Perry

SUMMARY

Rick Perry is most famous for embarrassing himself by condemning federal spending and then begging Obama for stimulus money to balance his own budget, cover unemployment, fight wildfires and the swine flu, and keep up with all that federal pork in Texas. But there is so much more. An intellectual featherweight, he couldn’t even handle the almost-ceremonial job of Texas Governor without getting into incredible amounts of trouble: gerrymandering, endless vetoes, threats to kill the entire school budget, stealing elections with illegal donations, trying to hide the paperwork on millions of dollars worth of foreign trips, taking a bribe to approve cancer treatments, blocking health care for teachers, firing people who proved he executed an innocent man, trying to give away huge amounts of money to road builders, and gambling millions on an insurance firm that collapsed. According to polls, if he ran for the White House, he would be crushed even in the Texas primary.

DETAILS

Another name which has bounced around as a potential presidential candidate is Rick Perry – Limbaugh and Bill Kristol want him to run, and so a lot of other conservative hardliners, including a few refugees from the Gingrich campaign, and some Texas donors -- he has strong fund-raising skills. Carolina Republicans want him in, and Iowa Republicans want him on the candidate bus tour there. One thing that might impel him into the race is the obviously weak field; another issue is his hatred of Romney, who allegedly used his position as RGA chief to deny Perry money in a gubernatorial race. However, in his own home state he polls at 4 percent for the presidential nomination, and  one poll indicated that Republicans don't want him to run, so he has his work cut out for him.

If Perry runs, he will try to run on his record. Unfortunately, under his tenure Texas faces a budget deficit of around $27 billion, Texas ranks 45th in high school graduation and dead last in percentage of the population which has health insurance, and his claim of job creation is belied by the fact that he had to use Obama's stimulus money to do it.

The stimulus issue would blow up in his face pretty terribly if he ran. He tried to portray himself as the enemy if Big Gummint, condemning the stimulus bill, complaining that the federal government was so oppressive that Texas should leave the Union. Hell no to federal money. Then he had to turn around and beg Obama for help with the swine flu epidemic, and then stimulus money to cover the Texas deficit, and then federal help with the wildfires, and of course the gobs of federal money Texas gets for the Johnson Space Center, all the military bases, the 800 federal buildings that employ thousands of Texans, the 15 national parks in Texas…..He managed to get slammed for rejecting Obama's help with unemployment money, and then slammed again for flipflopping and taking the money. And behind our backs he used eleven million dollars in stimulus money to fix up his mansion.

Oddly, former rival Kay Bailey Hutchison tried to back up Perry in whining for federal money: “I see a bias in this administration against Texas….I do see it in this administration absolutely. We didn’t get the help on the wildfires that any other state would have gotten. We had to fight hard for our education money.” Which is, of course, hogwash.

Here's Perry comparing Obama to the Pharaoh and trying to check the economic-extremism box and the religious-extremism box all in one statement: "I think in America from time to time we have to go through some difficult times — and I think we’re going through those difficult economic times for a purpose, to bring us back to those Biblical principles of you know, you don’t spend all the money. You work hard for those six years and you put up that seventh year in the warehouse to take you through the hard times. And not spending all of our money. Not asking for Pharaoh to give everything to everybody and to take care of folks because at the end of the day, it’s slavery. We become slaves to government."

PS under Rick "I Hate Obama's Federal Spending" Perry, Texas is building a health care exchange under Obamacare, using $1 million in HHS money. You’re welcome!

Perry got a bachelor’s in animal science at Texas A&M. As we know from watching Bush for eight years, you don’t need to be a genius to be Texas governor since the job is practically ceremonial. Even Fox news admits that “Perry has a reputation as a policy lightweight” and lobbyists and legislators have taken advantage of him a number of times. He gave $20 million to an insurance firm, Countrywide, which promised to create jobs; instead it cut jobs and then collapsed.He tried to give away huge tracts of Texas territory to a private firm to build a toll road running from Oklahoma to Mexico, and the firm would get to keep the toll proceeds.

Perry is a darling of the tea party because he is an extremist. He supports intelligent design; rejects global warming; and blocked health care for teachers. He is a hard-core opponent of abortion and signed a bill forcing pregnant women to look at sonograms before having the procedure. He wants to eliminate income tax and pass tort reform; he wants to let states withdraw from the Social Security and Medicaid programs, which would destroy the programs; he cut billions from children’s support services; he supported Texas’ anti-gay law; he advocated secession which even Kay Bailey Hutchison ridiculed. His anti-environmental record is so awful that Texas pollutes more than any other state. Even with a yahoo conservative legislature he set an all-time record in the use of vetoes; he tried to play chicken with the legislature by vetoing the entire public-school budget. As he woos the party base, he will downplay the fact that he began political life as a Democrat and campaigned for Gore in 1988, and that he signed the Texas DREAM Act, allowing illegals to go to college.

And he's a crook. He won his 2006 race by means of an illegal million-dollar donation that led to a lawsuit; Perry was forced to pay $426,000. He gerrymandered district borders to give the Republicans more House seats. He approved cervical cancer vaccinations but only because the drug firm paid him off and gave his aide a lobbying job. He approved the execution of retarded prisoners, and fired officials who proved he executed an innocent man. He spent more than a million taxpayer dollars on foreign trips and vacations and tried to hide the expenses from the public.

Huckabee

 Huckabee’s withdrawal from the 2012 race changes the contest in many ways. First, his departure may accelerate the entry of archconservatives like Palin and Bachmann eager to scoop up his supporters and claim his mantle as social-conservative leader and head tea bagger. Also someone will try to claim his role as the anti-Romney: Huckabee despises Romney. Also, Huckabee’s endorsement is worth a ton. Also he could shoot for the VP slot on the ticket, from the sidelines. Most of all, Huckabee’s departure will force Republican leaders, to the extent that there are any, to try to pick a frontrunner, from one of four options: support one of the only two candidates who polls within 13 points of Obama right now, Romney and Paul; try to build support for one of the small fry like Huntsman or Pawlenty; try to repair the damaged reputations of Palin or Gingrich; or try to recruit someone like Giuliani.

There is a fair chance that Huckabee is setting himself up for a run in 2016. In 2016 he would still only be 61. Arch-conservatives groups like the Club For Growth, who actually think he’s too liberal, may have lost power by then. There will be no Obama in his way, no Romney, no Gingrich: only a handful of relative unknowns. In the speech closing the door on the 2012 campaign, he stressed that he could have run strong had he gotten into the race; in the same speech he explicitly said he would do the same thing that Nixon did in the 1960s, to retain his political relevance and pave the way for a comeback, namely helping other Republicans: “I will gladly continue doing what I do and helping others in their campaigns for Congress, governorships, and other positions.” If he does run in 2016, count on him to launch in Iowa, where they love him; he began his book-signing tour there, and the first chapter of his book was entitled “I Love Iowa”. A 2016 race would still pose problems: he would face the deep scrutiny he didn’t get in 2008 when his race was over almost before it started, and his credentials as a social conservative are not matched in economic or national-security areas. And some conservatives are suspicious of him.

Despite Huckabee’s quite conservative beliefs, he would indeed have come under fire from conservatives if he had run. The arch-conservative Club For Growth declared war on Huckabee, claiming he spent too much and taxed too much in Arkansas. Also, some of the prisoners who sentences he commuted turned out to be seriously bad seeds: one of them murdered four policemen, and another raped and murdered two women, one of them pregnant. For some, Huckabee was actually too liberal, despite his very conservative views.

We forget that Huckabee is a professional preacher, a man who is way to the right on social issues: he sought a constitutional ban on abortions, wants to post the ten commandments in schools and impeach judges to bar legislature prayers to Jesus, advocated tax credits for Christian schooling, doesn’t believe in evolution, and advocated concealed-carry legislation. He claimed that our “culture of life” separates us from Islamic fascists: in other words, the pro-choice movement is equivalent to al-Qa’ida. He slammed Natalie Portman for giving birth before marriage, after giving Bristol Palin a free pass for doing the same thing. He also wants a fifty percent increase in military spending, and insisted Obama was born in Kenya.

Huckabee rejects moderation: “Throw the social conservatives, the pro-life, pro-family people overboard and the Republican party will be as irrelevant as the Whigs....They'll basically be a party of gray-haired old men sitting around the country club puffing cigars, sipping brandy and wondering whatever happened to the country. That will be the end of the party."

