Insight on the "Tea Party" phenomenon.

From Vishal Ganeshan:

Among Tea Party respondents, the President enjoys a 88% job disapproval rating. Further, 84% of respondents simply have an unfavorable opinion of him. That their overwhelmingly negative opinion of the President is largely divorced from his actual policies is disturbing, but it also brings to light one of the reasons for the GOP’s refusal to cooperate with the President and the Dems on any issue...the recipe for success is saying “no” to the President, regardless of the policy implications.

The whole article is worth reading.

Mitt Romney: None too bright

Campagins for both major parties' Presidential nomination tend always to feature a race to the bottom. The Democrats' is a perennial pandering to labor unions--especially government-employee rent-seeker unions--and other class warriors. The Republicans' is variable but equally tawdry, with two recent topics being "family values" and gay marriage.

This time around the race is to see who can best stick it to illegal aliens, the approximately twelve million American residents here without proper visas, usually breaking the law because the government, distinguishing between skilled and unskilled labor as though we're still in the Economic Stone Age, offers no means to comply.

This race has come with its own code-words and jargon, most of it euphemisms crafted to make peaceful activity sound nefarious: "Anchor babies", "stealing jobs", "our culture", etc. Ron Paul, although he's stayed out of the macho jingoist pissing contest, is not above these in general. On his website he frames amnesty as a "reward for breaking our laws," as though letting someone who is in violation of the law off the hook is the same as giving him a C-note.

Mitt Romney makes this look positively intelligent by portraying amnesty as a proposed solution to the problem. This is either a revelation of idiocy or an insult to the voters' intelligence: the questions of what to do about our obviously flawed immigration policy and whether to give 12 million illegal aliens amnesty (as opposed to rounding them up and deporting them) are separate. Nobody is proposing that by simply regularizing those already here, we will stop the flow.

I'm guessing that thousands of people who'd never let Joe Biden wave his hands and equate union members and the middle class are willingly hoodwinked by the hayseed fallacies of Romney and Paul. If politics were done like academic science, with open minds and respect for reason instead of appeals to the voters' often twisted ideas of reality, we'd be in better shape. Unfortunately we must deal with people as they are and not as we think they ought to be, however, what ever happened to the notion of leadership? We ought to be able to expect Paul and Romney to be above the rubes, not be one with them!

Giuliani's Pyrrhic victory

I'm no Ron Paul fan. He's a conspiracist crank, an economic Austrian, the most ineffectual multi-term Congressman in recent memory, and perhaps a racist, too. Add to that his supporters' obnoxious tendency to infer victory from stuffed Internet polls, and we have a man who this dyed-in-the-wool, Nozick-reading, third-party-voting, ACLU card-carrying classical liberal considers more of a shame than a credit to his end of the political spectrum.

But reports that he handed victory in the second "debate" among the contenders for the Republican nomination for President to Rudy Giuliani are premature. Giuliani may have gotten the best possible knee-jerk response, but on reflection he's being taken more and more for, well, an idiot, an empty-headed reactionary.

Credit goes to Paul for staying on message, for stuffing the nuttery in the closet, and for making it obvious to us all that having been Mayor of New York City on 11 Sept 2001 is no substitute for having read the 9/11 commission report. And the credit is coming in. CNN commentator and former Chicago Defender editor Roland Martin took it on himself to flesh out Paul's argument and nail Giuliani with a haymaker. To quote: "First, Giuliani must be an idiot to not have heard Paul's rationale before. That issue has been raised countless times in the last six years by any number of experts."

Now Pat Buchanan has entered the fray, too, taking the Republican Party to task over rejecting Paul's message. Republican dissent is now in the open and mainstream. Thanks to Paul, the problem can't be ignored, and Rudy for his part made it clear just how stupid the hawks' reasoning has been.

Worst case: The Republicans lose because of this and we end up with a social-democratic disaster under Obama or Edwards.

Mediocre case: The Republicans nominate a "moderate" and beat the Democrats, giving us gridlock and maybe some domestic policy reform.

Best case: The Republican mix gets shaken up, with America's favorite authoritarian and seething hawk McCain off the table as well as Giuliani. Romney gets some book learnin' about the conflict. The Democrats get fed up with slogans and waffling and push the knowledgeable and nuanced Bill Richardson to the fore. We end up with two acceptable choices plus perhaps a reasonable, respectable Libertarian for a change.

A man can dream, right? It's clear that Giuliani opened Pandora's box. What's inside remains to be seen.