Columnist.
Most presidential-year debates turn out to be worthless, assuming they turn out to be actual debates. For which dreary datum there's an unbeatable reason. Presidential-year bombast isn't about policy, it's about positioning -- finding the most flattering camera angle from which to pose for the voters. On this account, we need not pay much attention to the non-issue that has arisen out of nowhere: Obama spokeswoman's claim that Ann Romney never worked "a day in her life." The Romney campaign's riposte was that in fact Ann Romney raised five children. Doesn't that count in an age when the government does everything but breed our children? On from there to the think pieces about "Women in the Workplace and Their Tribulations."
As the current president of the United States tells it, his Republican adversaries are launched on a crusade to revive the dog-eat-dog economic philosophy known to our great grandparents as "social Darwinism." Horrors! Loosen dependence on government and there's no restraining the ferocity of the marketplace -- "nature red in tooth and claw," survival of the fittest, cutthroat capitalism, the only kind of capitalism Barack Obama seems ever to have heard of. The dynamics of free choice in the marketplace don't much engage the interest of a president with few, if any, contemporary rivals as to aptitude for ham-fisted political intervention.
What remains to be said concerning Royal Mail Ship Titanic and her icy end, just 100 years ago? What hasn't been thought, said or filmed already? Why, then, the ongoing fascination with Titanic -- as alive at our own end of the catastrophe's century mark as at the start of it, which was April 14-15, 1912? You could say memories of Titanic haunt us -- as maybe they should.
The reason U. S. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan should be president -- now, if not the day before yesterday -- is the same reason the country may eventually lick its budgetary problems. He bows his neck and keeps acomin' -- knowing intuitively that everything hard, from the building of Rome to the taming of the federal budget, requires not merely time but the services of someone willing and able to mix the mortar. Ryan seems up to the job, and who knows, under his -- or comparable -- leadership, we might get something done. "I gave up fear for Lent two years ago," he recently told The New York Times' James B. Stewart.
The Supreme Court of the United States, whose inveterate habit is telling Americans what's good for them, will do the honors once more after weighing the merits and demerits of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, generally and ominously known as Obamacare. Formal arguments before the court, commencing March 26, will last three days. In the end, five or six justices will advise us how much power the federal government may exercise over our method of providing health care and how we're to pay for it. Assuming, we ever manage to pay for it.
Rick Santorum protests that Mitt Romney "can't close the deal" with GOP voters -- a truism that, truth to tell, could apply with equal force to Rick Santorum, not to mention Newton Leroy Gingrich or even, come to think of it, Ron Paul. The Republican presidential campaign has been dispiriting, all right. With Gingrich and Santorum doing their best to render it more dispiriting still, with their forecasts of calamity should the probable nominee -- Romney -- become the actual nominee. Propped figuratively against the classroom lectern, Prof. Gingrich warns us the party has produced no weaker nominee since Warren G. Harding in 1920. At least Harding won the election, Gingrich fails to note, before dying in a morass of scandal, bequeathing us the sensible, if underrated, Calvin Coolidge as president.
After Barack Obama regains the presidency -- a prospect that seems likelier, the more the Republican candidates slice and dice one another -- we can look forward to four more years of statements such as: "You can either stand up for the oil companies, or you can stand up for the American people." I invite attention to a statement that is remarkable for so neatly packaging together condescension, arrogance and economic brainlessness -- the president's preferred operating mode (see: Obamacare and Solyndra) -- and no great compliment to his fellow Democrats, either.
The "social issues" have popped up in the Republican presidential campaign, courtesy of Rick Santorum, causing Democrats to drool, left-wing pundits to twirl their broadswords in the air and various Republicans to turn green, fearful of alienating key voting blocs. The horror, the horror -- can't the party's candidates just keep their searchlight trained on the economy? Probably not. The task of governing the United States of America seems not to accommodate that strategy any more. Current screeching about Santorum's introduction of religion into the campaign calculus reinforces that point.
Oh, have we got problems as a country and as a people -- not all of them connected with Iranian nuclear ambitions, the eurozone crisis and Mitt Romney's inner feelings about family dogs on the family station wagon roof. News that the U.S. illegitimacy rate is 51 percent for births to women aged 20 to 30 stuns less by means of the trend's sheer novelty than through the implications -- none desirable -- for a whole lot of things.
"Compromise," in President Obama's lexicon, has a funny meaning. It means -- with respect to the row over forcing religious employers to provide health insurance for contraception -- "Oh, all right, if you're going to be that way about it, we'll make the insurance companies provide the coverage. Will that make you shut up now?" It won't, I trust. It manifestly shouldn't. Shall we try to embarrass the president by examining the principle actually at stake here? The principle Obama wishes Americans to understand is that he cares; specifically, he cares about women who regard access to contraception and abortion as fundamental American rights.
