As Rachel Maddow pointed out last night, the absolutely regularity of the Republican debates leads to a perception that they are like a sitcom. Each week candidates get to take character development a little bit further, for good or for ill. The Romney-Perry spat the other day made for good old B-grade couch-potato watching.
As it happens, that wasn't a one-off deal. That spat has a history.
Mr. Romney’s decision, as chairman of the Republican Governors Association in 2006, to hire a consultant who was working for one of Mr. Perry’s political opponents left the Texas governor angry, aides said.
“I think that started the downhill decline in the relationship between the two of them,” a Texas Republican operative said on Wednesday, recalling the tension that existed at the time. “They have never been close.”
It was not long before Mr. Perry criticized Mr. Romney by name in his 2008 book about the history of the Boy Scouts. To Mr. Romney’s annoyance, Mr. Perry noted that the Scouts were blocked from participation in the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, which Mr. Romney led.
“In the absence of an explanation,” Mr. Perry wrote, “it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the decision was made as a reaction to the protests of gay activist groups.”...
... But beyond personal slights, the ideological and personal gulf separating the pair — Mr. Romney, a wealthy businessman from Massachusetts whose father was a governor who also ran for president, and Mr. Perry, with his roots on a Texas farm — has added to the longstanding suspicion and ill will between them. ...NYT
Don't look for any relief towards the end of the season for this sitcom. It's going to continue right into campaign ads on TV any day now.
Both Mr. Perry and Mr. Romney have war chests with millions of dollars that could pay for months of advertising. And new rules by the Republican party will encourage proportional voting in some states during the primary, a move that could drag out the contest as the candidates amass delegates more slowly than in the past.
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The Washington Post focuses on some serious hypocrisy on the part of candidates Rick Perry and Ron Paul.
Two Republican presidential candidates who have spoken out against federal subsidies for energy projects tried to obtain such benefits three years ago.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) pressed the energy secretary in 2008 to approve a federal loan guarantee to help an energy company hoping to expand a nuclear facility in Texas. NRG Energy was among the many firms vying for a slice of $18.5 billion in federal loan guarantees set aside for nuclear production, according to letters obtained by The Washington Post. That led to a rush of appeals from Congress members and other elected officials, including Perry and Paul, hoping to win support for their projects.
In recent candidates debates, the two have criticized federal energy loan programs.
Come to that, Rick Perry railed against President Obama's stimulus package but took it and used it to bail himself out of a deficit in Texas. As with most Republicans, he grants himself a huge gap between word and deed. Perry and Paul are hardly alone in decrying subsidies they seek for themselves.
Republicans have a history of supporting loan guarantee programs in the Energy Department. The programs were created in 2005 during the George W. Bush administration and were expanded in 2007 and again in President Obama's 2009 stimulus plan. A Washington Post review of Energy Department documents provided by Democratic officials shows that dozens of Republican lawmakers have requested loan guarantees for local projects, including House Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.).
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The editorial board of the Washington Post comes down heavily on the group pathology of Republican candidates rants about foreign aid. For most Americans, the issue of foreign aid -- what for and how much -- marks the border line between ignorance and wisdom. And this time around the candidates are so underwater on this issue -- so lacking in knowledge and discernment -- as to make George W. Bush look like a statesman.'
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, though, won the prize for he-ought-to-know-better nonsense. Mr. Romney endorsed defense-related foreign aid, but then seemed to suggest that the United States outsource to China its humanitarian assistance. “I happen to think it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to borrow money from the Chinese to go give to another country for humanitarian aid,” Mr. Romney said. “We ought to get the Chinese to take care of the people.” Is he so in sync with the goals and values of China’s foreign policy? The fumble was particularly remarkable in that it came just 11 days after Mr. Romney promised, in a major foreign policy address, to “apply the full spectrum of hard and soft power to influence events before they erupt into conflict” and to ensure an “American Century” of leadership. It turned out to be a short century.
It’s sad that, only three years after the George W. Bush presidency, no candidate defended foreign aid as a marker of American generosity and a transmitter of American values. Mr. Bush ramped up U.S. help for AIDS victims in Africa. He created the innovative Millennium Challenge Corp., which aims to increase the effectiveness of foreign aid by giving only to governments that serve their people decently. He understood, as any sensible politician does, that foreign aid will always be a hard sell, but he was willing to make the case. That’s a level of statesmanship missing from this year’s Republican field.
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The Economist's "Lexington" is pretty well disgusted at the Republicans' -- and particularly Mitt Romney's -- take on President Obama's foreign policy.
As the Republicans tell it, Mr Obama has spent his presidency projecting weakness, leading from behind, apologising for America, denying American exceptionalism and throwing Israel under a bus. Only Ron Paul, the candidate who wants to end America’s wars immediately and bring all the troops home, admits that Mr Obama has prosecuted the war on al-Qaeda at least as robustly as George Bush did, hitting people and places, such as Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, his Republican predecessor did not reach. That has not stopped Mr Romney from calling Mr Obama’s foreign policy “feckless” and accusing him of “an eloquently justified surrender of world leadership”.
Mr Obama has made mistakes in foreign policy, but not the ones the Republicans harp on. “Leading from behind” may turn out to have been a cost-effective way to help America’s allies dispose of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi. Mr Obama got nowhere in Palestine, but pushing for a two-state solution based on the 1967 border was longstanding American policy, not a betrayal of the Jewish state. The oft-repeated claim that he does not believe in America’s exceptionalism leans on selective quotation from a press conference in which he made it perfectly plain that he did.
In elections, politicians lie. What is more disappointing in Mr Romney is the gap between his lofty aim of perpetual American ascendancy and his unimaginative means...
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The Economist also questions the concept that governors make good presidents -- and particularly the current Texas governor, Rick Perry.
... Governors that have previous national and international experience and interests, like Bill Clinton, Rhodes Scholar, will be okay at bluffing their way through questions about "the Pakistani country". So will those candidates who basically made their lives studying, like Barack Obama (and Mr Clinton again). Ronald Reagan had two runs at the presidency, and ran a national union, besides governing the biggest state in America, and being apparently unflappable. This probably accounts for his success despite lack of a scholarly or internationalist background.
But those governors who mainly have parochial experience, like George W. Bush, won't thrive. The world is complicated and they've built their lives around simple truths. But how can you give a simple answer to something you've never even thought about? The problem that Mr Perry has run into is that America is not a big Texas. Much less is the world a big Texas. It seems like the governor is simply on the wrong stage.
