Showing posts with label Michelle Bachmann. Show all posts

The Nine: How Are the GOP Presidential Candidates Doing?

We've had three debates since Rick Perry entered the race and "solidified" the field. Say what you will about tactics, consultants, southern strategies, and Ed Rollins, it never fails to amaze how the awesome task of running for president always comes down to the candidate themselves. In the last three weeks, we've seen some people help themselves immensely, and we've seen others do incalculable harm, often while being themselves. Let's go down the roll call.

Michelle Bachmann: Just three weeks ago, Lady Icarus was running in second, had driven Tim Pawlenty from the race, and was offering witheringly effective critiques of the president. Then Rick Perry entered the race, and Bachmann went on TV and announced that vaccines cause "mental retardation." From Tea Party Queen to Lunatic Fringe in the space of one sentence. Depressing.

Herman Cain: I keep hearing how Cain can't win, that he's nothing but a pizzaman, and that he'll never rise from the second tier. But, he keeps winning these debates, at least according to the Luntz focus groups, and the hive mind of the right-wing blogosphere. He's also been admirably above the fray, refusing to violate Ronald Reagan's 11th commandment.

Newt Gingrich: yesterday's man has been putting his intellect and debating skills on full display, but he'll never escape his past. Gingrich deserves all praise for the 1994 revolution, and his toe-to-toe battles with the Clintons, but he legislated as a Big Government Republican, thus frittering away the '94 mandate. He is fundamentally untrustworthy.

John Huntsman: the one thing Huntsman has going for him is his tax reform/economic plan, which is serious and conservative. That is undercut by his smarmy presentation and his smug certitude about global warming and evolution.

Gary Johnson: the cool kids have been agitating for Johnson to be included in these debates, and he brought...poop jokes. Cribbed from Rush Limbaugh.

Ron Paul: agreed that Paul's foreign policy is to the left of Dennis Kucinich, but on economics and the role of government in society, he is - incredibly - still a lonely voice. His answer describing what society would do for the hypothetical dying young man was very thoughtful and even moving (in describing his medical practice pre-Great Society Paul said "we never turned anyone away"). Shades of 2008 when Paul was cast as the "crazy uncle" when he started ranting about the Fed, Wall Street, and the overweening government that was driving us all to ruin.

Rick Perry: "the race is very fluid," "it's a long time before Iowa," "it's a marathon, not a sprint." But, Rick Perry's lackluster debate performances have been killing him. You can be as conservative as you want, but if conservatives can't see that you will be able to beat the glib Obama in a debate, then it's no sale. Perry's outrageous claim that "you have no heart" if you don't support in-state tuition for illegal immigrants may be his "vaccines cause mental retardation;" the line that kills his candidacy. Sorry, jerk, but I just don't see how failing to support special privileges to illegal immigrants is racist or cruel.

Mitt Romney: I have no great eagerness to see Romney as the nominee, but I gotta say he has really stepped up his game since Perry got into the race. His presentation has been solid. His critiques of Obama have been sharp. And, John Nolte points out that he has demonstrated a real ability to neutralize the anti-GOP media. But, Romney remains fundamentally untrustworthy because he has already demonstrated that he would govern as a Big Government conservative. Romney certainly fits the ABO role well. But, a Romney win could easily mean that Obamacare will not be repealed. If he is to be the nominee, we'll need a lot more Tea Party members of Congress.

Rick Santorum: another second-tier guy who has been putting in first-tier debate performances. This is why you include some of the lower eschalon candidates in these early debates. One of them always shines, even as his campaign is little more than his wife and kids knocking on doors. If nothing else changes, I think Cain or Santorum will "shock the world" in Iowa, and emerge as this cycle's Huckabee.

Anti-Science

Michelle Bachmann has run an admirably uncompromising campaign, but her appearance on Fox News became a disaster when she said this about the supposed effect of the sort of vaccines Rick Perry tried to mandate (with an opt-out) for Texan teens:

Bachmann said last night on Greta that a woman came up to her after the debate, crying, and said that her daughter had been given the Garadsil vaccination and as a result had suffered mental retardation. Bachmann says that Perry shouldn’t just be given a mulligan on this because there are significant consequences to the decision he made to mandate Gardasil.

I'm sorry, but...are you kidding me? First of all, who walks up to a total stranger and starts unloading about their daughter's "mental retardation?" And who turns around and goes on television to announce this breathlessly to a national audience whom you are trying to persuade to support you in a long-shot bid for the White House? And why in the world is this sort of anti-vaccine hysteria - which was whipped up by the left-wing Lancet magazine - seemingly a grave concern for so many conservatives?

