Posts For: January 10, 2012

Gingrich’s Folly

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

01.10.2012 - 10:15 PM

Newt Gingrich’s bubble burst weeks ago, but the after-shocks of his collapse are still being felt in the Republican race. By choosing to launch a bizarre attack on Mitt Romney from the left, Gingrich did little damage to the frontrunner but he managed to besmirch his already tattered image even further. After a disastrous showing in New Hampshire where he is battling Rick Santorum for the dubious distinction of finishing a distant fourth, Gingrich is now headed for an even more disappointing outcome in South Carolina.

Despite a massive infusion of funds from wealthy contributors, Gingrich has virtually no chance at this point of coming back and winning the nomination. Though he pledged to go on to South Carolina in a lackluster concession speech, all he can accomplish at this point is to further sabotage Rick Santorum’s meager hopes of becoming the sole conservative “non-Romney” in the race. Even more to the point, by continuing to echo leftist Occupy Wall Street smears of Romney’s business career, he will ensure that the legacy of his presidential campaign is that of a bitter loser who sought unsuccessfully to bring down the ultimate nominee.

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Romney’s Big Night

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

01.10.2012 - 8:52 PM

Mitt Romney’s margin of victory in New Hampshire may have fallen short of his hopes and aspirations, but a double-digit win for the frontrunner must still be considered a major step toward the nomination. Given the dismal showing of Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich — the only candidates who might challenge him elsewhere in the country — after only two states have voted, it’s difficult to imagine that Romney will not be anointed as the GOP standard-bearer.

Romney’s critics on the right will, no doubt, try to downplay his sweep of Iowa and New Hampshire, but by winning both states, he’s done something no one would have expected him to do only a few weeks ago. Moreover, given his strong polling numbers among Republicans, the notion that the GOP base won’t stomach him as their nominee doesn’t have much credibility.

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Third Isn’t Good Enough for Huntsman

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

01.10.2012 - 8:09 PM

The networks have already declared Mitt Romney the winner of the New Hampshire primary, giving him an extraordinary sweep of the first two states to vote. Second place has also apparently been decided with the runner-up title going to libertarian extremist Ron Paul. That will keep Paul’s buzz up in the coming days, but it also means something else: the end of Jon Huntsman’s hopes for a breakout night in New Hampshire.

Huntsman bet everything on a huge showing in New Hampshire hoping that Democrats and independents would make him relevant. But a third place showing isn’t good enough. Of course, even if he had finished second it was difficult to see a path to contention for Huntsman, but a third place finish ensures that he is finished. Huntsman has enough of his father’s money in his pocket to go on campaigning as long as he likes, but defeat in New Hampshire means that this liberal’s idea of a conservative will soon fade from the spotlight.

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If Romney Split the Independents, He’s Going to Win Big Tonight

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

01.10.2012 - 7:49 PM

Exit polls are reportedly showing that New Hampshire independents are splitting their votes between Ron Paul and Mitt Romney. It’s no surprise that Paul would do well with this group because he has more appeal with them than with Republicans. The same is true for Jon Huntsman, who the polls show only a couple of points behind Paul among unaffiliated voters. But if the exit polls showing Romney picking up as many as 30 percent of independents are true, then he is heading for a big night. Because Romney is certain to win the Republican vote by a large margin, it’s hard to see how he doesn’t win the New Hampshire primary by a huge margin.

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Iranian Nukes? Cue the Laugh Track in Caracas

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

01.10.2012 - 6:06 PM

The friendly relationship between the dictatorial regimes in Iran and Venezuela has long troubled the United States, but the latest expression of this bizarre alliance has implications for Washington’s efforts to isolate Tehran. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in Caracas this week for another love fest with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. The highlight of their exchange was when Chavez referred to a grassy knoll in front of his palace. “That hill will open up and a big atomic bomb will come out,” said Chavez as the two authoritarians laughed about the big joke.

Iran’s nuclear ambitions are no laughing matter for those who fear the Islamist regime being able to put a nuclear umbrella over its terrorist allies Hezbollah and Hamas or being able to threaten Israel with extinction. But the importance of Chavez to Iran is not his ability to provide them with moral support. The only real lever short of the use of force for the West to stop Iran’s nuclear program is an oil embargo. This week’s visit to South America is a reminder that Tehran has allies, including oil producers like Venezuela who may be willing to help them in the event President Obama finds the will to try to enforce a tough sanctions policy.

