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

Religion and the 2012 Elections

By Alan Caruba

The one thing that Presidents from Washington through to modern times have held in common was the belief that religion was a central component of the life of the republic.

Calvin Coolidge, President from 1923 to 1929, said “Our government rests upon religion. It is from that source that we derive our reverence for truth and justice, for equality and liberality, and for the rights of mankind. Unless the people believe in these principles they cannot believe in our government. There are only two main theories of government in our world. One rests on righteousness and the other on force. One appeals to reason, and the other appeals to the sword. One is exemplified in the republic; the other is represented by despotism.”

Ronald Reagan echoed this view saying, “Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.”

For Barack Obama, Sundays have often been devoted to playing golf. A self-declared Christian, there are widespread concerns that he was and is a Muslim, given his childhood as the adopted son of an Indonesian Muslim, his mother’s second husband. In the 2008 campaign, he managed to overcome the fact that his spiritual mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, led a Chicago church with a doctrine of Black Liberation theology that was frequently highly critical of America.

When John F. Kennedy ran for office, the question was whether his being Catholic would play a role in whether he could be elected. He put that question to rest. Obama had to sever his ties with Rev. Wright in order to seek and win election.

As Mitt Romney closes in on the Republican nomination some liberals are already sniping at his Mormon faith. while Rick Santorum’s emphasis on the strictures of his faith has played an unknown factor in his fluctuating fortunes.

The Gallup organization began systematically tracking religion in 1948, asking Americans to name the major religion with which they personally identified. Back then, two percent (2%) of Americans volunteered “no religion” and another three percent (3%) had an otherwise unidentified religious identity. By the 1970s, the number of Americans with no formal religious identity began to increase, reaching eleven percent (11%) by 1990.

By 2010, sixteen percent (16%) said they had no religious identity or had an otherwise undesignated response. A Gallup analysis noted that “Lack of identification with a formal religious group does not necessarily mean religion is irrelevant in a broad sense in a person’s life. One can remain quite religious, or at least spiritual, while at the same time eschewing attachment to or identity with a formal religion or denomination.”

The Gallup polling demonstrates that eighty-four percent (84%) of Americans, a huge majority, do identify themselves as affiliated in some fashion, formal or not, with a faith of choice.

Drawing on two surveys, the General Social Survey and the National Congressional Study, Mark Chavez, a professor of sociology, religion, and divinity at Duke University, author of “American Religion: Contemporary Trends”, concluded that traditional belief and practice is relatively stable, but that confidence in religious institutions has declined more than confidence in secular ones.

In a March 3rd, Wall Street Journal commentary, Peggy Noonan wrote, “The other day in a seminar at a university, a student of political science asked a sort of complicated question that seemed to be about the predictability of human response to a given set of political stimuli. I answered that if you view people as souls, believe that we have souls within us, that they are us, then nothing political is fully predictable, because you never know what a soul will do, how a soul will respond, what truth it will apprehend and react to.”

The current firestorm over the Obamacare mandate that contravenes personal conscience, a pillar of all religions, has ignited a debate over the separation of church and state. The Constitution specifically forbids “the establishment” of a state religion and, by extenstion, forbids the federal government from coming between an individual’s spiritual beliefs and its demands.

Coolidge also said “We do not need more intellectual power; we need more moral power. We do not need more knowledge; we need more character. We do not need more government; we need more culture. We do not need more law; we need more religion. We do not need more of the things that are seen; we need more of the things that are unseen.”

Religion is hardwired into humans. From the Stone Age onward, we have created religions as a means to cope with an often dangerous and indifferent world, and to peer into what Shakespeare called “The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” Consciously or not, three years into President Obama’s term, millions of Americans are reexamining their religious beliefs and I suspect this will play an important role in the outcome of the 2012 elections.

Americans may have grown more secular in their general outlook, but there is still that inner voice, their relationship with the faith into which they were born or they embraced—their soul—and the historic distrust of big government that will shape the outcome of the election.

The Founding Fathers believed that only men of “virtue” could lead America and only citizens who practiced virtue in their lives could preserve and protect the republic. They were right.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Thoughts on Super Tuesday

By Alan Caruba

As The Music Man’s Professor Harold Hill will tell you, pool is a game that will “Help you cultivate horse sense, a cool head, and a keen eye”, particularly if you want to run the table—to shoot all the numbered balls into the pockets. As someone who once owned his own pool table, I have to agree with Prof. Hill.

I am not a political pundit and, indeed, I write about politics with a general sense of reluctance. That’s hard to avoid in the year of a general election and, currently, the madness generated by multiple primaries and caucuses.

That said, I think Mitt Romney is going to “run the table” on March 6th, known as Super Tuesday, for its many primaries, because he ran the table last week in Michigan and Arizona. He came out on top in the Wyoming caucuses as well.

While I watch the polls like others, my seat-of-the-pants judgment is that a majority of Republican voters are slowly, but surely concluding that Mitt Romney can and will defeat Barack Obama while his opponents cannot.

Much has been made of Romney’s personal wealth—some might call it success—but Americans have never been reluctant to elect men of considerable wealth to the presidency. Franklin Delano Roosevelt comes to mind. His was inherited because, Lord knows, he would have starved as a lawyer. His uncle, Teddy, was wealthy by the standards of his day.

Let’s not forget John F. Kennedy whose daddy made a small fortune as a bootlegger and later in Hollywood. Lyndon Johnson rose from modest means to acquire wealth during his years in the Senate. And, yes, the Bush family had wealth too. Bush41 made his in a classic American fashion, oil!

The argument going on in the Republican ranks has been about electing a genuine conservative. People tend to forget that during his political career even Ronald Reagan raised taxes when necessary and took stands that were surely not conservative by a purist’s standard. Bush43 foisted “No Child Left Behind” on us; one of the worst pieces of liberal legislation in modern times.

