What is genuine?

Susan Rice on her first trip to Israel, "I will never forget my first visit to Israel, when I was just 14 years old.... We had the extraordinary experience of flying on one of the very first flights from Tel Aviv to Cairo, just around the time of Camp David. On that same trip, we went to Yad Vashem, we floated in the Dead Sea, we walked the lanes of the Old City, climbed Masada, and picked fruit at a kibbutz. I learned by heart the words of the sacred prayer, the Sh’ma. And since that first wonderful visit, my admiration for Israel has grown ever stronger."

Romney on his home state of Michigan, "I love this state [Michigan]. It seems right here. The trees are the right height here. I like seeing the lakes. I love the lakes. There's just something very special here. The Great Lakes, but also all the little inland lakes that dots the parts of Michigan. I love cars. I grew up totally in love with cars."

Romney could use some tips from the US ambassador to the UN about being genuine, methinks. 

Stop worrying about Ohio

Mitt Romney, having been dragged through the washers over Michigan, is now being told he needs to win Ohio or else the world will end. Santorum is supposed to be the big dangerman because he is from neighbouring Pennsylvania and is all about the blue collar works in the “rust belt”.

Ohio seems important because it is a swing state in the general election. It is vitally important in the general because, as I have mentioned before, only about 12 states are contested in a general election. Some states tend to always vote one way or another. Republicans will not win Massachusetts or California. Democrats will not win Mississippi or Oklahoma. That’s just how it goes. Ohio is one of the states that changes its mind every so often, so you’ll see a huge effort in this state by both parties leading into November.

However, claiming Romney needs to win it in the primary to secure it in the general election is untrue. Although Ohio is an open primary (anyone can vote in it, as opposed to having to register with the party in some other states) it will be a small amount of Republicans who vote on the day. The amount of voters in a primary is always smaller than the number of voters in an election. Now, believe you me, the voters who vote Republican on primary day will almost certainly be voting Republican on election day, in spite of who wins the nomination. In other words, if Rick Santorum wins Ohio, but Mitt Romney wins the Republican nomination, the probability of Ohio falling Democrat or Republican remains pretty much the same.

Let’s look at an example: In the 2008 Democrat primaries, Barack Obama lost the nomination race in five major swing states and still went on to win them in the general election. Michigan, Florida, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and ---> *OHIO*<--- all preferred Hillary Clinton over Obama. But all five states were carried by Democrats.

Also, it’s not as though Romney hasn’t beaten the rest in a major swing state before during this nomination process. He won Florida – remember the state that was so important in handing George Bush 43 the election in 2000? Florida will have 29 electoral votes in the 2012 election, ten more than Ohio. It is a VITAL state to win in a general, and by current media analysis it should factor into the same “need to win” as Ohio. Florida has voted for the winner of the general election in every vote since 1964, with the exception of 1992. Ohio has voted along with the winning party in every election since 1964. So outside one election result, Florida is as determinative as Ohio.

An aside from my point of view, Romney’s biggest danger on Super Tuesday is not Rick Santorum. It is Newt Gringrich who is polling very competitively in southern states: Georgia (Gingrich’s home state), Oklahoma and Tennessee all go a-voting on Tuesday 6 March, with those three boasting 177 delegates between them. Getting drilled in all of the southern states, which is quite plausible, would hurt Romney far more than dropping Ohio. 

Is Romney's result really that bad?

Image kindly pinched from HollywoodReporter.com

I watch a lot of sensationalist news. I figure that by watching Fox and MSNBC, I will average out the hysteria into a basic understanding of what is going on in the world. But sometimes the hysterics cannot be accurately blended into fact, and I feel like the great loser in this melee of somewhat-facts over the last week has been Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. 

"Analysts" of all types unanimously agreed that it was vital for Mitt Romney to win his home state of Michigan in Tuesday's primary. At face value this seems legitimate: one would expect candidates to take their own state, particularly one where their father was an incredibly popular governor. However, what threatened to sink Romney was not so much the fact the people don't like him. Romney penned a highly controversial piece in the New York Times called "Let Detroit go Bankrupt", which criticised what President Barack Obama planned to do (and ultimately did), which was bail out the auto industry, much of which is based in Detroit, Michigan.

