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**UPDATED MONDAY MORNING**
THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH PODCAST:
Baldwin/McCullough *LIVE* – Hr 1/Hr 2

Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide:

And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. Whitney Houston DEAD at 48. What is the measure of a life well lived? Two very personal WWII vets gone in the past two weeks that had immeasurable impact on KMC’s life can be contrasted by comparison… Plus breaking developments. 800.345.9622.

2. How do you feel about the fact that President Obama tried to force his view of contraception on people of religious convictions. Thoughts: 800.345.9622.

ALSO: We’re BACK! CPAC 2012… we report…!

Are you looking to make a major difference in the success you can experience in business, promotion, marriage, or life? Then you owe it to yourself to discover the secrets of Dani Johnson and her transformational seminar First Steps to Success. These events sell out quickly, and many come away getting promoted, starting businesses, or earning a 6 or 7 figure income for the first time in their lives. Dani Johnson… committed to your TOTAL SUCCESS check out First Steps now!

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

“Drain the Jacuzzi!”

“This government isn’t too big to fail, it’s too big to succeed.”

“We don’t want an economy built to last, we want an economy built to grow.”

“This is Obama’s Washington.”

I wonder, however, if one of the points she hammered throughout the speech really registered with her audience.  Her signature line in this speech was “The door is open.”  She meant that political conditions are becoming conducive to a renewed commitment to small government and liberty.  People’s mindsets are changing.  We are not governed by the “rules” of political seasons past; the door is open to choosing our candidates and charting our nation’s future on a different basis.  The door is open to not accepting a continuation of the false compromises of previous decades.

(As I go to press, I see that Tina Korbe picked up on this theme.)

I have referred to those false compromises – “compromises” in which the conservative, small-government side gave up virtually everything – as the “old consensus.”  I see it losing, bit by bit, in this primary season.  People are no longer obediently making their political choices within the parameters defined for them by the professional political class.

This doesn’t mean that the voters have ideal candidates with whom to make their statement against the old consensus.  Santorum and Gingrich both have their drawbacks, as Paul always has.  But a critical mass of voters has recognized that Romney is the old consensus, and they are rejecting it.  The CPAC vote was remarkable for Romney’s 38% — because it wasn’t bigger, because Santorum got 31%, and even Gingrich, in a conclave of the politically connected, got 15%.

Everyone outpolled Ron Paul at CPAC, even though he has regularly won the CPAC vote in the past.  This signals a change in the mindset of politically active conservatives – not merely a new perspective that it’s overwhelmingly important to defeat Obama, but a perspective that the core of the conservative movement is shifting, and we need a serious mainstream candidate because it is a life-or-death matter to be effective in the political process.

That obviously doesn’t mean the CPAC voters think we need a “moderate,” leadership- and media-approved candidate.  If it did, they would have gone for Romney, rather than voting 46% for the mainstream candidates who are not Romney – and who are perceived, in many if not all cases correctly, as less satisfied with and enthusiastically “managerial” about the matter of big government.

But the point to take away is that voter sentiment, as it relates to the meaning of different candidates and the basis of government, is changing.

And that, I think, is about half the reason why Sarah Palin didn’t throw her hat in the ring for this campaign cycle.  Her evaluation of political conditions is remarkably accurate and prescient:  she saw, long before most of the voters did, that the game of expectations itself needed to change, and that only we could do it.

What strategic value was there for Palin in participating in the Cynical Media Slime-fest and All-Out Kick-em-in-the-Nads, mud-slinging, business-as-usual, expectations-on-autopilot primary season?

Six or eight months ago, the sea change in the voters’ sentiments and propensities might have been foreseeable, but it hadn’t happened yet.  Those who think Palin could have won lots of primaries on the basis of pre-primary voter sentiments are wrong, I think.  After all, the business-as-usual approach – Karl Rove tells everyone how bad a candidate is, the media magnify his or her every quirk or mistake, the media and some (not all) of the other candidates pile on with allegations that range from hostile spin to outright falsehood – has so far felled our most conservative candidates.

But in the process, the voters have been changing.  That’s what Palin saw before others did.  Do I think she is counting the days to a brokered convention?  No.  There is no one who could reasonably adopt that as a “plan.”  She won’t run this year; that’s my rational assessment as well as my gut feeling.  (I could of course be wrong, although I think some big conditions will have to change more for that to be the case.)

But if she does run, it will not be because she has changed, but because we have.  There are political conditions in which she could run successfully, and conditions in which she couldn’t.  The latter have constituted our political environment up until the last couple of months.

If the conditions are changing now, I believe that is largely because voters are having to wise up to the flaws in our own thinking by going through this ugly spectacle.  We already knew that the media have no intention of giving our candidates a fair shake, and that many in the GOP leadership want to submarine the small-government conservatives.   What many voters didn’t understand is that if we want to select leaders of character, we have to graduate from high school, and overlook the vicissitudes of “presentation” that sometimes make good people look like buffoons to those who see without humility, mercy, or discrimination.  We have to see with better eyes.  We have to think independently of the jeers embedded in the media narrative.  We have to be wiser citizens, placing in political leadership only the hope that is appropriate to free men and women.

We can’t have a candidate who sounds like Mitt Romney, but will lead the way a small-government conservative would.  That’s not an option.  What we’re doing in this primary season is coming to grips with that reality.  I think Palin knew instinctively that we would have to, before it would make sense for her to jump back into the electoral fray.

But, as I said, I think that’s only about half the explanation.  The other half is that Palin is an evangelical Christian.  She believes God has a plan for her life, and that He gives her a certainty in her spirit about the big choices she has to make.  I suspect she has had a peaceful certainty that joining the campaign as a candidate for 2012 was not something she should do.  If she were to analyze it, she might say that God knows better than any of us how the voters’ concerns and expectations are going to change.

Meanwhile, the door is open.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Who is to be congratulated for the elimination of Cain, Perry, Bachmann, and Huntsman?  The voters.  That’s right.  Sure, the candidates made some mistakes.  The media did everything possible to prejudice voters against them, and that was a crying shame.  But voters didn’t have to let the media or the contrived, somewhat artificial debate process make their decisions for them.

There is good news in all this.  First, the voters really are making the decision.  Second, the voters are starting to think for themselves.  It would have been nice for that to happen earlier, but there’s no time like the present.

Third, with the voters thinking for themselves, candidates who are focused on liberty issues are still on the ballot, and the party dialogue on those issues continues.  I know a lot of people don’t see it this way, but they’re wrong:  the most important thing the GOP can possibly do in 2012 is decide what it is and what it wants.  Self-identified “conservative” voters may be in a national majority according to the surveys, but it has been more than 20 years since we were all pulling together.

The bottom line is that the GOP is not agreed on what the problem is. We’re fighting that out right now – and it’s healthy, if annoying.  One faction says the problem is Obama; the other faction says it’s the way we now govern ourselves, which – no matter who is in charge – cannot avoid oppressing the people with regulation, debt, and crony-enrichment schemes at the people’s expense.  The latter faction is divided between those who see enough prospect for change with one of the candidates still in the race, and those who don’t.  Those who see even Gingrich and Santorum as too reflexively “big government” in their thinking are a growing voice.

The good news is that we are having the debate in a way that matters.  That is very good news.  Never underestimate the power of ideas.  They stick with people, even when it seems they haven’t, and they are the only thing that can motivate people to unite and make positive changes.

The mainstream media don’t depict it that way, of course.  They labor to depict the GOP primary season as a turkey shoot run by Keystone Kops.  But Americans have a choice as to whether they let the mainstream media distribute their opinions to them, like thematic gift baskets, and more and more Americans are choosing to just say no.

I wrote last year about Rick Perry as a candidate of the “old consensus” – my term for the modus vivendi adopted over the last 60 years by Democrats, who were increasingly taken over by progressive statists, and Republicans, who fought a rear-guard action to keep statism from getting too big and expensive.  Under the old consensus, Republicans were largely focused on the monetary and economic expense of statism, and the tacit agreement was that the right would accept as much statism as we could “afford.”  As long as we were growing economically – so this consensus went – we could afford a fairly heavy burden of statism.  Perry, I thought (and still do think), was on the Reagan end of the consensus rather than the Rockefeller end.

But what I see happening in the Republican primaries is an awakening of conservative voters to the disasters invited by the old consensus.  The loss of fiscal integrity and loss of liberty for America are products of the old consensus, and they have proceeded in lockstep: we are losing as much of the latter as we are of the former.  I believe 2012 is the year in which a critical mass of GOP voters has awoken to the reality that the old consensus is a destructive path and is in any case unsustainable.  Voting to continue down it on any basis is voting to remain on course for destruction.

I urge GOP voters not to be discouraged about this.  Ideas outlast everything else.  The idea of individual liberty and limited government cannot be killed.  America has not had a fundamental dispute over basic ideas for a very long time; we have become conditioned to the foggy stasis of bumper-sticker slogans and complacent, rarely-visited idea-sets.  It feels unsettled and strange to truly be debating the relationship of man and the state: to be breaking up those idea-sets and repudiating things supposedly bought into decades ago.  But a movement of ideas is a force of remarkable power, and one that no state power arrangement has ever ultimately withstood.  America’s burgeoning movement of ideas will not expire ignominiously.

The future of liberty on earth depends on what happens in America in the next decade.  If there is any nation on earth that can navigate peacefully back from the brink of statist implosion and loss of liberty, it is the United States. In 2012, GOP voters can rejoice in having alternatives, imperfect as they are, to a big-government statist candidate.  Voters can choose to affect the political process – and possibly the outcome in November – by casting their votes on principle.

Some words to live by as we go forward.  The president doesn’t make us, we make him.  The integrity and character of the people are paramount.  The only sure way to lose a battle is to stop fighting.  America has beaten the odds every time.  We will beat them again.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

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**UPDATED MONDAY MORNING**
THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH PODCAST:
Baldwin/McCullough *LIVE* – Hr 1/Hr 2

Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide:

And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. What if there was a single moment in which one of the Presidential candidates pretty much LOST the race because of a very poor choice of words? What if that person had the infrastructure to win the nomination? But what if we knew that that single phrase was going to kill off any hope for someone to run a thoughtful campaign against Obama? Well I think Mitt Romney pretty much did all of that and more this last week… The great con being that Mitt just had a stupid use of words. But Obama’s policies have actually wrecked this nation beyond recognition, especially the very poor. 800.345.9622.

2. Best selling author Steve Brown says God gives us three free sins… which ones are they? Why does it matter?  Thoughts: 800.345.9622.

ALSO: We’re BACK! CPAC 2012… make your plans to join us!

Are you looking to make a major difference in the success you can experience in business, promotion, marriage, or life? Then you owe it to yourself to discover the secrets of Dani Johnson and her transformational seminar First Steps to Success. These events sell out quickly, and many come away getting promoted, starting businesses, or earning a 6 or 7 figure income for the first time in their lives. Dani Johnson… committed to your TOTAL SUCCESS check out First Steps now!

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

So, is Adelson’s money buying Newt’s support of Israel?

Not hardly. One of my readers did a little research and sent me a few helpful links. (Thanks!)

Look at this article from 1998 in the San Francisco Jewish Weekly, titled Resignation of Newt Gingrich means Israel is losing a friend. For those of you readers who can’t do difficult math, that article was written more than 13 years ago, which means Sheldon Adelson’s money played no part in Newt’s opinion on Israel. So far, the best the Forward can come up with is Adelson’s money contributed to Gingrich’s group in 2006. Whoops. That’s eight whole years after we read this:

A Jewish Democratic politico said of Gingrich’s pro-Israel credentials, “I don’t think Newt is acting. I’d like to say he’s full of it, but he isn’t. Yes, he was trying to out right-wing the right-wing Jews, but he’s a true believer. Livingston may say what AIPAC wants to hear, but it’s not in his kishkes. He’s not a true believer.”

Really? A Democrat called Gingrich a right-wing Israel supporter in 1998?

But wait. There’s more! In 1998, Gingrich also called Jerusalem “the united and eternal capital of Israel”

Oh, pshaw. There must be some way Adelson’s money influenced Gingrich’s opinion. Maybe he’s so rich, he has a secret time machine and he went back in time to convince Newt to support Israel?

Or maybe Newt’s been a supporter of Israel for decades. (Also, Newt is pretty damned close to getting the Yourish.com cherished Master of Juvenile Scorn™ designation.)

Speaker Newt Gingrich said today that the White House was trying to blackmail Israel by pushing it toward the negotiating table, but President Clinton said he was only trying to bring about fruitful talks on Mideast peace.

