Posts For: January 16, 2012

Romney Running Out the Clock as Rivals Go Down Fighting

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

01.16.2012 - 11:53 PM

With only five days left until the crucial South Carolina primary, Mitt Romney’s Republican rivals know that time is running out for them to catch up with the frontrunner. So it was little surprise that Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Rick Perry came out fighting at the Fox News/Wall Street Journal debate in Myrtle Beach. The result was a lively two hours of sharp exchanges between the candidates that made for better television than almost all of the 15 GOP debates that preceded it. But although Romney spent most of the night trying to fend off attacks and Gingrich, Santorum and even Perry all had strong performances, the evening ended as it began with the former Massachusetts governor still in position to put a stranglehold on the nomination with a victory in South Carolina.

Romney took hits on his business record and his record of flip-flopping throughout the debate. But as he has done in most of the earlier debates, he kept his cool and responded strongly when he got the chance. Though he was not able to spend as much time attacking President Obama as he liked, Romney still emerges as the victor if for no other reason than the fact that his invigorated opponents are all still splitting the conservative vote, making it nearly impossible for any one of them to catch the leader.

5

Leave a comment

Live Blog: The GOP Debate

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

01.16.2012 - 8:52 PM

The debate ends: More winners than losers. Gingrich, Santorum and Perry all did well. Romney took punches but none did much damage. That means frontrunner leaves the stage still in a commanding position.

***

Romney scores with attack on McCain-Feingold. Super PAC ads are the fruit of campaign finance “reform.”

***

Romney: Gingrich’s super PAC-funded documentary about Bain is the biggest hoax since Bigfoot.

***

Gingrich nails Romney again on super PAC ads. Of course, his own super PACs have been just as bad.

***

Santorum: Ron Paul’s vote on gun manufacturers liability law would have wiped out 2nd amendment.

***

Romney says pro-gun groups backed the gun control law he signed. Turns it around and attacks Obama as an anti-gun president. Santorum says NRA agreed with him too.

***

Looks like the Santorum-Gingrich non-aggression pact is over.

Leave a comment

Live Blogging the GOP Debate Tonight

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

01.16.2012 - 6:00 PM

Join us tonight as senior online editor Jonathan S. Tobin live blogs the latest Republican presidential debate from South Carolina. So tune in to Fox News at 9 pm and then log on to Commentarymagazine.com for live insights as the remaining five GOP contenders have at it once again.

Leave a comment

Debate Preview: Just Five Left Standing

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

01.16.2012 - 5:42 PM

With Jon Huntsman joining Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Tim Pawlenty on the sidelines of the Republican presidential race, the stage at tonight’s FOX News/Wall Street Journal debate in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina will be a bit less crowded than the previous episodes of America’s favorite political reality show. That may allow the moderators to ask more questions but it will raise the stakes for the five men still left standing. With polls showing Mitt Romney’s lead growing in both South Carolina as well as nationally, this debate and the one on CNN on Thursday will provide his opponents with what may well be their last meaningful chances to alter the outcome of the race.

That means Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Rick Perry are probably going to be aiming most of their fire at the frontrunner rather than each other. But unlike the attacks on Gingrich’s records that seemed to derail his campaign in Iowa, the attempt by the former speaker and the Texas governor to blast Romney’s business record from a left-wing perspective seems to have backfired. Though there are other avenues of attack, it remains to been seen whether anything they can say in these last five days can alter the course of a primary that may anoint Romney as the inevitable nominee.

Leave a comment

Say Goodnight, Newt

Peter Wehner | @Peter_Wehner

01.16.2012 - 5:10 PM

Here are two sentences that buttress the argument of those of us who said Newt Gingrich was temperamentally unfit to be president by virtue of his chronic indiscipline, erratic style and lack of philosophical grounding. It comes from Michael Moore, perhaps the most visible and harshest American critic of capitalism in the last couple of decades.

