Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.
Malcolm Forbes
Political Joke of the Day
"The only difference between Mitt Romney and a statue of Mitt Romney is that the statue never changes in position." - Stephen Colbert
Gingrich Takes South Carolina:
My Posted Prediction Fails
A Bold Prediction: Romney Still Takes South Carolina. With the RCP's most recent SC polls averaging a 2-point lead for Gingrich and Internet betting showing Gingrich with an 80% chance of winning, I'm going to take a contrarian spin. Why? Not because I've endorsed Romney (and the fact Romney has fallen in the polls has nothing to do with this blog's endorsement) or am in a state of denial. The reasons are: (1) there are a lot of undecideds in South Carolina, and I expect them to prefer Romney to Gingrich; (2) South Carolina seems to be a bellwether for the nation, and the national advantage of Romney over Gingrich is still at least 10 points; (3) whereas Gingrich's ex-wife's recent assertion that Gingrich wanted an open marriage may not cause Gingrich's campaign to falter, it may have tempered Gingrich's momentum; (4) South Carolina likes to pick winners and generally prefers more establishment types like Romney... A South Carolina victory for Gingrich more likely than not will be a one-off--and let us not forget, Gingrich once led with 41% of the polls.Before I go on, let me put in a plug for Google search: one of the things I discovered by accident sometime in the past (probably looking for a sports webpage covering a specific game) is that Google will embed the target results (e.g., the current score if the game is in process) top in the search results. The same thing holds true for other events. So after entering a search for "South Carolina GOP primary 2012", I found an updated embedded results following a brief collection of headlines on primary results. Very cool. Google provides the same value in other contexts; for example, several days back, a recruiter contacted me about any interest in a DBA gig in Camp Hill, PA. All I had was enter "Camp Hill, PA" in the search box; Google Maps has an embedded Camp Hill map near the top of the page, and I'm 3 mouse clicks away from driving directions from my street address. [Disclosure: Google owns Blogger, which hosts my blog.]
With 99% of precincts in: Gingrich 40.4%, Romney 27.9%, Santorum 17%, Paul 13%.
What happened to my predictions? First of all, I was relying on older polls. There were two posted yesterday, one by Clemson mirroring about a 6-point lead for Gingrich., like the (Democratic) PPP poll. It was clear that Gingrich had picked up momentum during the week and a lot of it had to do with to do with the two debates, but there were other things at work--and, I realize this sounds wildly out of touch with reality on the surface, but I don't think it was a validation of Gingrich's candidacy. Give me a chance to make my case.
I got a couple of pollster emails early this morning after publishing my post. Nationalpolls.com had this to say on their website: "The polls have done a great job thus far in the Republican nomination process -- except to factor in late minute movements. Gingrich is the clear momentum candidate in South Carolina....PPP has Gingrich ahead by nine points in their latest poll BUT ahead by 14 points (40-26) if only looking at the last date of their poll." ARG reported a 2-day poll also ending yesterday, with an identical 40-26 advantage. Their email this morning reported 4 separate predictive services indicating an 8 to 10-point victory for Gingrich. But if you look at the RCP polls through Wednesday, every recent poll had Gingrich in the low 20's and Romney in the 30's. On Thursday, of 5 polls, 4 had Gingrich in the 30's, and 2 had Romney in the 30's. And then the last 2 days, Gingrich stretched from the mid-30's to 40 points while Romney had dipped into the upper 20's, across the board. Another email reported that undecideds were breaking heavily in favor of Gingrich instead of Romney, something that I did not expect. I suspected that Romney would at least hold his own,
Second, I expected that South Carolina would break in favor of Romney because of a few well-established grounds: electability and notorious social conservatism. Gingrich has no real shot of beating Obama this fall. I have previously suggested that I would vote for a yellow dog before I voted for Obama, but if I thought the GOP nominated the wrong person, whom almost certainly would lose to Obama (like Gingrich), there would be repercussions, which I'll discuss at the end of the commentary.
One of the interesting sidenotes to this primary was a split between Tea Party-backed South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley whom backed Romney and Sarah Palin, whom backed Haley for governor but backed Gingrich in the primary. I haven't read the reaction, but the idea of Palin as kingmaker has been widely discredited. There were reasons Romney lost, and people are entitled to their own reasons. I have my own theory of why Palin implicitly endorsed Gingrich, but it's for the wrong, dangerous reason that I'll discuss shortly.
