Godzilla Found in Times Square *

Looks scary, doesn’t he?

* Actually, it was a cockroach, but who’s going to read a story about roaches in New York? Even bedbugs are hardly newsworthy these days. But the headline got your attention, right?

That seems to be the goal of a recent Reuters piece headlined “Romney Gains Toehold in Silicon Valley.” The premise of the article seems to be that, while Obama was “the darling of the technology world” in 2008, he is facing headwinds in 2012. Mitt Romney “is making inroads to a key source of cash for Obama, who some tech leaders view as anti-business because of uncertainty that they blame on the Dodd-Frank financial regulation reform and the healthcare overhaul.” Unfortunately, the reporter spends the rest of the article undermining the lede, demonstrating that a nice hook — the Fundraiser-in-Chief is being trounced in the money game! — doesn’t guarantee a substantial follow-up.

Pressed by the relentless 24-hour news cycle to churn out more content than ever, even venerable media outlets like Reuters are apt to turn mountains into molehills. Framing every political development as a make-or-break moment drives clicks and adds urgency to a routine horserace story. Mitt Romney’s latest gaffe — from “corporations are people” to “I’m not concerned about the very poor” — morphs from a slip of the tongue into an outright disaster, a revelation about the candidate’s plutocratic tendency that threatens to derail his campaign. Despite evidence that such breathless coverage barely moves the needle in polls and in fact reaches less than half of voters (SOURCE), news organizations continue to overplay their hands. They assume, perhaps correctly, that no one wants to read about Obama’s so-so monthly haul from the Zuckerberg crowd. But imply that Obama’s techie donors are deserting his socialist policies in droves, and suddenly you have a story that might float to the top of Google news.

In the hands of certain “journalists” — most of the folks at Fox News, anyone associated with one of Breitbart’s sites — the manufactured drama would not have been limited to the headline. Instead, the entire article would have been filled with derisive comments from Peter Thiel and distorted statistics purporting to demonstrate that the president is in the danger zone. Reuters, whatever its faults, still has integrity. Its lede may be overblown and undercut by facile reporting, but its journalists are at least honest enough to add caveats to their more stretched assertions. Indeed, they back off so many of the statements made so boldly in previous paragraphs that the reader starts to suffer from whiplash. Punching holes in the so-called logic behind the article’s Death in Silicon Valley premise is so easy that the piece reads like something from The Onion.

Let’s take Reuters’ dubious assertions one by one:

He lags behind his 2008 campaign in donations from workers at Internet, computer and telecom equipment powerhouses such as Google, IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Cisco . . . . The Obama campaign has raised $1.44 million through May from employees of 15 top tech companies, as compared to $1.6 million donated by the same companies’ staff four years ago.

Four years ago, Obama was engaged in one of the most competitive (and expensive) Democratic primaries in history. Hillary Clinton didn’t officially concede the nomination until June; in May, the candidates were still furiously raising money to duke it out in individual states. Obviously, this year Obama is the uncontested Democratic nominee. Of course he’s not raking in as much money. In its increasingly frequent, plaintive fundraising e-mails to supporters, the Obama campaign has made much of the fact that all donations — not just those from tech employees — are down dramatically from comparative months in 2008. There’s nothing unique about the drop-off in money from Silicon Valley. The New York Times observes that “nearly every major industry,” has given less in 2012. “From Wall Street to Hollywood, from doctors and lawyers,” donors are reluctant to open their wallets without a high-profile primary battle. The upshot: “Mr. Obama’s campaign raised about $196 million through March, compared with $235 million at the same point in 2008.”

Romney, a former private equity executive, is making inroads to a key source of cash for Obama . . . . Romney has raised almost $340,000 during this election campaign from the 15 tech companies’ employees, far behind his opponent but already ahead of the roughly $240,000 that Republican presidential candidate John McCain picked up through May 2008.

Romney raises less than 25% of Obama’s haul from the tech world, and that qualifies as making inroads? That’s like saying Romney is making inroads with Jewish voters because he’s polling at 29% instead of 23%. Sure, it’s technically true, but it’s also such a marginal difference that only some serious hyping by the Fox News talking heads can turn it into a newsworthy “crisis” for Obama. Put another way, at my last job, I made about $20,000. If my salary had jumped to $28,000, I would have been thrilled. But to claim that my raise meant I was gaining on my supervisor — who pulled down a cool $130,000 a year — would have provoked laughter. However, those numbers are roughly proportional to Romney’s tech fundraising vis-a-vis McCain and Obama.

While the numbers are small, Romney did slip past his rival among one group that is vital to the tech world. He has raised $392,300 through April from venture capitalists, some $20,000 more than Obama, according to federal disclosures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

This nugget is not so surprising when you consider Romney has been billing himself as a venture capitalist for years, despite some serious questions, raised even by conservatives, as to whether Bain can really be characterized as a venture capital firm. (In in its earliest days, Bain indeed invested money in eventually successful start-ups like Staples, but the bulk of the company’s business and wealth were derived from private equity deals, in which Bain bought struggling companies with borrowed money and attempted to extract maximum profits before reselling those companies.) Is it such a shocker that venture capitalists are amenable to donating to someone they regard as a fellow venture capitalist? If Romney were raising boatloads of cash from a less likely group — say, former University of Chicago constitutional law professors — well, that might be significant.

