The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

SANTORUM SURGE: Finally, the Polls in Iowa Are Catching Up With … Me

Posted on | December 28, 2011 | 70 Comments

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa
I’m inside a town hall meeting with Rick Santorum. About a hundred people here, and the big news today in Iowa is the CNN/Time poll showing Santorum surging into third place, with 16%, ahead of Newt Gingrich, who is now fourth with 14%, followed by Rick Perry (11%) and Michelle Bachmann (9%).

UPDATE: Erick Erickson isn’t happy:

As a pro-lifer myself, I have to throw up a bit in my mouth that Iowa conservatives are seriously considering Rick Santorum . . .

Yeah, if Perry finishes fifth in Iowa, the epitaph on the tombstone of his campaign will read: “Howdy. Thank you, Erick.”

UPDATE II (Smitty): Here is the CNN interview, Wolf Blitzer interviewing Rick Santorum, with a screencap of the poll results after:

CNN poll shows Santorum in third place in Iowa

UPDATE III: Here’s a photo of Senator Sanatorum shaking hands with Iowans before his town hall meeting here in Cedar Rapids:

Remember that the Santorum surge began Dec. 1, when there was an earthquake in Vanuatu.

UPDATE IV (Smitty): now a Memeorandum thread. What says the Blogosphere?

  • Catholic Bandita links Drudge’s touting of the “Wild Card”, Rick Santorum.
  • A Point of View has the observation, emphasis mine:

    It doesn’t matter what the main stream media thinks or says about Santorum at this point. The plain fact is that his conservative, catholic bona fides are there for all to see and are genuine. That Palin has praised him and he has signalled, through his praise of Palin, that he would support her policy and ethics may be the signal to the Palin supporters that Santorum is Palin’s proxy.

    While Sarah may fall short of a full endorsement, a bit of nudge-nudge, wink-wink could really get the tea party going, IYKWIMAITYD.

  • The Daily Caller:

    Despite lacking the money and resources enjoyed by many of his rivals, Santorum appears to be benefiting from his dogged campaigning throughout each one of Iowa’s 99 counties. The former Pennsylvania senator has also attracted endorsements from prominent evangelical leaders in the state, and is gaining traction among the social conservatives who tend to dominate the Iowa caucuses every four years.
    “Most of Santorum’s gains have come among likely caucus participants who are born-again or evangelical, and he now tops the list among that crucial voting bloc, with support from 22% of born-again compared to 18% for Paul, 16% for Romney, and 14% for Gingrich,” CNN polling director Keating Holland said in a statement.

    If money was paramount, Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman would have done better in California, no?

  • Dan Riehl still likes Perry (and what conservative does not?) but isn’t inimical to Santorum:

    Frankly, I don’t want Santorum to prevail in Iowa, as I’ve already backed Perry and think he’s the best choice, given what they are. But I’m unwilling to throw out my principles to become the media’s anti-Conservative water-boy in some misguided attempt to try and make myself look smart, as opposed to a principled conservative, which is what I mostly am – first, last and always and most importantly of all.

UPDATE V (RSM): Here are Chris Moody of Yahoo News and Shushana Walshe of ABC News, covering the (unexpectedly!) surging Santorum:

Donald Douglas at American Power has more Santorum blogging.


Category: CNN, Fear and Loathing in Iowa, Iowa, Polls, Rick Santorum

Are You Sure That BHO Would Not Pursue War With Iran, Pamela?

Posted on | December 28, 2011 | 20 Comments

by Smitty

From CBS News:

A federal judge has signed a default judgment finding Iran, the Taliban and al Qaeda liable in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Judge George Daniels in Manhattan signed the judgment Thursday, a week after hearing testimony in the 10-year-old case. The signed ruling, which he promised last week, came in a $100 billion lawsuit brought by family members of victims of the attacks. He directed a magistrate judge to preside over remaining issues, including fixing compensatory and punitive damages.