Huckabee went public with his views that gays are like addicts and molesters, a dangerous health risk: he advocated putting HIV patients in concentration camps. Huckabee on same-sex marriage: “You don’t go ahead and accommodate every behavioral pattern that is against the ideal. That would be like saying, well, there are a lot of people who like to use drugs, so let’s go ahead and accommodate those who want who use drugs. There are some people who believe in incest, so we should accommodate them. There are people who believe in polygamy, so we should accommodate them.”

Huckabee on gay adoption: “I think this is not about trying to create statements for people who want to change the basic fundamental definitions of family. And always we should act in the best interest of the children, not in the seeming interest of the adults. Children are not puppies. This is not a time to see if we can experiment and find out, how does this work?”

Likewise fiscal issues: Huckabee wants to keep Bush’s tax cuts, flatten the tax structure and block bankruptcies, both of which would devastate the middle class, and reject the Kyoto carbon effort. Huckabee implies that Obama would have killed Ted Kennedy. "In fact, listen to what I said. It was actually a tribute to Senator Kennedy and an observation that he did what Americans would want to do: follow the best health care advice that they can find. And we don't want the government telling us to go home and take a pain pill and die. When diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at age 77, Senator Kennedy didn't do as President Obama suggested and take a pain pill and ride it home. He did what most of us would do or want to do. He went to the very best medical facilities in the world, had surgery, and sought to live as long and as strong as possible."

Daniels

Mitch Daniels acquired an impressive amount of baggage, for such a short time in the limelight. The big one, to my mind, is that he was Bush’s budget director. During his tenure the government racked by some of the biggest deficits in the history of the planet; he was criticized for turning a $200 billion surplus into a $400 billion deficit, all within his 29-month stretch at the OMB, and his insistence that the Iraq war would only cost $60 billion was off by about a trillion. Incredibly he blames the whole budget thing on the dotcom bust; at least the last disastrous budget guy, David Stockman, had the good manners to hang his head and admit that the Reagan budgets were idiotic, but Daniels is still laboring under the delusion that the emperor is still clothed. He still speaks at length about budget issues, as though he had actual credibility.

Other factors working against him:

·         His Indiana track record. He attacked Planned Parenthood and union collective bargaining rights, which would make him stronger in the primaries but fatally weak in the general.

·         In Indiana he demanded a tax increase that was so sloppily handled that the legislature threw the idea in the trash; eventually it emerged that the tax increase was never necessary. Also he admitted that nationally taxes may need to be increased.

·         Health care. Daniels implemented Obama’s health plan and took the money for it, all while advocating repeal; he supported mandates, supported universal coverage, signed a law keeping children on their parent’s plans until age 24, required Medicaid to expand eligibility, required hospital error reporting, raised cigarette taxes to pay for health care, and crowded private insurers out of the market according to critics.

·         He called for a truce on social issues, promising to “take the venom” out of political debate and “show respect for our opponent”, which will not sell in Iowa or South Carolina, for example; people like Santorum were already slapping him around for being insufficiently wingnutty.

·         He’s not an intellectual giant. Like many governors he’s weak on national issues, and he admitted openly that he’s probably not prepared to debate Obama on foreign policy.

If he had run, I could hear the Romney ads now: “Mitch Daniels, budget buster, wants to increase your taxes, wants to surrender on social issues, and what’s up with the wife and the drugs?” Daniels once said he wants Condi Rice as his running mate, presumably because he’s clueless on global issues. Despite all this, desperate Republicans wanted Daniels to run: Barbour was pestering him, the GOP media worshipped him, and even Cafferty on CNN said Daniels was the only Republican with a chance to beat Obama, which is rather incredible since Daniels polled a toxic 14 points behind Obama.

Trump

Trump has quit the race, continuing his poor record of finishing what he starts. Trump inherited his father’s empire, and led it immediately into debt, bankruptcy, and SEC investigations about lying to investors. In his “comeback” he established a track record of building “I-Love-Me” Trump towers with unsold units in overbuilt areas -- and a pile of lawsuits and a second trip to bankruptcy court. His “Trump University” was sued and investigated for defrauding its students: he was forced to drop the word “University”. His other interests are professional wrestling, beauty pageants, showing off his business “talents” on TV, and cheating on his wife. The man’s a career liar and a career crook, with no capacity for handling large amounts of money. So he was a perfect fit for the Republican party: too bad he quit!

The Vice-Presidency

Obviously it is abnormally early to think about running mates, but there is something to be said for putting a bit more thought into the Number Twos. Slopping vetting gave us John Edwards: what if Edwards, cheating on his cancer-stricken wife, fathering a baby, and possibly committing financial irregularities, had become vice president in 2004, or president or attorney general in 2008? Cover-ups, impeachment? Doing a more thorough job might have spared us Joe Lieberman, Dan Quayle, or Dick Cheney, who was given the job of picking the running mate and anointed himself.

Joe Biden will be 70 next year, and Obama no longer needs Biden to lend him gravitas, if indeed he ever did. So there are many options: Hillary; whose favorables are 23 points ahead of Biden’s; also Kathy Sebelius, Bill Nelson, one of the Virginia Democrats, Schweitzer, or possibly someone else who could run well for president in 2016.

But my wild-card pick to run with Obama would be…Charlie Crist. Politically Crist is not far from where Obama stands. Crist supported Obama on the stimulus plan, he vetoed GOP budget cuts, he wants to cut pollution, he opposes offshore drilling, he fought against insurance companies, he fought for a compromise health-care plan, he has good relations with the black community, he supports civil unions but not gay adoption, his staff was reaching out to moderates, he appointed both moderate and conservative judges. He does have conservative positions on capital punishment, “partial-birth abortion”, the Defense Of Marriage Act, school vouchers, school prayer and concealed-carry, but are these issues insurmountable?

The Republicans will be tricky to forecast this time. Will they try to balance the ticket, with a hardcore tea drinker paired up with a more boring fiscal conservative? At least one must be a Tea Party fan: last time the arch-conservatives felt that (a) McCain wasn’t pure enough, and that (b) he must be counterbalanced with someone trusted by the far right, which is why McCain was forced to go with Palin rather than someone who was actually fit for office like Ridge.

One candidate I would be wary of is Thune. Thune twisted arms in the Senate, to get his hands a bunch of stuff which would have been better left undone. Such as: provisions supporting ethanol, to help South Dakota farmers, even though it is really stupid policy; language supporting wind-power, to help his hometown; a crooked $2 billion deal for the crooked railroads he used to lobby for; forcing an amendment to a troop support bill so that the folks back in South Dakota can enjoy concealed-carry gun rights; saving an unnecessary air force base in South Dakota. "I've said all along that I'm going to play whatever cards I have to get the best possible outcome I can for my base." If you’re from South Dakota, or one of Thune’s crooked paymasters, or a nut with a gun, or someone who hates gays, or hates women’s rights, Thune is your pal. For the rest of us, who want good honest policy, not so much.

Desperate Republicans have been talking up Jeb Bush, but Bush isn’t interested in the presidency itself, and the electorate isn't interested in him: a spring 2011 poll shows Bush losing by 20 to Obama, and that was before the bin Laden raid. Bush’s baggage includes the Schiavo case and far-right views on school vouchers, affirmative action, library funding and tort reform. The leftwing blogosphere is hollering about his alleged links to Miguel Recarey who was apparently nailed for Medicare fraud. So far the rest of the media has steered clear of that issue, but if we were using the Jeremiah-Wright-Bill-Ayers guilt-by-association rules….Could Bush turn Florida red, as vice presidential nominee?

Another prospect who is very popular with speculators is Rubio. He's been in the Senate for a few months, he has an incredibly thin resume, and he's a Cheney guy. Some Republicans think he could help in Florida and with Latinos, but he is really too inexperienced.

Another name that has been floated is Pataki. Good luck: the Cato Institute calls him a big spender, he's pro-choice, he likes gay marriage, he signed a comprehensive health care plan; he also signed big cuts in taxes and education.

 

Giuliani

SUMMARY

Mister Noun-Verb-911’s record on 911 is actually terrible: even after the first World Trade Center attack he ignored the threat of a new Islamic terror attack, gave firemen the same radios that failed the first time, and put his emergency site right in the WTC even though it was a known terror target; he botched the 911 response, lied about his incompetent actions which killed firefighters, lied about his efforts at Ground Zero, and treated the victims’ families, policemen and firefighters like dirt. Meanwhile, he also lied about his anti-crime efforts, lied about his deficits and tax cuts and theft of pension money, lost more than thirty lawsuits trying to silence critics, violated the law by working to get a prosecutor fired in a case he was defending, hired criminals to work for the city, hired smearmongers for his political team and crafted a smear campaign against Hillary Clinton, was forced to take his name out of the running for senior posts because of scandals, and has a record of infidelity that is almost as embarrassing as Newt’s.

