Today’s the day I fly off to Las Vegas to cover Tuesday’s crucial Republican presidential debate. It’s a long flight from Dulles to LAX, then a four-hour layover before I catch the plane to Vegas. I’ll be crashing in Barbara Espinosa‘s suite at the Sands, while Smitty and Wombat — both of them got their media credentials for the debate — will fly in Tuesday.
But while I’ll be in Vegas the next four days to cover the debate and the Western Republican Leadership Conference, it’s important to remember that this isn’t about Vegas. This is about getting my revenge on those [insert obscene epithets] in the Florida GOP leadership who screwed up the campaign schedule, ruined Christmas and wrecked my life by moving their primary to Jan. 31.
Those were the first four words of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s announcement speech at the Red State Gathering in Charleston, S.C., on Aug. 13. At the time, I was the only one who saw Perry’s diss of Iowa Republicans — his deliberate attempt to upstage the Ames Straw Poll held the same day — as an ominous portent of doom.
Perry’s decision to make his announcement in South Carolina was widely viewed at the time as a genius move that would lock down his support in a crucial early primary state, and once he emerged as the most viable conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, Perry would have no trouble making up whatever he’d lost in Iowa by dissing Ames.
Such was the conventional wisdom in August, but now today (via Wombat’s “Live at Five” aggregation) we see this headline:
Cain Takes Lead In South Carolina
ATLANTA — Herman Cain holds a decisive lead in the South Carolina Republican primary, according to a survey conducted Sunday for The Augusta Chronicle.
The InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion Research poll of 476 registered voters likely to vote in the GOP primary gave Cain 32 percent, twice the share of Mitt Romney’s 16. Rick Perry holds12 percent, making him essentially tied with Romney because the difference is within the 5 percent margin of error.
“In this case, South Carolina is a three-man race,” said InsiderAdvantage CEO Matt Towery. . . .
In a telephone conversation over the weekend, a Perry supporter tried to convince me that the Texas governor is still the only viable alternative to Romney, that Herman Cain can’t possibly win the nomination, and that anyone who is supporting any candidate other than Perry is therefore effectively pro-Romney.
I’m a complete idiot who knows nothing about politics or blogging (just ask Tabitha Hale), so it is beyond my ability to explain that, or to fathom why Rick “Viable Alternative” Perry is in sixth place — trailing Jon Huntsman! — in the recent New Hampshire polls.
Maybe Rick Perry will have bought $15 million worth of debate mojo, and maybe Herman Cain will have forgotten how to tie his own shoes. And then all the bloggers in Denver can laugh at me some more, just like you’ve been laughing at me all along.
Left-wing actor Sean Penn slimed the Tea Party as motivated by racism, charging on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight on Friday evening that an impediment to President Obama’s success is “what I call the ‘Get the N-word out of the White House party,’ the Tea Party.”
At a time when Herman Cain tops polls of Republican primary voters, Penn proceeded to allege, without citing any evidence, that “there’s a big bubble coming out of their heads saying, you know, ‘can we just lynch him?’”
Jeff Goldstein: “Crazy haters, these redneck hickist teabaggers are. That is, crazy like racist racist foxes!” But of course, Goldstein is a Jew, and everybody knows how those Jews are, right?
You may be amused to learn that a few weeks ago one of our posts got linked by the neo-Nazi site StormFront, where they noted (a) Herman Cain’s upset victory in the Florida GOP straw poll and (b) what I had called the Cain Doctrine: ‘You Mess With Israel, You Are Messing With the United States.”
And then, of course, Question the Timing, despite the fact that Cain had been saying this for months, back when he was “Herman Who?” and stuck in single digits in all the polls.
How long before Sean Penn, Janeane Garofalo, Morgan Freeman and the Occupy Wall Street crowd resort to calling Herman Cain a “Zionist puppet”? And what will they say when we remind them that neo-Nazis thought of it first? You can be sure that there was some nudge-nudge wink-wink among lefties when they saw this HuffPo headline:
Well, of course, he would deny it, right? To the kooks, his denial actually proves that Cain is part of the Zionist/neocon/Wall Street/Republican plot, because one of the defining characteristics of a conspiracy is that it is clandestine. And if you don’t understand their theory, you’re probably using the wrong brand of tinfoil in your hat, so that the CIA brain-control signals are still penetrating. Kooks always prefer their theories to be extraordinarily complex, because that way they look like geniuses for having figured it out. Whereas my theory of the Florida Republican Party’s secret plot is quite simple: They’re evil!
“I thought David Gregory really lost his cool early on, as he was questioning Cain about 9-9-9. If you watch the video, you can see he’s agitated and grimacing in a way that really lacks the usual polished journalist quality.”
— Ann Althouse, “Herman Cain Nailed Meet the Press”
This is an unexpected but really quite welcome development. Professor Althouse has been critical of Cain previously and (like most in academia) is not generally a fan of the populist style. From the transcript of Meet the Press, she excerpts these examples of David Gregory’s visible frustration:
The reality of the plan is that some people pay more, some people pay less…. You’re saying [prices] actually go down?… This isn’t about behavior, Mr. Cain, this is about whether you pay–if you don’t pay taxes now, and you now have income tax and a sales tax, you pay more in taxes…. Mr. Cain, we talked to independent analysts ourselves…. We’re not just reading newspaper clips here… They tell us, they’ve looked at this, based on what’s available of the plan, and it’s incontrovertible.
MR. GREGORY: The wealthiest Americans would pay less, the poorest Americans and middle class would pay more. You don’t dispute that.
MR. CAIN: I do dispute that. You are making — you and others are making assumptions about what wealthy Americans would do with their money, and you’re making assumptions about what the middle class and the poor. You can’t predict the behavior. If wealthy Americans…
MR. GREGORY: This isn’t about behavior, Mr. Cain, this is about whether you pay — if you don’t pay taxes now, and you now have income tax and a sales tax, you pay more in taxes.
MR. CAIN: More people will pay less in taxes. More people will pay less in taxes when you consider all the taxes.
What Cain was saying is that every system of taxation involves hidden economic incentives, and incentives influence behavior. Cain was correctly saying that the sales tax element of “9-9-9,” which Gregory and others assume would impose higher taxes on the poor, would only cause them to pay more taxes if they do not respond to the incentives, namely to spend less — or buy more secondhand merchandise, which isn’t taxed under his plan.
Cain is likewise correct in saying that “you can’t predict behavior” — i.e., The Law of Unintended Consequences. While this is as good an argument against “9-9-9” as it is in favor of it, Cain is correct that we cannot make easy assumptions about how such a radical alteration of the federal tax system would impact the economic behavior and financial well-being of various classes of people.
We can agree that a flat tax will generally be of most benefit to the wealthy (who pay a much higher percentage of their income under the existing progressive system) without assuming, willy-nilly, that others will be impoverished as a result. And the point of “9-9-9” is not to achieve “social justice,” but rather to unleash capital investment to spur economic growth. It is a supply-side solution to our current economic woes, and as such has been praised by the Club for Growth and by Art Laffer.
Would a man rather be unemployed and paying no taxes, or would he rather have a job and pay taxes? That’s the real choice, and yet David Gregory can’t seem to understand it.
We could update an old joke Ronald Reagan used to tell: “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job. And a recovery is when David Gregory loses his job.”
But while I’ll be in Vegas the next four days to cover the debate and the Western Republican Leadership Conference, it’s important to remember that this isn’t about Vegas. This is about getting my revenge on those [insert obscene epithets] in the Florida GOP leadership who screwed up the campaign schedule, ruined Christmas and wrecked my life by moving their primary to Jan. 31.
