It’s Thursday, January 12th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, the WSJ‘s Paul Gigot describes….

Romney’s New Hampshire Breadth

The presidential hopeful’s victory Tuesday was striking in its reach across major demographic and ideological groups.

 

New Hampshire was Mitt Romney’s home turf, but his victory Tuesday was still striking in its reach across the GOP coalition. According to the exit polls, he won a plurality of the vote or close to it across nearly all major demographic and ideological groups.

The former Massachusetts governor won 49% of Republicans, who constituted half of the electorate. But he also won 29% of self-described independents, losing only to Ron Paul’s 32%. This is in contrast to John McCain in 2008 and in 2000, when the Arizona senator’s New Hampshire wins relied on more independents. That could pose problems for Mr. Romney in the general election when he would need to win independents by a considerable margin. But New Hampshire suggests he is consolidating support among GOP regulars, which will make him difficult to beat for the nomination.

Also notable was Mr. Romney’s appeal to those who strongly or somewhat support the tea party, who represented about half of primary voters. Mr. Romney won 40% compared to 22% for Mr. Paul. Reaching tea party denizens had been one of Mr. Romney’s weaknesses, and there will be more of them in South Carolina than in New England.

One other point: Mr. Romney also did well among late-deciding voters, winning a third of the 46% of all voters who said they made up their minds on Tuesday or in the last few days. This was smaller than his plurality among those who had decided earlier, but it suggests the attacks on his record at Bain Capital had only a small impact.

Mr. Romney’s biggest advantages continue to be a splintered field of conservatives who are dividing the non-Romney vote and the perception that he is the most electable in November. But his New Hampshire strength shows that more primary voters are getting comfortable with his candidacy. South Carolina may be the rest of the field’s last chance to stop him.

Given the rest of the Republican field….we hope not!

Next up, Jonah Goldberg (we should note, writing before the New Hampshire exit polling) discusses what remains Mitt’s major vulnerability:

Romney’s Authenticity Problem

 

Mitt Romney is the most improbable of presidential candidates: a weak juggernaut. He is poised to sweep every primary contest — a first for a non-incumbent. And yet, in Republican ranks there’s an abiding sense that he should be beatable — and beaten.

It’s not that Romney doesn’t have fans. His events in New Hampshire were packed to the rafters and felt like general-election rallies. He’s surging in polls in South Carolina and Florida.

And yet the non-Mitt mood just won’t go away. Indeed, it’s intensifying. One reason for that is people are starting to doubt whether he is in fact the best candidate to beat President Obama. For instance, you hear conservatives wondering more and more whether all of the attention from the White House is a head fake. Romney certainly makes a convenient foil for a presidential campaign already in populist overdrive. The desperate attacks from Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry on his career in the private sector are indefensible, but Romney certainly has a gift for inviting them. You can be sure President Obama is grateful to Gingrich and Perry for making them bipartisan critiques.

Still, I suspect there’s no head fake. Romney has his faults, but his 2 percent milk personality makes him hard to demonize. He seems more like a super-helpful manager at a rental car company than a fire-and-brimstone preacher. The White House would dearly love the opportunity to run against a culture warrior. It seems many in the media would like the same thing. (Which should come as no surprise since they’re using identical playbooks!) Hence the absurd grilling of the candidates in Saturday night’s ABC/Yahoo/WMUR-TV debate.

(For reasons that remain mysterious, the moderators wasted vast swaths of time quizzing the candidates on gay marriage, whether they thought states could ban condoms, and on how Rick Santorum would respond if one of his sons declared his homosexuality. Because, as we all know, how a president would treat his hypothetically gay son is the defining issue of our times.) (For more on this issue, see Brent Bozell’s column below.)

Romney was at his best swatting away the swarm on inanities at the debate — birth control is “working just fine.” He’s weakest, however, when discussing himself. In this he is the anti-Obama. The president is never more eloquent and heartfelt than when he is talking about himself; it’s his ideas he can’t move.

