Gingrich, Romney, Trump Monopolize Media; Santorum Keeps Campaigning

Posted on | February 3, 2012 | 39 Comments

“[Obama] made the claim that his policies of taxing the rich is authorized by the Bible. That he is doing what is biblically called for by taxing the rich, by having the government tax the rich. Now, I’ve read the Bible, and I must have missed that passage. . . . This is an administration that attacks religion, and then tries to cloak itself in religion in order to take your money.”
– Rick Santorum, Thursday in Fallon, Nevada

“Sincerity is the important thing on TV. A presidential candidate should at least seem to believe what he’s saying — even if it’s all stone crazy.”
– Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72

If you’ve been watching Fox News lately, you are perhaps aware that the “fair and balanced” network has jumped onto the same bandwagon as most of the rest of the major media: The GOP presidential campaign is now a two-man race between the frontrunners, Mitt and Newt.

This was evidently the narrative the media wanted back in December, before Rick Santorum shocked the world with his astonishing surge to victory in Iowa — a result that was immediately dismissed as a fluke by the media, so that they could get back to telling you about the two-man frontrunner race they had decided on weeks earlier.

That Fox is part of this media bandwagon is a fact I note in passing, while pointing out what was obvious to me long ago: Newt can’t beat Mitt.

It can’t happen and won’t happen, and those conservatives who believe they can make it happen are engaged in a type of behavior that Ace of Spades has called “wishcasting” — the idea that you can do anything you want to do, if only you wish and hope and believe in it enough.

There are many reasons why the seemingly possible dream of a Newt nomination is actually less practically feasible than the admittedly long-shot chance of an unexpected comeback by Rick Santorum. Most of these reasons have to do with Newt’s biography and character: His personal flaws and failings, which are well known even to his supporters, but which he (and they) suppose will be ignored by undecided voters who are less ideological than themselves because, doggone it, he has such great ideas!

You see a bit of this admiration for Newt’s ideas in Karl Rove’s campaign critique, where he faults Romney for relying too heavily on the “successful businesman” biographical narrative. But the problem for Newt is that, beyond his career as a leader of conservative Republicans, his biographical narrative is a major net negative. Even if Republican primary voters could overlook everything else, Gingrich’s two divorces are the kind of “baggage” that he can’t possibly carry to the White House.

Now, maybe you’ve got a divorce or two under your own belt and wish to believe that the American people would be willing to overlook this element of Gingrich’s biographical narrative — but this belief is only possible if you assume that most people share your own vehement opposition to Obama and would be willing to ignore the messy details of Newt’s narrative.

Please see R. Emmett Tyrrell’s column last week on that subject. Furthermore, let’s quote Tyrrell’s column this week:

Ah, yes, Newt Gingrich did in the last days of the Florida primary precisely what I predicted he would do. He hurled wild charges at Mitt Romney that suggested Newt was losing his grip. He charged Romney with lying and falling into the hands of George Soros and Goldman Sachs, and he did this while seeking the Republican presidential nomination!
Newt quoted Soros as saying, “We think either Obama or Romney’s fine, but Gingrich, he would change things.” Citing Goldman Sachs’ profiting from the bailout, he linked the Wall Street firm to anti-Gingrich ads, filling in the dots: “Those ads,” he averred, “are your money recycled to attack me.” On Sunday, he suggested that Rick Santorum drop out of the race and support him. Santorum had left the campaign trail to be with his desperately ill daughter. That is the kind of grace we have come to expect from Gingrich, who, by the way, supplied no evidence of Goldman Sachs’ or of Soros’s aiding Romney.

The astute reader will perhaps perceive that the esteemed editor of The American Spectator relied on his shoe-leather man’s reporting from Newt’s Fort Myers “Fear and Loathing” rally, a service I was more than happy to provide, and which in turn involves a debt to the good readers who hit the tip jar for the Florida trip.

Ideology vs. Biography

My conservative friends who don’t like Tyrrell’s take on the Gingrich campaign will, however, find it difficult to denounce him as spineless soulmate of David Brooks. Bob Tyrrell is no RINO, he just damn well knows that Newt couldn’t withstand the media scrutiny of a general election campaign against Obama.

The obverse of that coin is perhaps less apparent to most conservatives who like Gingrich for his “grandiose” ideas and are thus engaged in a wishcasting campaign on Newt’s behalf. Conservatives who don’t like Rick Santorum will immediately cite as their primary objections those elements of Santorum’s political career (e.g., his votes for No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D, his 2004 endorsement of Arlen Specter) which are only objectionable to conservative Republicans like themselves.

