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February 3, 2012
The Politics of Absolutely Everything
By GAIL COLLINS (NY Times)
This week we had a huge political fight about breast cancer. Clearly, we
have now hit the point where there's nothing that can't be divided into
red-state-blue-state.
Nothing. The other day I saw a blog called "I Dig My Garden" that
had a
forum on whether Republicans could truly love gardening. And there was a
little dust-up in Albany over politicization of a local pet blog, which had
featured a discussion on Mitt Romney's driving to Canada with the family dog
strapped to the roof of the car.
But breast cancer would seem like the last thing to go. Everybody hates
cancer and everybody likes breasts - infants, adults, women, men. Really,
it's
America's most
popular body part.
The Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation has made its fight against breast
cancer into one of the most successful charitable enterprises in recent
history, partly because it makes everybody feel good and helps corporate
sponsors create good will. It's raised about $2 billion over the years. This
is the group that brought us the pink ribbons and pink umbrellas and pink
beauty products, and "Buckets for the Cure," a rather controversial
promotion it undertook with that well-known purveyor of healthy eating
choices, Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Breast cancer tends to get a disproportionate share of health care
financing, and Komen's enormous success tilts things still further. (The
foundation spends a good deal of time and money tracking down smaller
anticancer organizations and demanding that they cease and desist from using
the words "for the cure" or using the color pink.) Critics also
suggest that
Komen is way too fixated on mammograms, which are a good tool, but are
hardly the be-all-and-end-all of cancer prevention. On the other hand, Komen
does financially support much-needed grass-roots programs like Planned
Parenthood's medical exams for mostly young, lower-income women.
So imagine our surprise when Komen announced that it wouldn't be giving any
more grants to Planned Parenthood because of a new policy of not supporting
groups that are "under investigation." The investigation in
question is
being run by a Republican congressman from Florida
who wants to determine
whether Planned Parenthood uses taxpayer money to pay for abortions. Which
it doesn't, as a matter of longstanding policy. But the congressman wants to
see a very large quantity of documents so he can be absolutely, positively,
really, really sure.
Then came the mega-outcry. Although average
Americans are divided rather
evenly on the issue of abortion, feelings about Planned Parenthood providing
doctors to examine the breasts of low-income women are not really all that
mixed.
When all hell broke loose, Komen's chief executive, Nancy Brinker, dropped
the story about investigations and announced that the real reason for the
switch in policy was an effort to avoid "duplicative grants" by
eliminating
health care providers who don't actually perform mammograms themselves.
Planned Parenthood provides the medical exams, and if a doctor finds
something worrisome, the patients are sent off to a radiologist to be
tested. This is exactly the same way things work in medical offices
throughout the land.
On Friday, the Komen people backed down, and apologized to the entire world.
Really, if you call them up, they would probably apologize to you, too.
Brinker said the new under-investigation policy would now cover only
criminal investigations. The "duplicative grants" policy appears to
have
vanished from the face of the earth.
The Planned Parenthood folk declared themselves satisfied with the result.
Given the fact that money had been pouring in ever since Komen made its
first announcement, they actually seemed kind of euphoric.
"It's restored everybody's faith in the basic goodness of people,"
said
Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood.
Nobody really knows whether future grants from Komen will be forthcoming.
Despite all its protests to the contrary, the foundation was pretty clearly
playing to the anti-abortion crowd. Until now, hardly anyone had noticed
that Brinker, a longtime Republican donor who once served as ambassador to
Hungary during
the George W. Bush administration, had recently named a
former pro-life candidate for governor of Georgia, Karen Handel, as the
foundation's senior vice president for public policy.
Perhaps this is all coincidence, but, in light of the last week, you'd have
to say: nah.
A lot of the old Komen donors and supporters probably won't be coming back.
It would be a shame if they just retreated in disillusionment. Let's hope
they go off into the wider world of women's health care programs and help
spread the wealth. That really would be a happy ending.
Also, Republicans definitely do like gardening. But feel free to talk as
much as you want about Mitt Romney and the dog.
February 1, 2012
Mitt Speaks. Oh, No!
By GAIL COLLINS (NY Times)
On the morning after the Florida
primary, Mitt Romney bounded out of bed,
inhaled the sweet air of victory, donned his new cloak of invulnerability
...
