Super Tuesday: The End Is Near

Victories by Rick Santorum in Tennessee and Oklahoma and Newt Gingrich in Georgia forestalled a Mitt Romney coronation on Super Tuesday, but it increasingly appears that the other three Republican contenders are only delaying the inevitable. The press, whether out of desire for a drawn-out horse race or out of reluctance not to step on the toes of candidates still proclaiming to be in it to win it, insists that, as Jeff Zeleny writes in the Times, “Mitt Romney won the delegates, but not necessarily the argument.”

It doesn’t take a very strong B.S. detector to realize that a good argument will hardly win the nomination. The situation now mirrors the tail end of the Clinton-Obama drama of 2008, when Clinton steadfastly refused to leave the race, despite having no mathematically possible path forward. To venture into the dangerous (for me) territory of sports metaphors, you win by winning. You win by scoring more points. Not by attracting the most dedicated, bodypaint-covered fans; not by provoking the loudest applause; not by looking like the most talented team on the court. The political corollary: You don’t win by stirring up the most indignant rage (Santorum), spouting the wildest ideas (Gingrich), or storming the caucuses with the most die-hard college students (Paul). It’s even worth noting that you don’t win by having the biggest bank account (Romney) or the most flawless resume in corporate America (Romney again). And you certainly don’t win by muffing state eligibility requirements, as Santorum did in Ohio; losing 18 delegates this way is the equivalent of tripping over your shoelaces or scoring a basket for the opposing team. (Don’t sports folks call this kind of thing an unforced error?)

You win by amassing 1,144 delegates. By that metric, Romney is not only the front-runner but the undeclared victor. He currently has 415 delegates; Santorum has 176, Gingrich 105, and Paul 47. Two hundred thirty-nine delegates is not a gap — it’s a gulf, and one that is nearly unbridgeable. There are simply not enough states in which any of other three candidates — whose stubborn refusal to drop out will ensure a divided non-Romney vote — are strong enough to get to 239. As Karen Tumulty writes in the Washington Post:

Though Mitt Romney’s opponents continue to insist there is a road to the Republican presidential nomination for them after the Super Tuesday contests, the arithmetic suggests otherwise.

How long it will take for the other contenders and their supporters to figure that out — and to make peace with it — is another question.

I suspect Ron Paul, who openly admits that his “chances are slim,” has figured it out. Gingrich and Santorum, on the other hand, are both delusional enough to keep hoping for divine intervention (literally, for Santorum) or a popular revolt in which the masses wrench the nomination away from the establishment elites holed up at the Fox News headquarters. Politico’s Maggie Haberman archly points to the possibility that “Santorum could miraculously win every winner-take-all state through Texas.” As for the candidates’ supporters: Sheldon Adelson, the casino mogul who funneled over $10 million to a pro-Gingrich super PAC but who has quietly offered his support to Romney should he win the nomination, is no dummy. Beyond a few quirky billionaires (namely Foster Friess, the Santorum backer who endorsed Bayer aspirin as a birth control method), the lion’s share of Republican fundraisers have already fallen into line behind Romney.

The zombie of the Republican race will undoubtedly stagger into spring, seemingly alive despite a mathematical bullet to the brain. Gingrich and Santorum may score a few wins in the South; indeed, Gingrich has pinned his candidacy on Alabama and Mississippi, which vote on March 13. But after April, when the Republican National Committee gives states the official green-light to award delegates on a winner-take-all basis, Romney’s narrow edge will become an undeniably insurmountable lead. Let the general election begin.

Newt Gingrich’s Quieter Gaffe

The Republican presidential field is so prone to gaffes — Mitt Romney’s “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” Rick Santorum’s comparison of gay relationships to “man on dog” — that the subtler horrors coughed up daily by the candidates often go unnoticed. You have to give Mitt Romney credit; despite his wooden affect and G-rated vices (hot chocolate!), the man suffers from such an advanced case of foot-in-mouth disease that he’s been able to overshadow the King of Ridiculousness himself, Newt Gingrich. It takes a lot — namely, a $10,000 bet or a fondness for firing people — to outdo moon colonies and schoolkids working as janitors. So it’s no surprise that this gem from Gingrich, delivered at a campaign event at a cowboy bar (don’t ask), flew under the radar:

We think it is the left which has abandoned and betrayed the poor because its safety net is actually a spider web and it traps people in dependency. My goal is the exact opposite of Governor Romney’s. My goal is to turn the safety net into a trampoline to allow the poor to rise and be like the rest of us.

