Tag: Mitt Romney

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Tiger in the Bathroom

As we enter what portends to be the week in which we will see the final death spasms of Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the American presidential election, an early candidate has emerged for Time magazine’s 2021 Person of the Year. That would be an unassuming political functionary named Bradford Jay Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state.

Raffensperger, a lifelong Republican, was the recipient of a phone call on Saturday from our clearly demented president, who spent the better part of an hour spewing rumors, conspiracy theories, and blatant lies, all the while haranguing, threatening, and begging the secretary of state to just, you know, change the state’s election results. What’s the harm?

“C’mon, fellas,” the president finally whined, “I just need 11,780 votes.” It was a line straight out of Goodfellas, the closing argument of a mob boss. Just cheat a little for me, or it might not go well for you.

It turned out that Raffensperger, a Trump voter and supporter, had a spine. He was the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, the last line of defense against a would-be autocrat determined to overturn a free and fair election based on no evidence whatsoever, only a desperate, overweening desire to stay in power.

At long last, and not a moment too soon, Donald J. Trump encountered a Republican with enough integrity, with enough sand in his craw, to simply say no to the president’s ludicrous kabuki horror show. “Your data is wrong,” Raffensperger said. By which he meant, your “data” comes from fools on Parler and OANN. You are the emperor but you have no clothes.

After the phone call, Trump was unhappy, so he went on Twitter and blasted Raffensperger, accusing him of not answering questions, of being untruthful. And once again, Trump was rebuffed by a single man with the stones to call his bluff. Turns out that the secretary of state had receipts: A tape of the entire phone call was released to the media so Americans could judge for themselves who was telling the truth, and who was not.

Trump supporters immediately got the vapors, gasping at the audacity of Raffensperger releasing a tape to prove he wasn’t a liar. A gentlemen, the Trumpers huffed, simply doesn’t do such things. It was a bit like complaining that Captain Sullenberger forgot to put on his turn signal before landing a crippled passenger jet in the middle of the Hudson River.

So what’s left of the Republican party after Duh Furor leaves in two weeks? You’ve got your never-Trumpers (Republicans who never drank the Orange-Aid). Then there are “concerned and troubled” Republicans, including Senators Susan Collins, Ben Sasse, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitt Romney, who aren’t all in for Trump, but who don’t speak against him without checking the wind. Next are the Trump panderers, those making the cynical political calculation to go along with whatever insanity Trump pulls out of his butt just to keep the magical “base” on their side. These are the folks who will stand up in the Senate and in Congress this week and proclaim that the election is “tainted,” while showing no evidence to support any of it. This group includes Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn and fellow Trump-spawn from hell, Senator-elect Bill Hagerty.

So what’s left after that? Nothing but “the base,” the potpourri of anti-abortionists, evangelicals, billionaires, gun-rights nuts, assorted racists and white supremacists, QAnon conspiracists, and millions of pissed-off caucasians who love Donald Trump because he tells them their lives are screwed-up only because other people (Black and brown and Chinese) are screwing them.

When Trump leaves office, how does this disparate bowl of fruits and nuts and cynical creeps ever reassemble itself into a national political party? I don’t think it does. The GOP has let itself become a personality cult. When Trump goes, it will splinter into a pile of pick-up sticks. They have nothing in common but Trump, who in 2024 — if he’s alive and/or not in prison — has no chance of winning the presidency again. It wasn’t even close this time. He lost by seven million votes, and his old white base is dying off.

It’s more likely that the former president will keep doing what he’s done all his life: get media attention by spewing whatever outrageous thoughts float to the top of his withering cortex; find suckers to grift and prop him up; and play golf as much as possible.

After Trump leaves, the Republicans will wake up like the wasted partiers in the morning-after scene of The Hangover, wondering what happened, why there’s a chicken walking around, where that inflatable sex doll came from — and what to do about that tiger in the bathroom.

