It’s Friday, November 4th, 2011….and here’s The Gouge!
First up, yet another reason we’ll pull the lever for Mitt Romney only as a last-ditch alternative to four more years of….
….The Dear Leader, courtesy of the WaPo:
As governor, Romney worked to reassure liberals
Mitt Romney was firm and direct with the abortion rights advocates sitting in his office nine years ago, assuring the group that if elected Massachusetts governor, he would protect the state’s abortion laws. Then, as the meeting drew to a close, the businessman offered an intriguing suggestion — that he would rise to national prominence in the Republican Party as a victor in a liberal state and could use his influence to soften the GOP’s hard-line opposition to abortion.
He would be a “good voice in the party” for their cause, and his moderation on the issue would be “widely written about,” he said, according to detailed notes taken by an officer of the group, NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts. “You need someone like me in Washington,” several participants recalled Romney saying that day in September 2002, an apparent reference to his future ambitions.
Romney made similar assurances to activists for gay rights and the environment, according to people familiar with the discussions, both as a candidate for governor and then in the early days of his term.
The encounters with liberal advocates offer some revealing insights into the ever-evolving ideology of Romney, who as a presidential candidate now espouses the hard-line opposition to abortion that he seemed to disparage less than a decade ago. Some details of his interactions with liberal activists were first reported in the Los Angeles Times in 2007, when Romney was introducing himself on the national stage.
This time, Romney, focusing more on his economic expertise than his gubernatorial record, is widely viewed as the GOP’s front-runner. His past positions remain fodder for critics as polls show that he has yet to win over many conservative primary voters — and as rivals in both parties try to brand him a flip-flopper.
Now, as they watch Romney’s ascent from his old stomping grounds in Boston, many of the liberals he encountered wonder whether his transformation has been sincere or a matter of sheer politics. Not only did he espouse more liberal views at the time, but Romney presented himself as a change agent who could soften the GOP’s rough ideological edges.
Next up, the WSJ details why our stomach is once more churning over the possibility of having to vote against our conscience:
The Cain Bonfire
The story about sexual harassment settlements was bound to come out.
Now Herman Cain knows how Icarus felt at the top. We won’t go so far as to push the analogy to conclude that the Cain campaign is crashing into the sea. But make no mistake: Herman Cain’s got a sea of trouble.
It’s clear by now that the voluble former restaurant executive had no expectation that his Presidential candidacy would fly as high as it has. If he did, he’d long ago have had in place the kind of campaign staff able at least to guide a candidate through the inevitable turbulence of modern politics.
The last few days witnessed the spectacle of Mr. Cain’s campaign first blaming the liberal media for reporting years-old claims of sexual harassment, then denying the claims as “baseless,” then acknowledging that he might have known something about the settlements reached by the National Restaurant Association where he was in charge.
The story reached fiasco status on Wednesday when Mr. Cain’s chief of staff, Mark Block, accused the Rick Perry campaign of leaking the early sexual harassment stories. Yesterday Mr. Block half-retracted the accusation. One may reasonably wonder whether Mr. Cain approved this stillborn damage-control strategy.Either answer would be unflattering.
Lesson one of the Cain mess is that running a campaign for the Presidency of the United States is unlike anything else in politics, or anything else in American life for that matter. Mr. Cain’s remarkable success so far, riding to the top of the GOP preference polls, is a testament to his skills at communicating and his willingness to offer bold policy proposals.
Mr. Cain has proven there is a hunger in the public for roiling the political status quo. If he has disappointed his supporters, which remains to be seen, it is because he hasn’t displayed sufficient self-awareness of the requirements of being a top-tier presidential candidate.
Anyone who makes it to the front of the candidate line is going to come under close—make that withering—scrutiny. If in one’s past exist two sexual harassment suits formally settled by one’s employer, that is going to become public. It is a certainty. Allowing oneself to drift through a campaign until the day the buried bombs go off is amateur hour.(A charge which has been made against Camp Cain more than once.) Republicans have a right to ask Mr. Cain what he would have said if he won the nomination and the news had broken after Labor Day next year. The Cain campaign would have been smarter to leak the story pre-emptively.