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Poll: Americans Fear Obama Reelection More than Iranian Nukes

Alana Goodman | @alanagoodman

01.10.2012 - 5:00 PM

This poll was conducted by Synovate eNation on behalf of US News and World Report’s Washington Whispers, which seems…questionable. But it has received a lot of attention from bloggers today, mainly for the finding that Americans fear Obama’s reelection by a 2:1 ratio.

In our New Year’s poll, when asked what news event they fear most about 2012, Americans by a margin of two-to-one said Obama’s reelection. Only 16 percent said they fear the Democrat won’t win a second term, while 33 percent said they fear four more years. …

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Gingrich and Perry Mistake Is Romney and Santorum Opportunity

Peter Wehner | @Peter_Wehner

01.10.2012 - 4:40 PM

Rick Santorum is taking a pass when it comes to jumping aboard the anti-Bain Capital bandwagon. Which goes some ways toward demonstrating that he is, in fact, a consistent conservative, as he claims – and a principled one, too.

Good for Senator Santorum.

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So This Is What A Free Market Looks Like

Seth Mandel | @SethAMandel

01.10.2012 - 3:51 PM

Alana mentions an aspect of Newt Gingrich’s attacks on Mitt Romney that is less about capitalism and more about electability: that he clumsily (read: honestly) defends what many see as the dirty work of capitalism. This is a fair argument to make, inasmuch as Romney has a tendency to litter his campaign stops with cartoonishly unattractive, but accurate, descriptions of the free market (i.e. let Detroit go bankrupt, he likes being able to fire people, “Don’t try to stop the foreclosure process”).

In his column yesterday, Jay Nordlinger writes of his pleasant surprise at watching Romney engage an “occupy” protester and defend corporate profits. Jay writes: “I don’t think I had ever seen a candidate do this. You’re supposed to blast corporate profits or change the subject.” Indeed, Romney doesn’t like to sugarcoat his defense of capitalism in all its glory, and the worry is that it risks turning him into the Col. Nathan Jessup of this election, just itching to turn to a liberal and say:

You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That the factory’s closing, while tragic, probably saved jobs. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves jobs. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that Wall Street, you need me on that Wall Street. We use words like market, creative destruction, invisible hand. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very economic freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way.

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The Final New Hampshire Polling

Alana Goodman | @alanagoodman

01.10.2012 - 2:16 PM

There aren’t many surprises to be found in today’s Suffolk University and Rasmussen polls, with Mitt Romney continuing to hold a formidable 20-point lead. The big news tonight will be exactly how wide of a margin Romney wins by. If he finishes with above 35 percent of the vote, he’ll be fine. If he ends up with much less than that, it will raise more questions about his ability to seal the deal with conservative voters. Here’s Rasmussen:

Romney earns 37 percent support, with Texas Congressman Ron Paul a distant second with 17 percent of the vote in the latest telephone survey of Likely Republican Primary Voters taken Sunday night. Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman is now in third with 15 percent, up slightly from 12 percent late last week.

The Suffolk tracking poll has almost identical findings for the top three competitors. Meanwhile, Santorum and Gingrich are fighting it out for the fourth tier, coming in at 13 percent and 12 percent respectively in the Rasmussen poll, and 11 and 9 percent respectively in the Suffolk poll. Rick Perry has 1 percent in both surveys.

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Syrian Refugees in Israel?

Michael J. Totten | @michaeljtotten

01.10.2012 - 1:50 PM

The Israeli Army’s Chief of Staff Benny Gantz says Israel is preparing to take in refugees following the downfall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. The interesting part is that Israel is expecting refugees from the Alawite minority and to house them on the Golan Heights.

The Assad family and most of the regime are Alawites at war with the Sunni Muslim majority. The Golan Heights was taken from Syria in the 1967 war when Damascus used it as a platform to shoot at and shell Israeli civilians in the Galilee far below.

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Will Buchanan Be Called to Account?

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

01.10.2012 - 1:20 PM

For decades, Pat Buchanan has maintained his perch as a mainstream political commentator, first on CNN and later on MSNBC. But according to the Washington Post, Buchanan may not return to the left-leaning cable network after his book tour ends. Though some on the right will blame his departure on the network’s decision to try to become the liberal answer to Fox News, it’s far more likely that what some see as the racist tone of his latest tome has finally brought Buchanan the comeuppance he has long deserved.

