Romney’s Electability
Alec MacGillis at The New Republic spies an interesting irony in Romney’s results:
Romney does well in the places where Barack Obama does well, and he does poorly in the places where Obama does poorly. … On the upside for Romney, one could argue that he will be as competitive as a Republican can hope to be in the metro suburbs of Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Colorado, etc.
… But the downside for Romney in this ironic alignment between his geographic strengths and Obama’s is that it underscores how poorly suited he is for this moment in his party’s trajectory—and for the campaign he himself is trying to run. … But it does suggest that Romney’s paint-by-numbers anti-Obama message is a poor fit for him—such a poor fit that the voters who should be most receptive to it are seeing through it for the cynical confection that it is.
Hmm. Do you doubt that Rick Santorum despises Barack Obama, and genuinely sees him as a mortal threat to America? I don’t. I don’t for a minute believe that Romney shares this passion, no matter what Romney says on the stump. And I think this speaks well of Romney, by the way! I mean — to be clear — I don’t care for Obama, and I’m deeply concerned about what a second Obama term may mean for religious liberty. But I don’t hate the guy, and when I hear apocalyptic rhetoric from Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich about how America is thisclose to becoming the People’s Republic of Obamastan if the GOP loses the fall election, I feel both amused and insulted.
Romney as Obama-Hating Crusader and Conservative Ideologue seems phony because it is phony. He’s a technocratic business Republican with a genial personality. Not my kind of Republican, generally — the business Republican part — but I trust Mitt Romney to have a more measured, indeed more accurate, read on the nation he would have to govern as president than an angry ideologue like Rick Santorum. Again, temperament is so, so important. Some people hate Obama so much they can’t see how likable he comes across to average people — and that’s a quality that will be highlighted even more if Obama has the good fortune of facing off this fall against a dour, rigid, perpetually pissed-off Santorum.
If Romney is elected in November, the same conservatives who are turning out to vote against him now are going to make his presidency hell. They despise him, and they will be eyeballing him intensely, looking for evidence of deviation from the True Path.
GOP Voters Waterboard Romney
You watching this Super Tuesday results coverage? Holy cow, Romney is, as I write this, losing Ohio. David Frum:
Has the Republican Party gone on strike?
Tonight’s message: Outside the Federalist heartland and the peculiar Virginia ballot, Republicans won’t accept Mitt Romney. Against such a weak field, for Romney to be battling to carry Ohio is deeply, deeply ominous.
The donors all made up their minds months ago. The rank-and-file are refusing.
UPDATE: As some commenters have noted below, it looks like Romney will eke out a victory. Still, I believe Frum is right. For Mitt Romney to have to be so beaten up by Rick Santorum — Rick Santorum! — this far into the primary season is pretty stunning. If Gingrich weren’t so vain, and had dropped after Michigan, is there any doubt that Santorum would have won Ohio comfortably?
UPDATE.2: I mean, think of it — Romney massively, massively outspent Santorum in Ohio, and if he wins, it’ll only be by a few thousand votes. The only other active GOP candidate on the ballot in Virginia was Ron Paul, and he got 41 percent of the vote to Romney’s 59. Really. Unless Obama is found in bed with a live boy or a dead girl (h/t: EWE), this election is his to lose.
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Whose South Is It Anyway?
This is an argument that will almost certainly interest no one but Southerners.
Marc Smirnoff of The Oxford American has an entertaining rant about the Southern lifestyle magazine Garden & Gun. He writes, in part:
Suddenly, it all came back to me and I noticed the fury I had forgotten. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the only Southern magazines I recall seeing in Oxford, Miss., were Southern Living andMississippi. Both magazines flaunted a South that seemed cordoned off for the private use and pleasure of wealthy white people. In those pages, I did not see the poorer, grittier, younger, and slightly more integrated South that I was coming to know. Nor did I encounter good writing. By then, I had fallen hard for Southern lit and the complete absence of intellectually adventurous writing in these and related publications repulsed me. I had been told—over and over—that to understand the South you had to understand how utterly committed natives are to toasting, if not imbibing, tradition. So how in the hell could anyone publish words from here while daring to ignore the South’s profound and penetrating literary heritage? (Answer: To make money.)
… The gist of my problem with Garden & Gun is that I perceive in it a similar exclusivity—a similar whitewashing of the South.
