Mitt Romney can’t go home again

Mitt Romney may never allow his handlers to set his hair on fire to win the Republican nomination. Every man has his limits. But don’t expect an elegant pivot back to the center after last night’s primary results in Ohio and in Tennessee.

At all the known tasks—raising money, raising children, making serious money personally, being a faithful and god-fearing husband—he has outperformed his Republican opponents. Yet, they’re beating him decisively amongst social conservatives and working class voters.  

These voters can be reached. However, Romney’s economic focus won’t do it. He’s already proven that he’s willing to say some pretty amazing things. No matter how extreme his tax cuts get, however, economics won’t win their hearts or save him from Obama this fall.

One of the difficulties in talking non-stop about economics and taxes is that they make you think about money. And right-thinking and affluent people don’t like dwelling on the subject in public, especially Republicans.

Only the wife of a man worth over $250million, Ann Romney, could explain to CNN that she “doesn’t feel wealthy.”

If Wall Street was crashing for the first time in memory, rather than growing again, Romney could be sold as a crisis manager against a neophyte social worker from Chicago. Today, however, trying to beat Obama with labor market statistics and alternative growth scenarios would be impossibly boring.

Romney, as Bill Clinton’s strategist James Carville coined in 1992, wants to believe that it’s “the economy, stupid.” Actually, the term “cultural wars” is extreme but politically more realistic. People are truly divided about how they should be treated by the state, how they should be treated in the economy, and by one another.

The good politicians try to bridge these differences and heal injustices. Bad politicians look for scapegoats and foreign enemies. There’s a lot for a good Romney to be excited about and for his conscience to play with.

Rush Limbaugh’s obscenities unite Ann and Mitt Romney

On tricky (potentially revealing) issues, some wives will say almost anything to help out. Mitt Romney knows that Ann Romney is that kind of wife.

What does he do when the loudest conservative in the country calls a young law student a “slut” and “prostitute” for disagreeing with him on access to contraceptives? Romney has said the issue is of grave national importance, the student spoke back gravely, and he’s been a blue blazer gentleman since his nineteenth birthday.

The frontrunner huddles with his wife of 42 years and they dance. Here’s a glimpse at a Romney White House under pressure:

“When finally pressed for an opinion on Friday night, CNN quotes him as saying, "I'll just say this which is it's not the language I would have used," Romney said. "I'm focusing on the issues I think are significant in the country today, and that's why I'm here talking about jobs and Ohio."

“Romney's wife spoke out as well, and in the same vein: 'I love it that women are concerned and voting for economic reasons,' she told a handful of supporters at her husband's Ohio campaign headquarters in Columbus. 'Moms are very angry about the deficit spending in Washington, D.C.'"

Click on: http://politics.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474981162013

Ann Romney, America’s best known bi-coastal homemaker, went on to enthuse that “Women ... for the first time, may be voting their pocket books, which is great.”

Their evasive duet deserves wide and unreserved scorn.

It expresses the frayed hope that women voters generally will look the other way in November on contraceptives, Supreme Court appointments, and health issues on which Republicans would roll back American social policy. They will also forget that their nominee couldn’t stand up to a vicious bully, that civility might be just too European for modern Republican politics. Heck, modern women like a good joke too and Limbaugh is just too funny to be scolded.  

Does Anne Romney imagine that her husband can be a good old boy on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—and a cosmopolitan on Tuesdays and Thursdays?

Does Ann Romney think that other women in America will let her husband lie to them because he doesn’t lie to her?

Furthermore, where did she pick up this princess notion that American women might, for the first time, put their pocketbooks—or allowance, in her case—front and center in a national election? As if the ditsy girly-vote and girly legislators launched the $trillion dollar wars of the last two generations, the free prescription drug plans, the universal tax cuts, the earmarks, and Star wars. And now—“I love it”—are growing up.

Historically, women have never been less concerned about the future, the sustainability of their families, their communities, and their country’s finances than men. And today are no easier to distract—when threatened individually or as a gender—by the Limbaugh’s, Catholic bishops, or their apologists. 

Fighting over an “ordinary” brand for Canada’s left

It’s too much to ask for the drama of a heresy trial or the Republican primaries. The Canadian left is too old and too conservative for any of that. Nevertheless, the New Democratic Party’s leadership race is finally starting to generate news and a little feeling.