Though Buchanan engaged in anti-Semitic rhetoric more than 20 years ago during the first Gulf War and has promoted revisionist views of World War Two in which he trashed Winston Churchill and questioned America’s decision to fight the Nazis, defended Holocaust war criminals and favored appeasing Islamists, none of that was enough to drive him to the margins of American punditry, where he belongs. But after claiming blacks may be less intelligent than whites in his latest book Suicide of a Superpower, Buchanan may have committed an unforgivable sin in the eyes of his employers.

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NY Times: Gingrich Tied to Investment Firm Similar to Bain

Alana Goodman | @alanagoodman

01.10.2012 - 1:00 PM

The New York Times reports that Newt Gingrich had his own ties to a leveraged buyout firm. This presents a bit of a problem for Gingrich’s new line of attack against Mitt Romney:

But Mr. Gingrich was himself on an advisory board for a major investment firm that had a similar business model, Forstmann Little, a pioneering private equity firm co-founded in 1978 by Theodore J. Forstmann that was, along with Mr. Romney’s Bain Capital and Henry R. Kravis’s Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts, among the leading private equity firms during the 1980s and 1990s.

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The Silent Young Jewish Majority

Matthew Ackerman | @MatthewAckerman

01.10.2012 - 12:34 PM

It has become an accepted point of Jewish communal debates in recent years that young American Jews are “distancing” from Israel. However, a contrarian view, that holds that a feeling of attachment to the Jewish state is at least as strong among young Jews as it is for older Jews, has been gaining traction of late, and it is buttressed by a recent poll, sent out yesterday by Mitchell Bard’s American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise.

The poll posed questions to 400 American Jewish undergraduate students and found that 66 percent of them view themselves as feeling “very close” or “fairly close” to Israel. By design, this question of a feeling of closeness is the same posed in the AJC’s 2011 annual survey of American Jewish opinion, which found that 68 percent of the general Jewish population also described their feeling toward Israel in similar terms. This, as well as the polls other results mean, according to Bard, that “Contrary to the claims of some outspoken critics, young Jews do not feel alienated from Israel.”

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Who is Obama Rooting for Tonight?

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

01.10.2012 - 12:06 PM

On Saturday night following the Republican presidential debate on ABC, a panel discussion broadcast on the network included the startling claim by Democratic talking head Donna Brazile that Mitt Romney’s dominance of the GOP field was “good news” for the Democrats because the frontrunner is “the weakest candidate.” Even ABC host and former Clinton administration official George Stephanopolous openly scoffed at her assertion, but some on the right are echoing her taunt.

Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh agreed with Brazile and went so far as to allege, perhaps humorously, that Stephanopolous’s retort was an attempt to get his fellow Democrat to keep quiet about their party’s secret desire for Romney to be the GOP nominee. Limbaugh has, of course, been quite vocal about Romney’s alleged weakness. He believes the GOP’s nomination of a man identified with Wall Street will help fire up the “occupy” base of the Democratic Party while also causing the conservative grass roots to sit out the general election, allowing Obama to cruise to victory. But while Limbaugh’s views are entitled to the respect due to the pre-eminent voice of the conservative insurgency, I very much doubt the president is delighted with the prospect of a big victory for Romney in New Hampshire tonight.

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Daley Departure Busts “No-Drama” Myth

Seth Mandel | @SethAMandel

01.10.2012 - 11:45 AM

The resignation of White House chief of staff Bill Daley must be frustrating to President Obama because it–with some help from the well-timed release of Jodi Kantor’s new book on the Obama White House–reveals the extent to which Obama has succeeded not in creating a no-drama administration (an impossible goal in the Washington of 2012 anyway), but rather in creating the impression of one.

The New York Times tries admirably to parrot the administration line, calling Daley’s departure a “distracting shake-up in a White House that has prided itself on a lack of internal drama, with a tightly knit circle of loyal senior advisers playing a steadying role.” But the paper is forced to give away the game later on in the story, revealing the Obama White House for what it is: the Hotel California of presidential administrations:

While the president said he asked Mr. Daley to reconsider his decision, he did not apply the kind of pressure he brought to bear on Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who has for several months been eager to return to New York.

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The Gingrich Collapse

Peter Wehner | @Peter_Wehner

01.10.2012 - 11:20 AM

The last week of observing Newt Gingrich has been fascinating not for political, but for psychological, reasons.

