2012 Presidential Election Year

The debate was into the second hour, and Mitt Romney had just played the Arlen Specter card against Rick Santorum, blaming Santorum’s 2004 endorsement of his fellow Pennsylvanian for the passage of Obamacare in 2010. Santorum responded by playing the Dukakis card against Romney. “Yes governor, you balanced the budget for four years,” Santorum told Romney during the Arizona debate televised by CNN. “You have a constitutional requirement to balance the budget for four years. No great shakes. I’m all for — I’d like to see it federally. But don’t go around bragging about something you have to do. Michael Dukakis balanced the budget for 10 years. Does that make him qualified to be president of the United States? I don’t think so.” As highlights go, it wasn’t spectacular, but Wednesday’s debate — the 20th nationally televised meeting of Republican candidates during this long campaign — was generally lacking in highlights. There were no dramatic gaffes or stumbles, and few memorable zingers. While the commentators on CNN afterwards offered their own “what did it mean” analyses, it is unlikely that the debate changed many minds. Newt Gingrich had arguably the best performance of the four finalists for the Republican nomination. CNN’s moderator John King was booed when he asked a question submitted by a viewer online: “Since birth control is the latest hot topic, which candidate believes in birth control, and if not, why?” This prompted Gingrich to lecture that “not once in the 2008 campaign, not once did anybody in the elite media ask why Barack Obama voted in favor of legalizing infanticide. … If we’re going to have a debate about who the extremist is on these issues, it is President Obama who, as a state senator, voted to protect doctors who killed babies who survived the abortion. It is not the Republicans.” The Republican audience in the Mesa Arts Center applauded, but the same “elite media” which ignored Obama’s record four years ago are also unlikely to make much of Gingrich’s strong debate performance. Gingrich thus did not “win” Wednesday’s debate in the same sense that he won the two debates that preceded the Jan. 21 South Carolina primary. Nor did any of the candidates “lose” Wednesday in the same sense that Gingrich lost the two debates preceding the Jan. 31 Florida primary. After Wednesday’s debate, CNN commentators tried to make the case that, because Santorum was not the clear winner, therefore Romney “won.” However, Santorum was all smiles in his post-debate interview with the network’s Gloria Borger, evidently feeling that, by not losing, he had scored a victory. It was Santorum’s first debate since he moved to the top of national polls following his Feb. 7 triple victories in Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri. According to the well-established precedent of this campaign cycle, whenever any non-Romney GOP candidate eclipses the former Massachusetts governor in the polls, he either stumbles in debates (Rick Perry), is devastated by scandal (Herman Cain) or is buried in attack ads by Romney, which was the fate suffered twice by Gingrich, first in Iowa and then again in Florida. Santorum committed no Perry-esque gaffes in Wednesday’s debate and seems unlikely to suffer a Cain-like scandal, which probably means that the Republican campaign from here out will be shaped less by TV debates than by TV advertising. And to secure the money necessary to fight Romney’s well-funded campaign in the ad wars, Santorum will be in Texas today for three fund-raising events before returning to the campaign trail Friday in Michigan, scene of next Tuesday’s closely-watched primary. Last night’s anti-climactic debate may, in fact, be the last GOP debate of the 2012 campaign. A scheduled March 1 debate in Atlanta was canceled after Romney pulled out. Another debate is scheduled March 19 in Portland, Ore., but Romney has not yet agreed to participate in that event and would probably only do so if it suits the interests of his own campaign. If Romney can win Michigan and Arizona next Tuesday, then leverage that momentum to do well in the “Super Tuesday” primaries March 6, it is difficult to see why he would give his rivals another shot at him in a TV debate. If Romney should then go on to clinch the nomination, some cynics will look back on the long series of debates and wonder whether it was all just a charade, a stage-managed TV show designed to create an illusion of excitement on the way to the predictable coronation of the Republican establishment’s favorite.

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Arizona Anti-Climax

Q: When can you be sure President Barack Obama is proposing a tax increase?

