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Charles Krauthammer says it has come down to Mitt v. Newt.
It’s Iowa minus 32 days, and barring yet another resurrection (or event of similar improbability), it’s Mitt Romney vs. Newt Gingrich. In a match race, here’s the scorecard:
Romney has managed to weather the debates unscathed. However, the brittleness he showed when confronted with the kind of informed follow-up questions that Bret Baier tossed his way Tuesday on Fox’s “Special Report” — the kind of scrutiny one doesn’t get in multiplayer debates — suggests that Romney may become increasingly vulnerable as the field narrows.
Moreover, Romney has profited from the temporary rise and spontaneous combustion of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain. No exertion required on Romney’s part.
Enter Gingrich, the current vessel for anti-Romney forces — and likely the final one. Gingrich’s obvious weakness is a history of flip-flops, zigzags and mind changes even more extensive than Romney’s — on climate change, the health-care mandate, cap-and-trade, Libya, the Ryan Medicare plan, etc.
The list is long. But what distinguishes Gingrich from Romney — and mitigates these heresies in the eyes of conservatives — is that he authored a historic conservative triumph: the 1994 Republican takeover of the House after 40 years of Democratic control.
Which means that Gingrich’s apostasies are seen as deviations from his conservative core — while Romney’s flip-flops are seen as deviations from .?.?. nothing. Romney has no signature achievement, legislation or manifesto that identifies him as a core conservative. …
Bill Kristol explains what we don’t know about the GOP race, and why it is good we don’t know.
… Confident pundits who treat the choice among them as an open-and-shut matter are behaving as .??.??. mere pundits. As are those who confidently proclaim which of the candidates is “most electable.” For example, right now, Romney seems a stronger general election candidate than Gingrich. That’s what most of the polling so far would suggest. But these polls don’t capture the implications of the last couple of weeks of the campaign, which suggest that Gingrich can make the case for himself to heretofore unconvinced voters in a way Romney cannot. Admittedly, these are mostly Republican voters Newt has been charming. Can he similarly win over independents, or disaffected Democrats?
We don’t know. We do suspect, however, that the mainstream media’s view—and conservative elites’ view—of who the swing voters are is somewhat distorted. Every journalist knows upper-middle-class, suburban, socially moderate independents on the East and West Coasts who (for now, at least) would be more likely to vote Republican if the nominee were Romney rather than Gingrich. Journalists do not tend to know the lower-middle-class, non-college-educated, churchgoing voters of exurban Tampa, or the working-class Reagan Democrats of Toledo, who are also swing voters, and who might prefer Gingrich. In any case, for now we don’t really know which of the two frontrunners—or, for that matter, which of the other candidates—would have a better chance to win. And that’s without factoring in possible third and fourth parties, which could well appear on the scene in 2012 and would have different kinds of appeal depending on the identity of the GOP nominee.
We do not know. But if it’s not given to us mere humans to know, we are capable of learning. We’re a month away from the Iowa caucus. There are three months before 90 percent of the Republicans in the nation begin voting, and even then, further information will be produced and processed as the primaries unfold. The Democrats are stuck with their nominee—a failed and unpopular president. Republicans, by contrast, are free to choose. They are in no way required to rush to judgment. And they need not defer to pundits whose “station, office, and dignity” impel them to claim to know what they do not know.
We need to spend some time on last week’s unemployment numbers. David Harsanyi is first.
… What would the unemployment rate look like if we had the same level of active workers as we did when the recession first struck? The American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis tweeted: “If labor force size was same as Oct., U-3 unemployment rate would be 8.9%; same as when Obama took office, 11%”. Eleven percent.
Apologies for my cynicism, but though the unemployment rate does not offer us the full story, politically speaking, it is an important political ingredient that could help President Obama — the man who helped turn a recession into a new state of normal – win a deeply undeserved second term for a couple of reasons:
1- Unemployment rates will decline and the economy will look a lot healthier than it actually is to many less- informed voters. Everyday Americans don’t have the time to parse unemployment statistics – they just want to see the right trajectory. In the end, though, none of the underlying fundamental problems have changed.
2- The more Americans drop out of the work force the more Americans will be tied to some form of government dependency, the lifeblood of progressive politics. We are already experiencing record number of citizens relying on government, and while progressives might find dependency moral and beneficial, it is a sure sign of an ailing nation. …
James Pethokoukis with seven reasons it is better, but still terrible.
