Tebow.
And this must be puzzling to many, but David Atkins helps out with the appropriate theological questions:
Did God already know Tebow and Santorum would fail? If so, why not help them?
Did God make Tebow and Santorum fail, presumably as a cruel test of faith?
Did God give Tebow and Santorum the free will to perform better, but they failed Him?
If they had the potential to do better but failed Him, did God know they would fail Him in advance? If so, why the interest, and why create the conditions for their failure?
If God knew they would fail and made them fail, and Tebow’s and Santorum’s victories were important enough to involve Himself, how could God find testing the faith of their followers more valuable than showing the righteous glory of their ideals through victory?
So many questions, so little time…
Yes, it’s all very puzzling, and perhaps one should consult the Book of Job or something. But then, at the same time the Patriots were disassembling the Broncos, with all of America watching in dismay at the mysterious ways of God, something else was going on that was equally mysterious:
The GOP presidential candidate forum held Saturday in Charleston, S.C., was not exactly a debate. In fact, it was sort of the opposite of a debate.
The event was moderated by Fox News host and former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. All the candidates except for Ron Paul attended, but they never actually shared the stage. They were explicitly prohibited from attacking – or even mentioning – each other.
That’s an odd format, and maybe four people in the whole country watched this, but it had its moments:
Newt Gingrich did not even bother with the oblique attacks. He went after the former Massachusetts governor by name. He continued the argument he has pursued for the past week – that Romney made a fortune at the investment company Bain Capital by closing companies and laying people off.
“Gov. Romney ran saying he created 100,000 jobs in the private sector,” Gingrich said.
He was reminded not to mention the other candidates. Having been scolded by the host and booed by the audience, Gingrich joined the other candidates in going after Romney without naming him.
Newt Gingrich was booed? For a man who considers himself always the smartest man in the room, and sneers at anyone who doubts that, that most have been uncomfortable. And this particular NPR account adds a quick note on what else mist have made him uncomfortable:
As the forum was taping Saturday, conservative Christian leaders decided to throw their weight behind Santorum. Now it remains to be seen whether the anti-Romney voters will fall in line behind those leaders.
Those conservative Christian leaders don’t care if Gingrich is the smartest man in the room. That’s moot. He’s not God’s guy. But then Tom Brady was not God’s guy either – he just knows how to play the game, and win. Unfortunately there’s a message there. Perhaps they should have been watching the football game.
But Gingrich did come up with one interesting idea:
Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich suggested at a Fox News forum hosted by Mike Huckabee in South Carolina on Saturday that it would be a good idea to fire federal employees for being too liberal. Federal law, on the other hand, says Gingrich’s plan would be illegal.
But illegal or not, his new big idea is to fire anyone anywhere in the federal government who isn’t a conservative Republican. Maybe that makes up for not being God’s guy. But it seems he’s getting a tad desperate. Or maybe he’s just eccentric. But it doesn’t matter. He’s losing, badly. Still, this is a bit creepy.
But one of the four people in America watching this creepiness, the Huckabee Forum, was Andrew Sullivan live-blogging the event with nuggets like this:
Romney is actually saying that newly-elected president Obama chose not to seek compromise with Republicans but to ram his agenda through “against the will of the American people.” The sheer distortion of reality that Romney is prepared to unleash is staggering. He truly is prepared to say anything about Obama, and has only one criterion beforehand: will it help or hurt me? The idea of a reference to something called truth is beyond him.
I have to say that the setting of Romney sitting down in an armchair and answering questions makes him look even smugger than normal.
Sullivan was getting upset:
A questioner: “there seem to be more and more discrimination against religion.” Romney panders shamelessly, backing the Christianist view that the government should reflect Christian emblems. This debate so far is no debate, and awful, but Romney is literally making me nauseated.
The canned responses to the hysterical premises of the questioners reveal an almost reptilian quality in the man. Maybe it’s just me, but Romney made my skin crawl tonight for the first time in one of these events.
This is called getting creeped-out, and then he just gave up:
Well, I tried. I can’t see this pageant producing anything interesting at this point, and really cannot watch it any more. It’s Saturday night. Watching these individuals lie and posture and pander is too much for me to handle. Back to my life –
And he apologizes. But he’d had enough. But later he adds that he’s beginning to wonder about Romney “if only because of the fatal combination of a tax plan that cuts taxes on the very wealthy even more and his own suicidal refusal to release his own tax returns promptly.”
