Rick and Karen Santorum greet supporters
in Myrtle Beach, S.C., Jan. 16, 2012
MYRTLE BEACH, S.C.
I just got through covering Rick Santorum’s speech to the Faith and Freedom Coalition event here. Afterwards, Senator Santorum, his wife Karen and their four oldest children — Elizabeth, John, Daniel and Sarah — greeted supporters here for tonight’s debate. The senator’s wife was kind enough to say a few words to my son Jefferson. who came along on this trip as my assistant.
Stop and think about that for a minute, folks. I’m 52 — a year younger than the senator and a year older than his wife — and I’m thinking back to who I was and how I lived 30 years ago.
Would I want somebody doing a story based on an interview with one of my ex-girlfriends from back then? Would I want my wife and children and friends to read such a story?
Exactly what political relevance or news value this Daily Beast story has, I’m at a loss to explain, but I’m shocked that they would publish such a thing, especially considering how any critical inquiry into Barack Obama’s past associations was declared off-limits — even racist — four years ago.
This is the Information Age. We’re using technology to streamline enterprises and improve profitability. Except in government. Technology, should, for a quick guess, be a liberating force. The laws, theoretically, ought to need less people to administer over time, no? Ha ha, quite the opposite: that word processer churns out even more laws, requiring even more clowns to pretend to administer.
I don’t agree with the title of the graph: this problem is not an Obama-centric one. It has everything to do with the nature of bureaucracy. While amputating Obama from the body politic and cauterizing the wound remains our first priority, in the longer run, asking ourselves who these civil servants are and are they really needed is a job that Has. Got. To. Be. Done.
“I don’t know why he hasn’t released his tax returns. I think he should,” Santorum said in an interview Monday on the Laura Ingraham radio show. The former Pennsylvania senator added that it was important especially for “someone with [an] enormity of wealth,” like Romney.
“Well, let’s see how he manages his own economy,” Santorum said.
It isn’t clear what exactly Dr. Strange-glove buys through obscurity here. Are we going to discover Romney paid for Kenyans to attend Columbia, or something?
Update II: linked by The Lonely Conservative. And by the way, hasn’t Dr. Strange-glove’s campaign heard of The Streisand Effect? If there is some strategy behind what they are doing, please leave it in the comments.
Network TV cameras at the Huntsman press conference
MYRTLE BEACH, S.C.
Jon Huntsman quit the 2012 presidential campaign just as he ran it all along: Sowing confusion with contradictory messages.
“This race has degenerated into an onslaught of negative and personal attacks,” the former Utah governor said in announcing that he was suspending his campaign. Huntsman denounced “the current toxic form of our political discourse,” which he said had created a “corrosive” environment.
However, Huntsman then endorsed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the GOP frontrunner whose so-called “super PAC,” Restore Our Future, has spent millions of dollars on negative attack ads against his Republican rivals Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. None of Romney’s attack ads ever targeted Huntsman, whose anemic poll numbers never made him a serious challenger to Romney for the nomination.
Huntsman’s farewell speech was crammed full of mixed messages. Having served as the Obama administration’s ambassador to China, Huntsman included a shot at the president in his speech Monday, accusing Obama of waging “class warfare for political gain.” And having spent six months attempting to distract and divide the Republican opposition to Romney, Huntsman said it was “time to unite around a candidate best equipped to defeat Barack Obama.”
Another consistent theme of Huntsman’s candidacy also continued until its end: His final campaign press conference was lavishly covered by the media. Multiple network cameras, dozens of press photographers and scores of reporters were on hand for the 11 a.m. event in Room 202 of the Sheraton Convention Center on Oak Street. Among the faces I recognized in the media swarm: Byron York of the Washington Examiner, Danny Yadron of the Wall Street Journal, Dan Balz of the Washington Post, Michelle Goldberg of Newsweek and Carl Cameron and John Roberts of Fox News.
Huntsman’s media coverage was always grossly disproportionate to his support among Republican voters. He was the subject of glowing profiles in the mainstream press and treated with deference in network TV interviews. Yet despite his enviable media coverage, Huntsman never got out of the single digits in national polls of likely GOP primary voters. Strangely enough, however, his poll numbers were always deemed minimally sufficient to include him in televised debates. He eventually decided to stake his entire campaign on the New Hampshire primary, where he placed third by getting support from voters who approved of Obama’s policies and were hostile to the Tea Party movement, according to exit polls.
And so now, the quixotic candidacy of the man whom I long ago dubbed “Governor Asterisk” is now officially over. Students of American political history who examine the peculiar course of Huntsman’s campaign will undoubtedly scratch their heads and ask themselves, “What the f–k was that all about?”
Video of Huntsman’s speech, recorded by my 13-year-old son Jefferson:
Muir at Day by Day is provocative, but I find the idea fraught with peril. Just as Congress doesn’t call a vote without a fairly deterministic outcome, the likelihood of a Sarah Palin write-in going pear shaped and resulting in Obama II: What Haven’t I Fracked Yet? is far too high for comfort.
In my perfect world, a viable conservative candidate, e.g. Santorum, would bring her on as a VP, both to harness the energy she brings, and to line her up for POTUS in 2020. Because 16 years of continuous fiscal sanity would be a fantastic start toward restoring liberty to its rightful place in this country.
MYRTLE BEACH, S.C.
