Dispatch #9

Well, that didn’t take long—only forever. This week Newt Gingrich suspended his campaign and cut his staff back significantly. Big names in the party, like the Bush family, have begun to endorse Mitt Romney publicly, and the rhetoric against him has been toned down and ratcheted up against Barack Obama. Romney says little himself, which helps, because when he does open his mouth, he’s prone to gaffe whenever he’s not “on message,” that is to say, whenever he’s not giving bland and unconvincing voice to party ideology or permitting his superPAC (political action committee: Restore Our Future) to trash his rivals with attack ads. So the Republican primary campaign, which has been described as a circus, as bad reality television, and as a train wreck, begins to close out. The GOP hopes to forgive and forget amongst themselves and move on against Obama; it will be the Democrats’ pleasure to remind them and the rest of America what they have just been through and whom they have come up with as a result.

American media is not a thoughtful forum for political discourse. As one observer has noticed, “In the United States general doctrines concerning religion, philosophy, morality, and even politics do not vary at all, or at least are only modified by the slow and unconscious working of some hidden process. Even the crudest prejudices take an unconscionable time to efface, in spite of all the froth and stir of men and things.” The froth and stir of the Republican primary process will be succeeded by the froth and stir of the general election process into November, both very public, fulsome of sound and furious—and expensive. All content of which will be to little avail. The slow, unconscious, and hidden process to which Alexis de Tocqueville (II, 21, 640) referred over a century and a half ago has become, in this century, at this moment, the slow and hidden process of economic recovery. If it is mending, Mr. Obama will be reelected.

The more important conversation in American political discourse this week was the clash of arguments made before the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the Obama administration’s health care legislation. As most of the world knows, the health care and health insurance system in the United States is one of the worst in the industrialized world, and the law passed by Congress two years ago when Democrats had clear majorities in the House and Senate was the second attempt on their part (Democrats had failed to enact health care legislation during the first Clinton administration) to address this embarrassing situation. Like most large-scale legislation, the Affordable Health Care Act is complex, cumbersome, contradictory. The constitutional, legal, and political niceties are too complicated to even begin to address here and may not even be comprehensible at all, but however the Court decides—and Court-watchers are mindful about not trying to read its mind before it speaks it in June—the Court will decide the issues 5-4, revealing that it is as divided as the country, as partisan and as immoveable.

Dispatch #8

Candidate Romney won Illinois handily, and more important for him than the delegates, the antagonistic, ideological elements of his party have begun to see the proverbial writing on the wall: Romney will win the nomination. Neither Santorum nor Gingrich have conceded—yet.  Both have pledged to remain until the convention and drag this contest out to the utmost, until June. However, if I were to hazard a prediction, I would guess that Gingrich will eventually bow out beforehand, having earlier in the campaign reconciled himself—at that time—to a Romney candidacy. The attack ads run by Romney have personalized the campaign unduly and provoked harder feelings between the candidates than necessary, but Gingrich strikes me as canny and expedient enough to suspend his campaign. If he drops out, in the best interests of the party, of course, and the convention, by some act of God, does deadlock somehow, he can present as the tested, selfless candidate on the second ballot. Santorum, having come to understand himself as the champion of true conservatism, enjoying the attention as such, and despising Romney’s lack of political conviction and his referring to Santorum as, among other things, an “economic lightweight,” will find it much more difficult to concede. He might even be reading the biblical writing on the wall: the Republicans will lose in November anyway. So, why not fight the good fight for principles and values? Jesus did.

The complaint of the punditry, including the Republican Party punditry, has been that the slate of candidates has been weak. I don’t think that that’s quite true. Mitt Romney is, pound for pound, as serious a candidate as George W. Bush was. The problem isn’t with the candidates; it’s with a profoundly divided party. The representative of the more restive, vociferous, and imprudent “base” of the party would be simply unelectable; the uncharismatic representative of the rest of the party only might not be electable. No candidate could bridge that fundamental divide. Sadly, the miracle the Republicans have to pray for in November is a stalled American economy.

Dispatch #7

With 40% of the primary delegates accounted for, Mitt Romney has 53% of them; at this rate, he will eventually collect the necessary number, 1144, to claim the nomination. No other candidate has a chance at reaching that number without a miracle, divine intervention, an act of God. Fortunately for the right wing of the party, they believe in such things.

Ahead of the Illinois primary, a large northern state that should go to Romney and add to his lead, Rick Santorum, the distant second, is trying to generate some enthusiasm and an upset. He’s actually said something. In his sweater vest, the very image of Catholic choir-boyishness, Santorum has declared war on pornography. Whenever one needs to fire up the evangelical base of the GOP, one resorts to emotional issues of a social and cultural nature: values—abortion, gay marriage, and now, pornography.

