Marbury

romney hangs on to a sinking ship

 

(Photo: Reuters)

Mitt grinds out a victory in Michigan, where he simply had to win, and takes Arizona too (he was expected to win in the latter but the scale of his victory will be satisfying).

So Romney remains front-runner, Santorum's surge is stayed, and the race remains in precarious equilibrium. Next week, it's Super Tuesday, which could see any number of outcomes, including the return of Gingrich as a significant player - he hopes to do well in the south. Alternatively, if Gingrich does badly, he might drop out, and leave Santorum as the only remotely viable alternative to Romney, which would be bad news for the latter. I suspect Romney will continue to do Just Well Enough, which means this race will drag on into the summer.

A long race ended up being good for Obama in 2008. It toughened him up as a candidate, flushed out his vulnerabilities (Reverend Wright etc), and strengthened his profile and organisation in battleground states. But I'm doubtful that the same applies to Romney. The longer this goes on, the weaker he looks. He's not David taking on Goliath, as Obama was; he's trying to overcome a guy who appears to believe that a college education is for snobs, a guy whose most famous policy is lunar colonisation, and...Ron Paul. The more difficult Romney makes this look, the more diminished he becomes, and the more extreme too, in the eyes of general election voters (Obama and Clinton weren't really dragging each other to the left). He is also liable to make more of those priceless bloopers.

Meanwhile, Obama is pulling way ahead of Romney in head-to-head polls, and even beats a "generic Republican", which indicates that the prize of the GOP nomination is losing its value.

michigan: where trees are the right height

If we didn't know him better we'd think he was on amphetamines. As it is, I suspect we're seeing the effects of extreme tiredness and intense pressure on the Romney frontal cortex:

 

This reminds me of something that was once said of Romney's father George, a former governor of Michigan (the Romney family has deep ties to the state, hence Mitt's crazed riff): that watching him campaign was "like watching a duck make love to a football".

Michigan votes today. It's a huge moment for Romney, a must-win. The polls suggest it will be extremely close.

sick man

The most famous segment of one of the best-known speeches in modern American history:

Many find these words inspiring. They make Rick Santorum violently nauseous:

In remarks last year at the College of Saint Mary Magdalen in Warner, N.H., Santorum had told the crowd of J.F.K.’s famous 1960 address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, “Earlier in my political career, I had the opportunity to read the speech, and I almost threw up. You should read the speech.”...On Sunday, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Santorum whether he stood by his statement...Santorum defended his remarks...“I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” Santorum said. “The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.”...

Stephanopoulos asked Santorum, “You think you wanted to throw up?” “Well, yes, absolutely,” Santorum replied. “To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up. What kind of country do we live that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case? That makes me throw up.”

One of Santorum's most striking characteristics as a politician is a willingness to own his most controversial remarks. Most politicians running for president wouldn't have criticised JFK's speech in the first place, JFK being the iconic figure he is for Americans across the political spectrum. Neither would they have used such extreme language. But if they had, they would definitely find a way to "walk it back" when asked about it on national TV. Santorum doesn't do that. He repeats, explains, and intensifies. He doesn't succumb to pressure from advisers, because he doesn't have any advisers, at least not in the professional sense. He can truly claim to be "unspun"; an honest politician.

There are plenty of people who find this approach honourable and refreshing, and it certainly makes for a stark contrast with Mitt Romney. I find it increases my appreciation for shiftiness and spin.

(More on Santorum here).

obama can't stop singing

The president offers us a lesson in how to leave your own party. Mick Jagger plays roadie. 

Rarely have the blues sounded happier.

This is pretty much a perfectly executed piece of choreography - the reluctant (but not that reluctant) performance, the interchange with the band, the landing on "Sweet Home Chicago" and then - exit! Yet it appears to be genuinely spontaneous and when you think about it, it could have gone very wrong. The president is clearly just feeling lucky. And who can blame him?

Let me sound a more authentically bluesy note though: these pictures will play wonderfully well on the evening news to those who already like Obama, or to those Americans who are generally feeling good about life. But to voters who are feeling pessimistic about their job prospects or worried about the state of the nation, seeing the president in party mode may serve only to infuriate.

good question

Posed by Rick Santorum:

Gov. Romney’s greatest attribute is ‘Well I’ve got the most money and the best organization.’  Well he’s not going to have the most money and the best organization in the fall, is he?

why the white knight won't turn up

 

Michael Czerwonka/EPA

The Republican nomination race is in a dire state. None of its candidates seem capable of uniting the party. Inevitably, then, there is a lively strain of speculation on whether, if this uncertainty and discontent persists, a white knight from the right will enter the race during the Spring, or even ride into the convention and be nominated by acclaim. The names coming up include Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, Sarah Palin (that last being considered a possibility only by Sarah Palin). It's tremendous fun, this, and heaven knows I don't like to stamp on fun, but I'm afraid it's not going to happen. The nominee will almost certainly be one of the existing candidates, and very probably Mitt Romney. Dull but true.