South Carolina likes to vote conservatively--this is different from "conservative". By that I mean they like to vote for the tried and true, e.g., the late Senator Strom Thurmond and the state's two senators are former Congressmen. I thought they would gravitate to the safer "establishment" figure, Mitt Romney. He's picked up endorsements from almost every prior GOP Presidential nominee and a wide variety of governors; he didn't resign in disgrace from the House like Gingrich
I thought the social conservatives would have more of an impact. After Santorum won an impressive evangelical party endorsement, he picked up almost no support or bounce from that. I mean if McCain's campaign in 2000 was torpedoed by rumors that McCain's adopted daughter from Bangladesh was his "love child" by an African-American mistress, how could Gingrich survive charges from his ex-wife that he wanted them to have an open marriage? Remember how ABC News debated releasing the allegations for fears of affecting the results? It's now very clear the revelation had NO effect on Gingrich's late surge: he soored nearly as high as during his earlier campaign surge (nationalpolls.com showed that Romney did better than the polls taken during the earlier post-Cain surge during the first week of December when Gingrich scored from 38 to 43% while Romney had 19 to 23%.
So what happened? First of all, Romney had a bad week; the flip of the win in Iowa hurt, even though it was mostly symbolic. He also was caught flat-footed in a no-win situation about reporting of taxes, something he had to know was going to demanded sooner or later. Second, Gingrich has found a formula in the "debates" that seems to connect with GOP voters. I think attacking the media, which I regard as defensive and pathetic, works in a world where the mainstream media are regarded as agenda-driven, biased against center-right politics and personally against conservative favorites, like Sarah Palin. I think Gingrich's playing the media hypocrisy card is predictable and if and when he tries to use it against Obama in a general campaign, Obama will be ready for it. You cannot be predictable in real debates, versus whatever these things are. I absolutely guarantee that Obama's handlers are focus-group testing responses to Gingrich's predictable responses.
I was listening to Dennis Miller's podcasts, where Miller described Gingrich as the smartest guy in the room and one whom can put Obama in his place this fall. With all due respect, Gingrich is not even in Romney or Ron Paul's league. This is not to say that Romney hasn't made mistakes, even dumb mistakes. I have in the past purchased at least a couple of Gingrich books, and I am not impressed. If you read some of earlier commentaries this month--for example, where I'm talking about communitarianism or the issue this week of Internet freedom, I'm going to a level of discussion qualitatively beyond what Gingrich does. Gingrich has a PhD in history (his thesis was on the Congo)--not business and economics and certainly not the law, and from an academic perspective, his career was a failure: he failed to win tenure.
(As an aside, I will acknowledge that I never got tenure, but I never went up for tenure; I had one 3-year contracts and two 1-year contracts. It probably differs by school and context (e.g., the person at Bowling Green State who got the position I turned down reportedly won tenure in his fourth year there, while I was scrambling to find a one-year contract as a visiting professor; to this day, I have my own version of the Politics of Envy, academic style. As faithful readers know, I turned down BGSU because I was told I wouldn't have an opportunity to teach graduate classes. BGSU only offered one graduate MIS course, the core MBA course, and that was "owned" by some CIS textbook author and adjunct professor. ) In most programs I'm aware, you go up towards the end of a second 3-year contract. If you read that WSJ article about Gingrich's academic career, on the other hand, Gingrich is doing stuff which most junior professors like me would consider almost career suicidal. He was trying to start up an environmental studies program; to the best of my knowledge, he had no earned credentials in the field. He's applying to be President of the college in his first year, chairman of his department the second year; he's running unsuccessfully for Congress. I mean, I was putting in 70 hour weeks working on articles, new course preps, devising and grading computer assignments, etc.--I didn't have time to play university politics. Why in the world would I want to give senior faculty with a voice in my own tenure process motives against me (say, a WWII veteran history professor with his own eye on becoming department chairman). Gingrich, like Obama, pays too much attention to superficial surface details; Romney, on the other hand, is like a chess champion whom is thinking 8 moves ahead; he's the kind of guy whom not only can read the financial reports in detail, things that make Gingrich's and Obama's eyes glaze over; if you look at how he headed off liberal attempts to implement a version of HillaryCare in Massachusetts, it's brilliant, masterful political strategy: he even sold Ted Kennedy, whom was once his opposition in the 1994 Senate race, on his approach. Ted Kennedy spent decades trying to implement a single-payer system. I mean, conservatives have been arguing superficial points. I have differences with how Romney approaches certain issues, but seriously: if you asked me whom I would rather have dinner with, among Obama, Gingrich, or Romney, I would pick Romney (and I would ask him to invite Ron Paul). My positions on a number of issues are different than Romney's (take immigration and foreign policy, for instance.) But Gingrich? Seriously, Mr. Miller, you just haven't met very many smart people if you think he's the smartest guy in the room. Gingrich is a master of self-promotion, just like Barack Obama. He calls himself a "Reagan conservative", but Reagan was more of a libertarian-conservative than a neo-con like Gingrich. Gingrich is full of hubris, just like Barack Obama.