“People creating jobs in Silicon Valley are very entrepreneurial, very much geared to be capitalists, and the current administration, frankly, is more of the socialist bent,” said Daniel Dumezich, a Chicago-based tax attorney and major Romney fundraiser.

Without even addressing the “socialist” accusation, which is lobbed with dismal regularity by the conservative community (really, ask all those left-wing proponents of single-payer health care how Obama is doing on the socialist front), the inclusion of this quotation is slightly bizarre. What does a tax attorney have to do with the tech world? Does Dumezich work for Facebook or Google? Who knows; the Reuters story doesn’t say. The job description — “a Chicago-based tax attorney” is priceless for another reason: Since when is Silicon Valley located in Illinois? Reuters has not only found a conspiracy theorist; it’s found a conspiracy theorist who lives 1800 miles from the tech capital of the U.S.

Federal financial disclosures show that together with his Super PAC (political action committee) allies, Romney has received thousands from Texas Pacific Group partner Dick Boyce, Cisco CEO John Chambers and Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman – who made a fortune as CEO of eBay during its big years of growth and who lost the 2010 California governor’s race.

Yes, Meg Whitman — the Republican candidate in the 2010 California governor’s race. When Jerry Brown starts throwing money at conservative super PACs, get back to me. That would be news.

Finally, more than halfway into the piece, we get the actual bottom line. This isn’t a case of burying the lede; it’s more akin to drilling an oil well at the bottom of the Marianas Trench and tossing the lede down the bore hole:

“There is no doubt that, in terms of money and votes, Silicon Valley will be Obama territory,” said Steve Westly, a venture capitalist and major Obama fundraiser in California.

To be clear, I’m not necessarily jumping on Reuters for tilting its coverage in favor of Romney. I don’t think that’s the issue here. Even if the tech world remains a reliable source of Democratic donations, the president has every reason to be worried about the money race. His campaign was out-raised in June by a nearly 2-to-1 margin ($105 million to $70 million), and the amount of cash flowing into conservative super PACs like American Crossroads and affiliated non-profits like Crossroads GPS is immense.

The real problem is that, by hyping every blip and bleep in the race, the news service contributes to the low-information, high-drama atmosphere that has permeated Election 2012 from the beginning of the Republican primaries. With so much noise, it’s no wonder that readers and viewers find it difficult to separate the important aspects of the campaign — say, what each candidate would actually do with four years in the Oval Office — from the hyberbole-infused distractions (Romney’s house has a car elevator! Obama ate dog!).

Reuters itself isn’t even the biggest offender. Picking up the story from the wires, CNBC slaps on an even more egregious headline: Is Mitt Romney the New Darling of Silicon Valley? Outrageous questions are used as click-bait by every news site out there (see: “Did a Tick Bite Really Bring Down JPMorgan?“), but isn’t the financial press supposed to target a savvy, educated audience? Of course, perhaps I should give the audience more credit. Even the most cursory reading of the article supplies an easy answer to CNBC’s inquiry. Is Mitt Romney the new darling of Silicon Valley? Uh, no. Is he “making inroads” into Obama’s Facebook/Twitter/Square territory? Not particularly.

Not for the first time, I echo economist Brad DeLong, whose blog tends to be more enlightening (though slightly more comma-challenged) than Reuters and CNBC put together: Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps?

#SCOTUSHumor for a Dreary Day

These may be collector’s items after Thursday

Another Monday, another missed chance for the Supreme Court to rule on health care reform. The verdict is now due Thursday, except in the prolong-the-agony scenario in which “the justices decide to punt it over until next year — an outcome that is possible, although thought to be unlikely,” according to Wonkblog’s Sarah Kliff. I have no intention of writing anything long about the fate of the Affordable Care Act, as I will vomit if I have to read one more boilerplate anticipatory article (WaPost: “Everything You Need to Know About ObamaCare and SCOTUS in One Post,” NYT:”Wearing Brave Face, Obama Prepares for Health Care Ruling,” Politico: “A Viewer’s Guide to the SCOTUS Health Care Ruling“), let alone write one. The world does not need another “11 Facts About the Affordable Care Act.” Besides, the constant barrage of coverage has left my wonky, liberal-crusader nerves raw. Perhaps it’s silly to care so much about a 2,700-page law, but in this case even more than usual, the political is personal. I’m feverishly protective of the legislation not only because I believe universal health care is a moral imperative but because I am loath to see President Obama’s signature achievement invalidated.

