Ten random thoughts after Repub debate No. (omg) 19.

Last debate until Feb. 22. My heart and oh my aching butt say “Yay.” We need a break. On the other hand, without the debates, the vast majority of the campaign messages come from 30-second half-truths paid for by a small number of rich contributors and, in the new world created by Citizens United, even most of those nastygrams are sponsored by SuperPACs so the candidates don’t even have to take direct responsibility. And, since those ad blitzes are state-by-state, they emphasize even more the vagaries of the primary and caucus schedule. Debates can also turn into drivel and gaffe-driven gong shows. And they emphasize many qualities that have little to do with the qualities that will make a good president (as if we knew what those are). But, on balance, a campaign driven by debates is better than one driven by ads. Churchill had it right: “Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.” And he also had it right when he said: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

The applause was back. The last debate was the only one so far in which the sponsors asked the audience to keep quiet. That was better. This was worse. I have no evidence, but it seemed clear to me that Team Romney had done what it could to pack the room and instructed their fans to seize every opportunity to cheer and clap wildly for Mitt Romney who, notwithstanding other attributes, is not really gifted at emitting applause lines and has suffered for it in previous debates, especially as compared to Newt (they-always-love-it-when-I-bash-the-liberal-establishment-media) Gingrich.

Rick Santorum had the best night of the four contestants still in the pageant. The polls suggest that Santorum doesn’t matter much anymore, except to the degree that he continues to divide, with Newt Gingrich, the anybody-but-Romney (but not Ron Paul either) vote. Maybe so. But if you accept – as I do not -- the Repub premise that Obamacare is the end of civilization, then Romney has a big problem because the program that he signed into law and implemented in Massachusetts is so similar in its approach. Romney has figured out how to talk at great length about what are mostly small technical differences between Romneycare and Obamacare, plus the fact that (duh) one is a state program and one is a federal program. In an extended exchange, Santorum pounded away on the Romneycare/Obamacare similarities. Although this has been done before (as what has not?), it seemed to me that Santorum stripped away the excuses and left Romney promising to repeal for the other 49 states what has been a good and successful program in Massachusetts.

On the other hand, Santorum hit Gingrich and Romney for “falling for the global warming hoax.”

The pundits agree that Gingrich had a bad night. He didn’t actually commit a major gaffe and certainly suffered no brain freeze moment (which is usually what makes for a bad night in Punditland, see Rick Perry, except you can’t see him anymore because he is gone and even Texans don’t like him much anymore). But Gingrich – whose co-frontrunner status was created by winning debates – needs the big debate moments to keep moving forward. The big “gotcha moment” that stung Gingrich was when Romney revealed (and it wasn’t even clear that Gingrich knew this about himself) that Gingrich owned mutual funds that profited from investments in Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. This was totally silly, of course. Very few investors pay attention to all of the holdings within mutual funds. But Gingrich had just finished making a big deal about the fact that Romney had profited from investments in Fannie and Freddie. But mostly, Gingrich’s weak night was less about his bad moments than his lack of good ones.

Personally, I respect Ron Paul for his willingness to say what he believes irrespective of strategic considerations or political correctness. For example, he would move the United States toward normal relations with Cuba and said so last night even though the position is not politically smart in Florida. In general, we’ve reached the point where Paul is starting to be treated as a joke. I noticed that in the post-game analysis, those who praised Paul’s performance all said he was funny. One comment by Paul, which no one seemed to notice, showed what can happen when someone is blunt about the Republican anti-government message. Paul, like the rest of them, thinks government interference explains what is wrong with U.S. health care. It often occurs to me that if that is how they feel, they need to explain why they don’t advocate for abolishing Medicare. Dr. Paul came pretty close last night, noting that when he first started practicing medicine in the early 1960s, “ there was no Medicare or Medicaid and no one was out in the streets without it. Now, people are suffering.” Hmmm. Gingrich (who, I am sad to speculate, does politically calculate what he says) seemed to associate himself with Paul’s rosy view of a world without Medicare.  Gingrich: “You look at medicine in the early '60s, and you look at how communities solved problems, it was a fundamentally more flexible and less expensive system. And there's a lot to be said for rethinking from the ground up, the entire approach to health care.”