Over at Atlas Shrugs, Pamela Geller reacts:

This was an act of war. Yet Iran has not been punished for its role in the 911 attacks. As this new information contines to emerge, the next President of the United States should remove this murderous regime. That should be a campaign promise.
We can be sure that Obama is going to do nothing about this, except maybe film another obsequious video reaching out to the bloody mullahs.

I’m not as sure as Pamela here. It would be totally in keeping with Obama’s cynical style to look at this judgement and decide that a formal declaration of war is in order, and then commence to clean house. If BHO asked for it, is Boehner going to do anything other than fall in line? Doubt it.

That way, he gets the 5% Saber-Rattling bonus in the polls, with another 10% Strange New Constitutional Respect bonus. Crazy? Sure, but you might find it equally bizarre that Newt Gingrich can’t make the primary ballot in his own state. Go figure.

Category: Atlas Shrugs, Barack Obama

Is BHO’s Re-Election Interest Misplaced?

Posted on | December 28, 2011 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

Disagreeing with Andrew Malcom here, emphasis mine:

This makes it easier, if not quite inevitable, that Republicans will regain their Senate majority from 2006. Harry Reid’s Senate is now 53-47, counting two independents who caucus with him. So far, eight senators, six of them Dems, have decided to retire instead of facing this already seething American electorate.
Fully 23 of the 33 Senate seats up in 2012 are held by Democrats, which is a lot of seats to defend.
The GOP would have to nominate a large number of Elmer Fudds to blow this one. Holding their own and grabbing four seats gives Republicans a majority in that body, which means the country could have a federal budget for the first time in nearly three years.
With Nebraska and North Dakota’s open seat virtually in the bag, they’d only need two gains, say, Ohio, Missouri, Virginia or Montana, where GOP Rep. Denny Rehberg looks strong in his challenge.
And having a totally Republican Congress would be great news for Obama because he could then blame all of his second-term failures on them, instead of just having the House as he does now.

The only reason for a lack of significant calls for BHO’s impeachment Now, Now, Now is the miserable piece of work known as Senator Harry Reid.

Lacking such a paragon of statesmanship guarding his six, the likelihood of public demand for impeachment skyrockets. Sure, the GOP may not reach a filibuster-proof majority, but the risk of public opinion feeding on itself and increasing to an irresistible pitch is definitely there. If the GOP had control of the Senate now, the Fast & Furious investigation might well be taking a different tack.

Maybe #OccupyResoluteDesk should work on getting all of the pardons written out and then head for a permanent golf vacation.

via Insty

Category: Barack Obama, Democrats

Greetings From the Quad City

Posted on | December 28, 2011 | 9 Comments

DAVENPORT, Iowa — Woke up late today — too late for the complimentary breakfast here at the Radisson Quad City Plaza — and thought, “Hey, no need to hurry today.” Monday I flew into Cedar Rapids and had to go halfway across the state to a Rick Santorum event, then back to Iowa City. Then yesterday I had to go rent a car and drive to Davenport for a Mitt Romney event … and today?

Well, there’s a full schedule of campaign events, and I’m probably going to go see Rick Perry in Pella at 3:30 p.m. (CT) today, then catch Rick Santorum in Cedar Rapids at 6:30 p.m.. A calculation — based on the fact that I’m now driving a sweet black Ford Mustang — says I don’t have to leave here until about 1 p.m. So I’m typing this while the USA Network is showing Juneau (I’d never seen it before) and reading the copy of the Quad City Times I picked up (for 75 cents) at the coffee shop down the street. Here’s the first paragraph of the front-page story by Ed Tibbetts:

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, keying on a speech President Barack Obama made in Davenport four years  ago this week, said Tuesday the president abandoned his campaign promises to unite the country and “demonizes our fellow Americans,” and he cast the election as one to save the vision of the country.

