Republican Party

Mike Huckabee! Glenn Beck! Rush Limbaugh! That time Time magazine called him an “influential evangelical” even though he’s a Catholic and therefore not actually an evangelical Christian! Sarah Palin! The Wall Street Journal!

I have a couple of thoughts on this.

First, those little tildes instead of em dashes for the quote attributions are bugging me. It makes all the quotes look like message board signatures. Second, the Santorum logo is pretty funny. The “O” sun that the eagle is blocking is too small or something, and it looks like this is an ad for Rick Sant Rum.

Also, obviously, if blurbs from Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck make you more inclined to support a candidate, you are basically the sort of person who sums up why America is broken and ungovernable.

Many of these positive quotes came from when Rick Santorum was a fringe candidate polling in the single digits, and they can best be understood as an attempt to be polite to the guy (Palin, a Gingrich enabler, is offering him faint praise here), or, alternately, attempts to damage Romney back when it was still possible for a new acceptable-to-the-elites candidate to enter the race (that was the point of the Journal’s inexplicable attacks on Romney’s perfectly supply-sidey tax plan). But none of that matters now! Rick Santorum will make everyone regret saying nice things about him back when they thought he’d go away after Iowa. (Except Glenn Beck, who probably does think Rick Santorum is likely the next George Washington, even though nothing about that makes any sort of sense, at all.)

Santorum will also maybe make Mitt Romney regret focusing all of his attention (money) on Newt Gingrich. Here’s Santorum’s other, better new ad, in which a creepy Romney lookalike (more a George Romney lookalike, actually?) shoots … “mud” at a Rick Santorum Fathead in that abandoned building from the end of “The Departed.”

George Romney looks so sad when he gets mud on his nice shirt, at the end! (He is also a horrible shot!) Also is Romney just doing target practice with these cutouts or is Santorum tricking him with decoys? It is not entirely clear. (And what does cap-and-trade have to do with anything?) But this ad is much better than the other one, because it is disgusting and odd instead of boring.

It is also, obviously, a negative attack ad attacking another candidate for airing negative attack ads, because an important aspect of the modern political campaign is constantly acting as wounded as possible for any reason at all while calling attention to your opponent’s total lack of basic human decency. Santorum is adept at playing the aggrieved victim (Google and homosexuals are so mean to him!) though he’s practically preempting Romney’s actual attack on Santorum, which didn’t really begin in earnest until, like, yesterday. Still, the important thing is that Santorum has reached the “hiring an impersonator of your opponent” stage, and there is no turning back now. (Next stop: comparing your opponent to a possessed sheep.)

At the National Review’s Katrina Trinko points out, Santorum has bought $41,000 in airtime in Michigan, compared to Romney’s $824,000. So Santorum needs the sillier gimmicky ads, like a Romney doppelganger firing a shit-rifle in a warehouse, to go “viral.” (We’re helping, Rick!) The best way to get free media pickup is to be extremely outrageous and/or shameless, so it’s all downhill from here, in terms of tone. Especially because Santorum’s lead is extremely precarious and based in large part on his not being Gingrich or Romney, both of whom voters now think of as detestable assholes, because of the ads they both ran against each other. (So be careful, Rick!)

Gingrich should not listen to them. At all. (Not that Gingrich listens to anyone, besides perhaps his wife, but still.) This editorial can be safely ignored for the following reasons:

First of all, everyone should always do the opposite of whatever a National Review editorial says to do. The opposite of what “The Editors” want is invariably the correct choice, morally and politically. If politicians always made “doing the opposite of what The Editors of the National Review want” a top priority, there would be universal peace and prosperity and kick-ass super-trains crisscrossing the nation.