Mitt Romney’s campaign is essentially plastic and dishonest, an insuperable problem Wednesday’s debate in Mesa, Arizona, underscored yet again for disenchanted primary voters. Romney bested a rattled Rick Santorum in it, but this victory, like his others, looked hollow and dispiriting. One suspects that Romney’s low surrogates paid punks to enter the debate hall and loudly boo his opponents. Not that Santorum didn’t deserve a few. He blew it, exposing himself to repeated strikes from a Ron Paul-Mitt Romney pincer movement. Seated to Santorum’s right and left, Paul and Romney took turns needling him. If, as the saying goes, a candidate “who is explaining is losing,” then Santorum lost very badly. He kept getting entangled in the weeds of boring disputes from the past in which he had betrayed this or that conservative principle. Romney, at his most hypocritical, labored hard to present himself as more socially conservative than Santorum, noting that Rick had voted for Planned Parenthood funding. Astonishingly, Santorum missed his chance at a return upper cut. Why didn’t he mention that Romney once gave money to Planned Parenthood from his own pocket? Why didn’t he mention that Romneycare dollars go to Planned Parenthood? Romney’s sudden social conservatism invites an obvious question: How stupid does he think primary voters are? Romney’s con job here depends upon the amnesia of his audience. Here’s a politician who pled fealty to Roe v. Wade , voted for Democrat Paul Tsongas, and competed with Ted Kennedy as a champion of “gay rights.” By the way, Romney’s social conservatism didn’t even last for the whole debate. In the second hour of it, he indicated his support for women in combat. Meanwhile, an unmolested Newt Gingrich, freed from the pressures of “frontrunner status,” resumed his role as the commanding, Olympian overseer at GOP debates. He told CNN’s John King off again, demanding to know why he was peppering Republican candidates with gotcha questions about “birth control” when he and his pals in the press had never asked Barack Obama about his support for the killing of infants as a state senator in Illinois. After that scolding, a rebuffed King didn’t even bother to recapitulate the dumb question that he had initially teed up to the candidates. Newt’s tack here is exactly right. Why let a media of secularist bigots and the ghoulish party of Planned Parenthood dictate the terms of this race? Go on offense in the culture war, GOP. Remind Americans that the Democrats are the party of killing the unborn, some infants, the annoyingly disabled, and the inconvenient elderly. Remind Americans that Obama wanted elementary school students subjected to the sick sex ed propaganda of Planned Parenthood. Remind Americans that Obama is not at war with radical Islam but with orthodox Christianity. Isn’t it telling that the only time the Maureen Dowds speak of “mullahs” pejoratively is when they affix that label to Christians like Santorum? They speak darkly of conscientious Christians as “dangerous fanatics.” Never mind that most of the violence in America is coming from the abortion mills liberals champion and finance. Feminists on their second or third abortion are a lot scarier to me than homeschooling Christians. But let’s get back to the debate. Even as Romney took his mittens off and suckerpunched Santorum for earmarks Mitt himself supported — Romney remains the smarmy apple polisher who likes to narc on his misbehaving classmates — one could almost see strings attached to the reinvented Republican’s back. Romney is the semi-reformed RINO dummy of high-priced ventriloquists — a dummy whose words and robotic jerks come from the pushing and pulling of scummy strategists and pollsters who crawl along a corrupt corridor from Boston to D.C. His “Fortune 500″ campaign makes me sick. Is the GOP really going to nominate this fraud? The cheapness and inauthenticity of his campaign is too depressing for words. One small example of this dismal charade came early in the debate when Romney made an utterly random reference to “George Costanza.” Apparently, one of Romney’s oh-so-clever strategists told him to dispel his image as a nerd trapped in the 1950s by spicing up his answers with “hip” references. So what does Romney do? He cites, for no apparent reason, a character from a sitcom that went off NBC’s schedule over a decade ago.