DETAILS

In case anyone is serious about drafting Rudy, here is a short and incomplete list of the potential issues. Giuliani…

• Put the Office of Emergency Management headquarters at the WTC even though it was a known terror target, and placed diesel tanks there which helped the facility burn down
• Gave firemen the same radios that failed during the first WTC attack, which killed many firefighters, and then he lied about it
• Botched the air-quality issue at Ground Zero, and failed to protect the firemen
• Allowed turf wars and corruption to slow the 911 response
• Admitted lying about how much time he spent at Ground Zero
• Ignored the threat from Islamic extremists even after the first WTC attack
• Claimed to be a terrorism expert but had no idea who bin Laden was
• Shut victims’ families out of the effort to design the 911 memorial; eventually he had to limit his appearances in New York because of protests from victims’ families, police and firefighters
• Hired a number of criminals for senior positions
• Threw poor families in the street so big corporations could launch development efforts
• Indulged in racial profiling and angered much of the city for his support of the NYPD after the Amadou Diallo shooting
• Tried so often to restrict free speech against his opponents that he lost 35 lawsuits on that one issue alone
• Claimed credit for a drop in New York crime which actually began before he took office
• Claimed credit for an anti-Mafia strategy which was actually launched by a Cornell professor
• Created gigantic deficits with rash tax cuts and raids on pension funds, and then was caught lying about it; the next mayor, Bloomberg, was forced take extraordinary measures to save the city from collapse
• Said with a straight face, “Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.”
• Went to work for polluters, Big Tobacco, and the drug firm that was caught lying about Oxycontin; used his political muscle to get a U.S. attorney fired so he couldn’t pursue the drug case, which Giuliani absolutely should have gone to jail for
• Has no experience in national issues
• Admitted ignorance about North Korea’s nuclear arms program
• Wants to ban late-term abortion, opposes same-sex marriage, supports school vouchers, supports torture, supports school prayer, supports putting the Ten Commandments in schools, and promises to appoint Scalia-like judges to the bench
• Hired a political consulting team known for racist smear attacks
• Admitted crafting a Senate campaign strategy which was based on repeated dishonest attacks against Hillary Clinton
• Made grandiose projections for 2008 campaign fundraising which fell short by 70 million
• Was caught in a series of scandals which forced him to take his name out of consideration for a Senate seat and then for DHS chief
• Was forced to annul his first marriage because he married his first cousin; dumped his second wife via a press conference rather than break the news in person -- he was having an affair with the woman who would become his third wife.

To gauge how impractical this idea is: Giuliani is pro-choice; he personally opposes abortion but doesn't want it criminalized. Try selling that to the wingnuts in Iowa, Carolina, the Super Tuesday states....It is reported that if he runs he will gamble all his chips on New Hampshire, just as he did during his doomed effort to take the Florida primary in 2008.

Christie

SUMMARY

Chris Christie has an incredibly short, thin career, and he has even that only because he was one of Bush’s money boys and was rewarded with a U.S. Attorney job he wasn’t qualified for. In a very short time his career has been blotted from one end to the other with crooked contract deals, illegal prosecutions, defamation suits, ruined careers, violated campaign promises, fired whistleblowers, fingerpointing, acts of million-dollar incompetence, hard-nosed scrutiny from House investigators, a whupping from a state court for stealing from school budgets and lying about it, and an effort to throw a Senate election by issuing a frivolous subpoena against a political enemy. Obama would just love to run against him.

DETAILS

Chris Christie has only been in the governor’s chair since early 2010, and has already added an amazing amount of baggage to his track record.

He won a local election by lying so egregiously about his opponents that they sued for defamation; a key county employee also sued for defamation. He was so controversial that he was primaried out of office by another Republican; Christie sued for defamation.

He then worked as a lobbyist, blocking regulations against fraud and other corporate skullduggery.

Despite having very little legal experience he got a job as U.S. Attorney by fundraising for Bush and getting a boost from Karl Rove; as U.S. Attorney he came under fire for giving no-bid contracts and legal breaks to relatives and allies, to campaign donors, and to one prosecutor who had declined to prosecute Christie’s crooked brother. One of his violations ruined the career of Michele Brown, an assistant U.S. Attorney. The House Judiciary Committee had to drag him in for questioning; Christie showed up, but then ignored the direction of the committee and ran out on the hearings. The same Committee investigated his use of the court monitor system, and shortly thereafter the Justice Department changed the court-monitor rules to prevent corruption. His tenure as U.S. Attorney was also marred by the illegal use of entrapment and cellphone tracking; the ACLU had to go after him.

He tried to rig a senatorial election by issuing a frivolous subpoena to a Democratic Senator just before the election.

He campaigned on protecting the pensions of police and firemen, and then violated an agreement and cut their pensions as governor, which led to a lawsuit.

He cost New Jersey $400 million in education grants by fouling up the grant application, and then tried to blame Obama for his own mistakes, and fired the official who blew the whistle on him. The New Jersey Education Association publicly slapped down Christie for rejecting a compromise with the unions, which contributed to the mess. Finally he was slapped down by the state supreme court for trying to steal money from poor schools and give property-tax breaks which would disproportionately help the rich. And deceiving the Court in the process.

He essentially proposed to end Medicaid in his state by lowering the eligibility threshold to around $5000 in income.

All this is why he has a net disapproval number in the polling in his own home state.

Cain

Herman Cain: if pizza is a major campaign issue, he has a chance. Otherwise, he knows nothing. Some concerns....

He candidly admits he’s an ignoramus on foreign affairs: “I'm working real hard on understanding heads of state, on other countries around the world, being able to pronounce their names properly. Being able to have their proper title when I talk about them in that context. Yes, that is an area that I have not focused on because when I was doing my radio show, foreign affairs didn't come up that often in terms of what my listeners wanted.” He drew a total blank on a key Israel issue -- “Right of return?” – and he admitted he has no idea what to do about the war in Afghanistan.

He was hollering in May about making people reread the Constitution, and then proceeded to reel off quotes from the Constitution, which are actually from the Declaration of Independence. Later he started hollering about who, under the Constitution, controls bankruptcy laws, and got it completely wrong. Thus endeth the history lesson.

He wants to cut corporate tax rates, return to the gold standard, “reform” Social Security, ban abortion, repeal Obamacare, ban same-sex marriage, and impose the suicidally impractical Fair Tax.

He won’t appoint a Muslim to high office because Muslims allegedly want to impose sharia law, although he is now parsing his statement and allowing that he might hire a Muslim if they took a McCarthy-style loyalty oath, which he would not demand of members of other faiths. He also wails publicly that legal immigrant students could be attackers-to-be, and claims Obama was raised in Kenya.

He called Planned Parenthood “a planned genocide…to kill black babies.”

He is 65 and has already battled advanced cancer.

It is difficult to see how the GOP is going to pivot from years of race-baiting, to backing a black pizza guy. It would require an entire change in mentality and strategy. And against Cain, Obama could put some of the south in play.

Paul

Ron Paul is a gay-bashing racist who loves Ayn Rand, psycho rightwing militias and Pat Buchanan, and who sued Bill Clinton for winning the Kosovo War the wrong way; he despises women, hates immigrants, hates Native Americans. In his eyes, FEMA is unconstitutional: if you’re a flood victim, too bad. Also unconstitutional: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. He wants to shut down the Federal Reserve, VA hospitals, the IRS, and a number of cabinet departments. His tax policy is bizarre. He supports DOMA and the gold standard; he proposes to solve our deficit problems by selling the gold in Fort Knox. He wants to pull out of Iraq, Afghanistan and any other military conflict; he wants to pull out of NATO, which is fighting in Afghanistan, and the WTO. He opposes affirmative action, Roe v Wade, the Civil Rights Act, support for Israel, the Cuba embargo, the Patriot Act, the War On Drugs. And if he wants to make all of this cataclysmic change happen, he’d need to hurry, because he’d be in his eighties by the end of his first term.