First of all, there are pesky technical hurdles to late entrants, like filing deadlines, the kind of thing many media commentators dismiss as mere detail, but which - as Hillary Clinton found out in 2008 - matter.

Second, such scenarios involve Mitt gracefully stepping aside and agreeing to back the new man. Hmm. So after four years of planning, travelling, spending, fundraising, speaking, debating, coiffuring, fake grinning, self-abasing; after being smacked in the face again and again by his own party and returning doggedly to the fray each time; after winning more endorsements and (probably) more primaries than anyone else - Mitt is going to say, "OK, guys, gave it my best shot. Time for someone else to have a go." Really?

Third, the white knight candidate has to take a massive gamble. Two massive gambles, actually. First, he would have to be really confident that the red sea will part - that Republican voters would acclaim him en masse rather than revolt against his perceived arrogance. A rejection would be humiliating, and quite possibly career-ending. Second, he also has to be confident of victory against Obama in November. If Obama's approval ratings were still in the doldrums, the prospect might be more enticing. But right now, they're heading up, buoyed by what appears to be an economic recovery.

I think any white knights with presidential ambitions will be happy to let Mitt take the battle to Obama. 2016 is starting to look like a much more attractive contest.

obama's chinese smile

President Barack Obama meets with Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, February 14, 2012. UPI Martin Simon

The Atlantic's James Fallows has written an assessment of Obama's first term that contains an interesting passage on this president's handling of China.

Fallows is one of America's most experienced and respected journalists. He now specialises in long, heavily researched and carefully reasoned pieces that can, at their best, be pretty much the definitive word on the topic he's examining. The most famous example is Blind Into Baghdad, his diagnosis of how the Bush administration screwed up in Iraq. I was disappointed in Fallows's Obama piece, however, which is uncharacteristically shallow and windy. But it has its moments, particularly on Obama's recalibration of America's relationship with China, an underwritten story (Fallows, who was living in Beijing for the first years of Obama's presidency, is a genuine expert on this subject):

Much like Nixon’s approach to China, I think it will eventually be studied for its skillful combination of hard and soft power, incentives and threats, urgency and patience, plus deliberate—and effective—misdirection...Two years after Obama’s “humiliating” visit to Shanghai and Beijing, U.S. relations with China were a mix of cooperation and tension, as they had been through the post-Nixon years. But American relations with most other nations in the region were better than since before the Iraq War. In a visit to Australia late in 2011, Obama startled the Chinese leadership but won compliments elsewhere with the announcement of a new permanent U.S. Marine presence in Darwin, on Australia’s northern coast.

The strategy was Sun Tzu–like in its patient pursuit of an objective: reestablishing American hard and soft power while presenting a smiling “We welcome your rise!” face to the Chinese. “It was as decisive a diplomatic victory as anyone is likely to see,” Walter Russell Mead, of Bard College, often a critic of the administration, wrote about the announcement of the Australian base. “In the field of foreign policy, this was a coming of age of the Obama administration and it was conceived and executed about as flawlessly as these things ever can be.”

As I noted recently, one of the under-acknowledged successes of the Obama administration has been the quiet success of its diplomatic efforts to restore America's good name and global influence.

It's perhaps unusual for foreign policy to be regarded as the strongest aspect of a Democratic presidency, particularly when the president is as inexperienced as Obama. That this is the case tells us something about Obama's strengths and weaknesses. He is good at foreign policy because he enjoys thinking strategically, and is more capable than most - perhaps any - previous presidents of seeing the world from the point of view of non-Americans. But it's also because, unlike domestic policy, it involves relatively little public persuasion, or coalition-building on Capitol Hill. To be good at foreign policy you don't have to spend hours cajoling and flattering partisan political opponents - and disgruntled colleagues - into striking a deal, and you don't have to shake the hands of voters or feel their pain. Most of it can be conducted in secure rooms full of smart people, away from the glare of the media, and by presidential directive. This is the Obama comfort zone.

Despite being an extremely successful politician - he is president, after all - Obama has surprisingly little stomach for bread and butter politics. That's not a problem when it comes to foreign policy. But where he has fallen short in other areas of his presidency, his discomfort with traditional politicking is a handicap. 

groupthink and the price of money

Laurence Ball, a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, has published a paper that looks at the conduct of the U.S Federal Reserve board through the lens of social psychology, in particular the concept of "groupthink".