More:
There are also cracks in the specific G&G lifestyle that is so thunderously advocated. Add up all these gorgeous pictures of fox hunts, mint juleps, turkey hunts, polo matches, refurbished mansions, forest-sized gardens, pure-bred beagles, expensive fishing reels, silver flasks, artisanal knifes, engraved rifles, sexy riding crops, and what do you get but a near-replaying of The Old South Plantation Myth? Of course, the Myth is being updated so that it’s greener (“conservation” is a G&G catchphrase), sportier (everyone is an “avid sportsman”—phew—and not an actual plantation owner), hipper, younger, sexier, wittier—and on better terms with gender and race. But the New Myth still toys with much that is unspoken.2
There is nothing wrong with improving The Plantation Myth (or—do I really need to say it?—with hunting or fishing or polo), but the claim that this Myth universally embodies “the Southern lifestyle” needs to be analyzed. The lack of humility and awareness in not even being able to say “a Southern lifestyle” is perverse—and revealing.
In a recent segment on CBS This Morning, the current editor of Garden & Gun, David DiBenedetto, was asked if “any subjects [were] off-limits” to the magazine.
DiBenedetto: “Yeah. Politics, religion, and SEC football.”
Let me offer a half-hearted defense of G&G, as a subscriber. When I saw the sporting issue, and saw that it was all about rich white Southern gentry putting on their expensive togs, and hitting the woods, I wasn’t offended. I laughed at it. It has nothing to do with me, but so what? I like the magazine’s stories about craftsmen and bars and restaurants of the South. I like Roy Blount Jr. and Julia Reed. I do not aspire to be the kind of person who finds G&G to be a perfect distillation of my lifestyle. I was over at a friend’s house the other day, and saw G&G on his coffee table. He’s not the Southern gentry either, but I bet I know why he subscribes. He loves Bourbon whiskey, and loves talking about it. G&G is the kind of magazine that will run features about Bourbon, and craft distilling, and good bars in the South. He travels a bit with his job, and would like to keep up with where the most interesting places throughout the South are to have a drink. G&G gives him that. Southern Living is what our moms read.
A while ago, a writer for a magazine called me and asked me about G&G, and whether a magazine that doesn’t cover race, politics, religion, or football can ever really be about the South. I said yeah, why not? You wouldn’t want to get your entire picture of the South from G&G. It’s basically a lifestyle magazine for a certain kind of middle to upper middle class Southerner. It’s Southern Living for people who are too hip for Southern Living. I’m actually interested in race, politics, and religion (SEC football, not so much), but I don’t think you have to pull a long face every time you talk about the South. I spend all day online reading about race and politics and religion; when I go to bed at night, it’s pleasant to devour the eye candy in G&G. Me, I love food and food culture. Check out G&G’s coverage of oysters. I’m supposed to hate this magazine because it writes about Southern oysters, but not about Selma, or Baptists, or Bobby Jindal, or the LSU Tigers? Come on.
Smirnoff writes:
I’m no longer bothered by magazines that obsess over subjects I don’t, whether it’s food or gardens, poodles or football, pot or guns. I simply ask that they not make claims about representing the entirety of life in their pages if, in fact, they fail to do that.
But you are! Hence this rant. And then:
Oh jeez, did I forget to mention that I am laughably biased when it comes to G&G? My bad! I owe penance if I fooled anyone into thinking I am impartial. Let me be explicit: I am very jealous ofG&G for having six times more subscribers than The OA. If, in magazine-circulation terms, this is the equivalent of penis envy, I’ll even cop to that. Is that explicit enough?
Six times more subscribers than The OA! Well, there you have it.
Look, magazine rivalry is a good thing, usually. I haven’t seen a copy of The OA in ages; I should give it a try again. I probably have more in common with what’s in its pages than what I see in G&G. Still, I don’t mind saying that it’s a relief to me to be able to read about the South without having religion, politics, race, or SEC football shoved under my nose, especially because I can’t recall the last time I’ve read anything original or interesting in a magazine or newspaper about any of those subjects as they are lived in the South today. Without question, those are important subjects to the life of this region, but sh*t, sometimes, you just want to go to the party and talk about the whiskey.
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San Francisco, City of Magic
Writing at Salon, an erstwhile lesbian observes that moving to San Francisco turned her straight. Excerpt:
Shortly after that, we moved to San Francisco. Shortly after that, I was on a different shore and she was on a boat drifting farther away from me each day. Shortly after that, we stopped having sex. Words were somewhere in the absence growing between us but I couldn’t find them. My only weapon was repetition. I made us dinner. We watched “Glee.” We went to yoga. Shortly after that, she told me she wanted to date men, that our relationship was over.
