Debate Impressions

If one has a Republican friend or acquaintance, be nice and don't make many loud noises this morning.  Last night's debacle in New Hampshire was enough to provoke the most committed, teetotaling Republican to down a fifth of Jim Beam, straight and hot.

Let's get the candidates who have absolutely no chance off the table first.  They may be around for the next seven months or so, but once the buses leave South Carolina, they will be gone.

Herman Cain is a condescending jerk who has a bunch of ideas, and absolutely no idea how to make them work in the context of Government.  His skill set requires the absolute authority of a business executive, not a contentious Congress.  Cain is one bad interview from gone.  He's smug, arrogant, and the wrong color to get any traction with the full Republican electorate.

Ron Paul is a great cult figure, but that is exactly what he will remain.  His greatest obstacle is that he speaks the language of his cult.  The rest of us are sitting there listening to the theme from The Twilight Zone going through our heads.  He's not going away, but he is unlikely to connect with more than the ten to fifteen percent of the Republican Party that he already holds. 

Rick Santorum has one major problem which will not go away: he was thrown out by the voters in purple Pennsylvania.  The Keystone State leans slightly blue, but you would be hard pressed to know it because they will pick some of the most conservative candidates known to God or man.  If Santorum could not hold Pennsylvania, how in the world does he expect to hold Ohio or Florida?  He should run out of money before long.

Tim Pawlenty has more than one issue which will not go away.  He has a competitor from his home state in Michelle Bachmann.  He looks enough like Rick Santorum that their respective wives could view the photograph and ask, "What's wrong with this photo of my husband?"  By screwing with Romney, he has tinkled in the Rotarian Republicans' corn flakes.  And he is almighty dull.  He might last until Super Tuesday as the non-Mormon version of Romney.

The scariest moment your Wandering Gentile had while watching the debate was looking at Newt Gingrich and thinking, good Lord, he's the best one up there.  His answers were comparatively clear and articulate.  He showed a sense of having an idea of how to do things.  Hell, Gingrich was Clinton's tough old adversary, and almost worthy of nostalgia.

Newt Gingrich also sounds like a capon being strangled, and Romney does competent equally well.

Mitt Romney looked better.  He was clear, concise, articulate, and he is blessed with one of the better speaking voices in a party filled with men who sound as if they are waiting for puberty.  He is a little bit less dull than Pawlenty, who remains his closest competitor on the issues.  He was the best communicator on the stage on 13 June.

Michelle Bachmann was the other candidate who mattered. With her unofficial declaration as a candidate, she slapped the elephant in the room in the tusks. The elephant in the room is Sarah Palin. 

Palin will be the shadow over any candidate on the stage until she formally declares her decision.  Her name recognition exceeds that of Mitt Romney.  Palin has a national apparatus in place waiting for her to jump in, and by avoiding the early debates, she is finally listening to the wisest advice she could get: Better to be silent and considered to be a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.

The last thing Sarah Palin needs right now is a lucky punch from a second tier candidate that lays her candidacy on the ground.  The only ones who could get that in might be Gingrich or Santorum.  In spite of their being insufferable, the two of them are also much smarter than Governor Palin.  Santorum and his ideological twin Bachmann have the most to gain by the absence of Palin.  They are similarly paleoconservative in philosophy, and Bachmann has an outside chance of winning the nomination compared to Romney.

What one should watch for in the short term of this most off of off-years follows.

There will be attrition in the very near term of candidates with little or no traction.  Cain, Gingrich, and Santorum do not appear to have very strong campaigns and may not make it to Iowa.  The heat and light Pawlenty needs to grow in Minnesota will be consumed by Michelle Bachmann competing for much of the same supporters.

Ron Paul's supporters will be a spoiler, and will likely go to ABR, i.e., anyone but Romney.

If Michelle Bachmann gains traction over the next three months, she will serve as Palin's surrogate.  That is all Michelle Bachmann will ever be.  She lacks adequate name recognition, and she is unlikely to build a national base beyond those who would have written Palin in, anyway.

Look for Palin to get in late, possibly as late as December 1.  This keeps her out of debates where she has always done poorly, but leaves her viable in the Iowa caucuses.  Michelle Bachmann holds the enthusiasm of Iowa congressman Steve King, which puts Tim Pawlenty at a huge disadvantage.