”It’s become the Clinton Administration and Arafat against Israel,” Mr. Gingrich said at a news conference. ”The Clinton Administration says: ‘Happy birthday. Let us blackmail you on behalf of Arafat.’ ”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The Forward itself discussed Gingrich’s ties to Israel in the 1990s (buried, of course, in page two of an article using the Gloom-and-Doom Machine profiling his ties to Adelson). On the first page, they date the Adelson-Gingrich relationship back to 2007. This, kiddies, is how you get away with saying that your article is objective because it mentioned the recent and more distant relationships. It is also what is known as “slanting.” But the most important takeaway here is just what I wrote the other day: The only reason the liberal media is jumping all over the Gingrich-Adelson relationship is because Adelson is a Jew who is supporting a conservative Republican, rather than the liberal media-slash-Jewish establishment’s approved causes–which would be liberal Democrats.

Haim Saban influencing Bill Clinton? Not a problem. Sheldon Adelson is contributing to Newt Gingrich’s campaign? OMG, he’s a conservative, somebody stop him!1!!

Your objective media, exposed.

Cross-posted.

It’s a great message, isn’t it? And it fits in quite well with Team Obama’s 2012 strategy. There’s just one little problem, and it’s found lurking in Warren’s past in the private sector. The title of this piece by Holly Robichaud in the Boston Herald pretty much sums it up. Insurance past should sink Lizzy.

While Marsha Coakley and Lizzy Warren share the same personal flaws of being out of touch with the Massachusetts middle class, the Harvard professor also has a potential deadly political sin in her background. Maybe it is the reason President Obama didn’t nominate her to head up the consumer agency. It is not a secret that his administration believed Lizzy couldn’t survive the Senate confirmation process.

One of the Harvard professor’s many well-com-pensated part-time gigs included consulting for Travelers Insurance. I know that it is hard to believe that on one hand, Democrats would be bashing an industry, and on the other hand they are making money from it. To be a Democrat is to be a hypocrite.

What did Lizzy do to earn $44,000 in compensation from the insurance company? She made it harder for claimants to collect.

Now, I’m no expert here, but that doesn’t really sound very consumer protectiony to me. According to the article, Warren lent her expertise to Travelers to help them develop a strategy to structure a bankruptcy deal where they could avoid making millions of dollars in payments to patients exposed to asbestos. The total lawsuits amounted to something in the range of $500M.

Say… would those be some of the same “factory owners” and their insurers who never got rich on their own and owed it to society to give something back because of the social contract? If you’re basing your entire candidacy on being the Defender of the Little People, this doesn’t exactly do anything for your credentials, does it?

If the voters weren’t silly, they would understand that it has to be Mitt Romney, because, well, primary voters were silly and picked Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell over Mike Castle in Delaware, not to mention running with that goofy Sharron Angle in Nevada, and look how that turned out.  You can’t get California and you probably can’t get New York, if you’re the GOP nominee.  But you have a good shot at Pennsylvania and Ohio, Michigan and maybe even Illinois, if you’re Mitt Romney.  Newt Gingrich?  Forget it.  Gingrich can’t even win Georgia.

And the truth is, this analysis isn’t necessarily wrong.  If I had to make a bet, I’d bet that a Newt Gingrich nominated to run for the GOP in November would implode on the campaign trail.  He’d still make a better president than Obama, but his “sticking it to the media” shtick in the debates would lose its luster when he faced Obama.  He comes across as easily annoyed; the feistiness that resonates with voter sentiment in the primaries would weather time and tides poorly.  As between an irritable Gingrich and a cool, scripted Obama, I would predict without hesitation that the latter’s jokes during a debate would come off better.  All things being equal, that is.

As with the O’Donnell-Castle primary outcome in 2010, however, it’s not the voters who are silly.  They know that all things aren’t equal in 2012.  The voters who put Gingrich over the top yesterday believe that we can’t keep going down the same political path in the United States – and that that holds for Republicans at least as much as for Democrats, if not more.  Their perception is that the GOP leadership is invested in the current path of government: that it doesn’t want change; it is not committed to restoring liberty and limited government, but instead is comfortable with the growth of regulatory intrusiveness, and seeks merely to broker pragmatic accommodations to leftist activism as a sort of rear-guard action.

Considering that the GOP has been doing this for most of the last 80 years, the voters aren’t wrong.  They aren’t wrong about Mitt Romney: his record of enthusiastic accommodations to the left is a set of rusty, clanking weights tethered to the back of the Mitt-mobile.  Gingrich and Santorum both have some ‘splainin’ to do as well, but Gingrich has specifically repudiated some of his earlier faux pas (such as the snuggle-up with Nancy Pelosi on combating “global warming”).  He also speaks trenchantly on the issues that exercise the most voters:  federal debt, health care regulation, regulation in general, government intervention in the economy, illegal immigration.

It does matter to primary voters, moreover, that Gingrich “takes it to” the media by rhetorically denouncing the questions posed in the GOP debates.  Voters on the right perceive the one-sided political attitude of the media to be a significant problem for American politics.  And while I don’t get as excited as others do about Gingrich’s little rhetorical broadsides in the debates –responding with broadsides isn’t, per se, a component of leadership – this is another thing the voters aren’t wrong about.  Media bias is a problem, not only in politics but for our public life in general.  People believe a lot of things that aren’t so today because of the particular narratives favored by the major media.  The perception of public assent generated by the media’s formulations produces an environment for government taking actions that jeopardize our liberties.

Many voters are determined not to be ruled by federal executive agencies whose agendas are approved by MSNBC and the New York Times.  These voters are voting for the candidate they deem most likely to reverse America’s slide into precisely that method of government.  That they see such a candidate in Newt Gingrich speaks more loudly about the general state of the GOP than about anything else.  Voters are seeking to break the inertia and conventionalism of the Republican Party; this is, in fact, a power struggle, and one in which I would not bet against the voters.

The famous salvo from South Carolina in April 1861 precipitated a shooting war under old conditions that no longer prevail.  The Union had all the material advantage in that war, as it had the moral advantage in being determined to preserve the national union while ending slavery.

But today’s South is no longer under such a disadvantage.  A political salvo from the South is a different portent now.  Likewise, the Republican Party doesn’t hold a Union-like advantage over its members, nor is there any valid reason for our federal government to hold such an advantage over a law-abiding people.  Today’s “rebel” GOP voters in South Carolina aren’t the slave-regime old guard, they’re the abolitionists.  We need not be deceived that wanting to reverse the encroachments of the federal government, and defeat the plantation mentality in Washington, is evidence of irresponsibility or lawlessness.  The truth is closer to the opposite.

The people have one tool – the vote – by which to express the sentiment that things have to change.  In 2008, Mitt Romney didn’t look all that different from George W. Bush.  The Obama tenure has been a wake-up call that has put Romney in a new perspective: in 2012, he doesn’t look as different from Barack Obama as conservative voters would prefer.  Obama is less an outlier than the end-gamer of the same big-government principles embraced by both major parties over the past 80 years.  We have now seen with our own eyes where those principles lead, and the voters don’t want to go there.  It’s not the voters who need to wise up; it’s the Republican Party.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Share

**UPDATED MONDAY MORNING**
THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH PODCAST:
Baldwin/McCullough *LIVE* – Hr 1/Hr 2

Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide:

And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. The votes have been cast in South Carolina and we will hear from each of the candidates. If it’s close and Romney loses, he will feel as though he narrowly escaped. But his winning streak will be over. If Newt Gingrich wins–and wins big–it turns the entire race on its head. Should Rick Santorum stay in the race if he finishes 3rd? Why will Ron Paul stay in the race if he finishes dead last? We will do nothing but take your calls on all of these topics tonight *LIVE*: 800.345.9622.

2. Do black people prefer food stamps to jobs? One of the presidential candidates said they shouldn’t and he was promptly labeled racist. But why? How this has been twisted is absurd, but still amongst African Americans there is a verbal whisper campaign talking it up, most likely especially due to Newt’s win tonight. Thoughts: 800.345.9622.

Are you looking to make a major difference in the success you can experience in business, promotion, marriage, or life? Then you owe it to yourself to discover the secrets of Dani Johnson and her transformational seminar First Steps to Success. These events sell out quickly, and many come away getting promoted, starting businesses, or earning a 6 or 7 figure income for the first time in their lives. Dani Johnson… committed to your TOTAL SUCCESS check out First Steps now!

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

What I know now is, as part of its regular polling and surveying of NEA members, officers and activists, NEA asked respondents whom they preferred in the Presidential race. Obama won by a “substantial” margin, and Mitt Romney was the highest-ranking Republican candidate. The survey was taken in November 2011 or earlier, and so did not reflect the results of the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries.

I’ll leave it to the political pundits to determine whether this helps Romney or hurts him. As an organization, NEA only supports Republicans it considers to be moderate, and then usually only in primaries against more conservative opponents. However, NEA Republican members cover the full ideological spectrum, so their preferences don’t necessarily have to run toward the center.

Historically, the GOP Presidential nominee picks up about one-third of the NEA vote, without very large deviations from candidate to candidate. It’s possible that general disillusion among teachers about Obama, coupled with support for Romney, could alter the usual calculus, but Mike Huckabee’s experience from 2008 would argue against it.

Romney is not a small-government, limited-government conservative.  He will not go on offense against the dangerous principles on which government is being conducted today in the United States.  This is thought by many to be behind his “electability,” but it makes him the most defensive of potential Republican candidates.

RomneyCare is only one example of Romney’s comfort with big government, but it’s an important one.  Romney has continued to defend the principle of an absolute purchase mandate, levied on anyone with an income and a pulse.  The health “insurance” purchase mandate is not like the mandate for driver’s insurance, because citizens can opt out of being drivers.  But avoiding the health-insurance purchase mandate of RomneyCare requires opting out of life (or leaving Massachusetts).

Purchase mandates are not so much a states’ prerogatives issue as an issue of the principles controlling the purpose and scope of government.  RomneyCare is wrong for Massachusetts because it’s bad government.  Of course people in Massachusetts can choose to levy such a mandate if they want, but that doesn’t make it a good idea.  It puts government in an intrusive role that not only invites but demands a spiraling level of intrusion, one that pits citizen against citizen, rent-seekers against taxpayers, and government against liberty.

The US federal government is engaged today in far too many things that promote all three of these conflicts.  Advocacy groups leverage the EPA to prevent business activities that would generate thousands of jobs.  Both unions and big businesses lobby incessantly for regulations and special laws that will ensure they don’t have to face the consequences of unprofitability.  Yet very often, the conditions that make them unprofitable are themselves produced by regulation, rather than market factors.  These sources of cost to the public purse go increasingly uncriticized; the fiscal disaster, we are told, can only be averted by taking more from the taxpayers and further modifying the taxpayers’ behavior.

Health care is, as always, a prime example of this kind of interplay.  Once the premise of public funding for health care is established, everything anyone does becomes a cost issue for the public treasury.  There are some protected categories of behavior, like those that lead to STDs and AIDS, but constituencies arise for controlling people’s eating habits and fertility, and for proclaiming everything under the sun – including the sun itself – to be a public health hazard.  The urgent necessity of controlling what people do is amplified by the centralized, spiraling cost of health-care disbursements.  Few forms of government-brokered activism are as inimical to individual liberty.

Government – not social or economic dynamics – is now the primary means of pitting citizen against citizen.  This needs to change: the scope and independence of federal agencies and the regulatory impulse need to be dramatically reined in.  We can’t afford for the federal government to continue on the premise of the last 80 years.  The basic premise must change.

This doesn’t mean that the changes need to be abrupt, but they do need to be scheduled and prosecuted with determination.  Only someone who believes that, however, will be willing to make the case, and face down the multifarious opposition to reducing the footprint of government on principle.  Reduction on principle means that government can’t come back in 10 years and start regulating again things that it was ordered not to regulate in 2013 (or tighten regulations that were loosened).  It means that the apparatus for reclaiming an over-regulatory posture won’t even be there in 10 years.

Romney is not the man who will do this.  He has coexisted comfortably with the regulatory premise throughout his public life – even during his years at Bain Capital.  He sees a need to change some regulations on the margin, but he is not an advocate of fundamentally changing the premise on which we now regulate ourselves.

Although it’s not the point of this post, I will suggest, for comparison, what a truly deregulatory posture might look like.  Besides eliminating, or at least drastically reducing, the size and charter of the EPA and other federal agencies, a key shift in principle would be requiring that Congress positively approve every new regulation.  We already have the condition in which Congress sets parameters for the regulatory charters of the various agencies – and that is what has gotten us to the current environment of wild, often incoherent overregulation.  It is a good principle to start with, that whatever forms of regulation Congress doesn’t have time to attend to directly, we don’t need anyway.

