Sorry, just saying “It’s the law” isn’t presidential

Yesterday, Rick Santorum practiced sounding presidential by laying down his catch-22 on the upcoming referendum on statehood for Puerto Rico.

He’d leave the decision to initiate full union talks with the Puerto Ricans—sadly, with the caveat that they would have to accept only English as their official language. Awkward: for over a century, English and Spanish have been officially recognized.

Santorum excused his veto with a helpless shrug:

“Like any other state, there has to be compliance with this and any other federal law,” Mr. Santorum said in the interview with El Vocero, a Spanish-language newspaper, according to Reuters. “And that is that English has to be the principal language.”

Click on: www.nytimes.com/2012/03/15/us/politics/fortunes-turn-as-does-style-for-santorum.html?_r=1

There are two problems with this approach as a potential president of a great country.

First, it’s not accurate.

So long as the US remains a free great power, the New York Times and at least a handfull of others will be around to point out when presidents are inventing federal laws to excuse what they don’t want to agree to or to excuse something they shouldn’t have done. Today, there’s no federal statute mandating US states and territories to guard the supremacy of the embattled English language. And if there was one, you’d think a true conservative like Rick Santorum would oppose it, rather than hide behind it.

Second, it’s common—not presidential—to immediately quote the law or the constitution, as you read it, against a new idea.

America became a transcontinental federation and great global power, in large part, by amending its constitution and by electing brilliant negotiators. Commanders and chiefs were a last resort.

With Puerto Rican capita incomes barely a third of those of Americans, complete union with continental US would be contentious. However, to rule it out on language grounds is an evasion, even if there was a problem constitutionally.

Would constitutional conservatives like Rick Santorum, for instance, reject out of hand expanding the American federation to include Canada—with its comparable standard of living, economic productivity, parliamentary traditions, democratic secular values, military solidarity, free market institutions, and mutual friends globally—simply because seven million French-Speaking Quebecers would demand constitutional guarantees?

Would they turn down Canada because amending the American constitution on Canada’s behest would now be un-American?

PS: Sorry for being a bit uneven. We’re in Miami, visiting and trying to keep up.

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.

Newt Gingrich’s contract with big money

Call me a conspiracy theorist but I don’t think Newt Gingrich is just another “cheerful” loud mouth or an original voice in American public life. As a Republican presidential candidate, I don’t think he really has a mind of his own.

CNN just reported that Sheldon Adelson and his wife will pump millions more into Gingrich’s super-PAC “Winning the Future.” The Adelsons have already invested $11 million in Gingrich’s primary win in South Carolina and his life support systems ever since. It’s questionable he’d still be a candidate without their help.

Click on: www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/

Gingrich’s benefactor, of course, hasn’t put him on a leash and Gingrich needn’t expect to be cut off arbitrarily. Adelson didn’t make an estimated $22billion being temperamental.

Furthermore, Adelson isn’t doing something that actually hurts the front-runner right now—Romney’s anemic campaign needs a divided opposition. Furthermore, Adelson has made it clear that he’ll generously provide millions later if the Republicans eventually put Romney up against Obama. The New York Times reported that he’s simply a fervent Zionist who opposes any territorial compromise to make way for a Palestinian state and has “long been enamored of Mr Gingrich’s full-throated defense of Israel.”

Click on:http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/sheldon_g_adelson/index.html?scp=1-spot&sq=Sheldon%20Adelson&st=cse

There is, however, a contract between Gingrich’s throat and Adelson’s ear:

Newt Gingrich’s throat will crowd out any fresh intelligence or reflection on the last ten years of carnage in the Middle East that might worm into his head and threaten to move his rhetoric even an inch away from the most extreme and belligerent champions of the government of Israel.

He exercised his part of this contract during last week’s Republican debate. On the existential Iranian threat to Israel, Adelson’s ear was reminded by Gingrich that Barack Obama is the “most dangerous president in modern American history.” The rest of us—including long-time supporters of Israel, independents, conservatives, libertarians, Muslim-Americans, and liberal veterans, for that matter—might as well have gone to the kitchen, knocked back a double, and come back with a beer.

(Sure, Santorum and Romney sounded like warriors, too—naturally, they wouldn’t hesitate to send their boys. But, the former was simply being himself and the latter can’t act out of character anyway. Imagine finding, tracing, and then making a drama out of the convictions of Mitt Romney. They made only one Shakespeare and he always played with the facts.)

The Supreme Court and many thoughtful liberals and conservatives are reluctant to limit political advertising expenditures by the super PACs, unorganized groups, and individuals. Limiting free expression at all should be extremely hard to do and it’s impossible to prove that advertising “buys” elections or that, by itself, it suppresses voter turn-out.

Then, let’s agree to this: while you can’t corrupt the people with cheap advertising, you can effectively corrupt a politician by giving millions to his campaign.

It’s clean, efficient, and transparent. You don’t need focus groups and a sociologist; just read your benefactor’s profile in the New York Times.

Maybe no law can now be passed against it. Americans, however, still have the power of buyer beware. Does it pass the smell test to know that at least one intellectually curious candidate for president of the United States knows that the wheels will come off his campaign if he dares start thinking out loud on America’s interests internationally?

Catholic Bishops and Republicans prepare for war

Obama being Obama, he offered, last Friday, to make peace on a liberal issue on which he enjoys wide public support—requiring Catholic hospital and university employers to provide employee health insurance for contraceptive services.

With 57% of the general public and 56% of independent Catholics already in his corner, he presented a revised plan that would allow those employers to refrain from paying directly for contraceptive coverage—their insurers would be obligated to provide the coverage instead.

Click on: www.politico.com/news/stories/0212/72751.html#ixzz1mDCqtH8A

Obama effectively gets what he wants: near universal health insurance coverage for women and the freedom to get back to work on the economy.

Being the Obama they loath, however, Republicans scorned his offer to move on. Their leaders in Congress will proceed with legislation that will allow all employers in the US to follow their religious beliefs in deciding whether their employees get access to health insurance coverage for contraceptives. 

Rather than congratulate themselves on forcing another compromise out of a president who “doesn’t know how to lead,” they’ve chosen to side with the Conference of Bishops—and their stark insistence that the federal government not assist women to make choices they oppose.

Obama insists that no woman’s health should depend on “where she works.” Mitt Romney calls the regulation to accomplish that principle an “outrageous assault on religious conscience,” and Rick Santorum divines that this fight is about both religious freedom and government “control of our lives.”


Words in politics are disposable. Yet, the Republicans seem to have tied their fortunes to the “moral analysis” of the Bishops—a conference of wordsmiths that does not answer to swing voters or have any qualms about making women uncomfortable or sounding reactionary.

Mike Huckabee declared to a cheering conservative audience that “we are all Catholics now.” That’s a great one-liner. But, is it tenable politically? Can Romney or Santorum use that line in an acceptance speech at the Republican Convention next August and in a debate with Barack Obama?

In designing health and social programs, should a good president—Catholic, Mormon, or Evangelical—respond to a lobby of Catholic Bishops as good Catholic? 

After cramming on economics for so long, Democrats may not feel up to fighting with Republicans on an issue of conscience—this is: should the government defer to the teachings of Church hierarchy or to the preferences of individual believers and non-believers? It shouldn’t take elaborate preparation to stand up for a liberal principle that inspired the constitution.

When it comes down to whether a president answers to his church or to the people, Democrats would be well served to reply: “We’re all democrats; aren’t you?”