I guess if televised debates are going to be this common, they are going to become more and more televisionized. (Yes, that’s a made-up word.) They used to be special events, done without commercial interruptions. Now there are commercials. But even worse, they’ve started using the same hideous pandering techniques to entice the audience to stay through the commercials that the 24-hour news channels use all day long, which is to tease the viewers that something really hot is coming up after the break. Somewhere around the third commercial break, Wolf Blitzer announced: “All right, gentleman stand by. Much more to discuss. I want to take a short break. We have many more topics to include -- including this, we'll get into this a little bit, what would your wife -- why would your wife make the best first lady. I'll ask these four candidates. Stay with us.” Then after three minutes of commercials, instead of resuming, we had that incredibly annoying deal where it looks like the show is resuming really, it’s just another plug for sitting through more commercials:  “I'm Wolf Blitzer. We're here in Jacksonville for CNN's Florida Republican presidential debate. Many of you are watching online, commenting on Twitter, Facebook, at CNN.com. We have many more questions for the candidates, including one that hits close to home. Stand by to find out why each man on this stage thinks his wife would be the best first lady.” Then three more minutes of commercials. When the big moment finally came, the “My wife is a wonderful woman” answers were as maudlin as you would expect. (Except Ron Paul’s, who went for humor.) And Gingrich who wasn’t willing to say that his wife would be the best first lady because he’s gotten to know the other wives, and they are great too.

In general, I didn’t care for Wolf Blitzer’s questions (although one sympathizes with the challenge he faced after so many prior debates). But Blitzer and the journalists back at CNN did account for one of my favorite moments. Blitzer asked about and Gingrich complained about a Romney radio ad that attacked Gingrich for supposedly referring to Spanish as “the language of the ghetto.” Romney started his response by suggesting that he wasn’t aware of the ad and wasn’t sure it was really his ad. (Presumably, he meant “his” ad, as opposed to an ad sponsored by the pro-Romney SuperPAC over which he regrets he has no control). During the commercial break, the CNN newsroom double-checked and sure enough, they found the ad and it was indeed sponsored by the Romney campaign, not the SuperPAC and, here’s the beauty part, ended with the required tag line, in Romney’s own voice or that of a very good Romney impersonator: “I’m Mitt Romney, and I approved this message.”

Yes, it was a gotcha moment, but led to another moment during CNN’s post-debate analysis. Alex Castellano (who was triply qualified to discuss this because he is Hispanic, Republican and a media consultant to political campaigns) was asked about the credibility of Romney’s claim that he was unaware of the ad. Castellano said that, indeed, most candidates don’t know what their ads say. The ad-makers have a canned tape of their candidate’s voice saying “I approved this message,” and they are authorized to stick it on any ad they choose to air. I suggest the legal requirement be changed to require the candidate to say “and I approved this message even though I don’t know what it says.”

The polls suggested before the debate that Romney had halted Gingrich’s post-South Carolina surge and was back in the lead in Florida. After last night, they all predicted that Romney would win Florida and have started restoring the old narrative of the all-but-inevitable Romney nomination. Considering that everyone who has tried to make predictions about this race has been proven, I kinda wish they would stop making predictions. But don’t hold your breath.

It’s usually assumed that Joe Biden will be back on the Dem ticket this time. You’ve probably heard a contrary rumor, sometimes called the switcheroo and denied by all concerned, in which Hillary Clinton become the veep candidate and Biden slides into her current job as secretary of state. But Newt Gingrich has a different idea.

Gingrich is trying very hard to put Saul Alinsky on the Dem ticket. He’s been campaigning for Alinsky for several weeks but it became too obvious to ignore on the night of Gingrich’s big win in South Carolina when he drew this distinction between himself and the president:

“The founding fathers of America are the source from which we draw our understanding of America. [Obama] draws his from Saul Alinsky, radical left-wingers and people who don't like the classical America.”

On Sunday, on “Meet the Press,” David Gregory asked Gingrich about that message and he replied:

“What I said last night is the truth. Nobody in the elite media wants to cover it. Nobody's ever gone back and looked at what Saul Alinsky stands for. Nobody ever asks what ‘neighborhood organizer’ meant. He wasn't organizing Boys and Girls Clubs. He was teaching political radicalism. It explains his entire administration. He is who he is. It's — you know, it's not that he's a bad human being, my impression is that he has a good family, that he really loves his children and his wife, that he's a very pleasant person in some ways. But the objective fact is he believes in a very radical vision of America's future that is fundamentally different from probably 80 percent of this country.”