Much reduction in the footprint of regulation would flow from that.  I also like Rick Perry’s proposal to reduce the amount of time Congress spends in session.  It is shifts in principle like this that will change the basis of government.  Changing that basis is our only hope for arresting the fiscal freight train headed for the mother of all wrecks.  But Romney is not the candidate who will push for the changes we need.

That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be better than Obama.  He would.  But electing Romney will mean at least four more years of playing on defense:  trying to mitigate the score being racked up by the other side, rather than playing on offense to score touchdowns for liberty and smaller government.  That’s why so many of the voters can’t get excited about Romney.  They know we need someone to lead us in a direction of fundamental change – a shift in the principle of government, back toward the limited-government idea of the Founders, plus a very big reduction in its footprint – and they know Romney won’t do that.

I would put the other candidates (with Ron Paul as an outlier) in this order, as to how much they would push for fundamental change: Perry, Gingrich, Santorum.  All three would go further than Romney would in this regard.  If any of these candidates got a Republican-controlled Congress, we could expect some amount of actual reduction in the persistent basis for regulation.

Romney’s approach would be to tinker with it on the margins.  I will vote for Romney if he’s the choice, just as I will vote for any of the other three.  But what we need is a small-government president who will go on offense.  Defense will only stave off the eventual loss.  And as we see with the Republican apathy over Romney, in politics – unlike football – defense isn’t exciting or motivational.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Newt Gingrich is out swinging with a new web ad dubbed, “For The Dogs.” The soon-to-be released ad highlights some of Romney’s most humorous verbal gaffes — an obvious attempt to poke holes in the notion of Mitt Romney’s electability.

Newt does go there–as he should–but the ‘Mitt strapped his dog to the roof of his car’ story has three versions:  the “my dog likes fresh air” PETA explanation from Mitt, the one with Seamus in an airtight kennel from Mitt, or what actually happened from the Boston Globe:

Family members told the Globe that Romney attached a special windshield onto Seamus’ carrier to protect him from the wind. Romney was traveling that summer with his wife, five sons, and Seamus to his parent’s cottage on Lake Huron. But hours into the ride, Seamus apparently suffered diarrhea, which ran down the back window of the car. Romney’s sons, all under 14, howled in disgust. Romney pulled off the road into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, and they drove on to Ontario.  emphasis mine

I’m going with the Globe’s story on this one.  You be the judge.

Here is Newt’s latest For the Dogs ad:

Vivian: So you don’t actually have a billion dollars, huh?

Edward:  No, I get some of it from banks, investors…

Vivian: And you don’t make anything and you don’t build anything.

Edward: No. No.

Vivian: So what do you do with the companies once you buy them?

Edward: I sell them.

Vivian: … You sell them.

Edward: Well, l… don’t sell the whole company; I break it up into pieces… and then I sell that off; it’s worth more than the whole.

Vivian: So it’s sort of like, um, stealing cars and selling ‘em for the parts, right?

Edward: [ Exhales ] Yeah, sort of. But legal.

Edward Lewis could have added:  “… and I love being able to FIRE PEOPLE!!”  Or so the soundbite-driven understanding of all this would have it.

You’d think Romney’s opponents would know that much of the base they’re trying to appeal to hates demagoguery against business.  When a business isn’t profitable, there are good reasons why it’s better to repackage and repurpose its assets for more profitable use.  Unprofitable businesses aren’t made profitable by political bailouts; they are made dependent and unsustainable.  Businesses like Bain Capital ensure that resources are being put to the most profitable, job-creating uses, given the environment of regulation and taxes that businesses have to operate in.  There’s nothing wrong with the existence of such companies; indeed, they are a positive factor in a dynamic business climate.

But then, Romney is tin-eared himself on some significant things.  He did, in fact, say that he likes to be able to fire people if they’re not performing.  That is a stupid, politically insensitive way to word a valid requirement of a healthy economy.  People sometimes have to be fired, but it’s suspicious for someone to “like” being able to do it.  There is nothing more gratifying than an employee who does well, and in particular one who improves over time, while there is nothing that makes the average boss feel as terrible as having to fire one who simply can’t seem to measure up.

Why couldn’t Romney have said instead that businesses need to be able to fire non-performing employees, even though it’s never any fun to do that?  Apparently because that’s not the way he sees it.  His phrase about liking to be able to fire people is the one that came naturally to him.  It doesn’t mean he’s a cold-hearted jerk who loves to give people bad news, but it is a personality problem for him in political leadership.  ‘80s-era pop psychologists would have said that he is very “objective-oriented”: he resonates to the idea of the goal and the achievement, and gives short shrift to the people.

Republicans do want a better climate for business, but the more abstract, data-focused perspective of a Bain Capital graduate is not necessarily what they are looking for.  I don’t actually want a president who imagines he can boost the bottom line of US companies.  I want one who understands that government policies affect people, largely through the constraints they put on business.  And I want him to respect the rights and dignity of individual people, neither trying to bribe them with goodies nor trying to herd them into programs that he sees as financially smart.  I’m not looking for a president with an opinion on whether a whole bunch of things he isn’t in charge of can be profitable.

Bringing up Bain as an issue has also turned up the fact that Bain profited from a deal in the early 1990s involving a steel company that received a $44 million federal bailout for its pension plan.  While it is demagoguery to equate this with Bain itself receiving a federal bailout, it is still a problem for Romney.  Companies like Bain have been operating in the environment of government incentives, regulations, and bailouts for quite a while now, and Romney’s record is one of being comfortable with that.  (He endorsed the TARP bailout in 2008.)

More and more of the people are not comfortable with it.  It is well and good that Romney wants the government to get off business’s back, but it’s not OK to remove only some constraints while leaving others, and continuing to bail the whole mess out.

Sadly, Romney’s opponents have wasted a superb opportunity to talk about what they think is the proper relationship between business and government.  They have simply jumped on the demagoguery bandwagon, which frankly is cheap and annoying.  If I were crafting talking points, I would address the “liking to fire people” comment graciously – something along the lines of “I’m sure this is what Governor Romney meant to say” – and focus more on Romney’s comfort with the extent to which government regulates business, profits from regulating business, and bails business out so it can keep regulating and profiting.

One last thought.  In contrast to the bloviation-fest precipitated by the Bain Eruption, consider the cool dispatch and intelligence with which the candidates knocked down the idiotic social-issue questions posed by Stephanopoulos and Sawyer in the debate on Saturday night.  The candidates were ready to talk about those issues – irrelevant as they were – with principled specifics.

On the matter of business and government, however, it’s been all big-government complacency on one side, and all mindless demagoguery on the other.  Not a hint of a principled argument about the free market and the appropriate role of government, from the perspective of either a man-and-the-state theory, or a regulation-vs.-the-market theory.

Nothing has made clear like the last 40 months that there is no longer an American consensus on these matters.  The Obama camp knows exactly where it stands.  But the GOP candidates aren’t internally motivated and prepared to make specific cases about it, as they are about social issues.  Yet that’s what the voters are waiting to hear.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Romney, the son of a politician, has been running for office, holding office or thinking about running for office for more than two decades. “Just level with the American people,” Gingrich growled. “You’ve been running … at least since the 1990s.”

For some reason, Romney can’t do that. Or at least it seems like he can’t. His authentic inauthenticity problem isn’t going away. And it’s sapping enthusiasm from the rank and file.

Goldberg is right, but the underlying theme that voters need to be reminded of is that during so many important debates fromhealthcare, jobs, Wall Street Reform, confirmations, recess appointments, to taxes the culprits to invoke cloture or side with the Democrats typically are the same:  Senators Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe,  and Scott Brown–the trifecta of RINOs. All from the northeast, too.  See where I’m going with this?

Frankly, Romney, who the mainstream liberal media would like to see win the nomination, has yet to unite the GOP base.  His used car salesman pitch simply rubs people the wrong way.  We’ve seen this over and over again–even John McCain pointed this out and won in 2007′s primary–and now supports him–that should speak volumes to my point.  Romney has always been dogged by this and this is why we have such a large ‘Not Romney’ camp on the right side of the aisle.

The GOP is also paying the bitter price for not having anyone in line to succeed GW Bush.  The party’s internal tug of war will be an historical teachable moment and prepare the party for future elections.  The one saving grace is that, while the Democrats have Hillary, they have no one to succeed her at this point in time.  I say Hillary because she seems to be the only power broker left untarnished by Obama–even though she is an Alinsky kinda girl.

Additionally, the GOP presidential candidate will have a two-pronged mission as the nominee:  to beat the MSM and Obama.  However, enlightened voters now know for sure the media is mostly state-controlled, Obama was never vetted, and that his radical leftist ideology drives his policies, appointments, and regulations out of the mainstream.

Furthermore, the MSM needs Romney to offset Obama.  The formula is quite simple:  RomneyCare is to ObamaCare as Obama’s rhetoric is to Romney’s rhetoric all of which cancel each other out according to how the media sees it.

I’m not buying the media hype over who can beat Obama.  The primary is the primary and the game changes in the general.  Voters are more inclined to vote with their wallets.  We have gas prices averaging at almost $4 per gallon across the country, skyrocketing food prices, record foreclosures, record number of people on food stamps, high unemployment, ObamaCare, crippling regulations, and much more.  So if the MSM thinks that the historic 2010 midterm GOP wave was a whim, think again.  The Right accomplished its key mission of splitting the Congress so that Obama’s agenda could not be rammed through anymore.  Would we have liked the Senate, sure, but in 2012, the job will be finished.  My point is that who do we really want in the Oval Office?  A northeastern Republican who disavows the GOP or not.  We already have someone who does not have the consent of the governed.  Are we really going to take that risk again?

Finally, Romney has always touted RomneyCare as a great model for all the states to implement, but the reality is, the only person who implemented RomneyCare was Obama and now we have ObamaCare.  No thanks.

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**UPDATED MONDAY MORNING**
THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH PODCAST:
Baldwin/McCullough *LIVE* – Hr 1/Hr 2

Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide:

And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. The center of the political universe for the next four days is right here Manchester, New Hampshire, and that’s where Baldwin/McCullough come to you live tonight. Ron Paul’s supporters lining the streets on one side, Mitt Romney’s on the other, and after parties with Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich. Lawrence O’Donnell, Frank Luntz, Ed Morrissey, wandering the streets and we trust our studio as well. 9-11pm EST tonight don’t miss the hilarity of the most overblown serious primary in the nation… unless you’re from the Granite State, and in that case, thanks for the hospitality!

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

But I recoil in horror from others, notably his demand that schools teach the “scientific alternative” to evolutionary biology (by which he means the thoroughly un-scientific and misnamed “intelligent design”); and he is completely opposed to embryonic stem-cell research funding, without consideration that such research can probably be done without destroying the embryos. (I’m using Wikipedia’s list of some of his positions, though I did backtrack as much as possible to the primary-source interviews and Santorum’s own site.)

But considering the second part of the question — whether his positions on social issues are so extreme as to drive me away, despite his fairly good fiscal and foreign policies (which are at least somewhat better than Romney’s) — I’m on firmer ground. Santorum supports House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI, 96%) spending-cut plan and pushes for moderate reforms to Medicare and Social Security, but nothing spectacular like privatization (too bad). On the foreign-policy front, he supports the War Against Radical Islamism (WARI) and wants to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites (good if he can pull it off, bad if he tries and fails).

So which side wins? Although I am appalled by what a friend of mine refers to as Santorum’s “Flat-Earth Catholicism,” I just don’t think it would ever come up in a Rick Santorum presidency, not substantively. I doubt any state is going to attempt to outlaw “sodomy,” adultery, or contraception; and even if it tried, surely the opinion of the POTUS would matter little if any in the ensuing court fight.

Where the social stances might really matter, however, is in the election itself. I’m not worried that President Santorum would install a “Nehemiah Scudder” style prophetic theocracy (though 2012 is the very year the Rev. Scudder takes over, according to Robert Heinlein’s “future history” timeline!); but a great many voters might fear just that. Irrational, yes; but elections rarely turn on rational and logical cogitation alone. Would Santorum’s goofier social stances so frighten away voters not on the religious right?

Yes, probably some. But how many? Fortunately, most of Santorum’s apostasies from the norms of modern thought are fairly technical in nature, such as the distinction between science and so-called “intelligent design,” which looms very large indeed within the real scientific community but likely induces nothing from the mass of voters but a puzzled “Eh?” Most of the social positions will just zoom along below the electoral radar.

I believe the biggest danger would be Santorum’s suggestion that, contrary to the Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, Americans have no fundamental right to privacy. Such a stance may make sense in a technical, legal sense, at least as the Court clumsily expressed the thought in the case in question; but the vast majority of Americans passionately believe that there exists a fundamental core of individual liberty, inside of which government may not legislate.

