As the Perry campaign continues a downward fall, buzz over Newt Gingrich is rising in its place. Could a surprise still happen? Around here we are starting to make predictions…
CandidatesBlog contributor, Ryan Larsen says:
I predict Newt Gingrich will win Iowa and after that the field will narrow to Newt and Mitt. Of course, I want Mitt to win Iowa, but with the other candidates tanking I think the right-wing media is coalescing around Newt, and the people will follow.
This can work out very well for Mitt, because Newt’s intellect is unimpeachable. Romney and Newt need to have one-on-one substantive debates – the type Gingrich wants anyway – and this will finally offer Romney a chance to showcase his own intellect. When he runs circles around Newt, the way he did in the back-and-forth on mandates in a recent debate, everyone watching will finally see how intelligent Romney is. They will see that it’s not just “skills” and being “slick” but it’s sheer brilliance. Romney ONLY gets flustered when others are denying him a chance to talk. Gingrich won’t do that, and Romney will correspondingly shine.
I’m skeptical about Newt winning Iowa but agree about everything else. Iowa is a mystery to me. It seems like its natural Santorum territory but he’s practically moved there and is still at 1 percentiness. There’s definitely a surprise lurking in the weeds, im just not sure what or where. but I think Mitt has the best shot since no matter what 2 people he’s down to, he comes out on top:
Romney vs Perry = Romney on communication & economics
Romney vs Gingrich = Romney on clean record
Romney vs Cain = Romney on experience & clean record
The only threat I can see being credible against Romney on communication, squeaky clean record, economics and private and public experience is Huntsman and theres no evidence that he’s gonna make it down to the 2-man stretch.
Gingrich gave marvelously detailed answers, reflecting the deep study he has made on American public policy during his years in politics, and demonstrated that he has the best command of both facts and philosophy on stage.
Gingrich was on his game from the beginning when he let loose a ringing anti-Bernake, anti-food stamps, anti-Alinsky answer. … The narrative about his rise will continue.
The big winners in the debate tonight were probably Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney. …
Newt Gingrich was cerebral and wide-ranging. When CNBC tried to trip him up, he fired back with specifics that delighted the crowd. His breadth of learning was refreshing and dominating.
Gingrich got off the best line of the night when he faulted the media for not asking the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators if they have a clue how the new economy works. … Gingrich wants to challenge President Obama to a series of Lincoln-Douglas–style debates that would last for three hours and get into great detail about everything that matters. I have no doubt Gingrich would win such a debate.
[Newt's] performance in tonight’s debate was another impressive performance by a man who not only has a wealth of knowledge on all the issues, but he’s smart enough to not to be played by the media.
Newt Gingrich: Once again, the former House Speaker owned the stage. He did not completely dominate, but it is hard to argue that anyone other than Gingrich won the debate. He battled with the moderators again and might have come off as too angry at times. However, on style and substance, Newt delivered. Again.
…
Overall Winner: Newt Gingrich. This is getting redundant. He did not dominate, but Gingrich was the most in command of anyone on the stage.
Newt has hit his stride, and was consistently the most impressive and forceful person on the stage—and forceful without saying a negative word about any of the other candidates.
As usual, [Newt] was dynamite: brilliant, deliberative and right about everything. Now that we all realized that we’re less than a year from the presidential election, we’re trying to visualize the presidential debates. Which of the GOP candidates could thrust and parry with Obama most effectively? All of them would do a great job. Only Newt would truly make mincemeat out of him. That’s the main reason he’s rising in the polls. He’s a serious conservative intellectual who is fearless.
But the winner of the debate was Newt. I mentioned last time that he’s my sleeper pick to challenge Romney, and he did a lot to improve his chances tonight.
Daniel
…what is increasingly clear is that the former House Speaker is the most learned candidate running for president. Drawing on his wealth of knowledge and years of experience in Congress, Gingrich adeptly understands the most trying issues of our time. His ability to answer complex questions, as he did Wednesday night, with specific and innovative solutions is emboldening his candidacy.
Gawker has an interesting headline The Old Mitt Romney Photo That He Probably Wants Destroyed
Time’s Michael Scherer digs up this photo from the Romney media archives showing our man Mittens and his old Bain Capital buddies playing with money.
Look at them, hugging and eating and rubbing and sucking their corporate-raider money. At least Romney had enough sense not to stuff it in his collar like that one guy, instead choosing to simply grab on to the right end of a bill while smiling, devilishly. Oh, and then there’s some money falling out of his coat. Oops!
