Visual source: Newseum
Eugene Robinson:
I guess I was wrong. I thought Republicans surely would have come to their senses by now. Instead, they seem to be rushing deeper into madness.
With less than a month to go before the Iowa caucuses, Mitt Romney, the candidate shown by polls to have the best chance of defeating President Obama, evidently remains unacceptable to most of his party. He has spent the summer and fall playing second fiddle to a series of unconvincing “front-runners” who fade into the shadows once their shortcomings become obvious.
The latest is Newt Gingrich, a man with more baggage than Louis Vuitton — and the taste for fine jewelry of Louis XIV, judging by his Tiffany’s bill. Be honest: Is there anybody out there who believes Gingrich would make it through a general-election campaign against Obama without self-destructing? I didn’t think so.
Michael Gerson:
In the news coverage of Newt Gingrich’s rapid rise, there is wonderment that evangelicals are willing to forgive his serial offenses against the Seventh Commandment. It is like being surprised that Catholics feel guilt, or that Unitarians put “coexist” stickers on their bumpers.
Evangelicals like nothing more than a good conversion story — even, evidently, when the road to Damascus also leads to Rome. Religious right leaders have compared Gingrich to the Apostle Paul and to King David, who managed to put that whole Bathsheba episode behind him. Gingrich, who has previously compared himself to Charles de Gaulle, Margaret Thatcher, Henry Clay and the Duke of Wellington, can only be pleased.
For evangelicals, moral failure is an expectation and conversion a qualification. Their primary judgment is not the depth of the sin but the sincerity of the repentance. And many have found Gingrich’s repentance to be durable and sincere.
Karl Rove:
Mr. Gingrich must temper runaway expectations. For example, his lead in the RealClearPolitics average in Iowa is 12 points. But what happens on Jan. 3 if he doesn't win Iowa, or comes in first with a smaller margin than people expect?
That could happen in part because Mr. Gingrich has little or no campaign organization in Iowa and most other states. He didn't file a complete slate of New Hampshire delegates and alternates. He is the only candidate who didn't qualify for the Missouri primary, and on Wednesday he failed to present enough signatures to get on the ballot in Ohio. Redistricting squabbles may lead the legislature to move the primary to a later date and re-open filing, but it's still embarrassing to be so poorly organized.
David Brooks:
[W]hy am I not more excited by the Gingrich surge?
In the first place, Gingrich loves government more than I do. He has no Hayekian modesty to restrain his faith in statist endeavor. For example, he has called for “a massive new program to build a permanent lunar colony to exploit the Moon’s resources.” He has suggested that “a mirror system in space could provide the light equivalent of many full moons so that there would be no need for nighttime lighting of the highways.”
I’m for national greatness conservatism, but this is a little too great.
Furthermore, he has an unconservative faith in his own innocence. The crossroads where government meets enterprise can be an exciting crossroads. It can also be a corrupt crossroads. It requires moral rectitude to separate public service from private gain. Gingrich was perfectly content to belly up to the Freddie Mac trough and then invent a Hamiltonian rational to justify his own greed.
Paul Krugman:
[A]ccording to the prediction market Intrade, there’s a 45 percent chance that a real-life Gordon Gekko will be the next Republican presidential nominee.
I am not, of course, the first person to notice the similarity between Mitt Romney’s business career and the fictional exploits of Oliver Stone’s antihero. In fact, the labor-backed group Americans United for Change is using “Romney-Gekko” as the basis for an ad campaign. But there’s an issue here that runs deeper than potshots against Mr. Romney.
For the current orthodoxy among Republicans is that we mustn’t even criticize the wealthy, let alone demand that they pay higher taxes, because they’re “job creators.” Yet the fact is that quite a few of today’s wealthy got that way by destroying jobs rather than creating them. And Mr. Romney’s business history offers a very good illustration of that fact.
Timothy Egan:
How do you praise the sanctity of traditional heterosexual marriage when the best-known nuptials of the year, between a Kardashian and a basketball player, lasted all of 72 days? Or, for that matter, when a possible Republican nominee for president, Newt Gingrich, cares so much about marriage that he’s tried it three times?
Newt Gingrich and his wife, Callista, at a Kennedy Center gala in December.
You don’t. The above mockeries of marriage are just the latest reasons one of the most potent wedge issues of American politics — the banner of gays, guns and God — will have little impact next year.
The New York Times:
Campaign ads are often deceitful, offensive or infuriating, cynically exploiting religion or families and distorting an opponent’s record. The latest ones from the Republican primary, however, are so brazen and the politicians so unapologetic that it is only bound to get worse.
A new ad from Gov. Rick Perry, to use the latest example, will test anyone who thinks they can no longer be affronted by a political hustle. It begins with Mr. Perry telling the camera that he’s not ashamed to admit he’s a Christian. Are there Christian candidates who are ashamed of it? None come to mind. Perhaps, like some of his supporters, he’s trying to remind evangelical voters that he is not a Mormon, unlike two other Republican candidates. Or perhaps he’s referring to President Obama who does not parade his religious beliefs on a signboard.
Joseph A. Califano Jr.:
Without presidential leadership in the trenches, there is no chance that Congress, particularly a divided Congress, will step on the third-rail politics of raising taxes or cutting popular programs such as Medicare, much less deploy the federal government to reduce the number of Americans living in poverty. These are the same folks who haven’t been able to agree on a budget for almost three years.
Washington seems to have lost its sense of social justice and economic responsibility. As political and private-sector leaders nationwide realize that an engaged president is key to progress, many wish that Barack Obama was more like Lyndon B. Johnson. The refrain of many Democrats — and some Republicans — is that at least with LBJ, Washington worked and we got something done.
Obama will never be like Johnson, but LBJ’s presidency offers lessons that could help him win a second term and make that term more than another example of Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that the only thing worse than not getting what you want is getting it.