The professor wants to know why the Fed's chairman, Ben Bernanke, has changed his mind over the years about the need to aggressively stimulate a flat economy using fiscal measures, if interest rates are already near zero. In short, Bernanke used to advocate such a policy, but now he doesn't. Rather than simply accepting that Bernanke changed his mind, Ball argues that he was a party to groupthink, defined by the psychologist who coined it in 1971, Irving Janis, as “the mode of thinking that persons engage in when concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive group that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action.”

When groupthink occurs, individuals go along with what they perceive as the majority view, or the view of a group leader. Each individual silences his or her own dissent: people self-censor any opinions that they sense might differ from the majority view, because they value group harmony too much to risk disturbing it, and because they want to avoid disapproval from their peers. The results can be disastrous; Janis used groupthink to explain the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the escalation of the Vietnam war.

I don't have a view on Ball's overall argument but he does turn up some interesting evidence. One of the factors identified by psychologists as common to groupthink is situations is the presence of a high degree of camaraderie amongst the members of the group. The Fed (FOMC) sounds like a jolly old club:

Laurence Meyer reports that, when he entered his first FOMC meeting, he was “warmly welcomed into the club.” A New York Times article about the FOMC transcripts for 2006 notes the frequency of jokes, “banter,” and “gossip about people who are not present”

Ordinarily we think of camaraderie as a good thing. It's certainly pleasurable for the people who are part of it. But whether it's likely to lead to good decisions - well, that's another question. Here's Tim Geithner - then board member and current Treasury Secretary - addressing Alan Greenspan on the occasion of the latter's last Fed meeting in 2006:

I’d like the record to show that I think you’re pretty terrific, too. And thinking in terms of probabilities, I think the risk that we decide in the future that you’re even better than we think is higher than the alternative.

Well, uh, it didn't exactly turn out that way, did it, Timmy?

The Fed has a foreign counterpart that Ball mentions approvingly as being less likely to suffer from groupthink - the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee:

The reasons include the absence of a directive leader or a desire for consensus: 5-4 votes on policy decisions are common, and the Governor is sometimes on the losing side. Each committee member has a legal mandate to vote based on her individual views. The committee includes “external” members who are not part of the Bank’s management... Finally, the Bank of England has long encouraged outside scrutiny through post-meeting news conferences, a practice that started only in 2011 at the Fed.

That's something we can comfort ourselves with, as America's growth curve turns upward again and ours remains resolutely supine.

why santorum is a real threat to romney

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

No, it's not just the sweater vests (or, as we call them over here, tank tops).

I've been guilty of underestimating Santorum, as most of us have. I still think he's likely to lose, but he's got a decent-sized chance of overturning the front-runner. Just as the human body will develop antibodies that are perfectly designed to neutralise a particular virus, it may be that the GOP race has thrown up a candidate whose strengths intersect lethally with Romney's vulnerabilities.

Michael Sokolove is a New York Times reporter who spent time with Santorum in 2005 in the course of writing a profile of him. He came away with a sense that, whatever else he is, Santorum is not your average politician:

When I was with Santorum, in Washington and on a campaign swing in Pennsylvania, I observed that his staff didn’t call him Senator, as most of the 100 titans in that august body like to be addressed. They called him Boss or Rick. I could ask him pretty much anything, and he would answer. One thing I particularly appreciated was that if I inquired about some seemingly outrageous statement he made in the past, he didn’t deny it or try to frame it in some more palatable way; he would actually expand upon it. He had the courage of his convictions.

At this point, you might want to think about Mitt Romney and ask yourself if that last phrase is one people associate with him. Or if maybe that's the inverse of the phrases most associated with him.

Here's Sokolove again:

Santorum really does have “real-guy” cred in a way that no one else in that field does. When he talks about working people, you feel he actually knows some of them. He has conviction. He says what he thinks, no matter how possibly alarming his views may be, and repeats the same thing the next day and the next.

Again, consider the Romney. A man whose regular guy credentials are on a par with those of Mr Burns.

Then, of course, there is the question of ideology. Republican voters are in the mood for a true-red conservative. Santorum may not be a small-government guy (he's actually more of a Bush-era statist) but on the most emotive parts of the Republican agenda - social issues - all his signals flash red.

In short, Santorum's character, his personal style, and his politics might have been designed to expose Romney's weaknesses in the eyes of this electorate.

