Romney vs. Gingrich is a fight for the soul of the party Reagan once united.
By PEGGY NOONAN
This is the most volatile and tumultuous presidential primary race of our lifetimes. Look at these numbers. In June 2011, in South Carolina, Mitt Romney led Newt Gingrich by 15 points, 27% to 12%, in a Public Policy Polling survey. Two months later, PPP had Rick Perry leading Mr. Romney by 20 points, 36% to 16%, with Mr. Gingrich running third. In early December, Mr. Gingrich vaulted to the top, leading Mr. Romney by 23 points (CNN). A month later Mr. Romney led by 18.
Last Saturday, South Carolina voted. Mr. Gingrich won in a 12-point blowout.
Jump to Florida. In late November, Mr. Gingrich led Mr. Romney by 30 points. (PPP). In mid-January, Mr. Romney led by 26 points (Sunshine State News). A week later Mr. Gingrich was back on top by nine (Rasmussen). This Thursday Rasmussen said Romney was leading Gingrich by eight, 39% to 32%.
This isn’t “different polls say different things,” this is tumult, and it’s left almost everyone in politics scratching their heads: What the heck is going on? An unusually high number of voters have reported making up their minds late, just before the voting. Never before have three different candidates won the first three races in a GOP nomination contest.
South Carolina Republicans delivered what former president George W. Bush once called a “thumpin’” to Mitt Romney. Republicans have too many misgivings about Romney — misgivings we share — to give him a shortcut to the nomination. He will have to earn it, if he can. So far he has been content to deliver lifeless platitudes, apparently under the impression that saying he “believes in America” is the way to clinch an argument rather than begin or summarize one. Instead of projecting strength, he has wilted under challenge. For a while there, his position on releasing tax returns was starting to look as convoluted as the tax code itself. He has done little to persuade conservative voters that he will fight for our priorities.
But attention must now turn to South Carolina’s big winner, Newt Gingrich. If the question before South Carolinians was whether to declare the nomination contest over by choosing Romney, the question before Floridians is whether to make Gingrich the front-runner. Romney is now running a sharply negative campaign in order to capitalize on this distinction. Since neither Gingrich nor Romney can make the case that he is a purebred conservative or a world-beating political talent, both are now essentially relying on a negative argument: The other guy is unreliable and unelectable. There is enough truth in both indictments to explain the continued appeal of other candidates’ joining the race.
Among the present candidates, we continue to prefer Romney and Rick Santorum over Gingrich and Ron Paul. Our opposition to Paul is based on our disagreement with a foreign policy based on what we consider a dangerously naïve and narrow conception of U.S. interests. Our opposition to Gingrich, by contrast, is not based on any philosophical disagreement. Among Gingrich, Romney, and Santorum, we find only minor ideological differences. None has been a consistent small-government conservative in office; all are running on conservative, and similar, platforms this year. (more…)
A test for Romney, GOP officials, and the former speaker himself.
Newt Gingrich’s sweeping victory in South Carolina throws the GOP Presidential contest into a useful uproar and poses a challenge for Mitt Romney, what’s left of the Republican establishment, and not least for Mr. Gingrich himself. We’ll see who rises to the occasion.
There’s no denying the breadth of the former House speaker’s triumph in the Palmetto State. He won among rank-and-file Republicans, tea partiers, men and women, all manner of conservatives, most income groups, and every age group save those under 30 (who went narrowly for Ron Paul over Mr. Gingrich).
Most strikingly, he routed Mr. Romney on what had been the former Massachusetts governor’s greatest strength—electability. Some 45% of voters in the exit poll said defeating President Obama was the candidate trait that mattered most, and they went for Mr. Gingrich over Mr. Romney, 51% to 37%.
This reflects Mr. Gingrich’s debate skills but perhaps more his willingness to promote conservative values. Since Reagan, Republicans have had a President or nominee who was typically either tongue-tied or timid in defending their policies and principles. With Mr. Obama preparing a re-election assault on those principles, GOP voters understandably want a tenacious advocate. Voters sense that, whatever his other failings, Mr. Gingrich can match Mr. Obama on the issues and won’t go down without a fight. (more…)
As the attorney general who filed the lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that is now before the U.S. Supreme Court, I care deeply about repealing and replacing the law. For this to happen, President Obama has to be replaced. There is no other candidate as well equipped as Newt Gingrich to take it to Barack Obama in a health-care debate.
Contrary to what many pundits say, Newt Gingrich is the most likely of the Republican candidates to defeat Mr. Obama this fall. Why? Because he is the most able to articulate the conservative positions, is the most concise and convincing advocate when speaking and debating, and has the best and boldest plan to restore the economy.