There’s also not a lot for me to say about the decisions that the Court did hand down today, as I don’t really have a dog in any of those three fights. The ruling on Arizona’s immigration law was unexpected but satisfactory, as it threw out S.B. 1070’s most punitive measures and reaffirmed the supremacy of the federal government while allowing state police to continue common-sense checks of arrestees’ immigration status. The Court’s rejection Montana’s challenge to Citizens United was expected but equally satisfactory, as I’m one of those old-school First Amendment absolutists who believe, contra current conventional Democratic wisdom, that freedom of speech shouldn’t be held hostage to anti-corporate outrage. The 5-4 ruling against mandatory life sentences for juvenile offenders was perhaps the most surprising (in a good way), though I have to wonder how a court that finds life-without-parole to be “cruel and unusual” doesn’t feel the same way about the death penalty’s state-sanctioned killing. Today’s most interesting interlude had little to do with the substance of the rulings, and came in the form of Justice Scalia’s dyspeptic and tangential rant against Obama’s recent decision to spare illegal immigrants under age 30 from deportation. Scalia cited the President’s remarks to the media about the policy switch being “the right thing to do,” leading Slate commentator Dahlia Lithwick to observe tartly that the justice had expressed “perhaps the first originalist reading of a presidential press conference.” Salon’s Glenn Greenwald tweeted that “What’s so ironic about Scalia is he’s 1) the loudest complainer about Court politicization & 2) the most politicized Justice in a long time.”

Come Thursday, I will join the 50,000 court-watchers waiting on tenterhooks before their computer screens, willing Scotusblog’s live feed to update and having my last nerve shredded by the constant doors-slamming sounds of the live blog. (What tech moron decided that clicking noise was a good idea, anyway?) For now, I thought I’d do a roundup of the lighter reactions to Monday’s announcements. The Washington Post’s Fix blog collected “the best SCOTUS tweets of the day,” including the following:

I don’t agree with John Podhoretz on much, but I liked this:

The Fix missed some of the best ones, however. From some of my own favorite (mostly left-wing) folks on Twitter:

Mitt Romney refused to say whether he supported the Arizona decision, leading to a comedic exchange between his spokesman and the media accompanying him on a chartered jet specifically for the purpose of hearing his reaction to a ruling on “Obamacare.” Though eager for the press to act as a stenographer for his potential post-ACA triumphalism (planned commentary: “I told you so”), he clearly didn’t feel his gaggle of reporters should be allowed to report on his noncommittal dance around S.B. 1070’s constitutionality. A sampling of what Politico called the “lengthy exchange”:

QUESTION: So does he think it’s wrongly decided?

GORKA: “The governor supports the states’ rights to do this. It’s a 10th amendment issue.”

QUESTION: So he thinks it’s constitutional?

GORKA: “The governor believes the states have the rights to craft their own immigration laws, especially when the federal government has failed to do so.”

QUESTION: And what does he think about parts invalidated?

GORKA: “What Arizona has done and other states have done is a direct result of the failure of this president to address illegal immigration. It’s within their rights to craft those laws and this debate, and the Supreme Court ruling is a direct response of the president failing to address this issue.”

QUESTION: Does (Romney) support the law as it was drafted in Arizona?

GORKA: “The governor supports the right of states, that’s all we’re going to say on this issue.”

QUESTION: Does he have a position on the law, or no position?

And so on, for another thirteen questions and “answers.”

Just reading the transcript is exhausting. Mother Jones reporter Adam Serwer condenses:

As a side note, I’m not sure why Romney and his press flaks weren’t more prepared for questions about the Arizona ruling. Yes, the Republican candidate has been evasive to the highestdegree about his positions on everything from immigration to tax reform, but it’s not as if he wasn’t expecting the Supreme Court to rule on the issue. Given the fact he knew the decision was coming this Monday, Wednesday or Thursday, how hard would it have been to come up with some substantial talking points by Sunday evening? Heck, he needed only to look to Indiana Senate candidate Richard Murdock, who inadvertently jumped the gun last week when he released four video responses to SCOTUS’s health care decision — one for every possibility, from partial invalidation to outright rejection. Oops. The pre-taped statements garnered heaps of ridicule (is Mourdock’s schedule really so packed with VIP events that he’ll be unavailable to comment in real time?), including a mention on Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report,” where the host joked that “[t]he United State Supreme Court has done what none of us expected: The mandate has been struck down, there’s been another recount, and George Bush is president again.” Mourdock may suffer from an inflated ego, but perhaps his strategy would have been a good one for Romney to adopt.

But I digress. Returning to the Twitter feed, a humorous take on the Citizens United decision:

Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic reacts to the three-day delay:

Other gems:

From Fix blogger Chris Cillizza himself:

By far the best Tweet of the day, if by “best” you mean “makes me want to put my head down on the desk and weep.”