Fifty-one words? Too long, Ed. That paragraph should have ended with “country.” When I pay 75 cents for a newspaper, I expect that first paragraph to grab me by the throat and compel me to read the whole damn thing. Maybe your editors are to blame. I know you can write better stuff than that clunky 51-word lead, Ed.

See? That’s the kind of cranky stuff I’d be doing if I had more time on my hands. It’s probably for the best thaat I always seem to be racing back and forth across the state like maniac. And that’s why I just took off all my clothes before getting in the shower, to do Raw Naked Blogging of today’s latest Iowa-centric headlines:

EMILY’s List ranks Gingrich as
‘worst’ GOP presidential candidate
— The Hill

Republican Rivals Unleash
Broadside on Paul in Iowa
— New York Times

For Romney, stealth campaign brings
real hopes of winning Iowa
— Washington Post

Poll: Newsletters Not Hurting Paul in Iowa
— Slate

Perry changes stance to oppose all abortions
— CNN

Pro-Gingrich Super PAC: Romney is
‘2nd most dangerous man in America’
— NBC

Paul holds slim lead over Romney
in first post-Christmas Iowa poll
— The Hill

So that’s the news, but the tip-jar hitters didn’t send me to Iowa just so I could sit in a hotel room aggregating headlines while naked.

I could do naked aggregation at home. And sometimes do.

You’d never read a sentence like that in the Quad City Times, even though they charge 75 cents a copy. You can read this for free, but you should hit the tip jar anyway. This hotel room is $89 a night and I missed the free breakfast, so I’ll probably have to pick up some Mickey D’s on the way to Pella, which will cost me $3. But before I do that, first I’ve got to take a shower. And maybe before I leave I’ll do some Wet Naked Updates. That could be worth a few extra bucks, eh?

UPDATE: Wow. Nothing like a long hot shower to make me feel better. But the shower was long enough that I’ve only got a few minutes to throw up a couple of quick (wet and naked) linkbacks to our blog buddies before I get dressed and head out on the road to Pella:

Rick Santorum just launched a new statewide radio ad. Maybe I’ll get a chance to hear it while I’m driving to Pella. Hit the freaking tip jar!





Category: Election 2012, Fear and Loathing in Iowa, Iowa, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Shoe Leather Fund

Dear Jonah Goldberg: What?

Posted on | December 28, 2011 | 12 Comments

by Smitty

Jonah Goldberg has an excellent column in the LA Times, but throws this in:

Frankly, I can’t blame anyone for being underwhelmed by Romney, or begrudge anyone their frustration with the field. What’s harder to understand is how nobody has noticed that the conservative establishment, which includes many of my friends denouncing it, has become vastly more conservative over the last two decades. It’s more pro-life, more pro-2nd Amendment, more opposed to tax increases.

I guess my take on the nature of conservativism begins with the Founding Fathers, who seemed rather libertarian in outlook. Maybe if the technology had existed 240 years ago to pull stunts like the TSA, the Founders would have done it.

But I doubt it. Would the Founders have bought into central banking and social security? Maybe, maybe not, and counterfactuals are distraction, in any case.

So, if ‘becoming vastly more conservative’ means you can now slide a piece of paper between the Democrat and Republican parties, fine. I’ll buy it. But the GOP has a great deal of atonement to accomplish, and the VA primary fracas, hopefully, is not a general indicator of the willingness to repent of the GOP’s statist, anti-American leanings.

via McEnroe

Category: GOP

One Wonders: What Was The Context Of Cheney’s Deficit Remark?

Posted on | December 28, 2011 | 12 Comments

by Smitty

Ran across this last night, emphasis mine:

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill was told “deficits don’t matter” when he warned of a looming fiscal crisis.
O’Neill, fired in a shakeup of Bush’s economic team in December 2002, raised objections to a new round of tax cuts and said the president balked at his more aggressive plan to combat corporate crime after a string of accounting scandals because of opposition from “the corporate crowd,” a key constituency.
O’Neill said he tried to warn Vice President Dick Cheney that growing budget deficits-expected to top $500 billion this fiscal year alone-posed a threat to the economy. Cheney cut him off. “You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” he said, according to excerpts. Cheney continued: “We won the midterms (congressional elections). This is our due.” A month later, Cheney told the Treasury secretary he was fired.
The vice president’s office had no immediate comment, but John Snow, who replaced O’Neill, insisted that deficits “do matter” to the administration.

