So here’s a counterintuitive argument: These primaries have damaged the Republican candidates’ images in the short run. But in the long run, they may yet help Romney — if he prevails — because by comparison with Santorum and Newt Gingrich, he seems “moderate,” and his supporters are more “moderate” than the voters backing the other guys. And Romney has been on so many sides of so many issues that pundits can arbitrarily imagine their own Romney.
My friend and colleague Matt Miller wrote recently that “everyone knows Romney is basically a pragmatic centrist.” No, “everyone” does not know this. The evidence from his tax plan, in fact, is that he’s an extremist for the privileged.
We’re witnessing what should be called the Two Cadillacs Fallacy: Romney’s rather authentic moments suggesting he doesn’t understand the lives of average people (such as his comment on his wife’s two Cadillacs) are dismissed as “gaffes,” while Santorum’s views on social issues are denounced as “extreme.” But Romney’s gaffes are more than gaffes: They reflect deeply held and radical views about how wealth and power ought to be distributed in the United States. These should worry us a lot more than Santorum’s dopey “snob” comment or his tasteless denunciation of JFK. …
Romney’s most faithful constituency in primaries [is] Republicans earning more than $200,000 a year. In Michigan, they backed him over Santorum by 2 to 1.
They’re Romney’s base for good reason. That “across-the-board” tax cut sounds fair and balanced. But a Tax Policy Center study in November of the impact of a 20 percent across-the-board rate cut showed that the wealthiest 0.1 percent would get an average tax reduction of $264,000. The poorest 20 percent would get $78, and those smack in the middle would get $791.
Most people can only dream of Wall Street’s shrinking paychecks. Median household income in 2010 was $49,445, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, lower than the previous year and less than 1 percent of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s $7 million restricted-stock bonus for 2011. The percentage of Americans living in poverty climbed to 15.1 percent, the highest in almost two decades. ….
The smaller bonus checks that hit accounts across the financial-services industry this month are making it difficult to maintain the lifestyles that Wall Street workers expect, according to interviews with bankers and their accountants, therapists, advisers and headhunters.
“People who don’t have money don’t understand the stress,” said Alan Dlugash, a partner at accounting firm Marks Paneth & Shron LLP in New York who specializes in financial planning for the wealthy. “Could you imagine what it’s like to say I got three kids in private school, I have to think about pulling them out? How do you do that?”
Thus does social conservatism skid through the last barriers of basic intellect, simple decency and common sense, hurtling breakneck off the deep end. Next stop: utter incoherence. …
But then, social conservatism is where logic fears to tread. It is a worldview driven by fear of the world beyond its racial, gender, religious, cultural and intellectual borders. Historically, it always has been. …
And you have to wonder: How narrow must a man’s worldview be, how paranoid his outlook, what a bunker his very life, when he is scared of Girl Scouts?
Some of us have argued that social conservatives use fear as a tactic. And there’s likely some truth to that. But one senses little of tactical planning in Morris’ missive. No, the fact is, he believes what he says. Many of them do.
If you want to be scared of something, be scared of that.
I’ve been fearing this for some time. Last weekend, Maureen Dowd said there is talk of a Republican savior emerging. When I mention Jeb Bush, my liberal friends think Duhbya destroyed the brand (as he nearly did America), but look at the loons the party has taken all-too-seriously so far. A friend thinks it might be a general, a hero. Leaving less than 2 months to find the skeletons before the election.
ROBERTS: Now, I don’t think most Americans think their kids shouldn’t go to college for ideological reasons. The effect of all of this, David, is that people in the party – the governors who were here in Washington this weekend – are beginning to say maybe we need another candidate; maybe we need a brokered convention – a wide open convention. Now, those things tend not to happen. But there’s a tremendous amount of nervousness, particularly with a new poll out today showing President Obama beating any Republican handily and doing very well with independents.
GREENE: There’s still a chance for a fresh face in the time that we have left, is political commentator Cokie Roberts.