Via Theo.

Matt Taibbi, a loudmouth hipster douchebag who writes for Rolling Stone, resembles the late Pauline Kael, who couldn’t understand how Richard Nixon could possibly have won the election, when she knew absolutely no one who voted for him. He sees Romney as completely boring and no threat to Obama whatsoever, but he at least puts it colorfully.

[T]his campaign, relatively speaking, will not be fierce or hotly contested. Instead it’ll be disappointing, embarrassing, and over very quickly, like a hand job in a Bangkok bathhouse.

When you come right down to it, isn’t life in general characteristically “disappointing, embarrassing, and over very quickly” for certain kinds of trendy scribblers?

From Roark Wolfe:

Jim Geraghty (via email):

May 8, 2012: The Night the Primaries Became a Lot of Fun

In Wisconsin, Scott Walker received more votes running against no one in the Republican primary than the two major Democratic candidates got combined.

In North Carolina, “No Preference” garnered 21 percent in the Democratic Party presidential primary against Barack Obama.

In West Virginia, “A felon incarcerated in Texas took one in three votes away from President Obama in West Virginia’s Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday. Keith Judd, who is serving time in a federal prison in Texarkana, Texas, for extortion, took 37 percent of the vote, with 50 percent of precincts reporting. Obama captured the remaining 63 percent.”

The night could have gone worse for Democrats, but . . . I’m not sure how.

David Harsanyi asks: Who the hell is “Julia,” and why am I paying for her whole life?
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Donald Douglas replies: Meet Julia: The Big-Government Dependency Robot and Dream Woman of Leftist Ideology.

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James Taranto explains that Julia really represents the Obama Administration’s new model for society’s fundamental relationship: the union between the dependent individual and the administrative state.

In 1999 Lionel Tiger coined the word “bureaugamy” to refer to the relationship between officially impoverished mothers of illegitimate children and the government. “The Life of Julia” is an insidious attack on the institution of the family, an endorsement of bureaugamy even for middle-class women.

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Nicole Gelinas describes just how Julia’s choices subsequently impact her son Zachary and what ultimately happens to Julia.

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Iowahawk swings at the Obama Campaign’s low, hanging curveball, offering his own version of Julia’s life, which ends with a a characteristically left-wing bang.

Barack Obama’s reelection campaign of 2012 is increasingly looking like Michael Dukakis’s campaign of 1988, in which the conspicuously Dove-ish Massachusetts liberal governor tried bolstering his commander-in-chief creds by being photographed wearing a helmet and riding in the turret of an M1 Abrams tank.

First, there was the attempt to portray Mitt Romney as mean to dogs for taking his Irish setter along on a vacation trip in a rooftop carrier which exploded in a nationwide gale of jokes after Jim Treacher pointed out that Barack Obama had referred, in his famous autobiography, to eating dog as a child in Indonesia.

Then, there was the short-lived attempt to push voters’ buttons by having various democrats note that Mitt Romney was a descendant of Mormon polygamists. This one also failed when Republicans responded that it was true that, like many Mormons, Mitt Romney had fairly remote polygamous ancestry, a great-grandfather, but Barack Obama’s father was also a polygamist.

The latest attempt on the part of the Obama campaign to gain advantage involved putting Bill Clinton in a video to praise Barack Obama for making the oh-so-very-difficult decision to send in the Navy SEALs to take out Bin Ladin.

The response to what is being referred to as the Obama campaign “spiking the football” has been a combination of criticism of the president for exploiting the bravery of members of the US military and ridicule.

Mitt Romney retorted that even Jimmy Carter would have made the same decision.

John McCain, in a follow-up rejoinder, delivered a withering response.

I’ve had the great honor of serving in the company of heroes. And, you know the thing about heroes, they don’t brag.”

And, worst news of all for the Obama team, this particular campaign ploy provoked pushback from former SEALs.

Daily Mail:

Serving and former US Navy SEALs have slammed President Barack Obama for taking the credit for killing Osama bin Laden and accused him of using Special Forces operators as ‘ammunition’ for his re-election campaign. ...

Ryan Zinke, a former Commander in the US Navy who spent 23 years as a SEAL and led a SEAL Team 6 assault unit, said: ‘The decision was a no brainer. I applaud him for making it but I would not overly pat myself on the back for making the right call.

‘I think every president would have done the same. He is justified in saying it was his decision but the preparation, the sacrifice – it was a broader team effort.’

Mr Zinke, who is now a Republican state senator in Montana, added that MR Obama was exploiting bin Laden’s death for his re-election bid. ‘The President and his administration are positioning him as a war president using the SEALs as ammunition.

