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The right to bear arms isn’t the only freedom implicated in massacres like last week’s

by Mojambo ( 110 Comments › )
Filed under Free Speech, Media, Second Amendment at December 20th, 2012 - 8:00 am

There has been a whole lot of foolish talk in the wake of the Newtown massacre. The massacre seems to have “liberated” a segment of the literati/chattering classes to spout the wildest nonsense.

by James Taranto

If hypocrisy were an intoxicating spirit, Andrew Rosenthal would be a master distiller. On Friday, we noticed this tweetfrom Rosenthal, the New York Times’s editorial page editor, which he posted at 1:42 p.m.: “Sickeningly quick. RT @BryanJFischer Shooters attack an elementary school in CT – another ‘gun-free zone.’ Makes children sitting ducks.”

We tended to agree with Rosenthal that Fischer, an official of the American Family Association who is a frequent contributor to this column, should have been more circumspect. The point about gun-free zones is a pertinent one, but the immediate aftermath of a horrific massacre is not the time to be picking arguments about divisive political issues. That’s why our Friday column was about other topics.

But there would be no such circumspection from Rosenthal and the Times. By 4:47 p.m., he was pounding the table: “Bloomberg wonders, http://bit.ly/VG0shC, and so do we, http://nyti.ms/U0QUkP, when it WILL be time to do something about gun violence.” […….]

David Frum was even quicker than the Times. Friday morning he tweeted: “Shooting at CT elementary school. Obviously, we need to lower the age limit for concealed carry so toddlers can defend themselves.” The sour sarcasm was especially out of place, and the comment was a bizarre non sequitur. We’ve never heard of a school without adults.

Frum’s tweet drew many responses from people who found it offensive. In the afternoon he answered them unrepentantly in a Daily Beast essay. He explained that his “first reaction” to the shooting “was anger,” which he “ventilated.” But note that he directed his anger at people who had committed no wrongful acts but merely disagreed with him:

I’ll accept no lectures about “sensitivity” on days of tragedy like today from people who work the other 364 days of the year against any attempt to prevent such tragedies.

It’s bad enough to have a gun lobby. It’s the last straw when that lobby also sets up itself as the civility police. It may not be politically possible to do anything about the prevalence of weapons of mass murder. But it damn well ought to be possible to complain about them–and about the people who condone them.

Of course you can complain about them. And they can complain about you, which is all they did. You can complain back, as you did, and so on and so on. It’s all part of the glorious free marketplace of ideas, albeit not its finest product. But the notion that your complaining is constructive while your detractors’ complaining is murderous is delusionary.

[…….]

Consider Frum’s reference to the “gun lobby.” The term usually calls to mind the National Rifle Association, but the NRA–unlike Fischer, Rosenthal, Bloomberg and Frum–had the tact to withhold comment in the immediate aftermath of the Connecticut attack. Frum’s detractors were no “lobby,” just individuals who disagreed with his views and found his manner disagreeable. Stigmatizing one’s opponents as a “lobby” is a tactic with an ugly recent history; as Frum himself observed about another practitioner, “[his] core argument is that he and his small-band of like-minded allies are entitled to prevail overtop the preferences of the great majority of Americans.”

A central reason these gun debates tend to be futile is that gun owners and gun-rights supporters think advocates of gun control will not settle for reasonable restrictions but want to deprive them of their constitutional rights altogether. They are right to think so, and Frum’s essay illustrates the point.

He notes, as we did Wednesday, that the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week struck down Illinois’s absolute ban on carrying concealed weapons. What he doesn’t mention is that the court stayed its order for 180 days to give state lawmakers time to craft a new law that passes constitutional muster. This would seem an excellent opportunity for advocates of reasonable gun regulations to weigh in on just what they might look like. For Frum, it was just a reminder that those who disagree with him are contemptible: “The [decision] moved me to revisit some writing I did this summer about the folly of imagining that law-abiding citizens make themselves more safe by owning weapons.”

Many of the voices demanding stricter gun control, like Frum, openly scoff at the Second Amendment. Others simply ignore it. Very few acknowledge the need to respect Americans’ constitutional right to keep and bear arms. To be sure, President Obama has done so on occasion, but not only his detractors suspect him of insincerity. Here is David Remnick, an Obama hagiographer, writing at The New Yorker’s website Friday:

[…….]