In commenting on Newt Gingrich’s assault on Bain Capital specifically and capitalism more broadly, here is what Mr. Moore said: “I wondered who they stole from my crew. It was fun to hear what I have been saying for 20 years, not just by any Republican candidate, but Newt Gingrich.”

Say goodnight, Newt.

Leave a comment

Iran’s Subsidiary Goal: Disarm Israel

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

01.16.2012 - 4:42 PM

The increased attention given to the threat from Iran’s nuclear program by both Israel and the United States has set off alarm bells on the left, where even the Obama administration’s at times half-hearted effort to pressure the Islamist regime is worrying. But those arguing against the crippling sanctions that the United States is thinking about imposing–let alone the use of force to avert the Iranian nuclear threat–have a subsidiary goal: disarming Israel. That’s the point of an op-ed in today’s New York Times by Shelby Telhami and Steven Kull, who urge that those worried about the danger an Iranian nuke would pose to Israel, the Middle East as a whole and the security of the West, should instead focus their efforts on getting Israel to disavow its own nuclear deterrent.

The conceit of this argument, which repeats a point some in Iran and others in the Muslim world have also put forward, is that the way to persuade the ayatollahs to renounce nukes is to force the Jewish state to dismantle its own nuclear arsenal. But the seeming fairness of this proposal masks its inherent bias. Unlike Iran, or indeed any other country on the planet, Israel faces threats to its existence as a nation. Those who wish to give up its ultimate weapon are asking it to put its trust in the goodwill of its neighbors and the international community, a notion that contradicts the lessons of Jewish history as well as the very reason for Israel’s existence.

6

Leave a comment

Clinton Adviser Endorses Islamist Cult Leader’s Paper

Michael Rubin | @mrubin1971

01.16.2012 - 4:20 PM

Anne-Marie Slaughter was, until last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s director of policy planning. Today, Today’s Zaman, a Turkish newspaper affiliated with the Islamist cult of Fethullah Gülen, broadcasts her endorsement of the conspiratorial broadsheet:

“I love Today’s Zaman,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor who is also in U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s team of foreign policy advisers. Her hailing of the newspaper illustrated a prevailing positive reception for the young news outlet in many capitals of the West and that it is swiftly becoming a must-read paper for the policy community and state mandarins.

5

Leave a comment

A Chance to Defend Democratic Capitalism

Peter Wehner | @Peter_Wehner

01.16.2012 - 4:00 PM

I’ll be very interested in tonight’s GOP presidential debate, in part to see if Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry go after Mitt Romney based on his association with Bain Capital. I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to avoid the topic (Gingrich did during his appearances in South Carolina on Sunday). Why? Because it’s clear the attacks on Bain — which conservatives rightly understood as an assault on enterprise and democratic capitalism — backfired badly on both men. They’ve been pounded by non-RINOs like Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Michelle Malkin, James Taranto, Charles Murray, Mark Steyn, National Review, Club for Growth, and many more.

The tack taken by Gingrich and Perry qualifies as one of the more inexplicable campaign decisions I can recall; the product, if one wants to be generous, of desperation. (The “King of Bain” video may be the most comical piece of campaign propaganda I have ever seen, something you’d expect from a person with Michael Moore’s views and one-tenth of his talent. It has been utterly destroyed by fact checkers.)

3

Leave a comment

Huntsman Withdrawal as Didactic as Usual

Alana Goodman | @alanagoodman

01.16.2012 - 3:40 PM

During the next few days, we’ll probably see a surge of rose-tinted, wistful commentary on Jon Huntsman — how he was both the most conservative and most reasonable candidate, whose one flaw was he ran for president during a time when the Republican Party had become radically dogmatic/extreme/anti-intellectual/uncompromising.

This is ridiculous. It’s hard to imagine there would ever have been a time when someone like Huntsman would be popular with conservatives. His problem wasn’t that he had a few moderate positions – plenty of Republican voters could have lived with that. His problem was always tone. He came off as self-righteous when arguing from the left, but deferential and respectful when arguing from the right.

