Mitt Romney: the Last Republican President?

There's a very provocative piece in the American Thinker about Romney (here) that suggests Mitt Romney may be the last Republican president, ever. Here's a takaway:


This is the last hurrah of the Republican establishment. The conservatives and libertarians will vote for Romney in November, but only because he is not Barack Obama. There will be no enthusiasm, which will hurt the down ballot contests for the U.S. Senate, the House and state governorships. Despite the factors weighing against Obama in this upcoming election, it will be a much closer contest that it should be; perhaps a razor thin victory for Romney.

If Romney were to lose the election, there will be a grass-roots revolt against the Republican Party which will spell its demise. If he wins and the nation, through the mis-directed policies of Romney and the Republicans in the Congress, continues on its current path of compromising and nibbling around the edges of the nation's problems, then Romney will be the last Republican president and the specter of the Democrats re-assuming power will be a reality.

So, here's a straight-up fact: there are more conservatives than there are Republicans. 40% of America is conservative, a number that holds quite steady over time. 30%, more or less, is Republican. This means many will hold their noses and hope for the best with Romney.

Conservatives have a very uneasy alliance with the Republican Party. Often, when Republicans make the mistake of nominating a moderate (Ford, Bush the Elder, Dole, McCain...), conservatives stay home and Republicans lose (giving lie to the conventional wisdom that Republicans need to win the middle to get elected). But this election may be different. Antipathy towards Obama's imperial liberalism runs so deep that conservatives will likely rally around anyone, even Romney.

The Tea Party is the manifestation of conservative displeasure with the Republican establishment. For now, they realize that splintering into a new political party would be self-defeating. But if Romney loses the general, you will either see a wholesale attack for control of the Republican party or, perhaps more likely, a wholesale defection. "Never again," they will cry. Never again will they trust the establishment.

If Romney wins, conservatives will be united in the hope that Romney is the conservative he claims to be. The problem is, all the evidence is that he's more of a George H.W. Bush, who, if you recall, pretended to be Reagan's conservative heir to get elected in 1988, and then was thrown out on his ass when he turned out to be the squishy moderate conservatives always thought him to be. 

Temperamentally, Romney reminds one of HW, too. One of HW's great flaws was that he wanted everyone to like him, a very bad trait if one wants to be a great leader. Ronald Reagan went to sleep every night knowing a third of the country hated him, and he slept like a baby. Churchill was much the same. 

Romney, on the other hand, wants to be liked, and here's the issue: the great problems that need fixing will require great wars to fix. The left will fight with everything they have to protect the status quo, and anyone who reaches for the big, game-changing fixes will be crucified in their circles as well as by their hand puppets, the media. Does anyone think Romney has the stomach for that?

Which leaves us with the second scenario: Romney wins and turns out to be HW, leaving conservatives feeling had. It is unlikely they give the the establishment any more chances. Look for a new party - the Constitution Party? - to be the result. This will consign the Republican Party to the ash heap and open the door for Democrats to run the table for years.

Not pretty either way.

Obama's Coming Debate Problem

Many have commented on how they'd love to see Newt debate Obama. The Naked Dollar concurs, but not at the cost of having Newt as the nominee.

What has gone unremarked is how much of a problem Obama will have debating any of the Republicans.

Debating is a skill that comes with practice. The first time you're up there, it can be terrifying. Witness poor Rick Perry, who improved markedly, but not enough to overcome his opening night gaffe. Look at Mitt Romney, who is far more skilled and disciplined (if uninspiring) this time than four years ago.

Barack Obama has never really had to debate anybody. McCain? Sorry, no. He was terrified to lay a glove on Obama for fear of being labelled a racist or a mean old man. And Obama, at the time, was a complete unknown with virtually no legislative record in the Senate or the Illinois House, so he had nothing to defend. He could say whatever he wanted, attack without being attacked.

Now, he is the 100% owner of three years of miserable performance. It is a target rich environment, to say the least, and I don't think any of the Republicans will be shy about going after him. The racist charge won't hold water this time, and whomever the nominee is, he will have spent six months in the toughest debating boot camp ever. He will be ready.

But let's think further back. Can you think of a time in his life when Obama has ever been seriously challenged, about anything? His political races, pre-McCain, were largely cake walks, and his years in academia would have provided him with full immunity from argument, given his race and political persuasion. If a faculty member at Occidental, Columbia, Harvard, or Chicago had ever taken issue with him, concerns for political correctness would have been more than enough to ensure their silence.

No, Obama has spent his life in a pleasant echo chamber, one where conclusions can be glib and rarely challenged, where knowing nods are exchanged in the faculty lounge. In my experience, this makes for people who wilt easily when confronted with rational arguments that don't conform their belief systems. The result is usually petulance and name calling.