If this does not appear in an attack ad at some point in the next year, then various rival campaigns will have failed.
An old black and white photo
UPDATE: The first use of this image in media about Romney has been spotted in NY Mag:
In response to the reports that the Obama administration will be looking to George W Bush’s 2004 re-election strategy, one columnist gives caution. Bush-Cheney ’04 may have scraped through a victory, but the same tactics won’t work for Obama. John Avlon gives five reasons 2012 is different but they rest on the following premise:
The balancing act in politics is inspiring the base without alienating the center of the electorate. Ultimately elections in America are won by the candidate who connects with moderates and the middle class. Thirteen months out, it is clear that President Obama has an uphill climb toward reelection ahead of him. His greatest asset is the weakness of the Republican field and his still-high personal approval ratings. But everything from job approval numbers to the unemployment rate to the consumer price index bodes badly for the president. If he wins reelection, it will be a much narrower victory than he enjoyed in 2008. Swing states like Indiana and North Carolina are unlikely to come back into his fold. He won independent voters by 8 percent last election but now his independent approval rating is underwater at 37 percent, with Mitt Romney carrying a 55 percent approval among independents in a head-to-head contrast.
Reaching for the last presidential reelect playbook smacks of a lack of imagination by Team Obama. Yes, the president needs to reignite support of his progressive base, which has suffered because of unrealistic expectations that collided with an enduringly bad global economy. But while playing to the base might feel good to Democratic Party consultants, a look at the national numbers shows that it threatens to take a long-shot and make it worse, guaranteeing a razor thin reelect at best by focusing on the base at the expense of independents and the center.
Lets be clear here, Perry was out of line from the beginning. Perry supporters can take heart in the fact that he stayed awake for nearly half the debate, only lapsing into incoherency towards the end of the debate. Unfortunately, most of the time in this debate, while he wasn’t asleep, he looked anything but presidential. Shouting matches and downright rudeness characterized Perry’s performance. It looked anything but Presidential.
However, Romney’s response didn’t help. On one hand, he dispelled SNL Romney’s statement, “I”m incapable of rage,” with a response that included getting into Rick Perry’s personal space and putting his hand on Perry’s shoulder in a very agressive away.
For many Republican voters, the gumption of Romney might be appreciated except it was accompanied by whining about the debate rules and appealing to the moderator by name. “Anderson!” in a tone not too dissimilar from a child crying, “Mom, make him stop!”
Many folks at home saw what Sarah Palin saw. Her kids were fussing at each other during the debate and she had moments when she could tell the debate from her kids fighting each other and couldn’t tell which would make the most sense.
Much of the after-debate was about who won the debate. On the fine points of a college debating judge, the case can always be made for Newt Gingrich, with a nod to Michele Bachmann doing nicely. In reality, debates are about moments. When we look back at recent presidential debates, we don’t remember the debates on points, what stands out are those moments.
American history is replete with examples of lengthy campaigns and multiyear chess games. Thomas Jefferson conducted a quiet effort against John Adams for the four years he was vice president to Adams, having lost a close Electoral College battle to him in 1796. Andrew Jackson never stopped running for president after he believed he was robbed of the office in 1824 by John Quincy Adams. Both these long-distance runners were rewarded with the White House.
What is novel, though, is the growing length of the overt public campaign for party nominations. For that we can largely thank Jimmy Carter.
Before 1976, extensive private preparations notwithstanding, candidates almost always waited until the actual calendar year of the election before announcing their candidacy. Mr. Carter changed that when he practically became a resident of Iowa, site of the country’s first nominating contest, shortly after he left office as governor of Georgia in 1975. His successful strategy became the new norm, copied by candidates in both parties since.
There’s also the nominating calendar:
From 1920 until 1972, the New Hampshire primary led off the presidential selection process on the second Tuesday in March. This helped to limit primary season to less than four months, until early June.
Then the great rush to the front of the primary pack began, fueled by states’ desires to get the money, media and electoral influence that come with early voting. In 1972, Florida tried to grab New Hampshire’s franchise, setting its primary for the same mid-March day as the Granite State’s. New Hampshire promptly moved up to March 7.
The leapfrogging has continued since and accelerated recently. In 1968, only New Hampshire held a March primary. By 1988 there were 20 March primaries. Inevitably, competition among states moved some of the March primaries into February, with a blizzard of 22 in February 2008.
Actor and comedian Jay Mohr was on Imus in the Morning and talked about the 2012 presidential campaign and candidates, saying he likes Jon Huntsman “because he’s hot”.