Leave a comment

In Defense of DC

Peter Wehner | @Peter_Wehner

01.16.2012 - 3:19 PM

Andy Ferguson, who seems incapable of writing something that is not worth reading, has penned a piece for The Weekly Standard that takes aim at those who criticize Washington, D.C., while enjoying wonderful (and often profitable) lives thanks to their careers in the nation’s capital. Andy’s target in this particular case is Rick Santorum, but he is just one of a seemingly endless list of candidates. Ferguson, who is also a monthly contributor to COMMENTARY, describes them as a Washingtonian of a particular type:

The anti-Washington Washingtonian—an AWW, a contented resident of the nation’s capital who has based his career on his loudly declared disdain for the nation’s capital, particularly the federal Leviathan residing there. The AWW campaigns against Washington, catalogues its harmful effects, extols alternatives, and contrasts it with the “real America,” which he vows to liberate forever from its depredations — while never admitting that Washington is the very thing that makes his life worth living.

This critique gives voice to something I’ve felt since almost the day I arrived in Washington in the 1980s.

Leave a comment

Reasons for Huntsman’s Flameout

Peter Wehner | @Peter_Wehner

01.16.2012 - 12:45 PM

Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman’s withdrawal from the GOP presidential race will come as a shock to almost no one. There are many reasons for Huntsman’s flameout, but one of them can be found in this June 2011 profile in Esquire magazine.

For [John] Weaver and the rest of the team, Huntsman’s intelligence and foreign-policy experience, combined with his strong record of fiscal conservatism and social semimoderation (he supports civil unions for gay couples and believes climate change is an urgent issue), made him the ideal candidate to shake up a Republican field that Weaver calls “the weakest since 1940.”

“There’s a simple reason our party is nowhere near being a national governing party,” Weaver told Esquire. “No one wants to be around a bunch of cranks.”

Read More

Leave a comment

Dredging the Future

John Steele Gordon | @steelegordon

01.16.2012 - 12:15 PM

George Will, in his column yesterday, notes that, a century ago, it took ten years to build the Panama Canal, one of the most challenging engineering feats of the age, a project that had to cope with a remote location, yellow fever, and steam-shovel technology. Building the new locks for the canal, which will allow much larger ships to use it, will take eight years. It will be completed in 2014. But the new “Panamax” ships will not be able to use many east coast harbors, such as Savannah and Charleston–the 4th busiest port on the east coast–because the harbors are not deep enough to handle ships that will carry up to 18,000 containers.

The solution, of course, is easy: dredge the harbors. But Savannah began studying the possibility of dredging in 1999. Today, 13 years later, the study is still not completed. When and if it is, the dredging itself will take five years. So even if dredging started today, Savannah will not be able to take the new Panamax ships until three years after they begin to transit the canal. But dredging won’t start upon completion of the environmental study because various self-appointed guardians of the environment will–as surely as the sun will rise in the east tomorrow–sue, arguing over every comma of the environmental impact statement that will run to thousands of pages. These groups have become past masters at using the legal system to delay–and thus all too often kill–projects they do not approve of, which, it seems, is nearly all of them.

Leave a comment

Romney’s Weaknesses Still on Full Display

Seth Mandel | @SethAMandel

01.16.2012 - 11:50 AM

Rick Santorum’s weekend interview with the Wall Street Journal reinforced the impression that his candidacy provides the clearest contrast with Mitt Romney’s latest attempts at branding himself—described here in the Washington Post. The contrast is not likely to favor Romney, and with the big evangelical endorsement going to Santorum this weekend, the former Pennsylvania senator might be in the strongest position of the remaining “not Romneys.”

At the end of that Post profile comes this quote from Kathleen Hall Jamieson, professor of rhetoric and communication at the University of Pennsylvania, about the image Romney projected after his New Hampshire victory speech:

“It’s difficult to look at that picture and say, yes, he woke up in the morning and decided to eliminate entire companies and throw large numbers of people out of work because all he cares about is money,” Jamieson said. “The visual rebuttal is devoted family and wife — and look at those adorable grandchildren!”