Looking for a good debater? Look for a conservative who went to a northeaster college (see: Ivy League) or a liberal who grew up in the South. When you're always on the defensive you learn that you must understand issues deeply. Take Bill Clinton. He spent much of his life negotiating the conservative waters of Arkansas, so he knows a thing or two about how conservatives think and what their arguments are. Obama? He still doesn't. In fact, he recently said he prefers watching the TV show Homeland to the Republican debates.

Does Obama have enough self-awareness to know any of this? No. The narcissism runs too deep. But The Naked Dollar predicts that his staff knows enough to be worried every time he speaks without a teleprompter. They will fight for the minimum number of debates possible. The other prediction: a flinty, defensive performance with at least one major gaffe.

Newt Has Lost It

I love Newt as a debater, I really do. And I once loved him as speaker. And I can even hold my nose enough to believe he is a changed man. But I cannot forgive either his attacks on Bain Capital and the Ryan Plan. He has lost the Naked Dollar.

Newt was the one running a positive campaign, the happy warrior for for small government conservatism. But no more. Paul Ryan's plan was the best anyone's done to date in terms of solving the entitlement mess. Perfect or not, it took political courage to step on politics' "third rail." You expect to by demonized by Democrats, but other Republicans? As they say, with friends like these...

Then there's Bain. Does Bain Capital ever fire people? Of course they do, but these are ailing companies that they buy. The drill is you nurse them back to health so what's left can prosper and, yes, employ people. Bain and other private equity firms plays a vital in our free enterprise system. Would you rather these companies go under? Or be socialized? Once again, we fully expect Democrats to distort the facts in order to score cheap points with an ill-informed electorate (assist to teachers unions).

But Republicans? Newt? He was supposed to be free enterprise's most ardent defender. Instead, he comes off like a political hack looking for the easy score. Shame on him.

Is the Naked Dollar for Romney, at this point? No, not yet. There's still Santorum, whom people seem to overlook. He is reliably conservative and has blue collar appeal, having won many times in Pennsylvania. What he lacks is charisma and the "look" of a president. Right now, those deficiencies are far surpassed by the deficiencies of others.

Mitt Romney and the Threat to the Conservative Brand

One recurring problem conservatives have is that the general public keeps getting them confused with the Republican Party. Oh, occasionally, the two act in concert, and this was most true during the Reagan years. But there's a reason the Tea Party exists, and a reason that 40% of the country calls itself conservative and yet only 30% call themselves Republicans. The alliance between conservatives and the Republican Party establishment is, and always has been, an uneasy one. Suspicion runs deep.


But the public, as we know, is not terribly informed about, well, anything. We don't need to see any more of Jay Leno's Man in the Street segments to figure this out. (My favorite...Jay, pointing to an American flag: "How many stars on that flag over there?" Woman: "I can't tell, it's waving.") The public tends to equate the Republican Party with conservatism, which is rarely the case. Thus, when a Republican president does something stupid and non-conservative, conservatives get blamed, too. This was a problem with Nixon, Ford, and both Bushes. (Think...wage/price controls, ADA, prescription drugs for seniors, Bush 1 tax hikes, etc., etc.)

What happens then is that a Democrat gets elected in response to the "conservative" mistakes, and then we really get screwed.

(A relative of mine, a Republican, voted for Obama based on the logic that McCain would have been a terrible president (true) and would have delivered Hillary unto us. The problem with this logic, of course, is that it delivered Obama unto us.)

And so Romney. I have several friends who know him, and there's always a wink and a nod; he has to pretend to be moderate to win, but when he does, you'll see, he's a good conservative.

I have a number of problems with this line of thought:

1. Moderate Republicans don't typically win, while conservative ones do. (See a piece I wrote on this here.) BUT, antipathy towards Obama runs so high that this might just be the cycle where it doesn't matter. Still...
2. When was the last time someone went to Washington and turned out to be more conservative than you thought? (See: never)
3. There is no evidence, anywhere, that Romney has conservative values.

I will count myself as happily wrong if Romney truly has been quietly harboring a conservative soul all these years. If I'm right, though, the potential consequences are disquieting:

1. The fundamental problems we face - entitlements, the tax code, public sector unions - will require an enormous amount of leadership to solve. A president without core convictions, a president who wants everyone to like him, won't get it done, and this may be our last chance to get these things right before we turn into Greece.
2. As things get worse, "conservatism" will get blamed, and we won't have a chance to elect a real conservative for a long, long time. So long, in fact, that a socialism will be the permanent state of affairs.

Looks like Mitt has a lock on things, so here's hoping I'm wrong.

Which Candidate Fits You Best?

