Closing Ranks, Winning the Election

By Alan Caruba

I am surely not breaking any new ground by suggesting it is time for Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich to end their primary campaigns and to urge that the Republican Party close ranks behind Mitt Romney.

This needs to be said by anyone and everyone who wants to see Obama defeated in November.

It would be an act of patriotism for both men, Santorum and Gingrich, to end their campaigns. I make no mention of Ron Paul because he was always a sideshow.

In this week’s column, Ann Coulter spells out why Santorum is hardly worthy of support.

“Meanwhile, when he was in Congress, Santorum wouldn't even vote to eliminate federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. Santorum supported all sorts of big-government spending plans -- No Child Left Behind, prescription drug coverage for seniors and the "bridge to nowhere."


But you'd think we would at least have Santorum's vote against federal funding for pornographers and deviants. Alas, no.


The NEA, you will recall, uses federal taxpayer money to subsidize crucifixes submerged in urine, photos of bullwhips up a man's derriere, poems celebrating the Central Park jogger's rapists, photos of amputated human genitalia, vomit, mutilated corpses and dead fetuses. (And that was just the children's wing of the museum!)


But Rick Santorum voted against cutting funding for the NEA every time a vote was taken both as a representative and a senator -- in 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1997 and 1998. These weren't accidental votes. Each one was deemed a key conservative vote on which members of Congress would be graded by the American Conservative Union.”

I have long been on record in my support of Mitt Romney and my view that Newt is unqualified for as long a list of reasons as Coulter offers regarding Santorum.

Because they failed to receive the support of voters and secure funding, Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, and Tim Pawlenty dropped out of the race what seems like an age ago.

Santorum continues and, in doing so, is saying things that make no sense even to those barely paying any attention to him at this point. He has never been in serious contention even in the few states where he has been credited with a win. The 2012 election will be won on the basis of economic, not social issues.

Newt’s percentages have been dismal, but Newt continues because he loves the spotlight and has a single deep-pockets financial backer that allows him to fly around recommending Moon colonies and other fanciful notions.

It is March 2012 and Republicans need to coalesce behind a single candidate, donate to him and the Party, volunteer, and do all the things necessary to defeat Obama. Otherwise, four years from now, if Obama is still President, he will be presiding over a nation whose exceptionalism, economy, and world power status will be a thing of the past.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Looney Tunes Version of the GOP Campaigns

My favorite Looney Tunes Characters (c) Warner Brothers

By Alan Caruba

I have begun to think of the Republican campaign as a series of Looney Tunes cartoons being replayed again and again. They are filled with a combination of laughs and the fantastical, self-defeating violence of Wily Coyote trying to catch the Roadrunner

As the primary season moves along, I sometimes think that far too many Republicans have temporarily lost their minds. Three years of Barack Obama will do that to you.

My response to the campaign thus far may have something to do with the fact that, like Reagan and others, I was once a Democrat and, to borrow a phrase from Paul, First Corinthians, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

These days, a lot of Republicans sound like a kid who sent Santa a list of toys he wanted and, even though he got most of them, he feels compelled to write and ask why he didn’t get all of them.

Granted that Republicans don’t have the most scintillating field of candidates, but most, including Donald Trump, have concluded that a guy that made millions as a successful venture capitalist, gave a couple of million away in charity just last year, has been a Governor, and hasn’t had a single hint of scandal in his life, might not be such a bad choice.

His opponents at this point include a guy who wants to start a Moon colony, is married to his third wife, left the Speaker’s position under a cloud of ethics impropriety, is given to saying genuinely bizarre and extremely nasty things with regularity, and would make the pathological narcissist in the White House look like a Boy Scout.

Another opponent—one whom nobody including himself—thinks could get elected seems to be in the race for the purpose of having one last hurrah, beating the drum for a few good ideas and a lot of really bad ones. Ron Paul has been in Congress since shortly after the last Ice Age ended and has sponsored only one bill that passed.

And, finally, there is Rick Santorum who is so infused with religious commitment that he reminds me of someone who was touted in a similar fashion, a former Sunday school teacher named Jimmy Carter. All the religion in the world cannot substitute for the steely-eyed realism a President requires in a world filled with evil counterparts.

