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SEQUESTER: The Horror!
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Weekend Political Wrap-Up, Paul Ryan Edition
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Esquire Blogger Sees Paul Ryan, Shreds His Safety Net
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The Spectacle Blog
South Carolina is the state that usually rescues the frontrunner; this time around, SC primary voters are being asked to stop one. Here’s how I expect everything to shake out, with candidates listed in order of finish.
1. Newt Gingrich — The former House speaker scores his first win of the 2012 primary season and experiences his second comeback of the campaign. Gingrich’s two-pronged attack on Mitt Romney’s conservatism and electability pays off. But can he sustain the momentum?
2. Mitt Romney — Romney manages to do better in South Carolina than once seemed possible but still only finishes second. Romney still has to be considered the favorite to win the nomination. But with the change in Iowa’s results, a loss in SC would make Romney only one for three so far. A loss right as he was looking inevitable could have unpredictable consequences, if his opponents can keep the pressure up.
3. Ron Paul — The renegade libertarian-leaning congressman from Texas has been an afterthought in most South Carolina coverage (as well as in CNN’s Charleston debate), but he could winding up quadrupling his share of the vote here compared to 2008. If he can keep ahead of oversensitive Rick Santorum, this will be his third top three showing in as many contests.
4. Rick Santorum — Santorum may be the unluckiest candidate in this race. He finishes ahead of Gingrich in New Hampshire and, as far as we know given the missing eight precincts, won Iowa — but only after everyone had stopped paying attention. He ought to be making some headway after the last debate, but only Public Policy Polling (which has him in third) seems to show this. And now Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman — both major candidates Santorum would have easily beaten — are out of the race.
View all comments (35) | Leave a comment
More Blog Posts by W. James Antle, III
http://spectator.org/blog/2012/01/21/south-carolina-predictions
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Clint| 1.21.12 @ 9:47AM
Looks Like The RINO-CINO Frontman Mittens Romney, That The Ruling Elite And Their Media Flunkie Agendists Have Attempted To Foist On The Voters, Ain't Gonna Be Coronated In South Carolina.
" Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has taken the top spot for the first time in poll averages compiled by The New York Times and Real Clear Politics for Saturday’s South Carolina primary.
" The Times average has the former House speaker leading former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, 35.4 percent to 32.7 percent. Texas Rep. Ron Paul takes third place with 16 percent and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum is fourth with 12.9 percent."
Mike| 1.21.12 @ 9:55AM
Cogent analysis Mr. Antle.
But, aren't we all wondering how well Steven Colbert and Herman Cain will do? A poster on another thread labelled the overall GOP campaign surreal. Hard to argue against that take.
Matthias Kein| 1.21.12 @ 10:03AM
Who is leading in the GOP primary?
Mr 1% Romney and Mr Big ideas Gingrich.
But where are the new big ideas? Lower taxes? Less government regulation? My 11 year old son can write an essay about that.
From the outside I must tell you. Truth and wisdom is a rare ingredient in the US primary election.
Watch: German preacher's thoughts on 2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpLYq525SpM
aware| 1.21.12 @ 10:50AM
"Truth and wisdom is a rare ingredient in the US primary election."......or any other US election, brother.
Elections are a farcical circus that keep the sheep distracted, hoping and voting while they are being herded and sheared. If elections really changed things they'd be abolished.
Elections are you deluding yourself into thinking you have one member of a criminal gang that will protect you from the predations of the gang he is part of. They make you believe it is full contact battle between a Red team and a Blue team, but all the injuries fall on the spectators in the grand stand. The team members never seem to suffer much from the brutalities of the game. I notice even "losing" gateways into a very lucrative life of privileged advantage for the team members.
But are to hate the players and never question the game.
Drek| 1.21.12 @ 12:46PM
Newt's big ideas have been getting pushed by him for decades now.
If you desire to stay abreast of his views on various subjects, pick up several of his books, or check out his websites.
It's no mystery here, nothing that Gingrich is hiding.
It's kind of difficult to get into details in debates or commercials when you're facing time constraints.
So cut him a break, ------------ and if you desire to learn about what Gingrich is proposing, ------ then do your homework.
Bill Hussein O'Stalin| 1.21.12 @ 10:20AM
Gingrich may be gaining but it's unlikely he finishes first. A close second compels him to go on to Florida where he will come in second again.
Even if he comes in first what will he accomplish?
Gingrich keeps claiming he's the conservative but in reality he's a middle of the road politician always keen to reach across the aisle and stay in the mainstream.
He doesn't have the courage for real conservatism. All he has is election year conservatism.
Drek| 1.21.12 @ 12:48PM
"[M]iddle of the road?"
Cut us a break. He's the most conservative of any candidate who has been close to gaining the nomination since Reagan himself.
Give the man his due.