Now, the auto industry is to Detroit what Table Mountain is to Cape Town - people get highly protective over it. Romney surely knew when he wrote that column for the New York Times that he was going to piss some people off. In fact, that's half the reason some people write columns. And such a divisive issue was bound to come up when he ran for president this time around. Of course Michiganders are going to have split opinion when it comes to the auto bailout; simple logic would dictate that some folks would be against it. In fact, it was nice to finally see Romney take a principled stand and stick with it.

What this means is that Romney was quite entitled to not win Michigan, in spite of his roots there, because he picked a side in a massively controversial battle. People were quite entitled to disagree with his view on the bail out. Surely the political system is better when people are voting over issues and records than the bloke that comes from a certain place and adores the height of the trees?

What also surprised me greatly was that not one media outlet I read, and I read many, discussed how Romney's opposition to the bailout may play in other states. Instead, we were treated to constant repetition of just how ghastly it would be if Mitt failed to win Michigan. Now, in many southern states, a portion of whom go to the polls on Super Tuesday (on 6 March) are far more concerned with fiscal conservatism. While arguing against the bailout may hurt in Michigan, it is unlikely to do so in Oklahoma, Tennessee or Georgia, all of whom will vote soon. And, let's be honest, if Romney starts winning in the south then this race will be over swiftly.

Something else the media climbed all over was Romney's speech to the Detroit Economics Club on Friday last week at the Ford Field, home of the Detroit Lions American football team. Romney has been invited by the club to deliver a speech about his economic plan for the US, and naturally, attendance to an address by a  presidential nominee was higher than normal. The DEC (note, NOT Mit Romney) changed the venue to the Ford Field and set up a stage and chairs in a small portion of the field. There was never any intention to fill the stadium. But multiple media outlets reported how Mitt Romney failed to fill a stadium. One would think that the nominee would have invited more than 1,200-odd people in a 60,000-seater stadium if he was attempting to do something grand, right?

Image pinched from mlive.com.

Often, Romney doesn't help himself. He manages to walk around with both feet in his mouth a lot of the time, with increasing regularity. But he isn't helped by criticism that isn't, well, in-depth.

While much criticism is justified, it is surely worth looking at why Romney may have stuck with a point of view past the next primary. It is easy enough to point fingers and say you're criticising. It is something else entirely to actually be critical.

How did Gingrich win South Carolina?

Less than a week ago Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich was way back in the polls in South Carolina. How did he turn his situation into a storming victory?

Image from thegrio.com

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich entered South Carolina having seen a virtually impossible increase in the polls in the last week. It wasn’t that long ago that Gingrich, according to some polling companies, was more than 20 points behind the nomination favourite Mitt Romney, yet he began Saturday’s primary as a frontrunner.

Republicans who are not Mitt Romney have enthusiastically maintained their “anyone-but-Romney” style of campaigning, but it was Gingrich’s performance in a CNN debate on Thursday 19 January that really pushed his advantage (and not for the first time). Earlier on Thursday, ABC published an interview with Gingrich’s second ex-wife in which she claimed that he asked her for an open relationship, so that he could shack up with the woman who is now his current wife, Callista. John King of CNN, who moderated the debate opened by asking Gingrich about the interview and Gingrich played a masterful hand in spinning it right around into a criticism of the media. Both right and left leaning political folks in the USA believe the main-stream media is prejudiced against them, and Gingrich’s lambasting of King, CNN and the media in general got the debate crowd onto its feet in a rousing spate of applause.

Gingrich also successfully fended attacks from former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum (who was declared the winner of the Iowa caucuses after results were reviewed) while managing to land enough punches on Romney. Romney’s detractors have found ammunition lately as they have discovered he is very uncomfortable talking about how wealthy he is. Rick Santorum has managed to own the working man point of view, as one would expect from a man who represented Pennsylvania, and Gingrich and Ron Paul don’t visibly have anywhere near the $200 million-plus that Romney is supposed to be worth. This all began when opposition candidates began asking Romney about when he planned on publicising his tax returns, ironically, a tradition started by George Romney, his father. For a few days in a row, Romney has flubbed answers about releasing his taxes, which would open up questions about his income, and eventually he dropped “I am not going to apologise for being successful!” at Thursday night’s debate. A line which resonates among rich people, but may not have amongst all of South Carolina, which has an unemployment rate above the national average. In contrast, Gingrich is not as prone to unleashing a terrible soundbyte as the man from Massachusetts; during the campaign Romney said the near $400,000 he made from speaking “wasn’t much”, asked another candidate to make a $10,000 bet, said he liked firing people (while the USA battles unemployment) and so on.