It’s the voters, however, about whom I worry. New Hampshire was expected to endorse Romney, but in South Carolina Republicans there gave the nod to Gingrich. The Floridians came through with the unmistakable choice, based I am inclined to think on the many older and wiser citizens that live there though, in fact, he won all the demographic groups.

Ron Paul may be mildly amusing to some, but he cannot win. Santorum is a nice guy and, as the saying goes, nice guys finish last. And Newt Gingrich is like one of the Loony Tunes characters, the Tasmanian devil, going around wrecking the place and throwing bombshells that do nothing to advance the Republican and/or conservative agenda.

Too many Republicans appear to be waiting for a candidate who is perfection in every respect, political and personal, and in the real world few fit that description. America has had its shot at electing a “messiah” and it has turned out very badly.

As the rest of the primaries unwind, I anticipate that Mitt Romney will emerge as the party’s choice. I also expect a lot of pure nonsense about his being a Mormon, about the fact that he has not always hewed perfectly to conservative principles, and that he has—God forbid—actually changed his mind more than once or twice in the past.

Lost in all this blather is the fact that he is ideally prepared for the toughest job in the world and appears to have both feet planted firmly on the ground. I actually like the idea that he occasionally misspeaks, admits it, and then apologizes.

I hope that between now and the convention in Tampa, Republicans will regain their senses, their optimism, and their fighting spirit.

Rolling over for the worst President of the modern era because our candidate is not “perfect” is not an option.

Voting for a third party candidate is not an option.

Staying home on Election Day because “your guy” didn’t get the nomination is not an option.

The Republican compass has to point in only one direction and that is the resounding defeat of Barack Obama.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Stupid Voters

By Alan Caruba

It’s a comment I hear all the time these days. “The voters are stupid.”

I am not sure that those saying it mean literally that the voters have a low level of intellect or academic achievement, but rather that they mean voters seem prone to making their choices based more on emotion than on a serious examination of the candidate’s qualifications and character.

The best example of this was the 2008 campaign in which a candidate was presented in much the same way companies seek to “brand” their product or service, repeating the same message (Obama’s was hope and change) until it becomes part of the consumers’ decision-making process. It’s why we buy a particular brand of cereal or car. We have come to associate values with it that go beyond the taste or the look.

Barack Obama had served barely two years in the U.S. Senate before he made an unprecedented leap from there to the White House. He was, for all intents and purposes, an unknown quantity with a legislative record—if anyone bothered to check—that was a straight Democratic Party line vote.

In his earlier incarnation as an Illinois legislator, he had voted “present” so many times it was clear he was avoiding taking any position he regarded as politically dangerous; a vote that would come back to haunt him and very few did. The media cooperated in this, avoiding calling attention to anything that might be deemed controversial.

By contrast, Hillary Clinton, whether you liked her or not, was a candidate with a full cart of baggage from her years as the former governor’s and president’s wife, and her years as a U.S. Senator who served, not from Arkansas where she first came to notice, but from New York where liberals thrive. The process of campaigning wore her out and, being the first women to seriously contend to be president, she had even more of a challenge to overcome. Her raw ambition tended to make people afraid of her.

What elected Obama had nothing to do with the slim qualifications he put forth. Few candidates had less to offer. He had never met a payroll. All information regarding his academic records was sealed from view. The press made no effort to ask what passport he had traveled on to Pakistan at one time and did not raise any question about his Social Security number, issued in Connecticut where he had never lived or worked. Famously, he released a “birth certificate” that anyone in Hawaii could attain for the asking, not the “long form” which is deemed credible.

The voters have paid a fearful price for electing Obama; increased unemployment, a huge national debt, a hollowed-out military, billions wasted on “Green” energy, unprotected borders, a Congress in near total gridlock, and a world beyond our shores that perceives an America made weaker by Obama’s three years in office.

I have worked as a public relations counselor for most of my life with earlier years spent as a journalist. I know something about how a product, a service, or an individual is “packaged” to present a positive “image.” What we have all learned since 2008 was that Obama was superbly “packaged” and that the image of an articulate, highly intelligent, well informed candidate was without substance. His inability to speak publicly without a TelePrompter swiftly became a joke.