Romney, meanwhile, has the opposite problem. Voters can buy his policies; it’s the salesman that leaves them unsure. For instance, in the Sunday “Meet the Press” debate, Romney suggested that he didn’t run for re-election as governor of Massachusetts because to do so would be vain or selfish somehow. “That would be about me.”

Newt Gingrich ridiculed that as “pious baloney.” And he was right. Romney’s claim that he’s just a businessman called to serve — Cincinnatus laying down his PowerPoint — is nonsense. Romney, the son of a politician, has been running for office, holding office or thinking about running for office for more than two decades. “Just level with the American people,” Gingrich growled. “You’ve been running … at least since the 1990s.”

For some reason Romney can’t do that. Or at least it seems like he can’t. (Just as he won’t, or can’t, admit Romneycare was both an horrific mistake and abject failure.) His authentic inauthenticity problem isn’t going away. And it’s sapping enthusiasm from the rank and file. The turnout in Iowa was disastrously low, barely higher than the turnout in 2008 — and if Ron Paul hadn’t brought thousands of non-Republicans to the caucus sites, it would have been decidedly lower than in 2008. That’s an ominous sign given how much enthusiasm there should be for making Obama a one-term president. It’s almost as if Romney’s banality is infectious.

Santorum’s tie in Iowa is widely attributed to his diligent door-to-door campaigning. The Iowa political hacktocracy is deeply invested in the idea that the retail politicking in Iowa pays off. But it wasn’t paying off three weeks before the voting, when Santorum was in single digits. No, Santorum’s Iowa success was attributable almost entirely to Gingrich’s Newtacular implosion. Santorum was simply the last non-Romney standing who hadn’t been torn apart by the press or Romney’s super-PACs.

The most persuasive case for Romney has always been that if he’s the nominee, the election will be a referendum on Obama. But that calculation always assumed that rank-and-file Republicans will vote for their nominee in huge numbers no matter what. That may well still be the case, but it feels less guaranteed every day.

Every four years, pundits and activists talk about how cool it would be to have a brokered convention. This is the first time I can remember where people say it may be necessary.

Even though Goldberg wrote his column prior to the dissection of the Granite State exit polls, his point remains valid.  Though we cannot in recent memory recall a Republican non-incumbent entering the primaries with a lock on the nomination, neither can we remember a top-tier candidate who engenders anywhere near the angst and anxiety which accompanies Romney.

And though we’ve spoken of late with many Conservatives who’ve recognized, as we have, Romney’s inevitability, Mitt’s inability to close the sale will continue to cause us concern….right up until the time Ron Paul puts any chance of a third-party run to rest.

Meanwhile, as Michelle Malkin observes, Mitt’s choice of campaign chums does nothing to settle our stomach:

Romney and McCain: The GOP Frenemies’ Club

 

Michael Corleone said to “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” But what, pray tell, do we do with our frenemies? This is the awful election-year quandary of movement conservatives. And everything you need to know about our heartache can be summed up in one image: 2008 presidential election loser John McCain and Mitt Romney together on the campaign trail.

When they’re together, they look like they’re holding each other (and the rest of us) hostage. Their toxic chemistry makes seething, ex-newlyweds Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries look like Fred and Ginger. In New Hampshire last week, after Romney’s Iowa caucus squeaker, an overly giddy McCain mocked his endorsee for his “landslide victory.” Awkward.

Then in South Carolina on Friday, McCain mistakenly referred to Romney as “President Obama” — as Romney and South Carolina GOP Gov. Nikki Haley rushed to correct the gaffe. Freudian slip? Senior moment? Sabotage? All of the above?

Of course, if you choose to pal around with a double-talking, big government barnacle, you get what you deserve.

McCain is the entrenched incumbent Arizona senator/war hero who lost to a neophyte, radical leftist community organizer from Chicago. The “straight-talk” GOP candidate flip-flopped on everything from illegal immigration to global warming to offshore drilling to closing Gitmo. He pandered to minority grievance-mongers and the liberal media. He proposed massive government interventions bigger than Obama’s.