My ex-girlfriend now has a boyfriend and lives in Minnesota. My yoga teacher, who announced to her mom at age 8 that she was a lesbian, now exclusively dates men, and has been in a committed relationship with a man for more than a year. My straightest guy friends have all at least made out with other men, while others are now dabbling in full-on dude sex. Whatever norm you came in with, San Francisco eventually takes it and turns it right on its (uncircumcised, pierced) head. It shouldn’t have surprised me that the City wanted to have its way with me too. Still, I was the last person who thought I’d be a lesbian who spent the next year and a half of her life sleeping with men.
Why would anyone want to live anywhere else?
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Our Rush Limbaugh Hypocrisy
Not that it will matter to some readers, but let me start by
1. Once again saying Rush Limbaugh was wrong to speak as he did of Sandra Fluke. I am not a Limbaugh fan, and think talk radio is, generally speaking, a bad thing for conservatism, because it encourages tribalist emoting at the expense of thoughtful discourse. (There are exceptions, e.g., Dennis Prager).
2. I have no patience for the outrage trolls on the Left. John Cook of Gawker (of all places) despises Limbaugh, but he is surely right here:
I am sick of spending all my time talking about how we talk about what we talk about when we talk about policy, instead of talking about actual policy. I am sick of recriminations and demands for retractions and counter-retractions and shocked outrage and line-drawing and line-crossing and apologies and non-apologies and boycotts and petitions. I am tired of watching every national debate inevitably pirouette out of the realm of morality, or merit, and into a rhetorical funhouse where insults bounce from mirror to distorted mirror. It’s our dominant mode of political debate now: We don’t evaluate arguments for their logic or elegance or force (or lack thereof), but for their appropriateness relative to metrics of racism, sexism, patriotism, religious bigotry etc.
It’s true that there’s no figure on the Left quite like Limbaugh, but it’s also true that certain figures on the Left pursue a “total war” campaign against people on the Right they deem as impure, and deserving of being driven out of public life.
3. But Andrew Breitbart and Glenn Beck , to name but two, also practiced a version of this, from the Right. What we see, more and more in American political life, is the politicization of everything, and the concomitant idea that one’s opponents are not only wrong, but evil, and must be destroyed.
4. Meanwhile, I’m seeing a very serious debate about religious liberty quashed while we all talk about what the bigmouth vulgarian Rush Limbaugh said about the ridiculous Sandra Fluke. The mainstream media are happy to promote this story line, because it suits their prejudices.
5. As I said the other day in this space, the Left wouldn’t treat Limbaugh like a Republican pope if there weren’t so many Republicans lining up regularly to kiss his ring, and to treat his daily broadcast like ex cathedra pronouncements. In a post titled “Conservatism’s Limbaugh Problem,” Ross Douthat writes:
The best evidence that conservatism has a Limbaugh problem, in this sense, isn’t so much the fact that the nation’s most popular right-wing talk show host sometimes says offensive things that create a backlash against the American right as a whole. Rather, it’s that when the spotlight isn’t on Limbaugh, and when his excesses aren’t front-and-center and thus impossible to deny, too many conservatives — including not just finger-in-the-wind politicians, but some of the country’s most sagacious conservative intellectuals — are weirdly reluctant to acknowledge that there are any valid critiques of him at all.
Remember last year, when Limbaugh, eager to blame the Kenyan Muslim socialist in the White House for supporting a war on African Christians, defended the terrorist fanatics of the Lord’s Resistance Army? Remember in January, when the much-married Limbaugh called the adulterous Newt Gingrich a “victim” of the sexual revolution — this, in a broadcast critical of Gingrich’s ex-wife Marianne? I don’t think most, or even many, GOP figures share Limbaugh’s views on these issues. But they really are scared of him, and I don’t understand it. It’s not the case that every time Limbaugh mouths off about something, Republican leaders should feel the responsibility to distance themselves from him. But you can’t call him merely an “entertainer” when he says something obnoxious, but consider him “leader of the opposition” (as a Clinton-era National Review cover once proclaimed) when it’s to their advantage. (N.B., in 2009, a conservative writer at The American Thinker denounced GOP chairman Michael Steele for insulting Rush with the “just an entertainer” line; in fact, said this guy, apparently with a straight face, Rush is a “political philosopher” in the tradition of Burke).