Some political observers think many SEALs are so infuriated by the Obama Administration’s exploitation of their valor for political gain that they are bitterly angry. SEALs commonly believe that, from the time of the actual operation, the White House has shamelessly used the Abbottabad raid, hastily and irresponsibly making details public, and placing its own interests above the safety and security of SEAL team members and American long-term strategic goals.

There is active speculation that an organized group of SEALs may play an active role later in the campaign to “Swift Boat” Barack Obama.

Ezra Klein notes that, if Romney wins, that means he’ll probably also deliver Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.

If Romney wins the election, it’s almost a sure bet that Republicans win control of both the House and the Senate. And that matters. Right now, the GOP’s agenda is the Ryan budget, and that’s entirely fiscal: It’s a premium support plan for Medicare, and tax cuts, and deep cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and other domestic programs. All that can be passed through budget reconciliation — which is to say, all that can be made immune to the filibuster.

So if Romney wins and the Republicans take control, they could accomplish quite a lot on party-line votes, even if their majorities are slim, and Democrats are opposed. Indeed, Romney could end up being a fairly transformational president for conservatives so long as he’s paired with a Republican Congress.

Not only will Romney most probably have Congressional majorities to work with, he will have a real mandate to do precisely all the things liberals like Klein dread, to begin the reduction of the size and responsibilities of the entitlement state.

John Hinderaker points out that, behind all the frivolous humor about Obama eating dogs, something serious was really going on. The commentariat of the Right was able to take an Obama campaign attack meme, turn it right around, and make the whole thing into a national humor fest.

The Obama Eats Dogs theme is silly, of course, but as many others have said, it is silliness with a purpose. The Obama campaign seriously intended to make an issue of the fact that decades ago, Mitt Romney put the family dog on the roof of his car, in some sort of kennel or container, because there was no room inside. The dog was fine, but the Democrats crowed that focus group testing showed that the incident would make voters dislike Romney. I think that claim was sheer fantasy, but in any event, the Democrats won’t be able to talk about Seamus now that everyone knows that Obama used to eat dogs. ...

While in the microcosm these issues may seem silly, they are important in the context of the 2012 campaign. The Democrats can’t defend Obama’s record and want to talk about anything in the world other than the economy and the federal debt. Thus, their campaign will consist of one distraction after another. The Romney campaign’s ability to hit back, turn the faux issue back on Obama, and return the conversation to the economy will be critical. At the moment, Romney’s counterpunching against Obama’s irrelevancies is looking strong.

Frank J. Fleming:

Had a few people try and tell me the Romney thing was horrible but Obama dog-eating is nothing. My response: nomnomnom

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

ABC News:

Much has been made about Mitt Romney, in 1983, putting his family dog Seamus in a kennel on top of his roof and driving from Boston to Canada, with said canine Seamus making his displeasure known in a rather scatological way.

Democrats have signaled they have every intention of making sure the American people — especially dog-lovers — know the tale. In January, senior Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod tweeted a photo of the president and Bo in a car, with the snide observation: “@davidaxelrod: How loving owners transport their dogs.”

The Romney campaign signaled Tuesday night that they are not about to cede any ground when it comes to a candidate’s odd past with man’s best friend. ....

The Daily Caller noted that in President Obama’s best-selling memoir, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” the president recalls being fed dog meat as a young boy in Indonesia with his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro.

“With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy),” the president wrote. “Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.”

After his mother married Soetoro, Obama lived in Indonesia from 1967 until 1971, from roughly the age of 6 through 10.

0:37 video

Richard Fernandez identifies precisely why 2012 will be very different from 2008.

What must be truly terrifying among the president’s supporters is the growing realization that he could actually lose to Mitt Romney. Yes: Mitt Romney. Not because Romney is a superlative candidate electrifying the American voter, but because the contest is clarifying as “anyone but Obama” in 2012.

The core problem is the extent of the president’s incompetence. It had always been thought that even if the president were poor at governance, he would be good at campaigning. They relied on that idea, and forgot what all track and field coaches know: the 100-meter man will not necessarily place well in the 42,195-meter marathon.

President Obama could find a second wind, yet clearly his key strength of futurism — the ability to act as a blank screen upon which people could project their aspirations — can no longer be useful in the face of his track record. Barack Obama in 2008 was a promise; Barack Obama in 2012 is a busted flush.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Works for me.

Peggy Noonan reflects on how the current president decidedly worsened his relationship with his opponents, while never really developing much of a relationship with the general electorate.