Would these ideological deviations be a liability in a general election? Not in the least, and Santorum’s conservative critics don’t even pretend they would. And the attractiveness of Santorum’s biographical narrative — devout Catholic family man, grandson of an Italian immigrant coal miner — even his conservative critics cannot deny. To accept Santorum as the more plausible of the two remaining conservative “Not Romney” candidates, however, would demand of these ideologues an unacceptable confession: Ideas aren’t everything in politics.

We are guilty of “wishcasting” if we ignore the obvious fact that many voters are grossly superficial in the way they look at elections. All you have to do to understand this, however, is to take seriously what independent voters always say: “I vote for the man, not the party.”

These voters are foolish, of course. They naively believe that they can assess “the man” running for president based on what they gather of his personal character by watching him on TV.

Independent voters are generally, as numerous studies have shows, the least-informed segment of the electorate. Their knowledge of policy issues is almost non-existent, and they are more interested in the fortunes of their favorite sports teams (or favorite American Idol contestants) than they are in the arguments for or against building the Keystone pipeline.

Independent voters are seldom a factor in primary elections, and only rarely play a role in off-year elections, in “backlash” years like 1966, 1978, 1994, 2006 or 2010, sparked by the presidential administration’s overreach. Independent voters usually pay no significant attention to politics except in the final weeks of a presidential campaign, when they see the two candidates on TV and decide — on the entirely superficial impressions conveyed by television — which of them seems less threatening and/or more trustworthy.

If you think those kinds of voters will pick Newt Gingrich over Barack Obama, seek professional help immediately. You’re delusional.

A Comic Episode on the Campaign Trail

You can defend your delusions in the comments, but I frankly didn’t intend to write a mini-essay on this subject when I woke up this morning. Rather, the plan was to aggregate some Big Headlines about the campaign, preparatory to making another push for Rick Santorum. So now the Big Headlines:

The Trump trap
– Washington Post

Romney playing with Trump-brand fire?
– Politico

Gingrich Camp Errs; Trump to Back Romney
– Wall Street Journal

Trump Bails On Newt, Reportedly Will
Now Endorse Mitt. Jen Rubin Hit Hardest
– AOSHQ

Only in this craziest of crazy campaign years could a comic episode be so perfectly scripted: When Trump flew into Vegas on Wednesday night, some of Newt’s crew thought he was coming to endorse their guy before Saturday’s Nevada caucuses and they pushed this angle to the media. For a few hours, therefore, the pro-Gingrich people were praising Trump as a patriotic tribune of the people, a genuine populist hero, while the pro-Romney people were denouncing Trump as a shallow self-promoting vulgarian. And then it was learned that, no, The Donald came to Vegas to throw his celebrity weight behind Mitt, at which point Newt’s people regretted their previous praise for Trump, and the Romney people began attempting to explain the upside of the shallow self-promoting vulgarian’s support.

Meanwhile, almost entirely off the media radar, Rick Santorum was announcing his campaign schedule in Missouri, Colorado and Minnesota, which includes a trip to the factory that makes his sweater vests:

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum plans to attend a pancake breakfast Sunday before visiting Bemidji Woolen Mills and giving a campaign speech.
According to an email from Santorum’s campaign, the former Pennsylvania senator will visit the St. Philip’s Catholic Church pancake breakfast at 12:30 p.m. Sunday.
He will tour Bemidji Woolen Mills, manufacturer for the candidate’s official sweater vest, at 1 p.m. and attend a rally at 2:30 p.m. in the Sanford Center.

That story from the Bemidji Pioneer didn’t make the headlines at Drudge, and you probably won’t hear much about it on Fox News or talk radio. Nor, for that matter, will Fox News make much of the fact that Gingrich isn’t even on the ballot in Missouri. For whatever reason — and they must have reasons, although they have never bothered to explain them — the executives who call the shots at Fox have decreed that the battle for the Republican nomination is now entirely a frontrunner fight between Mitt and Newt, and everything that might distract from that narrative is to be shoved aside.

The Medium, the Message, the Messengers

Conservatives have spent years decrying the biases of the liberal mainstream media. But when this campaign is over, if conservatives find themselves once more saddled with a Republican nominee not of their choosing, perhaps it will be time to begin considering the question of whether “media bias” is a problem that transcends ideological categories. That is to say, as Marshall McLuhan famously put it, the medium is the message, and TV people are TV people, regardless of whether they are liberal or conservative.