And on the same morning, on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Gingrich said: “The values that [Obama] believes in, the Saul Alinsky radical values that are at the heart of Obama, are a disaster.”

He has kept it up all this week, dropping Alinsky into his rhetoric as he tries to make the case to Floridian Repubs that he, and not Mitt Romney, is the electable one.

Perhaps Gingrich is right about the percentage of Americans who share Alinskyite values. But a much larger percentage have never heard of Saul Alinsky. And relatively few of them will rush out and read Alinsky’s signature 1946 work, "Reveille for Radicals." Perhaps it is sufficient, for Gingrich’s purposes that, to his target audience, Alinsky’s name may sound vaguely Jewish or Russian. Of course, I can’t prove that, but I don’t guess Gingrich can exactly prove that Obama is practicing Alinsky-ism as president.

On the other hand, there is no question that in his days as a young community organizer, Obama studied and was influenced by Alinskyism.

Saul Alinsky, who died when Obama was 11 years old, is often called the father of modern American community organizing. Obama was indeed a community organizer as a young man. And, so far as we know, Obama did not organize any boys and girls clubs. And indeed, according to this long piece by Ryan Lizza when he wrote for The New Republic, Obama was recruited and taught during his early Chicago period by Alinsky admirers. So who was Alinsky?

Alinky’s past
Saul Alinsky was, indeed, a child of Russian Jewish immigrants. He grew up in Chicago, where he also did much of his work. After dropping out of grad school archaeology and working briefly as a criminologist, then as a union organizer, he drifted into his life’s work as a more general organizer of the powerless, first in Chicago and then in various locales around the country. Alinsky can be safely described as a lefty and a radical.

He wasn’t a Marxist but he was deeply critical of capitalism. Mostly, he was interested in empowering the powerless. He was a skilled agitator who worked to get the poor and underprivileged riled up enough to get organized and force change. He preached non-violence and his techniques were designed to work within the U.S. democratic system. He stressed the importance of identifying self-interest and organizing around it because he believed that while many people like to ascribe their actions to altruistic motives, they are really moved by self-interest.

The Lizza piece gives the partial lie to Gingrich’s statement that no one in the media (excusez moi, the elite media), has paid attention to Alinsky’s influence on Obama. From the 2008 Lizza piece:

 “Obama so mastered the workshops on power that he later taught them himself. On his campaign website, one can find a photo of Obama in a classroom teaching students Alinskian methods. He stands in front of a blackboard on which he has written, ‘Power Analysis’ and ‘Relationships Built on Self Interest,’ an idea illustrated by a diagram of the flow of money from corporations to the mayor.

“But, although he was a first-class student of Alinsky's method, Obama also saw its limits. It appealed to his head but not his heart. For instance, Alinsky relished baiting politicians or low-level bureaucrats into public meetings where they would be humiliated. Obama found these ‘accountability sessions’ unsettling, even cruel. ‘Oftentimes, these elected officials didn't have that much more power than the people they represented,’ he told me.”

Understanding Alinskyism
If you would like to understand Alinskyism, you can read the prologue to “Rules for Radicals” here. If it’s the Alinsky-Obama connection you’re after, the Lizza piece would be a decent starting point.

But note that Lizza (who now writes for the New Yorker) is just out online with major piece that will appear in this week’s New Yorker. The piece is based on internal White House documents and explores in detail how Obama actually functions as president on a day-to-day basis and how decisions are reached in the Obama White House.

It portrays Obama as a captive of the disastrous economy and the intensity of partisan warfare. Lizza relies on a top presidential scholar who argues that presidents have much less ability to lead by persuasion than most of us think. Here’s a taste of that theme that also summarizes Lizza’s ultimate conclusions about what kind of president Obama has been:

“George C. Edwards III, a political scientist at Texas A. & M., who has sparked a quiet revolution in the ways that academics look at Presidential leadership, argues in ‘The Strategic President’ that there are two ways to think about great leaders. The common view is of a leader whom Edwards calls ‘the director of change,’ someone who reshapes public opinion and the political landscape with his charisma and his powers of persuasion. Obama’s many admirers expected him to be just this.