This Beltway fossil who now poses as a tea party hero proudly teamed with Big Government liberals Teddy Kennedy and Russ Feingold. He’s the “maverick” who supported the $700 billion TARP bailout, the $25 billion auto bailout, the first $85 billion AIG bailout and a $300 billion mortgage bailout — yet he now carps about “record deficits and debt.”

A career politician for the past 30 years, McCain set the stage for the suicidal anti-capitalist rhetoric now polluting the GOP primary. Four years ago this month, during a GOP primary debate held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, it was McCain up on stage denigrating Romney’s private-sector experience. Asked whether he thought Romney’s record as CEO made him qualified to lead, McCain snarked: “I know how to lead. I led the largest squadron in the United States Navy. And I did it out of patriotism, not for profit.” (Aye, matey!  Like his buddy John Kerry, McCain saw marriage as the surest way to profit….even if it involved leaving his first wife, crippled in an accident while she waited for her husband to return from Hanoi, immediately upon his release for a buxom beer-heiress!)

Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman have all followed suit, bashing Romney’s venture-capitalist past at Bain Capital with Occupy Wall Street-style zeal.

It’s one thing to carefully dissect Romney’s investments, as the Wall Street Journal did, and weigh his wins against his losses. (The paper found that “in total, Bain produced about $2.5 billion in gains for its investors in the 77 deals, on about $1.1 billion invested. Overall, Bain recorded roughly 50 percent to 80 percent annual gains in this period, which experts said was among the best track records for buyout firms in that era.”)

It’s quite another to shamelessly disparage those who work in private equities as immoral corporate raiders and avaricious job-killers, as the three aforementioned GOP Occupiers have done. (Frankly, we view it as unforgivable.) If they keep it up, they’ll soon be chaining themselves together with bike locks, performing “mic checks” and “down twinkles” at the next GOP debate.

Gingrich has pushed McCain’s profit-bashing line the furthest. Backed by a super-PAC (the very campaign finance vehicle he was whining about last week) flush with $5 million from casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the vendetta-driven former House speaker accused Romney and a “handful of rich people” of “looting” companies. Channeling left-wing propagandist Michael Moore, Gingrich railed that Bain “manipulate(d) the lives of thousands of other people.” Gingrich — who raked in millions consulting for the taxpayer-subsidized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac racket — also served on the advisory board of private equities firm and leveraged buyout experts Forstmann Little.

But, hey, it’s only “looting” if it doesn’t line your own pockets.

Romney’s chronic flip-flopping political career is teeming with reasons for grass-roots conservatives to oppose his nomination — from his support for racial preferences and government funding of abortion, liberal judges, global warming enviro-nitwittery, TARP, auto bailouts, the Obama stimulus, gun control and, of course, the Massachusetts individual health insurance mandates that presaged Obamacare. But instead of focusing on his long political record of expedience, incompetent non-Romneys have borrowed from McCain’s 2008 playbook and thrown wealth creators of all kinds who take risks in the private marketplace under the bus.

With frenemies like these, who needs Democrats?

And for the last word on the subject, we turn to the always acerbic, ever-entertaining Ann Coulter, who politely inquires:

Who Wouldn’t Enjoy Firing These People?

 

Earlier this week, Mitt Romney got into trouble for saying, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” To comprehend why the political class reacted as if Romney had just praised Hitler, you must understand that his critics live in a world in which no one can ever be fired — a world known as “the government.”

(And a tip for you Washington types: Just because a person became rich without working for government doesn’t mean he is “Wall Street.” A venture capital firm in Boston that tries to rescue businesses headed for bankruptcy, for example, is not “Wall Street.”)

Romney’s statement about being able to fire people was an arrow directed straight to the heart of Obamacare. (By the way, arrows to the heart are not covered by Obamacare.)