And he cites Michael Tomasky:
There’s still enough material in one or two of those [Bain] stories to make for some wrenching ads that are bound to pack more emotional wallop. And they’ll resonate more because of who Romney is and how he comes across -his gaudy net worth, his difficulty connecting with people, all of that. In some ways, the most damning thing in that documentary is that he tore down a $12 million beach house in La Jolla because it was inadequate to his needs.
Toss in that ghastly remark about it being all right to discuss inequality in ”quiet rooms,” which I feel certain we haven’t heard nearly the last of. Which quiet rooms did he mean? Not churches or funeral parlors. He meant corporate board rooms, where everyone would agree with him. An astonishingly frank moment, like the comment about liking to be able to fire people. I know he was talking about insurance companies, but here in the 99 percent, we don’t “fire” insurance companies, or usually doctors and certain other service professionals. We change them. It was a word choice that really did reveal a world view.
Sullivan:
I’ve gone from finding Romney tolerable to amusing to nauseating the more I have read about him and observed him.
But if you want something really cringe-worthy there was this:
Presidential candidates hear tales of woe all the time on the campaign trail. But rarely does one respond by pulling cash out of his back pocket to help a struggling voter pay her bills.
Mitt Romney did just that here Saturday night, according to ABC News. When a 55-year-old woman, Ruth Williams, who said she lost her job last October, approached the Republican presidential front-runner on the rope line following a campaign rally in Sumter, he gave her what an aide later said was about $50 or $60.
That was nice of him – a real Daddy Warbucks moment – the incredibly rich guy slips the total loser a few bucks and moves on. It was very noble, or about as patronizing and dismissive as you can imagine. Or was it a policy statement? Hand that out of work guy on the corner a few bucks and all will be just fine – no more need be done. That too is creepy.
But prominent religious-right groups and their leaders have known all along they don’t want to see Mitt Romney win the Republican presidential nomination. But they never have found the alternative, and they’ve never really tried before, but now they found that they simply must find that alternative:
Evangelical leaders pursued a last-ditch effort on Saturday to exert influence in the Republican presidential primary race, voting to support the candidacy of Rick Santorum in hopes of undercutting Mitt Romney’s march to the nomination.
A week before the South Carolina primary, a group of more than 100 influential Christian conservatives gathered at a ranch here and voted overwhelmingly to rally behind Mr. Santorum. An organizer described the vote as an “unexpected supermajority,” a decision that was intended to help winnow the Republican field and consolidate the opposition to Mr. Romney.
And Steve Benen comments:
The theological circumstances are fascinating, in and of themselves: these evangelicals were choosing between two Roman Catholics. It wasn’t that long ago when this would have been considered impossible, if not ridiculous.
Nevertheless, Santorum clearly needed the boost – he’s struggled badly since his strong showing in Iowa two weeks ago – and there can be little doubt that the right-wing organizations represented at yesterday’s meeting represent a fairly significant number of social conservative Republican voters. This is especially true of South Carolina, where the religious right remains a potent GOP force.
But Benen says they’re too late:
What the theocratic wing of the party may not realize is how poor its timing is. The religious right has had this problem before – the movement strongly opposed John McCain in 2008, but waited until he’d won New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida to start pushing Mike Huckabee in a concerted, organized way.
Likewise, it’s a little late in the game to decide Santorum’s their man for 2012. For months, this contingent of Republican voters has been split largely three ways, backing Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry. Michele Bachmann and even Ron Paul have generated some modest religious right support, too. The splintering, not surprisingly, has made it that much easier for Romney to take control of the race for the nomination.
And this time they decided to wait until after Romney won Iowa and New Hampshire, and took the lead in South Carolina and Florida. Benen is not impressed:
Guess what, religious right? It’s already too late, and you should have done this in October. For that matter, it’s not altogether clear how the endorsement will translate into votes. The groups didn’t encourage other candidates to get out of Santorum’s way, and none of the participants, at least publicly, committed any resources to Santorum’s effort. Indeed, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins told reporters yesterday he and his partners would not officially launch a new pro-Santorum initiative: “It will not be a coordinated effort.” These guys have the organizational strength to affect the race, but it’s not clear if they’re prepared to flex that muscle to the necessary extent.
In other words, the most likely scenario is that the far-right will continue to be split and Romney will continue to run the table.
Yes, they chose their own creep, but too late to matter much at all, and even so they’re not doing anything to support him. And Benen adds this:
By the way, while Gingrich was no doubt disappointed by the outcome of yesterday’s meeting, it’s Rick Perry who looks the worst. The Texas governor has long been a darling of the religious right, and the movement assumed last summer that he would be their standard bearer through the primaries. And yet, when the nation’s most powerful evangelical political leaders gathered – in Texas, no less – Perry was largely deemed an afterthought.