“Instead, Obama has turned out to be what Edwards calls ‘a facilitator of change.’ The facilitator is acutely aware of the constraints of public opinion and Congress. He is not foolish enough to believe that one man, even one invested with the powers of the Presidency, can alter the fundamentals of politics. Instead, ‘facilitators understand the opportunities for change in their environments and fashion strategies and tactics to exploit them.’

“Directors are more like revolutionaries. Facilitators are more like tacticians. Directors change the system. Facilitators work the system. Obama’s first three years as President are the story of his realization of the limits of his office, his frustration with those constraints, and, ultimately, his education in how to successfully operate within them. A close look at the choices Obama made on domestic policy, based on a review of hundreds of pages of internal White House documents, reveals someone who is canny and tough — but who is not the President his most idealistic supporters thought they had elected.”

As portrayed here, Obama came into office really believing that there was a way, through his own attitude and leadership, to get past the partisan deadlocks and produce legislation that included must-haves from both liberals and conservatives, Dems and Repubs. But he was wrong.  Lizza concludes that:

“Predictions that Obama would usher in a new era of post-partisan consensus politics now seem not just naïve but delusional.”

But, of course, because I was working on this piece, I rushed through the new Lizza piece looking for echoes of Alinskyism. Sorry, Mr. Gingrich. Maybe Lizza — despite access to a huge number of internal documents, including the decision memos that are sent to the president by his staff and how Obama responded to them — was duped. I can’t really picture the White House’s agenda in agreeing to the piece, although in the end it reaches a conclusion that the White House will like.

But the Alinskyism, it just ain’t in there.

Still, I expect Gingrich will continue to try to make Alinsky famous.

The president of a Dallas-based righty think tank put out a reaction statement to Pres. Obama's State of the Union message that captured the ideological divide nicely. To Institute for Policy Innovation president Tom Giovanetti, the whole speech, the whole tax code really, as well as most things the government does amount to an arrogant assertion that government has widsdom greater than the collective wisdom of a society as represented by the free market.

It's easy enough to poke holes in this approach. How could a properly humble government collect any taxes at all or spend anything on anything or -- just to be snarky for a sec -- be certain enough that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear/chemical/biological program of sufficient menace to the United States to justify hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives? And that's actually a fair question to put back to Giovanetti. If you follow his logic far enough down the path, pretty soon Social Security and Medicare are gone too, which might be fine with him for all I know, but which I doubt he is willing to acknowledge.

Still, when I read his statement about the SOTU speech and about the need for humility in government, it struck me as a fairly pure statement of an argument that liberals should face squarely. So here it is:

“The policy agenda laid out by President Obama in last night’s State of the Union speech implies a breadth and depth of knowledge so far encompassing and in excess of human capacity that it demonstrates the hubris of Big Government solutions better than anything any conservative could ever say or do.

Imagine the level of knowledge and wisdom the Obama administration implies that it possesses in order to advocate last night’s agenda. According to his speech, the president fully understands:

• Who needs tax breaks and who does not;
• What’s wrong with primary and secondary education and how to fix it, as well as how much the federal government should be spending on education and how much each state should spend;
• How much college should cost, who should attend, and how colleges should be run;
• What the mix of manufacturing industries should be in our economy, how to stimulate such industries and make them more competitive;
• What the right mix of energy should be in our economy—how much it should cost, where should come from, and how it should be extracted;
• What skills workers will need in the future, and how to develop these skills;
• What interest rates should be on education and home loans;
• Which homeowners should be able to refinance their homes;
• What future technologies we should now be investing in, and how to transform our electrical infrastructure with smart grids;
• Where broadband networks are needed, and how they will transform rural America;
• How much energy is being wasted in commercial buildings all over the country;
• The intricacies of the financial world, how it should work and how it should be regulated, knows how to prevent financial speculation and bubbles—esoteric knowledge that has eluded economists and social scientists for hundreds of years;
• How to strengthen Medicare and Social Security while also bending the entitlement cost curve;
• And the piece de resistance: He knows how to pay for education, high tech research, military modernization, green technology and veterans benefits by raising taxes on the relative handful of very wealthy income earners.