Ron Paul is supported by a wild band of internet freaks and donors, and he has field operatives in Iowa already, but his electoral history is spotty: he has run as a Libertarian, and even in Texas he has struggled to hold his House seat. A lot of his support comes from people who are independent of the party base. And this campaign did not get off to an auspicious start: Paul launched his campaign by saying he wouldn’t have launched the bin Laden raid, claiming it was unnecessary and that we should have worked with the Pakistanis to get him instead. This was so off the beam that even the Tea Party Nation founder said "If there is any doubt that Ron Paul should not even get near the Oval Office, even on a tour of the White House, he has just revealed it….For a Congressman to say the raid to kill the man who is one of the greatest mass murderers of Americans in history was, 'not necessary,' is simply nuts."

Santorum

Santorum's track record is a tad wobbly:

He claimed we found WMD’s in Iraq.

He equated Democrats to 1930s appeasement.

He wants to teach intelligent design in schools.

He implicitly equated homosexuality with incest, pedophilia, polygamy and bestiality. He believes that approving consensual sex is the first step to approving incest, polygamy and adultery, and that we shouldn’t “create” rights for gays, such as allowing them to adopt.

He tried prevent the National Weather Service from announcing weather data (a rival firm is based in his home state).

He charged taxpayers thousands of dollars for tuition for his kids, which they were not legally entitled to.

As an incumbent Senator he was tossed out of office by an 18 point margin, by his own constituents, the people who know him best.

He believes that African-Americans are incapable of handling marriage or competently addressing national issues.

He believes that women with careers are undermining the traditional family. He wants criminal charges against doctors who perform abortions even in cases of rape or incest.

He believes that Islam is evil and that we need to fight Sharia law, but Obama and Holder are giving in and kowtowing to Muslims and terrorists.

He wanted Ryan to gut Social Security too. In his campaign launch he bragged about working to kill social security with “personal retirement accounts”.

He tried to exploit D-Day by claiming that Obama is showing disrespect to the Normandy heroes by forcing them to use Medicare.

But I think there are two illustrations that depict him best. First, he tried to attack John “Five-Years-In-Hanoi” McCain on the torture issue. The response from McCain’s spokesperson, in response to Santorum’s nutty, said it all: “Who?” Effectively dismissing Santorum’s intellect and indeed his candidacy in one word.

And second, Rick Santorum went out there insinuating that Obama is…a black Muslim totalitarian communist who hates families. Let’s crack the code-words together.  “The founding documents upon which our founding documents were based and that's the Judeo-Christian ethics that is the base [i.e. no Muslim presidents for us!]... We are a people of western civilization [i.e. white people] founded upon the Bible [no Muslims!]. We believe in the ability, the collective ability of free and virtuous people to do more for our society than a benevolent authoritarian government [Obama’s a socialist tyrant!!] ….We believe in free markets, free enterprise, we believe in democratic capitalism [He’s a communist!!]. We believe that families are the basic unit of society, not government. That families are responsible for educating and cultivating character in our children, not our schools [no sex education, no evolution, but pray pray pray!!].….Barack Obama wanted to make us into Europe [scary foreigner!] ….We are going to fight for America. We are going to fight for the Judeo-Christian ethic. We’re going to fight for our founding documents [which are threatened by you know who] and we will win in November.”…Easier with the subtitles, isn’t it?

Huntsman

Perhaps this billionaire’s son thought he could use his ability to self-fund, to push his way into the race by selling himself as Romney without the Romneycare, but he hasn’t caught fire, for a couple of reasons. First, the most noteworthy entry on his quite flimsy resume is as Obama’s employee. Obama makes sure to remind everyone that Huntsman was a member of Team Obama. Obama even got Jimmy Carter to praise Huntsman publicly: everyone knows how much the GOP base loves ol’ Jimmy. Other than the trip to China, his track record is extremely thin: a whole lot of people liked his performance as governor, but nobody can remember anything he actually did in office.

Also there is plenty for the hardcore conservatives to be suspicious of: he is still wobbly on many issues, he believes in climate change, he supported the stimulus and TARP; he wants a path to citizenship for immigrants, he thinks health care is a right, he flipflopped on insurance mandates and the stimulus; he attacked insurance companies and bragged about it, he flipped on cap and trade by claiming the economy has changed; he is okay with civil unions, and he rejected the Mexico border fence. And he admires Obama.

In 2009 Huntsman sounded as though he didn’t want to be a Republican at all: he said the Republican party was devoid of ideas, grasping for air, possessed of gratuitous partisanship, a very narrow party of angry people, with a strategy of obstruction and obfuscation, given to griping and complaining. He went to New Hampshire, a very moderate state by Republican standards, and said America must stop the partisan bickering and be civil if we are to solve our problems, the last thing Republicans want to hear in an election year; one of his staffers warned about the continued domination of the GOP by the far-right “Doctor No” wing of the party.

Shortly after the 2008 election, conservatives were cancelling Huntsman’s appearances because he was too moderate, and Rush Limbaugh called him the candidate of the liberals. Rightwing groups are already targeting him. He has been fighting to reestablish himself as a true-blue Republican, endorsing the Ryan plan to wipe out Medicare, but so far he is reluctant to do meet the true litmus test for Republicans: slamming Obama, his former boss.

Also his strong point, foreign policy, is likely to be of little interest in 2012.

Pawlenty

SUMMARY
Tim Pawlenty is trying to portray himself as a tough-talking right-wing truth-teller, but actually he has a lengthy career as a hypocritical sometime-moderate flipflopper and liar, and his come-and-go Southern accent is already making the home folks giggle. But the folks in Minnesota are not laughing about what he did as governor. Even with all his accounting tricks, his hidden taxes, his illegal budget cuts, his attacks on union families and their pensions, and his outright theft from school budgets, he still trashed the Minnesota state budget so badly that Moody's lowered their bond rating. Even Fox News shot down his lies about his budgets.

DETAILS

In most respects, Tim Pawlenty should be a slam-dunk with the conservatives. He is anti-abortion and appointed an anti-abortion judge to the bench; he wants the Pledge of Allegiance required in schools; he wants to drill in ANWR; he wants to leave health care up to the market; he wants to make Bush’s tax cuts permanent. He proclaimed in 2001 that children who were at risk and in need were on their own: "Children who are victims of failed personal responsibility are not my problem, nor are they the problem for our government." And he advocated amending the Constitution to deny citizenship to children born here to immigrants, which would disqualify Mitt Romney, among others, from citizenship.

But like Romney, he has problems with flipflopping, and like Romney he is partly a victim of circumstances: his views haven’t changed much, but the party around him has lurched from left to right, thus affording the optical illusion that he himself has moved to the left. He approved cap-and-trade proposals, shooting an ad with Janet Napolitano advocating a federal law on the issue, setting up a task force to launch a cap-and-trade system and making an agreement with other states to implement it, and then was forced to publicly apologize and recant. He changed his stance on nullifying Obama’s health bill; he changed his stance on outreach to women and blacks, and on attack politics, and on gay rights, and on secession, and on too-big-to-fail, and on energy subsidies, and on bailouts, and on the Scozzafava race in New York. He claimed to be tough on sex crimes and then gave a pardon to a convicted sex offender who later raped his own daughter.

He has been particularly embarrassing in condemning the Obama stimulus. He was slamming Obama while his state administration was bragging about the stimulus money they’d gotten for Minnesota. Then Pawlenty slammed the stimulus again, at an event showcasing a firm which the stimulus helped. Which is like slamming Santa while you're opening your toys on Christmas morning.

Now, terrified of the tea party, he is simon-pure, no longer given to statements like this one: “Ronald Reagan was president a long time ago. A lot has happened since then. So the challenge for us is how do you take the principles from the late ’70s and ’80s and apply them to the circumstances and issues and opportunities of our time.”

Another problem: fiscal mismanagement. Pawlenty’s predecessor, a Republican, said “I don’t think any governor has left behind a worse financial mess than he has….Under Tim Pawlenty, it became Deficit Heaven.” The governor pointed out that Pawlenty left Minnesota with a fiscal disaster; he raised property taxes more than $2 billion, raised other taxes which were disguised as "fees", stole from health care funds, stole more than $1 billion from the schools and left them IOU's, and took stimulus money while simultaneously criticizing the program. But because he refused to raise income taxes, he still left the state with a $6 billion deficit, one of the biggest in the nation, and high unemployment. He was slapped down by the state supreme court for illegally cutting budget items, and slapped around again by Moody’s which lowered Minnesota’s bond ratings due to Pawlenty’s fiscal mess. He claimed he left the state with a surplus, but even Fox called it a “faux-surplus.” Meanwhile he fought Democrats in a budget battle that led to a government shutdown. He left office with a 44/50 disapproval differential.