This weird relationship the establishment Right has with Limbaugh is unhelpful, to say the least. It will be a good day when Limbaugh can mouth off, and it doesn’t embroil the GOP and the broader conservative movement in an absurd melodrama. Yes, I know the MSM loves this stuff. But the Right has made it far too easy by reflexively kowtowing to Limbaugh. (George F. Will on GOP leaders: “They want to bomb Iran, but they’re afraid of Rush Limbaugh.”) If any good can come out of this depressing debacle, it will be that the Right will have a Murdoch Moment over Limbaugh, and break his spell. Limbaugh is going to continue being Limbaugh. It’s who he is, and it’s what’s made him rich. It would help the GOP and the cause of conservatism if the Right would nut up and put some daylight between itself and Limbaugh. Do you know what percentage of Limbaugh listeners are in the 18 to 29 year old demographic? According to a Pew study, only 15 percent. Whatever else he is, Rush Limbaugh is not the future.
(Note well: I am not going to let the comments thread turn into a festival of liberal trolling. If you have something constructive but critical to say about Limbaugh, talk radio, and the Right, say it, and I’ll happily approve it. But if you’re just going to vent about what a bunch of sexist, bigoted, hate-mongering savages Limbaugh and his listeners are, save yourself the time, we’ve heard it all before earlier this week.)
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Must Be Racism, For Sure
Black students, especially boys, face much harsher discipline in public schools than other students, according to new data from theDepartment of Education.
Although black students made up only 18 percent of those enrolled in the schools sampled, they accounted for 35 percent of those suspended once, 46 percent of those suspended more than once and 39 percent of all expulsions, according to the Civil Rights Data Collection’s 2009-10 statistics from 72,000 schools in 7,000 districts, serving about 85 percent of the nation’s students. The data covered students from kindergarten age through high school.
One in five black boys and more than one in 10 black girls received an out-of-school suspension. Over all, black students were three and a half times as likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers.
And in districts that reported expulsions under zero-tolerance policies, Hispanic and black students represent 45 percent of the student body, but 56 percent of those expelled under such policies.
“Education is the civil rights of our generation,” said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in a telephone briefing with reporters on Monday. “The undeniable truth is that the everyday education experience for too many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise.”
Well, that settles it. Must be racism. Read the whole story, and search in vain for any suggestion that maybe, just maybe, the disproportionate rates of suspension and expulsion have something to do with disproportionate rates of bad behavior. Could this behavior have something to do with the fact that almost three times as many black kids live in single parent homes as white kids do, and almost twice as many Hispanic kids do, versus white (citation here)? Do you suppose the disproportionate number of minority kids who live in poverty (percentage wise, the black and Hispanic poverty rate is three times that of the white rate) has anything to do with these school discipline stats?
No, poverty and single parenthood can’t have anything to do with it. It must be racism. The NYT cites exactly two “expert” sources to explain the data: the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center. And the Education Secretary himself said that these numbers mean that minority kids are suffering from a violation of “the principle of equity.” He will be making the data public today at a Howard University speech he’s calling a “major civil rights announcement.” It is possible that Arne Duncan’s speech will be more expansive and complex than his quote in this story indicates. After all, a reporter who thinks that by talking to the ACLU and the SPLC, she’s covered the waterfront on this story, may well have heard Duncan’s telephone remarks selectively. We’ll see.
If by “civil rights,” however, Duncan believes that school disciplinarians are the 21st century of equivalent of Bull Connor, that’s another story. I am open to the idea that racism could be behind these numbers to a certain extent. But the standard liberal idea that disproportionate racial numbers is proof on its face of racial bias is certainly wrong — especially when you consider that two factors that have a lot to do with bad juvenile behavior, growing up in a single-parent home and poverty, are so disproportionately present in minority communities, versus whites. Did this factor not even occur to the Times reporter?
UPDATE: If you look at other reports from the same conference call with Sec. Duncan (e.g., this one from USA Today), you see that this is how Duncan himself spun the results. For example:
“The sad fact is that minority students across America face much harsher discipline than non-minorities, even within the same school,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters.
I understand that the administration is going to have its particular spin on things. But is it too much to ask reporters to, you know, question these things? Maybe they’re going to wait until the full data are released today. If the data show that minority kids face harsher punishments for the same offenses as white kids, then that’s pretty clearly a sign of racism. But if minority kids are getting in trouble more than white kids, I would want to look at poverty and single parenthood as factors, instead of simply looking at disparate impact and assuming that racism must be to blame.
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McCain: Let’s Bomb Syria!
And to think this man almost became president:
Later today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, will become the first U.S. senator to publicly call for U.S. led air strikes to halt the violence and atrocities being committed by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“After a year of bloodshed, the crisis in Syria has reached a decisive moment,” McCain will say Monday afternoon in a speech on the Senate floor, according to excerpts obtained in advance byThe Cable.