Can any person, or any group of persons, possess the knowledge and wisdom necessary to advocate such an agenda? Of course not.

This is why conservatives trust markets rather than government. There is far more knowledge and wisdom in the collective, real-time decisions being made at any given moment by 300 million Americans in the economy than there is in any collection of government bureaucrats gathered in Washington.

And it’s why the right solution for our country is for the government to largely get out of the way and let the American economy run managed by the collective wisdom of the American people making decisions in a free economy, rather than being dictated to by a relative handful of government know-it-alls who assume a level of knowledge we all know is impossible.  Conservatives trust the American people; liberals trust arrogant and dishonest government bureaucrats.”

The Institute for Policy Innovation was founded by former House Republican Leader Dick Armey in 1987.

President Obama’s State of the Union (SOTU) message (full text here from White House website) was a nice change from the four-a-week series of televised Republican splat-ball contests (the next debate is Thursday night). But Obama definitely didn’t fly me to the moon (nor did the speech let me play among the stars).

Several commentators (Andrew Sullivan had a good version of this) were reminded of Bill Clinton’s approach to his second term: lots of small, somewhat moderate proposals that would be hard for Republicans to ridicule as Bolshevism.

If we take the SOTU as what it’s supposed to be — a president’s vision for the year ahead — it’s naïve to think that Republicans, who have the power to block everything but executive orders,  are going to risk making Obama look good by enacting any of his proposals.

But since — in case you hadn’t heard — 2012 is an election year (and, Obama hopes, a reelection year), it is necessary to view the speech as a preview of his pitch for four more years.

What was the pitch? Something like this: In my first term, I did big things. (He did, you know, and the Repubs pledge to repeal all of them.) Recognizing the change in the Congress, if I get a second term, I will do small things. But those small things will require that the richest Americans pay more taxes. So, while frequently telling them that I’m not Robespierre, I’m going to keep making the case for that.

GOP charges
Peter Beinert, writing for the Daily Beast/Newsweek and disliking the speech much more than I did, put it this way:

“From Mitt Romney to Newt Gingrich to Glenn Beck, the conservative assault on Barack Obama comes down to this: Unfettered capitalism is true Americanism. Obama’s efforts to use government to make American capitalism more stable and more just constitute an alien imposition, hatched in foreign lands, and designed to make us less free… Obama will either effectively answer that charge, or he will lose reelection.”

Free free free, the Repubs will say. Fair fair fair, the Dems will answer. From Obama last night:

“We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of Americans barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.  [Applause.]  What’s at stake aren’t Democratic values or Republican values, but American values. And we have to reclaim them.”

Actually, I beg to differ. As things now stand, those are Dem proposals.

I wish Obama would stop trying to do everything with tax incentives. He should steal the Repub thunder by embracing a radical simplification of the tax code, then set the rates — and rates could go down for everyone if you took out most of the credits and deductions — so that they would raise more revenue, more progressively than the current system does. Adding complexity to the tax code breeds cynicism and is game for the rich.

Mitch Daniels responds
In choosing Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels to give the Repub rebuttal, the party made a strange comment about their own presidential field. Daniels is smart, calm, dull and reasonable.

This being the TV age and all, it was hard to get past how dweebie he looks. But if you listened to him, he was channeling an older, saner style of Republicanism. Daniels overreached when he described Obama’s policies as “pro poverty,” but he managed to capture some of the more respectable Repub objections to Obamaism when he described it as a “grand experiment in trickle-down government,” when he bemoaned “all those stimulus dollars that the president borrowed and blew,” and when he referred to “a government as big and bossy as this one.”

It goes without saying Daniels went without mentioning any of the dollars that Obama’s unmentionable predecessor borrowed and blew.

After Daniels spoke, Ari Fleischer, the former Bush spokester now part of CNN’s analysis team, gushed about Daniels. Fleischer confessed he wishes Daniels had jumped into the presidential race. Two seconds later, Dem operative Paul Begala slammed Daniels’ presentation as “a glass of warm milk with a fly in it — both boring and depressing.” As they say folks: that’s infotainment.

