Alf Landon

Jonathan V. Last:

The best line I heard about Florida came from a despondent Erick Erikson, who quipped, “It’s like we’re facing Jimmy Carter and nominating Alf Landon.”

Now, that’s not entirely fair. After all, Landon actually won reelection as the governor of Kansas while running in a very tough year for Republicans. (Ba-dump-bump)

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Sean Trende contemplates the paradox that is the 2012 election.

As the Republican primary slogs forward, supporters of Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney are arguing that the other candidate is “unelectable.” The reasoning regarding Gingrich tends to revolve around his horrendous favorability ratings, and a propensity for self-destruction. The rationale regarding Romney is more varied, and is well enunciated by Quin Hillyer and John Hawkins. Last Wednesday, Erick Erickson at RedState — no Romney fan — threw up his hands and declared both leading candidates unelectable. …

Arguably, we’ve never seen a situation like this before, when an unelectable incumbent draws an unelectable opponent. It’s kind of an “immovable object vs. irresistible force” scenario. In theory, neither candidate should be able to win this election, but in practice, someone must.

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Strong men wept and deranged conservatives banged their foreheads against walls and trees this week, when conservatism’s sweetheart Ann Coulter defended Romneycare.

If only the Democrats had decided to socialize the food industry or housing, Romneycare would probably still be viewed as a massive triumph for conservative free-market principles — as it was at the time.

It’s not as if we had a beautifully functioning free market in health care until Gov. Mitt Romney came along and wrecked it by requiring that Massachusetts residents purchase their own health insurance. In 2007, when Romneycare became law, the federal government alone was already picking up the tab for 45.4 percent of all health care expenditures in the country.

Until Obamacare, mandatory private health insurance was considered the free-market alternative to the Democrats’ piecemeal socialization of the entire medical industry.

In November 2004, for example, libertarian Ronald Bailey praised mandated private health insurance in Reason magazine, saying that it “could preserve and extend the advantages of a free market with a minimal amount of coercion.”

A leading conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, helped design Romneycare, and its health care analyst, Bob Moffit, flew to Boston for the bill signing.

Romneycare was also supported by Regina Herzlinger, Harvard Business School professor and health policy analyst for the conservative Manhattan Institute. Herzlinger praised Romneycare for making consumers, not business or government, the primary purchasers of health care. …
No one is claiming that the Constitution gives each person an unalienable right not to buy insurance.

States have been forcing people to do things from the beginning of the republic: drilling for the militia, taking blood tests before marriage, paying for public schools, registering property titles and waiting in line for six hours at the Department of Motor Vehicles in order to drive.

There’s no obvious constitutional difference between a state forcing militia-age males to equip themselves with guns and a state forcing adults in today’s world to equip themselves with health insurance.

Oy, veh!

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Jeff Greenfield predicts that anti-Romney conservatives will not go down without a fight, and that there’ll be plenty of battles at the GOP Convention in August.

A candidate can pick up a fair share of delegates in many states by targeting his campaign on a district-by- district basis. This also means that, statistically at least, it will be harder for Mitt Romney to wrap up the nomination early.

Finally, the rules open the door to a contentious convention, if not a contested one.

Why? Because if there’s sentiment for a fight over a platform plank, or whether convention rules outlaw winner-take- all voting, all the dissidents need is 25 percent of the votes in the respective committees — a mark the combined anti-Romney forces might well achieve. Further, if Gingrich wants his name put in nomination, all he needs is a plurality of delegates — not a majority — in five states. He already has that plurality in South Carolina and may yet pick up pluralities in four more states along the way.

If those adamantly opposed to Romney wind up with this kind of strength, it means they will have the power to start rules fights or demand the gold standard be included in the platform. They may be able to offer their own vice-presidential nominee or throw the timing of important speeches into chaos.

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Jonah Goldberg looks philosophically at a possible Romney nomination.

Let me try to offer some solace. Even if Romney is a Potemkin conservative (a claim I think has merit but is also exaggerated), there is an instrumental case to be made for him: It is better to have a president who owes you than to have one who claims to own you.

A President Romney would be on a very short leash. A President Gingrich would probably chew through his leash in the first ten minutes of his presidency and wander off into trouble. If elected, Romney must follow through for conservatives and honor his vows to repeal Obamacare, implement Representative Paul Ryan’s agenda, and stay true to his pro-life commitments.

Moreover, Romney is not a man of vision. He is a man of duty and purpose. He was told to “fix” health care in ways Massachusetts would like. He was told to fix the 2002 Olympics. He was told to create Bain Capital. He did it all. The man does his assignments.

In this light, voting for Romney isn’t a betrayal, it’s a transaction. No, that’s not very exciting or reassuring for those who’d sooner see monkeys fly out their nethers than compromise again. But such a bargain may just be necessary before judgment day comes.

Former democrat congressman (he lost in 2010) Alan Grayson is a loudmouth bolshevik, but he’s right on the results of the Florida GOP Primary.

[T]he GOP is leaving Florida worse than it arrived.

“I think there has been lasting damage,” he said. “I think that when Newt Gingrich parades around the country saying Mitt Romney is a liar and Mitt Romney parades around country saying Newt Gingrich is a liar, the conclusion most people draw is they’re both liars.”

I’d say though that it started in South Carolina, when the Gingrich campaign took the low road and started attacking Mitt Romney using the left’s anti-capitalist, class warfare arguments.

The massive counter-attack on Gingrich, featuring prominent Republicans, former Congressional colleagues, and conservative pundits, which stooped to utilizing bogus democrat party ethics charges fabricated in the late 1990s for purely partisan advantage was effective and appalling.

We came into this presidential campaign, essentially with an economy-based free “Elect One President” card which ought to have made this race a relative walk-over and a complete sure thing.