Remnick is ignorant about Laurence Tribe, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wrong about Obama.

Maybe there would be fewer mass shootings if there were no Second Amendment. But the same can be said of the First. A Washington Post story over the weekend crystallizes the point. Here are the opening paragraphs:

[……]

“He will long be remembered.” That suggests a fairly simple answer to the vexing question of why people do things like this: They do it for recognition. Given the media frenzies that followed Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora and the rest, they have every confidence of getting it.

To suggest such a banal motive is neither to diminish the evil of the crime nor to deny that the killer was mentally ill. […….]

One might object that the killer in this case, as they often do, took his own life and thus is not around to “enjoy” his recognition. But the human desire for recognition consists in substantial part of projecting beyond one’s own death. Whose dreams of fame would not be crushed by the assurance that one would be forgotten immediately after dying?

Our point here is that the medium is the motive: If these killers seek recognition, it is available to them because the mass media can be counted on to give extensive attention to their horrific deeds. They are, after all, newsworthy, and they do raise important questions of public concern, not only about the availability of weapons and the vulnerability of “gun-free zones” but also about the treatment of mental illness.

We journalists often proclaim high-mindedly that the public has a right to know–and we’re right. But as in the Garden of Eden, knowledge is dangerous. An industry devoted to serving the public’s right to know gives twisted and evil men the means of becoming known.

This problem is not obviously amenable to a solution, and it certainly is not amenable to a legal one. A regime of media regulation that would be both effective at preventing mass shootings and consistent with the American Constitution is no easier to imagine than a regime of gun regulation that would meet the same criteria.

The Times’s Saturday editorial, before getting to the inevitable antigun talking points, hinted at this moral ambiguity of journalism:

People will want to know about the killer in Newtown, Conn. His background and his supposed motives. Did he show signs of violence? But what actually matters are the children. What are their names? What did they dream of becoming? Did they enjoy finger painting? Or tee ball?

“What actually matters are the children.” A lovely thought, an empty piety. The children had “news value” only because they came to a horrible end. Had they been left alone to grow up, it’s unlikely any of them would ever have come to the attention of the Times editorial page. The editorial omits the murderer’s name–perhaps a deliberate gesture, and if so, a futile one. Even if you don’t know his name, you know who he is.

Committing journalism is not a wrongful act, and often it is a noble one. But all of us who, in the course of making a living at it, help publicize these horrific acts are in a small way implicated in enabling them. Perhaps those who scapegoat gun-rights supporters do so because they have too much pride to contemplate their own fallen nature.

Read the rest – The Medium is the Motive

Tags: David Frum, James Taranto
Posted in Free Speech, Media, Second Amendment | 110 Comments »

Anti-white bigotry goes mainstream

by Mojambo ( 211 Comments › )
Filed under Bigotry, Media at November 28th, 2012 - 8:00 am

Nothing so obnoxious as the bigoted use of the description “old white guys” or just plain “white males” being used so casually. A pasty faced, aging, paunchy, white blogger who used to be somewhat relevant has indicated his self loathing by constantly referring to “old, white males” without seeing the irony of that statement.

by James Taranto

Everytime [sic] I think the Democratic race card players could not get more vile, more deranged, more patronizingly demeaning to blacks, someone manages to defy even my vivid imagination,” thunders blogger William Jacobson. He’s referring to a passage in a Washington Posteditorial about critics of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice–a passage that in our view is useful for its clarity.

At issue is a Nov. 19 letter to the President Obama, written by Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina and signed by 97 House Republicans, which declares that the signatories are “deeply troubled” that the president is considering nominating Rice secretary of state, and that they “strongly oppose” such a nomination.

[……….]

The Post focuses on the critics rather than their choice of words. Here’s the passage that outrages Jacobson: “Could it be, as members of the Congressional Black Caucus are charging, that the signatories of the letter are targeting Ms. Rice because she is an African American woman? The signatories deny that, and we can’t know their hearts. What we do know is that more than 80 of the signatories are white males, and nearly half are from states of the former Confederacy.”

Let’s examine this argument carefully. The Post acknowledges that “we can’t know their hearts.” But it finds a (literally) prima facie reason to suspect them of invidious motives: Almost all of them are persons of pallor. The Post is casting aspersions on Duncan and his colleagues based explicitly on the color of their skin. And it is accusing them of racism!