There are occasional whispers about a possible Perry comeback, but yesterday seems to mark another nail in the coffin for his national ambitions.
And Rick Perry is of course creepy in his own way:
Texas Gov. and presidential aspirant Rick Perry believes the Obama administration is using “over-the-top rhetoric” and shows “disdain for the military” in its handling of the Marines videotaped urinating on dead fighters in Afghanistan.
Speaking to CNN Chief Political Correspondent Candy Crowley Sunday, Perry said, “What’s really disturbing to me is the over-the-top rhetoric from this administration and their disdain for the military.”
“When you’re 18 or 19, you do dumb things. These kids made a mistake, there’s not any doubt about it,” Perry continued.
He added that those involved in the incident should be “appropriately punished,” but that charging the Marines with a criminal act is “over the top.” He maintained that the soldiers were following in the tradition of Gen. George Patton, who he said acted similarly in war times.
And Digby comments:
Now that’s the kind of Commander in Chief we’ve been waiting for: the kind who says that urinating on corpses is a part of the great American military tradition. (Just don’t do it on an American flag or you’ll regret it.)
I’m not surprised that this is Perry’s strategy in South Carolina. Only a few years ago it would have been a huge winner there. It’s a testament to changing times (and Perry’s remarkable inability to appeal to anyone but bloggers at Red State) that it’s not working. Standing up for crude martial violence is usually quite successful in that state, but it doesn’t appear to be working.
In a creep show you find what hope you can, but Perry may be in single digits in the polls because he a clown, not because he’s a creep.
But then creepiness can sometimes be mitigated by sunny optimism, and Mitt Romney was on the campaign trail in South Carolina being optimistic – as he expects to ride this sunniness to end up in the White House because of the economy, but not in the way you’d think:
In his remarks [Friday], Romney also acknowledged the economy was getting better – something he has said before….
“And [President Obama]‘s going to say the economy is getting better,” Romney said. “Thank heavens it’s getting better.”
And Benen has something to say about that:
For those keeping track, Romney said twice in three sentences that he believes the economy is “getting better.”
I’ve noticed over the last week, this keeps coming up. Shortly before the New Hampshire primary, Romney said he’s “glad” the economy is improving, but quickly added that President Obama “doesn’t deserve” credit. In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Romney also said the economy is recovering, but said “this president has not helped it.”
And in a debate for the Republican presidential candidates last weekend, Romney made his case this way:
“The president is going to try to take responsibility for things getting better. It’s like the rooster trying to take responsibility for the sun rising. He didn’t do it.”
I believe campaign professionals call this a “losing argument.”
All you need to do is think about it:
As a campaign matter, if Romney is right about a strengthening recovery, he has to realize he’s going to lose. For the entirety of 2011, the former governor had a single message he repeated ad nauseum: Obama made a bad economy worse. It wasn’t true, but so long as the recovery was largely invisible, it was a message that could fool a lot of the people a lot of the time.
Two weeks into 2012, Romney has a new message: don’t give Obama credit for making the economy better. In effect, the Republican is arguing, “Sure, Obama inherited a deep recession. And sure, he took a bunch of steps to turn the economy around. And sure, we’re now seeing more jobs being created and more economic growth. But vote against him anyway.”
This isn’t just a tough sell; it’s an impossible one.
In fact, if it’s like the rooster trying to take responsibility for the sun rising, then the sun is rising and it’s morning in America and all that. And Benen cites Jonathan Chait – “This seems like a shockingly weak line. If you concede that it’s morning, you’ve lost the argument.”
In fact, Chait says this:
The unchallenged march of the formerly pro-choice, self-described “progressive” father of national health insurance to the Republican nomination is one of the most bizarre political spectacles of my life. I am running out of explanations for it, including explanations that require party-wide conspiracies or science fiction. (Perhaps Romney has a force field that turns to mush the brain of anybody who threatens him.)
Maybe it’s just general creepiness.
And then Sunday night we learned that the only relatively non-creepy person in the race is dropping out – after being endorsed by the largest newspaper in South Carolina, but dead last in all the polls, the quite sane and startlingly reasonable Jon Huntsman is packing it in. It’s a creep show and there’s no room for him. These guys are going to hand the ball to Tim Tebow or something. But didn’t anyone watch that game? God was having fun with us.