So, no, there is no perfect conservative candidate in realistic, political terms. There are men, however, who got elected as conservatives and did some good conservative things in office.

As the contrast between Rick Santorum and Romney became clear, people are being asked to make a choice between Santorum’s shoot-from-the-hip, holier than thou style and the Romney model that demonstrated a Republican could be elected in a Democrat State. Even I have criticized Romney for being a bit “robotic”, but he did was what any good politician would do; he stayed on message.

President Obama does not want to run against Mitt Romney because it will be next to impossible to smear him in the same fashion he could with Gingrich or Santorum. Ron Paul is not a serious candidate except for his mission to acquire enough delegates to force the convention platform to include his favorite cause, eliminating the Federal Reserve.

Tuesday will be full of the usual drama associated with politics, but I believe that Republican voters have turned a corner as regards Mitt Romney.

As one Wall Street Journal pundit pointed out recently, President Obama lives in “a mythical America”, one where it’s smart to spend $8.2 billion on “clean energy” companies while decrying the tax incentives to oil companies that represent half the money wasted on producers of biofuels, solar panels and wind turbines. And let’s not forget Obama’s new favorite source of energy, algae, otherwise known as pond scum.

If I am wrong, so be it, but I think Super Tuesday is going to demonstrate that Republicans are determined to avoid four more years of Obama. I even suspect that a surprising number of Democrats feel that way as well.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Political Absurdities

By Alan Caruba

At various points in any election year, the campaigns achieve moments of total absurdity that are passed off as news, usually with a straight face.

When certain Republicans begin to refer to “vulture capitalism” you know such a moment has arrived because, if Republicans are not all about capitalism, there is not much else for them to discuss. By capitalism I mean the state of the economy, workplace and trade issues, taxes, and everything else involved with paying one’s bills and becoming filthy rich if possible.

Republicans read The Wall Street Journal. Democrats read The New York Times. I rest my case.

The other recent absurdity was President Barack Obama telling NBC’s Matt Laurer that he deserved a second term. As if driving the U.S. debt up to $15 trillion wasn’t enough, apparently Obama wants to stick around so he can cancel another project that could create 20,000 jobs like the Keystone XL pipeline.

It is patently absurd for Obama to claim that his administration has “created” new jobs, but that is his campaign message these days. How many are unemployed? Have given up looking for a job? The only jobs government creates are government jobs and those have exploded in Obama’s first term. The rest of the time government is usually a huge obstacle to the private sector when it wants to do the same thing.

The greatest absurdity of all of the 2008 campaigns was that a totally unknown Senator from Illinois, there for barely two of a six year term, should emerge as the “messiah” of the masses to save America.

From what? Answer: the dreadful financial mess based on the idiotic notion that government should be in the housing and mortgage business.

This genius then proceeded to spend the first two years of his presidency telling everyone that it was all George Bush’s fault, thus ignoring the many times Bush warned Congress against the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac implosion. Sadly, Rasmussen Reports says 40% of Americans do think it is Bush’s fault.

Obama’s “solution” to the mess was a multi-billion-dollar “stimulus” that, by now, everyone agrees was a political slush fund and a failure. Then he borrowed more money than any president in U.S. history—including FDR who had to fund World War Two. It’s a long list of blunders, but the bottom line is massive stagnant unemployment and a housing market that’s still in the tank.

Why does every national election always seem to produce at least one candidate who uses the process to advocate ideas that most voters regard as absurd and, of course, I refer to Ron Paul’s view that we should pull back all our military from their foreign missions. While I agree we should stop getting into wars without Congressional consent—something the Constitution requires—that rule has been ignored since World War Two.
Since then the U.S. has engaged in wars of every description while the members of Congress could be found whistling in the hallways of the Capital in the hope people wouldn’t notice. The United Nations has offered cover some of the time, but we went into Vietnam, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq with only the flimsiest pretense that they were not military actions.

Not to be outdone, Newt Gingrich opined that the U.S. should put a colony on the Moon. This was so absurd that even Saturday Night Live lampooned it. What is absurd, however, is the way Obama has ended the U.S. space program to the point we have to hitch a ride with the Russians. Worse, however, was Rick Santorum’s recent assertion that Mitt Romney “rigged” the outcome of the CPAC straw vote. The last candidate who ran on moral issues was Jimmy Carter. Consider yourself warned.

I personally regard the term “flip-flopper” an absurdity because I have never known of any politician who has not changed his mind and, frankly, would not want to vote for one so inflexible he or she could not change with the times.

What’s really absurd have been the directions various presidents have taken the nation in the recent times. Lyndon B. Johnson not only expanded the war in Vietnam, but he threw in the War on Poverty for good measure. In retrospect, it was a total failure. Richard Nixon ended his presidency with the Watergate scandal. Jimmy Carter drove the oil industry out of the U.S., reduced our military strength, and was such a dismal failure he only lasted one term.

I’m thinking that Obama will follow in Carter’s footsteps and we shall look back on “cash for clunkers”, Solyndra, and, of course, Obamacare, and ask ourselves, what were we thinking? The answer is that a majority of the voters were not thinking!

Neither Carter, nor Obama are aberrations. They were the result of the hardcore twenty-five to thirty percent of the voters who are irredeemably liberal, vote Democrat, and for whom reality and facts are of no importance.

Then there are another percentile who identify themselves as Democrats without realizing that our current financial crisis was created by Democrats! Republicans will reliably vote for their party’s candidate and that means a thin sliver of self-identified independents will decide the November elections.

All elections bring out the absurd in everyone, candidates and voters alike. We fall in love with one, experience the rapture of supporting them, and then wake up the day after the election and spend the next four years feeling like a recovering junky.

© 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