So, to say that those who voted for him were “stupid” is to misread the new era of politics, one that has more to do with “American Idol” and “Dancing With the Stars” than with the serious selection of the leader of the nation and the free world.

As they say in advertising, voters bought the sizzle, not the steak.

We are seeing this process continue as the Republican candidates vie for votes. The Gingrich “surge” in South Carolina came after he had two successful debates. It is true that Gingrich is a good debater, but the real question is whether he would be a good president. Questions about his character remain.

Gingrich has been comfortable sharing a couch with Nancy Pelosi to advocate the bogus global warming “theory” or taking money from Freddie Mac.. Now he is trying to appear to be a “real” conservative as opposed to Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and the quixotic Ron Paul.

While his judgment on issues has been called into question, Romney’s character never has. There has never been a hint of scandal in his life. In terms of policy, he was the Governor of one of the most liberal states and he did support Romneycare there. Politics is rarely pretty and even New Jersey’s fire-breathing Governor, Chris Christie, has taken some extraordinarily liberal positions and made some questionable appointments.

There might have been a time when Gingrich was, indeed, a bona fide conservative, but his long years in Washington, D.C., have taught him that “to get along you have to go along” In the end, even his colleagues in the House, for reasons of policy and personality, could no longer support him as Speaker.

From the days of Bush41 until the 2010 elections the Republican Party looked so much like the Democratic Party, voters had an increasingly hard time telling them apart. The Tea Party movement changed that. They and the “independents” are going to decide the 2012 elections that are currently making history with endless debates.

The debates are proving to be a succession of sound bites and vitriol between the candidates. They increasingly demonstrate how the mainstream media, the debate sponsors, are visibly seeking to influence the outcome of the election and they demonstrate that many voters are easily swayed by matters that have little to do with actual policies and issues.

There has been less and less substance with each debate.

I fear that too many Republican voters are having too many mood swings, relying on a moment or two from the most recent debate than on a serious examination—I repeat myself—of the candidate’s qualifications and character. Romney is carefully scripted and a tad robotic, but Gingrich could become the GOP nominee simply because he is entertaining.

Without doubt, President Obama and the Democrats are enjoying the Republican free-for-all and, without doubt, they have concluded that the voters are stupid.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

No Newt, Now or Ever

By Alan Caruba

Back in March I wrote about “The Newt-ster” and ended by saying, “I like the Newt-ster. I just don’t want him to run.” I still don’t.

As Speaker of the House and since, Newt’s legislative record has been all over the political spectrum. He has long been known to have various enthusiasms that he later abandons.

Though Newt did get welfare reform, then-President Clinton played him like a fiddle, getting him blamed for shutting down the government. Then the House Democrats finished him off with a plethora of ethics charges, most of which were dismissed, but he ended up paying a fine for one and resigning.

He has been ethically challenged in both his political and personal life. That kind of behavior rarely changes.

His main claim to fame was engineering the return to power in Congress by Republicans after forty years of Democrat rule. He co-authored a Contract with America, organized the Republicans in Congress to get behind it, and power switched hands in 1994. President Reagan who held office throughout the 1980s demonstrated how much can be accomplished by real leadership even with a Democrat-controlled Congress.

I have a major warning to offer regarding Newt Gingrich and I say it as someone who has studied history and witnessed a big chunk of it. Whenever the U.S. has elected an intellectual, it has suffered.

The most notable example is Woodrow Wilson, a former New Jersey Governor and president of Princeton University. His legacy includes the implementation of the income tax and establishment of the Federal Reserve. He wanted the U.S. to ratify the League of Nations, but the Senate rejected it for the same reason it should have rejected the United Nations.

Before him, Teddy Roosevelt, a man of action as well as intellect, was a progressive whose own party would not nominate him and who formed a third party which the voters rejected. This is not to say men of superior intellect have not been President, but the office calls for both leadership and the pragmatic capacity to understand “the real world” as opposed to the world of the mind. It also requires real courage.

Throughout history, men of intellect have concocted some of the worst systems to control the human population which they generally regarded with contempt. Karl Marx comes to mind. Generally speaking, intellectuals distrust the common sense of a humanity unencumbered by idiotic laws. These days the process of control is referred to as “social engineering.”

