The Camp Of The Saints

NEWT DESTRUCTA EST!:

-If you’re someone like myself who thinks that Newton Leroy’s rise is not a good thing, then who do you blame for the fact that he is now a major contender for the GOP Nomination?

Over at The Corner, I think Mark Steyn had the best answer on Sunday last [this is worth quoting in full]:

The nature of this peculiar primary season — the reason it seems at odds with both the 2009–2010 political narrative and the seriousness of the times — was determined by Mitt Romney. Even if you don’t mind Romneycare, or the abortion flip-flop, or any of the rest, there’s a more basic problem: He’s not a natural campaigner, and on the stump he instinctively recoils from any personal connection with the voters. So, in compensation, he’s bought himself a bunch of A-list advisers and a lavish campaign. He is, as he likes to say, the only candidate with experience in the private sector. So he knows better than to throw his money away, right? But that’s just what he’s doing, in big ways and small.

Small: It’s a good idea to get that telegenic gal (daughter-in-law?) to stand behind him during the concession speech, but one of those expensive consultants ought to tell her not to look so bored and glassy-eyed as the stiff guy grinds through the same-old-same-old for the umpteenth time. To those watching on TV last night, she looked like we felt.

Big: Why is the stump speech so awful? “I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.” Mitt paid some guy to write this insipid pap [Bob: 'I believe in America. America has-ah made-ah my fortune']. And he paid others to approve it. Not only is it bland and generic, it’s lethal to him in a way that it wouldn’t be to Gingrich or Perry or Bachmann or Paul because it plays to his caricature — as a synthetic, stage-managed hollow man of no fixed beliefs. And, when Ron Paul’s going on about “fiat money” and Newt’s brimming with specifics on everything (he was great on the pipeline last night), Mitt’s generalities are awfully condescending: The finely calibrated inoffensiveness is kind of offensive.

And what’s with the wind up? The “shining city on the hill”? That’s another guy’s line — a guy with whom you have had hitherto little connection other than your public repudiation of him back in the Nineties. Can’t any of his highly paid honchos write him a campaign slogan that’s his own and doesn’t sound in his mouth so cheesily anodyne, as if some guy ran a focus-group and this phrase came up with the lowest negatives?

And where, among all the dough he’s handing out, is the rapid-response team? Newt’s “spontaneous” indignation at John King was carefully crafted by Gingrich himself. By contrast, Mitt has a ton of consultants, and not one of them thought he needed a credible answer on Bain or taxes? For a guy running as a chief exec applying proven private-sector solutions, his campaign looks awfully like an unreformable government bureaucracy: big, bloated, overstaffed, burning money, slow to react, and all but impossible to change.

Mitt’s strategy for 2012 as for 2008 was to sit on his lead and run out the clock: Four years ago, that strategy died in New Hampshire; this time round it died one state later. Congratulations! Years ago, I was chit-chatting with Arthur Laurents, the writer of West Side Story and The Way We Were and much else, about some show that was in trouble on the road that he’d been called in to “fix.” “The trouble with a bad show,” he sighed, “is that you can make it better but you can never make it good.” The Romney candidacy is better than it was four years ago, but it’s not clear that it’s good. Mitt needs to get good real fast: A real speech, real plan, real responses, and real fire in the belly. Does he have it in him?

I just don’t see it.

Both nature and politics abhor a vacuum.  In this case, with his endless supply of hot air, Newton Leroy has filled the spaces Willard vacated.

-Barbara Espinosa, Mistress of American Freedom, has started compiling a damning dossier on Newton Leroy.  The titles of the links alone give you a good taste of what you’ll find.  Here are a few [tip of the fedora to Stacy McCain]:

= Newt & Pelosi in Feb 1989 co-sponsored HR 1078 by including $60 million a year the UN Population Fund.

= NEWT GINGRICH’S IDOL AS A PRESIDENT WAS FDR

= NEWT WITH Obama and Al Sharpton…Is Newt education flip flopper?

= Newt Gingrich Co-Sponsored the 1987 Pro-Fairness Doctrine Bill

Thank you for your efforts, Barbara.

ROMNEY DELENDA EST!:

-If one is known by the company one keeps then I think we can safely say that Willard has no intention of repealing Obamacare.  One of his advisors, former Senator Norm Coleman, is saying at best you can only change it.

James Antle has the whole quote here and comments:

What makes this a big deal is that it is likely the beginning, rather than the end, of moving the goalposts on this issue….

Come on, in your heart of hearts, deep-down in your gut, you knew this would happen, you knew the GOP Establishment would never have the testicular fortitude to really shoot for repeal of Obamacare.

If Mitt throws old Norm under the bus, will you believe him?……..nah…me neither.

-Yesterday from the AFP, we learned:

More than 220,000 people have already cast their ballots in Florida’s Republican presidential primary under the state’s early voting system ahead of the January 31 contest, a party official said Sunday.

Analysts say those early votes could help establishment favorite Mitt Romney regain some momentum after his bruising loss to former House speaker Newt Gingrich in the South Carolina primary on Saturday.