A couple of other items related to race and politics caught our attention over the Thanksgiving weekend. First, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., an Illinois Democrat and CBC member, resigned from Congress “amid federal ethics investigations and a diagnosis of mental illness,” as the Chicago Tribune reports. That sets up a special election to fill the vacancy:

[……..]
This passes with neither editorial comment nor a disapproving quote. It’s hard to imagine the same absence of reaction if a group of pols offered “to broker a nominee” with the goal of preventing a black candidate from winning a white-majority district.

Then there’s the email from the Obama campaign–yeah, they’re still coming, though at a slower pace than before the election–inviting supporters to take a survey. Among the questions: “Which constituency groups do you identify yourself with? Select all that apply.”

There are 22 boxes you can check off. Some are ideological (“Environmentalists” and perhaps “Labor”), some occupational (“Educators,” “Healthcare professionals”), some regional (“Americans abroad,” “Rural Americans”). There’s a box for “Women” but none for men, though there’s a separate “Gender” question, which hilariously has three options: “Male,” “Female” and “Other/no answer.” Touré will no doubt soon inveigh against the “otherization” of the Gender No. 3.

What caught our attention were the ethnic categories: “African Americans,” “Arab-Americans,” “Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders,” Jewish Americans,” “Latinos” and “Native Americans” (the last, of course, refers to American Indians, not natural-born citizens).

[……..]

One explanation for the absence of a “white” or “European-American” category (or, alternatively, several dozen specific European ethnicities) could be that whites tend to vote Republican, and the campaign is interested in Democratic-leaning voting blocs. But several other of the Obama survey categories lean toward the GOP, too: “People of faith,” “Rural Americans,” “Seniors,” “Small business owners” and “Veterans/military families.” Counterpart groups that are Democratic-leaning or swing-voting are missing from the list, too, including nonbelievers, urban and suburban dwellers, and the middle-aged (though there are categories for both “Young professionals” and “Youth”).

The reason for the absence of a “Whites” category is that white identity politics is all but nonexistent in America today. That wasn’t always the case, of course: For a century after the Civil War, Southern white supremacists were an important part of the Democratic Party coalition. They were defeated and discredited in the 1960s, and the Democrats, still the party of identity politics, switched their focus to various nonwhite minorities.

Obama’s re-election was a triumph for this new identity politics–but the Post’s nasty editorial hints at a reason to think this form of politics may have long-term costs for both the party and the country.

The trouble with a diverse coalition based on ethnic or racial identity is that solidarity within each group can easily produce conflicts among the groups. Permissive immigration policies, for example, may be good for Hispanics and Asians but bad for blacks. Racial preferences in college admissions help blacks and Hispanics at the expense of Asians.

One way of holding together such a disparate coalition is by delivering prosperity, so that everyone can feel he’s doing well. Failing that, another way is by identifying a common adversary–such as the “white male.” During Obama’s first term, the demonization of the “white male” was common among left-liberal commentators, especially MSNBC types. The Post has now lent its considerably more mainstream institutional voice to this form of bigotry.

This seems likely to weaken the taboo against white identity politics. Whites who are not old enough to remember the pre-civil-rights era–Rep. Duncan, for instance, was born in 1966–have every reason to feel aggrieved by being targeted in this way.

The danger to Democrats is that they still need white votes. According to this year’s exit polls, Obama won re-election while receiving only 39% of the white vote. But that’s higher than Mitt Romney’s percentage among blacks (6%), Latinos (27%), Asian-Americans (26%) or “Other” (38%). It’s true that Republicans suffer electorally for the perception that they are hostile to minorities, but Democrats also stand to suffer for being hostile to whites.

The danger for the country is that a racially polarized electorate will produce a hostile, balkanized culture. In 2008 Obama held out the hope of a postracial America. His re-election raises the possibility of a most-racial America.