Bruce VanWyngarden brucev@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Two Parties, One Goal

The Memphis City Council and the Shelby County Commission are 13-member bodies that meet with regularity, both in full session and in committee meetings. The way in which they both have come to operate might constitute a lesson of sorts to other legislative bodies supposedly higher up the chain of government. By that, of course, we mean the Tennessee General Assembly and the Congress of the United States.

The most direct contrast to those more rarefied legislative entities can probably be supplied by the county commission, because it, like the Tennessee legislature and the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, is elected according to the dictates of the two-party system, which pits Democrats against Republicans in electoral contests and thereafter requires the representatives of either party to sit in common assembly.

Increasingly, the commission provides a textbook example of how the two-party system is supposed to work. There are conflicts, sometimes ferocious ones, but these develop more often according to personality than to party lines. Differences that arise from the ideological divide of the two parties occur, of course, but they are usually resolved by the simple arithmetic of a vote-count (abetted in no few cases by some artful vote-trading).

Mitt Romney, father of Obamacare

After a stutter or two a few years back, the commission has resumed its “gentlemen’s agreement” tradition of rotating its chairmanship back and forth by party. This year’s chair, elected on Monday, is a Republican, Heidi Shafer, who succeeded Democrat Melvin Burgess.

During this past year, the members of the commission concurred across party lines on matters ranging from minority contracting to taxing philosophy to the essentials of a long-term “strategic agenda.” It is hard to make direct comparisons to the General Assembly, where the ratio of majority Republicans to minority Democrats is wildly disproportional, but the two houses of Congress are balanced enough between the two parties to allow for instructive contrasts. Rather infamously, the two-party system there is totally dysfunctional, and “gridlock” is too kind a name for it.

The nation has just witnessed the spectacle of one party in the Senate trying to abolish the nation’s prevailing health-care insurance system — and recklessly, without a real alternative. The scheme failed only because three members of the majority party were conscientious enough to scuttle it, calling instead for bipartisan action and consultative reform efforts.

What made the shabby repeal effort doubly ironic was that the Affordable Care Act, so tenuously rescued from Republicans acting in near-total lockstep, had been inspired by a Republican think tank and a Republican governor, Massachusett’s Mitt Romney, in the first place. The congressional GOP’s fanatic resistance to the act had been based on nothing more, ultimately, than a nakedly partisan pledge made eight years ago to oppose anything and everything offered by Democratic President, Barack Obama.

Now that Obama is out of office, that sordid motive is obsolete. Going forward, two parties, like two heads, can be better than one. But only if they genuinely take heed of each other.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Perception Trumps Reality

In the run-up to the recent deadline for enrolling in Obamacare, I called one of the few people with a hand in designing both the Affordable Care Act and the Massachusetts health-care reform plan signed into law in 2006 by then-Governor Mitt Romney.

Obviously, Jonathan Gruber, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is personally invested in the success of health-care reform. So I expected him to give me an optimistic assessment of the future of the federal law.

Juan Williams

He did not.

Instead, his voice sounded low-key and uncertain. He said it is “too early to tell” the fate of Obamacare.

His cautious judgment is that a final verdict on its success or failure might be three years away. To hear such fretting from an architect of the health-care plan opened the door to the fact that even its biggest supporters see trouble ahead.

Gruber agrees with Republican critics who complain that the administration lacks information about how many of the more than 8 million people now signed up previously lacked health insurance; how many are healthy and young; how many have paid for their coverage; and how much premiums will go up next year.

So, is Gruber resigned to the plan ending up in history’s dumpster?

“No,” he said, before emphasizing that the basic plan is working fine, despite the initial website problems. The danger to Obamacare, he says, has nothing to do with the final sign-up numbers. The plan has enrolled enough people, including enough young people, to be sustainable, he said.

The problem is that the law is still vulnerable to being crushed by the negative political narrative being created in Washington.

“The risk is that people who oppose the law will find enough troubling anecdotes in aggregate, that they scare the public and a majority of Congress and the White House into making bad political decisions that are detrimental to the law,” he said.

In terms of the actual policy, Gruber said, there is not anything to worry about. But a threat to reform exists, he added.

