News Of The Day

Is Andrew Breitbart really dead? After the ACORN and Shirley Sherrod stories turned out to be shams, I tend not to trust news involving that guy.

House Of Lords Watch

Olympia Snowe's decision not to run for re-election may be a bigger story than anything remaining in the GOP presidential primary (well, assuming that Romney wins). Democrats are pretty well-positioned, having two Congresscritters contending for the nomination -- Chellie Pingree and Mike Michaud, as well as former Governor John Baldacci. I don't know anything beyond what I've seen on their Wikipedia pages, but Pingree seems to be more progressive than Michaud. Susan Collins is up for re-election in 2014, and if Snowe's decision is any kind of suggestion that she'll do the same thing, it's something for Democrats to celebrate.

Bob Kerrey's decision to run for his old Nebraska Senate seat is also good news, but I'd still expect the Republicans to carry that one. I'm pleased to see Mazie Hirono up big over Ed Case in a recent poll, though it's a Hirono campaign poll and earlier polling hasn't been so strong. I'm less happy to see Tommy Thompson leading Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin -- Baldwin is one of the most left-wing people in Congress and I'd love to see her win.

Some (Last?) Thoughts About Santorum

I found a lot to like in Andrew Sullivan's denunciation of Rick Santorum's theological conservatism. There were two things I thought were worth critically discussing. The first was his characterization of Santorum's faith:

he is not a man of questioning, sincere faith and should not be flattered as such. He is a man of the kind of fear that leads to fundamentalist faith, a faith without doubt and in complete subservience to external authority.

I like that "questioning, sincere faith" fits together as a phrase to Andrew -- I like people for whom this makes sense more than those for whom it doesn't. But I fear the latter are much more common than the former.

On a more tactical note, I wondered if anything like this actually works:

For now we can see in plain view the religious fanaticism that has destroyed one of the major parties in this country, a destruction that is perilous for any workable politics. It must be defeated - and not by electing a plastic liar and panderer like Romney. But by nominating Santorum and defeating him by such a margin that this theo-political Frankenstein, which threatens both genuine faith and civil politics, is dispatched once and for all.

Is this actually a dynamic that has any chance of working? If the Republican Party loses with Santorum, will the forces he represents really be dispatched? Or will Republicans dig themselves deeper into a hole of fanaticism and paranoia, inventing strange new theories that blame traitorous party moderates for the loss and continuing to nominate extremists? I'd expect Fox and Limbaugh to lead them the latter way.

Anyway, it doesn't really matter that much with Romney coasting towards the nomination, but I thought it was worth talking about. (Edit: maybe this sentence should sound less certain about Romney's chances -- I weary of predictions.)

Liking Jobs Makes You Forget That You Don't Like Contraception

John Sides presents the chart at right to help us evaluate whether the contraception decision hurt Obama among Catholics. Jan. 28-29 apparently was when dioceses were told to talk about Obama's decision during worship services (and Jan. 29 was a Sunday). He notes that a good jobs report came out Feb. 3, but discounts this explanation of why Obama's numbers among Catholics moved back up, saying "There is no apparent reason why Catholics would react to the jobs report differently than others."

It seemed to me that the jobs report provides a perfectly good explanation. Instead of continuing to be unhappy about the contraception thing like the Church hierarchy wants you to, a good jobs report gives you something else to think about. The impact of events fades with time, and especially with the occurrence of new events.

Rick Santorum? Really? Rick Santorum?

I admit to being mostly baffled by the current state of play in the Republican Primary. Rick Santorum is currently ahead by a wide margin in Michigan, which is a semi-home state for Mitt Romney (Mitt's father, George Romney, was the state's popular in the '60s).  My basic view of the race has been that it would eventually come down to Romney and the Conservative Southern Alternative. But the various candidates for spokesman of the CSA fell one by one. Sonny Perdue (GA) never even gave it a shot, since he'd probably end up looking like a dumber version of Rick Perry; Bob Riley AL tried to raise taxes during the Bush Era; Mark Sanford (SC) saw his campaign end on the Appalachian Trail; Bobby Jindal (LA) was a dud at SOTU response and decided to sit this one out; Charlie Crist (FL) decided to save his soul and became a Democratic-leaning Independent; Haley Barbour (MS) turned out to be a little to racist for anyone to believe he could get elected; Rick Perry (TX) ... yeah ... and Kentucky, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee were governed by Democrats until at least 2009. That leaves a collection of Senators, a large number of whom are sort of too old to be President, and for the rest of them, the marginal utility of running for President is much lower once you've earned a lot of seniority. So Newt became the last Conservative Southern Alternative standing, only to be done in by his post-Congressional career and general doucheitude.

But instead of a Conservative Southern Alternative, Rick Santorum has emerged as the Conservative Non-Yankee Alternative. This role was originally supposed to go to Tim Pawlenty, but he failed to inspire anyone last summer. And so Rick Santorum became the last man standing in that contest, and appears to have outlasted Gingrich. I don't think he would have survived against a more viable CSA, like the fantasy world Rick Perry who can speak in complete sentences, but in this field where even the also-rans are pretty weak, simply hanging in there as long as possible, not saying anything that sounds vaguely racist, all while having rock solid social conservative credentials (Santorums only deviations are on labor issues, and those deviations are very, very modest), turns out to be a viable strategy. I wonder what Tim Pawlenty thinks of these developments.

Mitt has two weeks and an unlimited war chest of Super PAC spending to try to change these numbers, and Santorum probably won't have the resources to respond. So there is a good chance that around mid-summer, we'll look back and say "remember when we thought Santorum actually had a chance to win the nomination? That was a good one!" Nonetheless, the fact that he has succeeded despite not having any real markers of White Southern identity politics has forced me to re-think the way I view the Republican electorate.