That said, anyone who finds the past week’s events disgusting, on virtually any level, has our sympathy.
Let us stipulate that sexual harassment, most often by piggish men against female colleagues, is real. It happens. But you would have to be born yesterday in the American workplace not also to know that sexual harassment has become a legal industry. Every human-resources department expects to get lawsuits alleging sexual harassment, which run the gamut from frivolous to serious. Employers set their own guidelines of when to fight and when to settle.
So far, there has been no indication of where on this spectrum the National Restaurant Association settlements fall. No matter. America’s media-saturated politics has entered a period in which there is but one standard for candidates: Where there’s smoke, there’s a bonfire. Herman Cain is in the bonfire. The game now is to see if he can survive it.
Which brings us to lesson two of the past week: This is why we don’t have “better candidates.” No normal person would risk it. We have no idea if this is why so many prominent Republicans—Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels—decided not to run despite a vulnerable incumbent and a weak GOP field. But we understand it if it were the reason.
Mr. Cain has developed an ardent base of supporters. It will be up to them when the voting starts in January to decide how seriously to take these accusations and how to judge the quality of his candidacy.
Again, it isn’t the charges against Cain that bother us (nor, given their reaction to the prurient, perjurous, misdeeds Bill Clinton, should they bother the Left and their MSM shills); it’s his reaction to a crisis he HAD TO KNOW WAS COMING.
It’s only our opinion, but from where we sit, Herman’s….
Next up, in International News….
Papandreou Scraps Referendum on Greek Debt Plan
Greece’s prime minister abandoned his explosive plan to put a European rescue deal to popular vote Thursday, keeping his government alive — but passionate squabbling in Athens left the country’s solvency in doubt and the eurozone in turmoil. Prime Minister George Papandreou reversed course after a rebellion within his own Socialist party over the referendum, but ignored repeated calls to resign and call elections.
Chaos persisted in the country that coined the term: Papandreou faces a critical vote of confidence in his government Friday as the Socialist rebellion still simmers. And the main opposition conservatives were not placated, insisting on his resignation.
Opa!!! (which, roughly translated, means, “Our lazy, sorry asses are dead broke!”)
And in the Environmental Moment, Mark Steyn offers his observations on Connecticut’s pending Diaper Act:
It’s not welfare, it’s stimulus.
Last Thursday was officially “Diaper Need Awareness Day” in the state of Connecticut. . . . If you’re wondering what sentient being isn’t aware of diapers, you’re missing the point: Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro is raising awareness of the need for diapers in order to, as Politico reported, “push the Federal Government to provide free diapers to poor families.” Congresswoman DeLauro has introduced the “DIAPER” Act—that’s to say, the Diaper Investment and Aid to Promote Economic Recovery Act. So don’t worry, it’s not welfare, it’s “stimulus.” . . .
And, given that sinking bazillions of dollars into green-jobs schemes to build eco-cars in Finland and . . . other innovations of the Obama administration haven’t worked, who’s to say borrowing money from the Chinese Politburo and sticking it in your kid’s diaper isn’t the kind of outside-the-box thinking that won’t do the trick?
Then there’s this from Kimberly Strassel in the WSJ:
The Democrats’ Blue-Collar Blues
Why is the president considering tanking thousands of union jobs in a 9% unemployment economy?
‘Blue and green should never be seen without a color in between,” runs the old design line. An imperiled President Obama is learning the political pain of mixing colors.
His greens are certainly in evidence, camped in ever greater numbers in front of the White House to protest the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that will move oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The pipeline officially needs State Department approval, though this week Mr. Obama further elevated the controversy by announcing that he would be making the final call.
Which gets us to his blues, or rather the 20,000 blue-collar construction jobs that would come with the pipeline, and the further 118,000 spin-off jobs. The unions—from the Teamsters, to the Plumbers and Pipefitters, to the Laborers—are out in force pushing for this giant job creator. “We can’t wait to get America building again,” blares a union-sponsored website in support of Keystone, poking at the president’s latest political rhetoric.
