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.