The potential fatal threat he sees comes from the 50-plus votes taken by the House of Representatives to repeal the law, and the endless barrage of negative advertising by Republicans and their big-money backers.

“Those [House] votes, those advertisements are psychological attacks,” he said. “They create an air of uncertainty. If people think it is not working, then they are less likely to support the law.”

Without the political attacks, Gruber said, the Affordable Care Act will work.

“No doubt in my mind that if people left it alone for three years and let it run, it would be highly successful,” he contends, “but that is not the world we live in.”

Gruber recalls Romney and a representative of the conservative Heritage Foundation standing onstage with a Democrat, then-Senator Ted Kennedy, to sign the state law that is the model for the national version. The state law is popular and successful.

The reason congressional Republicans have no alternative to the federal Affordable Care Act, Gruber said, is that the individual mandate and exchanges at the heart of the current reform are originally “conservative, Republican ideas.”

The GOP devised the Massachusetts plan, Gruber said, out of opposition to Hillary Clinton’s proposal, during her time as first lady, of an employer-mandate to offer health insurance. The GOP also opposed a labor unions’ proposal for a single payer system, much like Medicare, that pushed private insurance companies out of the equation.

As evidence of the current policy’s success, Gruber points to millions of people now being able to buy health insurance; people not risking bankruptcy because of an accident or illness; and millions more people signing up for Medicaid.

He notes the popularity of letting young people stay on their parents’ insurance plan until they are 26 and not allowing insurance companies to turn away people with pre-existing conditions. The economist also stresses that the United States has been slowing its annual increase in health-care spending since the plan was signed into law.

“The key question at the moment is whether people who support the law can make enough stories out of the winners to create a positive [psychological] effect and give it time to succeed.” Juan Williams is a Fox News political analyst and former senior national correspondent for National Public Radio.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said…

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

About Bryce Ashby and Michael LaRosa’s Viewpoint on requiring state legislators to take remedial civics classes …

I entirely agree with the Bryce Ashby and Michael LaRosa that our state legislators should be required to pass a civics test in order to hold office. That would certainly reduce the laughing-stock potential of Tennessee nationally.

But why stop there? Equally important to the functioning of our representative republic is an informed electorate. Let’s require a simple civics test at the polls on each election day. (My parents had to do this back in the 1950s, along with a $1 poll tax. Both measures have since been declared unconstitutional.)

But just think about it: If voters even had to come up with one correct answer regarding the fundamentals of our government, there would never be a Democrat elected in Tennessee again!

Bill Busler

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s column on Obamacare …

The Affordable Care Act was drafted in a Senate committee chaired by Max Baucus of Montana. Years ago, I considered moving to Montana, so I took the Billings Gazette for a long time. I followed the career of Baucus from the state legislature to Congress to the Senate. He was a Democrat in a Republican-leaning state.

His Senate committee quickly discarded the single-payer system, like Medicare, when it met resistance. They switched to a plan that originated in a conservative think tank and was the basis of the Massachusetts health-care plan. Baucus took nearly 200 suggestions from Republicans to be bipartisan. It got no Republican votes, and Republicans have zealously tried to impede and repeal it, yet they have no replacement plan for the 7.5 million now signed up.

Why is Governor Haslam afraid of Tenncare being defunded after expansion? If he’s really concerned about the state’s finances, he wouldn’t have let more than $100 million in money already taxed and collected go to other states. No one has seen the alternative to Tenncare that the governor is supposedly proposing to Health and Human Services. There is a kicker in a provision in the law called the “shared responsibility tax” on employees that could run as high as $72 million. What will they do if the the governor and the legislature don’t act?

Greg Cravens

Raymond Skinner

About Jackson Baker’s post, “Whalum Slams Joe Brown’s Pretensions to Party Leadership” …

TRUTH !!!!!! “How in the world, how on God’s green earth, can a person be literally gone from Memphis and Shelby County for 20 years and come back and claim to be the Democratic boss?”