Second, The Editors don’t even have the facts of Santorum’s surge correct: As Dave Weigel points out, Gingrich, contrary to The Editors’ claims, has won more delegates than Santorum thus far. Santorum has three delegates. Three. The press likes to cover caucuses and primaries even when they’re meaningless and non-binding and feature negligible turnout because those are the only actual events to cover in a primary race, but the result is that a couple of random wins are massively over-imbued with supposed import, leading even the politically savvy Editors of the National Review to believe that Rick Santorum has actually won a bunch of delegates because he got some old people into some auditoriums in suburban Minnesota.

Third, there is nothing about the Santorum surge that makes it any more sustainable or solid than all the previous candidate surges, except that it’s happening while primary contests are actually happening instead of last September. In other words, a Santorum collapse could be imminent, and it could come whenever Mitt Romney gets around to seriously devoting his attention to destroying him with money. Santorum has a lot of room to be attacked from the right, especially since he’s got the Rust Belt Republican politician habit of occasionally sounding sympathetic to working-class resentment of rich people. And his political history is filled with assorted crimes against current fanatical GOP dogma. Weigel posted a good one earlier: An old campaign ad in which Santorum actually admits to loving newspapers.

Oh also something about supporting Amtrak, despite trains being part of the UN plot to destroy American sovereignty.

Finally, there is the fact that Rick Santorum is an unambiguously awful candidate. He is not just a “social conservative,” he is a paleolithic anachronism of reactionary thought. The American people, despite the fervid wishes of a couple bishops and Kathryn Jean Lopez, are not actually remotely anti-contraception. Most voters — especially since the ratification of the 19th Amendment — think women should be allowed to have jobs outside the home. The last time the Republicans won a presidential election, they had 48% of the female vote, and I imagine they’d like to tie or beat that number this year, maybe? Rick Santorum is decidedly not the man for that job, unless scientists invent some sort of mind control ray that falls into the hands of Phyllis Schlafly.

So, no, Newt Gingrich, don’t quit just yet, and I’m not just saying that because having Gingrich around makes a political writer’s work marginally more colorful. All Gingrich really needs to remain “competitive” in the media race through Super Tuesday is one more big check from his rich uncle Scrooge McAdelson.

(Not that Gingrich is going to be the nominee! It’s still going to be Romney unless something unprecedentedly hilarious happens at the convention.)

CPAC also uninvited the John Birch Society, which had made a triumphant return to mainstream conservative acceptance in 2010, when they co-sponsored the conference.

But! While the Birchers and the open homosexualists are no longer welcome, there is still room for multiple outspoken white nationalists!

The National Review’s John Derbyshire, a stock “pervert Tory” character from a Martin Amis novel sprung to life and given a sinecure at the National Review, is hosting a panel on “multiculturalism” (boo hiss) featuring two of America’s most detestable sacks of shit: Peter Brimelow, founder of white supremacist site VDARE, and Robert Vandervoort, the director of some sort of “don’t make me press one for English” nativist group and a white nationalist from way back.

CPAC organizers are like, we didn’t specifically organize this panel ourselves so whatever, but they are not canceling the panel, because the conservative movement has always quietly set a place at the table for their white supremacist allies when they get together for Thanksgiving. And after everyone says grace (and sings “God Bless America” and the national anthem and does the Pledge of Allegiance) comes the ceremonial declaration that liberals are the real racists, for inventing welfare.

The Derbyshire, Brimelow, and Vandervoort (these names!) panel is called “The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the Pursuit of Diversity Is Weakening the American Identity,” and the fact that these panelists are all well-compensated members in good standing of the conservative movement instead of shrieking their “defense of Western Civilization” nonsense for free from a bench outside a subway station does suggest that something has gone wrong with the American experiment. (I think we let too many racist British people enter the country and steal our right-wing think tank and magazine contributor jobs, personally.)

I am guessing the panel will feature at least one “why is there no white history month” joke.

CPAC’s biggest draw today was the speech by Marco Rubio, who many expect to be Mitt Romney’s eventual running mate, because Republicans think he’ll appeal to the voters they accuse of poisoning American identity with their insufficiently Western European heritages.