“What opposition groups in Syria need most urgently is relief from Assad’s tank and artillery sieges in many cities that are still contested. Homs is lost for now, but Idlib, and Hama, and Qusayr, and Deraa, and other cities in Syria could still be saved,” McCain will say. “But time is running out. Assad’s forces are on the march. Providing military assistance to the Free Syrian Army and other opposition groups is necessary, but at this late hour, that alone will not be sufficient to stop the slaughter and save innocent lives. The only realistic way to do so is with foreign airpower.”
I don’t count myself in any way a supporter of the bloodthirsty Assad regime. But we should stay out of it.
It’s a good thing McCain was defeated by a man who is against inserting the US military into Arab civil wars. Oh, wait…
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GCB is DOA
Did any of you watch “GCB” last night? It’s the ABC show based on the snarky novel “Good Christian Bitches,” about rich women from the Park Cities neighborhoods of Dallas (technically they’re their own towns, but that’s a distinction without a difference outside of Dallas). The joke is that these wealthy women are church-going hypocrites. It sounds like shooting fish in a barrel, but actually the sociology of this sort of thing — or is it cultural anthropology? — is pretty fascinating. Longtime readers know that I lived in Dallas from 2003 to 2010, and married a Dallas girl. I have never lived in a place where the religious and social worlds were so interesting. The world of “GCB” really does exist. Or rather, the world that “GCB” purports to send up — a social environment of extreme wealth, materialist vulgarity, sensuality, bitchiness, and purple piety — really exists. And it is ripe for satire.
“GCB” is not satire. It’s a minstrel show, and based on last night’s episode, it’s just not funny. Nobody enjoys making fun of this sort of thing more than people from Dallas — their version of the “Keep Austin Weird” bumper sticker is “Keep Dallas Plastic” — and Mrs. Dreher and I were excited about last night’s premiere. But we barely laughed at all, and, well, it just seemed like somebody from California’s idea of what bitchy Park Cities women are. Except the writer is not from California, but is from Natchitoches, Louisiana — Bobby Harling, author of “Steel Magnolias.” Natchitoches is not Dallas, though, and the whole effect was kind of like reading a French intellectual’s description of going to Disneyworld. You could recognize the types, and you knew what he was getting at, but it was wildly overplayed.
What “GCB” desperately needs is subtlety and wit. It’s not smart; in fact, it’s actively stupid. One of Mrs. Dreher’s Dallas friends e-mailed to say, “The writer confused Plano with the Highland Park. No Highland Park woman would have John 3:16 on the back of her car.” That friend, an acute observer of the ways of Dallas’s religious and class tribes, forwarded the following image, taken from the pages of a local parenting magazine. “This is the real Dallas,” she said:
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CATO: From Libertarian to Republican?
TAC’s Jordan Bloom blogged something the other day about the struggle for the soul of the CATO Institute. Even so, I had no idea things were as bad as Jonathan Adler reports on Eugene Volokh’s blog , [corrected from earlier — RD]regarding the Koch brothers forcing new board members on CATO:
Let’s take a look at a few of these new board members of ours. Kevin Gentry is a social conservative activist who’s also vice-chair of the Virginia GOP. Nancy Pfotenauer is a former spokesperson for the McCain campaign who has argued on television in favor of theIraqwar and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy pertaining to gays in the military. Ted Olson is a Republican super-lawyer who’s never identified himself as a libertarian.
Just before the last shareholders meeting, the Koch brothers also nominated –but were unable to elect – eight additional individuals for our board. Those nominees included the executive vice president of Koch Industries, a staff lawyer for Koch Industries, a staff lawyer for the Charles Koch Foundation, a former Director of Federal Affairs for Koch Industries, a former Executive Director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (and who was, incidentally, a McCain bundler), and a lifelong Wichita friend of Charles Koch. Aside from those functionaries, they also nominated a couple of people with public profiles that make the jaw drop:
- John Hinderaker of the Powerline blog, whose firm counts Koch Industries as a client. Hinderaker has written, “It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.” Hinderaker supports the Patriot Act and the Iraq War and calls himself a neocon.
- Tony Woodlief, who has been president of two Koch-created nonprofits and vice president of the Charles Koch Foundation. Woodlief has blogged about “the rotten heart of libertarianism,” calling it “a flawed and failed religion posing as a philosophy of governance” while complaining about libertarians “toking up” at political meetings.
That’s really something. I’m not a libertarian at all — in fact, my social conservatism is at times diametrically opposed to libertarianism — but it seems pretty clear to me that if the Kochs have their way, CATO will cease to be libertarian in any real sense, and will instead become yet another mainline GOP ideas factory. That would be a loss.
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