One chart says it all. As flawed as Mitt Romney is, can the GOP really afford a candidate with these favorability ratings?

A few days ago, I wrote that Romney and Gingrich seemed like equally weak candidates. But I think I underestimated how much people hate Gingrich. Romney’s history at Bain Capital is bad, but Gingrich is basically unelectable.

Ladies and gentlemen, things are about to get awesome. Two already horrible candidates are about to beat the tar out of each other until neither one has the slightest chance against Barack Obama.

The conventional wisdom is that in 2008, the long battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton ultimately helped Obama become a stronger candidate. I have sad news for the Republicans — the same thing is not happening in the Republican primary. 

First of all, the 2008 Democratic primary built enormous amounts of excitement because it pitted candidates against each other who would not only make history, but were spectacular candidates. The Republicans can’t say the same; both Gingrich and Romney are fatally flawed. In fact, the primary has been characterized by extreme dissatisfaction with the available options.

Read More

Both congratulations and condolences are in order for Mitt Romney. Congratulations, Governor Romney, for being close to wrapping up the Republican primary earlier than anyone has in decades! And my condolences for how badly your rivals have undermined the central message of your general election campaign.

We’ve seen something shocking in the last week in the Republican primary. It’s natural that Mitt Romney’s opponents have attacked him hard. What’s surprising is the way they’ve done it. They have repeatedly attacked Romney’s history as a hedge fund manager, and his contention that his experience makes him qualified to turn the economy around. In fact, they’ve gone even farther than that, attacking what until a month ago was right-wing orthodoxy on economic policy.

Greg Sargent put it well:

This general election will turn heavily on a battle over the two candidates’ visions of capitalism and the proper role of government in regulating it. Yet the leading GOP candidates are on record arguing that Romney’s practice of it — which he regularly cites as proof of his ability to create jobs, as a generally constructive force and even as synonymous with the American way — is not really capitalism at all, but a destructive, profit-driven perversion of it. Thanks to them, this is no longer a left-wing argument.

In fact, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry may be the most effective spokesmen for the Occupy Wall Street message. In their hands, it has morphed from a radical left-wing argument into a bipartisan principle.

So thanks, Rep. Gingrich and Gov. Perry! And sorry your election just got so much more difficult, Gov. Romney.

For decades now, the tax rate for the richest Americans has been on the decline. As a result, they’ve been pulling in a larger and larger share of the nation’s after-tax income. In fact, they’re now taking all of the gains from our economic growth, and it’s killing our economy.

Newt Gingrich, though, thinks we need to give them even more. Here’s his plan to give an enormous tax cut for the rich:

People earning more than $1 million a year would receive an average tax cut of $613,689 in 2015, compared with what they pay now. That change would boost their after-tax income by 28.7 percent and put their average tax rate at 11.9 percent. [Bloomberg, via Think Progress, emphasis added]

How would he pay for this? I’m sure he’ll just ask the rest of us to pay for it by giving up things like Medicare and Social Security.

The Republican primary just keeps on giving, and I have a feeling Newt Gingrich is going to be an enormous asset for the Democrats. In just a few weeks as the new frontrunner, he’s managed to force Mitt Romney into a position that Democrats have been dreaming of for months.

We all know that Mitt Romney will take any position on any issue if it will get him elected. But in trying to go on the offensive against Gingrich, he just made a colossal mistake, and you can be sure the Democrats won’t let him flip-flop on this. Romney just said he would sign Paul Ryan’s plan to end Medicare. You know, the one 80 percent of voters disapprove of.

Frankly, I think this is all most Americans will need to know about Mitt Romney in a general election. He’s done.

Of course, it may turn out that Gingrich actually defeats Romney and gets the nomination himself, in which case this doesn’t help us. But Newt Gingrich as the GOP candidate would be a train wreck as well. However it plays out, Obama’s re-election chances just improved dramatically.

Newt Gingrich is the latest “flavor of the month” in the GOP primary. He has taken the lead, both in national polls and a new poll in Iowa. He should receive a further boost with Herman Cain’s endorsement today.

But while Gingrich is the latest in the rotating cast of not-Romney candidates, he’s likely to be the last and strongest, for a few reasons:

1. Gingrich has been slowly and methodically building his support for months.
2. With Herman Cain’s exit, the not-Romneys will be splitting their support among fewer candidates.
3. There’s likely no time left for a different flavor of the month before the Iowa caucuses.

In one sense, that’s a good thing for the Republicans. In particular, he’s a much better fit for the party. He’s far more conservative — and consistently so — than Romney. More importantly, he’s been one of the Republicans’ primary thought leaders for the past two decades.

That said, a Gingrich candidacy would be a major gift for Obama and the Democrats. Here are just a few reasons:

Read More

It turns out that gay marriage is responsible for our continuing economic woes. At least, that’s what Newt Gingrich says. Do you find that hard to understand? It might help to follow along with Gingrich’s spectacular reasoning:

HOST: We’re becoming increasingly secular, the family is under attack and economically we’re experiencing woes like we’ve never known in our history it seems. So what is the connection here?…

GINGRICH: You have to recognize that free enterprise is based on free people and … free people are based on faith. The very basis of our belief and freedom is that we believe we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. The very source of our strength is that we believe these are truths – not theories, not ideologies, not gimmicks, not political consultants, powerpoints – truths, and so there’s a core absolute overlap between free enterprise, freedom and freedom of faith. And if you don’t have freedom of faith in the end you’re not going to have free enterprise because there’s no moral force that defends and protects you.

This may seem like incoherent blather, but it’s actually a good example of how the right wing thinks about the economy. Their economic theories are mostly faith-based. For example, they believe that if we appease the almighty Rich, the Rich will bestow Jobs upon us. Connecting their economic magical thinking with their views on social policy might seem absurd, but what’s one more leap of faith?

I’m not sure if you noticed, but Republicans really hate Barack Obama. So much so that their sole criterion for determining where they stand on the issues is to just oppose anything and everything Obama does. Health reform was a great example. Obama and the Democrats passed a Republican plan, but the Republicans went nuts anyway.

But Newt Gingrich brought the policy of knee-jerk opposition to its absurd zenith yesterday. In the span of 16 days, he completely changed his position on Libya:

Read More