The Court shouldn’t have called it “privacy;” and it certainly shouldn’t have concluded (in Roe v. Wade) that the right of “privacy” includes the right to abort zygotes, foetuses, and even babies within minutes of being fully born. (Actually, I believe that last position is an abomination even under Roe; my, what progress we have made!) Ne’theless, nearly everybody agrees that there is an irreducible shell of personal liberty surrounding every man and woman that protects him from a totalitarian government run amok.

I can prove my case with a single example: Does anybody believe that it would be constitutional for a state to enact a law proscribing how many times per week a husband and wife are allowed to make love in their own home?

If you answer No, then you necessarily believe that (a) such a law breaches that fundamental core of individual liberty, the irreducible shell; and (b) there are inviolable limits to federal and state government beyond those explicitly written into the Constitiution.

To the extent that voters believe Rick Santorum’s dismissal of a “right to privacy” means he rejects the irreducible shell of personal liberty described above, said voters will be very likely to vote for Barack H. Obama over the “theocratic” Rick Santorum.

Santorum’s vital task, then, is to reassure Americans that his thinking on what most people envision when they hear the word “privacy” is still aligned within the mainstream of modern thought; that he does not advocate government control over aspects of life that the huge majority believe belong to the conscience of the individual, not the diktats of a Council of Experts.

If Santorum can assure voters — including the arrogant author of this post — that he is not a “Flat-Earther” on any social issue that really counts, then we might be persuaded to support him more than Mitt Romney. That is, until and unless Santorum’s campaign collapses like all the other not-romneys before him.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

For months, Santorum has been the only Republican presidential candidate whose campaign didn’t have a big custom bus – and he still doesn’t, because this bus actually belongs to the famous Duggar family of Arkansas, who arrived in the Hawkeye State this week to join their favorite candidate’s final push in the Iowa caucuses. I interviewed John Duggar, one of the family’s 20 children, at the event in Boone:

A statement released by the Santorum campaign quotes the family’s super-mom Michelle Duggar:

“This year’s Presidential race outcome will set the course of America for the next several years! Rick Santorum is a pro-life, Christian conservative with the family values and common sense business perspective that we need to get our nation back on track, to create jobs and to stand for what is right! Rick has a proven track record as a leader in the US Senate he fought to end partial birth abortion, he has stood for defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Rick believes in lower taxes and less government control in our lives. He also will fight for drilling our own oil out of Alaska, which will lower fuel prices, create jobs and put thousands of dollars back in families pocketbooks. Rick is the man for the job, and the entire Duggar family asks those who are looking for a conservative candidate to support to join them in voting for Rick Santorum for President. He will be a voice for senior citizens, the working families and the unborn.”

The event in Boone was jam-packed, and not just with the numerous Duggars. The national media, who spent most of 2011 ignoring Rick Santorum, have turned out in droves to cover his suddenly surging campaign. It was impossible for me to get near the candidate inside the restaurant, where he was surrounded by reporters, photographers and TV cameramen. However, I did talk to two members of Santorum’s South Carolina campaign operation, who are here to lend a hand in the final Iowa push. One of them told me, “I’m laughing at all the media that keeps saying Rick doesn’t have any organization in South Carolina. He’s campaigned in South Carolina more than any other candidate has. … All we needed was a spark, and it looks like we got one.”

The plan for the Santorum campaign, if the surge comes through tomorrow with a strong result, is for their 24-year-old Iowa field director Jake Braunger to leap-frog ahead to help the South Carolina operation. Meanwhile, those who have discounted Santorum’s strength in New Hampshire may be in for a rude shock. In fact, as I pointed out yesterday, Santorum’s national campaign director Mike Biundo is a veteran GOP operative in the Granite State with strong Tea Party connections.

Many have apparently underestimated Santorum’s campaign all year, and now some are even claiming that “A vote for Rick Santorum is a vote for Mitt Romney.” Such arguments evidently assume that some other candidate in the GOP field is better prepared to be the strongest pick for the conservative “Anybody But Romney” movement. Yet as I pointed out today in The American Spectator, what happens in Iowa tomorrow night could destroy all such claims:

If the numbers in the final Des Moines Register poll are accurate, however, Santorum’s closing surge may be strong enough to vault him into second place, ahead of Paul — a result which would turn the “electability” argument on its head. How can Gingrich and Perry’s advocates claim that they are credible alternatives to Romney, if they can’t even beat a low-budget underdog campaign like Santorum’s? And what does it say for the vaunted superiority of those other campaigns that they failed to realize Santorum was moving ahead here until it was too late for them to respond effectively?

Pundits who imagine they can predict the future based on polls and media reports are often embarrassed by the actual results when ordinary voters have their say. It is probably impossible to predict what the outcome will be here Tuesday night, and even more difficult to guess what will happen as the campaign moves forward to New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and beyond. But those who have preemptively declared that Rick Santorum can’t win the GOP nomination may soon need to re-calculate their assessments.

“Right now, I’m typing this in the passenger seat while Aaron is driving his brand new Honda Civic with less than 9,000 miles on the odometer. I’m sure this car could hit 110 mph, but Aaron has this whole Midwestern law-abiding thing going on, so he refuses to push it past 80.”

Where I come from, real men drive fast. High-speed driving is a cultural trait of my people. As I explained to Aaron, we Appalachian-Americans inherit the “NASCAR hillbilly gene” and when he asked me who was my favorite stock-car driver, I said Junior Johnson — the moonshiner-turned-racer immortalized by Tom Wolfe as “The Last American Hero.”

Of course, we Appalachian-Americans are the victims of discrimination by law enforcement agencies who have never been sympathetic to our cultural traditions. First they outlawed homemade whiskey and in recent decades, using an infernal Yankee invention called “radar,” they’ve been infringing our natural-born right to drive as fast as we can. (Which is to say, pretty doggone fast.)

My driver’s license has about as many points as your average NBA final; score and my monthly car insurance payments exceed the Gross Domestic Product of several Third World countries. This discriminatory oppression of Appalachian-Americans — we are routinely hassled by cops for “Driving While Redneck,” as we call it —  is actually a serious immediment to my journalistic career. Because when I’m late for a press conference halfway across the Hawkeye State, that’s when it would be a real advantage to do some all-out hillbilly driving like my Grandpa Kirby did when he was running whiskey into Phenix City, Alabama.

Nevertheless, Aaron Rupp was probably right to set the cruise-control at a steady 78 mph as we traversed I-80 Monday afternoon on our way from Cedar Rapids to Adel, even though his low-slung Honda probably could have been zipping along at triple-digit speeds. Rupp knows that Midwestern culture is particularly hostile to the ancestral folkways of a downhome Good Ol’ Boy who can’t resist the urge to drive a four-lane interstate highway the way Dale Earnhardt (may he rest in peace) used to drive the back straightaway at Talladega.

Iowa’s law enforcement community continues to enforce the vehicular bigotry they call “speed limits,” but the wisdom of our Founding Fathers prevents them from violating another natural-born hillbilly right, killing stuff with shotguns:

IOWA CITY, Iowa — Rick Santorum bagged at least four pheasants during his hunting trip Monday at Doc’s Hunt Club. Those four birds were just the “clean kills” that he was certain were the result of his own marksmanship — a conservative count, Santorum emphasized to the crowd of reporters who showed up at the hunting club in Adel, west of Des Moines.
While the former Pennsylvania senator was pleased with his outing, most of the reporters who showed up were more interested to know if Santorum had bagged even bigger game during this political season — the endorsement of his hunting companion, Iowa Rep. Steve King. But the conservative Republican congressman said he wasn’t quite ready to make that commitment.
“You know, I came here today to shoot some pheasants with my friend Rick Santorum and we’re having a great day,” King told the reporters assembled for Monday’s press conference. “So I’m going to deliberate on all of this and I’ve got a few days yet before a decision has to be made.… I’m leaving that open.” …

You can read the rest of that at The American Spectator. I apologize that low-speed driving impaired my ability to get more complete coverage, but it’s not Aaron’s fault that Iowa law doesn’t recognize the cultural imperatives of the NASCAR Nation.

Nevertheless, by camping out in New Hampshire — where independents can vote in the Jan. 10 GOP primary — Huntsman has managed to work himself up to third or fourth place in polls there, assisted by preposterously generous coverage from the liberal media. Yet it is impossible to imagine what the pundits call a “path to the nomination” for Huntsman, and his only obvious purpose in the 2012 campaign is to suck up debate time that might otherwise go to actual Republican candidates.

You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that Huntsman has been adopted as the pet GOP hopeful on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. If there is a “Huntsman bubble,” Joe Scarborough is the guy blowing on the nozzle to inflate that bubble:

MSNBC has in recent weeks become the daily venue for one of the most bizarre reality shows on cable TV: Morning Bromance, starring Joe Scarborough as a man helplessly smitten with “Republican presidential candidate” Jon Huntsman.
When he isn’t blowing air-kisses at Huntsman, Scarborough is citing every possible media blurb about Huntsman as ratification of the former Utah governor’s make-believe campaign. Joe is to Jon what 11-year-old girls are to Justin Bieber, or what Chris Matthews is to Barack Obama. If Scarborough hasn’t yet announced his leg-tingles for Huntsman, it’s only because the MSNBC host wants to save his final orgasmic gush for the eve of the New Hampshire primary, where some polls show Joe’s teen-idol candidate in third place behind Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. …

Click here to read the rest.

At this juncture, only two candidates, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, have agreed to show up. The rest of the field has bowed out, and two of the remaining hopefuls—Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman—have dismissed the event as a circus.

According to the New York Daily News, the decision of Michele Bachmann to take a pass on the debate is the unkindest cut of all and has “damaged Trump’s reputation as a GOP kingmaker.” Trump is quoted as saying of the Minnesota congresswoman:

She came up to see me four times. She would call me and ask me for advice. She said if she wins, she would like to think about me for the vice presidency.

Trump, himself an erstwhile Republican presidential candidate, maintains that his decision to pull the plug will not be predicated on a low turnout for his debate but on possible plans to re-enter the race:

If the Republican, in my opinion, is not the right candidate [to defeat President Obama], I am unwilling to give up my right to run as an independent candidate.

Trump, who actually led in the polls at one point, claims he dropped out initially because of equal-time provisions that prohibited him from simultaneously running for president and hosting The Apprentice through the show’s May season finale. And here I would have thought that his spectacular mishandling of the birther issue and the attendant drop in his support were factors.

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While I have no firm estimate of how many eligible voters were in attendance, I can state officially that the number of kids was ginormous. Lots of big home-schooling families showed up – families with seven, eight, nine kids. Santorum is traveling with his own family of seven kids, so the super-size families certainly seem simpatico with the former Pennsylvania senator. . . .
He was quite impressive, and I very much agree with Santorum’s complaint that the media has unfairly ignored his candidacy.

That was more than four months ago and, unfairly or not, the media are still ignoring Santorum’s candidacy — except when they mock it, as liberal writers like Timothy Noah of the New Republic have begun doing:

Tim McNulty of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a tongue-in-cheek “Daily Santorum” blog feature, just in case. And my former colleague at Slate, Dave Weigel, has started a “Santorum Surge Watch,” though I think he’s mostly kidding, too. In this environment, though, today’s wisecrack is tomorrow’s front-runner. Let the Santorum surge begin.

Keep in mind that Santorum is the only candidate in the Republican field who has visited all 99 counties in Iowa this year. He’s in Iowa today. He’ll be in Iowa tomorrow. He is going to be more or less a full-time resident of Iowa until Jan. 3, and you might think that would count for something in a state where social conservatives are supposed to be a key GOP constituency. Yet Santorum’s campaign is being treated like a joke.

Why, of all the main contenders for the Republican 2012 nomination, has Santorum never had his moment in the sun?

• Theory One: Liberal media especially hate Rick Santorum because of his staunch advocacy of social conservative values, in particular his outspoken opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. So the media are ignoring Santorum out of spite, and the lack of coverage is effectively suffocating his campaign. This is Santorum’s own analysis of the problem. However, liberal bias can’t account for why even Fox News treats Santorum’s candidacy as an afterthought, which brings us to . . .
• Theory Two: Republicans have finally surrendered on social issues. Nearly two decades after Pat Buchanan declared at the 1992 Republican National Convention that our nation was in a “religious war … a cultural war … a struggle for the soul of America,” the GOP has grown tired of fighting a losing battle. Lawrence v. Texas settled the gay issue, Roe v. Wade is never going to be overturned, and there’s no point arguing about it anymore: America is now, permanently, a nation that doesn’t blink an eye at “Heather Has Two Mommies” or a million abortions a year. Not only is the economy the main issue Republicans are supposed to be talking about in the Obama Era, but the Smart People like Karl Rove and Charles Krauthammer seem to believe it’s the only issue Republicans should be talking about. According to this theory, Santorum is being punished by GOP voters for refusing to shut up about social issues where, as all the Smart People know, the battle has already been lost (if indeed the people in charge of the Republican Party were ever really serious about fighting such a battle).