Mitt Romney will continue as the moderate alternative to Bachmann Palin overdrive.  The fatal error that Romney's campaign will make is that he will continue to run to the right.  Romney's problem is that he is not credible as a paleoconservative, not if he had a successful career achieving statewide office in Massachusetts.  Indeed, the waning support for the tea parties indicates that he would have a chance as a moderate in the general election.

However, in order to get to the general election, one must cater to the party's base.  And that base will prefer someone with a better set of credentials as a Conservative, be it Bachmann, or more likely, Palin.  Mitt Romney would be well served by campaigning for the Vice-Presidency, because Governor Palin has a history of not bearing up well under scrutiny from the national press.

The future of the Republican Party will be dependent upon the strength of bringing moderates into the fold. 

It shall be seen if they remain to do so in 2016. 

The Wandering Gentile: A Vlog post!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByJr-1LW6XY&sns=fbe Wandering Gentile: A Vlog post!

Is Palin Running?

Of course Sarah Palin is running for President.

For all of Palin's vast inadequacies, she does one thing with exceptional competence: campaign.  Please do not confuse this with actual capability, intelligence, or the capacity to guide even the smallest jurisdiction in a direction which will lead to prosperity or providence.  She runs because she has been running for the last 30 years.

A marathon runner has the physical fitness to be the Center of a soccer team.  That runner may not have the ball-handling skills that a pudgy, chain-smoking roofer from Tegucigalpa has, though.  Endurance and speed may bring the opportunity for more goals, but without someone with ball-handling skill, all it means is a lot of running around on one end of the field.  Not a lot of goals will be scored.

It is time to watch Palin the marathonner.  In this realm, she shines.  Politics requires endurance.  If one tires out the opposition, one can cruise right up to the goal and tap the ball in.

Endurance is one tactic which works a majority of the time.  It does not work on the greats, because they have endurance too.  Thousands of Soccer players fell trying to wear Pele out, and just when it looked as if Pele were finished, he bicycled the ball into the goal.

Barack Obama is the Pele of American Presidential Politics, maybe with a little bit of Beckham's curving kick to go along for good measure. 

In other words, Obama puts points on the scoreboard. 

Mrs. Palin is running, and she's looking for the Republican nomination.  The one person who will be most drastically affected by this is Mitt Romney, because he will be the frontrunner until maybe ten seconds after Palin officially announces.  Michelle Bachmann will be annoyed, but she is not going to do much besides pout.  Herman Cain will be a bit fussy, but frankly, he's the wrong color to ever pull more than 15% of the Republican electorate. 

The announcement will be later than sooner.  This is the slowest period in American politics, and Palin is an adept campaigner.  The time will be used to shore up the huge negatives Palin has with independents and moderates, and give a strong look at which of the lackluster candidates for the nomination as to who would make the best Vice-Presidential nominee.

Palin's short list should include, but not be limited to anyone already declared.  A guess says that she may pick a running mate from a traditionally Democratic state-Chris Christie, Paul LePage, and Michelle Bachmann would add regional strength without losing appeal to her base in the deep south.

It will be asked if Palin can win the nomination.  That question is akin to asking if the sun will rise tomorrow. 

Palin, for her lack of goodwill among moderates and independents, is still considered to be "accomplished" by the base of the Republican Party.  One other factor is not popping up that may well prove to be the Republicans' downfall in 2012.

It does not appear that the Democrats will present a serious primary challenge to President Obama next year.   That leverages a number of primary voters which might be caught in an internecine debate about the direction of the Democratic Party to pursue a challenge which would make for a compelling contrast of ideas and realizations.

No Soccer fan wants to watch meaningless contest.  But people who care little for the sport might enjoy a championship match involving the rivalry (think Red Sox and Yankees with violence) between Manchester United and Liverpool.

Democrats have the chance to bring up the most despised rival in Sarah Palin if she is on the ballot.

Republicans have more to lose in the near future from a Palin candidacy than gain.  Palin's endorsement, along with identity as part of the Tea Party, managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in at least half a dozen mid-term contests last year.  The paleoconservatism of the quasipopulist Tea Party movement found little traction outside of the deep south. 

More moderate populations are expressing a deep buyers remorse for movement candidates like Rick Scott, John Kasich, and Scott Walker.  A Palin candidacy has the chance to make those contrasts much clearer.