According to Stacy McCain [emphasis mine]:

…Just got off the phone with Sunshine State Sarah, who is wired into the Florida GOP scene and insists that pundits in D.C. and New York are naively underestimating the depth and strength of Romney’s organizaqtion in Florida. Sarah reminded me that Romney endorsed Marco Rubio against Charlie Crist and — echoing an observation that Michael Barone shared when we were in New Hampshire — Romney has the Cuban vote in South Florida wrapped up tight.

Gingrich has very little organizational strength in Florida. Newt’s campaign there didn’t even exist until three weeks ago. And Sarah says the Romney team has been pushing hard for early voters, hitting them with mail pieces and phone calls. The pundits who are looking at the Florida race “from 30,000 feet,” as Sarah says, are missing a lot of the ground-level factors that favor Romney there.

This whole trend of the last decade to get people to vote via absentee ballot is very upsetting.  Not only is it illegal, but it undermines the whole purpose of campaigns.

You are only allowed to vote by absentee ballot if (1) you will be out-of-state on election day, (2) if you are physically unable to get to the polls, and (3) if you are serving your country in the military or elected office and will be out-of-state on election day.  When you sign the ballot, you swear that one of these three conditions has been met.  If none of them has and you still so swear, you are committing a criminal act.

The purpose of campaigns is to have sufficient time to vet the candidates who are seeking your vote.  By a campaign pressuring someone to vote early, you are seeking to deny them this time.

This whole absentee voting scandal just barely misses rising to the level of voter fraud — just barely [it's a kissing cousin].

That Willard Mitt Romney is encouraging hundreds of thousands of people to break the law – that any candidate should do it – is revolting.

ERICKSON, NIHIL EST SCORTUM:

Without waiting for Rick Perry’s political body to come out of rigor, Erick Erickson has now begun a new affair with Newton Leroy.  And in that capacity, like any whore worth his or her salt, he’s fellating his new love with a zeal only a putana who is infatuated with his new client does.  He’s also now saying that a vote for Rick Santorum is a vote for Willard Mitt Romney, as Stacy McCain reports and comments on here.

Richard McEnroe sums up this political streetwalker best:

For a big-deal opinion-shaping macher, Erickson sure seems to spend a lot of time chasing other people’s parades… 

-Besides all of the above: Erick has to answer for Santino, er, Sarah.

SANTORUM ROBUSTAS CALUMNIANDO:

-One of the arguments I’ve heard made in favor of Newton Leroy over Rick Santorum is that: ‘Yes, Newt can be nasty, but that kind of toughness is what we need to go up against Obama’.  What about if Newton Leroy gets elected?  One person I know responded: ‘The presidency isn’t the place for a nice guy’.

I disagree. 

Let me state first: I agree with Stacy that Gingrich is ‘a selfish, arrogant asshole’.  Newt is out for only Newt.  He’s a nasty piece of work.  But the folks I mentioned above think this maybe just what these troubled times call for.  Fair enough.

However, I think they’ve got it wrong: what we need is someone who is tough, someone who is willing to defend his policies against the endless onslaughts from the Left and their Useful Idiots in the GOP.  Being possessed of the requisite toughness doesn’t mean that one must also be a nasty, narcissistic, jerk.  Ronald Reagan was tough and he wasn’t nasty at all.  In fact he was a nice man.

Rick Santorum is often accused of being nice — and he is — but he also is in possession of a toughness that he has displayed throughout this campaign and in his personal life.

What disturbs me about the South Carolina voters who pulled the lever for Newt knowing full-well that he was an arsehole and seeing that as a plus in this race is that they used the same logic as those who supported Caesar and his crossing of The Rubicon.

-I share Jeff Goldstein’s puzzlement:

What I don’t understand — well, aside from [Newt's] icky social conservatism, which is an existential threat to the nature of the contract between the individual and the government in a way far more worrisome than, say, advocating for government/private partnerships, or waxing rhapsodic over the moral and ethical necessity of ethanol subsidies, or identifying politically with Woodrow Wilson and FDR — is why the conservative base didn’t swerve to Santorum, who didn’t attack Romney on Bain capital, who has never loved the idea of an individual mandate, who doesn’t believe in the “grandiosity” of the government or government leaders, and who has performed quite well in the debates on both substance and in defending conservative (if not always libertarian) ideas.

Maybe there’s still time for enough conservatives to get over their crush.

STACY, PRETIA QUI CRIMINA SUNT INSANSE:

I know exactly how Stacy McCain feels:

For the past month, not a day has gone by without someone on TV, talk radio or the blogosphere issuing an Emergency Declaration of Impending Doom unless their favorite candidate wins the GOP nomination (or their least-favorite candidate loses). I’m about at the point where I’m ready to start blogging all day about Kate Upton bikini pictures or something — anything — except this depressingly vitriolic presidential campaign.

That comment comes during a damn fine report [and I'm not just saying that because he gives Jennifer Rubin a well-deserved spanking] on the state of the GOP Race which I would highly recommend to you.

Also, Stacy needs money to fund his trip to Florida and beyond, so please do what you can by hitting his damn Tip Jar.

I’ve got much, much more, but this post is long enough as it is.  I’ll save the rest for a future Nomination Excitation entry.

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* I know the post title doesn’t make any sense, but
(1) I couldn’t come up with a worthy one and (2)
this one just popped into my head and I like it.