Does Theory Two explain Santorum’s lack of traction in the polls? Has the Culture War ended in the unconditional surrender of social conservatives, so that whoever wins the 2012 Republican presidential nomination will have nothing to say on such issues?

Santorum’s low-budget campaign recently took out an ad in Iowa newspapers declaring “no surrender” on social issues, and none of the best-known spokesmen for conservatism — you know, the famous faces on Fox News — even bothered to notice. Have we now become a nation of sophisticated cosmpolitans, so that even self-declared conservatives are silent on social issues and everybody politely ignores those few holdouts like Santorum who didn’t get the memo?

Maybe. And maybe not.

Because I’m thinking of that famous scene in Animal House, after the Deltas have been expelled from Faber College and D-Day says to Bluto: ”Let it go. War’s over, man.” Rick Santorum’s family-values supporters probably wouldn’t approve of Bluto’s memorably R-rated reply:

Over? Did you say “over”? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no! … And it ain’t over now. ‘Cause when the goin’ gets tough…  The tough get goin’! Who’s with me? Let’s go! …
What the f— happened to the Delta I used to know? Where’s the spirit? Where’s the guts, huh? This could be the greatest night of our lives, but you’re gonna let it be the worst. “Ooh, we’re afraid to go with you Bluto, we might get in trouble.” Well just kiss my a– from now on! Not me! I’m not gonna take this.

It has long been my belief that the Republican Party keeps making the mistake of trying to be the Omegas — arrogant, privileged bullies — when instead they should emulate the defiant Deltas. Not necessarily in the sense of throwing decadent toga parties, but in the sense of having fun, confidently being themselves and thumbing their noses at the liberal Dean Wormers who enforce the “double-secret probation” rules of political correctness: “No more fun of any kind!” (Feel free to substitute bogus accusations of racism, sexism and homophobia for “fun” in that sentence.)

None of the developments in this wild and crazy year have so shocked me as the latest strange turn in the road to the White House: When the Cain Train ran off the rails — Herman allegedly “took a few liberties with our female party guests,” as Otter says in another famous Animal House scene — the surprising beneficiary was Newt Gingrich, the most Omega-like Republican candidate in the 2012 field.

Do GOP voters really want to nominate Greg Marmalard for president? I don’t think so. So permit me to play the role of Otter in that pivotal scene at Delta house: Santorum’s right. Psychotic, but absolutely right. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part — and the voters of Iowa are just the guys to do it.

If there is anywhere on the planet where social conservatives still have anything to say about electing Republicans, it’s the Iowa caucuses, and there were two events last week that got my attention — first, Sarah Palin singled out Rick Santorum for praise on Hannity’s Fox News show. And second, Santorum was endorsed by Pastor Cary Gordon.

Pastor Who?

Yeah, I know. I never heard of the guy until he endorsed Santorum, but he’s the Sioux City evangelical minister who led a successful fight to defeat the re-election of three Iowa state supreme court justices who had voted to make gay marriage the law of that Midwestern land. Not only did Pastor Gordon endorse Santorum, but he recorded this 19-minute video explaining his endorsement:

Pastor Gordon might not be much of an Animal House fan, but he is in effect acting as the Eric Stratton of Iowa conservatives, providing the decisive approval of a madcap scheme proposed by the frat-house slob who, as we all know, is destined to become Senator Joseph Blutarsky. And the dramatic parallel is almost perfect, in that the major media seem to have decided for us that this year’s GOP race is going to be as orderly as a homecoming parade — “now that the GOP race has narrowed to a two-man contest between Gingrich and  Romney,” as Maggie Haberman of Politico said.

Really? Is that it?

The only choice is between Mitt RomneyCare and Newt the Scozzafava-Hugger?

Maybe. I dunno. I’m not one of those Smart People like Rove and Krauthammer.

Maybe social conservatives in Iowa are going to let Maggie Haberman tell them who to vote for. But forgive me for having the urge to walk into the five-and-dime store and ask the clerk, “Could I buy 10,000 marbles, please?” Because if the Iowa caucuses are the Faber College homecoming parade, then the Rick Santorum campaign is a float in the shape of a birthday cake, emblazoned with an immortal motto: “Eat Me.”

And if Sarah Palin should follow up her praise for Santorum’s consistent conservatism by answering the prayers of his supporters and actually giving him her public endorsement, she would be like D-Day inside the Delta Tau Chi Deathmobile: “Ramming speed!”

The new ad, clearly aimed at social conservatives who are a key GOP constituency in the Hawkeye State, is timed to coincide with Santorum’s three-day “Faith, Family and Freedom” tour of Iowa, which began Sunday in Sioux City.

“I believe what makes America exceptional is not just our economic potential or our remarkable innovation, but the fact that we are a moral enterprise,” Santorum says in the ad (click here to view in PDF format). “As President, I will protect America’s moral foundation, empower American families and build America’s economic freedom. And I won’t compromise on my values to do so.”

In a press release, the Santorum campaign said the new ad will appear “in several major Iowa papers” including the Des Moines Register.

(Cross-posted at The Other McCain.)

Asked by host Christianne Amanapour about Gingrich’s stand on “social values,” Santorum said: “I think Newt has consistently put those in, let’s say, the back of the bus. He has never really been an advocate of pushing those issues. Newt is someone who likes to get issues that are 80 to 90 percent in the polls, and 80 percent in the polls are generally not necessarily conservative — strong conservative issues.”

Santorum touted his own record as he prepared to begin a three-day “Faith, Family and Freedom Tour” of Iowa, where social conservatives are a key constituency in the Republican caucuses, now less than a month away. (Full transcript here.)

“I think character is definitely an issue,” the former Pennsylvania senator said. “You know, I think they have to make a decision based upon the person’s entire record. And certainly character counts. And I think you look at — you know, I’ve been married 21 years, I have seven children, that’s a factor that people are going to look at and should look at when it comes to, you know, the person.”

While Santorum continues to lag in polls, he has campaigned relentlessly in Iowa, visiting all 99 counties and building a solid grassroots operation in the Hawkeye State. … CLICK HERE to read the rest at TheOtherMcCain.com

Among Romney’s “strange food habits” are pulling the cheese from his pizza and the skin from KFC fried chicken, prompting Burnett to joke, “I’m glad to hear he’s got vices.”

What are some of his other vices? Well, there’s humility, if you can call that a vice. A relative of Romney confided in Allen that the multi-millionaire likes to “repair” holes in gloves with duct tape rather than throw the gloves away. And then there is Romney’s compulsive need to work out. He’s so committed to personal health that if his hotel has no gym, he’ll run through the hallways. Good thing for him that doesn’t sound weird.

Maybe my reaction to this portrait of the candidate is colored by his testiness and weak performance during his interview with Bret Baier on Tuesday, but these details are distressingly reminiscent of another candidate. They call to mind a candidate so pure of body that he would choke down a waffle for the cameras, though his preference would have been for a bowl of his standard high-fiber gruel—a man whose physical prowess was such that it drew admiration from the press.

That candidate, who went on to become President Barack Obama, has been exposed as a fraud. He may have convinced his acolytes that he runs a tight ship at the White House, where his staff is compelled to endure a “near-mandatory regimen [of] egg-white omelets and workouts with the president’s personal trainer,” but the man was—and for all we know still is—a smoker! Either he’s the unluckiest dude on earth, having gotten caught by the paparazzi time and again stuffing his face with fast food to score political points, or he shares his wife’s addiction to burgers and fries.

The bottom line is that the president of the United States doesn’t need to be Superman. I would have been perfectly content for Obama to live exclusively on milkshakes and candy bars throughout his first term if he made good on his promise to pull the country out of its financial black hole. My vote for the next president will likewise have nothing to do with his diet or affectionate anecdotes showcasing his human side.

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On Monday, Tapper and Knoller went head to head with Carney over the president’s mostly taxpayer-funded 56 visits to battleground states so far, a number that puts him far ahead of any of his predecessors at the same point in the reelection cycle.

In this video clip of a White House briefing, Tapper can be heard saying:

President Obama seems to travel to battleground states more so than any other president before him. And I’m wondering if you could respond to this. It looks like the president is campaigning on the taxpayer dime more than any other president has done.

Playing the role of dutiful lackey, Carney replies, “I reject the premise of that,” adding that since Obama “expanded the political map” by winning some red states, so many more states are considered “purple” or swing-states now.

Carney’s answer may explain the large number of visits, but it fails to respond to the second part of the question, which is how the Obama campaign justifies using taxpayer money to finance the trips.

It is a point that Knoller picks up on about halfway through the clip, prompting Carney to offer up one his most Gibbsian answers to date.

But the dialogue doesn’t end there. On Tuesday, Todd asks more or less the same question. This time Carney comes up with an estimate—presumably out of thin air—of the amount of time Obama spends campaigning versus the time he spends governing the nation. Carney’s estimate? The president spends 5% of his time campaigning for reelection.

That explains why the country is in such dire straits. If Obama spent more time running for office and less time running the country, we’d probably all be far better off.

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None of this is good news for Mitt Romney, whose own numbers plunged to a new low in the same poll. Increasingly, Romney is coming off as robotic, as someone who—to borrow the words of Joe McQuaid, the Union Leader’s publisher—is “going to say … what he thinks you want him to say.”

But, judging from his less than polished performance in an interview with FOX News Channel’s Bret Baier Tuesday night, political expediency is the least of his problems. Romney appeared uncomfortable, and a little peckish at times. Worse yet, he was ill-prepared for Baier’s questions about his shifting views on key issues—precisely the sorts of questions he will face in the presidential debates should he win the nomination.

When Baier noted early in the interview that Romney has been accused of being “on both sides of some issues,” including climate change, abortion, immigration, and gay rights, Romney bristled, replying:

Well, Bret, your list is just not accurate. So, one, we’re going to have to be better informed about my views on issues. My view is you can look at what I’ve written in my book, you can look at a person who’s devoted his life to his family, to his faith, to his country, and I’m running for president because of the things I believe I think I can do to help this country. [Editor's note: The editorial we is a nice touch.]

Putting aside the damning revelation that a line in his book was changed after the initial printing, Romney needs to articulate his positions firsthand. Unless he’s on a book tour, he should not be sending voters back to his book.

He also needs to go back and “study the film.” In an era where virtually everything is captured on video, it is suicidal for a candidate to challenge an interviewer on his record, as Romney did in this exchange:

Baier: I’m sure you’ve seen these ads using videotape of you in previous years speaking on various issues. And it seems like it’s in direct contrast to positions you take now.

Romney: Well, I’m glad the Democratic ads are breaking through—

[Crosstalk]

Baier: Well, Jon Huntsman has a couple ads that do the same thing.

Romney: —and there’s no question but that people are going to take snippets and take things out of context and try and show there are differences where in some cases there are not….

Would, for Romney’s sake, that the problem was simply a matter of context. By his own admission, his position on abortion has changed, but it is hardly the only issue on which the candidate has attempted to be all things to all people.

Although it seems as though there’s no direction to go at this point in the interview but up, things go downhill fast when the questions turn to specific issues. Romney’s position on immigration is incomprehensible, and his professed views on RomneyCare, captured in this video from the interview, are based on fiction. Baier puts the lie to Romney’s claim that he never advocated extending his health care plan to the nation later in the broadcast, when he plays a clip in which the candidate expresses support for doing precisely that.

With Barack Obama’s polling numbers in the gutter and his quiver empty, Republicans should have an easy time unseating him in 2012. The fact that they do not is less a function of Obama’s plan for the future than it is the Republicans’ lack of one. As the party fumbles to cobble together a message, the last thing it needs is a nominee who can’t get his own story straight. If Mitt Romney is to be that nominee, he had better get to work.

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• Poll: Independents reject Obama’s “jobs bill” 53% to 33%; likability under 50%
• 2012 campaign slogan: A vote for someone other than Obama is a vote for racism

While President Obama is not exclusively to blame for the God-awful “mess” the country finds itself in, a CNN/ORC International Poll released Wednesday demonstrates that one demographic—white blue-collar Democrats—has so soured on his presidency that nearly half would prefer their party nominate a different candidate to run in 2012.

The poll also shows that Obama’s approval rating has plummeted from 76% shortly after his election in 2008 to 44% now, while his disapproval—23% then, 54% now—has taken the opposite turn.