Moreover, and unlike former Gov. Mitt Romney—who is burdened by his continued defense of RomneyCare—Newt has admitted the error of his earlier support of the individual mandate and can fully take on the president over the issue of ObamaCare. And after the economy and national security, this is the most important issue in the campaign. (more…)
A year into his first full-time teaching job, Newt Gingrich applied to be college president, submitting with his application a paper titled “Some Projections on West Georgia College’s Next Thirty Years.”
Newt Gingrich fashions himself as the history professor of the GOP presidential field. So what exactly was he like as an academic? Elizabeth Williamson on Lunch Break looks at West Georgia College, which employed the former Speaker in the late 1970s.
Mel Steely, a history professor who played a role in Mr. Gingrich’s hiring in 1970, said the bid drew “a chuckle” from administrators. The following year, Mr. Gingrich applied to be chairman of the history department. That wasn’t greeted so kindly, Mr. Steely said, with some favoring a longtime professor and World War II veteran.
“We weren’t going to make Newt our chairman, but he liked the idea of competing for almost anything,” said Mr. Steely, who later wrote a complimentary biography of Mr. Gingrich titled “The Gentleman From Georgia.” “He figured ‘I’m capable of doing this,’ and it didn’t bother him so much that it offended anybody.”
Mr. Gingrich often says his experience as a historian would make him a superior president. During Monday’s GOP debate, he lectured “as a historian” on “a fact-based model” for revamping Social Security, citing the success of programs in Galveston, Texas, and Chile.
So what was Professor Gingrich actually like? A clutch of little-known records from what is now the University of West Georgia in Carrollton suggests the ambition and intellectual grandeur of Newt 2012 aren’t a long way from the 1970s vintage. In addition to seeking the college presidency, Mr. Gingrich was often absent as he pursued political goals. He embarked on an effort to moonlight as a paid consultant. And, it turns out, he spent little time teaching history. (more…)
This is Romney’s moment to distinguish himself by making a moral case for free-market capitalism.
By DONALD L. LUSKINMr. Luskin is chief investment officer at Trend Macrolytics LLC.
EXCER[T FROM THIS ARTICLE: The rules under today’s politics are quite different. Consider the federal government’s 2009 bailout of General Motors. GM’s secured bondholders were contractually entitled to equity in the failing company, yet the president stripped them of their rights, giving their equity unfairly to the company’s unions—which had helped get that president elected.
This is the new order that Newt Gingrich is advocating when he attacks Mitt Romney and Bain: Equity should go to workers, not to the owners who made the risky up-front investments that created it in the first place. It’s a vast new entitlement for labor—one not embodied in law but imposed at the whim of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and now advocated by a man seeking that job.
Newt Gingrich’s claim about Mitt Romney and Bain Capital—that its business model was “figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company”—is an egregious lie. Yet Mr. Gingrich is not stupid. He and the other Republican primary contenders who have echoed his attack have calculated that the only way to beat President Barack Obama, who uses the words “millionaires and billionaires” as insults, is to join him. It’s unanimous, then—capitalism is immoral.
At last, Mitt Romney finds himself with an issue that can define him, an issue about which the 2012 election can be a referendum. This is Mr. Romney’s moment to distinguish himself by proudly making a moral case for free-market capitalism.
A merely pragmatic case for capitalism won’t do. That’s the phony expediency that Mr. Gingrich employs when he panders to pro-growth Republicans, saying “the whole purpose of investment is . . . job creation.” Capitalism has indeed proven to be excellent at creating jobs. But politicians—from the bureaucrats who lent federal money to Solyndra, all the way to the outright socialists—claim they can do that, too.
The enduring case for capitalism—the moral case that Romney must make now—is that it is the only economic system consistent with liberty.
Private equity—the realm of capitalism in which Bain Capital operates—is an expression of that liberty. There’s nothing mysterious here. Private-equity firms are much like mutual funds that invest in stocks. But when a private-equity firm invests, it typically buys the entire company. Then the private-equity firm becomes actively involved in the management of the companies it owns.
Sometimes that means trying to turn around firms that have fallen on hard times. And if that doesn’t work, private-equity firms can’t just sell their shares and walk away. They have to take the responsibility for tough decisions: closing down factories and stores, eliminating jobs.
AFP/Getty ImagesPresidential Republican primary candidate Newt Gingrich addresses the crowd of several hundred people gathered at a Town Hall Meeting in Georgetown, South Carolina.