Obamacare is an example of social engineering and all the wasted billions on Green or renewable energy is another. The pathetic efforts to stamp out the use of the word “terrorism” from government pronouncements as well as the idiotic “Fast and Furious” gun-running program to undermine the Second Amendment are two more. So far as the federal government is concerned, there is no aspect of our lives in which it does not want to interfere or require obedience. Incandescent light bulbs anyone? The volume of water in a toilet? Nutritional standards? It is endless!

Gingrich began his career as a professor of history and his present rhetoric reveals his penchant for lecturing audiences while demonstrating his intellectual prowess. He is an engaging speaker, but behind it is a life spent being on both sides of most issues and often on the wrong side. Since leaving Congress he has been a well-paid “consultant” to anyone seeking to eat from the federal trough.

A glaring example of his willingness to embrace really bad ideas was his book, “A Contract with the Earth” which espoused all the usual environmental claptrap that assists and underwrites the horrid Green legislative agenda to limit carbon dioxide emissions for the real purpose of harming economic growth.

A Wikipedia synopsis describes the book thusly: “’A Contract with the Earth’ is, broadly, a manifesto that challenges those on the right to provide a strategy for repairing the planet and calls on government to embrace the concept that a healthy environment is required for a healthy democracy and economy. This approach, alternately branded mainstream and entrepreneurial environmentalism by the authors, requires that companies should lead the way in environmental issues while governments provide them with incentives to reduce their carbon footprint.” (Emphasis added)

Carbon footprints are an absurd concept conjured up by the same crowd that tried to impose the Kyoto Protocols on nations in 1997. As of the recent UN conference on climate change, most nations have signaled they will, having signed on, ignore it, along with China which was exempted along with India. Canada will drop out. And the Protocols will be consigned to the dustbin of history along with “global warming.”

Newt has never found some absurd intellectual notion that he would not embrace, short of Communism. He was dismissive of the congressional Republican proposals to reduce spending as “right wing social engineering” when many understand that they represent the best way to extricate ourselves from the enormous debt the Obama administration has imposed on the nation and the necessity of restructuring Medicare.

In short, he could just as easily run as a Democrat as a Republican and, if nominated, would be utterly destroyed by Barack Obama and the Democrat machine in the same way Obama dismembered Hillary Clinton’s bid in 2008.

A December 15 poll by Rasmussen Reports found that Gingrich “now trails President Obama by double digits, his second straight weekly decline since becoming the GOP frontrunner.”

If, by now, you have concluded that I distrust intellectuals and most of the ivory tower academicians, you are right. Since the 1960s many of left-wing ideologues---protesters---found their way onto the faculties of the nation’s colleges and universities, and it is why the teacher’s unions have done everything in their power to eliminate the truth about American history from the curriculum.

No Newt now or ever is my slogan and I hope he is rejected by sensible Republicans in the forthcoming primaries.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

"What Were They Thinking?"

By Alan Caruba

The thing I fear most right now is having to write a column about the Republican Party in late November 2012 with the title, “What Were They Thinking?”

Let’s put it this way. No incumbent President since Jimmy Carter has had worse polling numbers than Barack Hussein Obama.

The question—the fear—on the minds of most Republicans these days is whether the Party intends to commit political suicide by choosing the wrong candidate to run against Obama and to add to their present agony, it has a litter of candidates who run the gamut from charisma-challenged to scarily brilliant.

Let’s review the choices.

Jon Huntsman, a former Governor of Utah, is in the race I’m convinced only because he harbors a deep animus for Mitt Romney, a former Governor of Massachusetts and fellow Mormon. Oh? You didn’t notice we have not one, but two, Mormons running? We do. No matter. Huntsman has so far managed to keep his tinfoil hat hidden in a box in the trunk of his car. Fortunately and wisely virtually no one is paying him any attention.

Then there’s Michele Bachmann. Frankly, I don’t want to have to listen to Nanny Michele for four years telling me to clean my plate because there are starving children somewhere in the world. She gained notice leading the Tea Partiers against Obamacare. Good for her. Now please return to the House of Representatives and leave us alone.