Finally, the survey shows that a combined 53% of respondents oppose Obama’s health care law, while 38% favor the law. What is striking about this statistic is a secondary split among those who oppose it. Thirty-seven percent claim the law is too liberal, while 14% say it is not liberal enough. The clear suggestion is that the president, who has straddled the fence on many issues, has alienated voters from the other end of the ideological spectrum while simultaneously failing to win over those at his own end.

Related Articles

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• By January 2013, Obama will have added as much debt as all 43 prior presidents
• Poll: More than half of voters do not believe Obama deserves a second term
• Poll: Independents reject Obama’s “jobs bill” 53% to 33%; likability under 50%
• Economy needs 254K jobs a month for 5 yrs to reach pre-recession unemployment

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Leading the pack this morning was a Wall Street Journal article by Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen, two of the more rational living Democratic pollsters, arguing that Obama should step aside to make way for “the one candidate who would become, by acclamation, the nominee of the Democratic Party: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.”

The suggestion is not an original one, nor is it surprising coming from a pair of old-school and hence centrist Democrats. Their argument is intriguing, within reason. They write:

Having unique experience in government as first lady, senator and now as Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton is more qualified than any presidential candidate in recent memory, including her husband.

I would agree that Clinton has made a decent showing as secretary of state, but that is largely a function of context: She is a member of a presidential cabinet that contains as many kooks and boobs as it does statesmen. In the company of the likes of Timothy Geithner, Eric Holder, Janet Napolitano, and Steven Chu, it is easy to look competent. Which is in no way to say that Clinton has been devoid of missteps since signing on as head of State.

Caddell and Schoen’s column must cut ice because it touched a nerve at Salon.com, which issued a “rebuttal” of sorts frankly (if amusingly) titled “Fake Democratic pollsters have stupid idea.” The author, Alex Pareene, calls Caddell and Schoen “two loser ‘Democratic’ ‘pollsters’,” implying that they are neither and claiming that they are arguing that

if Democrats want to succeed electorally, they must immediately cease being Democrats, and become, instead, Republicans.

Interesting. I wouldn’t have thought support for Hillary Clinton was big among Republicans.

Andrew Malcolm, writing at Investors Business Daily, announces the official beginning of the “Dump Obama” movement, asking, “Guess who’d replace him?” His column, too, seems to follow Caddell and Schoen’s, except that he agrees with their prescription, writing:

Despite a call for a primary challenge by Sen. Bernie Sanders, no one seriously expected one to emerge. Although such intra-party struggles allow unhappy ideological factions to vent frustrations, of which the left has many with Obama, they also virtually foreclose victory in the ensuing general elections.

However, there’s still ample time for simmering party unhappiness with Obama and the growing fear of losing the White House and the Senate to reach a boiling point. So, the big money folks on both coasts quietly go to Obama next spring, urge him to be a realist and pull the plug on his reelection plans.

Finally, there is Richard Salsman’s article in Forbes titled “President Obama’s Hopeless ‘Malaise’ Moment.” Instead of focusing on Democrats’ frustration with Obama, he addresses Obama’s frustrations with just about everyone but mainly his favorite whipping boys, the Republicans in Congress and the corporate “fat cats” on Wall Street.

He equates Obama’s current predicament to that of another extremely unpopular Democratic president, Jimmy Carter. Hence the title of the piece. Salsman writes:

Just like Carter’s anti-capitalist mentality, Obama’s also calls for ‘sacrifice’ (as if that’s ‘noble’), instead of celebrating those among us who seek to live and gain by creating and exchanging new values, whether material or intangible. For Carter and Obama, those are ‘greedy’ and ‘selfish’ pursuits (true) which only deprive our lives of true meaning (false). As such, each man imposed regulatory-spending-tax-monetary regimes that stifled private-sector incentives, sapped entrepreneurial vitality, and chilled investor risk-taking.

Another problem that Obama shares with Carter is an implicit vote of no confidence from his own party. Although the budget deal in Congress recently fell through, it is one brokered by congressional Democrats and Republicans. Obama’s own deal had been roundly rejecting by his fellow party members as well as the “enemy” party he is so fond of lambasting.

Related Articles

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• Poll: 1 in 4 Dems want someone other than Obama as their candidate
• By January 2013, Obama will have added as much debt as all 43 prior presidents
• Poll: More than half of voters do not believe Obama deserves a second term
• Poll: Independents reject Obama’s “jobs bill” 53% to 33%; likability under 50%
• Economy needs 254K jobs a month for 5 yrs to reach pre-recession unemployment

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

20111117KMC – Radio Podcast
20111117KMCVid – TV Podcast

*Find The Kevin McCullough Show on our newest affiliate of the month: WGCF-FM – Paducah, KY
(including the ciities of: Paducah, KY., Cape Girardeau, MO., Paris, TN., Carbondale, IL.)

ON THE KEVIN McCULLOUGH SHOW:

1. THE HEADLINE ITEMS:
Conservative columnist and best-selling author Ann Coulter unleashed a boatload of bad advice on the GOP primary voter base in her most recent column. But with only 28% of voters being able to even identify the respective GOP candidates, isn’t she jumping the shark–just a tad?. kmcradio@gmail.com

2. THE PRACTICAL DILEMMA:
Sweet success in taking GLEE down a notch or two. We warned, you took action and GLEE lost nearly 40% audience share. So what does it mean going forward? The GLEE producers are considering *SHOCK* a return to family friendly storylines, and a greater emphasis on the music. Thoughts?  Your replies: kmcradio@gmail.com.

3. THE GOD THOUGHT:
“There remains for us only the very narrow way, often extremely difficult to find, of living every day as though it were our last, and yet living in faith and responsibility as though there were to be a great future.” CONTINUE: “God Thought” on facebook!

Also able to be heard via a snappy smart phone listening app for the AFR Radio Network at that same time each night 8pm EST. Download Apple’s iTunes AFR’s app here. Android and other smart phones may download here.

Ann Coulter, without question, holds a certain degree of “importance” in the weekly debate over the jot and tittles of the debate between the left and right in America.

She is perhaps one of the most identifiable personalities on the right in America, second only to Rush Limbaugh.

The collective conservative universe bows in homage as the Townhall.com, WorldNetDaily, and HumanEvents websites e-blast her newest missive to their respective distribution lists every Wednesday evening vying for the first set of eyeballs to come to their own landing page for her newest rant.

Radio hosts jump like school boys with a crush when her newest book comes out, always eagerly sacrificing their most valuable asset (their own platforms) entirely for her gain.

She draws large crowds at both conservative and homosexual political conferences. She speaks openly of her own faith (Christianity), while regularly misinterpreting and/or misleading others as to the meanings of Christ, specifically the most important Christian doctrine–Grace.

She’s smart as whip, and can dish out an impromptu tongue lashing while delivering the destructive blow maintaining a bit of a devilish grin.

Often she throws rhetorical temper tantrums over issues she has no relationship to. In the Amanda Knox case she sided against an innocent American girl, who had wrongfully been skillfully framed for the murder of a roommate. In doing so she called Knox’s defenders “liberals and progressives” doing so from a framework of ignorance or negligence–neither an attractive quality. But she was materially and expressly false in those assumptions and refused to apologize to the conservative, Christian, Republican families she slandered in the process.

Ann’s best qualities come in post-election analysis, seldom has she been very good in pre-election prognostication. She backed Duncan Hunter in the 2008 primary, until he dropped out, and then she backed Mitt Romney, the guy who despite spending an enormous fortune could muster no better than third in the 2008 race–behind a very weak McCain candidacy.

In 2011 she had exclusively backed a candidate who wasn’t even in the race (New Jersey Governor Chris Christie), and this week in her syndicated column she claims that none of the candidates in the race other than Mitt Romney have a chance of defeating incumbent Barack Obama in the general election.

In 2008 it was uncovered long after the primaries had been concluded that the Romney campaign staff had in unethical and covert ways infiltrated prominent conservative opinion sources like the National Review with leads and exclusives that were designed to adversely harm all the other candidacies minus Romney. Most specifically National Review repeated false assertions made by these Romney operatives about Governor Mike Huckabee. Coulter parroted them in her syndicated space and was never called to account to it until she appeared on the Huckabee television show–to pimp her book of course–when the Governor politely, but assertively called her inaccuracies into question.

It caused such consternation to Coulter that she walked out after one segment, though she had been booked for two.

Now she is arguing that because former Speaker Newt Gingrich has some legitimate baggage in his past that he is unelectable–despite his notable and steady rise in recent polls. She even goes so far as to imply that the “non-Romneys” in the race are being propped up by the “mainstream media.”

In other words, for all the prattle she has dished out over the last dozen years about conservative ideals and purity, she’s willing to chuck it all for the convenience of not having to actually execute a primary election cycle. So she has decreed it, “Mitt will win.” Therefore it must be.

Wrong!

It is important for Romney’s considerable weaknesses to be exposed so that conservatives can pick the truly best narrative to oppose Obama.

Obama has lost 2 million jobs. The GOP needs a candidate who can help usher in an environment by which jobs will be created. That’s mostly done through small business, and getting out of their way. That is not the record of the man who wrote the very blueprint for Obamacare. That is not the record of the man who cannibalized companies and sold the parts at Bain capital.

Romney’s 25% poll ceiling is bad for a primary race, but his lack of appeal to Evangelicals, Hispanics, Blacks, pro-life, pro-gun, and pro-family constituencies is horrible for the GOP in the general election.

Most importantly if Romney is the nominee, Obama will be re-elected.

This doesn’t make Coulter’s criticism of Gingrich’s dealings with Freddie Mac unimportant, but his association with the agency is no worse than Mitt Romney seeing to it that while most health care procedures now get rationed in Massachusetts, $50 state-subsidized abortions flow freely from Romneycare.

Maybe Ann is lazy. She is certainly disadvantaged. She definitely shrinks when challenged.

Rush Limbaugh talks to callers on a daily basis, this is the advantage of a talk show host–they are actually in touch with what conservatives are thinking. Ann has tried her hand at talk radio on a couple of fill-in stints, each attempt met with a ratings yawn. Perhaps it’s the interaction with people that weren’t waiting for her to sign a book that tripped her up.

Whatever the case Republicans need a candidate who will demonstrate an ability to create jobs in the private sector. They need a candidate that can interact with groups of voters like blue-dog democrats who are demanding a balanced budget. They need a candidate who can appeal across ethnic and racial lines. They need a candidate who has a serious economic plan, a bold tax reduction plan, a plan to attract rapid small business growth, and a plan to revitalize the energy sector. They need a candidate who will downsize Washington DC, and return the power to the people that sent them there. They would even settle for a candidate that would start all foreign-aid at zero and force nations to prove loyalty in exchange for U.S. support.

Several of the non-Romneys have appeal on several of these levels.

Mitt Romney pretty much appeals to establishment Republicans with strong ties to the liberal northeast–almost all of them white.

Republicans a lot like Coulter.

Kevin McCullough is the nationally syndicated host of “The Kevin McCullough Show” weekdays (7-9am EST) & “Baldwin/McCullough Radio” Saturdays (9-11pm EST) now on more than 300+ stations. His newest best-selling hardcover from Thomas Nelson Publishers, “No He Can’t: How Barack Obama is Dismantling Hope and Change” is in stores now.

20111108KMC – Radio Podcast
20111108KMCVid – TV Podcast

*Find The Kevin McCullough Show on our newest affiliate of the month: WGCF-FM – Paducah, KY
(including the ciities of: Paducah, KY., Cape Girardeau, MO., Paris, TN., Carbondale, IL.)

ON THE KEVIN McCULLOUGH SHOW:

1. THE HEADLINE ITEMS:
One Herman Cain accuser has come forward and given specifics, on a set of dates, time, place, agenda, and actions. Are there lessons to be learned from such “revelations?” Whether or NOT they are true? I believe there is, and we’ll chat about them in the NEWS section on today’s show! kmcradio@gmail.com

2. THE PRACTICAL DILEMMA:
The administration has ushered in a whole new reality: 7 in 10 small businesses can not afford to hire even ONE more worker before the end of the year. Not only that the DNC is punishing North Carolina by exporting jobs that should be going to Charlotte area businesses, to union based operations in Washington DC. The DNC is doing so to maintain the peace with its union allies. Why I think it will cost them the state in the election on the next edition. Your replies: kmcradio@gmail.com.

3. THE GOD THOUGHT:
“Until your faith is put to the test, it remains theoretical. You never KNOW what you believe until hard times come. Then you find out, for better or for worse.” CONTINUE: “God Thought” on facebook!

Also able to be heard via a snappy smart phone listening app for the AFR Radio Network at that same time each night 8pm EST. Download Apple’s iTunes AFR’s app here. Android and other smart phones may download here.