Talking about insurance providers, he said:

“I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy. It also means if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. You know, if someone doesn’t give me a good service that I need, I want to say I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.”

Obamacare, you will recall, will be administered by the same people who run the Department of Motor Vehicles. They will operate under the same self-paced, self-evaluated work rules that have made government offices the envy of efficiency specialists everywhere.

And no one will be able to fire them — unless they’re caught doing something truly vile and criminal, such as stealing from patients in nursing homes. Oops, I take that back: Government employees who rob the elderly also can’t be fired.

The Los Angeles Times recently reported that, after a spate of burglaries at a veterans hospital in California several years ago, authorities set up video cameras to catch the perpetrators. In short order, nurse’s aide Linda Riccitelli was videotaped sneaking into the room of 93-year-old Raymond Germain as he slept, sticking her hand into his dresser drawer and stealing the bait money that had been left there.

Riccitelli was fired and a burglary prosecution initiated. A few years later, the California Personnel Board rescinded her firing and awarded her three-years back pay. The board dismissed the videotape of Riccitelli stealing the money as “circumstantial.” (The criminal prosecution was also dropped after Germain died.)

But surely we’ll be able to fire a government employee who commits a physical assault on a mentally disturbed patient? No, wrong again.

Psychiatric technician Gregory Powell was working at a government center for the mentally retarded when he hit a severely disturbed individual with a shoe so hard that the impression of the shoe’s sole was visible on the victim three hours later. A psychologist who witnessed the attack said the patient was cowering on the couch before being struck.

Powell was fired, but, again, the California Personnel Board ordered him rehired.

Now, let’s turn to New York City and look for any clues about why it might be the highest-taxed city in the nation.

For years, the New York City school budget included $35 million to $65 million a year to place hundreds of teachers in “rubber rooms,” after they had committed such serious offenses that they were barred from classrooms. Teachers accused of raping students sat in rooms doing no work all day, still collecting government paychecks because they couldn’t be fired.

After an uproar over the rubber rooms a few years ago, Michael Bloomberg got rid of the rooms. But the teachers still can’t be fired. Wherever there is government, there is malfeasance and criminality — and government employees who can never be fired.

In 2010, 33 employees of the Securities and Exchange Commission — half making $100,000 to $200,000 per year — were found to have spent most of their workdays downloading Internet pornography over a five-year period. (Thank goodness there were no financial shenanigans going on then, so the SEC guys had plenty of time on their hands.)

One, a senior lawyer at SEC headquarters in Washington, D.C., admitted to spending eight hours a day looking at Internet pornography, sometimes even “working” through his lunch hour. Another admitted watching up to five hours a day of pornography in his office. (Would that Bernie Madoff had posted naked photos of himself online!) Not one of the porn-surfing employees of the SEC was fired.

In 2009, the inspector general of the National Science Foundation was forced to abandon an investigation of grant fraud when he stumbled across dozens of NSF employees, including senior management, surfing pornographic websites on government computers during working hours. A senior official who had spent 331 workdays talking to fully or partially nude women online was allowed to resign (but was not fired). I hope they gave him his computer as a parting gift.

The others kept their jobs — including an NSF employee who had downloaded hundreds of pornographic videos and pictures and even developed pornographic PowerPoint slide shows. (And you thought PowerPoint presentations were always boring.) They weren’t fired or even embarrassed. One appealed his 10-day suspension, complaining that it was too severe. The government refused to release any of their names.

These are the people who are going to be controlling your access to medical services if Obamacare isn’t repealed. There will be only one insurance provider, and you won’t be able to switch, even if the service is lousy (and it will be).

Obamacare employees will spend their days surfing pornography, instead of approving your heart operation. They can steal from you and even physically assault you. And they can never be fired.

That’s one gargantuan difference with “Romneycare” right there: If you don’t like what your insurer is doing in Massachusetts, you can get a new one. Now, wouldn’t you like to be able to fire people who provide services to you?

