Scott Spiegel

Over the past few weeks, a controversy has been brewing between conservative commentators Ann Coulter and Mark Levin over the relative fitness of frontrunners Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination.

In her columns and TV appearances, Coulter has been stumping for Romney and stomping all over Gingrich.  On his syndicated radio talk show, Levin has been denouncing Romney as a non-conservative and bolstering Gingrich as a flawed but superior alternative.

The tiff echoes Coulter’s endorsement earlier this year of Chris Christie, before he insisted he wasn’t running, and Levin’s dismissal of Christie as a RINO.  In both cases, Levin has expressed contempt for the “Republican establishment” trying to decide the GOP nominee, though it would be hard to characterize Coulter as part of any establishment.

Coulter’s endorsement of Romney is a bit puzzling, when one recalls her animosity toward John McCain and her tongue-in-cheek threat to campaign for Hillary Clinton if McCain got the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.  Coulter argued then that Republicans do not win elections when they run moderate candidates, because such candidates appear ideologically weak against genuine leftists such as Obama.  On the contrary, because this is a center-right country, Republicans win when they run unapologetic conservatives such as Ronald Reagan, who offer a contrasting alternative to the Democratic candidate.

Coulter has reconciled this apparent contradiction by arguing that McCain was consistently moderate or center-left.  In contrast, Romney has flip-flopped and been inconsistent, but has switched from liberal to conservative positions.

Levin claims that Gingrich has a stronger track record as a conservative than Romney, including the former’s efforts to get the first Republican majority reelected in the House in 68 years and his implementation of welfare reform.  Levin warns that we can’t trust Romney to go to bat for conservative principles, given his spotty past.

I sympathize greatly with Levin’s frustration that we can’t seem to find a strong, consistent, articulate conservative this election cycle who’s willing to run, doesn’t have heavy personal or political baggage, and can maintain a double-digit showing in the polls.  I worry whether anyone we nominate—Romney, Gingrich, or someone else—will consistently stand up for conservative principles once president.

I’m no Romney fan, and I empathize with those who claim his major virtue is his electability.  However, the more I think about Coulter’s argument—or rather, my take on it—the more I think she’s right, but with one major caveat.

As Coulter explained to Sean Hannity recently, the most important thing we need our next president to do—among the many Democratic messes that have to be cleaned up—is to repeal ObamaCare.  The GOP can’t get rid of ObamaCare without a Republican president, unless they have a supermajority in the Senate, a majority in the House, and no Republican defectors.  None of this is guaranteed.  A Senate supermajority will be especially difficult to achieve, perhaps even more so than putting a Republican in the White House.

As Coulter noted, ObamaCare must be repealed as soon as the 113^th Congress and the 45^th president are sworn in.  One of the many compromises/blunders Congressional Democrats made in order to ram ObamaCare through was pacifying voters with a phony claim that the bill would save money over the next 10 years; they did so by having ObamaCare taxes kick in starting in 2010 but most benefits not begin until 2014.  This gave the GOP a leg up in getting the bill repealed—but it gave them only so much time.  Coulter predicts that once people start collecting their “treats” and federal insurance starts crowding out the private market, the bill will never be repealed.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments for and against the ObamaCare individual mandate in March; however, it is not certain that the court will find the provision unconstitutional, or that Congressional Democrats won’t find some way around the ruling.

Thus, if the most important thing for the next president to do is to repeal ObamaCare, then I would paraphrase William F. Buckley, Jr. and recommend that we vote for the most electable Republican who will repeal ObamaCare.  Assuming that all seven contenders would repeal it—and all have credibly pledged to do so—and that Romney is the most electable candidate, this suggests we go with Romney.  Other issues are important—but not as important as repealing ObamaCare.

The situation recalls moderate Republican Scott Brown’s battle against Democrat Martha Coakley for the late Senator Ted Kennedy’s seat in November 2009.  Brown’s win in liberal Massachusetts, and his swearing in as the 41^st GOP Senator—the one needed to block Democrats’ supermajority—was seen as a referendum on ObamaCare, because Brown had sworn to vote against the House’s version of the bill.  (Democrats cheated by using budget reconciliation to meld the Senate and House bills, but that’s another story.)

Brown ran on a platform of promising to vote against ObamaCare.  As I wrote at the time, Senator Brown could propose “a bill using Medicare funds to subsidize partial-birth abortions for illegal Islamist immigrant tax cheats with Al-Qaeda ties, and he would still be Republicans’ hero for having voted down the health care bill.”