Source: [X-ref O’Neill] Adam Entous, Reuters, on AOL News Jan 11, 2004

Category: Uncategorized

Rick Perry Is Suing Virginia Over Primary Ballot Exclusion? UPDATE: ‘It Appears That Rick Perry Is Right’

Posted on | December 28, 2011 | 30 Comments

by Smitty

Or, “Rich Ferrous Vein Discovered In Irony Mine”. From the WaPoo:

Perry’s suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Richmond, contends that the state Republican chairman and members of the State Board of Elections ­violated Perry’s constitutional rights by enforcing state requirements for the gathering of signatures.
The suit maintains that Perry was unable to submit the required number of signatures because of the board’s “requirement that all petition circulators be an eligible or registered qualified voter in Virginia.”
That requirement substantially limits the number of people who could circulate petitions and thus “imposes a severe burden” on Perry’s freedoms of speech and association, the lawsuit argued. It cites the Constitution’s First and 14th amendments.
The lawsuit also challenges on the same grounds requirements regarding the number of signatures and the qualifications for signers.

I mean, isn’t Rick from “Don’t mess with” Texas? Haven’t the Virginia rules, while arguably onerous, been published a long time? While not a 10th Amendment call, doesn’t this very suit kind of trample the notion of federalism? If the Virginia primary was Newt’s Pearl Harbor, does this suit risk turning it into Perry’s Alamo?

Snark aside, unless he can show that the VA GOP deliberately rigged this primary, on which point I am really skeptical, the whole effort seems misguided. Sure, the GOP may here may be reading the rules closely, and sticking to the un-anointed, establishment candidates, but they’re still the rules.

Reached for comment, Hayao Miyazaki had this to say:

Update: a bit of research, based upon the comments, gives us a Red State post linking Ballot Access News, emphasis mine:

But what has not been reported is that in the only other presidential primaries in which Virginia required 10,000 signatures (2000, 2004, and 2008) the signatures were not checked. Any candidate who submitted at least 10,000 raw signatures, on notarized sheets, and which had at least 400 signatures from each U.S. House district, was put on the ballot. In 2000, five Republicans qualified: George Bush, John McCain, Alan Keyes, Gary Bauer, and Steve Forbes. In 2004 there was no Republican primary in Virginia. In 2008, six Republicans qualified: John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Rudy Giuliani, and Fred Thompson (an earlier version of this post erroneously said Alan Keyes qualified in 2008, but he only qualified in 2000).
The only reason the Virginia Republican Party checked the signatures for validity for the current primary is that in October 2011, an independent candidate for the legislature, Michael Osborne, sued the Virginia Republican Party because it did not check petitions for its own members, when they submitted primary petitions. Osborne had no trouble getting the needed 125 valid signatures for his own independent candidacy, but he charged that his Republican opponent’s primary petition had never been checked, and that if it had been, that opponent would not have qualified. The lawsuit, Osborne v Boyles, cl 11-520-00, was filed in Bristol County Circuit Court. It was filed too late to be heard before the election, but is still pending. The effect of the lawsuit was to persuade the Republican Party to start checking petitions. If the Republican Party had not changed that policy, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry would be on the 2012 ballot.

What I glean here is:

  • The rules have NOT BEEN changed.
  • Enforcement has been uneven over time.
  • The Osborne suit, coming in October 2011, is mighty, mighty convenient. Why, a couple months before the 2012 Presidential election due date, did an independent candidate for state legislature, quite unexpectedly become interested in the internals of the GOP nomination process? I’m not saying That He Elevated Fetishing Internal X-rays Which Any Sane Interlocutor Never cares about to an absurd level, but it would lead one to question the timing if, say, some link between Osborne and one of the campaigns were to surface.