Something’s happening to President Obama’s relationship with those who are inclined not to like his policies. They are now inclined not to like him. His supporters would say, “Nothing new there,” but actually I think there is. I’m referring to the broad, stable, nonradical, non-birther right. Among them the level of dislike for the president has ratcheted up sharply the past few months.

It’s not due to the election, and it’s not because the Republican candidates are so compelling and making such brilliant cases against him. That, actually, isn’t happening.

What is happening is that the president is coming across more and more as a trimmer, as an operator who’s not operating in good faith. This is hardening positions and leading to increased political bitterness. And it’s his fault, too. As an increase in polarization is a bad thing, it’s a big fault. ...

In terms of the broad electorate, I’m not sure he really has a relationship. A president only gets a year or two to forge real bonds with the American people. In that time a crucial thing he must establish is that what is on his mind is what is on their mind. This is especially true during a crisis.

From the day Mr. Obama was sworn in, what was on the mind of the American people was financial calamity—unemployment, declining home values, foreclosures. These issues came within a context of some overarching questions: Can America survive its spending, its taxing, its regulating, is America over, can we turn it around?

That’s what the American people were thinking about.

But the new president wasn’t thinking about that. All the books written about the creation of economic policy within his administration make clear the president and his aides didn’t know it was so bad, didn’t understand the depth of the crisis, didn’t have a sense of how long it would last. They didn’t have their mind on what the American people had their mind on.

The president had his mind on health care. And, to be fair-minded, health care was part of the economic story. But only a part! And not the most urgent part. Not the most frightening, distressing, immediate part. Not the ‘Is America over?’ part.

And so the relationship the president wanted never really knitted together. Health care was like the birth-control mandate: It came from his hermetically sealed inner circle, which operates with what seems an almost entirely abstract sense of America. They know Chicago, the machine, the ethnic realities. They know Democratic Party politics. They know the books they’ve read, largely written by people like them—bright, credentialed, intellectually cloistered. But there always seems a lack of lived experience among them, which is why they were so surprised by the town hall uprisings of August 2009 and the 2010 midterm elections.

I think Peggy hit this one dead on. People are shocked at the president and his administration’s utter indifference toward, and contempt for, perspectives and values different from his own. We’ve never had a president, however liberal, who would simply shrug off the constitutional protection of religious freedom so casually. Beyond that, Obama not only failed to act so as to restore economic confidence to improve the economy, he made it perfectly clear that, for him, social justice (and democrat party patronage) was far more important than prosperity and growth.

It isn’t clear that Mitt Romney (or whoever) really deserves to win, but Barack Obama certainly deserves to lose.

Walter Shapiro, in the New Republic, concludes that the Louisiana primary marks the end of Newt Gingrich’s quest. “There are no third acts in American politics.” Shapiro opines.

“At an age when most young men are focused on playing sports and meeting girls, Newt was fantasizing about saving the world.”

—Steven M. Gillon, The Pact, 2008

Despite Newt Gingrich’s best efforts, it looks like the world is going to have to save itself.

Unfortunately, I tend to think he is right. For a while, it looked as if it was actually possible that Newt Gingrich could use the power of debate to re-shape the trajectory of the primary contest and the election in his own favor, that he could singlehandedly move our political process out of the modern sound bite and electronic image era and back into the era of verbal discourse and the contest of ideas.

Gingrich, however, also deliberately threw the first punches below the belt, attacking Romney, forsooth! for capitalist actvivity. Gingrich’s attack ads seem to have reminded Republicans of some behavior giving the impression of opportunism in the past, and a variety of prominent conservative and Republican figures responded with a devastating, highly coordinated attack from which Newt never really recovered.

Gingrich was clearly a flawed candidate. Of course, they are all flawed, but Newt Gingrich’s flaws are not being forgiven or overlooked.

Donald Sensing observes that the great paid-for-contraceptives brouhaha is intended by democrats to persuade silly women to vote on the basis of group politics.

In the Democrat mind, sex without sex’s consequences are the only thing that women should think about when they approach a voting booth. Finney and Thompson, et. al., actually think that unless the government makes sure that women’s sex lives are unencumbered, then a woman simply cannot manage her job, housing or children. Sex rules all else.

The Democrat party truly cannot comprehend a woman going to vote who is more concerned about the dent in her paycheck caused by $5-per-gallon gasoline than finding free condoms, or who worries about the future impoverishment of her children and grandchildren because of Obama’s borrow and spend binges more than she worries about buying the Pill, or whose most pressing concern is not sexual liberty, but a college-graduate son or daughter who has moved back to live with mom because s/he can’t find a job and therefore can’t make student loan payments and rent at the same time.

