Romney again? Really?

 

Not only handsome but a powerful big-government centrist.

New post up at Liberty Unyielding.  Enjoy!

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Crisis of politics: The opportunity in the storm

Each day brings new bad news about Obamacare.  Each day also brings another volley from one or both sides in the War Between the Republicans.  (See here, here, here, and here, if you must.)

This is silly.

A recap, to begin.  The Tea Party and limited-government folks are right that we are at a great crisis point in the life of the republic.  The “moderate” or “establishment” conservatives are right that there is a limit to what can be done at the moment within the constraints of law.

But two things really need doing.

A house divided: The GOP dialogue continues

I wrote a few days ago about the current division in the Republican Party, which is as profound as I can remember seeing it in my lifetime.  The dialogue on this isn’t going to end any time soon.  There’s a sense in which we would be shortsighted to want it to.  Some observations.

1.  Rush Limbaugh is right about the Tea Party and other limited-government conservatives.  They have been galvanized by the recent fight, not abashed.  The sense about Ted Cruz among limited-government conservatives may be best expressed by Lincoln’s famous exclamation

GOP: Polls and hinge points of history

What does it mean that recent polls show 7 in 10 respondents think Republicans are putting their agenda ahead of what’s good for the country, as opposed to the 5 in 10 respondents who think President Obama is doing the same?

The answer probably lies in an analysis of the ancillary question posed in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll: do respondents agree or not with the statement that the GOP or the president is “demonstrating strong leadership and standing up for what they [he] believe[s] in”?

For Republicans, only 27% of respondents agreed with that statement.  For Obama, 46% of them agreed.

On the face of it, that’s actually a contradictory assessment

A Republican Party like it’s 1996?

Super Tuesday on 6 March will reset the stage for the next act in the GOP nomination process.  It may be early days to draw comparisons, but it is worth noting one thing before Super Tuesday: the 2012 Republican primary season has, to date, looked more like that of 1996 than like any other from 1980 to the present.

A key feature 1996 and 2012 have in common is that, as of today’s date (4 March), the primary elections have delivered one outright win (50% or more of the vote) to any candidate.