1. The red flag here is the sharp drop in the size of the labor force versus October. The participation rate fell from an already low 64.2 percent to 64.0 percent. In a strong jobs recovery, that number should be rising as more people look for work. If the labor force participation rate were back at its January 2009 level, the U-3 rate would be 11.0 percent.
2. As it is, the broader U-6 rate — which includes part timers who wish they were full timers — is still a sky-high 15.6 percent, down from 16.2 percent last month.
3. The broadest measure of employment is the employment/population ratio and it rose to 58.5 percent from 58.4 percent. But as MKM Partners notes: “The employment/population ratio has averaged 58.4 since December 2009, meaning there has essentially been no real progress on employment in two years’ time. … In other words, we are not growing fast enough to reduce the so-called output gap/labor market slack.”
4. The workweek was flat, at 34.3 hours in November, but aggregate hours worked actually fell 0.1 percent after two months of relatively strong gains. (MKM)
Peter Wehner says the drop in labor force participation is disturbing.
On the surface, the new jobs report, which shows the unemployment rate dropping to 8.6 percent from 9.0 percent the previous month, is good news. Below the surface, however, the news is actually quite disturbing.
According to the Department of Labor, 120,000 jobs were created last month, which is an unusually low figure for what is supposed to be a recovery. But what really stands out about the DOL report is that 315,000 people dropped out of the labor market in November. To put it another way: The number of people dropping out of the labor force in November was more than two-and-a-half times as large as those joining the labor force. In fact, the labor participation rate fell to 64 percent from 64.2 percent in October – nearly matching the lowest figure we’ve seen (63.9 percent in July) since the early 1980s. The long-term unemployed (27 weeks or more) increased as well, even as the average hourly earnings went down. (Wages are up by only 1.8 percent over the past 12 months while overall inflation increased by 3.6 percent.)
What this means is that we’ve got a very weak labor market.
Often a decreasing unemployment rate is a sign of economic strength. In this case it’s a sign of economic weakness. And all the political spin in the world won’t change that.
Pethokoukis looks deeper at political implications.
Despite a sharp drop in the U-3 unemployment rate last month to 8.6 percent from 9.0 percent, there was no triumphalism coming from the Obama White House this morning. As economic adviser Alan Krueger wrote on the White House blog about the November employment numbers:
Today’s employment report provides further evidence that the economy is continuing to heal from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, but the pace of improvement is still not fast enough given the large job losses from the recession that began in December 2007. … The monthly employment and unemployment numbers are volatile and employment estimates are subject to substantial revision. Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.
Sobriety is certainly called for when the main reason the unemployment rate dropped so much was due to a shrinking labor force. And the broader U-6 rate, which includes part timers who wished they were full timers, is at a stomach-churning 15.6 percent. (Also recall that the unemployment rate during the last pre-Great Recession year averaged 4.6 percent.) But at least jobs are being created and the unemployment rate is falling.
So politically the November jobs report is a net plus for the Obama reelection effort. Or is it? …
Margaret Wente says suppression of debate is a disaster for climate science.
Environment Minister Peter Kent has done us all a favour by stating the obvious: Canada has no intention of signing on to a new Kyoto deal. So long as, the world’s biggest emitters want nothing to do with it, we’d be crazy if we did. Mr. Kent also refuses to be guilted out by climate reparations, a loony and unworkable scheme to extort hundreds of billions of dollars from rich countries and send it all to countries such as China. Such candour from Ottawa is a refreshing change from the usual hypocrisy, which began the moment Jean Chrétien committed Canada to the first Kyoto Protocol back in 1998.
Yet even though a global climate deal is now a fantasy, the rhetoric remains as overheated as ever. Without a deal, we’re told, the seas will rise, the glaciers will melt, the hurricanes will blow, the forest fires will rage and the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will do their awful work.
Or maybe not. As Roger Pielke Jr., one of the saner voices on the climate scene, points out, the hurricanes have failed to blow since Hurricane Wilma hit the Gulf Coast back in 2005. Despite the dire predictions of the experts, the U.S. has now experienced its longest period free of major hurricanes since 1906.