Read the rest – Most-racial America

Tags: James Taranto
Posted in Bigotry, Media | 211 Comments »

Two different points of view: Republicans must stop fighting against birth control and instead battle government control; and the Santorum surge and social issues

by Mojambo ( 138 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Health Care, Politics, Republican Party at February 21st, 2012 - 8:30 am

First – there is a reason why Republicans seem doomed to losing presidential elections. While the country maybe center-right it is not hard right. “Put an aspirin between your knees” if you are a woman – is the type of brain fart that guarantees us the reelection of Obama. As one rapper said (paraphrasing) “I don’t want to be governed by a middle aged former pot head hippie, and I also do not want a Bible thumpin’ preacher either”.

by Michael D. Tanner

With his mandate that all employers, including religiously affiliated institutions such as Catholic hospitals and charities, provide workers with health insurance that covers contraceptives, President Obama handed Republicans a terrific opportunity to talk about the growing intrusiveness of government.

This is, after all, an administration that wants to dictate what foods we eat, what lightbulbs we use, what cars we drive, even how our toilets flush.

Yet Republicans are in the process of fumbling this opportunity away by turning what should be a discussion of government power into an argument about contraception.

For a long time, it was said that Democrats are terrified that somewhere someone is making money, and Republicans are terrified that someone somewhere is having fun. And with this issue — as so often seems the case when the subject turns to sex — Republicans seem determined to prove this stereotype true.

The most obvious case was the suggestion by Foster Friess, the biggest funder of Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s super PAC, that the best contraception was for women to put an aspirin between their knees. Friess now suggests that he was joking. Yet Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, among others, have joined in with this line of argument, suggesting that contraception was unnecessary if women just exercised “self-restraint.” Running through the Republican outrage over this issue has been a subcurrent that contraceptives are, in Santorum’s words, “a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

Setting aside the fact that even married women use contraceptives, why are Republicans using this issue to lecture us on morality?

The problem with the contraceptive mandate is not the contraceptive part — it’s the mandate. The new health-care law requires every employer with 50 or more employees to provide their workers with health insurance. It also requires every American who doesn’t receive health insurance through work or a government program to buy insurance themselves or face a fine.

[…..]

In this case, the benefit we are talking about is contraceptives, and it has sparked particular outrage because it will force religious institutions to pay, even indirectly, for a benefit that they find morally repugnant. But it is hardly the only benefit that the new health-care law mandates. Among other benefits, your policy must now include mental health benefits, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, prescription drugs, dental and vision care for children and a host of other services. You may not want those benefits, and they may make your insurance more expensive, but it is no longer your choice. The government will now decide for you. Your choice of deductibles and co-payments will also be restricted.

This debate has nothing to do with access to birth control. Contraceptives are legal. There is nothing that prevents any woman who wants contraceptives from purchasing them. Most insurance plans already do so, and when they don’t, women can purchase a rider that provides the additional coverage.

[…..]

This should provide Republicans with an opening to discuss the arrogance of a government that presumes to know better than we do how to run our lives. Yet too many Republicans seem to see this as an opportunity to tell us how they would run our lives instead. Both sides in this debate are contemptuous of our ability to make our own decisions.

Most Americans would prefer that the government simply leave us alone. They do not want the president to be our national employee benefits administrator, nor do they want him to be our preacher-in-chief.

Republicans need to learn the difference.

Read the rest – Misconception

Second – James Taranto introduces us to the other side of the argument and make a case that social issues are a winning, not a losing issue (courtesy of Jeffrey Bell). Obviously I do not completely agree with him but he does make some good points. I personally believe that Reagan won because Americans saw stagflation, our nation being pushed around by the mullahs and the U.S.S. R., and our refusal to admit to and acquiesce in the idea that America’s best days were behind it.

by James Taranto

If you’re a Republican in New York or another big city, you may be anxious or even terrified at the prospect that Rick Santorum, the supposedly unelectable social conservative, may win the GOP presidential nomination. Jeffrey Bell would like to set your mind at ease.

Social conservatism, Mr. Bell argues in his forthcoming book, “The Case for Polarized Politics,” has a winning track record for the GOP. “Social issues were nonexistent in the period 1932 to 1964,” he observes. “The Republican Party won two presidential elections out of nine, and they had the Congress for all of four years in that entire period. . . . When social issues came into the mix—I would date it from the 1968 election . . . the Republican Party won seven out of 11 presidential elections.”

The Democrats who won, including even Barack Obama in 2008, did not play up social liberalism in their campaigns. In 1992 Bill Clinton was a death-penalty advocate who promised to “end welfare as we know it” and make abortion “safe, legal and rare.” Social issues have come to the fore on the GOP side in two of the past six presidential elections—in 1988 (prison furloughs, the Pledge of Allegiance, the ACLU) and 2004 (same-sex marriage). “Those are the only two elections since Reagan where the Republican Party has won a popular majority,” Mr. Bell says. “It isn’t coincidental.”