Television requires certain elements in order to be good TV. Dramatic conflict makes for good TV and (if I can engage in a mind-reading guesswork) the executives at Fox News see the fight between the bombastic Gingrich and the slick Romney as good TV. Both of these candidates were already “celebrities” to the network’s GOP-leaning audience before the campaign ever began, whereas Santorum was comparatively obscure.

So every time Rick Santorum manages to force himself into the story, the executives at Fox News curse their misfortune: He’s messing up their narrative, distracting from the storyline they’ve spent weeks crafting for their viewers. And if you have no special reason to view Fox with a critical eye, you probably don’t notice their reluctance to take Santorum’s campaign seriously, or to speculate about the reasons for that reluctance.

Everyone has biases and prejudices — far be it from the Future U.S. Ambassador to Vanuatu to claim selfless objectivity — but the biases and prejudices of network news executives have the power to produce self-fulfilling prophecies. Everytime you see Chris Stirewalt or Brit Hume mutter on Fox that Santorum can’t raise enough money to be a contender, you are in effect being told: “Don’t give money to Santorum. He can’t win.” And when that message is broadcast repeatedly to a nationwide audience of millions, it amounts to a pre-emptive effort to strangle the Santorum campaign, which is exactly the desired effect.

“Make that pesky underdog go away,” Stirewalt and Hume are telling you, “so we can get back to telling you about the exciting drama of the Newt-versus-Mitt frontrunner fight.”

What they are not telling you, however, is what they know as well as I do: Newt can’t beat Mitt, and so the “exciting drama” of the frontrunner fight for the GOP nomination — if they can ever finish strangling Santorum’s campaign — will be a swift and decisive victory for Romney. And then Fox News can move on to telling you about the exciting drama of the general election campaign between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

Let’s face it: The folks at Fox are as tired of this primary campaign as you are. They’re itching to get on to the Big Show. Their expense-paid trips to the Republican National Convention in Tampa are a done deal, anyway.

However, unlike you — the average conservative Republican voter — the folks at Fox don’t really give a damn who wins in November. When the election is over, no matter whether Obama is re-elected, the folks at Fox will still get paid to be on TV, and their ratings might actually be higher in a second term for President Obama than they would be in a first term for President Romney. (Recall that MSNBC got a ratings bump during Bush’s second term, when the resentments of disgruntled left-wing moonbats made Keith Olbermann a minor celebrity for a few years.)

Their Biases and Mine

Let me acknowledge that there is an unavoidable element of self-interest reflected in my criticism of Fox. Several years ago, in one of my first arguments with Conor Friedersdorf, I accused him of “insufficient cynicism,” being guilty of the naive True Believer mentality that warps the political thinking of young idealists and other fools.

Wise men recognize the extent to which their own self-interests influence their political opinions. So it is with me. Being temperamentally unsuited to life within the confines of bureaucratic institutions, I am inarguably prejudiced in favor of liberty, seeking the kind of dynamic and unregulated society in which there is opportunity for a man averse to the paperwork and red tape — applying for licenses and permits — which the 21st-century Managerial State necessarily imposes as what economists call “barriers to entry” into the marketplace.

Digital technology has permitted me to compete, in a minor way, with the bureaucratic institutions of journalism where I spent more than two decades of my life as an often disruptive employee, subject to the discipline of those more temperamentally suited to the managerial tasks required by any complex enterprise. Even a medium-sized daily newspaper requires the services of many such people, whose aptitude for management almost always coincides with the sense that someone like me needs to be controlled and carefully supervised, lest he say or do something that would disrupt or embarrass the organization.

It took me a long, long time to analyze and fully accept this understanding of my career predicament, and even longer to find a way out of it — namely, this wild-ass second career as a Road Man for the Lords of Karma. Some third phase of my career may loom ahead, shrouded in the misty fog, but for now I’m just hurtling along in the same haphazard high-speed manner I’ve been traveling these past four years. And I cheerfully acknowledge the cynical fact that this freelance existence biases my opinions about everything, including the cosmic significance of Vanuatu, Crucial Linch-Pin of the South Pacific.

Other journalists have the luxury of never having been required to examine the element of self-interest in their political attitudes. If you’re pulling down six figures in a political-news gig at a TV network, the last thing in the world you want to do is to damage your reputation by suggesting something crazy like the idea that a low-budget underdog candidate currently running a distant third in the national polls could actually be a stronger contender than the famous frontrunner your network has been touting as the Last Hope of Conservatism.

Outside the Box, or Just Plain Crazy?