Romney’s opponents have also used his career in the private sector, at Bain Capital, as a jobs-destroyer: notable in South Carolina as GS Industries, based in the state and bought by Bain Capital in 1993, ended up going bankrupt while Bain went off with a tidy profit. While this incident itself doesn’t really denote Romney’s attitude toward capitalism or business in general, it is an easy pounce for Gingrich, Santorum and Paul, and their super PACs (Super political action committees, organisations which support a certain candidate but face different electoral laws than the official campaigns).

Many people cited John McCain’s success in South Carolina in 2008 when he successfully won the nomination to face Barack Obama in the election, and assumed that McCain’s moderate conservative views may have meant success for Romney.  However, South Carolina is supremely proud of its US military heritage. McCain served and was a prisoner of war. Romney was not. In fact, Ron Paul is the only candidate left who has any military experience at all, so it is very possible he could have benefited from this.

Gingrich’s success in South Carolina proved two things: Romney is going to struggle in conservative states, and the televised debates are very important.

The next debate on Monday, in Florida, the most unpredictable state in the US, will be superb television. Mitt Romney has two days to make sure he’s on the right side of it.

Huntsman's mistake to leave out Iowa

 Image from http://whitehouse2012.wordpress.com

I found an interesting little piece on Politico, a piece of it is below, about how ex-Utah governor Jon Huntsman may have played his strategies really badly coming up to the Republican presidential nomination vote in New Hampshire. New Hampshire is a state which should favour the middle-of-the-road Republicans which are pretty limited to ex-Massachusetts governor, and favourite for the nomination Mitt Romney (who boasts a storming poll lead) and Huntsman.

Huntsman centered his campaign around doing well in New Hampshire, and totally dismissed his own chances in Iowa, where social conservatives run the roost. Now, while no one could really have expected social conservatives to unite behind ex-Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, had Huntsman thrown his lot into Iowa, it would have pinched votes solely from Romney, weakening his entry into New Hampshire.

Artur Davis, a former Democrat congressman for Alamaba spells it out nicely here in Politico:

The decision to bypass Iowa looms largest: it’s likely that Huntsman’s active presence there would have pulled enough votes from Mitt Romney to leave him wounded in third place. Crippling Romney was always Huntsman’s pathway in New Hampshire, and Huntsman seemed not to recognize that Iowa was the place to do it.

Read the full writ here. 

Something to ponder when Huntsman shuts shop after he takes a pasting at the opening primary on Tuesday (10 January).

Why Rick Perry might not yet be down and out

Of the Republican candidates in the race, there's only a few we need to take seriously.

We can discount Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and ex-Senator Rick Santorum because they are both too extreme to appeal to independent voters - not all Republicans belong to the (modern definition of the) tea party, after all. Congressman Ron Paul, while easily the most intelligent and skeleton- and hypocrisy-free candidate, will not win the nomination because he is just far too extreme, and his libertarianism wouldn't permit Republicans to ban women's right to decide what to do with their bodies, and would defile Jesus by telling the government to get out of deciding who can get married. While his dedicated supporters will follow him around the country, they can still only vote once. John Huntsman, another candidate who suffers from being able to think outside popular rhetoric, is just not being taken seriously at all.

It is going to be a showdown between ex-Massachusetts governor and flip-flopper extraordinaire, Mitt Romney, Uz-busi-busi-busi-businessman Herman Cain, controversial ex-House speaker Newt Gingrich and erm, uh, hmmmm, erm, who's the last one? Oops. Oh yes, Texas governor Rick Perry. 

Romney's unpopularity is fairly well-known and easy to identify.
1) He was governor of a blue state.
2) He, on record, backed a woman's right to choose whether she wanted to terminate her pregnancy (but has since changed his mind).
3) He backed Massachusetts' relatively restrictive gun control laws (but has since changed his mind).
4) He said he would fight for equality for homosexual people (he now supports the defence of marriage act which would ultimately ban gay marriage).
5a) He had a statewide healthcare plan for Massachusetts from which, according to numerous sources, Barack Obama pinched ideas his own healthcare reform which is, ironically, causing more heart attacks within the Republican base than no healthcare would. (He professes a distaste for Obama's healthcare bill now, on the grounds that states should decide their own fortunes.)
5b) Under the healthcare bill which he signed in 2006, illegal immigrants could get medical attention.