(I'm going to agree that Rick Perry's efforts to mandate the administering Gardasill were ill-conceived, and heavy handed, but for all the strenuous denunciations you hear about this issue, you would never know that Perry rescinded his order, and no one ever received a dose, at least not because the Republic of Texas told them to. That's right. Perry (1) made a decision, (2) received a lot of blowback that convinced him he was overreaching and (3) reversed himself. Isn't that we supposedly want our leaders to do? Isn't that what we wanted Dems to do before voting on Obamacare?)

Bachmann has developed an unfortunate reputation for credulously repeating misinformation. At this point, you have to wonder if rival campaigns are paying people to make flakey claims to Bachmann in hopes that she will, in all sincerity, repeat them over the airwaves. What an embarrassment.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin shows how to make the vaccine/crony capitalism connection without bringing up autism, "mental retardation" and other fringe-y matters. Of course, the length of Malkin's post proves the difficulty of making this argument in the rapid-fire setting of a debate or a TV appearance. That's why it was such a mistake for Bachmann to keep expanding on her point, rather than sticking with the basic (bad) facts: that Gov. Perry was trying to make the vaccination of pre-teens mandatory when the vaccine had been on the market for less than a year. It calls into question Perry's claim to be a small government superhero. These sort of mandates add up, one by one, until people spend more and more time and money complying with "feel-good" mandates rather than making intelligent choices for themselves. Stick with that and you've got a good line of attack from the Tea Party right. But move beyond that to Jenny McCarthy territory and you are literally surrendering the intellectual high ground.

Red Red Meat: Rick Perry Appeals To The Base

Apparently, there was a very unpresidential moment during Rick Perry's first full day of campaigning when he said this about the Chairman of the Federal Reserve:

Mr. Perry brought the Fed directly into the campaign debate Monday night by saying it would be "almost ... treasonous" for the central bank to play politics by expanding the money supply.
"If this guy prints more money between now and the election," Mr. Perry said in Cedar Rapids Monday night, without naming Mr. Bernanke, "I don't know what y'all would do to him in Iowa, but we—we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas."

This, of course, is being spun by our objective press as a threat of physical violence, as well as a serious promise by Rick Perry to put Ben Bernanke on the dock and then hang him from the nearest yardarm. Also, the president himself has gone on one of his "civility" tangents, saying Gov. Perry should be "very careful" about what he says now that he has entered the arena.

Rick Perry also says he doesn't believe in global warming.

Well.

Is there an alternate universe where criticizing the Federal Reserve for debasing the dollar is considered a "gaffe?" As a matter of fact, there is. It's the universe know as Alpha Cen-Beltway, where even "conservatives" Peter Wehner and Karl Rove will rush to the microphones to join Democrats in calling for a right-winger to be more "civil." Rove must has forgotten his experiences with left-wing civility back during the Plame-gate investigation.

The one good thing to come out of the Donald Trump boomlet was the lesson that any candidate who comes out hard against Obama, DC, the Democratic Party, and their enablers in the RNC will instantly bolt to the top of the opinion polls. Perry is simply among the first GOP politicians to apply this lesson which is so screamingly obvious that the only people who don't get are the moderate Republicans who would rather administer the welfare state, rather than work to dismantle it.

(and, as an aside, isn't it funny how when someone says he doesn't believe in global warming, they are instantly dubbed an ignoramous, or worse? But say you believe in global warming, and you are an enlightened philosopher king. Yet global warming proponents don't do much more than opponents: they simply say something like "scientists say..." But, it's not like Green politicians are any better able to discuss the "science" than non-Greens. All of them are just reading off cue cards, too.)

This isn't meant to be some great endorsement of Perry, btw. My problem with his Ben Bernanke statement was not its substance, but the way he expressed himself. Frankly, he sounded like he was trying to "sound Texan" to show us what a rough 'n' ready fella he is. Right now, Michelle Bachmann is the best among the three front runners at bringing the rhetorical rafters down around the heads of America's elites.

Also, Perry has trouble coming from his right flank where influential conservatives like Michelle Malkin and Erick Erickson are reminding us of the Perry Administration's creepy attempt to mandate that teen-aged Texans be vaccinated against HPV. It's a troubling story, both for the overweening hand of the state angle, and for the "crony capitalism" angle. (Merck was pushing the vaccinations because it wanted to make more $$ off its HPV patent). It's also one that Perry is trying to brush off with a "I made a mistake"-style excuse that may or may not work.

