Dispatch #11

On Tuesday of last week, candidate Santorum terminated his hopeless and ill-conceived run on the Republican nomination.  His surprising three-state primary flare faded all too certainly, as did the equally brief lights of Donald Trump, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich before him. The GOP’s long, expensive, and rather dismal internecine contest is now over; in its place is promised a longer, more expensive, and equally dismal contest against President Obama and the Democratic Party.

For a number of reasons having to do with the expansion and diffusion of media in this country and a Supreme Court decision that effectively, essentially, and officially recognizes money as political speech, this race will be the most mediated, the most expensive, and probably the most trivial and vicious. (You don’t have to have a particularly meaningful message, only the financial means to message.) Unless you are entertained by such—and many in this country are, as by traffic accidents—it would be best, again, not to attend too closely to the give-and-take of this free-for-all. The electoral outcome, as I have stressed before, will have much less to do with the cheap shots, the errant tweets, mud-slinging, name-calling, put-downs, gaffes, gibes, labels, and the simplistic ideological values-mongering on both sides than with the trends in the unemployment rate, housing market, GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth, and the Dow (the stock exchange). Follow that money.

Dispatch #10

Yesterday candidate Romney won all three primaries in Wisconsin, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. The Republican race for the party nomination is over and done, though candidate Santorum has promised to stir and froth until the end, in June. The original, inevitable nominee-to-be has turned his attention to President Obama and begun what will be seven months of ceaseless negativity, trying to characterize the president as a “failed leader” with a “failed record.” Governor Romney has little record of success as a political leader, and the success that he has had installing a health-care system in Massachusetts that became a model for Obama’s own health-care legislation, is not the kind of achievement that will inspire his Republican base. He cannot run on his moderate and modest political record. He can only run against Obama. Therefore, he will “go negative,” having little positive to add to the discussion, and the negativity will very quickly become tiresome and ugly. But academic and polling research on negative campaigning indicates that it works in the short term, though in the long term it tears at the fabric of civil discourse. If the economy stalls or weakens, the negativity will “stick,” and Romney will have a chance. If the economy continues to improve steadily, if slowly, President Obama will be returned to office.

It’s not as if the president has done a wonderful job in office. Voting for him then, and voting for him again this year, I’d grade him at C or C+. But the Republican Party, perversely recalcitrant, is the greater failure of the contemporary political scene. Their inability to compromise or cooperate in any way with an initially well-intended President Obama accounts for much of the president’s poor performance. His great failure may have been trying too hard and too long to enlist Republican participation in actually governing the nation. Nothing in the candidate Romney nor the attitude or practice of the GOP promises anything positive. It will be a nasty half year.