To their credit, the nation’s pornographers aren’t taking this threat overly seriously because they aren’t really taking the possibilities of Santorum’s candidacy seriously. I haven’t heard or read that any have raised First Amendment issues; but they can count, and that’s all they have to do. (I have read of one industry spokesperson argue against Santorum’s call on grounds of increased employment.) The point here is that when the nation’s pornographers have a keener grasp of the realities of the political situation than the Republican Party, this is probably not a good thing for the Republican Party—or the Republic as a whole. 

Dispatch #6

While the Republican primary contest continues in Mississippi and Alabama, degrading the general elective prospects of Mitt Romney, Barack Obama’s poll numbers fell this week as well. His overall approval rating declined to below 50%, and in preference polls between the president and Mitt Romney, Obama shows to no great advantage. But Obama’s ups and downs have little to do with the Republican candidates and much more to do with his chief adversary, the economy. Gasoline prices at the moment are rising markedly nationwide, a pocketbook issue, and while the president has little control over such commodity prices or on the economy as a whole, he takes the blame—or the credit—for these trends. Which is why, in the November election, that contest and its closeness will be determined less by issues, policies, ideas, values, and all the talk about them. The outcome will be determined by directional signals of the economy seven or eight months hence. Presidential elections are most often referenda on the economy. If the growth rate in GDP (Gross Domestic Product), the unemployment rate, and the inflation rate are favorable, Barack Obama will be reelected, perhaps even easily. Though his poll numbers fell this week, 54% of those polled anticipate a second term for him. If the economy worsens, however, a perfectly battered and vapid candidate like Mitt Romney can still win. While hardly thoughtful or deeply rational, democratic elections make a certain kind of fundamental, visceral, irrational sense.

Dispatch #5

The political headline this morning was “Romney claims victory in Guam, Northern Marianas.” As the equatorial Pacific goes, so goes America—eventually. But the Republican Party must ask itself what the islanders on the other side of the world can see that can’t been seen in our own Deep South. The future?

Dispatch #4

Super Tuesday, as this week’s primary is known, passed as expected. The front-runner and odds-on favorite, Mitt Romney scored six state wins out of ten possible, with roughly 40% of the votes and delegates.  Santorum, Gingrich, and Paul shared 60% more or less evenly. Though Santorum won three states and Gingrich one, neither managed thereby to pose a serious challenge to Romney or a viable alternative. On the other hand, Romney’s performance, typically lacklustrous, has driven no one from the field nor made the inevitable (Romney’s eventual nomination) any more palatable, visible, or wishful to his fellow candidates or the right wing of the Republican Party. For all the talking, most of it inane, fantastic, repetitive, the nomination will come down to the numbers, which Romney is collecting slowly, surely, and excruciatingly painfully—both for himself and for us. Most observers concede that this thing needs to be over, now, but as I feared in my last dispatch, the tedium will roll on, much to the benefit of the Democrats and President Obama. (I was wrong about one thing: Romney took a 3^rd place in North Dakota. But, to be honest, I didn’t even know that North Dakota had a Super Tuesday primary.)

While the campaign and its rhetoric will have no effect on the ultimate outcome, the Republican elite are absolutely right to lament that nothing good can come from its still being a contest. The next few months will be filled only with continuing doubt about and disparagement of their best hope, Mitt, and while all the eventual losers can be reasonably expected to fall in line behind the nominee, the ranks, though nominally closed, will remain divided and unenthusiastic. If the economy continues to recover—227,000 jobs were reported added in February—and there is no September surprise, no act of God on behalf of the Republican faithful, a mild appreciation for Mitt Romney and a visceral hatred of Barack Obama will not be enough to unseat the latter.

The nastiness and small-mindedness of not only this campaign, but of politics generally in the United States over the last twenty years, has had another noticeable and negative effect as well. The increasingly strident partisan tone of the discourse has made it about equally increasingly difficult for the parties to compromise and actually govern after the election. And in a constitutional system with multiple opportunities for checking and balancing power, the losing party can opt for obstructive tactics that result in what has come to be known as “gridlock.” While in the past nastiness, small-mindedness, and gridlock have been occasional, serious and regrettable features of American political history, obstruction and gridlock have become the standard operating procedure. Most of the blame for this degradation goes to the Republican political operatives who cut their teeth in the Nixon administration and are responsible for the current Republican culture, but the Democrats have certainly learned how to respond in kind. While the Democrats have been generally more public-minded and public-spirited than Republicans, that is to say, they have been generally more “republican,” small r, they have not been as smart as they have thought themselves to be, nor been as smart as they have needed to be in managing an almost infinitely complex world, with the live weight of almost half of the Republic antagonistically on their backs.