Author S.E. Cupp was also on the show and commented on the 2012 presidential election now that Chris Christie and Sarah Palin have chosen not to run, saying it’s going to be weird for Conservatives to pretend that they actually like Mitt Romney.
Philip Klein, senior editorial writer for The Washington Examiner, wrote a piece titled, Romney’s false health care claims echo Obama’s. Klein attacks a few sound bites Mitt Romney gave at the recent Fox/Google debate while trying to explain his 2006 MA health care bill. Unfortunately, Klein ignores the larger context of what Romney is saying, which Romney amply provides in his book, No Apology.
In his effort to make Romneycare and Obamacare seem alike, Klein doesn’t deny the differences between them. Moreover, he doesn’t even mention the differences. Romney didn’t cut Medicare/Medicaid, didn’t impose insurance price controls and didn’t do a host of other things Obama did in his 2,700 page bill. Romney’s bill is only 72 pages.
“It’s a work in progress,” Rubio says, speaking of the Bay State program. “There are major distinctions between that and what Obama is trying to do in Washington. For one, it didn’t raise any taxes. Number two, it is not adding to our deficit. That is my biggest objection to Obamacare, although there are many others. My number-one objection to Obamacare is that we can’t afford it, even if it was the greatest idea in the world.”
“Florida and Massachusetts are very different places,” Rubio continues. “All I would say to you is that states were designed to be laboratories for creative thoughts and ideas. That’s what the Framers of our great republic intended. They wanted the states to be the places that came up with innovation and competition. And I’ll tell you what, if Massachusetts gets it wrong and Florida gets it right, people will move to Florida, and businesses will move to Florida, and vice versa. There are just major distinctions between what’s happening in Washington and what I hope states will do. Like I said, what I’m not in favor of is what Barack Obama has done, which is to raise taxes and add to the federal deficit in exchange of taking a step toward a single-payer system in America.”
Klein cites a number of quotes from President Obama regarding his own health care plan, comparing them to selected statements from Romney, made during the debate. For our purposes, Obama’s statements are not relevant. Whether or not Obama is being truthful about his own plan has no bearing on the truth of Romney’s statements.
Rather than admitting that Romney’s 30 second debate answers are not intended for a hyper-technical audience the way his book is, Klein claims Romney is “consistently making a series of blatant lies.” That is a serious accusation, so let’s look at the first of Romney’s statements which Klein is referring to (from the official debate transcript):
ROMNEY: Let me tell you this about our system in Massachusetts: 92 percent of our people were insured before we put our plan in place. Nothing’s changed for them. The system is the same. They have private market-based insurance.
Admittedly, the second half of Mitt’s statement is not technically accurate unless taken in the context of the first sentence. Romney wasn’t saying their lives haven’t changed in any way at all, but was addressing the primary concern people have expressed to him, which is the mandate to own insurance. Mitt appears to be minimizing that particular concern by explaining that since most people in MA already had insurance, the new law was only telling them to do something they were already doing.
But Klein doesn’t see it that way:
Neither bill literally says that people have to drop their coverage, but both Obamacare … and Romneycare … effectively make people lose their current coverage. For one thing, both mandate that individuals purchase insurance, and once the government does that, it has to define what qualifies as “insurance.” Obamacare employs the phrase “minimum essential coverage,” where as in Romneycare, it’s called “minimum creditable coverage” (see Chapter 111M, section 1). In both cases, anybody who does not have a qualified insurance policy, therefore, has to obtain one that meets the government-imposed standards, or pay a fine.
The first fact to defeat Klein’s argument is that the coverage mandates are on insurance companies, not on policy holders. So his claim that people lost their coverage and had to switch is untrue.
The second problem with Klein’s argument is that he complains about “minimum essential coverage,” however states routinely “define what qualifies as ‘insurance.’” States regulate insurance just like they regulate other companies. Texas, for example, has mandated benefits for insurance coverage, which it applied universally as recently as 2004, at which point the state implemented “consumer choice plans” which do not contain all of the state mandated benefits but must be individually approved by the state. Regulations like “minimum essential coverage” were nothing new for MA. As Romney accurately said, “the system is the same.” Regulatory changes are inherent in that system.
Perhaps Klein is thinking of how the MA legislature expanded regulations further by mandating that “the division shall include within its covered services for adults all federally optional services that were included in its state plan or demonstration program in effect on January 1, 2002.” Romney vetoed this in the bill but the legislature overrode the veto. In his book, Romney explains, “I would reinstitute my vetoes of the legislature’s additions. Among these, one of the most significant is my conviction that the state should not mandate which benefits must be included in health insurance policies: Consumers should be free to choose which benefits they want” (PB, p. 194).
