This is the beginning of a watershed election in the history of the country. It is the first presidential campaign that we have had since the turn of the last century that has to be contested while everyone involved has to cooperate in the fiction that the whole process isn’t completely for sale.
I watched this happen in Iowa over the last three days, and I continue to be astonished why this isn’t the only story being told. This is something epochal. It is something that happens very, very rarely. It is the dawn of the age of thoroughly weaponized money, encouraged by every branch of the national government, most especially including the judiciary. Remember back all those years when Barack Obama looked down at the justices from the podium in the House chamber and read them out for Citizens United, and Sam Alito shook his head and mouthed, “Not true” visibly on TV?
Not true?
In Iowa, Mitt Romney’s super-PAC outspent the actual Romney campaign by a 2-1 margin.
Not true?
How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?
Romney wins by 8 votes, and Dick Morris calls it a “huge win.” This is bare naked spin, of course.
According to number crunchers, Romney spent $113.07 for each vote, while Santorum paid only $1.65. Romney’s percentage of the vote was actually less than in 2008.
Charles Pierce again:
Not that this won’t be entertaining, but Santorum’s year-long schmoozing with the evangelical base here garnered him exactly the same amount of support that Willard Romney managed to produce with a few weeks of an advertising blitz. That would not have been possible in 2008. We will see going forward how far Santorum’s sweater-vest and his gooey piety gets him when he starts wearing the bullseye, which should begin about 22 seconds from now.
Another interesting bit of info — last night the teevee bobbleheads were calling the turnout “record.” But this morning I read that the number of Republicans participating in the caucus actually was lower than in 2008:
If you read that Weigel post and do the math, 91,000 Republicans voted last night, versus 102,000 in 2008. The raw vote count was slightly higher this year, but that’s because Democrats and Independents decided to vote in the caucus, either due to Paulism or lack of anything better to do on a cold winter night.
The “Weigel post” is “Rickrolled: Three Lessons From Iowa.” The third lessons, already covered, is that Republican enthusiasm is much overrated. The first lesson is that the voters who identified themselves with the Tea Party are not small government libertarians after all; they more than not voted for Santorum. “Rick Perry, who campaigned desparately on the issues Tea Partiers say they care about — no earmarks! Term limits! Part time Congress! — got 14 percent of this vote. Michele Bachmann got 9 percent of it.”
The second lesson is that when money is speech, people can ignore it. Rick Perry spent $4 million in ads — $817 per vote — trying to sell himself as the guy who will protect us from gay soldiers, and came away with 10 percent.
But doesn’t that mean money doesn’t matter? Peter Hamby writes that the Newt surge “was torpedoed by a barrage of negative ads and mailers from Ron Paul’s campaign and ‘super PACs’ backing Mitt Romney.” And one could assume that if they’d had a couple more weeks, the same forces could have torpedoed the Santorum surge as well.
One might also assume there is a lot of giggling in the White House right about now.
Latest news — Bachmann is dropping out. No big surprise. Bachmann supporters are more likely to gravitate to Santorum than to Romney, but we’re not talking vast numbers of people here. Perry is expected to drop out any minute now. Word is that Newt is going to run negative ads against Romney, to try to take him down.
And as for Ron Paul, do read Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Update: Good discussion in the comments with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s post. The demonization of Obama and consecration of Paul going on on the Left both come from the intense desire to find the one magic candidate, the “savior,” who will single-handedly fix everything. Ironically, those of us who still support Obama more often than not are not the “Obamabots” but people who saw him realistically to begin with.
Likewise, it’s not hard to see that if Paul were elected President, his supporters would be profoundly disappointed and soon turn to someone else to “save” them.
Thank you for that Coates link.
I love his last line:
“But every man is a prophet, until he faces a Congress.”
Nothing describes Obama’s first two years in office from the last year, and about what he could and could not get accomplished, better than that.
Falling in love with Ron Paul is like falling in love with a Picasso cubist painting of a woman, because you found something you liked that vaguely resembles your dream girl.
The rest of us see nothing but cold, sharp angles, that look like anything but a woman.*
*No criticism of Picasso is intended here.
He, unlike “Liberal” Paulites, knew what he was doing.
The Citizens United decision which allows campaign contributors anonymity is really hard to figure unless it was to ‘protect’ them from being sued for libel – published statements that are untrue, malicious, and damaging to one’s reputation.
Then again, it’s become painfully true that laws, justice, rights…do not apply in the political arena like they do in society. Is it any wonder that American politics are thoroughly corrupt – they’re lawless.
The Coates article is great – thank you. Great parallel between Farrakhan and Paul, and way each is perceived by those who need to be heard.
The lesson with Rick Perry is that people will ignore money that crafts ads about issues nobody cares about. Perry is obviously the amateur in this respect that slick Mitt is not.
It’ll be interesting if the ensuing bloodbath within the GOP will ever make it clear – by the victims themselves – that Citizens United made it all possible, if not inevitable.