Mr. Bell, 68, is an unlikely tribune for social conservatism. His main interest has always been economics. He was “an early supply-sider” who worked on Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns of 1976 and 1980 and Jack Kemp’s in 1988. In 1978 he ran an anti-tax campaign for the U.S. Senate in New Jersey, defeating Republican incumbent Clifford Case in the primary but losing to Democrat Bill Bradley.

Even now his day job is to advocate for the gold standard at the American Principles Project. But he’s been interested in social issues since the 1980s, when “it became increasingly clear to me . . . that social issues were beginning to be very important in comparison to economic issues,” in part because “Reaganomics worked so well that the Democrats . . . kind of retired the economic issues.”

In Mr. Bell’s telling, social conservatism is both relatively new and uniquely American, and it is a response to aggression, not an initiation of it. The left has had “its center of gravity in social issues” since the French Revolution, he says. “Yes, the left at that time, with people like Robespierre, was interested in overthrowing the monarchy and the French aristocracy. But they were even more vehemently in favor of bringing down institutions like the family and organized religion. In that regard, the left has never changed. . . . I think we’ve had a good illustration of it in the last month or so.”

He means the ObamaCare mandate that religious institutions must provide employee insurance for contraceptive services, including abortifacient drugs and sterilization procedures, even if doing so would violate their moral teachings. “You would think that once the economy started looking a little better, Obama would want to take a bow . . . but instead all of a sudden you have this contraception flap. From what I can find out about it, it wasn’t a miscalculation. They knew that the Catholic Church and other believers were going to push back against this thing. . . . They were determined to push it through, because it’s their irreplaceable ideological core. . . . The left keeps putting these issues into the mix, and they do it very deliberately, and I think they do it as a matter of principle.”

Another example: “In the lame-duck session of the last Congress, when the Democrats had their last [House] majority . . . what was their biggest priority? Well, they let the Bush tax cuts be renewed for another couple of years, but what they did get through was gays in the military. . . . It keeps coming back because it’s the agenda of the left. They’re not going to leave these issues alone.”

American social conservatism, Mr. Bell says, began in response to the sexual revolution, which since the 1960s has been “the biggest agenda item and the biggest success story of the left.” That was true in Western Europe and Japan too, but only in America did a socially conservative opposition arise.

The roots of social conservatism, he maintains, lie in the American Revolution. “Nature’s God is the only authority cited in the Declaration of Independence. . . . The usual [assumption] is, the U.S. has social conservatism because it’s more religious. . . . My feeling is that the very founding of the country is the natural law, which is God-given, but it isn’t particular to any one religion. . . . If you believe that rights are unalienable and that they come from God, the odds are that you’re a social conservative.”

The rise of the tea-party movement heartened many libertarian conservatives, who saw it as leading the Republican Party away from social conservatism. Mr. Bell acknowledges that the tea party is distinct from social conservatism, but he also argues that the two have the same intellectual and political roots:

“I think the tea party is an ally of social conservatism, because it also seems to go back to that idea in the Founding. . . . The tea party brings absolute values, normative values, to a whole set of issues where they really weren’t present, namely economics and the size of government.” Another commonality is that both arose in reaction to an aggressive left.

The populist nature of social conservatism perplexes liberals, who think less-affluent Americans ought to side with the party of statist economics. The libertarian social scientist Charles Murray presents a more sophisticated variant of the puzzle in his new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” Mr. Murray shows that upper-middle-class Americans lead far more conservative lives than the less affluent do, by such measures as marriage, illegitimacy, churchgoing and crime.

Yet Mr. Bell notes that social conservatism is largely a working-class phenomenon: “Middle America does have more children than elite America, and they vote socially conservative, even though they might not necessarily be behaving that way in their personal life. They may be overwhelmed by the sexual revolution and its cultural impacts.”

Mr. Bell squares that circle by arguing that social conservatism is “aspirational” and “driven by a sense in Middle America that the kind of cultural atmosphere we have, the kind of incentives, the example set by government, is something that has to be pushed back against.” Mr. Murray urges liberal elites to stop being nonjudgmental—to “preach what they practice.” To hear Mr. Bell tell it, they should listen instead.

