Visual source: Newseum
The New York Times looks at the "slush funds of Iowa":
To influence the small fraction of Iowa voters who will participate in Tuesday’s caucuses, the candidates and their supporters will have spent $12.5 million, an unprecedented amount. Only a third of that was spent by the candidates themselves; the rest comes from the “super PACs” that most of the candidates have allowed to be established. These political action committees are essentially septic tanks into which wealthy individuals and corporations can drop unlimited amounts of money, which is then processed into ads that are theoretically made independently of the candidates. [...]
As bad as the 2010 midterm elections were for the influence of big money, this year’s presidential campaign — the first since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision two years ago — is shaping up to be worse. There are no limits to the dollars involved, and no accountability for the candidates those dollars are buying.
The AP:
It was an odd, almost discordant moment in a GOP contest where Bush, a two-term president who left office just three years ago, has gone all but unmentioned. While the candidates routinely lionize Ronald Reagan and blame President Barack Obama for the nation’s economic woes, none has been eager to embrace the Bush legacy of gaping budget deficits, two wars and record low approval ratings – or blame him for the country’s troubles either.
“Republicans talk a lot about losing their way during the last decade, and when they do they’re talking about the Bush years,” said Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont-McKenna College. “For Republicans, the Bush administration has become the `yadda yadda yadda’ period of American history.”
Charles Babington sets up the post-Iowa Romney narrative:
Mitt Romney's surprisingly easy rise to the top of Iowa presidential polls, aided by his GOP rivals' in-fighting, masks vulnerabilities he will have to confront eventually.
Even if he wins today's caucuses, Romney has yet to excite his party's restless conservative base. And his rivals' focus on each other has let Romney skate along with minimal focus on his contentious health care record and his changed positions on abortion, gay rights and other issues since his days as Massachusetts governor.
Groups friendly to President Barack Obama plan to use the "flip-flopper" label against Romney if he's the nominee. They hope it will damage him as much as it did Democrat John Kerry in 2004.
John Harris and Alexander Burns:
The candidates say it on debate stages. Voters say it at campaign rallies. It is a staple of Republican rhetoric that 2012 is the most fateful election in decades — a big and perilous moment around which national destiny will hinge. Here’s what does not get said as often: This big moment on history’s stage is being filled by politicians who so far have looked way too small for the occasion.[...]
With a clear opportunity to win the gold medal of American politics — knocking off an incumbent president — Republicans produced a field of dwarves. Romney has been the only candidate who has managed to project an aura of presidential plausibility over a sustained period of time. Yet, despite being universally known, he is not the choice of three out of four Republicans, polls show.
George Packer:
In the tenth paragraph of a page A15 Times piece, Rick Santorum accuses Barack Obama of engaging in “absolutely un-American activities.” What are they? The article doesn’t say. The quote appears without explanation or comment, in an article entitled “Santorum’s Challenge: Broaden His Appeal Beyond Evangelical Christians.” Nor does the line show up anywhere else on the Web—apparently no reporter in the mob following the candidates through the last days before the Iowa caucuses thought it worth writing down, and no blogger thought it worth repeating. It was just a throwaway line, a hunk of spoiled red meat tossed at the crowd in a Sioux City coffee shop, no more newsworthy than saying, “It’s a great day to be an Iowan!” And the crowd ate it up, applauding lustily. According to the Times, Santorum, surging in the polls, “became emotional at times.” He “wore a beaming smile on his face.” He said that he was running for his children’s sake. A supporter from a nearby town said that he liked Santorum for his avoidance of hyperbole: “Santorum doesn’t make crazy statements.”
Several things are worth noting here. The first is that, in today’s Republican politics, one reliable way to reach beyond the Christian base is by whipping up nationalistic hysteria with language lifted straight from the McCarthy era. If criminalizing all abortions and nullifying all gay marriages are a little too sectarian for you, surely you’d like to try some old-fashioned traitor-hunting. (Santorum has also accused Obama of “sid[ing] with evil” in Iran, a country with which he plainly wants to go to war.)
Bloomberg's William D. Cohen asks if psychopaths have taken over Wall Street:
[A]ccording to Boddy’s “Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis,” these men were “able to influence the moral climate of the whole organization” to wield “considerable power.”
They “largely caused the crisis” because their “single- minded pursuit of their own self-enrichment and self- aggrandizement to the exclusion of all other considerations has led to an abandonment of the old-fashioned concept of noblesse oblige, equality, fairness, or of any real notion of corporate social responsibility.” [...] These psychopaths “present themselves as glibly unbothered by the chaos around them, unconcerned about those who have lost their jobs, savings and investments, and as lacking any regrets about what they have done. They cheerfully lie about their involvement in events, are very convincing in blaming others for what has happened and have no doubts about their own worth and value. They are happy to walk away from the economic disaster that they have managed to bring about, with huge payoffs and with new roles advising governments how to prevent such economic disasters.”