Not in the Dems’ world view is a woman who pays her mortgage every month but who know that her home’s market value is less than the mortgage principal remaining, and stupidly thinks that this is more important to her future (and thus her voting) than getting morning-after pills. There is no room in Democrat gender-identity politics for a woman who has been married to one man for 35 years and so never thinks about getting free contraceptives or an abortion (that is, what Dems say is “basic health care”) but who is intensely concerned with her elderly parents’ net worth falling as inflation rises.

No, these women simply do not authentically exist in the Democrat universe. Such women simply have not heard the full message that there should be nothing more important to a woman than sex, sex, sex.

To the Democrat party, women are simply sex objects, though with political and statist rather than fleshly purposes. But objects is all they are. That’s the real message that countless women get very well and strongly reject.

Hat tip to Theo.

David Weigel on Mitt Romney.

The frontrunner’s strategy from state to state looks a bit like Galactus’s strategy for planet-devouring: Move in, absorb everything. Restore Our Future is his Silver Surfer, softening up the terrain and warning of doom.

Hat tip to Jim Geraughty.

I didn’t watch the whole thing, but in the portions I witnessed I thought everyone did rather well. It seemed to me that the contest for the GOP nomination process had really accomplished a few things: weeding out some less prepared and less articulate contenders and polishing the performances of the survivors.

My only dissatisfaction really revolved around so many of candidates attacking one another, and trying to gain a personal edge by means of cheap shots and obviously opportunistic assaults on one another’s previous statements and records. If it were up to me, I’d have boat-hooked Ron Paul out of there on the basis of a real excess of that kind of thing.

Personally, I still like Gingrich best. I think he tends characteristically to draw upon a broader understanding of history and political theory than anybody else, and I am much attracted by his imagination. Assuming we win in November, the next president’s task is going to consist of presiding over a major reconsideration of the federal government’s role and responsibilities, developing a much more serious approach to budgeting, and—in essence—managing the transition from the Welfare Entitlement State to a new version of an American growth and opportunity state. I think Gingrich’s superior knowledge and intellect would be strong assets, and I think his fecundity in producing new ideas and new approaches would be invaluable.

Romney, as I’ve noted before, delivers consistently the smoothest, most professional, and most attractive portrayal of presidential leadership. He speaks passionately in defense of capitalism. He is obviously a highly competent and thoroughly responsible guy, and though he has not run for office or governed previously as much of a conservative, his current embrace of, practically amounting to a death-grip on, conservative principles seems sincere. Watching Romney perform, one is forced to conclude that he would do a decent job. His would not be a really revolutionary administration. He would funk and compromise all the really tough calls, but he would generally do just fine.

It seems remarkable how much Rick Santorum has grown into the role of conservative movement champion and front-running candidate. In some earlier debates, he seemed a somewhat irrelevant dark horse outsider, and even more of a cranky traditionalist scold than Michele Bachmann. Now, he has picked up the mantle of the hero and he’s wearing it well. He is the living embodiment of clean cut, ordinary old-fashioned Americanism, and he expresses himself reasonably and with admirable clarity.

It is generally fun to hear from Ron Paul. He no longer really belongs up there, I thought, but it is a pleasure to see libertarian positions as totally heretical from the establishment perspective as going back to the gold standard and simply abolishing the EPA, advocated seriously in a presidential debate. Ron Paul has his own distinctive manner of speech and presentation. He reminds one of some very bright, well-loved, and barking mad uncle, who can (and will) speak for hours on his own particular bizarre obsessions and can actually entertain you in the process, despite your knowing perfectly well just how far from the reality we inhabit is the home of Uncle Ron. I do wish, though, that Ron Paul would climb down off his sanctimonious libertarian high horse, and quit abusing all his opponents in extravagant terms for conventional previous behavior or votes. There is an annoying streak of Puritan hypocrite in Ron Paul.

I don’t think last night’s debate changed the situation much. Jim Geraughty, in his emailed Morning Jolt, had the most to say about Romney:

Romney is, bit by bit, proving to be a better debater than people thought. Yes, he’s pretty shameless about going after opponent’s inconsistencies and unpopular positions that he himself held earlier in his career—but the audaciousness of it tends to leave the opposition flustered and infuriated.