Here’s the juice: anyone who tells you with a straight face the public sector can do ANYTHING better or more efficiently than private business is either crazy, a civil servant, a current or would-be Dimocratic officeholder….or making untold millions off the runaway growth of government.

And….

Next up, Brent Bozell finally makes a motion we’ve been behind since the Republican debates began:

Unseat These Atrocious Moderators

 

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? (Seriously….does anyone out there know?!?  Please let us in on the secret.)

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? (Is Michael Steele still running the RNC?)

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.

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.

But the Republicans get Stephanopoulos the partisan asking Mitt Romney, “Do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?” By the sixth follow-up question, the audience was booing.

Diane Sawyer pounded Romney with the typical homosexual activist sitting at home. “Would you weigh in on the Yahoo question about what you would say sitting down in your living room to a gay couple who say, ‘We simply want to have the right to,’ — as the person who wrote the email said — ‘we want gay people to form loving, committed, long-term relationships.’ In human terms, what would you say to them?”

Because, as America knows, opposing the homosexual lifestyle is not just insensitive but inhumane.

Many Republicans loved Newt Gingrich when he slammed the ABC moderators for their obvious bias. No one, he pointed out, ever asks about the secular Obama progressives driving the Catholic Church out of the adoption process by demanding they place children with gay couples. “The bigotry question goes both ways. And there’s a lot more anti-Christian bigotry today than there is concerning the other side. And none of it gets covered by the news media.”

Over on NBC, Gregory and his co-conspirators asked 25 questions from the liberal perspective and just three from the right. It was extra-skewed by Gregory including quotes from liberal activists on Facebook. “And this from Martin Montalvo, because we do have a spending crisis but also a lot of people hurting. He writes this: ‘With more Americans on government assistance than ever before, is it un-American for Americans to feel relieved when the government helps them?'”

How perverse is this question? More than 45 million Americans are on food stamps, a record high. Is it “un-American” to question this ever-increasing load of government dependency?

Boston media hack Andy Hiller demanded both Romney and Santorum needed to become “a voice for increasing gay rights.” He even made it personal with Santorum. “What if you had a son who came to you and said he was gay?” The applause line would be “What if you had a son who came to you and admitted he was a Conservative?”

But worst of all, these “moderators” couldn’t utter a single question that was negative about Barack Obama. Not one.

Instead, Hiller pestered Rick Perry to agree with a Washington Post article written by John McCain right after the Tucson shootings, that Obama “is a patriot sincerely intent on using his time in office to advance our country’s cause. I reject accusations that his policies and beliefs make him unworthy to lead America or opposed to its founding ideals.” (Which proves yet again the only way McCain got into Annapolis, let alone graduated, was because of WHO he knew; cuz if brains were dynamite he couldn’t blow his nose.)

These are not moderators. They are Obama partisans. Again: Why is the GOP putting up with this?

Now THAT’S the $64,000 question!

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the “You Don’t Beat ‘Em By Joining ‘Em!” segment, courtesy today of James Taranto and an highly unlikely source:

The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports Jerusalem is considering a boneheaded idea:

The Ministerial Committee for Legislation on Monday voted to support a controversial bill that would make it a crime to call someone a “Nazi” or wear a yellow star as a means of protest. The bill is expected to pass a preliminary vote in the Knesset plenum tomorrow.

The draft bill, which was introduced a week after symbols of the Holocaust were used in demonstrations by ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem’s Mea She’arim neighborhood, calls for a prison sentence of up to six months and a fine of up to NIS 100,000 [about $26,000] for offenders.

The bill prohibits the use of all forms of the word “Nazi” or similar-sounding words; epithets associated with Nazism, the Third Reich or any of its leaders; the wearing of striped clothing resembling that worn by prisoners in World War II-era concentration camps and yellow stars like the ones Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust or other similar symbols.

Do you know who else criminalized speech? Hitler.

Know who else would love to?

In a New York minute!

Magoo