Tom Guleff

About Bianca Phillips’ post, “House Resolution Seeks to Defend Tennessee Marriage Amendment” …

Soon Joe Carr and his sorry ilk will be in the trash heap of history along with the segregationists of yesteryear. Meanwhile, they will waste our tax money passing useless resolutions and defending discriminatory laws that will soon be void. Marriage equality is winning!

Chris in Midtown

About a post titled “What’s Wrong With Zach Randolph’s Defense?” …

He’s slow and can’t jump. I’m prone to brevity.

38103

About a Toby Sells News Blog item, “Halbert: State is to Blame for Untested Rape Kits in Memphis” …

We can thank the Tennessee Republicans for not funding the testing of rape kits. And they call themselves “Christians” … only if Charles Manson is the Pope. Let us not forget it was these same Republicans who tried to pass a bill that would have redefined rape to make it legal. Vote Republican and you vote to support rape of women and children.

Sam Cardinal

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Republicans Adrift

On November 11th, a mere five days after the presidential election, the cruise ship Nieuw Amsterdam pushed off from Fort Lauderdale for a Caribbean jaunt. Aboard were nearly 600 emotionally tattered Republicans, most of whom had been expecting a Republican victory of Rovian proportions — surely they had all read Karl’s prediction in The Wall Street Journal — and now were about to cruise 750 miles to nowhere, just like the party they so adored. The Nieuw Amsterdam was 86,000 tons of painful metaphor.

The cruise was sponsored by National Review, for years the most important and probably the most readable journal in all of American conservatism. As with other such magazine jaunts, a group of columnists and other well-known movement types get piped aboard so that along with the flambéed everything comes a dessert of political instruction, faux insider stuff, and the usual warnings that civilization (as we know it) is coming to an end.

The difference between this cruise and others like it was the (paying) presence of Joe Hagan, a writer for New York magazine. To his considerable credit, Hagan abstained from shooting these particular fish in their barrel and instead portrayed them as dismayed and somewhat disoriented refugees from an America that used to be. Not only had they been unprepared for Mitt Romney’s loss, but it was dawning on them that their tribe — mostly affluent, elder whites — had lost the election as well as the demographic battle that had preceded it.

“Minorities came out like crazy,” Kevin Hassett, a former Romney adviser, told them. “White people didn’t get to the polls. There are far more African-Americans voting than they expected.” Imagine!

Who “they” might be is not exactly clear. But what is clear is that to the cruising Republicans there is something weirdly topsy-turvy about minorities gaining the political clout they once held in perpetual trust. Suddenly, the GOP must entice them to vote Republican. Scott Rasmussen, the GOP pollster who thought better of Romney’s chances than did the voters, put it this way: “You show them that you really care; you talk to them as grown-ups on a range of issues.”

A menacing sense of foreboding permeates Hagan’s article. The passengers both fear and hate Barack Obama. To them, he is the nightmare president — allegedly alien in outlook, morality, and economic approach. An economic cataclysm is imminent, and the nation has wandered into an icky swamp of immorality. “I’m afraid,” a passenger told Hagan. “Write that. We’re scared to death.”

I chortle not. I was once a National Review subscriber, although never a conservative. In its infancy and for years afterward, the magazine was bursting with ideas. The writing was often fresh and engaging — Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, and Garry Wills were contributors — and liberalism, to which I also subscribed, was already showing signs of intellectual exhaustion.

Now, though, it is conservatism that is both intellectually exhausted and nearly indefensible. It is the movement of the ideologically ossified, of gun zealots and homophobes, of the immigrant-phobic and the adamantly selfish. It insists that government must be small (an impossibility), education must be local (a stupidity), and that debt, no matter what the reason, is immoral and reckless. The movement has lost its reliable monster. Godless communists have been replaced by the church ladies of Planned Parenthood. History giggles.