Last Sunday, in Winnipeg, we’re told, the gloves came off.

Click on:  http://m.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ndp-leadership-candidates-take-off-the-gloves/article2350862/?service=mobile

The “wedge” issue was created by front-runner Thomas Mulcair, who suggested that the NDP must refresh its slogans and renew its appeal if it is to win power—they might even, gasp, drop expressions of loyalty to “ordinary Canadians” every time they open their mouths in public.

Stunningly, he declined to withdraw these remarks. Several of his opponents not only committed themselves to stick with the “ordinary” but saw great benefit in plodding along according to the way they do things now.

Peggy Nash, who whispers the word “inspire” in every second sentence and hopes to be everyone’s second ballot choice, insists that the Party has already nicely renewed itself under the infallible leadership of the recently deceased Jack Layton.

Jack Layton occupies the same position of authority in the NDP that Ronald Reagan has among Republicans. While never winning a national election, his name permits most New Democrat politicians to stop thinking.

Unfortunately, for Peggy Nash and the other leadership candidates favoring continuity, Jack’s campaign rhetoric is pretty lame without Jack’s famous cane.

Mulcair deserves careful attention. He actually wants to win the next election against Stephen Harper. He knows that to do that he must keep his 59 seats in Quebec. To do that, he knows he must show Quebecers that he’s on fire in English-speaking Canada. He can’t catch fire in English-speaking Canada without being more interesting than Bob Rae, who’ll likely be a 67-year-old leader of the Liberal Party.

That means dropping stale, deflating slogans like “ordinary Canadians.”

Canada and Iowa: Axis of Boredom

It’s not easy to decide which is more boring: thinking about what happened in Canada this year or thinking about what will happen in the Iowa caucuses next week.

Also, your pulse won’t quicken knowing that Texas Governor Rick Perry has been talking about Canada in Iowa. However, his ability to even get Canada wrong earned coverage in the New York Times and, for that, attention must be paid.

“The audiences at Mr. Perry’s events seemed somewhat unmoved by parts of his speech that talked about job creation. But when it came to energy and oil, they perked up.

“Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don’t have to buy from a foreign source,” Mr. Perry said in Clarinda, earning a loud round of enthusiastic applause.

“Later, the audience reacted again to Mr. Perry’s assertion that buying so much energy from foreign countries is “not good policy, it’s not good politics and frankly it’s un-American.”

Click on: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/what-moves-republican-crowds-in-iowa/?smid=tw-thecaucus&seid=auto

Canada just had a good year internationally, winning awards for livability, hospitality, and governance, while being singled out as the developed world’s worst polluter by the people’s green court in Durban, South Africa. Canada also had a good year in Washington, signing security deals and dropping bombs for NATO in Libya and Afghanistan. But none of that was good enough for Rick Perry and the people of Clarinda, Iowa.

Americans are spending billions administering their northern border and cutting their own throats commercially at the same time—and they can’t be bothered to recognize Canada as a foreign country!

The “Clarinda Incident” is too small to hurt. Canadians are now too big for that. However, Perry won applause for saying something that is essentially true: since the Free Trade Agreement of 1988, Canada is no longer a foreign supplier of oil like any other.

Canada’s oil industry, its industrial infrastructure, and its energy policies and regulations are continentally integrated. A barrel of Alberta oil contracted by an American consumer is as secure and as reliable as a barrel of oil contracted from an Alaskan. Indeed, its transportation and environmental risks are actually less. As a strategic North American asset, oil in Alberta is as valuable as oil in Texas—and is incomparably more secure than oil contracted off-shore from any other sovereign state.

The border risk—the sovereignty risk—is all on the Canadian side. That’s why it hurts to laugh at Perry’s clumsy language. Harper can’t turn off Canadian oil over the Keystone pipeline dispute. Furthermore, he can’t divert additional volumes of Alberta oil to China for many years without first going through a terrible fight with Canadian environmentalists, First Nations, and British Columbia, Canada’s third largest province.

The “Clarinda Incident” ought to be a wake-up call about the cruel reality of US presidential politics. Through to the Christmas recess of 2012, Obama and other Washington leaders will be making promises and decisions that profoundly affect Canadians. Canadians, unlike the good citizens of Clarinda, however, will have no say.

Happy New Year.