The big advantage that Romney still has over Santorum (in terms of voter appeal) is on electability. But then again:

Mr. Santorum can also make a credible claim to challenging Mr. Romney on electability. Mr. Santorum’s current unfavorable rating among all voters is 11 points lower than Mr. Romney’s, 36 percent versus 47 percent. Their favorable ratings are roughly equal: 30 percent for Mr. Santorum to 29 percent for Mr. Romney.

That's from Nate Silver. In fact, as Mr Silver has pointed out elsewhere, Santorum may be the most rational choice for the Republicans, given the current field. Arguably, he has a better balance of conservatism and electability than Romney. Plus, they just like the guy more. So why not go for it?

As I say, I still think Santorum will lose. I also think that no more candidates will enter the field, and that Romney will secure the nomination.

But the exciting thing about this race is that I may be wrong on any or all counts.

(By the way, does anyone else keep thinking Jerry Seinfeld is running for president?)

november surprise

Towards the end of his interesting post on the relationship between Obama's improving ratings and the improving jobs numbers (in short, there is one), Nate Silver points to something to watch out for:

Speaking of which, there is one set of headlines that could be especially important to Mr. Obama. On Friday, Nov. 2, the government will release a jobs report — just four days in advance of the Nov. 6 election.

That will represent the first time since 2000 that a jobs report immediately preceded a presidential election. If the election is too close to call at that point, the report could very easily make the difference.

Yikes.

walking softly

Obama meets Thatcher. Warning: this picture has nothing to do with the following post. (Photo: Lawrence Jackson/White House.)

As one of the Economist's bloggers argues in a fascinating post, behind the recent failure of the Security Council to reach agreement on Syria is an underplayed story: the extent to which America has regained moral authority and global influence, after its post-Iraq decline. China and Russia may have stopped the UN taking out sanctions against Assad. But they did so at the cost of making themselves look isolated, backward-looking and autocrat-friendly, at a time when there is a global groundswell for freedom, particularly in the Middle East. America's UN ambassador, Susan Rice, used exceptionally strong language to condemn the Russian-Chinese veto (she called it "disgusting"). She felt able to do so because America was so clearly on the right side of the argument, and had most of the rest of the world behind it, including the Arab League. The Turkish Foreign Minister even went so far as to criticise the "Cold War logic" of Russia. America's deft positioning in this dispute hasn't come out of nowhere, says the Economist:

For the past three years America has been walking softly, and it's working very, very well. Ten years back, America often found itself isolated, struggling to pull together "coalitions of the willing" packed with small client states. Lately, we have been finding ourselves in the majority, along with the democratic world, while Russia and China front a dwindling coalition of the unwilling. To some extent, this reflects a smart, subtle foreign-policy presence in which we have done a vastly better job of looking at what other countries actually want, and seeing where our interests align, rather than trying to bully other countries into supporting our goals. To some extent, it's luck: the Arab spring happened.

But it's also a testament to the continuing strength of this president's image abroad. His ratings may be down at home, but around the world, he is still an asset:

In almost every country, you'll see a dramatic or startling increase in confidence between 2008 and 2011. In Germany and France, George Bush had approval ratings in the low teens in 2008; Barack Obama's approval has never dropped below 80%. In Japan and Britain the shift is nearly as striking. In Egypt, the corresponding figures are 11% and 35%. Even in Russia itself, they are 22% and 41%. When Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice try to win backing for American positions at the UN, the exceptional popularity of the president they represent in other countries is obviously a factor.

Obama's foreign policy record is far from unblemished - his policy on Israel-Palestine has been a mess - but he deserves credit for the restoration of America's "soft power" in the world. This is partly because he put grown-ups into big jobs - Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Susan Rice (Rice's predecessor was John Bolton. John Bolton! The Homer Simpson of diplomacy). But it's also because his stewardship of policy has been coherent and consistent. He's projected a kindler, gentler image abroad, while at the same time demonstrating America will still exert hard power when it feels it needs to, not least along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, or in the audacious killing of Bin Laden.

When it comes to foreign policy, President Obama can fairly claim to have lived by Teddy Roosevelt's motto: Speak softly, and carry a big stick.

holy santorum!

Photo: Dilip Vishwanat for The New York Times

Rick Santorum won a clean sweep of three states last night: Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado.

Now, these contests are largely symbolic - no delegates were awarded in any of them. But symbols matter, and Romney's failure to sustain any momentum from his Florida win last week is another embarrassing and wounding sign that his party has very little enthusiasm for him. He is still the front-runner and the heavyweight in this campaign. He can devote ten times as many resources as any rival to the 11 Super Tuesday competitions on March 6. But he hasn't killed off this race off as a competitive event yet and by now, he really should have done.