Go the website PlannedParenthood.org. You know, Planned Parenthood, around whose rippling banner enlightened opinion rallied last week when news broke that Susan G. Komen for the Cure would, in the near future, cease granting it money. PP -- just a big-hearted service organization for women, fighting breast cancer and other female afflictions with might and main. One could buy into that sales pitch on the basis of the Category 5 hurricane that PP caused to sweep across the landscape.
What's all this "Republican establishment" vs. "grassroots populist" business; would somebody kindly inform me? I have rarely heard of anything nuttier. The essence of this widely retailed story is that rebellious men and women of the grassroots wish to prevent the nomination of Mitt Romney for president. If Romney got elected, we are apparently to believe, he would spend all his time at the country club, checking in periodically with his brokers, instead of removing the cultural and political debris left by the Obama administration. Whereas -- ah! -- if Newt Gingrich became the people's man in the White House, he and Joe the plumber would lead a national revival.
One South Carolina Republican woman said she craved to see a "bulldog" at the top of the GOP ticket. That would describe Newton Leroy Gingrich all right. The next follow-up question went un-posed: Do you want a bulldog heading up the executive branch of government, and if you do, to what end? -- so he can leave teeth marks on legs all over Capitol Hill? Or so he can get a few useful things done for the sake of a country in crisis? In South Carolina, Gingrich seemingly closed the sale with customers alarmed enough over the national predicament to vote for the bulldog, in hopes he can win next November. Or alternatively -- as one Gingrich voter suggested to Rush Limbaugh -- to send a message to Romney: Get your act together, big boy; start talking us through these times.
While second- and third-rank Republican presidential aspirants snort over front-runner Mitt Romney's liabilities, one of the truly large issues in present day politics emerges in Wisconsin. To wit, can anything be done to corral the excesses of public labor unions? The Wisconsin unions' answer is a smug no -- though of course they don't put it that way. What they say is voters should recall Gov. Scott Walker in a special election this year for limiting the collective bargaining rights of public employee unions. On Tuesday, the unions presented stacks of signed petitions they say will lead to Walker's early dismissal from government. (He assumed the governorship only in January 2011.) The petition signers seek also the ouster of the state's Republican lieutenant governor and four Republican senators.
The New York Times' Bill Keller wants Hillary Clinton to replace Joe Biden on the Obama re-election ticket, but a better, likelier choice by far is available -- one Newton Leroy Gingrich, reputedly a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination but in fact, an Obama surrogate working for Democratic victory in November. I have proof. That's to say, Gingrich keeps opening his mouth. Aargghhhh. The stuff that spills out! The terrible, horrible, no good, please-go-away race for the Republican presidential nomination has the potential to deliver President Obama the kind of ringing affirmation that seemed impossible not many months ago. That was before the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives began shrieking his dislike and contempt for, well, the candidate likeliest to deny him, Newt Gingrich. Can you imagine it for a second? -- the right to make over America in his personal and intellectual image.
The battle smoke lifts, the noise of past political combat dies away and we envision at last the right role model for John Boehner as he assumes the speakership. Who else, I ask, but Nancy Pelosi? The Rose of San Francisco will not go down in the speakership annals standing beside the honored likes of Henry Clay, Jack Garner and Sam Rayburn. Instead, she'll possibly go down as the speaker with both the hardest head and nose -- unyielding in pursuit of her objectives, giving an inch to critics only when forced to and then waiting patiently to snatch it back.
The death of the world's leading self-styled atheist (may his soul rest in peace) occasions reflection about his, shall we say, firm convictions regarding the truth of religion -- any religion. Christopher Hitchens, the English-born polemicist, was against 'em all, or at least said he was. The title of a best-selling book he published several years ago was, "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything."
With all these debates and polls and risings and fallings, we're supposed to think (I think) that there could hardly be a worse presidential selection process than this. Possibly, we should look on the bright side. The process digs up and conveys important information. The Herman Cain collapse brings these ruminations to mind. Cain was never my label of joy juice, but many Americans, generally of conservative bent, were ready to award him the state fair blue ribbon.
Bull corn, Sen. Schumer. (That's the way we used to talk back in simpler times, when language and political thought still awaited the debasement they've come to know in latter times.) New York's senior senator, Charles Schumer, contends that "a major shift in public opinion" has placed "jobs and income inequality" atop the list of political issues for 2012.
In the great scheme of things -- greater things than worldlings imagine on a trip to the mall -- it doesn't matter a bit that Texas A & M and the University of Texas are winding up their celebrated Thanksgiving Day, football rivalry. What matters -- maybe more than a little bit -- is the reason for the rivalry's end: filthy lucre, as the Apostle Paul called it, along with a greasy admixture of human vainglory. The Longhorns and the Aggies, aim to get richer than the good Lord and local circumstance ever made them. They want to swim in money, like Scrooge McDuck, as they entertain millions who never set foot on either of their spacious campuses but love the teams that live there.