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The Mittens Come Off in Mesa

WASHINGTON — There is another horripilation on the campaign trail. Someone has told a joke that has roused the virtue police. I am speaking of the virtue police, who are working for the grim forces of political correctitude. They do not find the joke very funny. The jokester is a supporter of Rick Santorum, and now he too is on the hot seat for it. Late last week his supporter, the amiable Foster Friess, perpetrated the joke. It went like this. “You know, back in my days, they’d use Bayer aspirin for contraceptives,” the easygoing multi-millionaire philanthropist told MSNBC. “The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.” Kaboom — all hell broke loose. According to the Washington Post , “the remark outraged women’s groups and many others.” Who would those “many others” be? Democrat campaign strategists? Stockholders in Bayer aspirin? Actually, I have not found anyone whom I know who gave the joke a second’s thought, and my confreres include members of the Concerned Women for America, scores of fellow bird watchers, and many people who use Bayer aspirin every day, particularly after reading the Washington Post . Actually, the Post would be on firmer ground if it had spoken merely of ” some women’s groups.” And let me add that even the complaints cited were pretty lame. I heard on CNN Friday some feminists gassing on about Friess’ joke, and they brought up Santorum’s response to it. Santorum said that it was a “bad joke” but that he was “not responsible for it….that is ‘gotcha’” politics. Well, it is preposterous “gotcha” politics. One of CNN’s feminists went on to say it was time for Santorum to “put on his big boy pants.” How cruel and insensitive is that! Since when do women remark on a man’s pants? What if Santorum cannot afford to buy a pair of “big boy” pants? Then the Democrats pivoted from Friess’ joke to the question of contraception. They are going to make an issue in this campaign of contraception! Allegedly the Republicans are against contraception. Truth be known, I cannot recall any election ever in American history that revolved around the issue of contraception. If the Democrats are going to continue at this infantile level, I would respond by accusing them of wanting to outlaw the passenger car in favor of returning America to the era of the buckboard. “Why, Mr. Obama, do you want us to return to the horse and buggy?” There is plenty of evidence that leading Democrats hate the passenger car. What is all this talk about bullet trains and mass transportation, if not a not-so-subtle call for the return of the horse and buggy? Yet to return to the matter of Friess’ so-called bad joke, I think I first heard it decades ago. As I recall, it was rather amusing then but not a knee slapper. If it left women fuming I never noticed. The joke did not have a long life. Now it is hurtful and cruel, so the women of the fevered brow tell us, while commenting on Santorum’s pants. Friess has amusingly noted on his blog: “To all those who took my joke as a modern day approach I deeply apologize and seek your forgiveness. My wife constantly tells me I need new material — she understood the joke but didn’t like it anyway — so I will keep that old one in the past where it belongs.” “Seek your forgiveness”? I think he is again joshing us. Foster Friess is an interesting man. He has spent millions of dollars around the world in disaster relief: in water projects in Malawi, in the Indonesian tsunami, in the 2010 Haitian earthquake. He has won dozens of awards for his philanthropy. In politics too he has been active. Now he is a major backer of Santorum. In 2008 he thought that the social issues got short shrift and so he invested his own money to allow those who articulate them a say in the public debate. He is a Christian and thinks that people of faith have much to offer the public discourse. I do too. Santorum’s presence in this campaign is one of the campaign’s surprises. He is making a race of it, and the rumor in Washington is that Obama is getting ready. Soon he may have to defend his position on the bullet train and his opposition to the passenger car. I should like to grill him on it and raise the question, “Mr. President, why are you so enamored of the horse and buggy? Do you think they are safe? Who will clean up the streets?” In the meantime I am reassured that Friess is going to remain amiable. Someone has got to hazard a joke during Campaign 2012. It is the civilized thing to do, even if the women of the fevered brow want to talk about Rick Santorum’s pants.