Clint| 1.21.12 @ 1:57PM
" the opposition to Romney has been led by conservative grassroots writers and activists, as well as groups like FreedomWorks. Gingrich isn’t much more popular among that contingent than Romney. In May, when Gingrich sharply criticized Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform plan, FreedomWorks Chairman Dick Armey reminded National Review that Gingrich had been a serial offender:
Citing Gingrich’s support of Dede Scozzafava in the 2009 congressional election in New York’s 23rd district, his backing of Medicare Part D and TARP, and his commercial with Nancy Pelosi about climate change, Armey observes that “Newt entered the race with serious ground to make up with these 2 million Tea Party activists.”…
Brendan Steinhauser, director of Federal and State Campaigns for FreedomWorks, reports that the Tea Partiers he’s talked to are “irate” at Gingrich… “I never met a single Tea Party activist that supported Newt Gingrich for president,” he adds."
The Tea Party Rebellion Is In South Carolina.
Bill Hussein O'Stalin| 1.21.12 @ 3:26PM
Well Drek, Let's give the Devil his due:
1. Global warming endorser without any facts to support his advertised belief.
2. Supports amnesty for illegal aliens and has for years. (This shouldn't be held against him unless you believe in the rule of law. However, since Reagan and Clinton, Both Bushes and Obama have pushed amnesty we should either believe we should embrace illegal activities at the behest of the Ruling Class or you should reject it and be told that conservatism involved breaking the law.)
3. Supports big spending and big government in all its infamy. In fact, Gingrich was one of the early supporters of big government in government run health care.
4. Gingrich worked behind the scenes through out the the year 2000 and beyond making millions in "consulting fees" working behind the scenes to keep Fannie/Freddie open while Fannie/Freddie continued to lose over 100 billion a year.
http://www.nationalreview.com/.....steyn?pg=3
DECEMBER 19, 2011 4:00 A.M.
The Gingrich Gestalt
(Page 3 of 4)
By Mark Steyn
With his numbers sinking, Mitt was driven to go negative. Asked where his policies differed from Gingrich’s, Romney cut to the chase: “We could start with his idea to have a lunar colony that would mine minerals from the moon.” You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, folks. Both leading conservative candidates have supported government mandates on health care. Both leading conservative candidates have supported massive expansion of entitlements. But they differ on the critical issue of whether we should use large numbers of welfare claimants to mine unpasteurized green cheese from the dark side of the moon. To be fair to Gingrich, he’s generally sounder on economic issues than Romney: Mitt’s reforms would leave us with a corporate-tax rate twice as high as Newt’s, and, in contrast to the Gingrich abolition of taxes on capital gains, Romney is proposing to end them only for those making under $200,000 because it would be wrong to “spend our precious tax dollars for a tax cut.” When “conservatives” think tax cuts are government “spending,” who needs Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank?
I have little fear that a Gingrich administration will be spending money on lunar mining or giant space mirrors or genetically modifying plant life around the planet to suck all the carbon out. But I rather doubt we’ll get the 12.5 percent corporate-tax rate and the abolition of the tax on capital gains, either. Newt is said to be “unpredictable.” This is true in the narrow sense that one would not have predicted that a social faux pas in placement on state transportation to the Yitzhak Rabin funeral would lead him to shut down the federal government. But, aside from such offenses to his amour-propre, Newt is actually extremely predictable. The surest way to bet is that the big-government stuff will happen and the rest won’t. It was Newt who gave us S-CHIP, the biggest expansion of Medicaid since the program was created. On the other hand, when it came to holding the line on “tax credits” for people who don’t pay any taxes, Gingrich looked into Clinton’s eyes and melted. Newt defends his big-government inclinations by placing them in an historical context of a muscular activist Washington, citing, for example, the Homestead Act of 1862. As it happens, I would be in favor of a new Homestead Act. Government owns far too much land, greater than the sovereign territory of many other major nations, and that fact alone supports the self-indulgent delusion that America can chug along as the Sierra Club writ large, a giant wildlife preserve that no longer needs to be in any business so vulgar as energy extraction, all of which can be outsourced (if you’re Obama) to Latin America or (if you’re Gingrich) to the moon. A small-government conservative might conclude that America would benefit from the equivalent of Mrs. Thatcher’s decision in 1979 to sell off public housing to its tenants: It’s not an especially big thing, but it’s a way of communicating your understanding of the relationship between the citizen and the state. In that sense, few of Gingrich’s proposals bear comparison with the Homestead Act: Instead of enabling Americans to take risks and push the frontiers, they incline mostly to the expansion of bureaucracy and an increase in dependency. As a result of Gingrich’s “reforms,” four out of ten American children are on Medicaid.