For humor in fewer than 140 characters, it’s hard to beat Twitter. Still, the ritual reading of tea leaves preceding any Supreme Court decision makes for amusing reading, as well as for some unintentional hilarity. Court-watchers grasp for the slightest clues about the upcoming ruling, despite the fact that the justices rarely (if ever) tip their hands and the army of SCOTUS clerks produces fewer leaks than the CIA. Recently, the process has been messy and filled with enough strained logic to make it less a decorous reading of tea leaves than a frenzied, gather-round-the-campfire reading of animal entrails. Innocuous public remarks from the justices take on loaded meaning; as Politico reported,

When Justice Elena Kagan joked last week that a ruling she’d written on an Indian tribe-related case was “Maybe not what you’ve all come for today,” some took it as a sign that the court’s liberal wing was in a relaxed mood that might signal a decision to uphold the health care law.

At Slate, former Acting Solicitor General Walter Dellinger mused that Justice Scalia’s diatribe against the Obama administration’s immigration policy may have provided a hint. Dellinger interpreted the Arizona ruling as a major win for the government, writing: “And that is why Justice Scalia is so upset. (Unless … he is being anticipatorily mad about what may happen on Thursday. You think?)”

Well, I could think that. But thinking doesn’t make it so.

Numerous observers have homed in on the seeming likelihood that Justice Roberts will write the majority opinion on ACA. Disregarding the inconvenient fact that Roberts’ authorship is hardly assured in the first place — the assumption rests on the theory that, because Kennedy wrote the bulk of the ruling against S.B. 1070, the responsibility for health care will fall to Roberts — it’s difficult to ascertain exactly what a Roberts-penned decision would mean. Ezra Klein wagers a guess, then offers a caveat:

One theory holds that it points towards a favorable ruling for the administration. If the conservatives had had to entice Kennedy to their side, they would have had to give the ruling to Kennedy to write. But if Kennedy joined the liberals to uphold the law, Roberts would also flip sides so he could write a ruling that imposed some kind of limiting principle on the Commerce Clause Act.

Or maybe Kennedy is with the conservatives and Roberts is simply the guy writing the ruling. Or maybe someone who is not Roberts and also not Kennedy is writing the ruling.

Republican Senator Mike Lee, who previously clerked for Justice Alito, interpreted the matter differently, explaining that Roberts had seemed unpersuaded by the government’s case during oral arguments. As he told the conservative Washington Examiner, “if we could be certain as of this moment that Chief Justice Roberts was the author of the majority opinion of the Court, I would say that would make it substantially more likely – that would be a strong indication – that it is going to be declared unconstitutional.”

However, anyone presuming to know the minds of nine complex, over-educated justices should heed the following warning from the Washington Post:

Of course, even the idea that Roberts is writing the majority opinion comes from what might best be called informed speculation, and should be tempered with the only truly immutable rule about the Supreme Court, a doctrine called No One Really Knows.

As we grind toward Thursday and disguise nervousness with humor, what are the folks at the Supreme Court doing? Proofreading, according to the National Journal, which reports that  the court enlists “professional legal editors review the text to check for style and ensure that all the case citations are correct.” The article cites a former clerk to Justice Kennedy who remarks that “It would be really surprising if there would be changes at this point — we’re three days away. It’s not like they’re changing their minds about how they are going to vote.”

That’s a relief, I suppose. I wouldn’t want the most major decision in recent Supreme Court history — and quite possibly John Roberts’ defining act as Chief Justice — to come down to a couple of coffee-fueled, procrastination-impaired all nighters. That may be how I wrote papers in college, but it’s no way to write a Supreme Court opinion. Still, one can hope that an undotted “i” or an uncrossed “t” sneaks past the proofreaders.

It will certainly make for better Twitter reading come Friday morning.

Student Loans and Deficit Double-Talk

Interest rates on federally subsidized student loans: the topic itself is a mouthful, and it’s a wonkish, unlikely issue to spark political debate. But the battle over interest rates, which are scheduled to increase from 3.4 to 6.8 percent in July, is shaping up to be Round 2 of the fight over the payroll tax cut. As with the payroll tax cut, leading Republicans claim to be for it in principle; they just want it to be paid for. But, as with the payroll tax battle, not everyone is staying on message. A claque of ultra-conservative House freshman are going off the ranch, once again showcasing John Boehner’s inability to control his caucus. When Republican representatives declare that they have “little tolerance” for people saddled with student debt, it illuminates the truth behind Boehner and Romney’s moderate rhetoric: the GOP doesn’t really like the principle of lower student-loan rates at all. In fact, the principle – that education is worthy of public support, that assistance to the working class is anything but money down a rat hole – is anathema to conservative ideology. Perhaps the divergent rhetoric represents genuine philosophical differences between Mitt “Massachusetts Moderate” Romney and the Tea Party, but I doubt it. Romney, ever the flip-flopper, was against low rates before he was for them, telling a student at a campaign event in Ohio that “It would be popular for me to stand up and say I’m going to give you government money to pay for your college, but I’m not going to promise that.” The real difference is that, while the party’s Tea Party element would rather self-destruct than brook an inch of compromise with Democrats (see: debt limit standoff), Boehner and Romney learned their lessons from the payroll tax cut fiasco. Republicans took a bruising in that fight, and the party’s leaders emerged just chastened enough not to relish a repeat.