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Foster Friess’ Joke

Focusing and sharpening his economic policy yesterday, Mitt Romney released his comprehensive tax reform plan which substantially cuts marginal tax rates without falling prey to the deficits-don’t-matter syndrome which has come to typify many Republicans these days. Both supply-siders and budget hawks will applaud this new initiative. He manages a walk down the supply side spurring economic growth while honoring his inner deficit hawk. “The right way forward is a flatter, fairer, simpler tax system that generates the revenue we need to fund a smaller government that is restrained to its historical size,” said Romney. At the heart of Governor Romney’s tax plan are permanent, across-the-board 20 percent cuts in marginal tax rates while limiting deductions, exemptions and credits for higher income Americans to insure revenue-neutrality. As reported by John Harwood for CNBC.com, Glenn Hubbard, Romney’s top economic advisor, said the plan would cut all six current tax brackets –10, 15, 25, 28, 33, and 35 percent (depending on the taxpayer’s income) — by the same proportion of 20 percent. This yields new brackets of 8, 12, 20, 22.4, 26.4, and 28 percent. “It’s a marginal rate cut for every American,” claims Hubbard. Hubbard, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, is now dean of Columbia University’s business school. The Romney plan will also maintain the current 15 percent rate on income from qualified dividends and capital gains but will cut taxes further for lower- and middle-income citizens with annual incomes below $200,000. In addition, it abolishes the Death Tax, i.e., inheritance tax, and repeals the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) for both individuals as well as corporations. The proposal also calls for reducing the current 35 percent corporate tax rate, one of the highest in the industrial world, to a very competitive 25 percent. It makes permanent the R&D tax credit as a spur to innovation for both manufacturing and non-manufacturing businesses. Following the lead of Japan and the United Kingdom, Romney would also switch to a territorial tax system, just like most of Europe, restoring American competitiveness in the global market place and encouraging domestic investment of foreign profits. Again, Glenn Hubbard contrasts Romney’s plan, favorably, with President Obama’s “full-throttle attack on multinationals.” Hubbard also took the opportunity to critique Senator Santorum’s tax plan, reports Harwood, for dramatically expanding the budget deficit and, given its differential or zero tax rate for manufacturing, results in “significant capital misallocation.” “Net-net, it’s a job destroyer, not a job creator,” said Hubbard. This is a serious policy issue which should be developed further in the course of the campaign. This supply-side tax proposal should also be viewed in tandem with Governor Romney’s to reduce federal spending to 20 percent of GDP by 2016, which he estimates will require $500 billion of non-defense cuts. This, according to Hubbard, is one of three different revenue streams that would keep this tax proposal revenue-neutral along with “dynamic” economic growth from its supply-side effects and additional income resulting from “base broadening” stemming from limiting deductions while lowering the marginal tax rates. Full disclosure: This writer is a Romney supporter and, as a former fan of the late Congressman Jack Kemp, applauds this new tax proposal as both good politics and even better policy. The Governor is a very convincing budget hawk, but he was losing the initiative on growth and supply-side tax reform while Senator Santorum and Speaker Gingrich proposed pain-free tax cuts that were largely indifferent to their deficit consequences. Mitt Romney’s supply-side tax cuts are reality-based in that they can be reconciled with fiscal responsibility, which is one thing the Tea Party has taught the Republican Party to take seriously once again.

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Mitt Takes a Walk on the Supply Side