Presumably this is what he meant when he told Newsweek that his Gestalt is “in many ways conservative, in many ways very moderate.” I’d prefer to formulate it this way: Gingrich is a pushover for progressivism who’s succeeded in passing himself off as a hard-line right-wing bastard. Which is why Democrats who make the mistake of believing their own talking points on Newt invariably have to improvise hastily. In 2007 John Kerry found himself booked for a debate with Gingrich on climate change and had his speechwriters prepare some boilerplate about Newt’s “marching in lockstep with the climate-change deniers.” Unfortunately for him, the former Speaker spoke first and announced that man-made global warming was a real threat that we needed to address “very actively.” He praised as “a very interesting read” Kerry’s unreadable book on the subject, and for good measure added that he was “very worried about polar bears” because “my name ‘Newt’ actually comes from the Danish ‘Knut,’ and there’s been a major crisis in Germany over a polar bear named ‘Knut.’” Kerry abandoned his prescripted attack on Gingrich, hailed his candor, and put his arm around him.
Mike| 1.21.12 @ 10:42AM
Election year conservatism. There may be no better description of Ronald Reagan than this.
One of the most enduring phenomena in American is how resistant the right is to speaking the truth about Reagan and how resistant the left is to speaking the truth about Kennedy.
Drek| 1.21.12 @ 12:52PM
Few there are that get 100% of everything they seek.
Reagan promised to eradicate the DOE and the Department of Education. Decades later, they are still with us.
Does that mean that Reagan isn't a conservative, does that mean he was only an election cycle conservative, does that mean his speeches were frauds, his sentiments sentimental hogwash?
Gingrich accomplished about as much as he could in his tenure as Speaker. The GOP wearied of ratcheting back the growth of the state, and desired instead to be managers and patrons, chairmen and chairwomen.
Gingrich became an impediment to their desire to enjoy comfortably their majority status.
It's no coincidence that once Gingrich was gone, the budget started expanding, and during GW's idiotic tenure, exploded, ------------- all of which set the stage for Obama.
Without GW's idiocy, we would never have been afflicted with the obama creature.
Mike| 1.21.12 @ 1:12PM
Now Drek, you must give proper credit to McCain and Palin. Its the right thing to do.
Anthony M| 1.21.12 @ 4:52PM
Reagan may have been personally conservative, but he didn't actually govern as a conservative. He increased spending without making any off-settting spendung cuts, put our Marines in harms way in Lebanon without arming them properly, signed the Martin King holiday bill honoring a far-leftist who consorted with communists and sided with the Viet-Cong while our boys were fighting and dying in the swamps and put non-conservative O'Connor on the supreme court as an affirmative action appointment. Reagan a conservative? I don't think so.
kingsmill| 1.21.12 @ 4:28PM
Reagan and William Buckley, the latter as early as 1952, admitted that a larger degree of statism than desirable would have be tolerated in order to survive within Cold War realities.
If you had commented on the inanity of the Right's slavish deference to Saint MLK, then you'd be saying something.
Clint| 1.21.12 @ 5:25PM
George Will, "Today, we have a very different kind of foreign policy. It’s called Wilsonian. And the premise of the Bush Doctrine is that America must spread democracy, because our national security depends upon it. And America can spread democracy. It knows how. It can engage in national building. This is conservative or not?"
William F. Buckley, " It’s not at all conservative. It’s anything but conservative. It’s not conservative at all, inasmuch as conservatism doesn’t invite unnecessary challenges. It insists on coming to terms with the world as it is …”
The Tea Party Rebellion Is In South Carolina.
gearjammer| 1.21.12 @ 10:43AM
What is the Ad Council ? And, how does it get to collaborate with federal government to push the lib agenda and Obama ?
martin j smith| 1.21.12 @ 10:43AM
In my mind the question arises is this: How truthful should take all this in ? That is say as others may have suggested this is farce and theatre or actual events. The main factors that cause doubt in my mind are these: A) The MSM having anything to do Republican debates b)The factor of Romney not yet being smeared by the MSM c) The factor of the Candidates not challenging the assumptions of the "mediators questions" from day one--since they put up with that format in the first place--Newt is a large exception. d)Why more of the candidates are not on the pipe in a big way challenging Obama NOW
on stuff like rejecting the pipeline deal,fast and furious,solyndra among many other issues. Why come ?
Mike| 1.21.12 @ 11:12AM
Don't forget that Fox News and Excellence in Broadcasting are part of the MSM. Gingrich even went after Chris Wallace.
In jurisprudence if one can't argue the facts, one argues the law. In politics if one cannot defend a record one attacks the media.
Bob Grant| 1.21.12 @ 12:27PM
Kinda like when George W Bush declined to challenge Dan Rather's libelous 60 Minutes hit piece? ... or how they (the mainstream media) cowardously reported Bushs' DWI incident days before the 2000 election, and too late for him properly respond?
It works both ways pal.
The Fourth Estate (media) should be beneath every thinking man's/woman's contempt. They are lazy, biased, and agenda driven, and couldn't care less about real journalism.