Boehner and Romney have disguised Republican hostility to lower student loan rates just as they hid their opposition to a lower payroll tax behind professed concern over adding to the deficit. In both cases, statements by rank-and-file Congress members betrayed the truth of the situation. In November, Sen. John Kyl derided the cut as bad economics, saying, “the payroll tax holiday has not stimulated job creation; this week, the Republican Senate candidate for Missouri claimed that federal intervention in the loan market was giving America “stage three cancer of socialism.” (To which President Obama responded, “Just when you think you’ve heard it all in Washington, somebody comes up with a new way to go off the deep end.”) North Carolina Representative Victoria Foxx – who heads the House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training, of all things – earned a mention from President Obama himself for declaring that:

I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt, because there’s no reason for that. I remind folks all the time that the Declaration of Independence says “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” You don’t sit on your butt and have it dumped in your lap.

Naturally, she voted against the original legislation to cut the interest rate in half, slamming it as “big-government takeover.” The conservative intelligentsia has been opposed to government loan programs for years, preferring to leave the entire enterprise to the private market. The Wall Street Journal editorial page regularly blames tuition assistance for driving up the cost of college – which it possibly does, though the state-level evisceration of public support for universities really hasn’t helped the matter either. At the core of the argument, however, is the standard Republican disdain for anyone they perceive as being “on the dole.” National Review writer Victor Davis Hanson actually has the audacity to ask, “If our students are burdened with oppressive loans, why do so many university rec centers look like five-star spas? Student cell phones and cars are indistinguishable from those of the faculty.” Need I point out that the wealth of the institution, especially institutions like Harvard with billion-dollar endowments, is hardly connected to the wealth of the students? Then there are conservatives who praise the decline of public support for higher ed:

When it comes to higher education, limited state budgets have resulted in tuition increases at public college and universities. These increases, in turn, have rebalanced the undergraduate enrollment away from majors dominated by liberal faculty — sociology, gender studies, environmental science — and toward more practical, ideologically neutral subjects, such as finance, engineering, and computer science.

There’s a silver lining to everything, I suppose.

Boehner’s insistence that he planned to extend low rates all along and that the president is “trying to invent a fight where there wasn’t and never has been one” is belied by the fact that the budget endorsed by 228 House Republicans explicitly calls for rates to double. The necessity of offsetting the cost is also a red herring, as the GOP finds its own pet initiatives well worth “worth borrowing money from China,” as Mitt Romney would say. Want to cut taxes? Pile on the debt. Want to put money in the pockets of people who actually have jobs – instead of those saint-like “job creators”? Whoa, Nelly; we’ve got to pay for that! In the GOP worldview, even disaster assistance for hurricane victims must be offset. There is little logic to these contradictory positions, though I suspect Republicans would try to argue that tax cuts, unlike student loan assistance, “pay for themselves” by increasing revenue. The problem with this theory is that even conservative economists, including current Romney adviser Gregory Mankiw, don’t pretend that tax cuts can pay for themselves; at most, Mankiw concludes, they can make up for one-third of their cost.

This only demonstrates the degree to which Republicans are held intellectually hostage to supply-side economics. They are so enthralled by the notion that tax cuts for the wealthy goose the economy that they refuse to believe that cuts for lower-income people have any impact at all. If the Republican criteria for a program not requiring offsets is potential to stimulate the economy (as they insist is the case for Eric Cantor’s recent proposal to give small businesses a 20% tax break), the argument could easily be made that the payroll tax cut and student loan assistance are stimulus measures as well. Only someone who doesn’t believe that a lack of demand has any role in the recession, despite the fact that consumer spending accounts for three-fourths of the economy, could believe that $1 trillion in debt prevents young adults from spending money on houses, cars or other goods. Somewhere, Paul Krugman is slapping his palm to his forehead.

The campaign for Cantor’s “small business” bill was notable for the absolute absence of any talk of offsets. Boehner praised the Republican proposal to pay for lower student loan rates by slicing money from an “Obamacare slush fund” (a designation labeled a “Pants on Fire” lie by PolitiFact — in reality, it’s the Department Health and Human Services will use establish prevention and public health programs) for “not adding a dime to the deficit.” Meanwhile, Cantor’s jobs bill provoked not a squeak about deficits or borrowing. It wasn’t that Cantor tried to pass off a tax cut as a revenue-booster; he simply didn’t offer any explanation at all, and no one – neither Republican nor Democrat – called him out on it. I can understand why the GOP would be reluctant to point out this inconsistency, but where were Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi? For that matter, where was David Axelrod? While leading Republicans were tweeting about the president eating dog meat, the Obama team could have been calling attention to this rank hypocrisy. After insisting that one tax cut be offset, why weren’t Republicans proposing to offset the latest tax cut as well? It proves Steve Benens’s tart observation that conservatives are not interested in real debt reduction: “It’s almost as if Republicans panicking about an alleged “debt crisis” don’t really believe their own rhetoric, and only use the line to rationalize brutal cuts to domestic investments that they oppose anyway.”

