South Carolina Primary Day: Before My Saturday Afternoon Nap in Charleston

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The National Affairs Desk, 8 p.m. Friday, Jan. 20, 2012.
Squinting at my computer screen while blogging about Will Folks.

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C.
Last night I lost my temper and blew up at Ben Howe, who was defending Erick Erickson’s pro-Perry bias as if it were an inconsequential thing to be shrugged off, despite its disastrous impact on the Republican primary campaign. There was a bit of back-and-forth and obviously, I recognized that Ben was arguing as a special pleader, obligated by the duties of loyalty to defend his Red State boss. But I was also personally invested, having predicted the failure of the “Phantom Menace” — and the likely consequences of that failure — before the fateful launch of the Perry bandwagon.

“What I fear will happen is that Perry will spend several months sucking up media oxygen and burning through GOP donor cash, only to collapse early next year. This will have the effect of suffocating other conservative candidates, and thereby lead to … Romney 2012.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Aug. 9, 2011

My argument Friday night with Howe was one of those situations where wisdom would have advised, “Drop it. It’s not worth arguing about. Agree to disagree.” But sleep deprivation and too much coffee had made me irritable, and Howe seemed to me to be disingenuously dismissive of Red State’s complicity in the Perry debacle.

On the one hand, you see, Red State constantly boasts of its enormous influence among the conservative grassroots. But on the other hand, having spent many months trying to convince the grassroots that the Smilin’ Texan was The Only Man Who Can Beat Romney, now Howe was trying to pretend that this catastrophic misuse of Red State’s influence was something trivial, and that Erickson should not be held accountable for it. Tired of Howe’s refusal to acknowledge the importance of Erickson’s role, and the enormous responsibility thus borne by Perry’s leading New Media advocates, I finally blew my top when Ben mockingly asked why Erickson should ‘fess up to his error.

“BECAUSE HE WAS F–KING WRONG, AND I WAS F–KING RIGHT, AND HE WON’T F–KING ADMIT IT, THAT’S WHY!”

And then I walked out to have a cigarette and regain my composure. My sudden outburst of rage was embarrassing, despite my own certainty about the essential point: Being right should count for something in the realm of political punditry.

Perry’s botched candidacy had enormous consequences: It discouraged other candidates (including Sarah Palin) from entering the race, it encouraged Tim Pawlenty to quit the race, it robbed Michele Bachmann of the boost she otherwise would have gained for winning the Ames Straw Poll and it prevented anyone from noticing the surprisingly strong fourth-place finish at Ames by Santorum’s low-budget campaign.

Well, I could write a book about all that, but I felt like an idiot for blowing up at Ben Howe, erupting in a fury like Hitler in a Downfall parody.  I should have just walked away and let the topic drop, but didn’t. So I mention it here only as a “colorful highlight” and will drop it now to give you some of the latest headlines via Memeorandum:

Gingrich Is Well-Positioned
as South Carolina Votes
— New York Times

Doubts creep in as an awkward Mitt Romney
tries not to lose the GOP nod
— The Hill

Poll shows big swing as S.C. votes
— CBS News

Mitt Romney Campaign Begins Preparing
For Possible South Carolina Loss
— Huffington Post

America hates Newt Gingrich
— The Washington Examiner

Here’s video of Craig Robinson interviewing Rick Santorum last night:

Santorum’s party tonight will be at the Citadel in Charleston, while the other candidates will all be having their Primary Night events in Columbia. If Perry’s supporters are in a mood to celebrate tonight, they should go to the party thrown by the Romney campaign, to which they unwittingly lent such valuable assistance.

“Howdy. Thank you, Erick.”

Now I’ve got to take a nap, so I don’t get irritable again. I’m so tired I almost forgot the Five Most Important Words in the English Language: Hit the freaking tip jar!




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52 comments

  2. “Boss” might not be the right term for Erick “I don’t like it when people say mean things about me” Erickson…

    “Shot-caller” might be more accurate.