Rick Santorum is a very nice fellow and that’s his problem. He’s too nice. He doesn’t scare me or anyone else. In a dangerous world, I want a President who just might blow the hell out of some nation or other. He’s stuck on the abortion issue when the majority of Americans have, for better or worse, moved on.

The Cain Train officially derailed on Saturday, Nov. 4, and saved us from having to further give him any serious attention. I don’t much care that a bunch of dubious women claimed he was a sex fiend. I do care that Herman couldn’t find Ecuador or Chad on the map if his life depended on it. He had no experience working with a legislature or in politics except for losing one race in Georgia. He was and is extraordinarily unqualified to be the President of the United States

It pains me to say this because I love Texans and have many friends who live there, but Governor Rick Perry is not ready for prime time. Granted that Texas is big enough to be a small nation, most people outside of Texas are unaware that its legislature meets in regular session on the second Tuesday in January of each odd-numbered year for a session that is limited to 140 calendar days! Perry is charming and fairly bright, but even I could run Texas by drinking heavily for 140 days every other year.

I will not even linger over Ron Paul because he is a Libertarian and widely believed to have come from another planet. Paul gives “old”, “cantankerous” and “opinionated” whole new meanings when you put those words together in a sentence.

In March of this year I wrote about “the Newt-ster” saying that Newt Gingrich “intellectually, is head and shoulders above anyone else in the race. In terms of pure brain power, he has a real grasp of most issues.” Gingrich has a grasp of every side of every issue because, at one time or another, he has been on it. If, however, you had heard him speak to the Polk County Republican Party in Iowa last week you would know he would wipe the floor with Obama in a debate. For all his flaws—and who does not have flaws—he has an historian’s and working politician’s grasp of issues, big and small. Do I agree with him on all of them? No, but I think he could make the changes needed to turn the nation around and I believe he has a passionate love of America.

Which leaves us with Mitt Romney; old sure-and-steady, a man who has had the political misfortune of actually changing his mind over the years, largely because he ran as a Republican in one of the most Democratic States of the Union…and won!

Romney is an attractive, intelligent, and very well qualified candidate, having succeeded in the worlds of politics and business. Let’s also give him points for having lived a moral life as a good husband and father. He has made it this far without a single major gaffe, but Romney increasingly gives the impression of being robotic. He is locked into his political gameplan and talking points, and it has worked to this point. It may get him the nomination.

Of the two, Gingrich is just more fun to listen to as he speaks extemporaneously, citing Jefferson and Lincoln, quoting the Declaration of Independence, reminding us why the first Americans fought a Revolution. Gingrich has already made some history of his own, wresting control of Congress away from the Democratic Party in the mid-1990s. He could do it again.

The Republican Party made a spectacular mistake in 2008 when they choose John McCain. I think the Iowa primary will give Gingrich a win. I think the New Hampshire primary will give Romney a win. After that, money—lots of it—and organization will make the difference.

What matters above all other considerations is that the Republican Party must have a candidate who can send Obama packing. If that happens, America’s future will begin to improve in the late evening of November 6 when the election results come in.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Newt-ster

By Alan Caruba

Fox News announced that Newt Gingrich will not be providing his observations on political events and personalities insofar as he is now regarded as running for the presidency.

Newt announced his intentions on Thursday, March 3. Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota is expected to jump in soon enough. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney will and my thought at this early stage is that the Republican Party is in desperate need of a candidate who can actually win.

I always had the feeling that Sen. John McCain won the 2008 primary campaign mostly because he wasn’t one of the other candidates, one of whom was Romney. McCain crossed the aisle so often to cooperate with Democrats in the Senate that he must have worn a path there. And then he picked Sarah Palin to be on his ticket as vice president.

Please, let’s not have a repeat of that disaster. At least, in 2012, the novelty of an Afro-American candidate will have dissipated in the wake of every foot-in-mouth statement and insane public policy that a single, sitting President could accumulate halfway through his first and last term in office.

Let me say that Gingrich, intellectually, is head and shoulders above anyone else in the race. In terms of pure brain-power, he has a real grasp of most issues.

The Newt-ster, however, has some problems.