Like a lot of Republicans these days, he has jeopardized his position with Rust-Belt working families with his attitude toward unions. He slashed union pensions and battled public-employee unions in a long transit strike. He claims government unions have launched a “silent coup”, working with corrupt politicians to get more money and benefits at the expense of “working families”, as though cops and firemen and teachers don’t work for a living. And he slammed the auto bailout which saved thousands of union jobs.

There are other challenges for Pawlenty: He is pushing donors hard now because he must prove his fundraising ability, but still he lags behind all the major candidates in raising money. His own staffers say he is a dull speaker; he tries to rock the house like Bachmann with the aggressive speaking and the slogans, launching his formal campaign by calling Obama a coward, but somehow never catches fire. The rightwing blogosphere is completely lukewarm about him.

In both of his gubernatorial races he would have lost if the Democrats hadn’t split their vote between two candidates; in his reelection bid he came within one percent, 22,000 votes, of being thrown out of his job. In July 2009 he trailed Obama by 11 in his own state, and even in November 2009 after the Tea Party explosion he still trailed Obama by nine in Minnesota. Recently a conservative said that the candidates with real credibility on religious issues were Bachmann and Santorum, completely ignoring Pawlenty, who like Bachmann is an evangelical (Santorum is Catholic). So far he is attacking Romney and ignoring Huntsman.

His stylistic gyrations are very shortly going to expose him as an imposter. He is trying to transform himself from moderate to red-meat rightwinger, beating his chest in a rather desperate “I’m a tough-talking man” dance like Bush 41 did, and has called Obama a "doofus". He is trying to convert from flipflopper to “straight talker” like McCain, with his transparent “bash ethanol in Iowa” tactic, for which he was promptly praised by conservatives, although an Iowa reporter said that isn't as much of a big deal as it used to be. He also went to Florida to criticize entitlements. He even tacks on a southern accent when talking to Iowa conservatives, causing laughter back in his home state.

He is also undercutting his truth-talking ethos by launching his race with an astounding number of factual errors, such as his claim that Obama's policies had shifted jobs from the private sector to the public sector, when actually the reverse is the case. He lied about health spending, Social Security solvency, Medicaid, his health programs in Minnesota, the U.S. debt, the NLRB, federal salaries, Obamacare, Obama’s tax policy, his own tax policy, Obama’s stance on unemployment, the bank bailouts, all in a very short period of time.

Even the conservative press panned this effort as the work of a political makeover artist, along the lines of "Let's position you as the guy who tells it like it is!", and even the Club For Growth, one of the key gatekeepers for conservative candidates, admitted that "we struggle to identify the real Pawlenty". By now America is long accustomed to seeing these Republican Barney Fifes trying to slide into the mantle of Reagan, and they know a fake when they see one.

Once the race began in earnest, and people began paying attention, he stumbled badly. He unveiled a wildly unrealistic tax plan which even he admitted was a "stretch" and "aspirational". Then after slamming Romney from afar with the "Obamneycare" line, which in itself sounded a bit silly, he was given a chance to launch the same attack to Romney's face in the New Hampshire debate, and chickened out. He was almost universally judged the loser in the debate.

Even worse, remember that the Republican party base wants to put two people on their national ticket who are willing and indeed eager to try to rip Obama's throat out. Pawlenty proved he didn't have the testicular fortitude to throw a punch at Romney even when he knew the other five politicians on the stage were just waiting to help pound on Romney. Even at the head of a mob of bullies, he proved himself a coward. So not only did he seriously damage his chances for the top spot on the ticket, he is much less likely to get the number-two slot, which is usually reserved for a party attack dog in the Quayle/Cheney/Palin mode. Contrariwise I think Bachmann's odds on both the presidential and vice-presidential slots improved drastically.

Palin

This article is divided into three sections: her 2012 prospects, her challenges, and her extraordinary relationship with accountability.

Will she run?

Palin’s baggage

Palin and accountability

Will she run?

Signs that say she will run are fairly strong:

A Huckabee-free poll showed her two points behind the frontrunner Romney, and a week later she had pulled into a tie. So does she pull into the lead in June? The hardcore tea-drinking party base still loves her, and the other GOP candidates are really weak. She can raise money and she can draw a crowd.

She is releasing her self-serving movie/infomercial in Iowa; the producer said that the film would catapult her into the front ranks of candidates. She took a Middle East trip which she could use to burnish her flimsy foreign-policy credentials. She said she has the fire in the belly several times.

Running really doesn’t cost her anything except a year of effort. If she gets in, and the race doesn’t turn out to her advantage, she can always quit.

Another sign she's running: think back to April, when angry union members and tea party people were holding rallies in Wisconsin. Palin, whose political skills include capitalizing on ready-made crowds, came and riled everyone up. She began the speech trying to defend Scott Walker, and ended it by smearing Obama, calling him a coward, screeching “The 2012 election begins here….It starts here! It starts now! …Mr. President, game on!”

But in the middle of that speech, Palin went after the Republican leaders in Congress, for making a deal with Democrats on the budget. She went after “the GOP establishment”, in a way that could be interpreted as an attack on the testosterone-impaired country-club Republicans running for President, men like Romney: she promised to take on the party establishment, admonishing them to fight, with this ringing quote -- “Maybe I should ask some of the Badger women’s hockey team—those champions—maybe I should ask them if we should be suggesting to GOP leaders they need to learn how to fight like a girl!” So Palin has declared war not only on Democrats but also on Republicans who even consider negotiation and compromise, rather than war to the knife. And she hinted that if the GOP wants a leader who will give them that sort of "take no prisoners" attitude, that leader may a have a uterus in her pants.

Among the signs that say she's running, I am counting the bus tour, which incidentally is probably illegal unless it is a campaign tour, financed as it is by her PAC. Her tour is visiting key primary states. Republicans are ridiculing her, and she is returning the favor by dropping into their districts without even the courtesy of giving them a heads-up. She is deliberately provoking the other candidates, particularly Romney, by hogging the cameras.

The press, wary of being conned by another non-candidacy like Trump's, are expressing doubts about her presidential viability, and she is returning fire by refusing to provide an itinerary, forcing them to endanger life and limb chasing her like paparazzi: across the countryside her bus is speeding, running lights, narrowly missing other vehicles all across the northeast, a metaphor for her entire career. The media's addiction to All Things Palin is actually deepened by her unfailing stream of factual malaprops: in a matter of a day or two she completely rewrote the history of Ellis Island as an anti-immigrant tale, and rewrote Paul Revere’s ride as a pro-gun initiative.

She has angered veterans by hijacking their rally. She has angered her own fans by limiting her availability. She has even irritated her road-weary daughter. I don’t see how she goes this far out on a limb, and then stops later in the summer and says “ naah, never mind, not running”. In such a case, her other options, playing the party playmaker or media player, just don’t work: she would have burned too many people. She can’t burn that many bridges behind her, and drop this many "I'm running" hints, unless she has a clear path in front of her, toward a race for the nomination. Trump has a career independent of his political ambitions, so he can afford to tease us and then run away: Palin doesn't have that luxury.

An even bigger sign she's running: an hour before Romney made his official announcement, Palin popped up in Romney’s hometown, slamming him for launching Romneycare in Massachusetts, rejecting his claim that state-level mandates are okay, claiming the policy could be his fatal flaw, challenging him to explain himself further, and insisting that the tea party wants small government. And insisting that she wasn’t trying to upstage his announcement. And she's doing this to the governor who, as head of the RGA, broke the law to pour money into her gubernatorial campaign. At the very least, she’s in the race to stop Romney.

This business with Romney is worth keeping an eye on. She said recently that she does indeed intend to chat with Republican politicians, but only the ones who meet her tea-party standards. It could be that her success criteria are either (a) making a credible run for the nomination herself, and/or (b) seeing to it that the tea party maintains the upper hand in plotting the course forward for the party and choosing the 2012 ticket. 

Another argument for running: unlike the other candidates, she doesn’t need to win the White House, in order to get enough attention and cred to go back to her nonpolitical career. But her nonpolitical career would likely be weak without a presidential run. She would probably not be a major player in the party without a White House run because she is, if anything, antagonizing party leaders, and has no credibility in policy. And being a provocative rightwing media star is shaky as a long-term plan: Anne Coulter, Laura Schlessinger and Michelle Malkin flamed out because they felt compelled to push the envelope further and further until the nation decided that what had been provocation was now mere irritation; Glenn Beck slid down the same slippery slope as well, and the only reason Limbaugh hasn’t followed them all the slide into oblivion is that his network owns 1200 stations and gives away his show for a pittance.