Mr. Murray’s book focuses on whites so as to avoid both the confounding variables and the controversies around race. Mr. Bell, for his part, sees in social conservatism opportunities for the GOP to expand its appeal among minority communities. “Latino voters tend to be more socially conservative,” Mr. Bell says, noting that in 2008 they backed California’s Proposition 8, which overturned a state Supreme Court ruling establishing same-sex marriage, by 53% to 47%. Non-Hispanic whites narrowly opposed the measure.

[……]

Even without immediate gains among minority voters, Mr. Bell sees social issues as the path to a GOP majority in 2012. They account for the George W. Bush-era red-blue divide, which Mr. Bell says endures—and, he adds, red has the advantage: “There was one state in 2000 that Bush carried that I would say was socially left of center, and that was New Hampshire,” the only state that flipped to John Kerry four years later. “By 2004, every state—all 31 states that Bush carried—were socially conservative states.” Those states now have 292 electoral votes, with 270 sufficient for a majority.

By contrast, not all the Kerry states are socially liberal. “The swing vote in the Midwest is socially conservative and less conservative economically,” Mr. Bell says, so that “social conservatism is more likely to be helpful than economic conservatism.”

Among states that last voted Republican in 1988 or earlier, he classifies two, Michigan and Pennsylvania, as socially conservative, and two more, Minnesota and Wisconsin, as “mildly” so. That adds up to 35 states, with 348 electoral votes, in which social conservatism is an advantage. A socially liberal Republican nominee might win more votes in California and New York—places where the GOP has declined as the country has become more polarized—but his prospects of carrying either would still be minuscule.

[……]

Mr. Santorum is the most consistent and unapologetic social conservative in the race, but Mr. Bell rejects the common claim that he places too strong an emphasis on social issues: “I think that’s unfair to Santorum. He goes out of his way to say that he has an economic platform, he isn’t just about social issues.”

He notes that on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last weekend, host David Gregory opened his interview with the candidate by asking a series of questions about social issues, one of which he prefaced by saying that such issues “have come . . . to define your campaign.”

Mr. Santorum disputed the premise: “It’s not what’s defining my campaign. I would say that what’s defining my campaign is going out and talking about liberty, talking about economic growth, talking about getting manufacturing jobs back here to this country, trying to grow this economy to make sure that everybody in America can participate in it.”

This exchange, like many other Santorum interviews, can be seen as a synecdoche of the liberal-conservative social-issue dynamic Mr. Bell describes. To the extent that social issues have “come to define” Mr. Santorum’s campaign, it is in substantial part because liberal interviewers like Mr. Gregory have kept pushing them. If Mr. Bell is right, Mr. Santorum should end up benefiting politically, including in November if he is the nominee.

But t what about voters who don’t make a high priority of social issues, who aren’t unwilling to vote for a social conservative but might be put off by a candidate who is—or is made to appear—a moralistic busybody? “The key thing along that line is the issue of coercion,” Mr. Bell says. “Who is guilty of coercion? I happen to think it’s the left.” Mr. Obama and his supporters are “going to imply that Santorum wants to impose all the tenets of traditional morality on the American population. He doesn’t. He just doesn’t want the opposite imposed on Middle America.”

Read the rest – Social issues and the Santorum surge

Tags: James Taranto, Jeffrey Bell, Michael D. Tanner
Posted in Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Health Care, Politics, Republican Party | 138 Comments »

Professor Gingrich v. Professor Obama

by Mojambo ( 86 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Elections 2012, George W. Bush, The Political Right at December 14th, 2011 - 8:30 am

I am just going to quote James Taranto of www.opinionjournal.com

Republicans who favor Newt Gingrich over Mitt Romney are making a big mistake, New York Times conservative Ross Douthat argues in an extraordinarily interesting column. Support for Gingrich, Douthat argues, arises from “a desperate desire to somehow beat Barack Obama at his own game, and to explode what conservatives consider the great fantasy of the 2008 campaign–the conceit that Obama possessed an unmatched brilliance and an unprecedented eloquence.”