Our only problem has been the conspicuous absence, for many years, of a respected, confident and articulate, national figure conservative candidate. For some unaccountable reason, no one has come along to occupy the role once filled by Barry Goldwater and later by Ronald Reagan. Newt Gingrich, for instance, did not really enter the race with that credential. I tend to think that Sarah Palin may yet grow into the role, though she is not there yet. Her declining to run prematurely speaks well for her judgment, and Palin has since 2008 been doing the kind of thing no conservative since Reagan has done: she has functioned as a reliable and effective voice for the conservative movement, and has had regular impact on the national political debate from outside elective office.

We Republicans and conservatives ought to be filled with optimism and resolve at a point in history when it is clear that we are going to have an opportunity to change the country’s direction for the better, but instead we seem to have no leadership, no principles, no really satisfactory candidates, and no class. We clearly have too damn many slime mold professional campaign operators, too many spiteful and grudge-bearing has-beens, and too little genuine leadership.

The Republican Party, the Conservative Movement, and the country want the kind of leader who makes, not only our economy, but our politics better, the kind of man who leads and inspires.

If Gingrich and Romney persist in what they’ve been doing, they may yet re-elect Obama.

James Taranto, astutely explains that, when Newt Gingrich unlimbers the anti-capitalist “You liquidated companies and killed jobs!” arguments against Mitt Romney, Gingrich is not just being cynical and opportunistic. He is as well (possibly even a bit intentionally) inoculating Romney and developing his immunity to the same kinds of attacks when they are delivered again later by Barack Obama during the actual campaign.

It’s shameful for Romney’s rivals–especially Gingrich, who should know better–to be engaging in this sort of class-warfare idiocy. As Charles Murray asked in an ironically nocturnal tweet: “How can a conservative attack Romney for Bain and sleep at night?”

Yet all that said, assuming that Romney is the eventual nominee, Gingrich is doing him a huge favor. …

If Gingrich didn’t attack Romney over Bain now, Barack Obama would do so in the fall. In fact, Obama will do so in the fall anyway, assuming Romney is the nominee. Others on the left, such as some guy at the Puffington Host, are already doing it:

Romney’s statement [about firing people], and in fact his entire career at Bain Capital, shows that this whole Republican job creator mantra is, to steal a line from Newt Gingrich, pious baloney. The word pious fits because Republicans really do worship the top 1 percent and the Wall Street tycoons like Romney who manipulate money but don’t actually build anything or create net new jobs. In fact, not only do they not create them, they actually destroy them.

By attacking now, Gingrich ensures that it won’t be the first voters hear about the matter, which will take some of the sting out of the Obama attacks. He’s also acting as a proxy for the president–call him Barack Hussein Gingrich–giving Romney the chance to practice and improve his defense, something he unquestionably needs to do.

Contrariwise, if Romney is incapable of learning to defend himself effectively, Republicans are better off learning that now, while there’s still time to nominate someone else.

We’ve all seen this happen before.

Barack Obama’s intimate associations with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and former Weatherman Bill Ayers were major issues during the nomination fight and caused his candidacy to reel a bit, but Obama survived, and later in the real campaign his former radical associations had magically become transformed into old news, not significantly relevant anymore.

Democrats pounced on Mitt Romney’s first campaign ad attacking Obama with glee. They had parsed the ad and discovered that one of the damaging Obama quotations (““If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we’re going to lose.”) had been repeated mockingly by Obama, coming originally from a McCain aide.

They had nailed Romney beautifully, the left-wing comentariat thought happily. Another ham-fisted Republican mistake was exposed, and ridiculed, and totaled up in their credit column. They’d won.

But, whoops! as the next couple of days passed, frustrated Obama staffers found that nobody really cared all that much about the fine details of that particular line’s original source and context. It applied very aptly to the incumbent president’s situation. The ad worked and did real damage.

And, in the end, Romney strategists got to sit back and smile contentedly, shaking their heads, and remarking with feigned astonishment to Politico about the Obama camp’s “overreaction to ‘a small buy on one station in New Hampshire.’ ”

Greg Rutter’s Definitive List of The 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You’re a Loser or Old or Something.

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The California State Senate voted 28-8 on June 1 to exempt its members from gun-control laws applying to other Californians. The only news source reporting was the Washington Times which neglected to quote or identify the bill.

It was probably the bill introduced in both houses in March which would place elected representatives in a class of persons having “good cause” to carry firearms.

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Eve Cassidy was a beautiful girl with an extraordinary voice, but she never received a major recording company contract because her repertoire was too eclectic. When she died of melanoma at age 33 in 1996, her recordings were posthumously published, and the album Songbird became a number one hit in England selling a million copies. YouTube has a collection of her recordings.

From Fred Lapides.

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Iowahawk’s Weinermandius, “Look on my junk, ye mighty, and despair!”

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Mitt Romney has a reasonably effective new commercial.

CNN describes a revealing campaign moment, in which Mike Huckbee chose to deflect press criticism of his own tardy awareness of a breaking story by echoing democrat-style criticism of Bush Administration foreign policy.

Huckabee’s comments came in an interview with Iowa’s Quad City Times, in which a reporter asked him why, last month, he was at first unaware of a National Intelligence Estimate detailing the threat posed by Iran, despite the fact the report had been made public for several hours.

“That was released at 10 o’clock in the morning,” Huckabee said. “At 5:30 in the afternoon, somebody says, ‘Have you read the report?’ Maybe I should’ve said, ‘Have you read the report?’ President Bush didn’t read it for four years; I don’t know why I should read it in four hours.”

Romney said Tuesday the comments were in ‘bad taste,” and lifted from the “Democratic playbook.”