  4. Perfectly understandable outburst.

    One hopes Mr. Howe understands that your anger was directed at him and is forgiving, especially as I can see that you are remorseful over having put him in an awkward situation.

    These things happen when so much is at stake.  Look at some of the vitriol going on here in the Comments section between people who normally get along.

    You’re doing a great job, Stacy.  As one of your donors, I’m sure I’m not alone in knowing I’m getting more than my money’s worth.

    WOLVERINES!

  6. Redstate has no credibility anymore.  10 minutes of looking at Perry’s TX record shows his running as a tea party conservative was a joke, and would cripple any momentum better candidates could build against Romney. 

  7. Is that a Blue Moon?  Lawsy, Stacy.  Come to Shreveport and I’ll introduce you to my friend Sam Adams.

  8. Howe is one of the better writers at Redstate, though that’s not saying much.  The problem with it is that it confused its popularity as a forum for popularity for its writers, and thought it could build support on the basis of its writers credibility.  That doesn’t work anymore, as National Review is learning with its support for Romney. 

  10. Dented shields, fallen pennants, broken lances.

    Such is coin of the realm for primary politics, especially prior to an important general.

    But I do hope you haven’t deluded yourself that you’ve been error free.

    You complain that Perry wasted time.  True enough.  But then again Perry didn’t understand that there were a host of issues upon which he was ill-prepared to debate.

    But what of Cain?

    What purpose did Cain ever serve?

    Now compounding his folly, he appears on that idiot Colbert’s show!

    Bachmann, a woman who has only won two Congressional races, dares to presume that she’s ready to assume leadership obligations of the free world, —————- the free fucking world!

    We’ve ALL had our time wasted this last year.

    But then again, bear in mind that it was the GOP establishment and the auxiliaries of the Romney campaign who did so much keeping much more prepared Republican Governors out of the race altogether.

  12. Perry wasn’t beaten on issues; he was beaten on soundbites. If that’s what’s important, then expect an endless stream of Obamas, and the death of elections.

  15. Stacy, you and Barry Manilow have a similarity.  He writes the songs (that makes Oprah and the whole world sing) but he did not sell or buy the billions of hamburgers that MacDonalds sold (only one of the Corporations that bought his songs).

    Likewise you and the bloggers helped (maybe) push a politico this way or that but the millions of dollars that went into Perry’s election bid did not come from you or any of the bloggers.  So realize that what he did and the play of the game is WAY beyond you or any of your pals’ advice. 

  16. Abraham Lincoln only won one congressional race and served one two-year term in Congress. While there, he opposed the Mexican-American War on purely partisan grounds. When his term expired, he worked as a railroad lawyer. He turned out to be what most consider our greatest President, though I personally put him after Washington. The only reason Bachmann didn’t clean everybody’s clock up there was probably because there are too many conservative evangelical Christians who are squeamish about electing a woman as President. She was the closest one up there to Newt in terms of combination of intellect and passion, her ethics and morals are beyond reproach, and she was the most consistent conservative of the entire lot of them, even more so than Perry, and certainly more than Santorum.

    If you want to be a cheerleader for Newt, that’s fine, but kindly put away the pom-poms when talking smack about the other candidates.

  18. Good Gawd Stacy McCain, get some sleep.   Your beef is not with  Ben Howe or Gov Perry, it’s with Erickson!!    He didn’t represent Perry in a likable manner either. I was POed at Eric E. for 1. dissing the Tea Party the night before a major Event & 2. bashing Sarah Palin.  So I was horrified when he was the one that announced Gov. Perry. 