In the long run, Republicans would be better served with a Palin candidacy now as part of a long-term restructuring to bring the party closer to the middle where elections are won and lost.  It is territory where Democrats dwelled for the period from late 1979 to the middle of 1992.  Without some sort of outreach to the middle, the Republican Party is doomed by demographics as well as policy.

The age and ethnicity of the current Republican voter is well over 40 and overwhelmingly white.  Educational attainment is also inferior to that of those preferring Democrats.  Income levels and net worth are metrics leading to a conclusion that the Republican party as we know it will not survive much past 2020, if at all.

Republican leadership knows this.  This is why a Palin candidacy for the nomination will succeed.  An explicit show of support empowers the ability to jettison the component which provides little value to continued success.  There is no longer an ability to survive on smaller pieces of pie.  They now have to make more pie.

And the fastest way to do that will be to get Sarah Palin away from the oven.

The New Calendar Arrives

If the Obama administration were a baseball game, taking Osama bin Laden out is a fifteen-run fourth inning in a game he was winning 7-3.  Make that 22-3 now. 

In one weekend, the instant replay showed that the ball hooked fair around the Pesky pole (ask a Red Sox fan about this particular obstacle at Fenway Park), by dragging out the original birth certificate signed by his mother's OB in Honolulu.  Then within hours, the Internet lit up like a Bush Family midnight visit to Baghdad. Osama, the infernal boogeyman of the last twenty years, was dead.

There are those who will argue that eliminating bin Laden may not have been legal.  A description of that particular mindset contains language which is not appropriate here.

When one commits an act of war upon a nation, confesses, and declares oneself to be the accountable party of the body committing the act of war, one becomes an enemy combatant.  That is cut and dried.  Whether or not the culpable party has the official backing of a nation-state or functions as a privateer is not relevant.

The tacit approval of several countries with Islamic majorities is apparent-particularly Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the former Taliban Regime in Afghanistan.  The implied, as opposed to express support saves a major city in any of those countries from becoming a parking lot. The fact that bin Laden was in Pakistan was troubling due to the fact that Pakistan is a nuclear power.

Remember the old Bush-era spectre of our only warning being a mushroom cloud over a major city?  Pakistan has the tools to make that happen.  Osama bin Laden was not hiding from the Pakistanis.

Indeed, it is pretty evident that the compound was out of the ordinary and the locals knew something was up.  There was somebody high enough up in the Pakistani command apparatus to make sure he stayed off the radar.  It is not entirely unbelieveable that someone with that kind of clout has access to tools and codes, the kind which make mass murder a one-stop affair.

Sometimes it is as simple as "it was him or us."  Bin Laden wasn't remarkably original in his target selection, which leads to the conclusion that New York and Washington were, if not the two leading targets, in the top three. 

The Obama Administration, in two and a half years of being a little less heinous in their practices compared to the Bush Administration, managed to neutralize Osama bin Laden without the use of "extraordinary rendition."  The euphemism is still offensive.

For the cost of a 24-man Seal Team, one Black Hawk stealth helicopter, and retraining one clumsy whirlybird pilot, they got Osama. All told, a bit over 60 million dollars, including ruined hardware. That is still real money, but a whole lot less real than three trillion dollars, 5000 servicepeople dead, seven-and-a-half YEARS without neutralizing the original objective, and the nation's reputation as a fair broker stuffed down a commode.

It was, mathematically speaking, like replacing an ugly $50,000 car that sits inoperable in the driveway and periodically eats a young family member, with a brand new sportscar which was purchased for ten cents, gets to the desired destination...and 38 miles per gallon.

This puts the national security aspect into dollars and cents-mostly cents.  Twenty cents a person is what the mission cost, belying the costs of the security mechanisms built under the George W. Bush administration.  The plot wasn't even new-it merely lacked Chuck Norris or Charles Bronson and Martin Balsam as the designated Jew from being culled from a Golan-Globus film of the mid-eighties.  (Which one? ALL OF THEM.)

Afghanistan  has returned to comparitive irrelevance.  Pakistan has proved to be an unreliable partner.  Iraq is as progressive friends advised nine years ago, superfluous and should not have been our problem.  The Southern border with Mexico was much less vulnerable than the comparably porous Northern border with Canada, which has a fairly open immigration policy with Pakistan.