This a simple but clever concept. Give your view on a variety of issues and then weight the issues by how important they are to you. At the end, find out which candidate most perfectly fits your view of the world.

My 1-2-3 were Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry. The Ron Paul part surprised me. Jon Huntsman and Barack Obama brought up the rear. No surprises there.

You can try it out here:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/candidate-match-game

Let us know what your results are by commenting!

Do You Have a Clue?

Hopefully, as a Naked Dollar reader, you do.

I received the following over the transom out of Pew Research:

Can You be Trusted to Vote Intelligently? 

This is a terrific multiple choice 13-question test. And it shows results in a number of ways.  It clearly indicates that the majority of Americans don't have a clue about what's going on in the world.  No wonder our politicians take such advantage of us.  It's astonishing that so many people got less than half right.

These results say that 80% of the (voting) public doesn't have a clue, and that's pretty scary.

There are no tricks here - just a simple test to see if you are current on your information.  This is quite good and the results are shocking.

*I believe it was Winston Churchill who opined that " . . . the biggest argument against democracy is a 5-minute conversation with the average voter . . ."

Test your knowledge with 13 questions, then be ready to shudder when you see how others did!

Test your news IQ - Pew Research Center

http://pewresearch.org/politicalquiz/quiz/index.php

Is It Right To Call Obama a Marxist?

Liberals love to throw around the word "fascist," so much so that it retains all the impact of calling someone a "poopy head." I've always found the word a peculiar epithet for liberals to adore, as fascists believed in top down, government-led control of the economy. If fact, the word "Nazi" stands for National Socialist Party. As economic systems, the only difference between fascism and true socialism is that fascists would allow for private ownership of industry - as long as the politicians called all the shots. Industrialists were allowed to enrich themselves as puppets of the state.

Socialism, fascism, communism...it's all splitting hairs. Socialism is nothing but communism light, with free elections, some tenuous property rights, and less cult of the state. Fascism has the tenuous property rights of socialism but also the cult of state of communism. But ALL believe in centralized control of the economy, with government consuming inordinately large chunks of a society's economic output.

There, I just cut through the confused clutter of a thousand poli sci classes.

Conservatives, of course, like to do their own name calling, with "socialist" and "Marxist" being their favorite zingers. And while these terms are often applied too loosely, they are at least generally applied to those who believe in large and dominant central governments, so unlike the liberal use of "fascist," at least conservatives are getting their insults right.


And often, it's not an insult, it's just a statement of fact. Words like "socialist" actually mean something, they're not just vague putdowns. To be precise, someone who believes an economy should be controlled by a dominant centralized government must be one the big three: socialist, communist, or fascist. I know of no other model for big government. If one of my readers does, please inform us. Liberal is not a model, for the record, it's a characterization, mostly for those who believe in the socialist model. And for those who are going to write me and say, "theocracy," I would argue that economically, these are socialist societies. With a sharia twist, perhaps, but socialist still.

So, I ask you for a moment to separate all these words from the silly insults they have become. No one, outside of the comical characters of the Occupy movement, likes to be called a socialist, because the word has been sullied. Same with the others, fascism and communism. All three have become epithets. This happens sometimes when a concept becomes thoroughly discredited by history. It's kind of like how liberals everywhere now call themselves "progressives," even though there's not a whit’s difference between the two. "Liberal" doesn't poll well anymore. 



So, if we were going to describe President Obama - as opposed to insulting him - what label best applies? I think we can safely rule out labels like "capitalist" and "libertarian." Clearly, Obama is a big government guy, so he must be one of the three, but which? As I said, as economic models the differences between the systems are not enormous, but there are a few.


A thought experiment is sometimes helpful in these exercises. A few weeks ago, I asked Naked Dollar readers to imagine Steve Jobs in a different time and place. My thinking was that the results would not have been quite so glorious (you can read it here).


Let's reverse the game. Let's take a historical figure, Lenin, and place him in modern America. What would be the result? I pick Lenin because more than any, he was responsible for the implementation of communism. Marx was an isolated theorist holed up in the British Library. Lenin was a man of action.


Well, let's start with what Lenin wouldn't be doing today: leading an armed revolt to assume power. This strategy is only effective when you are revolting against a tyrannical and corrupt power like the tzars or Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. So how to achieve Marxist ends within a benign democracy, where there are no trodden masses to support a revolt?


The answer is from within the system, for unlike 1917 Russia or 1958 Cuba, our system allows anyone to accumulate power if they play their cards right. In the U.S., growing government power is a game best played slowly, but also faster when the opportunities present. Lenin would have understood this. Do it in a way that few notice what's being imposed on them, like the proverbial frog in pot of water that slowly boils. You boil to death before you realize there's a problem.