    I have been a long time fan of your website and it’s been unbearable to see all of this Perry bashing.  HE IS NOT THE ENEMY!!  He is a good Conservative Governor.  Perry is a Tea Party guy,  he got dissed by the some of the North Texas Tea Party folks cause he wouldn’t call another special session…blah blah blah.  Petty crap.   You’ve got Gov. Perry talking points from Romney or something.  Plus, accused him of weird crap.  And for this,  several people probably owe him an apology for bearing false witness against him…..so to speak.

    imho you aren’t looking at the BIG picture.  The goal today is to pick a Non-Romney candidate, to show DC they won’t pick the candidate this time. Right?   Then, I don’t think Newt will stick.

    And then there’s the BIGGER picture, Plan B –>  http://tinyurl.com/7jjx2mf

  20. RSM, you are a faithful man, if all those faithless evangelicals who early on endorsed Perry then scattered like faithless witches when he stumbled were half the man you are, he may still be in this race. 

    Santorum may be able to win the national but he will not win the primary.  If he is an honorable man, after he loses tonight, he will endorse Gingrich. 

    ETA: That bit about Perry scaring Sarah was really a stretch.

  21. Being able to summarize, being able to articulate in a succinct fashion, complex issues, is perhaps THE touchstone of actually understanding those issues.

    Which means being articulate is not unimportant.

    I don’t think Perry ever really intended to move upwards beyond Austin.  I believe he was pushed forward by polling that constantly placed him in the forefront of the pack.   Such polling created a momentum that was difficult for him to resist.

    Had he desired to move upwards, then he needed to prepare himself.

  22. “[T]alking smack?”

    An interesting turn of phrase that.

    Is the Federal government of the size and complexity that it was during Lincoln’s day?

    Were the foreign problems besetting our young country at the time equivalent to those we struggle with today?

    Was it necessary to be telegenic then, or has that become something not unimportant since then?

    Lincoln was unique.

    We’re not likely to see his type in our lifetime?

    Bachmann wasn’t Lincoln, and never will be.  I don’t dis her service up on Capitol Hill.  But we now know from leaks from her own campaign, along with proven debate performances, that she intended to kneecap anybody who got near Romney.

    Now Romney is the weakest frontrunner the GOP has seen in quite some time who has waffled on abortion, but for the lady in white, she held herself out as the purest of angels on that issue.   YET she was supporting Romney’s candidacy.

    She had and has some serious, serious flaws.

  26. RSM’s beef extends way beyond Red State.

    Like the rest of us, he’s livid that our choices have narrowed to Gingrich or Romney.

    Furthermore, RSM is fully aware of crucial this election is to the country, and RSM, being a Southern boy, takes the country seriously.  Others do not.

    That’s a good chunk of the reason why RSM is passionate.

    We just have to bear in mind two key items:

    1} 10%+ REAL unemployment, and

    2} 20%+ REAL underemployment.

    Obama can be swept aside.

    Since Obama was inaugurated, roughly 1 out of every 5 Democrats has altered their political party affiliation.

    Just think about that!

    And all in a FIRST term!

  27. If Erickson didn’t exist, Soros would have to invent him. But if Soros invented him the result would not be nearly so insidious or nearly so damaging.

  28. I’d say the Civil War and the slavery issue was the equal and more of any problem we face today. Americans are fucking spoiled brats compared to the things Americans of that day had to contend with. We’ve lived in a fucking dream world for so damn long we look at any intrusion by reality into that world as the height of gravest tragedy.

    Do you seriously contend that the bullshit we face today even comes close to the prospect of an army of your fellow citizens coming into your town and committing massacres as happened in Lawrence Kansas?

    We have the capacity to this day to vaporize any country that gives us enough of a reason. We could wipe out every Arab living on the Arabian peninsula on any given day before breaking for lunch. Most of our fucking so-called “problems” are self-induced.

    Lincoln had real problems. Like for example, the whole fucking country falling apart on him. My point was he handled it, and yet his government experience was less than Bachmann’s. Sometimes experience isn’t all its cracked up to be. Sometimes it might even be a detriment.

    I had my own criticisms of Bachmann, some of the things she did and said and the way she ran her campaign, but to say she is not qualified to be President is patently false. 