When we attended Rick Santorum’s town-hall event in Florence yesterday, the C-SPAN “Road to the White House” crew was there. After we got back to the hotel, they were replaying it on C-SPAN. My 13-year-old son Jefferson saw himself on TV and said, “Millions of women are going to see this!” So in case any of lovestruck C-SPAN groupies were wondering, “Who’s the extremely pale redheaded kid in the black shirt who needs a haircut?” — yeah, that’s my kid. The video’s an hour-and-half long, and you’ll find him in there somewhere:
While I don’t have time to note every appearance of my son (or myself) in the video, perhaps our readers can watch it and note the times in the comments. Oh, and I also published an American Spectator column today:
Political ads are now running almost constantly during the commercial breaks on TV here, and most of them are attack ads. Mitt Romney’s “super PAC” Restore Our Future is attacking Newt Gingrich and Gingrich’s “super PAC” Winning Our Future is attacking Romney. And, as if to validate his newfound status as a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, Rick Santorum is now being attacked in TV ads, one by Ron Paul’s campaign and another by Romney’s “super PAC.”
Asked about one of those ads during a town-hall event in Florence on Sunday, Santorum struggled to find words for the pro-Romney PAC’s ad, which accuses him of wanting to extend voting rights to felons. “That is a lie,” the former Pennsylvania senator said at Percy & Willie’s restaurant. “To go and mislead the people of South Carolina as to what our record is on this is just… yuck. I expect that from Barack Obama. I don’t expect it from a Republican running for president.” . . .
Read the whole thing. Gotta run now — Huntsman’s going to be announcing his endorsement of Mitt Romney at an 11 a.m. press conference. Because those sneaky RINOs stick together like that, y’know.
How dare this man keep campaign promises, govern soberly, balance the budget, and refrain from raping the taxpayer? Didn’t he get the memo that, as of Barack Obama, our elected executives are giving it the Full Nero?
Walker is about as dangerous as my own governor, Bob McDonnell. Perhaps moreso: Walker did it all in spite of that noxious Troglopundit cluttering up his state, and dragging the Packers down in defeat.
The title is inspired by a post at Legal Insurrection, quoting Andrew McCarthy:
I keep hoping to hear those three words [about RomneyCare]: “I was wrong.” But they’re not coming. Romney supporters on the right keep rationalizing that he is just doing what he must do to stay viable: resisting a colossal flip-flop that would be more damaging than all the others. The candidate, however, says no, and attests that he is defending Romneycare because he believes in it. I usually worry that politicians lie. I’m worried that this one is telling the truth
The recent circling of the wagons around Bain leads me to believe that the Republican Party and conservatives, or at least almost all of their most vocal pundits, are unable to see the reality of what is approaching.
This is at the heart of the Mitt contradictions: if he’s such a hard-nosed capitalist, why RomneyCare? Is he somehow a victim of Bain Dramage? Or is Mitt more of a crony capitalist than a laissez faire capitalist?
Via Just a Conservative Girl, we have Colberts “Americans for a Better Tomorrow Tomorrow” delivering “Attack in B Minor for Strings”:
Nicely done, blatant hyperbole. But can Mitt deliver? Our Federal government, metaphorically speaking, needs a few trillion $ worth of “Heeeere’s JOHNNY!”, right in the over-reach department.
Yet, as Darleen notes over at Protein Wisdom, emphasis original:
Romney has promised that he’ll grant a waiver to all states in regards to Obamacare once he becomes President, effectively killing the legislation. But such a waiver doesn’t mark Romney as committing to limited-government principles. Indeed, such a waiver granted while continuing to defend Romneycare on risible reasoning is highly suspect of future proposals from President Romney done for our own good.
It gets down to the point that the Progressive improvements for our own good in the last century are:
contrary to the spirit of individual liberty in the Constitution,
have proven suicidally unaffordable,
have had the unintended consequence of breeding a quasi-aristocracy in the form of Federal bureaucrats (warm folks, individually, parasitic as a whole), and,
have bred a generation of dependent fools of the sort who would think #Occupy is a boffo idea.
I had dinner with several Democrats recently–some “leftist,” some moderate–and their views on the Republican primary left me feeling rather uneasy. The fact is that many Democrats are eager to face Mitt Romney in the fall, no matter what they might say in public.
. . . 4. Democrats don’t trust Romney because they believe conservatives don’t either. Though Democrats tell themselves Romney is extreme, they sense he lacks the full trust of the conservative base. Their explanation is not that Romney has taken positions to the left of his party, but that he is a “flip-flopper.” Right or wrong, the fact that conservatives seems to have doubts about Romney is seen as a point against him, not in his favor.
In summary, Mitt is about as opaque as Barack. If it proves to be the case that Mitt has the best campaign machine (money, grip on the state-level GOP, phalanx of offpsring to campaign for him) after the August convention, then fine. But the blogs are going to continue to support Not Mitt Romney in the overall Not Barack Obama effort, so long as he remains such a distant, unknown figure:
Once we do understand them, we conservatives will probably have no alternative but to destroy the party and then rebuild it. I don’t think we’ll naively believe it can be reformed.
Yet, I’m still contending that this approach will be easier than starting from scratch.
This is the Information Age. We’re using technology to streamline enterprises and improve profitability. Except in government. Technology, should, for a quick guess, be a liberating force. The laws, theoretically, ought to need less people to administer over time, no? Ha ha, quite the opposite: that word processer churns out even more laws, requiring even more clowns to pretend to administer.