I really hate to see this issue hang over the GOP like a cloud of air pollution. Maybe Ron Paul should get together with Mitt and have Romney’s campaign chair, VA Lt Gov Bill Bolling, set about enforcing the ballot rules in keeping with tradition. If either candidate is confident of his victory anyway, why should they seek to squelch competition? Especially at the cost of giving the GOP elephant such a donkey cast.

Update II: the plot thickens. At the Northern Virginia Tea Party FaceBook page,

Surprisingly, Rick Perry’s lawsuit challenging Virginia’s ballot access petition laws seems to be “spot on.” Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich were kept off Virginia’s GOP primary ballot for the March 6 primary. Rick Perry relies upon the US Supreme Court precedent of BUCKLEY V. AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW (97-930) 525 U.S. 182 (1999), in which the US Supreme Court agreed with the District Court: “the requirement of registration limits the number of persons available to circulate and sign [initiative] petitions and, accordingly, restricts core political speech.” THEREFORE, THE REQUIREMENT THAT PETITION GATHERERS MUST BE REGISTERED VOTERS IN VIRGINIA CLEARLY VIOLATES A DECISION BY THE US SUPREME COURT IN 1999. Of course, courts can find any number of reasons to take unexpected twists and turns. But it appears that Rick Perry is right.

My recommendation to the GOP is that this matter be concluded soonest, with Newt and Perry on the ballot. Continued wrestling with the pig is just going to get lipstick everywhere.

Update III: Still further details at Tim Boyer. Has the VA GOP conducted a successful auto-beclownment operation? It may very well have.

Update IV: HotAir has some great detail. Morrissey takes the straightforward approach that this is a competence test for the campaigns. I’m 60% in agreement there, and 40% interested in seeing what the legal fallout from Perry’s suit is. I happen to be of the ‘more is better’ school of thought; even if you’re a Romney or Paul supporter, inoculating your candidate from competition is not necessarily a Good Thing. Could I vote for Ron Paul in a primary as a protest against GOP tomfoolery? It sounds mad, but less so over time. . .

Category: Rick Perry, Texas, Virginia

When the Story Writes Itself

Posted on | December 28, 2011 | 9 Comments

DAVENPORT, Iowa
Sometimes this job is hard. And sometimes it’s easy. And there was a moment last night that made my job much easier. Watch the video:

And now here’s the lead of my column today:

“Ron Paul! Ron Paul! Ron Paul!” The chants were loud and persistent.
Mitt Romney came to town Monday and a Ron Paul rally broke out. As the Massachusetts governor left one of his relatively rare campaign appearances in Iowa, some two dozen supporters of the Texas congressman lined the sidewalk along outside the Hotel Blackhawk. Romney stepped out the door and heard the crowd expressing their enthusiasm for his GOP rival. Romney chuckled and waved before boarding the bus emblazoned with his slogan, “Believe in America.” As the bus pulled out and turned onto East Third Street, the Paul fans chanted louder and waved their signs, some occasionally yelling, “Liberty!”
In one of the multiplying oddities of the 2012 Republican presidential campaign, neither of the two candidates leading the polls in Iowa is the kind of conservative champion that has traditionally won the Hawkeye State’s first-in-the-nation caucus. Between them, however, the moderate Romney and the libertarian Paul combine more than 40 percent of the GOP vote here, according to the latest RealClearPolitics average of Iowa polls. And though they are neck-and-neck in the polls, there is no doubt which of the two current front-runners here generates the most fanatical support. When Ron Paul holds an event in Iowa, no Romney boosters are standing outside in the cold December wind maniacally shouting, “Mitt! Mitt! Mitt!” . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator.





Category: American Spectator, Election 2012, Fear and Loathing in Iowa, Iowa, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul
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