OT – from Paul Krugman today:
“Beautifying America
Andy Rosenthal, our editorial page editor, notes that Mitt Romney likes to quote from “America the Beautifulâ€, and tells us something I for one didn’t know:
The lyrics were written in 1894 by the Massachusetts poet Katharine Lee Bates, an ardent feminist and lesbian who was deeply disillusioned by the greed and excess of the Gilded Age.
Her original third verse was an expression of that anger:
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!”
The same crap for well over a century.
Interesting, huh?
Ron Paul’s bigotry is by no means in the past tense, either. I wanted to be sure I was giving him a fair shake, so I got on his own site and looked at the Issues page. His strong anti-choice stance pretty much torpedoes any claim he’s ever made to be a champion of liberty, but it was the page on immigration that bugged me the most. A guy who’s trying to convince us he isn’t a racist probably shouldn’t be using phrases like “No amnesty for lawbreakers,” and he might at least want to acknowledge that the main reason people come here illegally is to work. But no, Ron Paul’s main proposal for curbing illegal immigration is to end the welfare state.
Oh, and of course he wants to secure the border. And I would like to know if anyone seriously believes the kind of border security he’s talking about wouldn’t involve some pretty serious violations of people’s civil rights.
Oh, and his energy policy? Oil. It’s not like our oil addiction has ever led to any civil right violations, right?
In other news, the man who’s sage judgment unleashed Wailin’ Palin on the world endorses Mittens. I wonder how Romney feels about that.
Coates and Pierce! Wow! Beats TV analysts all hollow on the meta analysis. MSNBC commentators as of 7:09 tonight are still doing the horserace thing. Sad.
I looked at Gallup and nationally, if Santorum picks up ALL of the support from Perry and Bachmann, he rises to 20% compared to Romney 26% and Newt 22%. (Paul is nationally at 13%) If you disregard Huntsman, (who suffers from the disease ‘sanity’) as unelectable, the tactic of going negative on Santorum may be ineffective.
Where do dissatisfied anti-Romney votes go when a Romney super-PAC goes postal on Santorum? In the ‘old’ dynamic, Mittens benefited from knocking down any upstart because the votes lost by the victim were distributed and absorbed by a large field, still leaving Mitt in the twenty-something percent range – the frontrunner only because the 75% who don’t like Mitt are divided among numerous anti-Mitt factions.
I’m not predicting Santorum will win in New Hampshire or anywhere. I am saying that Bachman/Perry departure bounces Santorum into a major slot that makes a brokered convention MUCH more probable. Under the new rules, it’s NOT winner-take-all – delegate’s votes are distributed proportionately for all primaries held before April. I have no doubt Romney can buy the nomination in a brokered convention but there is no way the Ron Paul libertarians & Rick Santorum Teabaggers will like it. Especially if the fraud is bald-faced and flagrant. Heck yes, I’m hoping for a GOP convention that’s a bitter and divided as the vitriol of their philosophy.
One question not being asked – It was pretty obvious early last month that Pizza Guy was the hand-picked Tea Party candidate. By hand-picked, I mean Koch brothers money from the earliest stages and the lion’s share of Fox news time, even when he was in low single-digits. Then he tanked and pulled out. The question is – where does the support of the kingmakers go (Koch brothers – Norquest – Fox) with Cain gone? Does anybody know the answer to this?
I’m surprised nobody has picked up on this movie from 2003.
Willard – “A young man with an unusual connection with rats, uses them at his own sociopathic will.”
“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.” J.K. Galbraith
“One might assume there is a lot of giggling in the White House right about now.”
Yeah , baby!
I can imagine Michelle bursting out in laughter saying, Barak, come quick!
Look what they’re saying now!!!
It’s like the bloody “Gong Show”.
I don’t see an America with a president who home schooled his kids, thinks George Bush was a sage, and believes he will bring back the middle class and manufacturing in 4 yrs.
I can only hope that when the time comes for the general election, the Obama administration runs film clips of these gong show contestants eagerly shoving their feet in their mouths in praise of all the crap that went south over the past 10 years.
Just play the theme from “the Twilight Zone” in the backround, and let ‘er rip….
Bachmann dropping out?
I’m gonna miss Big Gay Marcus……
Oh, I’m just goofing……..
I hope someone will realize the strong pull of Rand’s ideas for young minds (aka new voters) who see the vague and looming forms of oppression and domination hulking over their current and future lives, choking off their options for individual and communal expression, and who do not yet have the life experiences or education, in many cases, to critically analyze the dangers of a R. Paul presidency. Those voters can still be educated, at least, while the TPs are less likely to ever recognize the dangers they invite in with their distorted notions of liberty.
For this morning’s shit’s and giggles, I bring you “White House Denies CIA Teleported Obama to Mars.”
This is not the work of “The Onion.” Nor is it, apparently, something someone cooked-up with their meth, while snorting coke, dropping acid, and washing down some lude’s with tequila:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/01/obama-mars/
And the comments?
TO DIE FOR!