At every one point in time, he has been on the wrong side of a very strong electoral issue with the members of his party. However, Romney remains the fancied candidate because of the sheer screw-ups his competitors seem to be making. While there is a far larger faction which doesn't want Romney, it is split between Cain, Perry and Gingrich. Which should present them with a fair few opportunities.

And in my humble opinion, Perry is best-placed to take advantage of this.

Herman Cain can't seem to stop messing up. Even if we remove the sexual harassment and sexual assault allegations against the man, of which we still don't yet have conclusive proof, Cain seems to make a daily cock-up which the media pounces on. It started with the piss-taking of Uz-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan which is actually quite an important nation when it comes to the war in Afghanistan. He moved onto China attempting to test nukes. Weird, as they were also doing that in the 1950s, and launched their first nuclear missile in 1966. He seized up on a fairly simple question about Libya, and then dropped the same answer he'd given at a Republican debate about Afghanistan, and then blamed the questioner for being out to make him look bad. He asked what the Cuban word for "delicious" was. His 999 plan is an absolute fiscal disaster, no matter how much voters may dislike the current tax plan.

Gingrich's rise in the polls will in all likelihood come to an end. Bear in mind every poll you see within the next 24 hours will not take into account the revelation that Gingrich was paid a $1.6 million consulting fee by Freddie Mac, a pretty hated government institution which is often blamed for the housing bubble which preceded the financial crisis in 2008. In theory, it is anathema to voter wanting smaller government to vote for someone who was complicit in a large one (full disclosure: many Democrats and other Republicans are guilty of precisely the same thing). This is on top of some of the more socially conservative voters' qualms about his exploits outside his marriage. While I think the latter is a rather low priority when it comes to selecting leaders, it IS an issue for many (Republicans and Democrats, by the way). Gingrich also has a history aligned with a shut-down congress during his term as House speaker (from 1995 to 1999), which isn't so hot to have on your CV when Congressional approval ratings, according to polls, sit below that of almost everyone except Cuba.

This leaves us with only Rick Perry who may have been as effective during debates as a condom with air vents, but has had a storming week since he hashed the name of the third government department he would shut down if he was president. Perry started by dealing with the fallout thereof, self-deprecating with his Texan drawl on David Letterman and numerous press conferences afterwards. He has one of the largest donor bases and is abusing the hell out of it, with adverts lambasting President Barack Obama, and staying consistent with his message of sorting out Washington and social conservatism. All of Perry's dirt has been in the open and is old news: his in-state tuition for the children of illegal immigrants so as not to have extra unemployed mouths for the state to feed, holidays at a farm called Niggerhead etc etc. Although Perry was once a Democrat in the 1980s, it was a hell of a long time before Romney's pro-Democrat leanings, and a Texan Democrat is still a conservative, pro-business politician. Perry is pro-life, anti-gay marriage, pro-Don't Ask Don't Tell, loves guns and has a history running Texas.

Finally, with his dirt out in the open, Perry is beginning to talk about the things he wants to talk about: Texas' marvellous run in creating jobs while the rest of the country's unemployment rate has increased. There are two views about whether this was beneficial to most Texans or not, but hell, he is bragging and in a presidential campaign he damn well should be. Perry also didn't flub foreign policy at last week's other debate, coming through largely unscathed. While others also made it through alright, Cain's repeated dribble relating to anything outside the border continues to plague him (hell, if I was Hawaii I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him). Perry's other big idea is shake up how Washington DC runs. While he would actually be seeking constitutional amendments, and is unlikely to ever get them, he has concrete plans to go along with his rhetoric, such as reduced hours for Congress so they can work in states, reduced terms for justices (which currently run for life) to 18 years, staggered so that a new judge is elected every two years. Gingrich is the only other non-Romney Republican in the race and for reasons I expressed earlier, I don't think his bounce in the polls will last long. An invitation for a debate with minority House leader Nancy Pelosi was a good show of confidence, and his bluff remained in tact as she declined.

Perry's huge advertising budget goes hand in hand with his ability to campaign. He is known as a master on-the-ground campaigner. Add to this a solid set of socially conservative policies, a state which has created more jobs than any other (and by quite some margin), pro-business speak, and the fact that he's never lost an election, and, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you someone who can break up the non-committal poll results we consistently see.

This is all on the proviso, however, that he doesn't screw up anymore.