In other words, every "Security" Republican's credibility has been effectively destroyed.  There is no unnecessarily elaborate Dr. Evil/Bond Villain death involved, no monologue, just the Osama cocktail, two shots and a splash of water.

There is a sentiment among a part of both the progressive and conservative communities alike that bin Laden should have been tried.  It is fair to characterize this viewpoint as an outlier.  There is no necessity in putting the people of New York, Washington, London, Madrid, or even The Hague through reliving the horrors of Osama's confessed crimes.  Nor is there a particularly compelling reason to make any of those cities a target for bin Laden's associates.  If he wanted a trial, bin Laden had ten years to surrender.

The incontrovertible truth is that Osama bin Laden was an armed, dangerous fugitive who had ample opportunity to solicit a fair hearing and supply his followers with a litany of propaganda.  He did not choose that route.

The Pakistanis will bear watching, but for now the intelligence gathered from bin Laden's computer files should prove to be very fruitful for American and allied intelligence services.  There could be up to a terabyte of plans and contact information.  All of bin Laden's now-known accomplices should be watching over their shoulders.

They will not anticipate when the visit comes from the CIA, MI6, or the Mossad.  These are not nice people, and they do not have nice tasks, but they are also a sad necessity of last resort.

As for those who prospered from bin Laden's continued existence, there is a huge vacuum where the monster, the destroyer lived.  These are people who profit from fear and loathing of the other.  A large component of those belong to the Republican Party in the United States.

Already, two viable candidates for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination have decided against entering the field.  One of them is Mike Huckabee, which should be sufficient to provoke jubilation in the Obama camp.  The other, Donald Trump, is a polarizing figure who would have done more to destroy the Republican party than promote it.  That job will now go to Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann.

Budget and security policy likewise inhabit a changed territory.  When the argument existed that legislative activity contributed significantly to the well-being of the nation and its citizens, it was not possible to prove a negative...nor is it ever.  In a landscape where effectiveness can be measured against a result, it becomes imperative that the whole shebang (a technical term) goes back on the table to see what can be disposed of.

This will require a Republican of stature serving in a weak district to happen before 2013.  Should no agreement be found, the death of Osama bin Laden may prove to be what fragments the Republican-Libertarian coalition in American politics.  It exists as a point of the deficit being unmanageable without an identifiable symbol at which resources may be directed. 

In other words, the Democratic Party has the opportunity to say "We are the party which wants to leave you alone and stop costing you money," to the vast majority of Americans.  They now have the leverage to show how that will be accomplished, and the credibility of action and results.

Oh, how one yearns to use the Anglo-Saxon vulgarity which is applicable to the condition of al Qaeda and the Republican party alike.

The Parable of Republican Fiscal Responsibility

A Republican goes on vacation.  A thousand miles from home he decides he wants a bacon sandwich.

So the Republican spends thirty dollars renting a car.  He spends an hour of time and and three gallons of gas searching for a supermarket.  At the supermarket he spends ten dollars on bacon, mayonnaise and bread. 

The Republican makes a huge mess in the hotel microwave for the maid to clean up.  She will not be tipped because the Republican presumes her to be illegal, despite the fact that she is blond, 6'6" tall, and named for her legal immigrant grandmother, Inga.

The Republican realizes that he has no method for taking care of the bacon and the mayonnaise, so he drives out to the truck stop and buys a portable cooler for a hundred dollars.

After the end of his three day visit, The Republican has a cooler he cannot take on the flight back, filled with food which, while not spoiled, is more than he requires.

Giving the surplus food to people who haven't got enough to eat goes against The Republican's work ethic, so he sticks it in the commercial waste-collection dumpster at the hotel.  The cooler, likewise, is not something which can be allowed into other hands, for fear that it may be repurposed for some nefarious end.

So the Republican stands at the airport, proud and pleased that the sandwich itself only cost two dollars.  But he wasted $158 to make that two dollar sandwich.

A Democrat is on vacation. A thousand miles from home, he decides he wants a bacon sandwich.  The Democrat walks to a nearby restaurant and asks for a bacon sandwich.  When he is done eating, he gives the waitress about seven dollars, including tip. 

The Republican shakes his head in amazement at how wasteful the Democrat is, when the Democrat could have done the job himself.