Keystone is more than just the administration’s latest headache. It’s the clear culmination of an Obama governing philosophy that has consistently put green priorities ahead of blue-collar workers, and that is now one of the biggest threats to his re-election.
This isn’t a constituency Mr. Obama should ever have dared to slight. Working-class white males were the Hillary Clinton bloc in 2008 and helped her trounce him in key states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio. Mr. Obama would go on in the general election to lock up the college-educated, the affluent, the women, the minorities, the first-time voters—you name it. He lost the white working class by 18 points.
Rather than court this constituency, Mr. Obama has spent three years waging war on them. Under the sway of (former) green czar Carol Browner, Environmental Protection Agency Director Lisa Jackson and the environmental lobby, the Obama administration has done more to kill working-class industries than any modern predecessor.
The EPA has labored over an ozone rule (estimated job losses: 7.3 million), power plant rules (1.4 million), a boiler rule (789,000), a coal-ash rule (316,00), a cement rule (23,000), and greenhouse gas rules (even Joe Biden can’t count that high).The administration blew up Louisiana’s offshore deepwater drilling industry, insisted Detroit make cars nobody wants to buy and, just to stay consistent, is moving to clamp down on the country’s one booming industry: natural gas.
Those going the way of the dodo are utility workers, pipefitters, construction guys, coal miners, factory workers, truck drivers, electrical workers and machinists. Many of these are union Democrats who don’t care if their union bosses are publicly sticking with the president. They are pessimistic about the future and increasingly angry over the president’s attack on their work.
A Pew poll this year found an astonishing 43% of the white working class didn’t believe they’d be better off in 10 years—the most negative views of any group polled, by far.It helps explain why, in the 2010 election, the white working class surged to give the GOP a record 63% of their vote, 30 points more than for Democrats. It’s why a poll out of the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania just found that 59% of union households now say they want someone in the White House other than Barack Obama.
Despite the media obsession with America’s changing demographics, blue-collar, white workers still make up 40% of the electorate, even more in states Mr. Obama needs. The latest 2012 census data suggest that white working-class voters could make up some 55% of the Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan votes.
This explains the White House’s recent decision to delay or scale back some EPA regs, including on greenhouse gases and ozone. A red-faced Mrs. Jackson has issued all manner of excuses. But the reality is the rule changes were a direct give-back to the blue-collar unions, which have been publicly protesting the regulations and privately warning the administration about electoral death. The White House had also been getting an earful from vulnerable congressional Democrats, who threatened to start voting with Republicans against these job-killers if the White House didn’t take them off the table.
More telling is that the White House is moving in a way that suggests even it knows these gestures come too late. Mr. Obama is throwing his campaign attention at Southern and Rocky Mountain states he won in 2008 (North Carolina, Virginia, Nevada, Colorado), looking for a way to 270 that goes around the Rust Belt.
This might also help explain Mr. Obama’s continued dithering on Keystone XL. Most presidents would eat dog food for the chance to generate a job bonanza and billions in investment with a project his own State Department says poses no environmental threat. But the green lobby hates it, and that green lobby is a staple of the liberal, educated, affluent base, and that’s the group the Obama team is ever more convinced it’s going to need in 2012.
And so we have a president who is seriously considering tanking thousands of union jobs, in a 9% unemployment economy, and while on a jobs tour. If that sounds crazy, well . . .
It’s about par for Team Tick-Tock’s increasingly erratic course!
On the Lighter Side….
Finally, since we’re on the subject of Jersey, we’ll wrap up the week with the Crime Blotter, where we learn….
Paterson Police Arrest 3 Men Caught On Tape In Machete Attack
0400….a fried chicken joint in Paterson, NJ; there’s no where else WE’D rather be! Maybe these guys thought it was “cut-your-own-legs-and-thighs” night. New Jersey: it’s the Garden State alright; yeah….gardens of stone.
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