... and went on CNN to announce that he doesn't care about poor people.
"I'm not concerned about the very poor," he told a slightly
stunned-looking
Soledad O'Brien.
Whenever the topic turns to wealth, or the lack thereof, some inner demon
seems to make Romney say something that sounds ridiculous, offensive or
ridiculously offensive.
If this had been post-South Carolina,
we might have assumed that he was
making a play for the segment of his party that believes the greatest threat
to the American way of life is greedy paupers. But the nomination was in the
bag! Mitt was just being Mitt and trying to present himself as the candidate
of the middle class, which he defined as "the 90-95 percent of Americans
who, right now, are struggling." Subtract the 1 percent at the top and
Romney appeared to be saying that he was absolutely not going to direct his
campaign at the bottom 4 percent of the American public. That certainly
makes sense politically, since you are talking - according to my very rough
calculations - mostly about folks who are living in households with incomes
under $5,000. Not a group with terrific turnout.
Let's deconstruct his entire remarks:
I'm in this race because I care about ... (tiniest of pauses)... Americans.
I'm not concerned about the very poor. ...
I don't think he actually meant to suggest the very poor were not Americans.
But still.
We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I'll fix it. ...
Does anybody truly believe that Romney is planning to spend any presidential
time dreaming up ways to fix the safety net for the benefit of the very
poor? Be real. This is the guy who drove to Canada
with the family dog
strapped on the roof.
I'm not concerned about the very rich. They're doing just fine. ...
Gee, he should know.
I'm concerned about the very heart of America,
the 90-95 percent of
Americans who, right now, are struggling. ...
Difficult as these times are, I don't think 90 percent to 95 percent of
Americans are struggling. If they were, the whole country would look like a
scene out of "Contagion" or "The Walking Dead."
We will hear from the Democrat Party (about) the plight of the poor. ...
Not really. If we had a dollar for every speech President Obama has given
about the poor, we would ... not have a lot of
money. However, it is
interesting to hear a candidate directly attacking the opposition for being
concerned about the destitute.
And there's no question, it's not good being poor. ...
Here, Mitt Romney demonstrates his capacity for empathy.
And we have a safety net to help those that are very poor. But my campaign
is focused on middle-income Americans. My campaign - you can choose where to
focus. You can focus on the rich. That's not my focus. You can focus on the
very poor. That's not my focus. ...
This is the third time in less than two minutes that he's mentioned that he
does not really give a fig about the people who make under $5,000 a year.
My focus is on middle-income Americans: Retirees living on Social Security.
People who can't find work. ...
Whoa! Do you think he's suggesting that the very poor do not have a problem
finding work? That they're too lazy to look? Or does he just figure that
they're all disabled, or children, or old people who don't get Social
Security? That would be pretty harsh. And weird, if he's trying to say:
"I
only care about the elderly if they made enough money to qualify for Social
Security. The rest are doing fine under government programs."
Folks that have kids that are getting ready to go to college. These are the
people who have been most badly hurt during the Obama years. We have a very
ample safety net, and we can talk about whether it needs to be strengthened
or whether there are holes in it. But we have food stamps. We have Medicaid.
We have housing vouchers. We have programs to help the poor. ...
Romney seems obsessed with the idea that his enemies are spreading rumors
that he's going to be devoting his presidential campaign to proposing new
programs to help the poor. Really, I do not think this is going to be a
problem.
But the middle-income Americans, they're the folks that are really
struggling right now. And they need someone that can help get this economy
going for them.
That's the end. Rest assured that Mitt Romney is not going to be spending a
single second fretting about the problems of really, really poor people. His
supporters can breathe a sigh of relief. Now all they're going to have to
worry about is the fact that he's going to keep talking like this for the
next nine months.
Republicans have only themselves to blame
By Richard Cohen, January 30
(Washington Post)
On Saturday night, at precisely 9:19 and 30 seconds, my iPhone, my iPad, my
computer and, for all I know, my toaster were informed that Herman Cain had
endorsed Newt Gingrich. The ping-ping of the devices suggested that
something momentous had happened - alerts from both The Post and the New
York Times - but in fact it was just additional evidence that the Republican
Party has become a circus: One clown endorsed another.