Newt’s current wife, Callista, is his third. He divorced the first two and had, shall we say, some fidelity problems. The real problem for me is an image I cannot shake from my mind, the one of Newt and Nancy Pelosi together on a couch in a television commercial discussing “climate change” and his support for the cap-and-trade scheme that would have been a huge tax on all energy use.

Politicians who get too close to the Giant Green Light of environmentalism tend to get soft in the head over critical issues. To his credit, these days Newt is talking about the need to drill for oil and repeal of the horrid Obamacare Act.

I don’t frankly trust or have much use for any politician who fell for or still speaks about “climate change.” The reason you haven’t heard much about it is that everyone short of Al Gore has disowned the hoax. And Gore even said he thought ethanol was a bad idea!

The Newt-ster arrives at his announcement with a ton of political baggage. While he is forever in the pantheon of Republican heroes for the overthrow of Democrat control of the Congress in 1994 after forty years in the political wilderness and lauded for engineering the overhaul of the federal welfare system.

He was also famously blamed for the 1995 government shutdown. That, however, was Clinton’s decision. The news media hung it on Newt. In 1997 he was censured for ethics violations and his resignation was tendered the following year. Suffice to say, his years as Speaker were difficult and one has to wonder, assuming lessons learned, whether the presidency must be even less kind were he to be elected.

I have little doubt that the Newt-ster could wipe the floor with Barack Obama in any debate. He is articulate, has a strong grasp of history from his days as a professor, and I still don’t think he can win for all the objections cited and for those that will surely jump up and bite him in the months ahead.

I long ago concluded that one has to be somewhat delusional to want to be President. There is a level of egocentricity required that most normal men lack. The Newt-ster wants to be President very badly. He has devoted every day since he first ran for public office to that goal and now, at age 67, he has to go for it or risk being too old later on.

I predict that the Obama-loving mainstream media will chew him up and spit him out. He has been through that inferno and survived, patiently writing books, building a political organization, giving speech at the right places to the right groups, but I think the Republican Party would throw him overboard the minute New Jersey Governor Chris Christie relented and said he would accept the nomination.

I like the Newt-ster. I just don’t want him to run.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Rallying the Republican Troops

By Alan Caruba

Perhaps the best news of the day is that Newt Gingrich has made it clear that he is available to take over the leadership of the Republican Party and reverse the current political catastrophe.

In 1994, Gingrich engineered the Republican return to power after forty years in the Democrat wilderness called Congress. It was no small feat, but even genius can be flawed and, in time, Gingrich had to give up his job as Speaker of the House and ultimately turned to writing some excellent novels based on Civil War events and a host of other activities.

He had arrived in Congress from Georgia after having been a professor of history and nothing will serve him so well, should he become the GOP choice to head the party, than that long sweep of the past that, for the Republicans began with a candidate from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln. We had some really nifty ones like Teddy Roosevelt, Ike Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, as well as others like the less memorable Calvin Coolidge who historians say did a good job too.

Then we had Nixon; twice elected, once resigned for crimes against the Constitution and pardoned by Gerald Ford whom few can recall. And, it would appear, two Bush’s too many.

Over the years since Franklin Delano Roosevelt struggled unsuccessfully to get us out of the Great Depression and led, successfully, the nation through World War II, Republicans have drifted with the rest of the population toward an ever-growing, ever-expanding federal government. Even Reagan could not rid us of the Department of Education that has ruined our schools.

Liberalism like the “Blob” of the movies engulfed everyone and everything in its path. Unlike Al Capp’s “Shmoo” of the Little Abner comic strip, the Blog does not provide for all our daily needs. Instead, it sucks the life out of its victims until they no longer want to take responsibility for their lives.

Republicans have spent the last week attacking one another for either attacking or supporting the McCain-Palin ticket. This kind of blood-letting is predictable and one hopes will be short-lived.

It is time now to rally the troops. Republicans have to organize, organize, organize for the next four years if they are ever to regain the White House and Congress.

This last election suffered seriously from a ticket that was too squishy and semi-liberal with McCain and, dare it be said, a tad too far to the right with Palin. Neither should be regarded as the future of the party if the party is to have a future.

Republicans are not totally bereft of talent and new faces. Let me suggest just one. Michael Steele has the look of a potential presidential candidate for 2012. There are others.

For now, we must be good soldiers and brave.