presidential election

Rick Santorum quits a race he wasn’t going to win

Mitt Romney is the Republican nominee for president. He doesn’t have the delegates yet, but everyone knows he is the candidate and everyone has known he would be the candidate for months.

And yet, the GOP primary race continues, a freak show of remarkable proportions that has done little more than succeed in damaging what little credibility Romney had.

Today’s big news, that Rick Santorum has “suspended his campaign,” really isn’t news at all. Santorum was never going to be the nominee and never should have been taken serious as a candidate. Santorum is a right-wing nut, a religious conservative with 16th-century views on women, sex and patriotism. His success in the primary — carrying the most rabid and backward voters imaginable — only proved the existence of the dark heart of the GOP.

Santorum was only the latest in a long list of the kind of candidates that Hunter S. Thompson would have loved to write about. Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, Newt Gingrich — all of them were varying shades of dangerous and weird.

Only Ron Paul, who had his own nasty baggage, offered any kind of alternative (criticism of crony capitalism and imperialism), and he was dismissed by the commentariat from the outset.

To capture the nomination, Romney — nominally a centrist/moderate in his past — has sprinted to the far corner of right-wing lunacy, with few among the mainstream press batting an eye. It was just something he needed to do, they say, and now he can tack back to the center and run the campaign he’s always wanted to run.

In this kind of atmosphere, one in which the strategy of the campaign is all that’s worth discussing, we are unlikely to get the kind of conversation about issues we need, or any honesty about the corporate-centered policies both parties push.

The difference between Romney and Barack Obama is one of degrees, not one of major substance. Both are beholden to the corporate order and tied to (different wings of) the foreign policy establishment. At least Obama doesn’t have to cowtow to the lunatic fringe. That, in and of itself, may be earn him a second term.

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Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Tin ears of the Romney-bot

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George H.W. Bush (i.e, 41) professed amazement at supermarket scanners during a trip to a food store to attempt to show how much of a regular guy he was. The fallout badly damaged what little credibility he had left, proving to an electorate weary of recession that he was tone deaf on economic matters. End result: Bill Clinton wins the presidency.

Examples of presidential candidates failing to understand the tenor of the times are legion — Nixon on the beach in dress pants, Dukakis in the tank, Kerry windsurfing, McCain suspending his campaign — and they almost always end badly for the candidate.

Enter Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor already had credibility problems due to his every evolving positions on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, and he has on more than one occasion proven that he has a tin ear worthy of the first President Bush (offering to make a $10,000 wager as though that were normal behavior, chanting “Who Let the Dogs Out” at a Martin Luther King Day parade in Florida).

And yet, he somehow found a way to top himself Monday:

Republican front-runner Mitt Romney stumbled down the homestretch of the New Hampshire primary on Monday, declaring, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me” as his rivals intensified already fierce criticism.

Romney has attempted to defend himself, saying the full context of the comment would show that he did not mean he likes to fire people but that he likes having the ability to jettison service workers who do a bad job. And while everyone of us takes this ability for granted — fire the plumber if he can’t fix the leak — it’s not like we enjoy doing it. It was a foolish comment, a tone deaf one that underscores that Romney is the scion of a very wealthy family and has little in common with the average voter — and everything in common with the 1 percent at the top of the economic heap.

Romney is the elite the Tea Party and Occupy movements have warned you about, and it is going to be difficult for him to portray himself as anything else.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Ron Paul is not a progressive

Ron Paul was right on both wars, on the bailout of the banks and continues to be right about the need for transparency at the fed. He is right about gay marriage and he is right on most civil liberties issues and the drug war.

Ron Paul, in a photo on his web site: http://www.ronpaul2012.com

But Ron Paul is not a progressive. Ron Paul is not anti-corporate. He believes that empowering business is the best way to accomplish all good things and that government has no role to play in ensuring a level playing field. It was Paul’s dismissal of a government role in health care that elicited the shout of “let him die” during the Republican debates.

He is hardcore on immigration, opposing “amnesty” and “birthright citizenship”; seeks the end to the welfare state; and wants to approve offshore oil drilling.

Forget the ugly racism of his newsletters — which do reflect either his own past racism or a remarkable willingness to allow racists to speak in his name — his opposition to crony capitalism (which the otherwise sane Robert Scheer lauds) is more about freeing capital than addressing the widening chasm of inequality or aiding those in need.

Pat Buchanan’s opposition to free trade comes to mind here, because it was an issue on which the rabid social conservative was able to make common cause with the left. The same thing is happening here. Paul is a libertarian conservative who happens to be right on a couple of issues and not a legitimate standard-bearer for progressives.

It would be better for the left to sit out the 2012 election than vote for Paul.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

The emptiness of presidential politics

From Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone, a post that Glenn Greenwald described as “one of the most succinct and accurate summaries of the 2012 presidential election and the state of American politics generally that has been written in awhile.” Call it the quote of the day, Iowa edition:

It takes an awful lot to rob the presidential race of this elemental appeal. But this year’s race has lost that buzz. In fact, this 2012 race may be the most meaningless national election campaign we’ve ever had. If the presidential race normally captivates the public as a dramatic and angry ideological battle pitting one impassioned half of society against the other, this year’s race feels like something else entirely.

In the wake of the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, and a dozen or more episodes of real rebellion on the streets, in the legislatures of cities and towns, and in state and federal courthouses, this presidential race now feels like a banal bureaucratic sideshow to the real event – the real event being a looming confrontation between huge masses of disaffected citizens on both sides of the aisle, and a corrupt and increasingly ideologically bankrupt political establishment, represented in large part by the two parties dominating this race.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

If a tree fell in a forest, would it run for president?

I have to wonder why the press insists on paying any attention to this clown. Terry Jones for president? Maybe the networks thought it was the Monty Python member.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.