Nothing good happens when Republicans leave land. In 2008, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker wrote about the voyage of the M.S. Oosterdam, which chugged up the Alaska coast carrying a tour group from The Weekly Standard. At Juneau, conservative notables, including Fox News commentator Fred Barnes, lunched with the governor, Sarah Palin — and, as men often do on shore leave, swooned. Her remarkable qualities — “how smart Palin was,” according to Barnes — and her considerable beauty left most of them a bit addled. A buzz went up. The zeitgeist was alerted. In due course, she was John McCain’s running mate. Only the voters saved us from a debacle.

The National Review cruise encountered no such star of tomorrow. Instead, the emphasis was on yesterday. These passengers were people who had a sense of possession about America. It was once theirs. It once looked like them and acted like them and thought like them. No more. In more ways than one, they were out to sea.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

A Dishonored Anniversary

On November 6, 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). No president since then has been able to develop, shepherd through Congress, and sign a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform package.

The Great Communicator from California knew something that Republicans — who continually channel his ethos and champion his legacy — are learning right now: Immigrants matter, Hispanics count, and mean-spirited, petty policies aimed at hurting Hispanics are paid back in kind at the polls.

Six years after Reagan left the White House, the Republican governor of his state, the hapless and forgettable Pete Wilson, pushed through Proposition 187, the so-called Save Our State Initiative. The law was designed to make life so miserable for the undocumented that they would (wait for it) … deport themselves.

Proposition 187 required school teachers to remove undocumented children from their classrooms (they refused) and mandated that treatment of the undocumented in the state’s emergency rooms should be denied by physicians, who also ignored this draconian law. By 1999, Prop. 187 was declared unconstitutional by the California Supreme Court; yet that ballot initiative forever changed politics in California, turning a once reliably red mega-state bright blue.

Over the past few years, with no understanding of Reagan’s message or his prudent, hate-free approach to immigration questions (IRCA provided permanent legal residence status to 2.7 million undocumented agricultural workers and targeted the corporations that knowingly hired the undocumented, abused their labor, and made excessive profits via a broken immigration system), state legislators in Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina have completely ignored the lessons from the 1994 California morass.

They have pushed through angry legislation (much of it unconstitutional) that questions children’s residency for purposes of school registration, targets those who, willfully or not, help the undocumented in any way, and makes an undocumented person’s mere “presence” in certain states an actual crime scene.

People in 2012 no longer communicate by rotary telephones. News of these abusive laws spread quickly via cell phones and Twitter; translated onto Spanish language television and radio, they became election issues in Ohio, Florida, Colorado, Nevada, and Virginia.

No surprise that the presidential candidate forced to defend the rash of recent and really stupid legislation out of Arizona and other places, the man who jumped on the bandwagon by actually coining the term “self-deport,” lost the presidential race on November 6th.

That anyone should be surprised that Romney lost, or received a mere 25 percent of the national Hispanic vote, is the real surprise. Those of us tuned into demographic trends or who fought through California’s brutal 1994 crash course on how not to treat human beings — immigrants, non-immigrants, documented, or undocumented — predicted the outcome of this election long ago.

Now, it’s time for President Obama, with the support of the U.S. Congress in a bipartisan, rational fashion, to craft and pass comprehensive immigration reform. It’s time for all of us to tune out the xenophobic obstructionists — the people who have had the upper hand in this debate for too long and who essentially see the undocumented as a lesser form of humanity — and enact pragmatic legislation that can be signed by thinking problem-solvers on both sides of the aisle.

Through a series of fines, penalties, and other means to demonstrate culpability within a revamped immigration system, folks who are here and integrated into our communities, who are working, going to school, and supporting families can be offered a pathway to citizenship — which is what millions of the undocumented want and what polls show a majority of Americans support.

Republicans went over the immigration cliff on Election Day, at a time when they could have been celebrating a presidential victory. Romney failed to connect with wide segments of the electorate and missed an opportunity to draw on the example of Ronald Reagan and to follow the historical direction he set — at a time, moreover, when he desperately needed both, on the 26th anniversary of the Great Communicator’s signature, bipartisan immigration reform act.