Read More

2

Leave a comment

Americans Not Particularly Worried About Income Inequality

Alana Goodman | @alanagoodman

01.16.2012 - 11:29 AM

The Heritage Foundation’s Lachlan Markey draws attention to an interesting stat from a recent Gallup poll that measured the economic concerns of Americans:

Gallup reports that only 2 percent of Americans list the “divide between rich and poor” as the most important economic issue facing the country. Those findings come from an open-ended survey, meaning respondents were not confined to a pre-selected group of responses. Unemployment and the national debt top the list, but all told, a full 17 economic issues rank higher in the American political consciousness than income inequality.

Read More

Leave a comment

How Israel’s Gaza Pullout Radicalized Sinai

Evelyn Gordon | @evelyng1234

01.16.2012 - 10:45 AM

Anyone who still thinks more Israel territorial withdrawals are a good idea should carefully study Ehud Yaari’s chilling new report for The Washington Institute on “Sinai: A New Front.” To anyone who has been following the situation, Yaari’s bottom line – that Sinai-based terrorism “could break a fragile bilateral peace [with Egypt] that is already challenged by growing post-Mubarak demands to abrogate, review, or amend the treaty” – isn’t new; I’ve been warning of this for months. Where the veteran Israeli journalist and Arabist makes a real contribution is his analysis of how Israel’s 2005 pullout from Gaza contributed to Sinai’s radicalization. And while he doesn’t say so, the implication of his research is obvious: An Israeli pullout from the West Bank could similarly radicalize and destabilize Jordan.

Clearly, radicalization doesn’t happen overnight, and Yaari indeed describes a slow spread of radical Islam among the Sinai Bedouin since the 1980s, along with a consequent rise in arms trafficking and terror. But Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, “and subsequent removal of troops from the Sinai-Gaza border,” catalyzed the process:

5

Leave a comment

Huntsman Post-Mortem: Forget About 2016

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

01.16.2012 - 10:45 AM

A year or more ago there were some political observers who saw Jon Huntsman as a coming man in the Republican Party. Most thought he would wait until 2016 to run for president, but the former Utah governor and ambassador to China was a future contender to be reckoned with. But after his disastrous presidential campaign comes to an end today, speculation about his political future will be kept to a minimum. Huntsman’s bid for the GOP nomination was not, as many have already noted, just a matter of the wrong man at the wrong time. The campaign spotlight unmercifully exposed the candidate’s weaknesses and bad judgment. No one should expect a rerun in 2016 in the event of a Republican defeat this November.

Huntsman’s was, from the start, a bizarrely conceived candidacy. Though he had impeccable conservative credentials on most domestic issues, Huntsman’s decision to position himself as the leading moderate in the race to lead a deeply conservative party was a blunder from which he could never recover. His anti-war foreign policy stances were best suited to a Democratic audience, not a Republican one. That accounted for the consistently laudatory coverage he received in the mainstream press. But the idea that Republicans would ever nominate a man who was best described as a liberal’s idea of a Republican was farcical.

Leave a comment

Our Message to Iran

Rick Richman | @jpundit

01.16.2012 - 10:15 AM

“You may say I’m a dreamer,” Jeffrey Goldberg wrote last week, urging one more attempt to talk to Iran. He’s a dreamer, but he’s not the only one. Trita Parsi, writing in the Washington Post, thinks we could get by “with a little help from [our] friends” (he names Norway, Sweden, South Africa, Oman and Qatar), whom he thinks we could ask to talk to Iran to ask Iran to talk to us.

Last week, after the IAEA confirmed that Iran is enriching uranium at its underground facility in Qom, Hillary Clinton issued a press release urging Iran to join talks to “restore confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature” of its nuclear program. It is all right out of a “Saturday Night Live” sketch.

