Columnist.
If you were listening reasonably carefully to last Wednesday's Republican presidential candidate debate, you heard Rick Santorum say, "Charles Murray just wrote a book about this." The question was about Santorum's remarks on contraception, but his answer addressed the broader issue of "the increasing number of children being born out of wedlock in America." That is indeed one of the subjects -- but only one -- of Murray's new book "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 to 2010."
A candidate's strengths can also be his weaknesses. Take the case of Rick Santorum. One of his strengths is perseverance. For more than a year, he made hundreds of appearances in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, with no visible result in the polls. He persevered and ended up finishing first in the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3. Then, after poor showings in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and Nevada, he finished first in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado on Feb. 7.
Many Republican House members, and the bloggers and tea partiers who cheered their victory in gaining a majority in November 2010, seem to be seething with discontent and eager for confrontation. They believe, reasonably, that that victory represented a repudiation of the vast expansion of government by the Obama Democrats. They want to see those policies reversed, and pronto. And if the dilatory Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the all-campaign-no-governance President Obama want a confrontation, so much the better.
Believers in central planning should take a look at Washington's Metro rail transit system. While they will find many things to like, they will also see examples of how central planners -- and especially rail transit planners -- can get things disastrously and expensively wrong. Things to like include aesthetics. Metro stations and cars are attractively designed and reasonably spacious. Metro attracts more riders than any other American rail transit system except, of course, New York's. It has stimulated local planners and developers to create vibrant downtown-like clusters of stores, restaurants and apartment buildings along the Orange Line in Arlington, Va., and around the Bethesda, Md., station on the Red Line.
Rick Santorum won big victories in three small contests in the Republican presidential race last Tuesday. In doing so, he reshaped the oft-reshaped nomination battle once again. But he has not installed himself as the favorite, and neither he nor Mitt Romney has established himself as the candidate who can do best in the general election. These were small contests not because the states involved were small -- Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado all actually have populations near the national average -- but because the primary in Missouri and the caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado are nonbinding, and so their results don't give any candidate any national convention delegates.
The Republican presidential candidates, except for Ron Paul, haven't been paying much attention to young voters in the primaries and caucuses so far. But any Republican nominee -- which is to say probably Mitt Romney, or maybe Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum -- had better be paying attention to them in the summer and fall. The reason three of the four Republicans haven't paid much attention to young voters is that the under-30 folks have been turning out in the Republican contests in miniscule numbers.
It's unusual when a reporter sympathetic to a politician writes a story that makes his subject look bad. But Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker has now done this twice. The first time was in an article last April on Obama's foreign policy in which he quoted a "top aide" (National Security Adviser Tom Donilon? It sounds like him) saying that the president was "leading from behind" on Libya. Not what most Americans expect their presidents to do.
Mitt Romney's impressive victory Tuesday makes it very likely that we will look back on the Florida primary as the contest that determined the 2012 Republican nomination. To be sure, the campaign fight will go on, and Romney is by no means assured of a sweep of the relatively few February contests. Newt Gingrich has vowed to run all the way to the convention, whatever the odds. He has shown similar determination in the past. He ran and lost twice for Congress before he was first elected in 1978. He saw his party lose seven straight elections for the House before he led it to its first majority in 40 years in 1994. Gingrich sees himself as a world historical figure, whose destiny should not be forestalled by a few weeks of negative ads and a couple of subpar debate performances. He's also pumped up by anger.
We got mixed signals from a turbulent political week. Barack Obama seems to be enjoying an uptick in polls -- up toward, but not quite at, 50 percent approval. It's a reminder that he can expect to benefit from Americans' desire to think well of their presidents and from the reluctance of many voters to be seen as rejecting the first black president. But his weakness was apparent in his State of the Union address: issues. He devoted a mere 44 words to the health care law passed in March 2010. This is the strongest evidence possible that his signal legislative achievement is a millstone around the neck of his campaign.
You know politicians are serious when they move from campaigning to governing. Something like that may be happening on the Republican campaign trail -- but, unfortunately, not at the Obama White House. Campaigning clearly carried the day for Newt Gingrich in South Carolina, where he beat Mitt Romney by a 40 percent to 28 percent margin. It's generally agreed that Gingrich clinched the race when he reacted angrily to questions by Fox News's Juan Williams and CNN's John King. Both times Gingrich got standing ovations. But not for how he'd govern. His platform can be summed up in a bumper sticker a Washington lawyer printed to buck up George H.W. Bush's hapless 1992 campaign: "Annoy the media -- vote for Bush." It was fun but didn't win many votes.
Those who take a certain pleasure in denouncing the evils negative political advertising should have spent the last week in South Carolina. They could have plunked down in front of TV sets, especially during morning, early evening and late evening news programs, and by adroit use of the remote control seen one negative spot after another. They could have watched again and again the Ron Paul campaign's stinging denunciation of Newt Gingrich for, among other things, taking $1.6 million from Freddie Mac. They could have seen a similar assault on Gingrich from the pro-Romney Restore Our Future super PAC (by the way, how do you restore something which by definition doesn't yet exist?).
MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. -- The crowd at the Fox News/Wall Street Journal debate in Myrtle Beach was feisty, with whoops and cheers for Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Rick Perry, though not so much for Ron Paul. But it wasn't nearly as feisty as the crowd that forced the shutdown of the 1860 Democratic National Convention in Charleston before it could choose a nominee, after which the party split into two conventions elsewhere and nominated Northern and Southern candidates. South Carolina bet wrong when it seceded from the Union in 1860 and fired on Fort Sumter in 1861 -- the hall where the 1860 convention was held was burned down by Union troops in 1865 -- and ever since South Carolina has not wanted to bet wrong again.
Of course President Obama is not concentrating on campaigning, White House press spokesmen assured us -- as the president headed off to Chicago for three fundraisers and a drop-in at his campaign headquarters, two days after a high-roller fundraising choked off traffic five blocks from the White House, with the assistance of a score of D.C. police cars. No one, or at least no one who is paying attention, is fooled. It's standard presidential procedure to say you're not absorbed in campaigning even as you go out to raise money every other day. Bill Clinton, in my view, spent an undue amount of time fundraising, George W. Bush spent more, and Barack Obama makes them both look like pikers.
To win just under 40 percent of the vote in a primary with five active candidates is pretty impressive, even for a candidate like Mitt Romney, who started off with significant advantages in New Hampshire. Yes, he is well-known there because he was governor of next-door Massachusetts, had run before and owns a house on Lake Winnipesaukee. But the exit poll indicates Romney held his own among independents, tea party supporters and late deciders. He didn't lose ground in the heat of the campaign, despite his ragged performance in Sunday's debate (he was obviously not candid about why he didn't run for re-election as governor) and his Monday statement, instantly regretted if I read the videotape right, that "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me."
A presidential campaign exposes candidates' strengths and weaknesses. The strengths they're eager to tell you about. So let's look at the weaknesses. Start with Rick Santorum, whose poll numbers in New Hampshire and South Carolina have been surging since (by last count) he lost the Iowa caucuses by the Chinese lucky number of 8 votes. Santorum's weakness is that he can't resist concentrating on peripheral issues. The prime example is his leadership in 2005 in getting the Senate summoned into voting for a law preventing the removal of life support for Terri Schiavo.
Elections are contests held during a moment in time between candidates who have records stretching back, often far back, into the past. So there is always a tension between the man (or woman) who is running and the moment. That tension is greater than usual when the contest is for the nomination of a political party dominated by a large number of newcomers to politics motivated by strong opposition to current policies. That was the case 40 years ago, when members of the peace movement, opposed to the Vietnam War, became the largest and most highly motivated part of the Democratic Party.
Election year has finally arrived, well after the beginning of a turbulent and unpredictable elections season, and voting begins on Tuesday in the Iowa Republicans caucuses. The few days of post-Christmas polling have shown the numbers oscillating and opinion changing in ways it hadn't been earlier in the campaign. Pre-Christmas, Barack Obama's job rating was on a bit of an uptick, nudging up toward but not quite reaching 50 percent approval in several polls. But two polls taken in the three days after Christmas by Gallup and Rasmussen show him with solidly negative job ratings, and Rasmussen shows him trailing Mitt Romney 45 percent to 39 percent -- his worst showing against Romney ever.
"A 2008 election widely regarded as heralding a shift toward the more government-friendly public sentiment of the New Deal and Great Society eras seems to have yielded just the reverse." So writes William Galston, Brookings Institution scholar and deputy domestic adviser in the Clinton White House, in the New Republic. Galston, one of the smartest political and policy analysts around, has strong evidence for this conclusion. He cites a recent Gallup poll showing that while 82 percent of Americans think it's extremely or very important to "grow and expand the economy" and 70 percent say it's similarly important to "increase equality of opportunity for people to get ahead," only 46 percent say it's important to "reduce the income and wealth gap between the rich and the poor," and 54 percent say this is only somewhat or not important.
The world usually turns out to work differently from what American presidents expected when they were campaigning. Franklin Roosevelt campaigned on domestic issues in 1932 and ran a more isolationist foreign policy for his first years in office than any of the Republican presidents elected in the 1920s. But he became aware of the threat that Adolf Hitler posed earlier than most, and changed course accordingly. George W. Bush called for a "humble" foreign policy when he was running in 2000. But the attacks of Sept. 11 utterly changed his priorities and policies.
LACONIA, N.H. -- Three weeks out from the New Hampshire primary, and voters in the Granite State don't seem to have settled firmly on one of the Republican presidential candidates. Or so one might conclude after interviewing voters in the Lakes region north of Concord in Laconia, which like the state as a whole voted for John McCain over Mitt Romney by a 37 percent to 32 percent in 2008, or nearby Meredith, where McCain did slightly better and Romney slightly worse. "Not interested" was the most common response, reflecting perhaps not indifference but an unwillingness to talk in the freezing air.