Even more inexplicable, however, was how little the media did to break the deafening silence. Not a single interviewer pressed Cantor or Boehner about the discrepancy at the time – and since then, to compound the error, the press has continued to shirk its duty. Days after calling for a bill estimated to reduce government revenue by $46 billion, Boehner is now adamant about offsetting one worth $6 billion. Has the phrase “penny wise, pound foolish” ever been more apt? The closest the fourth estate came to questioning the Republican rationale for the small-business tax break was this, from the AP:

The tax break would cost the government $46 billion in lost revenue – money that would add to deficits that are already huge. Catching Democrats’ attention was an estimate by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which studies tax legislation, that 49 percent of the bill’s benefits would go to employers making more than $1 million annually.

Yet no one called Boehner on the carpet. Plenty of pundits challenged the economics of the bill: Bruce Bartlett noted that any “small” business (a category defined by having fewer than 500 employees), including Paris Hilton and the Los Angeles Dodgers, would be entitled to the 20% break, even if it never created a single job. But the convenient disappearance of once-mandatory offsets never made it into a news article. In recent days, Senator Jess Sessions of Alabama blocked a measure to bail out the U.S. Postal Service because “the bill would increase the federal deficit by $34 billion. In other words, the spending and debt under the postal bill violates the debt limit agreement reached just last summer.” The Budget Control Act prevents the Senate from considering legislation that will increase the deficit, which proves just how cynical Cantor’s small-business tax break really is. It may have given House Republicans a nice talking point, but it never had a chance of becoming law.

Other gaping holes in Boehner’s logic have also gone unnoticed. Attempting to pin the slated rate hike on the opposition, the GOP decried the fact that “Democrats put in place a law that would double interest rates for student loans this year.” It’s a bit like castigating Republicans for raising taxes . . . because, after all, they knew in 2001 that the Bush cuts would expire in 2010.

Democrats are finally going on the defensive, protesting the Republican plan to use health care funds as an offset — though, to my knowledge, no one has brought up Cantor & Co.’s about-face on adding to the deficit. Criticizing the House proposal, Harry Reid said: “They would pay for it by stopping Americans from getting preventive healthcare. That doesn’t sound like a very good deal to me.” Because much of the preventative healthcare comprises services to women — screenings for breast and cervical cancer, prenatal testing — Nancy Pelosi has called the Republican plan “an assault on women’s health.” About the “Obamacare slush-fund,” she said:

Well, it may be a slush fund to him, but it’s survival to women . . . . And that just goes to show you what a luxury he thinks it is to have good health for women.

While it may be a stretch to tie interest rates on student loans into the ostensible GOP “war on women” (and, really, casting every single disagreement as a “war” degrades both parties), at least Democrats are highlighting the costs of offsets. Republicans were indignant when President Obama referred to the Ryan budget as “social Darwinism,” yet days later, the GOP floats a proposal that pits students against women and against the rest of the middle class. If that’s not social Darwinism, I don’t know what is.

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.

Media Roundup: Coincidence, Convergence, or Carelessness?

So Few Stories, So Many Pages to Fill

The four remaining Republican presidential candidates must rank alongside the paramecium and the white lab rat as the most examined organisms in the natural world. Perhaps the fine-toothed comb has been too fine, because the media seems to be running out of new angles on each man’s history. The Times scooped the Post — if one can call an article on a forty-year-old campaign “scooping” — with its story about Lenore Romney’s 1970 Senate campaign. A day later, the Post trotted out its own take on Mitt Romney’s mother. It was a neat reversal from two months ago, when the Post beat the Times to the story on increasingly rich Congresspeople and — presumably — forced the Times to push up the publication of its own package. The stories on Romney’s mother are remarkably similar, each boasting reminiscences from Elly Peterson (described in both cases as a “Romney confidante”) and drawing parallels between Lenore’s inability to connect with the electorate and her son’s present-day reputation for living in a bubble. Both articles note that Michigan voters perceived Lenore as a stand-in for her husband, a former Micigan governor who had moved on to the Nixon White House, but the Post emphasizes the tension between Lenore’s wifely image and her determination that women deserved a place in politics. The Times and the Post both quote her as asking, “Why should women have less say than men about the great decisions facing our nation?”