  29. The damage due to Rick Perry’s timing continued even as he withdrew from the election, sucking all the attention away from the fact that RICK SANTORUM WON IOWA. A pox be upon that islamoblow Perry and his nasty koolaid swilling Perryist zombies who vilified anyone and everyone who didn’t agree that he was GOP Jesus.
    Don’t worry about your ‘outburst’, Stacy, Perrybots deserve a whole lot worse than that and you WERE right and E.E. WAS WRONG and I am sure he still is (but I don’t bother with RedState or anything he does elsewhere so I can’t be sure what he has to say now).  Fuckum.

  30. Lincoln was the Obama of his time. he refounded the US, and killed the original republic. He is the reason for Wilson, FDR, Truman, LBJ, carter, Clinton, both Bushes and now Obama.

    Only someone utterly ignorant of what the country was under Washington could place Lincoln on a plane anything close to Washington.

  31. 7 states seceded because of Lincoln’s election. His 1st inaugural was a declaration of war. The upper south did not secede until Lincoln made his call for troops and the rest of the country couldn’t have cared less until Lincoln engineered Ft. Sumter, with the Confed cabinet fell into his trap.

    Lincoln’s problems were induced by Lincoln. He wrecked the south, and came close to do doing the same to the north. All to conquer an independent country. Rewriting history to favor the victor is quite common place. There is a reason that history is often called “lies agreed upon.” The history of the war of northern aggression falls under that head.

  33. Lincoln praise in the comments? Vomit.
    Lincoln the vilest tyrant, and destroyer of the republic.

    Next there will be praise of  Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and Nixon.

    Vomit.

  35. When Bachmann gets compared to Lincoln, reality is rapidly shrinking in the rear view mirror.  The United States government is the world’s largest enterprise with an annual budget greater than the entire economy of every other country in the world except China and Japan.  Millions of civilian employees working for thousands of agencies.

    And yet somehow people who have never run anything larger than their congressional office staff feel qualified to start at the top without a day of real management experience, and too many voters are dumb enough to agree.

  36. Lincoln’s problem was rather straightforward.

    The South succeeded; Lincoln had to go into the South and restore federal sovereignty.

    So yea, I think that was much easier as a theoretical construct than what afflicts us today.

    EXECUTING that was always going to be difficult, to be sure.

    But the problem itself was nothing like the situation in Pakistan for instance.

    And that’s just one of our problems.

  37. Yes and No.

    Never rule out the possibility of the gifted amateur, who sees things clearly and can execute.

    Recall what Napoleon said after all his battles, after all his campaigns, after all his many victories and yes, defeats.  He said “I never learned anything after all my battles that I didn’t already know long before any of them began.”

    Being an executive is about making decisions, and relatedly, and equally importantly, MAKING SURE OF ADEQUATE FOLLOW UP.  In Washington, decisions are made yet the execution thereof is often entrusted to staffers or bureaucrats who are often dead set against the decision taken, or the order given.

    Valerie Wilson for instance.

    That’s just one example.

  38. Erickson can hardly be expected to apologize every time he is wrong – the bandwidth costs alone would break the site.

    Do you suspect he had a head’s up on what Perry planned when, the night before, he called on him to withdraw and endorse Newt, and the next day Perry did, making it appear as if Erickson might have influenced those decisions? 

    But the reality is that Perry was one of the few with executive experience in the race.  No matter how good a guy sounds in a debate, it doesn’t mean he will be a good manager – and if he has no experience the odds are he will SUCK.

    Look at the Senators we’ve elected to the White House:  Harding, Kennedy, and Obama. 

    There is a reason we often elect Governors or Generals and only rarely legislators without executive experience.

  40. Oh will you get the fuck off of it? Lincoln fought to keep the country together because his predecessor allowed it to fall apart and would do absolutely nothing to keep it together.

    All so a bunch of limp-wrist southern dandy faggots could sit on their front porches sipping lemonade in the shade discussing philosophy and the nature of God while their slaves did all the god damn work. 

