Nothing But Words?

If you believe Rasmussen, Newt Gingrich has picked up 31 percentage points against Mitt Romney (from 22 down to 9 up) among Florida likely voters in the space of two weeks.  By all accounts, Newt's extraordinary performance in the debates leading up to the South Carolina primary was the proximate cause of his victory there, and thus the momentum that he's carrying into Florida.  We've always known that having a way with words, especially with the unscripted words that can't be transmitted to a candidate by way of speech writers and teleprompters, is an important asset on the campaign trail.  It clearly becomes all the more important an asset to the extent votes turn on the performance of the candidates in televised debates. 

Let's stipulate that Newt's gifts as an extemporaneous rhetorician give him a leg up over Romney in the Republican primaries and probably would give him a leg up over Obama in general election debates.  No one will argue with the proposition that Gingrich's fluency will help him make a case for himself as the Republican nominee and a general election candidate.  But Newt's fluency is his case for his own presidential candidacy.  At least you'd get that impression from this spot: 

Who Won Iowa?

You may have heard that the official recount of votes cast in the Iowa Caucuses ended with Rick Santorum 32 votes ahead of Mitt Romney, but with the votes from 8 separate electoral precincts missing, and therefore not recounted. The Iowa Republican Party has decided, on that basis, to call the election a tie.

Josh Marshall thinks that's a "cop-out for the ages":

"The rationale for calling this a tie, according to the Des Moines Register, which has the story as an exclusive, is that 8 precincts’ numbers are lost permanently and will never be certified. So in practice it’s a tie, too close to call, etc. That of course probably applies to pretty much all recount type elections — Bush v Gore, maybe Franken v. Coleman, etc. The vagueries of the process itself is too imprecise in some sense to tell you who ‘won’ in some Platonic (the other sense of the word) sense. But in normal elections where the people holding it aren’t deeply invested in not letting one guy win we have a name for that kind [of] situation — Rick Santorum won."

What's Newt For?

As usual, nobody on the stage in last night's debate could match Newt Gingrich as an extemporaneous rhetorician. When anyone else was asked a question, he tried to give the appearance of responsiveness by stringing his talking points together seamlessly.   Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum do this pretty well by now, but if you pay attention you can still spot the seams in their answers where one talking point ends and the next one begins.  You hardly have to pay attention to spot them when Rick Perry's talking--you just have to notice the momentary panic in his eyes during the couple of seconds it takes him to figure out which of the four or five things he can remember to say comes closest to being an answer to the question asked.  

Newt's playing in a different debating league.  He composes cohesive paragraphs on the spot that squarely answer the question he's addressing.  Even if, like me, you're not very sympathetic to most of what he has to say, you can't help but appreciate the economy and eloquence with which he often manages to say it.  Consider this:

Has Obama Found His Voice?

There’s a general feeling of relief in Democratic circles now that Obama has started making populist noises and bearing his teeth at Republicans. That’s understandable: it’s a lot easier to rally behind a president throwing punches rather than taking them on the chin. Moreover, there's no denying that Obama has scored his share of modest tactical victories over the last couple of months, like facing down House Republicans over a two-month extension of the payroll tax holiday.

I guess you can’t blame Democrats for clinging to the hope that, if Obama can win enough tactical skirmishes, we’ll reach a tipping point where disenchanted independent voters will start looking forward rather than backwards at the disappointments of the last three years. But when you think about it, that strategy's more than a little far-fetched. Consider how it looks to Yuval Levin from the right:

"Based on what the president and his advisers have said and done in recent weeks, that strategy appears to consist of creating populist confrontations with Congress and then complaining that Washington is broken because Republicans won’t let the president have his way. That’s a strategy that tells the public that the current situation in Washington is untenable and change is needed. Is that not an odd way for a Democratic incumbent president (whose party also controls the Senate) to run against a Republican outsider? . . .

"The Obama team’s approach might make sense if the substance of their policy proposals were enormously popular, so that telling the public that these could be enacted if only Obama is given a few more years to push them might help his case. But what are those proposals? A payroll-tax holiday? Higher taxes on the wealthy? Is there anything else?"

Gingrich Going Off The Conservative/Republican Reservation

 I just finished marveling at what Rick Perry was saying about Mitt Romney's days at Bain Capital.  Now a SuperPac supporting Newt Gingrich is producing a spot that you wouldn't be surprised to see coming from Moveon.org:

Rick Perry’s Moral Incoherence

I’m as astonished as the next guy that Rick Perry has campaigned so ineptly for the Republican presidential nomination. It never occurred to me five months ago that the nation’s longest-serving governor, presiding over the state with far and away the nation’s best record of job-creation at a time when job-creation is the most important thing on voters' minds, could make such a hash of things. It isn’t just a matter of how much trouble Perry has thinking on his feet—his “Oops moment” was an extreme case, but not an isolated one. The really shocking thing is the moral incoherence of some of his well-scripted utterances on the campaign trail. Perry has trouble making sense even when he knows exactly what he wants to say.

Recall how Perry countered Mitt Romney’s accusation that, as Governor of Texas, Perry had abetted illegal immigration by permitting undocumented aliens to qualify for in-state tuition rates at post-secondary educational institutions. It’s not that he was obliged to defend an indefensible policy.  If you’re going to have illegal immigrants in your state anyway do you really want them to be less productive than they have to be? Yet Perry countered, not by defending his own policy on its merits, but by reminding voters that Romney had once hired a contractor who employed undocumented aliens to do yard work at one of his houses—as if it were the responsibility of people buying services from independent contractors to monitor their compliance with federal immigration law. The most revealing thing about Perry is that he and his brain trust actually thought that he’d put points on the board by blaming Romney for something for which he clearly had no moral responsibility.

Can Democrats Win By Running Against Greed?

Take a look at this spot from moveon.org:



The general idea animating this spot is the same moralistic notion that animates OWS, viz., that the people in the middle and lower strata of the economic pyramid are being victimized by the greed of people in the upper strata. And Mitt Romney’s career in private equity at Bain Capital is Exhibit A. The laid off steel worker featured in the spot makes the point as pithily as it can be made: “Mitt Romney wants to call himself a “job creator”? Mitt Romney doesn’t care about jobs. He cares about money.”

The Reality Principle

George Packer is puzzled. He thinks the proposition that “the Republican Party has descended into unreality and extremism” is too obvious to stand in need of a defense. And, at least in liberal circles, he’s surely right about that. Yet why is a political party that has allegedly been taken over by crazy Tea Partiers almost certainly going to nominate a presidential candidate who, for all his manifest imperfections, isn’t at all crazy in the manner of an allegedly crazy Tea Partier?

“The great puzzle of the Republican campaign is that, in an era of unprecedented ideological fervor, the party will almost certainly nominate the candidate who is the blandest, least ideological, and least trusted by conservatives of them all (that would be Mitt Romney—Jon Huntsman doesn’t count as long as he’s in the low single digits). The reasons for this are not easy to see, and in some ways they’re fluky.”

Calling the reasons for Romney’s ascendance “fluky” suggests that only an improbable series of accidents explains it. But, since Rick Perry had his “oops” moment, Romney has been the only imaginable president in the field of declared Republican presidential candidates. And there never was an unpresidential figure with a serious chance of winning the nomination as a Tea Party candidate, and that includes not only Ron Paul, Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann, but Newt Gingrich. Granted, we can imagine a number of more authentically conservative candidates who might have given Romney a run for his money had they chosen to run—Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, et al. But none of them fit the profile of a crazy Tea Partier either.