Bryce Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney and board member at Latino Memphis, Inc. Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

It would be very easy to gloat. It would be a no-brainer to point out that Karl Rove finally got what has been coming to him his entire political career when he miscalculated everything but the time of day and wasted all those millions of dollars he raised to get Mitt Romney elected.

It would be easy to make fun of the extreme reactions to Romney’s loss of the presidential election from those who threw themselves onto the ground screaming and crying and declaring that the United States of America is now dead. It would be easy to attack the 22-year-old California woman who made headlines, got the attention of the Secret Service, and got fired from her job for posting on her Facebook page, “Another 4 years of this [N-word]. Maybe he will get assassinated this term,” and told a Fox News crew, “I didn’t think it would be that big of a deal. The assassination part is kind of harsh. I’m not saying like I would go do that or anything like that, by any means, but if it was to happen, I don’t think I’d care one bit.”

It would be easy to shoot all these writhing fish in their backward barrels. Instead, I’m going to focus on these words from President Barack Obama’s victory speech:

“America, I believe we can build on the progress we’ve made and continue to fight for new jobs and new opportunity and new security for the middle class. I believe we can keep the promise of our founders, the idea that if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you’re willing to try.”

I know I am walking on clouds right now, but those are three of the most important sentences I have heard a president speak in my lifetime. And it shows that America, by re-electing Obama, has hopefully tipped the scales in moving forward to make the United States what it set out to be from day one: a country where everyone is treated as equal, something that for more than 200 years has been anything but the case.

I just hope that those Republican politicians in power who blatantly and unapologetically refused to work with him on anything and held America hostage for four years by freezing any hopes of getting the economy up and going (which he did despite their hatred of him) will finally realize that those days have to be over, because the majority of the American people are just a little bit smarter than they gave them credit for and can no longer be treated like brainwashed lemmings while corporate America and the far right wing stand guard over social progress. It looks like maybe, just maybe, some of them are beginning to realize that the old blue mare ain’t what she used to be. At least I hope so.

To Mitt Romney, I would say, Okay, Mitt, for six years you’ve been a broken record, constantly talking about how you can create millions and millions of jobs. So now is the time to put your gargantuan stash of money where your mouth is. You can’t do it as president, but if you really can do it and weren’t just blowing smoke up everyone’s ass all this time, sit down with President Obama and go about making it happen. Establish something akin to the Clinton Global Initiative and focus on creating jobs in the United States. Work with him as a private citizen and save some face. Make it your life’s calling and stop worrying about what people do in the bedroom and what women do with their own bodies. It’s time to man up and — selflessly — do what you’ve been promising.

To President Obama: Embrace Romney in this respect. Give him a chance. I know you are still going to face a lot of stubborn Tea Party resistance no matter what you do or say, and that may never change, because so many of them are incapable of coming up with a thought that resembles compromise, but give it a whirl. See what happens. And then use your executive privilege to make sure that those three important sentences in your victory speech come to fruition.

Karl Rove, don’t go away mad; just go away. You are through. Retire and collect guns or something. No one needs you anymore. Not only did the majority of the people elect Barack Obama in 2008, but they also “re-elected” him against great odds last Tuesday. Take a hint. It’s a new, welcome, hopeful, inclusive, fairer, mind-bogglingly happy day for anyone with a heart, a soul, and an open mind.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

While Giving Them Heck in Iowa, Romney Gives Memphis a Nod.

CREDIT: jb

Numerous observers of the current presidential campaign have noticed what might
politely be called a political evolution on the part of former Massachusetts
governor Mitt Romney. Known as something of a moderate when he served as that New England state’s chief executive – among other things, he promoted a
universal health-care plan and acquiesced in civil-union status for gay couples
-Romney now runs as a bedrock conservative.

On the eve of the first actual vote in Iowa, whose crucial
caucuses are being held on Thursday evening, Romney has adopted – shades of
Richard Nixon — what might even be called a “Southern strategy.” Undoubtedly
mindful of a serious recent challenge from former Arkansas governor Mike
Huckabee to his once unchallenged lead in this Midwestern state, Romney has been
unloading down-home rhetoric on his audiences with both barrels.