On the other hand, Michelle Bachmann is in Big Trouble because she mistakenly hailed the birth of Elvis Presley...on the date of his death. If she ever retools her campaign, she should fire the guy who drafts her 3x5 cards, as Bachmann makes these sort of goofy mistakes all the time. Maybe they're small-time errors, but they do speak to a certain inattentiveness (I was vaguely aware that Elvis died in August. I also know how to spell "potato"). Without them, SNL and the Left would have little with which to attack Bachmann, and would be forced to start dealing with her rock-solid substantive attacks on Obamism.

Fair Blame Game

The liberal hive mind has thought over the S&P downgrade and come up with their slogan: it's the "Tea Party Downgrade!" John Kerry and David Axelrod were on the Sunday chat shows, frowning and frumping over this phrase, which you will no doubt see repeated in every left-leaning newspaper column published in the next two weeks. Powerline wonders if they can possibly sell this line.

Put aside for a moment the fact that Obama’s willingness to compromise was entirely theoretical; never did he put such a compromise plan on the table. His FY 2012 budget proposal was anything but a compromise; it included no entitlement reform and projected massive deficits for as far as the eye could see, and therefore received not a single vote in Congress.
What is most ludicrous is the Democrats’ effort to distract attention from the fact that they controlled Congress from January 2007 until January 2011. The first Congress that had any ability to be influenced by the Tea Party movement has been in office for only six months. Do the Democrats seriously expect anyone to believe that S&P’s downgrade of U.S. debt arises out of something that Republican Congressmen have done in the last six months? We expect the Democrats to appeal to ignorance at all times, but this is ridiculous.
Let’s take a walk down memory lane. What did the Democrats do with respect to federal debt during the four years they controlled both Houses of Congress? Here is a summary of the deficits the Democrats racked up during that time:
FY 2008 — $460 billion

FY 2009 — $1,410 billion ($1.4 trillion)

FY 2010 — $1,300 billion ($1.3 trillion)

FY 2011 — $1,600 (estimated) ($1.6 trillion)
Of the $14.5 trillion national debt, nearly $4.8 trillion–one-third of the total–was incurred during that four-year period when the Congress was exclusively controlled by the Democrats. Moreover, and equally important, during that time the Democrats did nothing to assure the markets that they have a long-term plan to deal with the country’s burgeoning debt. On the contrary, for more than two years the Congressional Democrats have refused to adopt or even to propose a budget! If you are looking for the reason why rating agencies have lost faith in the ability of our government to get its spending and debt under control, you need look no farther

Well, I don't know, but it has already worked on Megan McArdle who thinks Republicans should be/ will be "blamed."

I'm afraid I think that the lion's share of the blame goes to the GOP, which escalated to this completely unnecessary showdown, and then gave up any hope of a grand bargain because it would have required some revenue increases.

(But what about the specifics? I hear you cry. I find this singularly unconvincing as a rebuttal. The GOP was extraordinarily, um, specific about their total aversion to revenue increases, a position that they continued right up to the brink of a crisis, which makes me think that it was not merely a clever negotiating tactic. It is therefore not some sort of horrifying example of Democratic perfidy that the negotiations never went beyond fairly broad generalities. It's an example of what happens when you signal that you aren't going to compromise no matter what)

This was not terroristic, psychopathic, or whatever, and the people who used those sorts of epithets have forfeited the moral high ground they claim to occupy. I sympathize with the Tea Party's goals of smaller government. I even kind of understand what they thought they were trying to do. But it was an enormously counterproductive tactical mistake, and though of course I would say this, I believe it was made because everyone who tried to point this out was ignored . . . nay, not just ignored, but derided as a Beltway Insider Commiesymp.

In that political environment, hell, I'd downgrade us.

I'm sorry, but this was stupid. It hurt the country, and it hurt the party that staged the protest vote even more. All for very little gain

Jesus Christ, it's like the past 30 months never happened. Someone email those Powerline numbers to McArdle. Roughly one-third of the country's debt was taken on by Democrats in the Congress and the Executive Branch. (after spending the Bush years complaining about out-of-control spending!) The offer that Republicans supposedly couldn't refuse was to take ownership of that debt by increasing taxes and establishing unsustainable spending as the new baseline. Well I think that's an offer that's eminently refusable.

McArdle is a nice lady, one of the nicest in the blogosphere. She's got plenty lot of integrity, especially in her refusal to go along with liberal math. But, politically she's an unreliable fool: a "libertarian" who voted for Obama, and can never seem to support shrinking the size of government when it's time to head to the ramparts. You can meet a lot of libertarians like her. They're the ones who are smart enough not to be liberals but don't want to seem dumb, so they can't abide being Republican/Conservative. They know liberalism doesn't work, but...Sarah Palin is dumb and Rush Limbaugh is a blow-hard so it all balances out, I guess.