The brilliant Nate Silver was one of the few pundits to foresee that Santorum might do better than people expected in these midwestern states. In that post he also argued that Santorum, not Gingrich is now Romney's most dangerous opponent. Santorum is more disciplined, more consistent and has more of a direct line to evangelical voters than does Gingrich.

Last night's results supported Silver's proposition; Gingrich did poorly. Newt, of course, is on a personal mission to destroy or at least damage Romney. But at this stage, he could achieve that most effectively by pulling out of the race, leaving Santorum as the sole conservative anti-Romney.

Gingrich may know that, in his head of heads. In the battle between Newt's brain and Newt's galactic ego, however, I suspect the latter will win, and keep him in the race until he is forced out.

unreliable narrators

The most popular piece on the Guardian's site over the weekend has been a short article entitled Top Five Regrets of the Dying. It's based on a blog - now book - by an Australian palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware, who found common themes in the "dying epiphanies" of her patients. In short-form, these common regrets are:

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Should these principles be taken as a guide to living? This raises the question of whether people who are close to death are good judges of their own lives. It's a naturally appealing idea. We think of the very old as standing at a summit. Having emerged from the mists, they are able to look back out over the landscape of their life and discern every field, furrow and stream. Ware writes of the "phenomenal clarity" of her patients. Surely, this is when the wisdom stuff kicks in, right?

But what if our old age is as as full of self-justification, self-deception, misrememberings and willed illusions as the rest of our time on earth? In fact, what if it's more so, as the pressure to force the random stuff of experience into a coherent narrative reaches its highest intensity, and our cognitive skills reach their nadir? That combination might produce something that only seems like clarity, or wisdom.

I would say we'll only know when we get there. But of course, that's not true.

romney: the brechtian candidate

From the morning after Romney's Florida victory, earlier this week:

Romney has had several buckets of shit poured on him for these remarks, as you would expect. What is slightly surprising is that many of the biggest buckets have been tipped by his fellow Republicans. It's not moral outrage they feel, but anger and despair at the seemingly endless ability of Romney to generate Obama's attack ads.

It's not just what Romney says that makes Republicans weep - it's the way he says it. Note the icy rebuke to Soledad O'Brien (a wonderfully American name, by the way) when she dared to question him about his remark. It's deeply unattractive - and a more intelligent politician would have realised immediately that if she was picking up on it, others would too. Not Romney, who can't change direction or gear mid-interview but is capable only of ploughing on along his pre-programmed course.

I am actually starting to wonder if Romney is a robot designed by a latter-day Brecht, to satirise and undermine American politics from within. I say this because what's most interesting about his remarks is that they expose an uncomfortable truth: the poor are never a concern of politicians running for president, or indeed of most voters. The relentless focus of modern presidential candidates, Bill Clinton included, has been on the middle-class. Romney, in his painfully cack-handed manner, was accidentally doing what we always ask of politicians: he was telling the truth, without any spin.

The poor, by the way, have countered that they are entirely indifferent to Mr Romney.

unlike father, unlike son

This is the moment that George Romney, Mitt Romney's father, destroyed his own political career:

The interview is from 1967. Until then, Romney, a popular governor of Michigan, was a very credible contender for the 1968 Republication presidential nomination. But after he allowed that word, 'brainwashing', to escape his lips, his reputation took a massive blow, his campaign struggled to make headway, and he was forced to withdraw from the race before a vote was cast. The nomination was won, of course, by Richard Nixon, who went on to win the general election. George Romney's political career never recovered. 

Mitt, it is said by those who know his family, worshipped his father. Like George, he became a Mormon missionary, and he later followed him into politics, emulating his success by becoming governor of a state (Massachusetts). The closest  Mitt gets to displaying real emotion in public is when talking about his father.

But Mitt and George are very different personalities, and very different politicians. You might not have guessed it from watching his son on the campaign trail, but George Romney was a highly gregarious, loose-limbed campaigner who liked to shoot from the hip and talk off the top of his head. He wasn't always the most articulate guy (one of his opponents said that watching him campaign was "like watching a duck make love to a football") but he had spontaneity and eccentric charm in buckets.

Having won the Florida primary by a thumping margin, Mitt Romney is about to go one further than his father. He hopes to go one further still. In the months up until November, we're going to see even more of this tightly-wound personality attempting to do what his father failed to achieve, while acting in the opposite manner to him.

The 'brainwashing moment' doesn't explain why Mitt Romney is ultra-cautious in his speech, manner and decisions - he was probably just born that way - but the knowledge of it must have been a formative factor in his political persona. It's the closest we get to Romney's Rosebud.