Mark Bittman's cassoulet

The Times can also pat itself on the back for arriving early to the cassoulet trend. Mark Bittman’s whole-duck cassoulet recipe for the Times Sunday Magazine went live on the website on Feb. 23, while the Wall Street Journal’s weekend edition recipe played catch-up on Friday. Can a cassoulet food truck be far behind? Bittman offers a useful culinary definition for the uninitiated — a cassoulet is ” a glorified version of franks ’n’ beans” — and implores his reader not to be “discouraged by the page of instruction that follows.” The recipe, which suggests “4 to 5 hours” in cooking time, can nevertheless only be described as . . . discouraging. The Journal, whose culture section courts the cosmopolitan elite just as its editorial section mocks them, drops in bits of French and expounds on the dish’s legendary history, which goes back to 1355 and involves princes, wars, and a town with the tongue-twisting name of Castelnaudary. The author is apparently a cassoulet connoisseur, opining that “like the knights of Castelnaudary, I shun the addition of lamb.” She enlists a man described as “Steve Sando, the heirloom bean guru” — shades of “Bill Gates, the technology mogul” — who advises her to test the doneness of a bean by blowing on it. “If the skin wrinkles, the bean is cooked,” he says. The Journal’s recipe for Cassoulet de Canard Confit (no Anglicized “duck” here) calls for 7 hours of “hands-on time” . . . and a “total time” of three days. The rich are indeed different from you and me, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Left Hand, Meet Right Hand

From Takashi Murakami's "Kaikai Kiki" series

Sometimes the Times seems to be competing against itself, as in the case of two recent articles on the art scene in Qatar. Written by different reporters but published on the same day in the same section, the pair comes off as two versions of the same story: one is sanitized, a version that would have passed muster with the official Qatari media; the other reads as the unvarnished truth behind the puffery. Sara Hamdan’s article, “An Emirate Filling Up With Artwork,” maintains a dull neutrality that reports on the surface of the art world as seen by a foreign journalist — possibly one accompanied by a government minder. The details are businesslike: Oil-rich Qatari buyers, including the royal family, are playing a major role in the international art market, snapping up canvases by blue-chip artists like Rothko and Cezanne. Exhibitions by such western stars as Louise Bourgeois and Takashi Murakami grace the emirate’s museums, creating what one museum director calls “an art renaissance.” Hamdan is careful to note that Qatar is not just focused on glamor; she writes that “a commitment is being made to support regional artists in addition to building collections of renowned works.”

Louise Bourgeois's "Maman" is on display at the Qatar National Convention Center

The second article, by Rooksana Hossenally, strikes me as the unexpurgated version of Hamdan’s narrative. Hossenally name-checks the same marquee artists — Bourgeois, Murakami — but emphasizes the constraints in which even high-profile art is displayed. The same museum director quoted in Hamdan’s piece explains that “We are trying to show a point of view, not trying to upset the existing one. It is possible to provoke conversation without being insulting.” Avoiding insult is the rule of thumb for native artists in Qatar, few of whom feel the “support” the royal family claims to provide. International art, not local work, allows the emirate to show off on the world stage while repressing creative and political expression at home. Hossenally writes that “most local artists do not stand a chance” when “the country is handpicking artists who are politically neutral.” One artist dismisses the idea that real art can exist without free speech, describing the scene as “an empty shell. It glitters from the outside, but from the inside, it is empty.” The truth about the much-vaunted Bourgeois exhibition comes out: locals think it’s ugly. Hossenally’s clincher: For the royal family, “art is big business.”

The two articles zigzag blithely around each other, and you have to wonder whether the world section editors ever talk to one another. Hamdan’s story seems to have been lifted from the relatively bloodless business pages, while Hossenally’s piece is a better fit for the analysis-heavy world section. If the overlap wasn’t noticed at a pre-publication budget meeting, I can only hope someone raised an eyebrow afterward.

The Silo Effect

Another odd pairing of stories is perhaps more excusable, considering one appeared in the business section and the other as part of a special package in the education section. Still, given that the author of the latter, Steven Greenhouse, is the paper’s labor and workplace reporter and writes frequently for the business section, it’s hard to believe no one considered the potential for overlap. At the very least, shouldn’t Catherine Rampell, the business writer responsible for “Where the Jobs Are, the Training May Not Be,” have checked in with the ed section before writing an article on community colleges?

The articles don’t necessarily contradict each other, but they do talk past one another. Rampell’s piece details the effects of state budget cuts on community colleges, which are the major providers of job-training and technical programs for workers hoping to improve their skills during an economic downturn. “Technical, engineering and health care expertise are among the few skills in huge demand even in today’s lackluster job market,” Rampell writes — and indeed, President Obama recently proposed directing $8 million to community colleges to support job training. This potential investment is the jumping-off point for “Paycheck 101,” a series of articles in the education section about continuing education. Greenhouse’s piece, “Schools Try to Match the Jobless With 3.4 Million Jobs,” reports on the trend among community colleges as well as four-year colleges to “tailor their continuing-education offerings to where the job openings are — and where the jobs of tomorrow will be.” The cost of such a revamp is almost completely ignored; instead, Greenhouse describes the wonders of new programs geared toward booming fields like cybersecurity and digital marketing without mentioning how they are being funded. The story is heavy on anecdotes, from a former Army soldier who earned a certificate in geospatial mapping to a Campbell’s Soup Company engineer who brushed up on her science skills, and price is discussed only in terms of the cost-benefit analysis for students: “I paid about $350 a semester, less than $2,000 to acquire the additional skills,” the former soldier says. None of the administrators trumpeting their cutting-edge programs speak of stretched budgets or overfilled classes, though both are endemic in higher education.