It's hard to know who is the more ridiculous figure - the grandiloquent,
bombastic and compulsively dishonest Gingrich, or the beguilingly ignorant
Cain, a man who has never held elective office and who was reduced to
speechlessness when asked a question about Libya. Nonetheless, Gingrich, his
Alfred E. Neuman grin on his face, accepted the endorsement and then went on
with his nihilistic campaign for the White House. This has been an
exceedingly silly political season.
But it has also been a sad one. The Republican establishment acts as if this
season's goon squad of presidential candidates has come out of nowhere, an
act of God - a tsunami that hit the party and receded, leaving nothing but
nitwits standing. In column after column, conservative commentators lament
the present condition, but not their past acquiescence as their party turned
hostile to thought, reason and the two most important words in the English
language: It depends.
If you ask me what I think of abortion, I'd say, "It depends." It
depends on
whether you're talking about the ninth month of pregnancy, the first, the
health of the mother, the fetus - or, even, the morning-after pill. But in
the Republican contest, the answer to the question is always the same: no,
no and no again. Thanks for giving the matter such careful thought.
It is the same with taxes. Should they be raised? It depends. It depends on
economic and fiscal conditions - and on whose taxes will be raised and by
how much. The answer cannot be "No, never." That's not an economic
position;
it is an ideological one and exhibits a closed mind.
Similarly with global warming, GOP candidates are not certain it is
exacerbated by industry, auto emissions and such. They take this position
not because they have studied the science but because they are opposed to
government regulations. They fear the solution more than they do the
problem. Some also take a skeptical position regarding the theory of
evolution - proof right there that there is something wrong with this
theory.
This rampant anti-intellectualism is worrisome. The world is a complex
place, but to deal with it, the GOP presented a parade of hopefuls who
proposed nostrums or, in the case of Michele Bachmann, peddled false rumors
about vaccinations. When this started I cannot say - the late Richard
Hofstadter won the Pulitzer Prize for his "Anti-intellectualism in
American
Life" in 1964 - but the embrace of Sarah Palin by the GOP establishment
has
got to be noted. The lady has the gift of demagoguery and the required
anti-elitism, but she knows next to nothing about almost anything - and
revels in her ignorance.
Should the United States
bomb Iran's
nuclear installations? It depends.
Should America
enable Israel
to do it? It depends. How should China
be
handled? What about Russia
and Turkey,
not to mention Pakistan
- our ally
and a mosh pit of madmen? From the GOP candidates, the answers are simple:
Bomb Iran if
it goes nuclear, confront China,
stare down Russia
and - from
the unfathomably shallow Rick Perry - kiss off Pakistan.
Subtlety is
banished. Yahoos stride the stage.
It is entirely appropriate that last week's GOP debates fell between
"Pawn
Stars" and "American Pickers" in the 10 most-watched cable
television shows.
They are sheer entertainment having little to do with us and our problems.
The Republican Party has veered so far from reality that Gingrich is
lambasting Romney as a "Massachusetts
moderate" - moderation being, as it
was with the clueless Barry Goldwater, an epithet. Romney, who has all but
collapsed his rib cage to conform to conservative dogma, must be perplexed.
Others have prudently stayed out of the race.
The Republican establishment that has now risen up to smite the bratty
Gingrich has only itself to blame. For too long it has been mute in the face
of a belligerent anti-intellectualism, pretending that knowledge and
experience do not matter and that Washington is a condition and not a mere
city. The endorsement of Gingrich by Cain was not a bulletin. It was a
feeble blip on a scope. The GOP is brain-dead.
January 28, 2012
Tension on the Tarmac
By MAUREEN DOWD (NY
Times)
MIAMI
WHAT is it with Barack Obama's penchant for getting in tangles with blond
politicians on airport tarmacs?
Usually, tarmacs are for joyous welcomes or teary goodbyes. But No Drama
Obama saves his rare tempests for the runway.
In the last primary season, the tension in the relationship between Hillary
Clinton, who had expected to glide to the nomination, and the upstart
younger senator from Illinois came to a head one day in December 2007 as
both were preparing to board their planes in Washington to go to an Iowa
debate.
Hillary had sent word that she wanted to talk to Obama. Standing in front of
her plane, she apologized to him for the comments of her co-chairman in New
Hampshire, Billy Shaheen, who had warned that
Republicans would pounce on
Obama's confessions of cocaine and marijuana use.