There is a neat scene in Citizen Kane with Kane’s friend, played by Joseph Cotten. Earlier in the movie, Kane had been caught cheating on his wife, and newspaper headlines announced his affair with a “singer”, with the word in quotation marks, implying that she was no singer at all. This ended Kane’s political career. Kane, dumped by his wife, married the “singer”, and then tried to save face by producing a gigantic opera, with his new wife “singing” the lead, even though she really stunk. It was a disaster. Finally a reporter asks Cotten why Kane put his wife in a position in which she was obviously going to be humiliated publicly. Cotten said that Kane wanted to take the quote marks off the word ”singer”, to rehabilitate his wife’s reputation, and by extension his own.

And this is why Palin might run.

Palin’s campaign as a “candidate” in the 2008 election was such a catastrophe, that there is no way she can leave the stage for good, and be a punch line for the next 40 years. So she wants to run again in 2012, to take the quotation marks off the word “candidate”. Even though she is doomed to be humiliated again, just as Kane’s wife was.

Signs that suggest she will take a pass are not totally convincing:

Preparation. She is quietly building a bit of a network in Iowa, but she has made little effort until now to visit the early primary states, or make preparations there, or recruit donors or staffers. But that may not mean much: she has her own notion of launching a career without following the normal rules or touching all the bases, which has political professionals watching in bewilderment. Palin thinks rules are for other people, and her own allies admit she's not a political strategist.

Money: she would give up financial opportunities if she ran, but she could go right back to the money well after the race, assuming she lost, and make even more money.

Family: the protestations that she is worried about her family's privacy sound absurd in light of the way she has exploited her family already, to include taking them on the bus tours. Todd Palin himself ridiculed this argument: "This family has been tested. These kids grew up around the mayor of small town. Local politics is in your face every day. It's not like you get on a plane and fly to D.C. or Juneau." At best she'll play the privacy card if she needs a face-saving way to quit the race.

Fox doesn’t seem to think she’s running, but how many times has Fox gotten things wrong?

She is actually the youngest contender, so she can wait. It seems that we’ve been hearing her name since the Third Crusade, but she’s only 47. Obama is 49. Huntsman, Pawlenty, Santorum and Bachmann are in their fifties. Romney, Gingrich and Cain have few chances left because they’re in their sixties, and Ron Paul is in his seventies. But does she want to wait, and let her name fade from our memories?

All that said, as I mentioned, the normal rules don’t seem to apply to her, and trying to predict her behavior using the rules of logic is like trying to sail a boat across the Atlantic using a rectal thermometer to navigate -- pretty much the wrong tool for the job. As she marches through the summer, watch to see if she does things that only a genuine candidate would do, as opposed to someone trying to attract publicity or to participate in the election in some other capacity like fundraising. If she does run, she could damage the GOP cause by driving the GOP presidential field to the right, and by driving up Democratic donations.

If she is not the GOP nominee, will she run a third-party candidacy, to attack a nominee like Romney from the right? Wait for 2016? Stay on the sidelines as kingmaker, endorser (at the latest possible moment), fundraiser, talking head, rather than face the embarrassment of an ugly electoral loss? One alternative to a White House run: Palin has visited Arizona many times and may have bought a house there; Bristol lives there too. Instead of going for the White House she could go after Jon Kyl’s Senate seat. Or she could use an Arizona house as a base from which to campaign for president -- much more practical than Alaska.

Palin’s baggage

Normally in posts like this, I use write a long version of the story and put it under Details, and then write a short handy version and stick it here under Summary. With Palin, that was impossible. When I toted up all of her statements betraying total cluelessness on national policy, her far far rightwing positions, her incompetence as an executive, her endless ethical violations and abuse of power, her ugly thuglike political tactics, her mistreatment of her own supporters and employees, her habit of running away as soon as she faces scrutiny from the media or anyone else, her many many lies -- that version of the Palin saga ran on for pages, and I have not posted that on the site. The long section you see under here? That was the short version. If you really want to get the full picture regarding Planet Palin, you need to just dive right in: there are really no short-cuts. If she actually wins the nomination, perhaps I will whip out the really long version.

Sarah Palin is positive that she is ready to be commander in chief, despite repeatedly betraying a dangerous level of ignorance on national and world affairs. Her one exposure to real economics came in one of the five cow colleges she attended, where she got a D and gave up. She is ignorant of the world of money, as she betrayed with her answer on the Freddie Mac question.

As an executive she is so weak that even the post of mayor of the tiny town of Wasilla, Alaska, which her predecessors had handled themselves, so overtaxed her that she had to hire a city manager. That, and her tactics, almost led to a recall by the voters.

Even the Republican leader of the Alaska Senate said she was unready for the governor’s job, let alone the presidency. The governor’s job is a breeze for a competent executive, since most of the state is owned and run by Washington, and all the governor needs to do is dole out the federal pork and oil money. But even with those advantages and with her habit of stealing pension money and jacking up taxes on consumers, she couldn’t get control of the budget. She went through police chiefs one after the other, finally settling on a guy who had to be fired immediately because he was a sexual predator: sloppy vetting. She wrecked a series of local and state projects, wasting millions. Alaskans were angry because she was so busy showing off on the national stage that she was ignoring local issues like schools and energy problems.

She violated per diem laws, tax laws, small business laws, privacy laws, ethics laws; she has obstructed justice, and may have perjured herself. She used tax money for personal and political purposes. Her behavior has already been condemned by a legislative investigation and by a sitting judge.

She brought an unprecedented level of nastiness to local and national politics. She betrayed the Wasilla politician who helped her get her start. She used Ted Stevens as political patron and then threw him under the bus. She lobbied for earmarks and pork and then claimed to oppose them, blindsiding her voters; she also screwed over her constituents on sales taxes and on the bridge to nowhere. She screwed over McCain, defying him publicly on issues, badmouthing him behind his back, and blaming his campaign for the 2008 loss. She repeatedly terrorized and fired employees suspected of insufficient loyalty, and sacked people who dared to question her opinions. She and her husband repeatedly abused her power to terrorize family enemies and political opponents. She tried to fire a librarian just because she wouldn’t go along with her book-banning crusade. She was slapped down for trying to illegally pack the City Council with her supporters. She fought ideas that weren't generated by her or her loyalists. She was caught on tape laughing hysterically as the Alaskan Senate President, a cancer survivor, was called a cancer and a bitch. Her diva-like behavior, micromanagement and harassment led to incredible personnel turnover. She publicly humiliated her own daughter to save her own reputation, used her office to persecute her own brother-in-law, and ran a political smear campaign against her own mother-in-law.

Her support among moderates and independents, the people who pick all the presidents, is toxically low, because she is a right-wing extremist. She campaigned and raised money for Pat Buchanan. She belongs to an extremist church which wants to cure homosexuality, and sat patiently as her preacher said Jews deserve to die because they are unbelievers. She wants a Constitutional amendment overturning Roe and opposes abortion even in cases of rape. She opposes sex education, stem cell research, equal treatment for same-sex couples; ironically she cut funding for a program to help teen mothers! She wants creationism taught in our schools and tried to fire an opponent of book-banning.

She’s to the right of Bush on the environment: she even sued Bush regarding environmental protection. Her energy policy is to the right of Exxon; she thinks global warming is a hoax. Her bombs-away foreign policy is a neocon’s dream. She favors regressive taxes which hurt the middle class, and opposes fixing the health care system. She supports a violent Alaskan secession party that hates America.

Her only real political skill is to look right at the camera and say something completely dishonest or hypocritical, without blinking. For example, her implication that she was mayor when Obama was a community organizer was hogwash: Obama was an organizer before he even went to law school, while Palin was busy flunking out of her third or fourth cow college. Already other GOP leaders are getting sick of the Sarah Palin show, and she is getting into more scraps with the media.


After the 2008 election, things didn’t improve for her. After making herself a laughingstock during the campaign, and exposing herself as dangerously clueless on policy, one would think she would try to burnish her credentials as a competent executive. Well, she didn’t really get it done. Palin, with a billion-dollar deficit in Alaska, was calling for big government projects she couldn’t afford. She thought she would enhance her tea-party cred by grandstanding and rejecting part of the federal stimulus money, right after seeking the money; this backfired so badly that Alaska’s Republicans and Democrats all condemned the move and insisted she was hurting Alaska to help herself politically. They were particularly incensed at her rejection of the money for schools.

