AMERICAN FUTURE

If you’d told me that I would someday agree with Coulter on anything — anything! — I would have told you that you were out of your mind.

But it’s happened. She prefers Romney to Gingrich. So do I.

Here’s some choice excerpts from her column at townhall.com:

To talk with Gingrich supporters is to enter a world where words have no meaning. They denounce Mitt Romney as a candidate being pushed on them by “the Establishment” — with “the Establishment” defined as anyone who supports Romney or doesn’t support Newt.

Newtons claim Romney is a “moderate,” and Gingrich the true conservative — a feat that can be accomplished only by refusing to believe anything Romney says … and also refusing to believe anything Gingrich says.

. . . without the federal government, Gingrich would be penniless. He has been in Washington since the ’70s, first as a congressman, then becoming a rich man on the basis of having been a congressman. Most egregiously, he took $1.6 million to shill for Freddie Mac, one of the two institutions directly responsible for the housing crash that caused the financial collapse. (Or one of three, if you consider Barney Frank an institution.)

To act as if Obamacare is the same thing as “Romneycare” is just a word game, on the order of acting like a “gun” has the same properties as a “gunny sack,” or “fire” is the same thing as a “firefly” . . . For those of you who still think Romneycare is the worst possible sin a Republican candidate could commit — even worse than taking money from Freddie Mac as it destroyed the economy — that doesn’t help Gingrich: He supported Romneycare . . .

Now here’s something (among many other things) I didn’t know and that might be useful to Obama’s re-election campaign: “the nation’s leading conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, helped draft Romneycare. Indeed, Bob Moffit, Heritage’s senior fellow on health care issues, can be seen in the picture of the bill-signing ceremony, standing proudly behind Romney.”

Child of the sixties that I am, my reactions to this revelation (at least for me) are can-you-dig-it and far-out.

More from Coulter on Gingrich and Romneycare:

But Gingrich did more than support Romneycare. As former senator Rick Santorum has pointed out, Gingrich supported a FEDERAL individual mandate to purchase health insurance from 1993 until five minutes ago — i.e., at least until a “Meet the Press” appearance just last May.

She sums things up this way:

In a world where words have meaning, Mitt Romney is not the “moderate” in this race. He is the most conservative candidate still standing, with the possible exception of Rick Santorum, who is bad on illegal immigration . . .

Romney is “moderate” only in demeanor — which is just another word game. His positions are more conservative than Gingrich’s, but he doesn’t scare people like Gingrich does. Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms were moderate in demeanor, too. No one would call them political moderates.

Romney is the most electable candidate not only because it will be nearly impossible for the media to demonize this self-made Mormon square, devoted to his wife and church, but precisely because he is the most conservative candidate.

Conservatism is an electable quality. Hotheaded arrogance is neither conservative nor attractive to voters.

Ann, I agree: if we’re to have a Republican president, let it be Mitt, not Newt.

Is this the kiss of death for Gingrich? Could be.

Any comment by me would be superfluous.

Well (as Ronald Reagan said on numerous occasions), it’s time for this blog to start focusing on American politics — a subject I’ve come close to ignoring since I started posting last June.

I’ll start with “Incoherent party, incoherent candidates” from the Economist, which hits the mark:

REPUBLICANS are clearly not too enthused about Mitt Romney. Nor are they wild for any of the alternatives . . .

Mitt Romney looks like a weak phony in this election campaign because he has to pretend to believe with all his heart in orthodox tea-party conservative positions that he transparently doesn’t really believe in. We know this because in the past, Mr Romney supported health-care reform including an individual mandate along the lines of the system he instituted in Massachusetts, essentially the same system as Obamacare. And in the past, he supported a cap-and-trade system for limiting greenhouse-gas emissions to address climate change. But at the time, both of those were orthodox Republican Party positions . . . There were very few established Republican politicians who hadn’t taken positions in the George W. Bush era (or the Newt Gingrich era!) that pose ideological problems for them in the tea-party era . . .

Republicans’ disenchantment with their current presidential candidates is not an incidental characteristic of this crop of candidates. It’s a structural feature of a contemporary Republican Party whose pieces don’t hang together. Pro-Iraq-war neoconservative Republicans cannot actually live with Ron Paul Republicans. Wall Street-hating anti-bail-out Republicans cannot actually live with Wall Street-working bail-out-receiving Republicans. Evangelical-conservative Republicans cannot actually live with libertarian, socially liberal Republicans. Deficit-slashing Republicans cannot live with tax-slashing Republicans. Medicare-cutting Republicans cannot live with Medicare-defending Republicans. These factions have been glued together over the past three years by the intensity of their partisan hatred for Barack Obama, and all of the underlying resentments that antipathy masks. Republicans have buried their differences by assaulting everything Mr Obama supports, and because Mr Obama is a pretty middle-of-the-road politician, that includes a whole lot of things that many Republicans used to support. They are disenchanted with their candidates because their candidates are incoherent, but their candidates are incoherent because the base is incoherent. If the GOP wins this election, the party’s leaders are going to be confronted with that incoherence pretty quickly.

The next time you hear Newt trashing Fannie and Freddie, consider what he had to say about Government Sponsored Enterprises in April 2007, at which time the housing meltdown was already underway:

Certainly there is a lot of debate today about the housing GSEs, but I think it is telling that there is strong bipartisan support for maintaining the GSE model in housing. There is not much support for the idea of removing the GSE charters from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. And I think it’s clear why. The housing GSEs have made an important contribution to homeownership and the housing finance system. We have a much more liquid and stable housing finance system than we would have without the GSEs. And making homeownership more accessible and affordable is a policy goal I believe conservatives should embrace. Millions of people have entered the middle class through building wealth in their homes, and there is a lot of evidence that homeownership contributes to stable families and communities. These are results I think conservatives should embrace and want to extend as widely as possible. So while we need to improve the regulation of the GSEs, I would be very cautious about fundamentally changing their role or the model itself.

But when questioned during the November 9 Republican debate about his ties to Freddie, he said:

I offered them advice on precisely what they didn’t do. I have never done any lobbying, every contract that was written during the period when I was out of the office specifically said I would do no lobbying, and I offered advice. And my advice as a historian…I said to them at the time: This is a bubble. This is insane. This is impossible.

And a statement from his campaign said:

Gingrich advised that a business model that involved lending money to people with bad credit and no money down was unsustainable and a bubble, and that it was dangerous to buy securities made up of these mortgages.

Multiple choice question:

1. Gingrich liked GSEs before he disliked GSEs.
2. Gingrich disliked GSEs before he liked GSEs.
3. All of the above.