But given the opening, Obama dived in, telling Clinton
that she should
intervene to stop the pattern of insinuations and attacks by her supporters,
including one by a volunteer in Iowa
who had forwarded an e-mail claiming
Obama was a Muslim.
That's when Hillary got upset and began gesticulating, giving Obama a piece
of her mind about what she saw as unfair attacks on his side. Obama gently
put his hand on her arm "to chill her out," as an aide later told
me.
But Hillary did not like it, feeling she was being held in place and
patronized, even "manhandled," as her aide put it to a reporter.
On Wednesday, Obama had another bristly tarmac moment with Gov. Jan Brewer
of Arizona, who met Air Force
One when the president landed in Phoenix.
The
toxic dominatrix of illegal immigration, the woman who turned every Latino
in her state into a suspect, was flustered and gesticulating at the
president as he put his hand on her arm to chill her out. Brewer complained
afterward that she had felt "unnerved" and "a little bit
threatened" by
Obama and that he had walked away while she was in midsentence.
Brewer told Monica Crowley, subbing for Sean Hannity on Fox News, that she
had given the president a letter inviting him to join her at the border to
discuss enforcement. She said he shot back that her account of a 2010 Oval
Office meeting on the topic, published in her book, "Scorpions for
Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media and Cynical
Politicos to Secure America's Border," was distorted.
"He was patronizing," Brewer wrote about the president in her book,
adding:
"He's treating me like the cop he had over for a beer after he
bad-mouthed
the Cambridge police." (The
president's recent performances are boosting
sales of Brewer's book and Al Green's "Let's Stay Together.")
With typical Fox balance, Crowley
told Governor Brewer that she admired her
for "getting in the president's grill," adding, "You go,
girl."
The president can be thin-skinned, but the governor can be fat-headed. The
Constitution is more threatened by Brewer's racial profiling than the
governor was by the president's fact-checking. Brewer's grasp of facts is
tenuous, after all: she told The Arizona Republic in 2010 that her father
died fighting the Nazis in Germany,
when he died a decade after the end of
the war, which he spent working at an ammunition factory in Nevada.
Both of Obama's tarmac tiffs worked in his favor. After his encounter with
Hillary, he told advisers that it was the first time he knew he could beat
her because he saw fear in her eyes.
After his brouhaha with Brewer, dubbed "the dust-up in the desert,"
he
became a hero to the Hispanics he had gone West to court. They loved seeing
their Cruella de Vil get dressed down.
Everything is breaking Barry's way, as Mitt and Newt rip into each other in
vicious ads and debates like alligators going after house pets.
Romney was tutored in Florida
by Brett O'Donnell, a new debate coach. Too
bad he can't find a conviction coach.
O'Donnell manned up Mittens and taught him how to pummel Newt in
"moments of
strength," as the Republican strategist Alex Castellanos calls them. The
funny thing is that the reason Gingrich soared in South
Carolina, before
faltering here, was that Republicans are so afraid of debates with the
president that they are obsessed with sending forth their toughest adversary
for him.
They seem to have forgotten that, while Obama has had dazzling moments of
strength in executing Osama and in swashbuckling derring-do against Somali
pirates - if not in dealing with Congress - he was no Abe Lincoln in
debates. He did not like debating, and Michelle urged him to be more
visceral. He often faded onstage because he stubbornly refused to accept
debates as alpha combat rather than beta seminars. He disdained anything he
saw as superficial politics, from sound bites to macho put-downs.
If Obama continues to resist the gladiatorial subtext, while Romney embraces
it, the debates could be more evenly matched than the Republicans dare to
dream.
January 27, 2012
Lunar Colonies, Lunacy and Losses
By CHARLES M. BLOW (NY Times)
Newt Gingrich is spaced-out. Literally.
Anyone who remembers him from his days as speaker of the House in the '90s
remembers how erratic, unpredictable and off-the-wall he could be, but, so
far, this campaign season he has managed to conceal his many absurdities and
eccentricities.
Furthermore, many Republican primary voters seem willing to forgive and
forget his past. Others seem not even to remember it. He has been able to
pass himself off as a wise elder statesman - a historian without a history -
able to capture the anger and anxiety of the right and articulate it with
force, lucidity and gravitas.
Oh, it is to laugh! That is if you're on the left.
