With a win by Governor Mitt Romney in Nevada (48% meaning 83 delegates), he has strongly seized control of the race, and it showed on Newt Gingrich's face and in his oratory during his interview on today's program. Mr. Gingrich's stated goal is to make it to super Tuesday and the Texas primary where he believes true conservatives will come out for him. The truth is that the Texas political fat cats will throw their dollars in with Romney and he'll take the state. Mr. Gingrich was once again consistent in his attack of Mr. Romney saying today that he is pro-abortion, anti-gun, for more taxes. All indicators from Mr. Romney himself lead us to the conclusion that we're not sure where he actually will stand on many issues if he were elected President.
The key notion that Mr. Gingrich ignores and really has to ignore is that Republican primary voters are voting for Mr. Romney because they think he has the best chance to beat President Obama. However, they're proverbially holding their noses while casting that vote. How does a candidate win a Presidential election, not to mention lead the country, when no one on any side trusts him on what's he's going to do. Yet, he keeps winning primaries. Mr. Gingrich states many more policy positions than Mr. Romney (not difficult since Mr. Romney never states any) such as what he said today. He wants to create private savings accounts for Social Security for future recipients, have school choice for the very poor, a zero capitol gains tax. However, when a seasoned Republican strategist like Alex Castellanos says in the same program that Newt Gingrich has no path to the Presidency because he has now illustrated his instability and that in Nevada Mr. Romney won everyone exception divorce lawyers and narcissists. A sufficiently harsh critique. From here, if the Romney campaign keeps attacking hard on Mr. Gingrich, the former Speaker could go nuclear and try to smear Mr. Romney as much as he possibly can, damaging him to the point where a general election win is certainly less probable. However, if they secede the negativity, Mr. Gingrich could gain momentum.
In those aforementioned policy positions, Mr. Gingrich wants school choice for the very poor. It seems like a reasonable position, but our question is why can't we improve the local school so that the parents can choose that one. There's always talk, on the Democratic side at least, about the need for infrastructure rebuilding, but that must be narrowed to educational infrastructure rebuilding. This, literally, is where the future is, and we're seeing it crumble right in front of us. Furthermore, that Mr. Romney would say, in any context, that he's not concerned about the poor in this country because the school safety net works shows an unrecoverable distance between Mr. Romney's understanding of what's going economically and educationally and where people really are, way out of touch.
Also, making the capital gains tax 0% would do nothing (or very little) to create jobs. The disproportionate few with capital gains would be further enriched and sock away money that was simply made from having money. Not to mention that if you do that without closing some loop holes, a hedge fund manager for example can also claim his salary as a capital gain and then end up paying no taxes. Our debt would explode if capital gains was zero percent.
Crazy as it sounds, when Mr. Gregory half jokingly asked Mr. Gingrich about his comments with regard to space and bases on the moon, he made a good point. We've put billions into the space program and now we don't have a vehicle that could travel into orbit and back. It's not specifically that, but we agree with the general premise that gutting the space program is a mistake. We've unjustly diminished the contributions of NASA, from the technologies they bore that are now common place to the imaginative science it inspires.
But one last thing on Mr. Gingrich's interview - the Obama Administration's controversy with the Catholic Church and the rhetoric that went with it. Not that you would ever expect a minimum standard of discourse from a politician, it's not helpful when a figure like Mr. Gingrich emphatically states that the President of the United States has declared war on the Catholic Church without informing people what is actually going on. In the later round table discussion, they somewhat cleared it up, but here it is. When the Affordable Health Care Act goes into effect, all entities or companies that offer insurance coverage to individuals, they all must offer the same provisions. One of those provisions is contraception, that it should be covered. Here's the rub, the Catholic Church offers insurance through it's hospitals and they don't want to cover contraception because it's against their doctrine and institutional beliefs. The two sides of the argument follow these respective lines. Democrats, as articulated by Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA) today, say that if you offer insurance, all the standards have to be the same for everyone - no exceptions. The Republicans would argue that the Administration is trampling on the Church's religious liberties. It has the potential to become a very big issue and Mr. Gingrich framing it as secularism is crushing religious freedom is, in a word, ridiculous. First, demonizing the word 'secularism' is technically demonizing the constitution and the government's mandate to make decisions void of a religious perspective. Again, not helpful. If the Catholic Church is profiting from this insurance offering, then it must play by the same rules as everyone else. If the insurance offering is not for profit, then maybe it can be negotiated that they maintain their right to deny contraception coverage. That's a possible solution, though our general opinion is that banning contraception outright is not a good idea. If the Church decides to not obey the law, they'll come under debilitating fines. [Certainly, we don't weep for the Catholic Church on this front, and frankly, if they had practiced their own form of contraception and neutered some of their priests, they wouldn't have the financial problems they do.]
The 'Super Bowl' themed second segment featuring Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (D), New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) and Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels (R) struck us as a bit comical. When Mr. Daniels would say something, Mr. Bloomberg would say he agreed and then say completely contradictory. When Mr. Daniels called out President Obama regulations and taxes, Mr. Bloomberg agreed and then said we need to raise taxes on everyone, there's no way around it. That aside, Mr. Daniels stuck to his State of the Union rebuttal that President Obama has made the economy worse, that it is the worst recovery since we started keeping records on such things. This is a speculative argument and so is that if Mr. Romney were President the recovery would be better - something today's panel discussed. We would agree with Ms. Maddow that campaigning on that premise will hit a ceiling and is a thin argument. Mr. Romney needs to present more policy points on the trail instead of ugly renditions of 'America The Beautiful.'
Round Table: Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA), NY Times columnist David Brooks, GOP strategist Alex Castellanos, and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
No comments:
Post a Comment