Fact is the downgrade is a national disgrace, even if it comes at the hands of a firm that is just as likely trying to make amends for "missing" the Crash of '08 as it is in taking a sober look at the American balance sheet. People should be losing their jobs over this. Tim Geithner, for one should absolutely resign his office, but right now the only people calling for that are Michelle Bachmann and the State Treasurer of Indiana. Does McArdle really think the Indispensable Man has less blame to take in this affair that the GOP?

No doubt if you look hard enough McArdle's archives will contain some unflattering comments about Bachmann who is one of the few elected officials out there brave enough to have warned of this downgrade and voted accordingly. But, she has migraines, a "gay" husband, and is "crazy." (that's as opposed to Sarah Palin who also warned for years about America's credit rating and is therefore "stupid").

Conservative Republicans have been warning for years that the US was on an unsustainable fiscal course. When the "moderate" Obama revealed himself to be a hard leftist, and began racking up trillion dollar deficits, the entire Republican Party recoiled as one, with the bitter exception of Arlen Specter. The "radical" Tea Partiers of 2009/10 were so disturbed by the pace of spending that they literally could not stay home, but took to the streets in peaceful protest. And now McArdle wants these folks to take the blame?

If that is indeed what happens, then there is literally no justice.

The Plague Years: The Sickness In the Souls of the Left

Bill Maher has taken the Left's practice of degrading conservatives to a new low. On Friday's edition of Real Time, he and his guests discussed having violent "hate sex" with Michelle Bachmann and ... Rick Santorum?!

DAN SAVAGE, SEX ADVICE COLUMNIST: They're grifters and scumbags, the Bachmanns.

[Applause]

BILL MAHER, HOST: Grifters and scumbags.

SAVAGE: Yes

MAHER: Not just one or the other.

SAVAGE: They're not charming grifters like in the movie.

MAHER: No, no.

MARC MARON, COMEDIAN: I don't want to be crass but I just hope that Marcus Bachmann takes all that, you know, rage that comes from repression and denial and brings it into the bedroom with her. I hope he f--ks her angrily because, because that's how I would. And I've thought about it. I just…

[Laughter and applause]

MARON: …It's a political statement I'm trying to make.

SAVAGE: Just so we get, just so you don’t get charges of sexism, because only Michele Bachmann was involved, I sometimes think about f--king the s--t out of Rick Santorum.

[Laughter and applause]

SAVAGE: Because I think…

MARON: I’m with you.

SAVAGE: …he needs it. So, it’s not, it's not just women we’re talking about f--king. Like, let's bone that Santorum boy.

MARON: Alright. Let’s video it.

SAVAGE: I’m up for whipping up some santorum in Santorum

We don't indulge in too much evangelical finger-wagging around here, but that whole sequence is disgusting. Indeed, the above conversation is as pure a display of troubled diseased souls at work as you are likely to see. Jim Hoft isn't kidding when he says this is straight out of Satan's playbook. (you also have to love how "sex positive" types like Savage demand tolerance for their proclivities, yet use those same proclivities to demean their opponents. almost like they think there's something shameful about non-marital sex).

It goes without saying that the Left isn't targeting Michelle Bachmann with crass sex talk because of her stance on gay rights. It's because she is an effective critic of the president and his fiscal policies, and much more the "adult in the room" when it comes to trying to protect the country from further harm. If America's welfare state survives this latest bout with an ascendant conservative moment, they will probably need a long shower to wash off the stain of their victory.

Marco Rubio Seizes The Day

One of the benefits of the Obama era has been the ascent of a new breed of Republican officeholder. Call them Tea Partiers, if you want, but 3 years ago you wouldn't have seen people like Rand Paul, Mike Lee, or Rob Johnson in the Senate or Michelle Bachman ascending into the first tier of GOP presidential contenders. But, the guy with the most potential is Marco Rubio, and he has been on fire. If you ever get frustrated with the namby-pamby "collegiality" of DC Republicans, check out this blast from an interview Rubio did with Hugh Hewitt the other day:

HH: Senator Rubio, you represent a lot of senior citizens in Florida. The country knows that. I think it’s despicable to scare them this way. What’s your reaction to the President’s threat to hold their Social Security checks hostage?
MR: Well, if they don’t get their Social Security checks, it’s because the President’s decided to do that, because we still have revenue coming in. Here’s the other thing I would say. If in fact the President holds up their checks for Social Security, and Medicare, and whatever else he wants to hold up to make his point, isn’t he admitting that all these programs are funded by deficit spending? Isn’t he admitting that all these programs are dependant upon borrowed money? And I think the folks who are on Social Security, people like my mom, would be shocked to learn the truth that the money that they’re receiving in Social Security isn’t the money they worked hard for all these years to put away, the government was going to give back to them in their retirement. The government spent all that money already. They spent it long ago on other things. This is borrowed money. This is money that we’re borrowing from our children and our grandchildren. And I think people are going to, if that happens, I think people are going to be shocked to learn the real truth about what the government’s done with their Social Security money.