Coming from the guy who chastised Romney for even suggesting a difference between the rich and poor, saying “I am fed up with politicians of either party dividing Americans against each other,” this is pretty rich. The bizarre image of food stamp recipients performing aerial gymnastics notwithstanding, there are several things I find offensive about Gingrich’s statement.

For starters, since when are the poor not “like the rest of us”? Talk about dividing Americans against each other. The Census Bureau reports that the official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent. By that measure, more than one in ten Americans are poor. These are your neighbors, your kids’ classmates, the family behind you in the grocery store. That’s what is so scary about poverty in America; it can be almost invisible, hidden behind the doors of average-looking houses and masked by material goods like Xboxes and air conditioners — the very things Republicans cite when they insist that no one in this country is really poor. In short, the poor are “the rest of us.”

Even more disturbing is Gingrich’s casual implication that the poor lack some intrinsic work ethic or characteristic common to the rest of us. This is hardly revolutionary stuff, coming from the party that coined the term “welfare queens” and advocates drug-testing recipients of unemployment benefits, but it’s still a pernicious and offensive idea. A worldview in which CEOs “earn” every penny of their overinflated salaries and taxes “steal” from hard-working Americans is naturally one in which the poor are to blame for their situation. It is not a paradigm that allows for bad luck, lack of education or below-living-wage jobs. Anyone who is poor is obviously poor because of their own failings.

When Republicans scream about class warfare, they accuse the president of demonizing businesspeople and insulting the rich. But conservatives can’t have it both ways: If the rich are just like you and me, deserving of the billions they’ve earned through their own sweat, then the inverse must also be true. People in need of the safety net — or the trampoline, if Gingrich insists — are just like you and me as well.

“You keep using that word. I do not think that it means what you think it means.”

With Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann out of the race, the next few Republican debates will offer far fewer opportunities for drinking games: No “9-9-9,” no “23 foster children,” and now that Jon Huntsman has bowed out as well, no chance to take a shot every time the former ambassador breaks into Mandarin. There’s still Ronald Reagan, of course, whom Newt Gingrich name-checked before tonight’s debate even hit the five-minute mark; nothing will get you drunker faster than mentions of the Gipper. But since Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry launched blistering attacks on Mitt Romney’s business backgrounds, we have two new entries in the GOP’s talking-point lexicon. Both are criticisms the Republican party has long levied against the Obama administration, and neither are any more accurate when applied to fellow conservatives.

1. “Anti-capitalist”

Romney denounces Gingrich’s broadsides against his record at Bain Capital by claiming that attacks on private equity are “anti-capitalist” and seek to put “free enterprise on trial.” As it happens, I largely agree with the underlying premise of Romney’s defense: capitalism is not always pretty, and the mission of private equity companies isn’t to create jobs. (I would suggest to Romney that campaigning as a job-creator when he also destroyed a lot of jobs is perhaps not the best idea.) However, the idea that questioning the utility of one facet of capitalism is equivalent to opposing capitalism in its entirety is ridiculous. There’s a real debate to be had about the role of outfits like Bain that load companies with debt, extract fees, then cut and run. Calling such a debate “anti-capitalist” is like saying someone is anti-puppy because he doesn’t want pitbulls running loose around his kids. Dogs (and capitalists) are great, but not if they’re unrestrained or vicious.

2. “Class warfare”

Of course, according to Republicans, President Obama is still the #1 practitioner of class warfare. Rick Santorum sees something nefarious in the mere use of the term “middle class.” (He prefers “middle income,” which I assume is better because it avoids the word “class.”) Romney believes income inequality is a topic unsuited for polite conversation and should only be discussed in “quiet rooms.” Now Romney has added Gingrich and Perry, who has called him a “vulture capitalist,” to his list of class warriors. So here’s my second analogy of the day: Labeling the conversation about inequality “class warfare” is like telling Rosa Parks that refusing to give up her seat on the bus is “racial warfare.” In both cases, one group of people (whites, the super-rich) is accruing a disproportionate number of benefits (bus seats, money). No one is saying that white people or wealthy people are evil. But they shouldn’t be allowed to reap all the rewards while others have to scrimp for a meal.