In short, the entire liberal movement has operated by this playbook for the last 70 years, to great effect. Obama is merely the movement's apotheosis. So, intellectually, it's safe to call Obama either a socialist or a communist. The constructs of these ideologies are what he believes to his core.


But what about in practice? Communist? Sorry, no. I don't doubt Obama would like very much to rule without the inconvenience of Congress, the Supreme Court, or even voters. In a rare moment when he allowed a thought bubble to escape, he professed envy on the Chinese leadership that could just do whatever it wanted, without messy democratic constraints. But the fact is he can't, so we can't call him anything more than a communist wanna-be.


Socialist, perhaps? This is certainly closer to the mark, and Obama is especially animated by the class warfare aesthetic that adorns socialist movements everywhere. But socialists, like communists, want the government to own the means of production, particularly the biggies like banks, airlines, car companies, and so on. (Communists, on the other hand, want all those and the corner deli, too.) Interestingly, we haven't seen Obama, even in the midst of crisis, move to take over any industries. He merely wishes to control them. His levers of power are Obamacare, Dodd Frank, the EPA, and so forth. Not textbook socialism.


Which brings us to fascism. Obama certainly doesn't embrace any of the weird eugenics of fascists-past, nor is he quite so militaristic, so labeling him a fascist wouldn't be entirely accurate. But we are discussing economic models here, and, ironically, fascism may be closer to the mark than the others. Obama is willing to allow the appearance of private property but the reality is that an army of technocrats set the rules. Call it socialism by fiat.


Or perhaps we should call it Obama-ism, because anything so incredibly destructive probably deserves its very own ism.

Occupy Wall Street DOES Way In on B-Ball Strike, but...

You can't make this up.

In my previous post, I asked why OWS wasn't protesting against rich basketball players who earn an average of $5.5 million, but are striking for more.

Well, it turns out the OWS crowd has weighed in after all - on the side of the players. Being in the top 0.01% isn't enough.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Occupy Wall Street - Selective Outrage

The average person on Wall Street makes $300,000 per year. Nice, but not enough to put you in the top 1%. That takes $350,000. (Note, by the way, that you do not live like a rich person in New York on $300,000, either.)

The average NBA player, on the other hand, makes $5 million a year. This isn't just top 1%, it's maybe top 0.1%. And yet, they are on strike for more. That doesn't qualify as wild-ass greed? Shouldn't the OWS crowd be chanting and protesting outside the gates of their mansions? Shouldn't Obama be calling them out?

Also, by delaying the start of the season, they are depriving scores of everyday folk from earning a living: the hot dog vendors, the ticket takers, maintenance men, etc. 99 percenters all. Where's the outrage?

I suspect the NBA is exempt since:

1. They are unionized (even if they are the richest union in the world)
2. They play a sport officially liked by Barack Obama
3. They aren't known to vote Republican
4. They are largely minority, rendering them untouchable

As I ponder also why OWS has not encamped outside George Clooney's house, I note that 1, 2, and 3 also apply.

We're All Lucky Jobs Was Born in America

Like anyone, I love Apple products, and I agree that Steve Jobs is the Henry Ford/Walt Disney of our age. A corporate and a cultural hero.  

But...you knew there was a "but" coming, right?

BUT. He was other things as well, like a complete tyrant. A belittling, abusive monster around the office and in his personal relationships. Not a nice guy.

What to make of this? Does all the adulation deserve an asterisk? My Psych 101 prof would have called it cognitive dissonance.

It was after I read the one thousandth fawning hagiography of Jobs that I recalled an op-ed piece I happened upon six or seven years ago. I wish I could remember who wrote it, but I found it an instructive way to view this. The thrust of it was this:


What a great country we live in that we can harness the incredible talents of a man like Jobs for the maximum possible social utility. If Jobs had lived in another time and place, 1930s Soviet Union, say, his talents might have been harvested in far different ways. Like organizing the gulags more efficiently. Or figuring out how to better terrorize the Kulaks.

You see, a man with talents as outsized as Jobs was not going to live a life of obscurity, no matter what circumstances of his birth.  Steve Jobs, tyrant, lived a life of greatness thanks to the greatness of the system in which he lived. And while free market capitalism made Jobs rich, it created orders of magnitude more wealth for society in general, not to mention all the fun.

One wonders about the "what ifs" of those born to less fortunate political systems. What might Irwin Rommel have accomplished in America? Leni Riefenstahl? Or even, if I may be so provacative, a Josef Stalin? If you plucked Stalin from the USSR and gave him a life in, say, New York today, what might happen? He wouldn't kill millions, to be sure, and he likely wouldn't be lovable, but what would he accomplish? Something great? We'll never know.


Steve, nice or not, RIP.