Honestly, why doesn't every Republican talk like that? I also liked his line - in a speech on the Senate Floor, no less - about how Obama should stop acting like the leader of a banana republic.

The other Tea Party Republicans have taken turns in the media crosshairs, having to defend stupid gaffes (Bachmann) or disconcertingly outside-the-box statements about the Civil Rights Act (Paul). Rubio has escaped this, partly because he has kept a relatively low profile, and partly because his communication skills are so disciplined and refined that his mouth doesn't get him into the sort of trouble that Sarah Palin - God love 'er - steps into every few weeks. Read the Hewitt transcript all the way through: it's one great line after another, simultaneously attacking the president in (well-deserved) harsh terms while also laying out an alternative to endless government spending.

I think Reagan comparisons are absurd at this point. For one thing Rubio is a year younger than I am. But the guy can convey a message very well. To think that, under normal conditions, he would have never left Florida, and Charlie Crist would be in the Senate.

Bachmann Overdrive

Today's WSJ Weekend Interview featured Tea Party favorite Michelle Bachmann. As most MSM stories about Bachmann emphasize either that she's "extreme," "stupid" or "crazy," this is a rare opportunity to find out what her program is.

If she were to take her shot, she'd run on an economic package reminiscent of Jack Kemp, the late congressman who championed supply-side economics and was the GOP vice presidential nominee in 1996. "In my perfect world," she explains, "we'd take the 35% corporate tax rate down to nine so that we're the most competitive in the industrialized world. Zero out capital gains. Zero out the alternative minimum tax. Zero out the death tax."
The 3.8 million-word U.S. tax code may be irreparable, she says, a view she's held since working as a tax attorney at the IRS 20 years ago. "I love the FAIR tax. If we were starting over from scratch, I would favor a national sales tax." But she's not a sponsor of the FAIR tax bill because she fears that enacting it won't end the income tax, and "we would end up with a dual tax, a national sales tax and an income tax."
Her main goal is to get tax rates down with a broad-based income tax that everyone pays and that "gets rid of all the deductions." A system in which 47% of Americans don't pay any tax is ruinous for a democracy, she says, "because there is no tie to the government benefits that people demand. I think everyone should have to pay something."
On the stump she emphasizes an "America-centered energy policy" based on "drilling and mining for our rich resources here." And she believes that repealing ObamaCare is a precondition to restoring a prosperous economy. "You cannot have a pro-growth economy and advise, simultaneously, socialized medicine."
Her big challenge is whether the country is ready to support deep spending cuts. On this issue, she carries a sharper blade than everyone except Ron Paul. She voted for the Paul Ryan budget—but "with an asterisk." Why? "The asterisk is that we've got a huge messaging problem [on Medicare]. It needs to be called the 55-and-Under Plan. I can't tell you the number of 78-year-old women who think we're going to pull the rug out from under them."

Should someone who's only been in Congress since 2006 run for president? I'd like to know why the hell not. On the one hand, I keep hearing that the government has gotten so big that is has become an existential threat. On the other hand, the GOP establishment seems to think that the best person to lead us out of this mess is someone like Mitt Romney, last seen passing health care reform and speaking in favor of climate change legislation. Speaking for myself, that's not what I want to hear about this year (or any year). Bachmann, at least, seems to take the Tea Party message of shrinking government to heart. Could it be that she has a better sense of what might be a winning message than someone whose main claim is that it's his "turn?"

I keep hearing that Bachmann is "stupid." Could be. After all, only stupid people managed to win an election as a conservative Republican in Minnesota in 2006. Only stupid people have since successfully defended their seats from determined leftists who think nothing of spending $10 million to unseat someone they consider too stupid to live. And, only idiots work as tax attorneys, of course. Rule of thumb: if Democrats say someone is stupid, it usually means they are scared that mainstream America is getting ready to embrace that person before the left can label them stupidextremecrazywanttokillgrandma. Maybe Republicans don't want to vote for Bachmann, but it's clear that Democrats really don't want Republicans, let alone regular Americans, to vote for her. Should we really be so obliging to the left?

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