Meanwhile thousands of people in rural Alaska faced freezing or starving to death. Some were surviving on nuts, berrries and squirrels like prehistoric man. Palin and her government couldn’t even figure out how to declare a state of emergency. Even with all the federal pork and oil subsidies, they will need even more help from the federal government. Just think, she wants to be president and bring all this joy to the whole country.

Also the corruption in the House of Palin never seemed to stop. Palin, hard on the heels of getting caught violating state ethics laws, was nailed again, this time for not paying taxes on the per diem money she illegally misappropriated. Undeterred, she also charged the state of Alaska per diem for her trips to do interviews on Fox News, as though that was part of her official business. Two of Palin’s aides faced new ethics charges, for doing political business on the taxpayer’s dime. Her husband was busted for contempt. And this is just what she’s been caught her doing, so far.
When she suddenly resigned from the governor’s office many Republicans said it would be impossible for her to run for the White House. But what many people missed, was the catastrophic mess she left in Alaska: when she quit she left so many empty chairs in the state leadership that she almost had to resume office in order to avoid a constitutional crisis. The attorney general who was also serving as lieutenant governor quit under a cloud of scandal, as did the next two men in line, and one or two candidates who didn’t get confirmed.

She has still been trying to fight the good fight for the Republicans, starting the whole death-panel attack against Obama’s health plan, claiming Obama wants to cut off the old and the sick from health care and to establish single-payer health coverage, and criticizing the President while abroad, in China, which neatly enough is exactly what her rightwing allies condemned the Dixie Chicks for.
But it is never a long wait before she embarrasses herself, wearing a miniskirt to an event honoring war dead, or publicly ridiculing knowledge of the Constitution. “In these volatile times when we are a nation at war, now more than ever is when we need a commander-in-chief, not a constitutional law professor lecturing us from a lectern.”

First, Obama does fine as commander in chief. Second, has he been lecturing us on the Constitution? Third, after eight years of treating the Constitution as a “damn piece of paper”, the GOP has gone a step further, actually ridiculing knowledge of the Constitution and the law. We don’t need a president who knows the law: we need a man who can blow stuff up like Bush! Yee haw! That’s the new GOP platform, expressed by a frontrunner for the Presidency. And these are the same people who keep screeching that it’s Obama who’s the terrible danger to the Constitution! One day they love the Constitution so much they’d rather kill Congressmen than endanger it; the next day the Constitution is one big joke.

Perhaps Palin is still smarting from the embarrassment of flunking out of one tiny cow college after another, before finally scraping by with a journalism degree in Idaho. This, while Obama graduated magna from some little Podunk school called Harvard Law. I cain’t understand the Constitution, so of course it cain’t be important!

Also, even her base, the family-values Republicans, has been watching the Palin family saga in horror. We already know Sarah values her career more than her family, from when she publicly humiliated her daughter Bristol with the revelation about the pregnancy, just to save Sarah’s reputation; also it is likely that she forced Bristol to go through the farce of pretending to be engaged to Levi the Redneck, just to send the right political signal during the election. When Bristol flipped off millions of Sarah’s evangelical fans by admitting that the abstinence strategy for teenagers is stupid, and then evangelicals responded by attacking Bristol, Sarah refused to defend her own daughter: she’s too terrified of losing the rightwing base. Likewise when Levi Johnston had the nerve to say something less than complimentary about the Palins, her allies claimed Johnston committed incest with his sister: this girl who never done nuthin’ to nobody became a laughingstock, chewed up and spit out by the Palins for political gain.

Or this incident: "Babies and children are off limits!" A blogger ran a picture of Palin holding a "baby" whose head actually belongs to one of her big political supporters. Because the original photo consisted of Palin and her son Trig, Palin threw a hissy, insisting that kids are off-limits. Hmm….Palin has been shamelessly exploiting her kids ever since she got the nomination last summer. She exploited Trig for political purposes, and repeatedly exposed her daughter Bristol to public ridicule without even bothering to defend her daughter from attacks by Palin's own allies, the religious right. So, sorry, but you can't have it both ways. Either kids are part of the process, or not. Make up your mind.

 

Palin and accountability

There are more and more signs that she doesn’t want to face the accountability that goes with running for president. She attacks the media endlessly, and at her appearances she does all she can to avoid grownup questions from the grownup media: having questions prescreened, banning reporters entirely, banning cameras and recorders so that even non-reporters can’t post her inanities on the web for the comic enjoyment of all. Not only does Palin have no skill in fielding unscreened questions on policy issues, she isn't even going to try to learn.

Palin generally flees the press these days, and when she does field questions, hilarity often ensues, and not just in her goofy reimagining of the lives of the Founding Fathers. Here's Palin on the Cold War:  “We tried buying off the Kremlin with technologies in the 1970s. That policy was a component of “detente,” and the hope was that if we would share our technologies with them, they would become more peaceful. Things, of course, didn’t work out that way. The Kremlin took western technologies and embarked on a massive military building program. History teaches that peace comes from American military strength. And a central component of that has always been technological superiority. Why would President Obama even dream of giving this away?”

An Alaska reporter had a great item on Palin’s unfailing attempts to blame her crimes and follies on others: on her brother-in-law, on her police chief, on a wardrobe malfunction, on people who hate Jesus, on Katie Couric, on Charlie Gibson, on the RNC, on Levi Johnston, on McCain, on Tina Fey, on a cameraman, on Ashley Judd, on Senate Democrats. It’s never her fault.

If she were in the White House, she said, the "department of law" would protect her from baseless ethical allegations. "I think on a national level, your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we've been charged with and automatically throw them out," she said....There is no "Department of Law" at the White House. The bigger issue is that in Alaska she abused her power to attack real or imagined enemies; now we know if she gets the White House she will use powers to go after critics.

Even her allies have become disgruntled about her habit of running out on commitments to major events. She bailed on the Conservative PAC conference and even the NRA. Even Republicans ridiculed her for running away from her commitment to go to the conference of the National Governors Association. And of course her governorship.

Recent events have done little to help her cause. New reports about life behind the scenes on Planet Palin are truly unflattering. Apparently Palin has acquired a reputation for breaking commitments to attend events; according to one aide she went through at least ten schedulers because making excuses for her was just too onerous. A Palin aide admitted that Palin would be a disaster in national office, in completely over her head; he says she allowed her staffers to do her homework on the actual policy issues, she regularly used political power to destroy family critics, and she treated even her supporters like servants. Working for Palin, the aide smeared one of Palin’s cranky neighbors, faked pro-Palin letters to newspapers, and tried to rig on-line opinion polls in Palin’s favor. During all this, Fox News was forced to deny that their chief had called Palin an idiot.

Romney

SUMMARY

Romney actually has several different kinds of baggage going into the 2012 race: a number of them aren’t well-known to the voters, but the Democrats, who see him as potentially the strongest GOP presidential candidate, are going to make sure that everyone in America knows all about them. We remember from 2008 that Romney has a long track record as a flipflopper, changing his stance on almost every major issue, and recently he has taken a very public pounding on the one key issue wherein he actually stuck to his guns, the one issue which he hoped was going to be a major selling point for him, namely health care.

But there is more trouble coming. He expressed support for Paul Ryan the Medicare-killer, which the Democrats are already using in attack ads. The Democrats are also working to crush him on the issue of the auto bailout: Romney condemned the bailout and essentially wrote off his fellow Michiganders, and when the bailout turned into a smashing success, his team lamely sang multiple variations on the theme that the bailout had been Romney’s idea all along. Also, the all-powerful tea party is doing all they can to bring him down, and even the Wall Street Republicans would love to find an alternative to him for 2012; he hopes to hold his huge lead in relative moderate New Hampshire, and then woo his sometime-friend the Governor of South Carolina in order to get her critical endorsement in that state.

This post is divided into four sections, which you can find by clicking these links:

Romney and health care
Romney’s flipflops
Romney’s other problems
Romney’s candidacy

DETAILS

Romney and health care

Health care has been a major focus for the nation for three years now, and the Republicans have publicly promised to seek the repeal of Obama’s ACA: they still believe the ACA is unpopular. They want a nominee who can credibly fight that right, and Mitt Romney doesn’t qualify no matter how loudly he promises to repeal ACA, not only because he passed Romneycare but also because he predicted that someday the whole country would be using his mandate system; he has since recanted, but that in itself feeds into his reputation as a flipflopper. Nominating Romney implies that the Republicans finally accept that they were wrong on health care, which is not something the GOP does gracefully if they can avoid it.