What do I like about Romney, even though he is hardly a libertarian? I think at heart he is a problem solver and a pragmatist. This doesn't mean an absence of principles; as a businessman, he knows how government impairs business/job growth. The question is how do you navigate through a minefield of divisive issues (either Democrat or Republican) to the nomination. When you're a change agent--like Romney--you are aware of bureaucratic inertia and resistance to change. You aren't going to reveal your cards until you're in the White House and maybe not even then. Look at what happened when Scott Walker started off with a much needed but radical reform; he all but poisoned the well of bipartisanship. I would have approached that situation differently, So Romney knows, for instance, that military conservatives are an important part of the GOP base. He knows that you're not going to close a $1.3T deficit by cherry-picking a few billion here or there. The Dems, of course, want to play rope-a-dope; they know every federal dollar has an angry vested interest behind it. Force the GOP to reveal what they're going to cut. Cut PBS subsidies? They'll make sure that Obama is filmed carrying a picket sign down Sesame Street. I mean, literally the year after the Democrats made cuts in Medicare (that's hubris--rather, they're balancing the funding for a new benefit off the backs of doctors and hospitals with ineffectual price controls), a New York Democrat takes over the seat in a GOP district by going after Paul Ryan's MODEST attempts to reform Medicare--not to fund another insolvent program but to make the existing system more sustainable.
So anyway, what was Palin's endorsement of Gingrich about? In my view--very easy to explain. It's all about how she sees herself and her family as victims of the largely liberal mainstream media. There have been a couple of people whom have gone into her personal life and written judgmental things about her, and she sees the way the press is going after Gingrich's personal life (and his marriages in particular) in sympathetic terms. The second reason is because at heart she's a populist and Gingrich is turning to anti-capitalism populism for tactical reasons: he would like nothing better than for people to see him as David taking on Romney's Goliath. Romney doesn't have billionaire Ross Perot, Michael Bloomberg or Donald Trump money, but he was able to guarantee his 2008 run for the GOP Presidential nomination using his own resources.
Going back to Dennis Miller's gullible insights on Gingrich (don't forget--Miller endorsed Cain before Cain's campaign imploded), he repeats verbatim Gingrich's "positive campaign" talking points. Gingrich was hardly Mr. Congeniality while in Congress; the Dems were looking for political payback when Gingrich was rebuked by the House on ethics charges (and shortly thereafter resigned). Very few people who served under Gingrich (the only one I know supporting Gingrich is JC Watts, a former Congressman) have endorsed him. Look for Gingrich to spin that as those Republicans are "part of the establishment", when in fact anyone who ever reached the position of Speaker of the House is certainly more establishment than a single-term governor.
What do I think is the big takeaway from the South Carolina primary? Economic uncertainty. I think the idea that the anti-Bain ads did was to raise uncertainty that Romney can create jobs and the opposition has tried to impeach Romney's claims as a job creator. (I fully expect Obama to pull some superficial stunt like distributing pink slips with Romney's signature on them.)
Romney needs to revamp his message by explaining the differences between running Bain Capital and the government. He needs to reset expectations of what the government can do and point out that making the tough decisions sooner than later may avoid the riots and other problems we are seeing in Greece, France and Great Britain. He needs to appeal to old-fashioned American values of hard work and self-reliance. He needs to fashion a JFK-style pro-growth message ("ask not what your country can do for you...") and contrast with Obama's philosophy ("Demand more things for the government to do for you.") He should also adapt Gingrich's tactics and use them against Gingrich.
Finally, on a personal note, what turned me off as a conservative Democrat was what the Democratic Party did to Judge Bork. I'm looking very carefully at what the GOP does here. It's highly unlikely that Gingrich will win the nomination: Romney's numbers across the board are better against Obama; Gingrich is running out of "debates" for Gingrich to bash moderators and toss in one-liners; Romney's campaign is better organized and financed, and he should do well in Florida and in next month's contests.
I think the Romney campaign is bottoming out; and he should regain his momentum after a win of Florida, although I expect that Gingrich will get some bounce out of South Carolina and some neighboring state vote.
But if somehow Gingrich manages to win the nomination, this blog will NOT support his election, and I will register as an independent; if Ron Paul makes an independent run, I will support him. I'm more interested in what Romney does than what he says, and I think any Republican who this week voted for "words, just words" did his country a disservice. This election is not about Gingrich's (or Obama's) massive ego. The future of our country is at stake, and 4 years of analysis paralysis with either Gingrich or Obama in the White House means that nothing will be resolved over the next 4 years. We need someone whom will solve problems and put America first. I will not sink with the Gingrich ship.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Doors, "Love Her Madly"