This off-the-wall idea — that Santorum, and not Gingrich, is the strongest alternative to Romney — could never possibly occur to someone whose self-interest required him to say only Things That Make Logical Sense.

As much as people in the business world talk glibly about the importance of”thinking outside the box,” they are prone to mockery of unusual ideas, and the news business is like every other business in this regard. Just as no one in 2008 would have imagined I could hustle up enough PayPal contributions from blog readers to fund the long four-state campaign-trail trip from Iowa to Florida, neither can they permit themselves to wonder if I might be onto something when I suggest that Newt’s current “frontrunner” status is far more fragile than it looks.

Newt’s campaign can only survive a few more humiliating defeats before it implodes from the enormous weight of its utter implausibility. Whereas by contrast, Santorum has always been a long shot. Santorum’s expectations are lower, and he is therefore able to “succeed” with results that would be a bitter disappointment to the supporters of a big-budget frontrunner like Newt.

Gingrich will get stomped Saturday in Nevada. A few weeks from now, when Gingrich’s supporters have seen their man defeated over and over, without a significant win since South Carolina, Newt will quit and endorse Romney.

That prediction may look crazy now, but remember that Tim Pawlenty — who was once the most prominent Conservative Alternative to Romney — did exactly that after he placed third in the Ames straw poll.

Crazy, as I say, and I can get away with making that kind of crazy prediction because I’m just some dude out here in the blogosphere, rather than a prestigious TV personality whose self-interest requires that he say only Things That Make Logical Sense.

Where Will You Be Next Friday?

In order to be a voice crying in the wilderness, you first have to be willing to go out into the wilderness. That’s true for me, and it’s also true for Rick Santorum, who stuck to his guns on social issues, and then waited patiently and prayerfully for an opportunity he hoped would come.

Has he hoped in vain?

Rick Santorum will speak at CPAC next week, at 10:25 Friday morning, and let me conclude this 3,000-word rambling discourse with yet another crazy idea: How many thousands of people would take a one-day trip to Washington, D.C., to pack that ballroom with cheering supporters for Rick Santorum?

How many pro-lifers are within driving distance of D.C.? How many conservative Catholics? How many evangelical home-schoolers? How many people who like what Rick Santorum says about getting tough on Iran?

A three-day pass to CPAC costs $195, or $125 if you are a military veteran or active-duty personnel, or $35 for students. So let me ask you — all you people who believe that America is not just another place on the map, but a providential nation founded with an eye toward the purposes of our Creator — this simple question: Do you think it would be worth your time, effort and money to be there on Friday morning in the Marriott Ballroom, to make a show of force on behalf of Rick Santorum?

How far would you have to drive? How much time at work would you miss? How much would you spend on gas or a plane ticket, to be there Friday morning in Washington, D.C.?

Is it worth it to you?

This is a question only you can answer, but I can tell you what it would be worth to Rick Santorum. I’m told on good authority that CPAC has received more than 400 applications for media credentials, and another 350 requests for credentials from bloggers. All of those reporters and bloggers will be there in D.C. next Friday morning to see what kind of reception Rick Santorum gets at CPAC.

And I know that there must be many thousands of you Santorum supporters out there reading this who could be there next Friday if you really wanted to be there, and I know that such a show of force would make a huge difference in how the media perceives Santorum’s CPAC speech.

So here you see one of those rare opportunities when what Ace derides as “wishcasting” can actually happen, when ordinary people can make a difference if only they will have the courage to act on their beliefs.

In my mind’s eye, dear reader, I can imagine the scene next Friday morning when — in a shock to the entire media establishment — a veritable army comes marching into the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel with one mission uniting them: To show the world that they support Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign.

Not only can I imagine you as a member of Santorum’s army, giving him a thunderous ovation in that crowded ballroom, but I can see the reporters afterwards scrambling around the hotel corridors to interview people wearing Santorum stickers and Santorum T-shirts and Santorum sweater vests and carrying Santorum signs.

And it may be, dear reader, that one of these reporters will ask you for an interview. “Who are you? Where did you come from? Why are you here?” Tell them: “I am a soldier in Santorum’s army, and I came here to support the man who is going to be the next President of the United States.”

They won’t believe you, of course. But neither would they believe that there was any significance to yesterday’s earthquake in Vanuatu.

“Everybody is guilty of some transgression somewhere against conservatism . . . except Santorum.”
– Rush Limbaugh, Monday, Jan. 30, 2012

I’ll see you at CPAC, dear reader.

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