Various factors simply rub salt in Romney’s wounds: his plan has made Massachusetts the best state in terms of percentage of people insured, particularly for children, but he can’t campaign on this, his biggest resume entry -- he doesn't even mention it in his bio. The Democrats continually praise the Romney plan because it is so similar to their plan, and helpfully point out that the Romney plan allows for abortions, which even the ACA doesn’t do. The DNC also assembled a highlight reel entirely made up of Fox commentators slamming Romney’s big health care speech (in case anyone thought Romney has closed the sale with fiscal conservatives, the Wall Street Journal slammed his health plan too). Obama went all the way to Boston to praise Romney’s help in getting the Obama plan passed. Democrats are also running ads quoting Romney’s support for the GOP plan to destroy Medicare: “I applaud Rep. Paul Ryan. We’re on the same page.”

Romney fought back, rather lamely, by arguing: "If I become president, I will repeal ObamaCare. My bill was 70 pages. His is over 2,000. He’s doing a lot of stuff that’s devastating to the health care system in this country. He’s wrong." Actually the two plans are similar in many particulars, to include mandates, affordability credits, standard benefits, exchanges, bans on cancellations, protection of pre-existing conditions, and Medicaid expansion.

In one respect he should be thankful that people are focusing on his health plan: it distracts attention from other aspects of his record. He served one term, had terrible approval ratings, and had a terrible record creating jobs -- and then fired people left and right at Bain.

Some Republicans forgave Romney in 2008 despite Romneycare, as they did with McCain over immigration. They could do so again in 2012 particularly if their animus toward the ACA is really all about Obama rather than health reform itself: this is likely since many of them favored Romney’s mandate system before Obama advocated it. The weaker the other Republican candidates seem to be, the more likely such forgiveness is; almost all of his rivals have done at least one thing to anger the extremely rigid conservatives who run the party, so the hardliners could decide that Romney is the lesser of ten evils.

Incidentally, Romney is not simon-pure on climate change, either. He said humans contribute to climate change and we need to reduce emissions. 

Romney’s flipflops

Romney is falling victim to the GOP’s great leap to the right over the last ten years: policies which would have gotten a free pass a decade ago are anathema now. But Romney put himself in this position, really: he can’t flipflop on health care, the way Pawlenty is trying to do with his apologetic abandonment of cap-and-trade, because Romney has flipflopped on too many other issues already.

His track record of flipflopping is so flagrant that Leno is already making fun of him. He has changed his tune on guns and on gay rights. He advocated a Massachusetts sex-education plan and then slammed Obama for supporting the same thing. He played the blind-trust card to evade accountability for his investments and then slammed Kennedy for doing the same; some Romney money went into casinos and stem-cell research, which the right wing base might not know. He was screeching about Hillary’s alleged socialist agenda, which actually looks a lot like Romney’s Massachusetts policies on issues such as free-market capitalism. He promised to fight for automaker jobs and then argued against the auto bailout, thus pushing things in the direction of a Chapter 11 settlement which would wipe out those very jobs. He flipped on carbon policy and the minimum wage.

He veered so far to the left on abortion, promising to keep abortion legal as president, that he was endorsed by Republicans For Choice; then he claimed he had an epiphany after his sister-in-law died from an illegal abortion, advocated a constitutional amendment banning abortion entirely, and vetoed emergency contraception for rape victims, which ironically would lead to more dangerous illegal abortions. In other words, he has violated the Wingnut Trinity: guns, gays, abortion.

So, neatly enough, it is the one issue where he has not flipflopped, health care, that is killing him.

A danger sign: the Club For Growth, which has a striking track record of finding and destroying Republican candidates who are insufficiently extreme, is already slamming Romney as a flipflopper. An anti-abortion group is going after him for flipping on the abortion issue too.  

Romney’s other problems

Conservatives are concerned about his flipflops, and also the Mormonism. Romney is no mere dabbler in Mormonism: he used a ministerial deferment to dodge the draft, spent two and a half years as a Mormon missionary, and got his bachelor’s at Brigham Young.

It will be the easiest thing in the world for the evangelicals to pull out their anti-Mormon playbook: the Mormon belief that only Mormons practice proper Christianity and that all other denominations are abominations; the statements by Mormon founders that African-Americans were cursed, inferior, lacking in intelligence, unworthy to serve as clergy until they changed the rules in 1978, descended from creatures who had refused to take a side in the battle between god and Lucifer, and that a woman who had sex with an African-American would die on the spot. Of course in the general election voters may be interested to know that Mormons oppose gay marriage and equal rights for women.

And it will take the other campaigns almost no time at all to find this tidbit: in 2005 he backed cap-and-trade, launching an $800 million energy initiative, and demanding regulations on a coal plant. “I will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people. And that plant kills people and PG&E has been given a notice to have it cleaned up by 2004 and they have thumbed their nose at the people of Massachusetts and Salem Harbor by not cleaning it up on time. So we’re saying, clean it up on time, do the job in the community, invest in cleaning technology.”

That, and his state was 47th in the nation in job creation during his tenure.

That, and he also raised taxes, but called the tax increases loophole closings, fees, fines, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Sometimes, Romney’s efforts to reestablish his street cred with the far right are embarrassing. Romney asserted that victims of floods and tornadoes should not receive help from government. “Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better….We cannot — we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all.”

Romney’s candidacy

Ironically, Romney is a perfect fit for the GOP in most other respects. He is a neocon’s dream. He supported the Iraq invasion and the surge, approved torture, advocated doubling the size of Guantanamo, and wanted to prevent the people held illegally in Guantanamo from even having their cases heard.

On social issues, he vetoed stem cell research, supported abstinence education and vouchers for public schools, praised Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, advocated making English the national language, and insisted that freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.

He wanted to keep Bush’s tax cuts, cut tax rates further for corporations, eliminate capital gains tax and inheritance tax, and cut entitlement programs. He opposes the McCain-Feingold restrictions on campaign financing.

He can win over independents better than most Republican candidates, but the hardcore conservatives dislike him; Richard Viguerie said that Romney won’t win over conservatives. Also there are still hurt feelings on the part of McCain and Huckabee from 2008, and from people like Perry who feel Romney blocked the flow of money to his gubernatorial campaign; and recently Republicans met in Texas to discuss the race, where there was a notable lack of enthusiasm for Romney.

Rachel Maddow helpfully pointed out how many Republicans hated Romney in 2008, and he had scarcely set down the microphone following his 2012 campaign announcement before fellow Republicans were attacking him: in fact Palin attacked him an hour before he even announced. Republicans want someone else, particularly the donors: even the people who are writing him checks are practically holding their noses while they do it.

He has kept up his connections in Iowa and New Hampshire, but the governor of the critically-important primary state of South Carolina is still making up her mind about him. Past polls showed him to be the most competitive candidate against Obama, but others may be closing the gap in that department. On the stump, he must avoid his signature achievement, health care, and also the Mormon issue and all the issues on which he has changed his views; he can’t hit too hard on the issues dear to the hardliners, because other candidates can outdo him on those topics. He can raise money superlatively – in May 2011 he raised $10 million in one day -- but the committee which he set up to raise money angered some Republicans, because he initially used a lot of the money for himself, although later he spread the cash around. His family is reluctant to run; his wife has MS as well as early-stage breast cancer.

So, all that baggage, health care, the flipflopping, Mormonism: in a normal year he would be a longshot. In a more propitious year, Romney would be doomed: even the field of 2008 candidates includes a handful of politicians like Giuliani or either of the Thompsons who try to could swoop in and steal the nomination from him. But there’s nothing normal about this campaign, or his competitors: this is a campaign in which a circus clown like Donald Trump was briefly the frontrunner. At one point he had a lead in all four of the early primary states, and may be hoping to ride into the nomination on sheer momentum. So, particularly since Romney is 64, this is his year. He has been the de facto frontrunner, on and off, since the 2008 election ended.

His campaign roll-out in June 2011 went poorly, and not just because Palin deliberately upstaged him. His inaugural speech was loaded with lies about his record and Obama's on taxes, lies about foreclosure levels, lies about Obama allegedly apologizing for America, and this gem: "We are only inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy.” Which is patently absurd: Obama, in the face of Republican objections, saved the auto industry, saved the financial industry, allowed corporations to make incredible profits, allowed stockholders to make a mint. 

Things will not improve even if the GOP resolves to make the economy the centerpiece of their effort against Obama.  During Romney's tenure as governor, his state was 47th in job growth, gaining only 1 percent in payroll jobs compared to more than 5 percent nationally. And at Bain one of his core businesses was outsourcing jobs and eliminating jobs in the U.S.