Last night, he jabbed at Santorum, “When I was fighting to save the Olympics, you were fighting to save the Bridge to Nowhere.” Really, after lines such as that, people doubt Romney’s willingness to go after Obama? If nominated, Romney will probably lacerate Obama on the individual mandate, not cutting spending, insufficient support for drilling, demonizing the wealthy, and so on. Obama may coolly point out Romney’s past support for those positions, and I suspect Romney will just ignore it and point out that those positions are the wrong ones, and the American public opposes them. Would voters prefer the consistent man who stands for ideas they oppose? Or will they prefer a flip-flopper who currently holds the positions they support?

You and I—who have watched Romney debate as a passionately pro-choice candidate, brag that he would be better for Massachusetts gays than Ted Kennedy in 1994—look at his current emphatic finger-pointing during these debates, and think, “He might just be saying what he needs to get the nomination. I don’t know if I trust him. He sounds sincere now, but Massachusetts liberals probably thought he agreed with them in 2002, too.” But I suspect casual voters ignore anything before, say, last weekend. I suspect they put a whole lot more into a candidate’s nonverbal communication, and whether that conveys sincerity and constancy, than anything that would require them to, you know, read something. If you doubt me, look at Obama’s election.

In the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto discusses Jeffrey Bell’s new book, which argues that the politics of the culture wars inevitably fuels Republican electoral victories.

Social issues have come to the fore on the GOP side in two of the past six presidential elections—in 1988 (prison furloughs, the Pledge of Allegiance, the ACLU) and 2004 (same-sex marriage). “Those are the only two elections since Reagan where the Republican Party has won a popular majority,” Mr. Bell says. “It isn’t coincidental.”

Mr. Bell, 68, is an unlikely tribune for social conservatism. His main interest has always been economics. He was “an early supply-sider” who worked on Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns of 1976 and 1980 and Jack Kemp’s in 1988. In 1978 he ran an anti-tax campaign for the U.S. Senate in New Jersey, defeating Republican incumbent Clifford Case in the primary but losing to Democrat Bill Bradley.

Even now his day job is to advocate for the gold standard at the American Principles Project. But he’s been interested in social issues since the 1980s, when “it became increasingly clear to me . . . that social issues were beginning to be very important in comparison to economic issues,” in part because “Reaganomics worked so well that the Democrats . . . kind of retired the economic issues.”

In Mr. Bell’s telling, social conservatism is both relatively new and uniquely American, and it is a response to aggression, not an initiation of it. The left has had “its center of gravity in social issues” since the French Revolution, he says. “Yes, the left at that time, with people like Robespierre, was interested in overthrowing the monarchy and the French aristocracy. But they were even more vehemently in favor of bringing down institutions like the family and organized religion. In that regard, the left has never changed. . . . I think we’ve had a good illustration of it in the last month or so.”

He means the ObamaCare mandate that religious institutions must provide employee insurance for contraceptive services, including abortifacient drugs and sterilization procedures, even if doing so would violate their moral teachings. “You would think that once the economy started looking a little better, Obama would want to take a bow . . . but instead all of a sudden you have this contraception flap. From what I can find out about it, it wasn’t a miscalculation. They knew that the Catholic Church and other believers were going to push back against this thing. . . . They were determined to push it through, because it’s their irreplaceable ideological core. . . . The left keeps putting these issues into the mix, and they do it very deliberately, and I think they do it as a matter of principle.”

Another example: “In the lame-duck session of the last Congress, when the Democrats had their last [House] majority . . . what was their biggest priority? Well, they let the Bush tax cuts be renewed for another couple of years, but what they did get through was gays in the military. . . . It keeps coming back because it’s the agenda of the left. They’re not going to leave these issues alone.”

American social conservatism, Mr. Bell says, began in response to the sexual revolution, which since the 1960s has been “the biggest agenda item and the biggest success story of the left.” That was true in Western Europe and Japan too, but only in America did a socially conservative opposition arise.

Read the whole thing.

I thought this review was dead on accurate.

I’m an irreligious, libertine, libertarian conservative, personally completely and totally in favor of contraception and legal abortion, and I found myself recently defending the rights of Roman Catholic institutions, and even arguing with my Yale classmates that the perspective of Right-to-Lifers is morally serious and worthy of respect.

Liberal arrogance and intolerance is so great that I think it is true that a surprisingly large number of economic conservatives who have no close personal relationship whatsoever to Religion and Family Values can see themselves supporting Rick Santorum against Barack Obama very easily. The Left is the aggressor in the culture wars, and most Americans are basically decent people who reflexively side with the victim against the bully.