For a sampling of smart, diverse pundit reaction to the speech, you couldn’t do better than the roundup of  my favorite aggregator, Taegan Goddard.

But if what you want is a good laugh, humorist Andy Borowitz (the Borowitz Report) headlined his analysis: "Obama Risks Alienating Republicans By Using Facts; Radical Tactic Sparks Outrage." It reads:

"Mr. Obama stirred controversy throughout the speech with his relentless references to facts, data, and things that have actually happened, all long considered the third rail of American politics.

As the President made reference to tax rates and unemployment numbers, as well as sixteen separate mentions of Osama bin Laden, congressional Republicans’ blood began to boil.

After the speech, a furious Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters, 'It’s been a longstanding tradition in our politics not to use facts in a State of the Union Address, a tradition the President chose to ignore in an outrageous way tonight.  I won’t stand for it and the American people won’t stand for it.'

'“We want to work with the President for the good of the American people,' added House Speaker John Boehner.  'But he’s going to have to take facts off the table.  That’s a deal-breaker for us...'"

Last night was the (omg) 18^th debate in the Repub nominating contest.

Nobody won and nobody lost. The best thing about it was the no applause rule, which forced members of the viewing audience to decide which answer was a big deal. As far as I could tell, none of them were. We didn’t even have the obligatory Newt-Gingrich-criticizes-the-moderator’s-question moment.

If anybody didn’t already know that, since leaving Congress, Newt Gingrich has become a multimillionaire by doing a great many things, many of which look, to the untrained eye, a whole lot like lobbying, but aren’t technically lobbying, then they found that at last night. But that information has been around for many months (including that over a million bucks of the not-technically-lobbying that Newt’s firm did was for the disgraced semi-public housing firm known as Freddie Mac), and Romney’s super PAC made this fact very, very famous during the run-up to the Iowa caucuses.

Somehow, that information and other similar arguments were devastating to Gingrich when his poll ratings plummeted and he dropped from first-in-the-polls to fourth place in Iowa and New Hampshire. But then the same information stopped being devastating, as Gingrich surged back to the top in South Carolina and now in the national Republican polls and in current Florida polling.

So Romney is apparently hoping that this angle is regaining its devastatingness (and yes, I know that’s not a word). He did have one new detail that might help. Turns out that although Gingrich was not technically lobbying for Freddie Mac, and he no longer says that he was paid all that money to provide historical perspective (he now says the work was “consulting,” not “history” but also not “lobbying”), but as Romney emphasized last night, the Freddie Mac official to whom Gingrich provided the consulting was Freddie Mac’s lobbyist. Got that straight?

Gingrich revealed that his firm employed an expert in the law of lobbying to make sure that nothing that was done would cross the line into lobbying. Two ways to look at that: Gingrich wanted to make doubly and expensively sure that his firm wouldn’t cross the line into lobbying; or Gingrich wanted to make sure that he was able to get as close to the line as possible while still being able to claim that he had done no lobbying.

The second best thing about the debate was the candidates speculating on whether Fidel Castro will “meet his maker,” as moderator Brian Williams question politely euphemized, or go to “the other place” as Gingrich predicted.

The candidates spent a lot of time on what a big deal it would be for U.S.-Cuba policy when Castro dies, without ever mentioning that Castro has been sick for years and is no longer in charge, so it’s just possible that his death will not be an epochal event, at least in practical terms. But the best part of the debate’s surprisingly long Cuba section (this was, after all, the first debate in Florida) was the underlying assumption that U.S.-Cuba policy has long been driven by the great desire to see Cuba become a free, independent democracy.

In fact, the United States probably could have promoted a real democracy in Cuba during the six decades before Castro took power, when the United States treated Cuba as a quasi-pseudo-not-really-independent nation. The United States established important elements of the Cuban Constitution by an act of the U.S. Congress. Seriously. Cuba was required to accept those terms as a condition of getting U.S. troops to leave Cuba. And Cuba was required to lease to the Americans the base at Guantanamo Bay, which it still occupies.

The Cuban dictator (Fulgencio Batista) whom Castro overthrew in 1957 held power without any serious democratic legitimacy, and that was fine with the United States.