But for those on the right with firsthand knowledge of working with Gingrich
when he was in Washington, this
is a nightmare scenario. The outside
possibility that Gingrich could win the nomination and wreck the party
scares them to death. Their panic over this has reached a fever pitch.
And this is not without merit.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released this week found that Gingrich
now enjoys a 9-point lead nationally among registered Republican likely
primary voters. However, Gingrich fared worse than all other Republican
candidates when tested against Obama. The poll suggested that Obama would
trounce Gingrich by 18 points.
(Luckily for Mitt Romney, Gingrich's surge in Florida
may be fizzling. A
Quinnipiac poll of likely Republican voters in that state found that Romney
leads Gingrich by nine percentage points. If that holds, Romney and the
establishment Republicans will have dodged a bullet like Neo in "The
Matrix." A Romney loss in Florida
would call his candidacy into question
and send the party scrambling for a more attractive replacement.)
One of the latest establishment Republicans to try to avert the Gingrich
catastrophe is former Senator Bob Dole, who wrote a letter to the Romney
campaign on Thursday saying: "I have not been critical of Newt Gingrich,
but
it is now time to take a stand before it is too late." It only got
better
from there. Dole continued, "hardly anyone who served with Newt in
Congress
has endorsed him, and that fact speaks for itself. He was a one-man-band who
rarely took advice."
Dole's concern in his statement, and the concern of countless others, is:
"If Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican
candidates running for county, state and federal offices."
As Peter D. Hart, a Democratic pollster, told MSNBC,
"Gingrich is
Goldwater." He continued, "In the general election, Gingrich
not only takes
down his ship, he takes down the whole flotilla."
Part of the reason for this is Gingrich is thoroughly unlikable among the
electorate at large and utterly nonsensical in his approach to real
problem-solving. The fact that he has convinced some primary voters that he
is an intellectual is one of the best electoral sleights of hand I can
recall. As Dole said of Newt when he was in Washington:
"Gingrich had a new
idea every minute, and most of them were off the wall."
To that point, Gingrich told a crowd on Florida's
so-called Space Coast
on
Wednesday that "by the end of my second term, we will have the first
permanent base on the Moon. And it will be American." And he said that
he
would push for the introduction of a "Northwest Ordinance for
Space" so that
when the number of colonists reached 13,000, they could petition for
statehood.
(By the way, I find it interesting that Gingrich didn't insist on answering
the question about Puerto Rican statehood at Thursday's debate, yet he's
advocating for a state on the Moon. Earth to Newt: phone home.)
In the speech, Gingrich implied that he was "bold" and
"romantic" and called
himself "visionary" and "grandiose" in the vein of
Abraham Lincoln, John F.
Kennedy and the Wright brothers. Gingrich is a virtual supernova of
megalomaniacal madness.
In a way, the space speech made sense. Gingrich was doing what he does:
tossing out random ideas like darts at a board, hoping to score. He was
repackaging the idea of Manifest Destiny for the Moon and appealing to an
area of the country whose pride and purpose were wounded by the ending of
the space shuttle program.
But, on the other hand, this is exactly the kind of election-year lunacy
that establishment Republicans have been worrying about. Florida
has one of
the highest state unemployment rates in the country and has one of the
highest foreclosure rates in the country. The last thing that people who
can't
hold on to their jobs and houses here on Earth want to hear about is a
colony on the Moon. The whole thing bespeaks a man detached from the real
world concerns of real people.
As Dole's statement went on to say, "In my opinion, if we want to avoid
an
Obama landslide in November, Republicans should nominate Governor Romney as
our standard-bearer."
The truth is that the Republican Party has no good choice at this point. It
only has bad choices and worse choices. And the American public is beginning
to recognize that. As the Republican courtiers of incompetence beat up each
other, knock down each other and reveal each other's flaws, a number of
recent surveys have found that President Obama's poll numbers on a number of
metrics have begun to trend upward.
That's because an election is a choice, a zero-sum game - the worse the
Republican field looks, particularly if Gingrich is at the front of it, the
better President Obama looks by comparison, regardless of one's misgivings
about his first term.
Establishment Republicans understand this simple, painful truth: Romney is
no guarantee of victory, but Gingrich is an absolute guarantee of defeat. At
least here on Earth.
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