Similarly, Romney could be squishy on all kinds of issues, and conservatives would still be grateful—as long as he repeals ObamaCare.

But here’s the caveat: Is Romney in fact the most electable Republican?  Will RomneyCare, and the fact that Obama cited it as a model for ObamaCare, do him in?  Will Romney be more electable than Gingrich, who formerly supported the individual mandate on a national level?

For those who find some issue other than ObamaCare more important, or are willing to risk not having it repealed for the satisfaction of running a preferable but less electable candidate, my arguments won’t be persuasive.

But for those who think that the #1 priority of the next president should be undoing ObamaCare, Romney’s electability is the pressing unknown that must be discovered.



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Here’s a fun fact regarding President Obama’s Saturday announcement that the U.S. would finally be getting around to joining the international coalition to use military force against Libya’s Colonel Moammar Qaddafi in retaliation for his having unleashed government firepower against rebels.  Guess how many times Obama used any of the following words in his speech: victory, victorious, win, winning, defeat, right, just, moral, triumph, success, good, evil.  (Hint: it’s the same number of controversial NCAA Final Four picks he made last week.)  That’s right—0!

In contrast, he managed to squeeze in all of these words and phrases: international (10 uses), allies (6), partners (6), community (5), United Nations (3), not acting alone (3), coalition (2), league (2), council (2), coordinate (2), agree, join, meet, part, and union.

With so little emphasis on what we’re actually doing in Libya, how we’re going to do it, and with what expected results, an alien visiting Earth might be forgiven for wondering why we need to engage in so much coalition-building to do it.

What kind of corporation launching a new product deemphasizes: the product, the technology required to develop it, the need for it in the market, and the projected sales; yet fills up their business plan with reams of details on which contractors they’re going to generously give business to, which stores they’re going to offer their product to, which companies’ toes they’re going to avoid stepping on, and which corporations they might someday merge with?

The message Obama has been sending the world is: we’re not necessarily going to do anything about Libya, and we’re definitely not going to take the lead on it, but if there are lots of others of you who are going to do something, then we’re right there with you.

There are good arguments for and against bombing Libya; a sane case can be made either way.  A surprising number of liberals have come out in favor (Hillary Clinton, John Kerry); a surprising number of conservatives have come out against (Andrew McCarthy, Haley Barbour).

I happen to favor air strikes, though not without being able to see the other side’s point.  The idea that we should butt out of Libya, Egypt, Iran, etc. is premised on the notion that no matter what we do, Middle Eastern dictators will be replaced by worse dictators of the hard-line Islamic variety.  I reject this idea, and I don’t care about the warning the do-nothing crowd has offered that radical Islamist groups favor removing these tyrants.  Just because those groups support toppling Ahmadinejad, Mubarak, and Qaddafi doesn’t mean we can’t support it, but for different reasons.  They support it because it’s their best chance to install Islamic leaders; we support it because it’s our best chance to install pro-liberty leaders.  The choice isn’t “Do nothing” or “Topple the dictator and let the chips fall where they may”—the missing alternative is “Topple the dictator, and make sure someone better gets in there.”

That said, if I were Leader of the Free World, I think I would have circulated an inkling to the globe what my position was one way or another, pretty early on, before any action were too late.

Instead, Obama has given the impression that he wanted to find out what the cool kids were doing so he could join them and be part of the crowd.

It wouldn’t be so bad if we could believe that Obama has been seriously, meticulously scrutinizing the situation in Libya, weighing his options, not committing until the exact right time.  (It wouldn’t be so bad, in other words, if Obama hadn’t been spending his time playing golf, announcing his bracket picks, and practicing his Brazilian Portuguese.)  But given his talk during the 2008 campaign about the necessity of international consensus and the arrogance of acting alone, odds are he was waiting until a critical mass of world players signed on before sticking his scrawny neck out.

There are three possibilities that explain Obama’s dithering on Libya, none reassuring.  First: he had no idea what to do, was being pushed back and forth by pro- and anti-invasion camps in his administration, and simply went with the international consensus once it coalesced.  Second: he favored invasion, but didn’t want to take action until there was international support.  Third, and most disturbing: he didn’t favor invasion, but decided to go with that option once the world’s players came out for it.