    And the real irony is, if it weren’t for the Civil War Lincoln probably wouldn’t have tried to free the slaves. That wasn’t his priority at all. He actually considered shipping them back to Africa, and spoke against miscegenation.

     The Emancipation Proclamation was a military tactic that didn’t apply to slaves in states that did not secede, which included Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri. They weren’t freed until the 13th Amendment. The south brought their fucking shit all on themselves. Bottom line, they were fucking traitors. Go sing the song of the south somewhere else, I ain’t fucking buying your fantasyland shit.

  41. No, SDN, he was beaten because he came across like a doofus when the chips were down.  Nobody wanted another stumbletongued Texas mushmouth former governor holding the banner against Obama – and I speak as one who supported Perry from the beginning.

  42. Oh come on Zilla, now would you feel that way if Perry had endorsed Santorum? At least he did the right thing and got out of the way. He just endorsed Newt probably for the same reason Sarah encouraged South Carolinians to vote for Newt, because everybody knew Newt was the only one who had a chance of beating Romney in SC.

    Santorum needs to concentrate on Michigan if he wants to stay viable. Mittens is probably got Florida already sewn up due to early voting, but if anybody does overtake him there it will be Newt. In Michigan Santorum could appeal to the social conservatives and evangelicals, and also to the rank-and-file union members.

    Santorum also needs a website. As many kids as he’s got can’t one of them put something together for him?

  44. But of course we should trust a man who ran a company who’s employees have contributed to Democrats two-to-one over Republicans, and who has benefited from the very bureaucracy he claims he wants to reduce and reform. Yeeeee-yeahhhh, riiiiit. If you believe that fucking shit I’ve got a pair of magic Mormon underwear to sell you that will make your dick bigger.

    Now be sure and come back and tell me that Mitt will reduce the size and scope of the federal government, and then warn me of how that’s going to be a bad thing in so many ways.

  45. I LIKE  Newt, I am happy that he beat the snot out of Mittens tonight! Newt’s a close second for me behind RS.
    My problem with Perry is and has always been the fact that he is an islamocoddling islamoblow who says that ‘islam is a religion of peace’ and who he endorsed would not make a bit of difference to me. Rick Perry’s fans acted like total dicks and the sooner everyone can admit that the sooner we can all move on. 

    And Rick Santorum’s website is HERE: http://www.ricksantorum.com/
    where it has been since at least this past May when I got interested in his campaign.

  46. And by the way, on Bachmann, what makes you so sure she wouldn’t be as good or better than Lincoln? Like I said, Lincoln served one term, and only one term, in the US House. That was his sole government experience. Otherwise he was a lawyer, and for that matter, he wasn’t really that successful a lawyer from what I’ve gleaned. He was a railroad lawyer which is probably where he got his seed money to run for President. He paid that back post haste. But there was absolutely nothing, nothing whatsoever, in his career to offer any clue that he would be even a moderately competent President, let alone a great one.

    So where in his background is this much vaunted “executive experience” you keep going on and on about and insist is so absolutely vital and essential?

  48. Strangely absent . . ….

    . . . from Stacy McCain’s recounting of a tense encounter he had with RedState’s Ben Howe in South Carolina over the role Rick Perry played in the GOP primary are two words:  Herman Cain.  I’m not sure that it says anything about McCa…

  49. But it wasn’t that simple or straightforward. There were economic concerns, and matters of foreign relations, particularly regarding France and Britain. Some people in the Union also wanted to declare war on both of them. Lincoln had to contend with factions within his own party, traitorous rebel sympathizers in the North, and in Washington, and especially in New York. Yeah, he had Wall Street to contend with. He had subversive newspaper editors to deal with as well. And it took him half of his first term to put together a competent fighting force, because he had subversives in his own damn military to contend with. Including among his own generals. There was nothing at all “simple” or “straightforward” about it.

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