Bonus:

While this one may not be a dog-whistle debate phrase, you could also play a drinking game with the number of times conservatives disparage liberals based on geography. Mitt Romney is a “Massachusetts moderate” (extra points for alliteration), Nancy Pelosi is a “San Francisco liberal,” and Elizabeth Warren is a “Harvard professor.” Though I have to give the GOP messaging gurus credit for managing to turn “moderate,” “liberal” and “professor” into synonyms for “baby-killing elitist,” what’s with all the slams against states and cities? You don’t hear Democrats snarking about “middle-of-nowhere hicks” or “Cheyenne gun lovers” — possibly because they’d have to specify “Cheynne, Wyoming,” which really takes the punch out of the insult. The closest equivalent for liberals is probably “Texas Republican,” though that conjures less an image of a Machiavellian politician than a bumbling, English-mangling governor (Bush or Perry, take your pick). Part of the discrepancy may depend on the fact that there are fewer concentrated centers of conservatism; urban areas tend to vote Democratic, and even states as red as Texas have pale blue splotches around Austin and Houston. Using “rural” or “small-town” as a pejorative is seen as bigotry, while for some reason it’s acceptable to paint all San Francisco residents or Berkley students as granola-crunching radicals. Democrats regularly get pegged as unorganized and off-message, but in this case, perhaps their inability to coin rude epithets isn’t such a bad thing.

Rightward March!

An editorial in today’s Times, “The Race to the Right,” says nothing revelatory yet is nevertheless a valuable (and disturbing) reminder of the GOP’s success in shifting the political center dramatically rightward. Policies once considered the bedrock of moderation — progressive taxation, the separation of church and state — are now branded as steps on the road to socialism. Republicans have managed to reframe previously routine negotiations as opportunities to ransom the country’s financial stability for ideological priorities: a “balanced-budget” amendment, the Keystone XL pipeline, even a provision preventing Washington, D.C., from using its local tax dollars to help fund abortions. Suddenly, the question is not whether to cut spending, but by how much. (Would the patient like his arm amputated, or would he prefer the arm and a leg?)

The Republican primaries are a microcosm of the GOP’s new world order. The Times writes: “Candidates often move to the ideological edges to win a primary, because that’s where the primary voters are, but the frenzied efforts of Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are particularly hard to watch.” Precisely because neither Romney nor Gingrich have the impeccable conservative credentials demanded by today’s Republican voters, “each has now adopted positions at the far end of the ideological spectrum.” Gingrich would send out the federal marshals to drag liberal judges before Congress to explain themselves, while Romney has maintained a drumbeat of falsehoods — Obama apologizes for America; Fannie and Freddie caused the financial crisis; Democrats favor “equal outcomes,” not equal opportunities — steady enough to make poor Paul Krugman reach for his blood-pressure medication.

The most interesting aspect of the Times editorial, however, is the observation that Gingrich and Romney have swung so far rightward because they “are competing with candidates like Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann who have much longer and more consistent conservative records.” On its face, this is an obvious statement; the presence of candidates who see sharia law as a looming menace and gay rights as a threat to religious freedom is bound to drive the conversation to the right. Yet neither Santorum nor Bachmann — to say nothing of Rick Perry, who thinks “there’s something wrong in America when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school” — poses a credible threat to the two frontrunners. Both are polling in the single digits, a fact all the more remarkable given Bachmann’s first-place finish in August’s Iowa Straw Poll. What is easy to forget is that a primary race, unlike a general election, is a multi-candidate field. Romney isn’t just trying to out-poll Gingrich; he’s trying to prevent Santorum and Bachmann from peeling off enough votes to become spoilers. Die-hard conservatives are already more likely to gravitate toward Gingrich, so Romney can’t risk a situation in which Santorum or Bachmann, both evangelical favorites and Tea Party darlings, plays Ralph Nader to Romney’s Al Gore. In a very real sense, Romney is competing with not only Santorum and Bachmann but Rick Perry, Ron Paul, Jon Huntsman (OK, maybe not Huntsman) and a potential Sarah Palin write-in as well. In the absence of this second tier of candidates, the two frontrunners could battle it out without being forced to throw red meat to the Tea Party. But because Iowa’s caucus-goers will be able to choose from an array of candidates who fall at every conceivable place on the conservative spectrum, Romney can’t rely on simply outdoing Newt Gingrich, whose ideological impurities include that moment on the couch with Nancy Pelosi and a $1.6 million payday from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

The losers in this breathless game of conservative one-upmanship are not necessarily primary voters. Despite polls that consistently register a high degree of dissatisfaction with the Republican field, voters and caucus-goers could hardly have a wider variety of candidates to choose from: Libertarians have Ron Paul and his quixotic battle to “End the Fed,” while the three people in New Hampshire who laughed at Jon Huntsman’s Nirvana reference can cast lonely votes for the motorcycle-riding, Mandarin-speaking moderate. The real losers will only emerge in November 2012, when the general election arrives and voters face a choice between Barack Obama and whichever rightward-charging panderer emerges from the Republican primaries. By then, the real losers will be the American people.