God bless Newt for challenging this joke of an industry.
Mike| 1.21.12 @ 1:15PM
Actually, Bob, the MSM was largely responsible for giving Rather his comeuppance.
Bob Grant| 1.21.12 @ 4:38PM
Uh, AFTER the blogger busted Rather.
Corr: I suppose cowardously is not an actual word so change it to cowardly.
apnep| 1.21.12 @ 10:53AM
Well, he's no Marxist that's for sure!
kf451| 1.21.12 @ 11:40AM
"Santorum may be the unluckiest candidate in this race."
Correction: Up until now, he's been the luckiest candidate in the race. He won Iowa because he had his surge at exactly the right time, before he had a chance to be vetted. That helped him in NH, but once people took a good look at him, he fizzled.
Drek| 1.21.12 @ 12:43PM
Yes and No.
Santorum could have went off on the clear attempt by the Iowa GOP to protect their place of primacy and to help the supposedly obvious nominee Romney.
No one insisted that Santorum wander the campaign trail in some sweater vest that one rarely sees anymore in some senior center!
Nobody forced upon Santorum his smug moralizing. It's one thing to be for family and traditional values; it's quite another to be a tiresome bore about it all, and about it all the time.
Nobody forced Santorum to privilege the issues he has chosen to heretofore in this campaign season.
He's made some blunders all on his own.
Which is why he's probably less than ten days away from announcing it's over for him, and that he's made his peace with Romney. YES, I anticipate him endorsing Romney.
bill| 1.21.12 @ 12:18PM
I have been predicting the SC Primary for months:
Winner: Gingrich
2nd:Romney
3rd:Santorum
4th: Paul
Gingrich won SC, and he gets the GOP nod. SC always picks the GOP nominee since 1980.
Drek| 1.21.12 @ 12:40PM
In not unrelated news:
Quin Hillyer is in a funk, and even now is drafting up some piece regurgitating what we've heard before;
Hugh Hewitt is in a panic, and even now is pondering whether it's too to pen yet another fulsome tome for Romney;
NR is in a panic, and even now wondering how they can follow up on Newt as Marvin the Martian with some other variant of space alien.
And so it goes.
Margaret| 1.21.12 @ 2:56PM
I agree with you and this is what America really hates. The corrupt, phony news media and pundits you have mentioned that are agenda driven entirely, and their methods are about at the same level as the propaganda of communist party of Soviets, Pravda, the anarchists of occupy, the modern democrat party, labor union bosses. etc. The next time they want to know what a real bigots are, they should look in a mirror!
America may not like Gingrich, but they need Gingrich. He has the right ingredients for the job these days. He is not an image, but an innovator. He is not a face, but a force. He knows his history rather than empty hopes. He knows the grit of politics, not blurry-eyed idealism. He knows who to have to work around him, tried and tested men for the cabinet. He knows what judges are needed. He knows about budgets, not just bailouts. He knows how to give fight to the democrats word for word. He also has been humbled lately. He is now a man of the church, not of the Club or the Mosque. We need to elect a president on criteria that is more substantive than wistful feelings of like or dislike.
somnolence| 1.21.12 @ 1:07PM
Since 1980 is only 32 years in time. So what about all the years before that. Gingrich won't have as many DELEGATES as Romney come Convention time, and that is what counts.
Drek| 1.21.12 @ 1:20PM
And where does political momentum and the lack thereof figure into your political calculus?
Bob K.| 1.21.12 @ 1:08PM
Very few people give a damn. From headlines of Drudge Report: 5 million people watch CNN debate. 6.2 Million "Jersey Shore." 18 million "American Idol."
http://www.drudgereport.com/
See headlines.
somnolence| 1.21.12 @ 1:12PM
The latest Reuters Poll shows that Romney has a 12 point lead in S.C.
Drek| 1.21.12 @ 1:24PM
We'll see.
But Romney's own team and media supporters exude a sense that South Carolina has ALREADY slipped away from them.
But we'll see.
If Romney is the frontrunner, if he's obviously going to gain the nomination, if he's clearly the guy, --------------------- why then is it required for so many to drag across the finish line?
Never did a would be political Titan require so much help from Liliputians.
But such is the strange and surreal world of the Romney political cosmos.
Oldefarte| 1.21.12 @ 2:38PM
I don't really give a damn who wins.....AS LONG AS IT'S A REPUBLICAN!!!!!!!!!
bill| 1.21.12 @ 3:14PM
Newt Gingrich is no perfect, but he is the "Shadow" of Reagan. He's about to write an epic comeback of the history of American politics. We won't rest until Obama is defeated and Newt becomes the POTUS.
Sean| 1.21.12 @ 6:31PM
Newt is unelectable in a general election. South Carolina might not care about his liberal policies and unmoral character, but those voting in the general election will.