Politics: 3rd week of January

Not covering SOTU in this post. (Not watching SOTU; have better things to do than listen to President "I won" campaigning for re-election against a do-nothing Congress.)

Besides, I offer this quote from Mitt Romney as a pre-emptive rebuttal to anything Caesar says tonight:

"If this election is a bidding war for who can promise more benefits, then I'm not your president. You have that president today."

Next up:

Union pensions. Apparently, say defenders of fat public-employee pensions, the reason for the big, big discrepancy between public pensions and private pensions is all due to the fact that 48% of public employees have college degrees compared to 22% of private employees.

So, um, who's paying for those degrees? Just wondering.

Okay, back to the Republican primary.

I stumbled across this title of an op-ed somewhere on the web: "Gingrich defends capitalism while Romney defends Romney." This was right around the same time that Gingrich and Perry started ripping into Romney over the conduct of Bain Capital, calling what Romney did "vulture capitalism." Sorry, that's defending capitalism now?

On a similar note, I keep reading that Gingrich is the "outsider" whereas Romney is the "establishment" candidate. By what twisted logic is the former Speaker of the House, a man who has lived the last 33 years in Washington, less of an establishment candidate than a man who served one term as governor?

Some words about South Carolina. The debate immediately before the election mattered, and was instrumental in tipping the state to Gingrich. Naturally, Romney has... agreed to do more debates! I like to think that Romney is a competent campaigner, because by God we need one to run against Obama, but this isn't helping.

Anyway, about that debate. Apparently Gingrich was on fire. I didn't see it. I read about it afterward. The first question was about Gingrich's ex-wife, and Gingrich's response was "how dare you?"

As I said, I didn't see Gingrich's response. I read about it afterwards. And my first thought was: we already have a petulant whiner in the White House right now. Why should we run another one against him?

Look, by all accounts Gingrich won that debate hands-down. I don't dispute that. But I'm getting a massive style-over-substance vibe from him, and we already have a style-over-substance guy in the White House now. A Gingrich-Obama debate would surely be a firecracker, but it would look a lot like something Shakespeare once said: "He speaks, yet he says nothing."

Here's the thing: when the other candidates and their PACs were attacking Romney's record at Bain, I welcomed it. You can check; I don't change the substance of any post with a "politics" tag after I post it (I have toned down the rhetoric at least once, and that was sometime last year). Caesar's going to use it in the general, so it's a valid point.

Don't think for a moment that Caesar's not going to use Gingrich's divorces in the general. And "how dare you," for all the righteous indignation that Gingrich can marshal, simply isn't a valid response.

It worked in South Carolina because a conservative audience was sick of liberal questions. But liberal questions are what we'll get in the general, and we'll have moderate, independent audiences. "How dare you" simply will not go over as well with them.