For anyone who has been paying attention, Gingrich has become consumed with rage toward Mitt Romney. What explains Gingrich’s behavior, I think, is that not long ago he really believed — he was certain — the nomination was his. Remember what he told ABC’s Jake Tapper: “I’m going to be the nominee,” the former Speaker told Tapper in December. “It’s very hard not to look at the recent polls and think that the odds are very high I’m going to be the nominee.” Gingrich was also convinced he was invincible. “And by the way,” he told Tapper, “I don’t object if people want to attack me, that’s their right. All I’m suggesting is that it’s not going to be very effective and that people are going to get sick of it very fast.”

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Republican Voters Still Think About the Ones Who Got Away

Alana Goodman | @alanagoodman

01.10.2012 - 10:57 AM

As Mitt Romney prepares to accomplish the unprecedented feat of winning both the Republican Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary today, here are some poll numbers to keep in mind. As Peter wrote, Romney is now the only candidate viewed as “acceptable” by the majority of Republican voters, and he leads among self-proclaimed conservative voters on acceptability. He is also seen as the most electable of the Republican candidates, and leads President Obama by two points in a general election matchup, according to a new CBS poll.

Electable, acceptable – by all practical measurements, Romney is the reasonable candidate to choose. But Republican voters still can’t stop thinking about the ones who got away:

The survey finds that 58 percent of Republican primary voters want more presidential choices, while just 37 percent say they are satisfied with the current field. The percentage of Republican primary voters that wants more choices has increased 12 percentage points since October…

It’s mathematically possible for another candidate to enter the race as late as early February and still win enough delegates to take the nomination, though some deadlines for candidates to get on state ballots have already passed, including those in delegate-rich Virginia and Illinois.

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Poll: Romney Is the “Acceptable Nominee”

Peter Wehner | @Peter_Wehner

01.10.2012 - 10:15 AM

According to a Gallup survey released today, Mitt Romney is the now the only candidate who a majority of conservative and moderate/liberal Republicans nationwide see as an acceptable GOP nominee for president.

Conservative Republicans are more likely to say Romney would be an acceptable nominee than either Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum. Fewer than half of conservative Republicans see Rick Perry, Ron Paul, or Jon Huntsman as acceptable nominees. And among moderate/liberal voters, none of the non-Romney candidates receives more than 40 percent when asked if they are an acceptable nominee.

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Wishful Thinking: Hamas’s “New Direction”

Evelyn Gordon | @evelyng1234

01.10.2012 - 9:53 AM

Yesterday, I wrote about the State Department’s wishful thinking on the Muslim Brotherhood. But the most widespread form of wishful thinking nowadays is undoubtedly the global enthusiasm for Hamas’s “new direction,” as evidenced by, for instance, this Haaretz editorial, enthusiastically reprinted the next day by the New York Times’ global edition, the International Herald Tribune.

Let’s for a moment ignore all the evidence to the contrary and assume Hamas really did agree to abandon terror for unarmed “popular struggle.” What would that mean for Israel? About 500 rockets a year fired at its civilian population. How do I know? Because Hamas, unwilling to risk another Israeli offensive, hasn’t personally fired rockets at Israel since the last offensive ended three years ago. Instead, it has allowed smaller groups to fire 1,571 rockets from Hamas-controlled Gaza while disclaiming responsibility – a tactic it would undoubtedly continue. In short, Hamas’s “new direction” wouldn’t reduce anti-Israel terror from Hamas-controlled territory one whit.

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Poll: Independents at Record Levels

Peter Wehner | @Peter_Wehner

01.10.2012 - 9:00 AM

According to a Gallup survey, the percentage of Americans identifying as political independents increased in 2011 by two points to 40 percent, the highest Gallup has ever measured. What’s interesting to note is that Gallup records from 1951-1988 indicate that the percentage of independents was generally in the low 30 percent range during those years, suggesting that the proportion of independents in 2011 was the largest in at least 60 years.

In addition, more Americans continue to identify as Democrats than as Republicans, 31 percent to 27 percent. (Republican identification dropped from 29 percent to 27 percent while Democratic identification held steady at 31 percent). Gallup points out that more Americans have identified as Democrats than Republicans in all but a few years since 1988 and the four-point gap between the two parties remains below the eight-point (36 percent to 28 percent) and seven-point (34 percent to 27 percent) Democratic advantages in 2008 and 2009, respectively.

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