That is a mistake, Douthat argues, because everybody has already figured out that the emperor is unclad:

It isn’t 2008 anymore, and conservatives don’t actually need to explode the fantasy of Obama’s eloquence and omnicompetence. The harsh reality of governing has already done that for them. Nobody awaits the president’s speeches with panting anticipation these days, or expects him to slay his opponents with the power of his intellect. Obamamania peaked with the inauguration, and it’s been ebbing ever since.

[…]

Douthat, however, deserves some special credit. Given the eagerness of New York Times liberals to find ways of charging conservatives with racism, it takes some courage for a New York Times conservative to disparage the intellect of the first black president.

by Ross Douthat

IN 2004, the Democrats were furious at what they considered the fraud to end all frauds: the selling of George W. Bush as a decisive military leader and all-American tough guy. So they nominated John Kerry for the presidency, hoping that having a real combat veteran as their standard-bearer — a bemedaled war hero, no less, who began his convention speech by announcing that he was “reporting for duty” — would finally expose Bush as the tinhorn chicken hawk that liberals believed him to be.

The conventional wisdom holds that Mitt Romney is the John Kerry figure (a Northeastern flip-flopper with good hair) in the 2012 Republican primary field, with his various challengers auditioning to play the more exciting role of Howard Dean. But Newt Gingrich’s recent rise in the polls is being sustained, in part, by a right-wing version of exactly the impulse that led Democrats to nominate Kerry: a desperate desire to somehow beat Barack Obama at his own game, and to explode what conservatives consider the great fantasy of the 2008 campaign — the conceit that Obama possessed an unmatched brilliance and an unprecedented eloquence.

This fantasy ran wild four years ago. Obama is “probably the smartest guy ever to become president,” the presidential historian Michael Beschloss announced shortly after the November election. The then-candidate’s Philadelphia address on race and Jeremiah Wright was “as great a speech as ever given by a presidential candidate,” a group of progressive luminaries declared in The Nation. Obama’s “Dreams From My Father” is quite possibly “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician,” Time Magazine’s Joe Klein declared. “He is not the Word made flesh,” Ezra Klein wrote of Obama’s rhetoric in The American Prospect, “but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.”

It’s easy to see why this kind of myth-making would infuriate Obama’s opponents. And so ever since the 2008 election, the right has embraced a sweeping counternarrative, in which the president’s eloquence is a myth and his brilliance a pure invention. Take away his campaign razzle-dazzle and his media cheering section, this argument goes, and what remains is a droning pedant, out of his depth and tongue-tied without a teleprompter.

This is where Gingrich comes in. Just as Kerry’s candidacy represented an attempt to effectively out-patriot George W. Bush (“You have a war president? We have a war hero!”), the former speaker has skillfully played to the Republican desire for a candidate who can finally outsmart and out-orate Obama.

[…]

“How does a Columbia-Harvard graduate, who was the editor of the law review … supposedly the best orator in the Democratic Party,” Gingrich asked recently, “how does he look himself in the mirror and say he’s afraid to debate a West Georgia College professor?” It’s a line that evokes a kind of conservative revenge fantasy, in which the liberal elitists who sneered at George W. Bush’s malapropisms and Sarah Palin’s “you betchas” receive their richly deserved comeuppance at the hands of Newton Gingrich, Ph.D.

But a fantasy is all it is. The American Spectator’s Quin Hillyer calls it “the fallacy of the master debater” — the belief that elections turn on dramatic rhetorical confrontations, in which the smarter and better-spoken candidate exposes his rival as a tongue-tied boob.

In reality, Kerry outdebated Bush but did not outpoll him, Al Gore won the 2000 debates on points only to lose them on personality, and Abraham Lincoln lost the Illinois Senate race to Stephen Douglas. When a presidential debate does matter to a campaign’s outcome, it’s usually a passing one-liner (Ronald Reagan’s “there you go again” Walter Mondale’s “where’s the beef?”) rather than a Ciceronian performance that makes the difference.

[…]

Newt Gingrich might debate circles around Obama. He might implode spectacularly, making a hot mess of himself while the president keeps his famous cool. But either way, setting up a grand rhetorical showdown seems unlikely to supply a disillusioned country with what it’s looking for from Republicans in 2012.

Conservatives may want catharsis, but the rest of the public seems to mainly want reassurance. They already know Barack Obama isn’t the messiah he was once cracked up to be. What they don’t know is whether they can trust anyone else to do better.