No, Erick wasn’t donning purple sneakers and waiting for some sort of mother ship hiding being the aforementioned asteroid, but he was proclaiming Romney such a great risk to the conservative fabric of the universe that he might “walk back” his rejection of Jon Huntsman. Yes, this is the same Erick Erickson who, at one point, appeared ready to hold the hem of Rick Perry’s bridal train as he walked down the aisle. (While I invest considerable snark in this description, you should click through and read his analysis of the current crop of candidates, which includes a lot of insightful analysis mixed in with a combination of anger and despair.)

But before you rush out to support Jon Huntsman, are we possibly forgetting somebody? Is this the time for… dare I say… Roementum?

Let’s face it… we’re running out of names in the hat. And Buddy Roemer has been waiting patiently on the sidelines in a grossly underfunded campaign, just in case everyone else imploded. I’ll be the first to tell you that I’ve been needling people on the social media circuits about Buddy’s campaign, and not just because I was trying to get in on the ground floor in hopes of eventually being named the U.S. Ambassador to Key Largo. (Though I’m still open to the position if you win, Buddy.)

But beyond all of the conservative side-show humor, Roemer is a solid fiscal conservative who actually gives a compelling presentation on the stump when he can drag enough people away from the pre-annointed superstars to listen. No, I don’t agree with all of his positions, but I suppose I can say that about all of the candidates. His campaign finance positions disturb me on multiple levels, since I don’t care for the idea of the government dictating how people spend their money or express their political speech. But that doesn’t mean that I would deride his personal decision to limit donations to his campaign to small amounts from individual donors.

Yes, I know… pipe dreams and silliness. But as I said, unless you’re firmly in Romney’s camp we may be getting down to Ghostbusters territory pretty soon. Who ya gonna call?

Can you feel the Roementum? (We may be discussing this tonight at 8 PM eastern on the RINO Hour of Power. Join us!)

Today, his chances of getting past this scandal grew immeasurably worse. A fourth woman has come forward with tales of Cain’s sexual predation. And this time there is a name—Sharon Bialek—and concrete details of the CEO’s alleged inappropriate advances.

There is also a recorded video statement by the accuser.

Bialek told reporters during a press conference on Monday that in 1997, Cain—then head of a restaurant trade group—tried to grope her genitals and force her head into his crotch. The woman claims that she initially rebuffed the advances and asked Cain what he thought he was doing. She insists that he replied, “You want a job, right?”

Cain’s campaign immediately issued a denial, but I believe the die is now cast. Whether Bialek is telling the truth is beside the point. Cain is now in the same unenviable place that former Congressman Anthony Weiner found himself in just before a shirtless photo of the veteran politician went viral. Even those who believe in Cain’s innocence will have formed an indelible picture that is hard to erase. I expect the candidate to withdraw from the race within the next two weeks.

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• Is Herman Cain ready to be president?
• Herman Cain accused of sexual harassment; issues denial
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With nearly 50 percent of voter support and an 18-point lead over his nearest challenger in the most recent poll, Ortega could end up with a mandate that would not only legitimize his re-election but allow him to make constitutional changes guaranteeing perpetual re-election.

Ortega’s well on his way – readers of my blog will remember that last year he insisted that the Nicaraguan Supreme Court declare term limits unconstitutional.

Over in Guatemala, a Retired general sweeps to power in Guatemala election

A retired right-wing general promising a crackdown on violent crime won Guatemala’s presidential election on Sunday and will be the first military man to take power since democracy was restored in 1986.

Otto Perez had 54.2 percent support with results in from 98 percent of polling stations while his rival, wealthy businessman Manuel Baldizon, trailed with 45.8 percent.

Guatemala’s electoral tribunal declared Perez the winner late on Sunday, and his supporters began celebrating in the streets.

It was a clear move to the right for Central America’s largest economy and came after leftist President Alvaro Colom failed to contain violent crime or protect the country from Mexican drug cartels using it as a key smuggling route.

The LA Times writes on how the Elections in Nicaragua, Guatemala underscore threats to democracy.

UPDATE,
U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Condemns Ortega’s Manipulation of Election, Democratic Process in Nicaragua

“Sunday’s so-called ‘election’ in Nicaragua was a complete sham. Daniel Ortega made sure of it.

“According to the Nicaraguan constitution, Ortega was not eligible to run for another term as President. But he forced his way onto the ballot through a corrupt scheme that trampled over Nicaraguan constitutional mandates.

“And once he forced his way onto the ballot, Ortega pulled out more tricks to make sure that he would win. He denied countless Nicaraguans the right to vote in order to stack the deck in his favor. He has clearly learned from his dictatorial buddies in the region, like Chavez, who is an expert at trampling democracy.

“Last month, I sent a letter to the Department of State urging the Administration to stand up to Ortega’s scheme to cling to power. The U.S. and other responsible nations cannot recognize the outcome of this stolen election.”

Cross-posted at Fausta’s blog

Showing footage of an ebullient crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night in 2008, the video—titled “What if…”—is an attempt to reawaken the lost spirit of hope and change through a series of clichés (“We built a movement one conversation at a time,” “We changed the course of history,” “Change isn’t something you stop fighting for”).

The ad closes with the ominous admonition that “one year from now all our progress could be erased,” followed by the question “Are you in?”

It’s a reasonable question. Perhaps Obama should try to reassemble the flag-waving hometown throngs who cheered his election three years ago and ask how many of them are still “in”? Or he should stop by a different park, here in New York, where the question was answered graphically this weekend by a group of Occupy Wall Street protesters.

In terms of erasing all “the progress” the president has made, a recent Rasmussen poll suggests that progress is in the eye of the beholder. According to the survey, 54% of voters favor repeal of his signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Health Care Act, and 28% give good or excellent marks to his progress on the economy.

It is impossible to know how different the state of the nation might be today if Obama had never been elected, but another poll, by ABC News/Washington Post reveals that anger toward the government—currently at 80%—has never been higher.

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Cain and his minions seem more focused on this story—on picking at its “scab,” if you will—than even the mainstream media, which, as Bret Baier claimed yesterday, is more fixated on Cain’s alleged harassment than they were on Bill Clinton’s. Baier noted that Politico has run 72 separate stories on Caingate in its first 3 days in the news cycle compared with 3 or less during the same period in re reports of Bill Clinton’s alleged dalliances with Gennifer Flowers, Kathleen Willey, and Paula Jones.

But so what? If the Cain story had real “legs”—if the insinuations were more specific or more incriminating—the headline for the latest development (word of a fourth accuser) would have almost certainly found space on the front page of today’s New York Times.

Even more significant for the Cain camp is that the candidate’s polling numbers remain strong. They are in fact up, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released this morning. Likewise his contributions. The clear message from Cain’s supporters is that they are unfazed by these allegations. The only one who seems clinically obsessed with them is Cain himself.

His campaign manager, Mark Block (that’s the same Mark Block who appears with a cigarette in a puzzling campaign ad that Cain later explained is meant to show “Mark being Mark”—whatever that means), has been making the situation worse. He has been blanketing the airwaves expressing outrage over the leak of this potentially damaging information, but his message has been garbled.

On Wednesday, he appeared on Special Report with Bret Baier, where he openly accused former Cain and current Perry aide Curt Anderson of leaking the story of the allegations. The next day, he appeared with another FOX News Channel host, Megyn Kelly, who played him a clip of Anderson’s protestation of innocence. Here is Block’s response:

All the evidence we had and what’s transpired in the last two weeks led up to Mr. Anderson as being the source. We were absolutely thrilled that he came on your show and said that it [sic] wasn’t because Mr. Cain has always had the utmost respect for him. I’m going to do the same thing that Mr. Anderson has done and move on, talk about issues, and get off of this silliness, as he called it, and on with the campaign.

When Kelly asked if Block was now willing to stand down from his accusation of the Perry campaign, he came back with this head scratcher:

I will stand behind what we said yesterday and was again thrilled that Mr. Anderson said it didn’t come from him. [Emphasis added]

Herman Cain’s appeal resides in his undeniable affability and the freshness of his ideas: His 999 plan has drawn more attention than any other GOP candidate proposal to date. Yet I think it is fair to say that he has succeeded in spite of, not because of, his campaign style. If he allows himself to become bogged down in what is looking increasingly like a distraction, he will only end up hurting himself.

So far, he is failing miserably in his efforts to explain past events and even more so in his efforts at refining earlier explanations. His best bet is to let it go. Contrary to his better instincts, he needs for once to act the politician. He need to rehearse the phrase “No comment.”

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2.  That Rick Perry had anything to do with the “leak” of “information” about sexual harassment complaints against Cain to Politico.

3.  That Mitt Romney was behind the “leaks” either.

4.  That the mythical ability to silence baseless innuendo, or spin it and come out smelling like a rose, or avoid it altogether, is a qualification for being president of the United States.

5.  That the left-wing mainstream media act in good faith when they retail these allegations.

6.  That media coverage of such allegations and innuendo is some form of vetted professional activity, rather than just a glorified form of slam book smears and middle-school cafeteria gossip.

7.  That it is incumbent on any of us to take the endless effluvia of the media smear machine seriously.

8.  That it is a sign of intelligence to thoughtfully consider these charges-without-evidence, rather than simply dismissing them.

9.  That the whole circus matters to our choice of president, in terms of illuminating for us the character or abilities of any of the candidates.

10.  That any of these cheap-allegation dramas is even about the candidates, rather than about us, and whether we have any judgment or discrimination when it comes to what we let the media fill our heads with.

If a competent prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich, today’s media can smear one – and then make it look like some innocent ham sandwich over there behind the counter did it.  But the media can only do this because we cooperate with them, by simply accepting every negative, damning, evil thought they suggest to us.

Keeping the barrage up is virtually cost-free for them.  They are not going to stop, no matter how conclusively it is proven that they are full of shinola.  Accepting their cues, and spending day after day discussing things on their terms, is the actual problem.  And that problem starts with us.

There is no corrective for this problem in the mechanics of politics or the media’s M.O.  Politics and the media aren’t going to change.  Period.  We have to decide what our characters and priorities will consist of.  Do we have the strength of mind to say this? – “Don’t bother me with your innuendo about Herman Cain.  I want to talk issues.  We need to cut spending, reduce regulation, and undo all of Obama’s dangerous executive orders.  We need to restore a constitutional balance of power in the federal government.  And that’s just for starters. Iran is closing in on a nuclear weapon.  China is menacing all of Asia.  European security is in jeopardy, and so is ours.  That’s what I want to talk about.  The future of the republic is at stake.”

Who cares if “they” think we’re stupid?  Are we seriously going to let this election degenerate into a suicidal snark free-for-all because someone might think we’re stupid, if we don’t bite on every worm the media dangle on the hook?

Any one of us could be in Cain’s or Perry’s position – or Bachmann’s, or Palin’s, or that of any conservative front-runner past or present.  Ronald Reagan himself wouldn’t have triumphed over this kind of media attack.  He would have looked every bit as caught off guard and flat-footed.  One thing the blogosphere does is amplify cheap, off-the-cuff opinions and send them echoing back to us in chorus, as if “everybody” now thinks Candidate X is toast and his character is in shreds.  Is that really true?  What obliges us to think so, other than the kind of fearful, triangulating approach to our personal opinions that we should have overcome by the time we got our high school diplomas?

Herman Cain hasn’t been convicted of sexual harassment, nor have charges been filed against him.  It would be public record if these things had happened.  It is not a sign of intelligence or moral discrimination for conservative voters to feast on vague allegations against our candidates, which we are told by third parties were made by persons whose names we don’t know, and which never resulted in prosecution or sanction.  As a rule for life, that’s no way to think about morality, law, society, or other people’s characters.

And Cain’s not even my preferred candidate.  But this applies to all of them.  If we wait for cheap “bad news” about other people to cease flowing, we’ll be stuck obsessing over it for all eternity.  It doesn’t have to be true or significant; it will just keep coming.  How much we are preoccupied with evil allegations is up to us.  We only think it’s the media doing this to us.  In reality, we’re doing it to ourselves.  We have the power to say no: we’re not playing any more.  Until we do that, the MSM will have us by the short hairs.

Oh, and one more thing I don’t believe:

11.  That Americans are too foolish and weak-minded to figure this out.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

That being said, I am beginning to have nagging doubts, none of which are related to the allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against him last Sunday. Rather, the more television exposure Cain receives—and as GOP frontrunner in many polls, he is on the small screen often—the more skeptical I become about his readiness for primetime. Increasingly, his answers to questions seem poorly thought out and disjointed, making his position on key policy issues unclear.

