Hendrik Hertzberg: Close Calls

[babylonsister]

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/01/16/120116taco_talk_hertzberg

Close Calls
by Hendrik Hertzberg
January 16, 2012

snip//

Thanks to millions spent on his behalf, mostly by Restore Our Future, his formally unaffiliated Death Star of a Super PAC, Mitt managed to deflect, in Iowa at least, the nuisance of Newt. The seventy-five bucks on TV ads alone that Romney had to spend per vote, as opposed to Santorum’s ten-spot, was a bargain compared with the two hundred and nineteen dollars that each supporter cost the hapless Rick Perry—to say nothing of the three hundred and thirty-three per vote it cost Romney to lose Iowa to Mike Huckabee four years ago. Romney’s detractors crow that seventy-five per cent of Iowa caucusers didn’t want him, but he could say the same about Santorum, and that seventy-nine per cent didn’t want Ron Paul, eighty-seven per cent didn’t want Gingrich, and so on, all the way down to the ninety-nine per cent—shades of Occupy!—who didn’t want Jon Huntsman.

Romney has been lucky, too, in his array of opponents. The more or less orthodox right-wingers obligingly formed the type of circular firing squad that used to be the specialty of liberal Democrats. Paul, whose batty-grandpa personality and oddball mélange of pacifism, anarcho-libertarian radicalism, and crackpot economics attracts an equally eccentric congeries of Tea Partiers and bong partiers, has done Romney no discernible harm. Huntsman, by making himself a “moderate” bogeyman (He ridicules creationism! He thinks global warming is real! He worked for Obama!), has done Romney the inadvertent favor of protecting his left flank. Gingrich has turned himself into Romney’s wrathful Javert, but his decision to stick it out through South Carolina instead of quitting and endorsing Santorum—assuming his determination survives New Hampshire—is a net plus for Mitt.

All this is kind of fun to watch—or would be, if it weren’t for what it says about the deeply alarming degeneracy of one of our country’s two great political parties, a party that already controls half of Congress, paralyzes the other half, and has a nontrivial chance of inhabiting the White House a year from now. By lineage and temperament, Romney, the likely nominee, is the pragmatic moderate he quite convincingly played on the Massachusetts stage. His problem now, and possibly his (and the nation’s) salvation later, is the suspicion that he changes his opinions to suit the political (and, one would hope, substantive) circumstances. No one, maybe not even Romney, knows if Romney means what he says. But as President, especially if the Republicans complete their takeover of Congress, he would be under irresistible pressure to do what he says. And what does he say? That he would let states recriminalize abortion; that he would seek constitutional amendments outlawing new same-sex marriages and requiring two-thirds congressional majorities for tax increases; that he would sabotage “Obamacare” (never mind that “Romneycare” was its prototype) and seek its repeal, destroying its cost savings and consigning tens of millions to the ranks of the uninsured and untreated; that he would replace unemployment benefits with unemployment “savings accounts”; that he would supercharge income inequality with further huge tax cuts for the wealthy; that he would gut financial regulation; that he would “double Guantánamo,” reauthorize torture, and deport undocumented aliens en masse (including President Obama’s Kenyan uncle); and more.

Santorum is for all that, too, of course. And more: he calls global warming “junk science”; he wants to keep American troops in Afghanistan until they achieve “victory”; he believes that the West Bank is “Israeli land,” as Israeli as Arizona is American; he blames the rape of children by priests on “academic, political, and cultural liberalism in America.” That last item points to what makes Santorum almost certainly unnominatable (and Romney almost certainly inevitable). In his 2005 book “It Takes a Family,” Santorum writes, “Some people ask me, ‘Why are conservatives so obsessed with sex?’ ” His answer—don’t get him started!—seems to be that sex is dangerous unless closely supervised by the state under strict faith-based guidelines. Needless to say, abortion is totally out, even for women and girls impregnated by rape or incest. As for contraception, Santorum said, in October, “It’s not O.K. It’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be”—and state governments should be free to outlaw it, along with “sodomy,” gay and straight. Last Thursday, in New Hampshire, when asked why gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry, he replied, “Well, what about three men? . . . Reason says that if you think it’s O.K. for two, then you have to differentiate with me as to why it’s not O.K. for three.” He got booed; it was a college audience. But Santorum may be a bit too much of a sex cop even for many evangelicals, especially younger ones, and even for some of his fellow ultra-conservative Catholics. Say this for him, though: on these issues, the man is nothing if not dogged. ♦