Three former factory workers featured in a film about layoffs at companies bought by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital say they weren’t laid off by Bain, as the film implied, but got promotions and raises after Bain bought the plant they worked in.
Winning Our FutureTommy and Tracy Jones, in ‘When Mitt Romney Came to Town.’
The workers’ charges of inaccuracy involve “When Mitt Romney Came to Town,” a 28-minute film also known as “King of Bain.” The film has become a focal point of the Republican presidential race in the past week. It was cited by rival Newt Gingrich at a televised debate last weekend and has been posted online by Winning Our Future, a group supporting Mr. Gingrich’s candidacy. The group is also airing ads in South Carolina cut from the film.
Some Republicans are worried that Mr. Gingrich and other GOP candidates questioning Bain’s work are adding credibility to similar attacks leveled by Democrats seeking to undermine Mr. Romney. On Friday, Mr. Gingrich called for Winning Our Future to address concerns about the movie.
Romney has a good story to tell, if he’s willing to tell it.
About the best that can be said about the Republican attacks on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital is that President Obama is going to do the same thing eventually, so GOP primary voters might as well know what’s coming. Yet that hardly absolves Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and others for their crude and damaging caricatures of modern business and capitalism.
Bain’s business model is little more than “rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company,” says Mr. Gingrich, whose previous insights into free enterprise include years of defending the taxpayer-fed business of corn ethanol.
A super PAC supporting the former House Speaker plans to spend $3.4 million in TV ads in South Carolina portraying Mr. Romney as Gordon Gekko without the social conscience. The financing for these ads will come from a billionaire who made his money in the casino business, which Mr. Gingrich apparently considers morally superior to investing in companies in the hope of making a profit.
Mr. Perry, who has no problem using taxpayer financing to back his political allies in Texas, chimes in that “I have no doubt that Mitt Romney was worried about pink slips, whether he was going to have enough of them to hand out. Because his company Bain Capital, with all the jobs that they killed, I’m sure he was worried he’d run out of pink slips.”
Politics isn’t subtle, and these candidates are desperate, but do they have to sound like Michael Moore?
We have our policy differences with Mr. Romney, but by any reasonable measure Bain Capital has been a net job and wealth creator. Founded in 1984 as an offshoot of the Bain consulting company, Bain Capital’s business is a combination of private equity and venture capital. The latter means taking a flyer on start-ups that may or may not pan out, something that neither Mr. Gingrich nor Mr. Obama seem to find offensive when those investments are made by Silicon Valley firms in “clean energy.”
One Bain investment during Mr. Romney’s tenure was to back an entrepreneur named Tom Stemberg, who was convinced he could provide savings for small-business owners if they were willing to shop at a store instead of taking deliveries. Today, the Staples chain of business-supply stores employs 90,000 people.
Bain also backed a start-up called Bright Horizons that now manages child-care centers for more than 700 corporate clients around the world. Many other venture bets failed, but that’s capitalism, which is supposed to be a profit and loss system.
Boston Globe via Getty ImagesMitt Romney at Bain’s offices in Copley Plaza in 1990. (more…)
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Is this what happened in the Democratic debates last time? Were candidates Obama and Clinton badgered about governments promoting contraceptives, even to children? What about abortion and the candidates’ radical views? In fact, in the entire 20 Democratic debates in 2007 and 2008 monitored by the Media Research Center’s Culture and Media Institute, there were only seven questions about abortion … in the entire campaign.
Sitting through the Republican debate on Saturday night with ABCs George Stephanopoulos was just painful, from beginning to end. Some of it was just political Ambien. But when it was finally over, there was just one question: Who in the GOP in his or her right mind invites a historically shameless Democratic spin controller like Stephanopoulos to “moderate” a primary debate like this — ever?
The only thing that can be said in defense of that horrible decision was turning to NBC the next morning and seeing “moderator” David Gregory be even more slanted in his questioning. ABC slanted the ideological questions in their debate by a ratio of 6 questions from the left to each 1 from the right. The NBC ratio was 8 to 1.
Why must the Republicans keep handing over their debate stage in the primary season to the people who desperately want them all to bumble, stumble and fall on their faces on national TV?
In the ABC debate — an event held for Republican voters presumably to decide who is reliably conservative enough to win the nomination — ABC asked three questions from the conservative perspective and 20 from the left (25 were ideologically neutral). Twelve of the 48 questions, or 25 percent of the night’s total, were devoted to promoting contraception and gay marriage, so trite and repetitive that finally the audience booed them down. (more…)