Given Obama’s hemming and hawing on Afghanistan, whereby private accounts suggest he didn’t want to initiate a troop surge in 2009 but did so anyway, and given his indirect ties to Qaddafi via Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan, I fear the third possibility most likely.

Behold a president who acts, not because he believes the United States has a unique historical and moral standing in the world and should take the lead on rectifying injustice, and possibly not even because he thinks it’s the right thing to do, but because… everyone else is doing it.



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Weighing in on the controversy surrounding the Senate Majority Leader’s racially insensitive remarks about candidate Barack Obama, Kanye West declared at a recent benefit for Haitian earthquake victims, “Harry Reid doesn’t care about dark-skinned black people with Negro dialects!”

According to Harry Reid’s electability criteria for black Democratic candidates—“light-skinned” with “no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one”—I notice that the following are all A-grade presidential material: Hillary “I Don’t Feel No Ways Tired” Clinton, Rod “I’m Blacker than Barack Obama” Blagojevich, and Bill “Our First Black President” Clinton.

On the taboo list are Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Marion Barry.

Also forbidden because of their complexion are dark-skinned black Republicans Clarence Thomas, J. C. Watts, and Alan Keyes.

Democrats’ response to Reid’s outrageous remarks, which were revealed in John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s new book “Game Change,” was to get angry at… Trent Lott.

Last week my column “Liberal Syntax: A Noun, a Verb, and a Bush Smear” offered a rule that characterizes liberals’ defense of their mishandling of national security and the economy.  For more general purposes, such as their defense of Reid’s remarks, I propose replacing “Bush” with “Republican.”

Since they brought up Lott’s comment, let’s drag it out into the light again and hold it up next to Reid’s sentiments.  Lott: “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him.  We’re proud of it.  And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either.”

For starters, compared to Lott’s words, Reid’s comments were explicit and vulgar and revealed a race-obsessed mindset.  They bring to mind, not Lott’s tribute to a fellow Southerner and half-century veteran of the Senate who was practically on his deathbed, but rather Joe Biden’s condescending statement that Obama “is articulate and bright and clean” and Bill Clinton’s dismissive remark to Ted Kennedy about Obama that “a few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”  In contrast, Lott’s comment, which echoed a remark he had made in 1980 comparing Reagan and Thurmond’s small-government, fiscally responsible views, requires several questionable levels of inference before you can jump to the conclusion that Lott was endorsing a segregationist Republican platform in 2002.

Reid’s motivation for his comments about Obama was to use race to cynically calculate, for political purposes, the electability by the Democratic base of token black candidates under consideration.  Similarly, other Democrats regularly exploit blacks to get their votes, as in Hillary “Nobody Told Me That The Road Would Be Easy” Clinton’s feverish recitation of spirituals (in a Negro dialect) in black churches.  Lott’s motivation was to find something nice to say about the life work of a senator on the occasion of his retirement and 100th birthday.

This is how it always works: a Republican says something that is milder or no worse than something a Democrat says—but, due to a combination of Republicans’ sense of honor (or lack of fortitude, depending on your perspective) and Democrats’ vicious persistence, the Republican is out, and the Democrat is in.  Democrats never come to the Republican’s defense, but Republicans frequently come to the Democrat’s defense—as many have with Reid—in an attempt to be fair, a favor that is never returned.  That’s the pattern—Democrats have no honor, Republicans aren’t vicious, so Democrats get to stay and Republicans have to go.  This is then seen as evidence by the media—and biased historians with no sense of context—that the Republican was guilty after all and the Democrat did nothing wrong.

The larger issue is not whether Reid is a racist.  The issue is whether Democratic leaders have historically manipulated African Americans for political gain, offering them freebies and using their “dialect” and pretending to stand for their interests, while privately looking down on them as a dependent, infantile interest group to be pandered to.

As succinctly affirmed by Allen West, black Republican candidate for the House in 2010 from Florida, “Reid’s comments [are] indicative of the true sentiment elitist liberals have toward black Americans.  The history of the Democrat party is one of slavery, secession, segregation, and now socialism, born from the Johnson Great Society programs that have castigated blacks as victims…  I would rather be called ‘an Uncle Tom and a sellout’ than lose my self-esteem and be considered an inferior by liberals…  I am not just some articulate, clean, well spoken Negro…  [I] shall never submit to the collective progressive ideal of inferiority.”

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