Those self-appointed guardians of world culture, the international functionaries at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in Paris, surely know that popular folklore story, the Tar-Baby. It figures in over 200 tales in societies of all races, ancient and modern, from West Africa to South America and Asia. In America it was told most memorably by Joel Chandler Harris in his Uncle Remus yarn about Br’er Rabbit, the cottontail entrapped by Br’er Fox with a sticky doll made of tar and turpentine. In all versions it is a cautionary tale about the danger of tacky situations that only get worse and entangling the more they are grappled with. As a bearer of universal, age-old wisdom, it is worthy of being included in UNESCO’s famous list of the world’s intangible heritage, right along with, say, Sbek Thom Khmer shadow theatre and the Mongol Biyelgee. But whimsical folk tales are one thing, harsh reality is another. Now UNESCO is struggling to detach itself from a real-life Tar-Baby. It takes the form of the $3 million Obiang Nguema Mbasogo International Prize for Research in the Life Sciences, set up by UNESCO with his money in 2008. For those who may not have seen ” The United Nations’ Rogue Agency ” in the February American Spectator , the story to date: The donor, President Obiang, is the brutal dictator of a tiny, oil-rich African nation, Equatorial Guinea — the 11th most corrupt country in the world, according to the 2011 corruption index kept by Transparency International. His colossal personal fortune makes him one of the world’s richest rulers. Sensing that some cynics might see impropriety in this, since his countrymen get by on about $1 dollar a day, he sought to whitewash his image by having UNESCO name a prize for him. Lured by this $3 million Tar-Baby, the organization readily accepted Br’er Obiang’s money four years ago. Many countries, including the U.S., opposed the prize. Senator Patrick Leahy, for one, has warned Director General Irina Bokova that “It is likely that the $3 million prize itself was the product of corruption or theft from the public treasury,” and said it was a serious mistake for UNESCO to associate itself with Obiang. Nobel laureates and human rights defenders around the world also protested. Belatedly realizing its mistake, an embarrassed UNESCO clumsily suspended the prize and began trying to get the tar off its hands. It did what bureaucracies usually do: it created a committee to discuss the problem. Meanwhile, investigations in the U.S. and France make clear just how compromisingly sticky UNESCO’s Tar-Baby is. As long ago as 2004, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations began looking into President Obiang’s financial dealings in the U.S. It found that he and close family members controlled tens of millions of petrodollars in American banks. In 2010, it issued a 325-page report zeroing in on how his prodigal playboy son, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, known as Teodorin, moved more than $100 million into the U.S. Not one to put his cash into mousy savings accounts, he laundered it via shell companies with names like Beautiful Vision and Sweet Pink, and spent it on trinkets like a $30 million compound in Malibu, where he had attended Pepperdine University. Last October the Justice Department went to court to seize some $70 million of his U.S. assets including the mansion, a Gulfstream jet, luxury cars, and a million dollars worth of Michel Jackson memorabilia. Could a United Nations agency like UNESCO not have known the kind of people it was partnering with? Or that in France, the organization’s home turf, investigating magistrates have been looking into Obiang’s brimming bank accounts and luxury assets, suspecting that they result from embezzlement, money-laundering, and other misuse of public funds? (He’s in good company: also suspected are his dodgy African neighbors, Congo’s President Denis Sassou Nguesso, and Gabon’s late President Omar Bongo Ondimba.) In 2010, a French appeals court authorized the investigations involving the three heads of state and their relatives. Relatives like Teodorin. Imagine then UNESCO’s chagrin when last September French police raided Teodorin’s six-story, 5,000-square-foot Paris mansion on Avenue Foch and towed away 11 cars from its garages and cobbled courtyard, including a Maserati, a Porsche Carrera, an Aston Martin and a Mercedes Maybach. Also two Bugatti Veyrons, the most expensive and fastest street car in the world, costing over $1 million apiece. But the tenacious French investigators hadn’t finished. The cops returned February 14 with a moving van and emptied the mansion of Rodin statues and other baubles worth an estimated $24 million. Equatorial Guinea’s local lawyer sputtered that the building benefits from diplomatic immunity. Indeed, President Obiang only last October named his son deputy permanent representative to –what else? — UNESCO, obviously intending to give him immunity from corruption charges. That’s unlikely to wash with French authorities. That UNESCO teams up with such strange bedfellows does not seem to worry the Obama Administration. For months it has been trying to get Congress to waive or change the law, dating from the 1990s, that obliged the U.S. to cut off funding to any UN agency that admitted the Palestinian Authority as a full member, as UNESCO provocatively did last October. Now the State Department has quietly included some $79 million in its new budget to cover its UNESCO contribution for FY 2013. “The President has also articulated quite clearly that he would like a waiver to allow us to participate in UNESCO,” said Thomas Nides, Deputy Secretary

Freedom Betrayed : Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath

Last week I happened to be attending a conference at a Midwestern medical school. Everywhere one looked there were smartly dressed female students. Many were of Asian descent, naturally, but not all. Every so often I came across a young man skulking across campus, but the males were made all the more conspicuous by their scarcity. I made a point of peeking into a few of the auditorium-sized classrooms. Again, a sea of young women. Now perhaps the males were having a mass skip day, or it could be that like a lot of men I tend to filter out the guys and tend only to notice the young gals. (Unlikely though, since I only have eyes for my beautiful wife.)