Take this Wednesday night appeal, made to a sizeable crowd
at the Hy-Vee corporate conference center in West Des Moines: “The first time it
mattered where I came from in this political season was in Memphis, Tennessee.
And someone, thankfully, had made up T-shirts for me and for my supporters
there. And they say: ‘Yankee Governor’ – that’s not a good start in Memphis —
and down below it said “Southern Values.’

“And as I asked people what they meant by Southern values,
you know what they mean by Southern values. Again: Love of family , love of God
and love of country, and love of hard work, love of opportunity. And so I said,
yeah, I got Southern values. And then you come out here. Those are heartland
values. That’s what you call them here.”

Although Romney focused somewhat on his managerial
background – he touted his organization of the Utah winter Olympics in 2002 and
had gold-medal skater Dan Jansen on hand for the occasion – he weighed in most
heavily with some serious patriotic fustian.

Disdaining Democrat John Edwards’ refrain of “two
Americas,” Romney scoffed, “We are one America. We are a nation united that
stand behind our fighting men.” And, perhaps looking beyond Iowa to his next
major challenge next week in New Hampshire, where a resurgent John McCain, a
supporter of the war effort in Iraq, is his major worry, Romney laid it on this
way: “We also love our president, who has kept us safe these last six years.”

One of the attendees at the Romney event was longtime
political consultant Mike Murphy, a former McCain aide who also worked in the
unsuccessful 1996 presidential campaign of Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander. “I’m
just a tourist here this time,” said Murphy, citing multiple allegiances to
various candidates in the field. But he pointedly noted McCain’s recent revival
as a serious presidential prospect, saying that the Arizona senator and Vietnam
war hero might even finish third in Iowa, a state he had once written off.

Former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson had a ghost of a
chance, but only if he and not McCain finished third behind Huckabee and Romney.
“Or maybe if he finishes a strong fourth — only, say, 500 votes behind.” But
Murphy acknowledged, “Fred doesn’t seem to have been that strong a candidate.”

Musing further, he noted that the recent skein of
Tennesseans with presidential hopes – “all potentially strong candidates” – that
included on the Republican side former senator Howard Baker, Alexander, and now
Thompson seemed all to have misfired because of “bad timing.”

Thompson was working the state hard on the eve of the vote,
though, conducting a series of Meet and Greet events. He had to compete for
audience attention not only with such heavyweight Republicans as Romney, McCain,
and Huckabee, but with the Big Three Democrats – Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and
Barack Obama, who had well-attended overlapping events in the Des Moines area
Wednesday night

Most of the field – Republicans and Democrats – will be at
it again on Thursday, making their final appeals across the state. The weather
appears to be cooperating. Although forecasts indicate continued cold
temperatures, they also call for sunny skies.

(Flyer political editor Jackson Baker will be
reporting regularly from Iowa and New Hampshire for the next few days.)

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

GOP Candidates Slam Huckabee on Sunday Talk Shows

The Washington Post does a weekly roundup of the Sunday morning political talkshows. This week, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee was getting hit from all sides. Tennessee’s Fred Thompson fired a salvo, and so did Mitt Romney.

From the Post: Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, surging in the polls for the GOP presidential nomination, faced criticism by two rivals yesterday.

Fred D. Thompson, a former senator from Tennessee, said, “Liberal is the only word that comes to mind, when he was governor.”

On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Thompson criticized Huckabee for his positions on illegal immigration, tax policy and Cuba, and for his belief that the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should be shut down.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney criticized Huckabee for a recent Foreign Affairs article in which he called the Bush administration’s foreign policy “arrogant.”

“Mike Huckabee owes the president an apology,” Romney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“I think he needs to read the article. It would really help if he would do that. Because if he did, he would see that there’s no apology necessary to the president,” Huckabee responded on CNN’s “Late Edition.”

For more, see the Post‘s website.