Leave a comment

More About “Foreign Policy’s” Israel Slurs

Evelyn Gordon | @evelyng1234

01.16.2012 - 9:50 AM

Foreign Policy has produced a slander so outrageous that Israel broke with its strict policy of never confirming or denying covert operations to issue a flat denial – and surprisingly, given Israel’s notoriously poor public relations, it’s a convincing one. On Friday, the magazine published an article by Mark Perry, a military and intelligence analyst who once served as an advisor to Yasser Arafat, that accused Mossad agents of posing as CIA agents to recruit Pakistani terrorists to commit sabotage and assassinations inside Iran. The alleged operation infuriated two successive presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Perry wrote, because it endangered American lives, undermined America’s relationship with Pakistan and painted America as engaged in terrorist activity. Additionally, Perry said, it convinced many senior American officials that Israel was a liability rather than a strategic asset.

Israel termed the report “absolute nonsense,” explaining that had it been true, then-Mossad chief Meir Dagan would have been declared persona non grata in Washington rather than being a welcome visitor. Nor is that idle speculation: Those same two presidents forced the ouster of three other senior Israeli defense officials over other issues; why would they have given Dagan a pass?

Leave a comment

Did Israel Run a False Flag Operation?

Michael Rubin | @mrubin1971

01.16.2012 - 9:24 AM

Mark Perry, a long-term advocate of talking to terrorists and cutting deals with Hamas and Hezbollah, published a damaging piece in Foreign Policy reporting a memo accusing Israelis posing as CIA operatives of supporting Jundallah, a Baluchi terrorist group in Iran. Those seeking to bash Israel or exculpate Iran bent over backwards to support the Islamic Republic and jumped on the allegation. The National Iranian American Council, for example, accepted Perry’s report as fact and called Israeli behavior “appalling.” A memo’s existence, however, does not automatically validate its contents,. CIA analysts often push random theories, many based on supposition rather than fact. Some CIA memos are brilliant; others suggest their authors were valedictorians of their summer school class.

The article’s sourcing is problematic and should also raise red flags. Perry relies on two current intelligence officers, only one of whom has seen the memo alleging Israeli malfeasance. One officer—presumably the same who saw the memo and perhaps also wrote it—describes Bush’s reaction, and so presumably was a briefer for the White House. Should Gen. David Petraeus, director of Central Intelligence, wish to identify that leaker, he could do so easily. In addition, Perry talks to four retired intelligence officials, whose names and positions he also cloaks in anonymity. Allowing these officials a wall of anonymity from behind which to throw mud is problematic as intelligence officials have admitted leaks to advance personal political agendas.

Leave a comment

Huntsman Follows Undecideds to Romney

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

01.16.2012 - 7:05 AM

The big political news today coming out of South Carolina is the decision of Jon Huntsman to withdraw from the Republican presidential race and endorse Mitt Romney. In doing so, Huntsman is acknowledging the failure of his campaign to catch fire and doing the honorable thing by backing the Republican who has the best chance of winning in November. But by getting on the Romney bandwagon, he’s following the same path that has seen a considerable portion of undecided South Carolinians who are now supporting the frontrunner.

Yesterday’s Insider Advantage/Majority Opinion Research poll conducted for Newsmax revealed a major swing to Romney when compared to the survey the same group had taken just four days earlier. While the numbers of all the other candidates remained relatively stable in the last week, Romney gained nine percentage points, going from 23 to 32 percent. That stretched his lead over Newt Gingrich to a comfortable 11 points with only five days to go before the Palmetto state votes. But just as important as the raw numbers is where Romney picked up support. In the last four days, IA/MOR poll found that those expressing “no opinion” went down from 15 to 7 percent. You don’t need a PhD in statistics to figure out that most of those undecideds are now in the Romney column.

Leave a comment

Are you a subscriber?

Subscriber Log In
Subscriber Services