It’s hard to argue that someone supported something they vetoed. But Klein tries anyway, and in the process tips his hand about his lack of objectivity:
In the past, Romney’s tried to tout the fact that he vetoed some of the benefit mandates but was overridden by the legislature. That’s a disingenuous argument, because he spent years crafting the bill, signed it with a smiling Ted Kennedy at his side, touted it publicly, and issued symbolic vetoes knowing that they would be overridden, just to give him some conservative cover. This argument would be the equivalent of a Republican Senator having worked with Democrats for a year to pass Obamacare, voting it out of committee, giving it the 60 vote threshold it needed to break a filibuster, and then voting against final passage and trying to use that final meaningless vote to make a case to primary voters.
Contrary to Klein’s claims, the legislature in MA continued making changes to the bill throughout the entire process. His U.S. Senate analogy fails because Romney always opposed the provisions he vetoed and never did anything comparable to voting them out of a Senate committee. It would be more accurate to say the Senate sent the provisions in the first place knowing Governor Romney would not be able to stop them from overriding his vetoes (although in the case of two of the vetoes, the legislature was not able to garner enough votes to override).
Klein continues his analysis:
“Furthermore, both plans create incentives for businesses to drop employer-based private insurance and dump workers on the government exchanges. We’ve seen rumblings of this as Obamacare moves closer to implementation, and last year the Boston Globe reported the following news: ‘The relentlessly rising cost of health insurance is prompting some small Massachusetts companies to drop coverage for their workers and encourage them to sign up for state-subsidized care instead, a trend that, some analysts say, could eventually weigh heavily on the state’s already-stressed budget.’
“So, Romney’s claim in last night’s debate is just as dishonest as when Obama made the same claim to the American people two years ago.”
And most importantly, Klein again neglects to crack open Romney’s book:
“When the reform was passed … we required everyone who received subsidized insurance to pay a fair share of their premiums–the new liberal administration decided that some people should get their insurance for nothing. Imagine the additional cost to the state of such a decision.” Romney further noted, “elections have consequences.” (PB, p. 194)
Now let’s look at Klein’s next example in the alleged “series of blatant lies”:
“ROMNEY: We had 8 percent of our people that weren’t insured. And so what we did is we said let’s find a way to get them insurance, again, market-based private insurance. We didn’t come up with some new government insurance plan.”
Indeed, the Massachusetts Connector is not an insurance plan. It just helps people find private insurance companies, and when necessary diverts medicaid funds for that purpose. Ronald Reagan proposed a plan to do something similar, with Medicare:
“The plan expands opportunities for Medicare beneficiaries to use their benefits to enroll in private health plans as an alternative to traditional Medicare coverage”
– Ronald Wilson Reagan, February 28, 1983, transmitting to Congress his Health Insurance Reform program
Now that we’ve heard from Reagan, let’s hear from Klein:
“It’s not clear if by “new government insurance plan,” Romney meant a “public option,” but either way, that’s moot, because the idea wasn’t a part of the final version of the national health care bill that Obama signed, either. Yet what both plans do have in common is a government-run health care exchange, in which individuals use government subsidies to purchase health insurance that meets requirements set by government-appointed officials.”
As we have already discussed, every state government sets requirements for private health insurance. If Klein is claiming that these constitute a “new government insurance plan,” he would have to apply that to the other states as well. Or perhaps he is claiming that medicaid is the “new government insurance plan,” but Romney didn’t create medicaid. It’s been around for a long time.
Now for the last of the alleged “blatant lies” cited by Klein:
“ROMNEY: Our plan in Massachusetts has some good parts, some bad parts, some things I’d change, some things I like about it. It’s different than Obamacare.”
Klein’s claim:
“Romney says there are some ‘bad parts,’ but won’t specify what they are.”
No. Klein just made that up. Klein is making the same mistake as our friends at RedState. And clearly Klein did not feel the need to do any real research before writing his attack. In his book, No Apology (PB), Romney explains some aspects which he once supported but no longer does, and has consistently opposed many aspects which were foisted upon the health care plan against his desires.
If Klein would actually learn more about Romney, he might like him.
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As the Perry campaign continues a downward fall, buzz over Newt Gingrich is rising in its place. Could a surprise still happen? Around here we are starting to make predictions…