Unlike the set of articles on the Qatar art scene, the stories by Greenhouse and Rampell address separate issues — the community-college funding crunch and the expansion of job training programs — and wouldn’t fare better as a single, combined piece. But the failure of Greenhouse’s article to give costs and budgets even a perfunctory glance give the piece an aura of cluelessness. Even without Rampell’s article, Greenhouse’s failure to explain who is paying for all these wonderful programs would be notable. Two headlines away from Rampell’s piece, however, the omission is particularly glaring.

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.

Betting on the GOP Horserace

The Times reports today that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s support has started “paying dividends for Romney.” Another endorsement, this one by Rep. Aaron Shock of Illinois, is described as “long-sought,” with Romney going “so far as attending the congressman’s 30th birthday in Chicago.” In a sense, I agree that these endorsements are important; they are fodder for the national media and help to keep Romney in the news amid the oxygen-sucking firestorm of the Herman Cain sexual harassment issue. Perhaps more crucially, a nod from someone like Christie, who is popular enough in Republican circles to have set off his own “Run, Christie, Run!” campaign earlier this year, can seal the deal with major donors. Even an endorsement from the relatively unknown Rep. Shock may send a message to GOP insiders, who presumably follow conservative politics more closely than a Democrat like myself. But I think it is a bridge too far to suggest that such endorsements influence a large number of voters. It’s hard to believe that anyone undecided about his or her preferred candidate would be seriously swayed by the opinion of a governor or Congressperson. My representative and governor are both Democrats, and both won my vote in 2010 — but I don’t put a premium on the endorsements of either. I simply don’t care enough about either man to base my vote on his opinion. Perhaps some people are more enthusiastic about their state’s politicians, but unless a the governor or representative already has a national presence (like Christie) or is the figurehead for a major strain of thought (Ron Paul, for example, or maybe Paul Ryan), I don’t see an endorsement as a make-or-break factor for the average voter. Members of Congress in particular seem unlikely to exert a strong pull, simply because they spend most of their time in Washington and, at least in Oregon, have minimal contact with the 99 percent of residents who don’t turn out for town hall meetings.

An analysis on the Times’ Caucus blog of Iowa’s role in the 2012 nominations mentions research that “contends that endorsements from party insiders are a significant predictor of primary votes.” The key word here, however, is “predictor.” Endorsements may predict the outcome of a primary, but do they determine that outcome? In many cases, I suspect the endorsements are more a reflection of the larger political environment than a driver of it. Mitt Romney has the most endorsements of any candidate, but Romney has also been the 2012 front-runner since he lost the nomination in 2008. It’s difficult to disentangle cause and effect; support in opinion polls feeds on a sense of inevitability, and widespread (though, in Romney’s case, not particularly passionate) support makes high-profile endorsers comfortable about linking their names to a vetted, establishment candidate. The same Caucus post notes that several Republican stars have thus far declined to endorse anyone, pointing out that “many of the coveted party elite, like Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, and former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida are still sitting on the sideline.”

This seems to reflect larger divisions in the Republican party; average voters are similarly undecided, with Romney earning the dubious distinction of being the lowest-polling “front-runner” in ages. The Caucus suggests, and I would concur, that this is attributable to the rise of the Tea Party, which putatively supports fiscal conservatism but is also a bastion of social-issue voters who feel even more strongly about outlawing abortion and gay marriage than they do about paying down the national debt. Party stalwarts like Karl Rove want little to do with insurgent candidates like Rick Perry, while establishment voices like George Will see Michele Bachmann as too far into the crazy zone to win a general election. David Brooks calls Romney “the serious one,” but the newly emboldened Tea Party is not interested in endorsements from such a relatively moderate camp. Michele Bachmann has taken to insisting that conservatives “shouldn’t settle” for someone less than ideologically pure, even going so far as to cast Romney as a “frugal socialist” alongside presumably more profligate socialists like President Obama.

It’s no wonder, then, that Kelly Ayotte and Nikki Haley, both of whom rode the Tea Party wave into office, are reluctant to hitch their stars to a particular candidate. Endorse Romney and risk being branded an undaring creature of Washington; support Bachmann or Rick Santorum and risk hitching one’s star to a doomed campaign. In a way, there’s more on the line for endorsers than for voters themselves. The average citizen is at least granted the privacy of the voting booth, but big names (Gov. Christie) and small fries (Rep. Shock) alike cast their figurative ballots early, often and openly. Their choices are paraded before the public like bloody sheets after the medieval wedding night, and ridicule awaits any sign of insufficient political vigor.