Take, for example, his position on abortion, which he was asked to clarify on FOX News Channel’s Special Report with Bret Baier last night. Here is the exchange between the candidate and panelist A. B. Stoddard of The Hill (cue 11:52 in the video, which is here):

CAIN: I believe that abortion should be illegal. I’ve always thought that way. I believe that life begins at conception—life begins at conception—and I do not believe in abortion. The point I was trying to make is that legally I don’t think abortion should be allowed, but the point I was trying to make, if a situation exists where they may consider some other alternative, then how will the law prevent that? That was the only point I was trying to make.

STODDARD: You [previously] said that it was best left to the woman and her family. What are you describing? A situation that they would—

CAIN: An extreme situation, a very extreme situation—

STODDARD: Involving abortion?

CAIN: And I can’t describe all of the— First of all, these extreme situations, we can never say never relative to these extreme situations. I go back to—

STODDARD: Do you have any exceptions for rape and incest?

CAIN: No, I do not.

Got that? Putting aside the troubling notion that a rape victim would be forced to carry to term the child of the man who violated her, the response conjures up disquieting visions of dirty knives and dark alleys. Was this really the best Cain or his handlers could do in a friendly environment?

Earlier in the same session, Cain was asked by Charles Krauthammer to enlarge upon his signature 9-9-9 plan. Cain’s defense of criticisms that his 9% federal sales tax would duplicate state sales taxes was on point. He correctly noted that the cost of goods and services already reflects multiple systems of taxation, federal and otherwise.

Where Cain ran astray, however, was when Krauthammer asked him whether the nation under his plan would experience a deflation (video cue 11:39).

CAIN: We’re saying that the price of goods are gonna go down.

KRAUTHAMMER: That’s deflation.

CAIN: Yes, the price of goods are gonna go down.

If Cain genuinely believes that his economic plan will precipitate a cataclysmic change in the economy of the type he claims to anticipate, then he needs to explain the long-term implications to the American people. In particular, he needs to elaborate on how the deflation he envisions will be different from the one some economists claim fueled the current recession.

Early in the debates, Cain largely ducked questions on foreign policy, claiming he would surround himself with savvy advisers to provide needed council. If he is to remain a serious contender, he needs those advisers now, and not just to tell him the name of the president of Uzbekistan.

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First, to the original facts of the case. At the conclusion of my original piece, I asked the question as to whether or not Politico “had the goods” on this and I posited that they did. This question is now definitively settled and has been confirmed – repeatedly – by the candidate himself. There was at least one woman – and nearly certainly two – who made accusations of sexual harassment. This led to to charges being raised, an investigation and a payment being made which included a non-disclosure agreement. These were the items that Politico reported, and their original article went to great lengths to point out that they were “allegations” and that they involved gestures, comments, etc., and not physical contact or any sort of affair. What they reported has turned out to be the facts.

If you are one of the people still clinging to blaming Politico for this, describing it as a “smear” and the rest of the responses I’m seeing, you’re off base. When a person runs for the presidency, if there are documents such as these lurking out there – particularly involving a case where a payout resulted from it – that’s news. It’s going to be reported. To deny this you have to either be such a partisan supporter of the candidate that you won’t allow any non-positive reporting or so new to this process that all I can say is, “Welcome to politics. Hope you enjoy your stay.”

Calling what Politico did a “smear” would be no different than Democrats saying the press “smeared” Eliot Spitzer for noting that he cavorted with prostitutes. It’s not a nice thing to say about anyone, but if it happened… it’s news.

But as I alluded earlier, the bigger story for the time being is really the response by the candidate and his staff. (I specify “for the time being” because this wound could still be ripped open further if any new developments or additional allegations emerge on the heels of this.) The handling of this by Team Cain over the first 36 hours has been nothing short of abysmal, and the candidate himself has probably done the most damage.

In a very short period of time, Herman Cain did what can only fairly be called a complete reversal in his story, contrary to the well intentioned protests from his supporters. The candidate went from saying that he had no knowledge of any such settlement, and he “hoped” that the payout wasn’t very large, to saying that he was aware of some sort of payment, to providing details of what he thought the payment might have been. (This was all in the same day after he’d been given ten days notice to prepare, but more on that below.) This culminated on Tuesday morning with an interview with Robin Meade on CNN Headline News Morning Express where he made a truly floundering attempt to claim that he was answering the questions correctly based on the difference between a “settlement” and an “agreement.”

This was one of the most transparently evasive moments of the entire saga. Even for those of you claiming that Cain is such a keen legal eagle that he was drawing a proper legal distinction between the terms, (and it’s already starting) the problem should be clear. Were that the case, Cain knew that he was talking to reporters feeding a general audience, not grading somebody’s LSAT essay. Even under those circumstances, the proper answer might have been, “There was no settlement that I know of, but there was an agreement by the board which resulted in a payment to end this matter, even though the complaint had no merit.”

By failing to point that out, Cain demonstrated that he was uncomfortable with the answer and was attempting to hide the facts of the case. It was a bad move, and Herman Cain emerged from the exchange carrying a lot of wounds, mostly self-inflicted.

That’s less than weak tea. It comes across as a stereotypical politician trying to parse words to cover up what he didn’t want to say previously. It doesn’t rise quite to the level of “it depends what you mean by is” but it’s not far off. In fact, Ed Morrissey touched on this briefly this morning, but as I told him earlier, that seems like a bit of a whitewash to me. Cain may not have recalled all of the details the moment he heard it, but over the last week and a half he certainly could have dredged them up rather than acting like all of these memories came flooding back in a four-hour period on Monday. Cain has also attempted to make precisely that “memory loss” defense, but it rings completely hollow in my ears.

One of the other defenses being foisted is that Cain “isn’t a politician” and should therefore not be held to the same standards. (For reference, see Chris Barron’s piece today where he makes precisely this charge, as well as sticking to the “smear” line of attack and the memory loss defense.) Perhaps so. But he has hired professionals including Mark Block. Block was on TV two hours before Cain on Monday morning peddling a story saying he was “not personally aware” of any such charges ever being raised. This was obviously a clearly calculated defense strategy which had been worked out and they both wound up looking incompetent and shifty when Cain scuttled his assertions a mere two hours later. Perhaps Cain didn’t know any better, but Block absolutely should have. The man should be fired for – if nothing else – complete incompetence in handling this response. (Unless, of course, he was overruled by the candidate, in which case Herman Cain carries all the weight for it himself.)

All of these botched responses, stonewalling and arguing over semantics make Cain look shifty and evasive. Given ten days notice, if he had simply come out Monday morning and said that yes, in fact, a scurrilous suit had been brought against him a decade ago and had been rapidly debunked and dispatched with a small severance payment, the matter would be dead and gone. Instead, this amateurish handling of a breaking story which they knew about ages before it hit has damaged his credibility and raised suspicions where none need have been found.

And if all of this isn’t enough for Cain to show Mark Block the door, the already unfolding story of his non-profit and it’s alleged financial ties to the campaign should finish the job. That story isn’t getting nearly as much play yet because campaign finance charges aren’t as sexy as the current tale, but it’s in progress and could get very serious. Block seems to have been nothing but trouble for Cain thus far.

I don’t think this will be the final installment in the series. There are still a number of whispers out there and there may be additional details on the investigative agenda which are still too green to pick from the tree. Time alone will tell, and this may not sway enough of Cain’s supporter to derail his run at the nomination, but none of this looks good.

During Herman Cain’s tenure as the head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s, at least two female employees complained to colleagues and senior association officials about inappropriate behavior by Cain, ultimately leaving their jobs at the trade group, multiple sources confirm to POLITICO. The women complained of sexually suggestive behavior by Cain that made them angry and uncomfortable, the sources said, and they signed agreements with the restaurant group that gave them financial payouts to leave the association. The agreements also included language that bars the women from talking about their departures.

When this news first broke and we began immediately dissecting it on Twitter, I was mostly cautioning everyone among both Cain’s supporters and detractors to slow walk this one. Stories such as this, ripe with the juiciest buzzwords, are serious poison pills which can leave pundits looking very silly when they finish blowing up. One of the main problems is that the story, while apparently fairly well sourced and researched over a period of time, fails to deliver some of the bedrock facts which would help nail this down one way or the other. Of course, while I wish the reporters from Politico had showed us a little more leg, so to speak, I can also understand how the sources could leave them tongue tied in key areas.

Some things to consider before you jump too quickly into this maelstrom center on the types of accusations being levied. As Da Techguy points out, when you are a successful businessman in a position of power with a lot of money in play, you can attract lawsuits. It’s just a fact of life. I’m not in any way implying the two women in question were disingenuous in their accusations – we simply don’t have enough details to say either way at this point. But such things do happen in the real world, and sometimes large organizations will pay somebody off to just make a problem go away and avoid a prolonged freak show. The payments in question here are apparently in the “five figure” range, so that would be a cheap parachute to grab, IF that’s what happened.

There are also many levels of “sexual harassment” which fall well short of sexual assault. (Which has not even been alleged here, we should point out.) Again, we’re lacking the details of what is alleged to have been done. While not excusing anything, there’s a bit of a difference between grabbing someone’s private areas and, for example, a wink and a nod at an inappropriate moment which somebody might interpret as being more suggestive than it was intended. Politico doesn’t give us enough specifics to see where the alleged activity falls on that scale, so it’s too soon to say one way or the other.

But even with all of that said, this looks pretty bad, and Cain’s supporters may want to be careful in how exuberant they are in his defense. The responses we saw both last night and this morning make it look as if there is either some serious fire under all of this smoke or the Cain campaign is incompetent beyond description. It is now confirmed that Politico was working on this story and in contact with Cain’s people for ten days before they went to press. In all that time, surely somebody must have sat down with the candidate and said, “Look… the storm is coming. This is going to go public. We have to be ready with an answer.”

The answer they wound up going with was nothing short of disastrous, taking the form of an attempt at blaming the liberal media for reporting on it rather than denying or clarifying the story in a less damaging light. Cain’s campaign spokesperson called in to Geraldo and flatly refused to answer the “did this or did this not happen” question, saying instead that the media should contact the restaurant association. The question was put to Herman Cain himself, who glared silently at the camera for an uncomfortable period before saying, “… have you ever been accused of sexual harassment?”

If there’s a worse answer out there, I’m hard pressed to think what it might be, other than grabbing the reporter by the crotch and running away. With a week and a half to prepare, they had to be able to deliver better than this, and thus far it’s all been fumbles coming out of the gate.

I’m seeing some other defenses and postures coming from Cain supporters this morning which should really be avoided. The first is the knee-jerk reaction to say, “But… but… BILL CLINTON!” Yes, we all know what nasty business Bubba got up to. But if the past several years have taught us anything, it’s that liberals have beclowned themselves to the point of Bad Joke Status by responding to every criticism of President Obama with, “But.. but… BUSH!” Pointing out someone else who did something worse doesn’t alter what your guy has done.

The second – and probably worse – line I’m seeing is an attempt to conflate this situation with that of Clarence Thomas. Aside from both cases involving a prominent black man they have little to nothing in common. Anita Hill emerged from obscurity years after the fact to level undocumented charges which couldn’t be effectively substantiated only when Thomas was on the verge of ascending to the highest court in the land. The two women in question here apparently brought forth their complaints in a timely fashion and sought a resolution. They then seem to have remained silent on this and were not the ones who brought up the charges we’re seeing this week. This gives them a lot more credibility than Anita Hill.

So who did leak this particular story? I’ve already received a number of e-mails from correspondents suggesting a variety of theories. One popular one is that the Cain campaign leaked it themselves to “rip the band aid off quickly” and get this out of the way well in advance of the general election. While that can be an effective strategy for candidates, I call baloney on it in this case. If this had come from the Cain campaign they would have been far better prepared with a response as opposed to the train wreck currently unfolding in the press.

Was it either Romney or Perry? Possible, I suppose, and if that’s the case Politico’s reporters would never out their original tipster. But somebody else might let it slip, so it would be a hugely risky move.

The best bet – and this is only a guess, mind you – is that somebody connected to the National Restaurant Association in some fashion who has an ax to grind with Cain decided to whisper in Politco’s ear. Or perhaps just somebody familiar with the case from the 90′s who wanted to feel important and be the hero for some reporters and make a big splash. Hard to say, really.

But, to wrap this up, from what we’ve seen thus far I think Politico has the goods on this one and they’ve got more that they’re not letting out of the bag yet. (If they ever plan to do so at all.) There are too many people weighing in on the story for this to be complete fiction at this point, so Cain’s defenders should be cautious about trying to lay this entirely at the feet of the liberal media. The question at this point is whether this will merely be a thorn in Cain’s side or a gaping breach in the hull of his campaign’s ship. We should know soon enough… probably after a week or ten days gives the story enough time to soak in nationally and then get a few new rounds of polling completed.

NOTE: See also Ed Morrissey’s analysis of this breaking story this morning.

The nominees:

Have at it!

Enjoy!