Newt Trumprich

Donald Trump will be moderating a GOP debate on December 27th, and already, Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul have stated that they will not be attending.  Trump had a conference call with the media this afternoon about that subject and what resulted was comedy gold:

In response to Jon Huntsman’s critique, Trump said, “Well, he could use a little show business to get his ratings up, because his poll numbers are terrible … he has no chance whatsoever of getting the nomination, so it’s actually a good thing if he’s not there.”

Trump said that Ron Paul, who is not attending the Trump debate, has “zero chance” of becoming the GOP nominee. “I wonder how he would do in the private sector. He probably wouldn’t have made ten cents,” Trump remarked.

In response to Karl Rove’s criticism on Fox this morning that Trump, who is considering an independent presidential run, shouldn’t be moderating a GOP debate, Trump blasted Rove as responsible for the GOP’s woes in recent years.

“I don’t think that Karl Rove is a smart person. I think he’s highly overrated.  … He’s a man who’s only after Karl Rove,” Trump said, adding that Rove was “part of the problem with the Republican party.”

Even though Huntsman and Paul are probably right not to attend, Trump got off some of the funniest lines yet this election season.  The most interesting part though was what Trump said about Newt Gingrich, with whom he had just met before the conference call:

 “Newt Gingrich just left my office,” Trump said. “He’s a very smart man. He thought it was great. And one of the things he says was because we’ll get tremendous ratings. I happen to get great ratings, okay, if you’ve noticed.”

The great humility shown in that statement curiously mirrored another, less notable one that occurred about a year ago.  When Michael Barone asked Gingrich about the possibilities of him running for president, Newt turned to him and said, “Why wouldn’t I?”  It is striking the ways that Newt and Trump are alike...

Romney's Interview

Also, in case you missed it, below is the video of Romney's now-famous interview with Bret Baier that occurred earlier this week.

  I think Scott Johnson from Powerline sums it up perfectly:

It is an unimpressive performance. Baier conducts himself in a perfectly professional manner. When challenged with predictable questions by Baier, Romney is by turns discombobulated and even petulant (great line: “We’re going to have to be better informed about my views on issues”) before he recovers his footing toward the end of the interview.

Mitt Romney: Managerial Progressive

In a blistering post, Paul Rahe, Professor of History at Hillsdale College, finds Mitt Romney to be a managerial progressive, who is a adept at changing his political positions and sees that the major problems as he sees them are to be solved by government at the expense of securing the individual rights of the governed.  Here is more:

[Romney] has virtues. He is managerial and not a utopian progressive.  If elected, he will for a time be mindful of the commitments he has made. He will fight for the repeal of Obamacare, for, If he does not do so, he will be toast, and he knows it. He will also work hard to put our fiscal house in order, for he really does believe in managerial competence, but I would not rule out tax increases. After all, he agrees with Barack Obama that those who take in more than $200,000 a year should pay more than they do now. If there are any openings on the Supreme Court in his first couple of years in office, Romney will probably nominate conservatives. But, after the midterm elections in 2014, all bets are off. Managerial progressives see elections as problems to be solved. They re-tailor their positions to the tastes of the electorate they expect to face (at least, as they understand that electorate).

Even more problematic is Romney's lack of clarity on first principles, especially at a time when the public mind is turning against liberalism and open more than ever to the conservative argument:

Even more to the point, Romney is not going to make the conservative argument – and that matters enormously. When Lincoln said, “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed,” he spoke the truth. In my lifetime, there has never been a moment when the American public was more open to the conservative argument than it is now. Barack Obama, his “stimulus” bill, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank have given liberalism a very bad name. This could be the turning of the tide. It could be the moment in which we begin to pare away at the administrative entitlements state. But that can only happen if we win the argument over its legitimacy. And if we do not make that argument, we certainly cannot win it. Nothing that Romney has said in any of his speeches to date or in any of the debates suggests that he believes that there is anything fundamentally wrong with the administrative entitlements state. It needs a bit of tweaking here and there. Expenditures and revenues must be brought into balance. But it is in principle sound. That is what he believes. That is the position he will espouse.

The reason why Lincoln is the greatest president is that during the greatest struggle the country has ever faced, he returned time and time again to the natural rights and natural right principles of the Founders.  He began the process of recovering the public mind, which at the time was slowly drugging itself with theories of secession and slavery as a positive good.  He knew the only way to argue against the evils of slavery was to base his argument on principles that are universal in scope, principles that existed before the creation of any government.  Lincoln could never explain the wrong of slavery if he based his argument upon the opinion of the majority.  He could never explain that wrong if he based his argument on possible "inefficiencies" that slavery posed (in fact, slavery prospered because of the invention of efficient machines such as the cotton gin).  He had to go to the root of the problem.  He had to explain why it was wrong for anyone to enslave anyone else without that man's consent.  To do this is to go to the level of principle, something which Romney will not do publicly or otherwise, because if he were to do that, he would have to explain the wrong in principle created by Romneycare in Massachusetts--a wrong that is present no matter if it were confined within a single state or the policy of the federal government.

I will leave with this:  it is important to remember that Rahe's critique, however, does not apply just to Romney:  it can be aimed at most the presidents who served during the twentieth century. 

Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln

Two-time academy award winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis was recently photographed in a restaurant in Richmond, Virginia looking rather much like our 16th President.  He is currently filming Steven Spielberg's Lincoln which is based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals.  I am most definitely looking foward to this movie, mostly due to seeing Day-Lewis's performance as Lincoln (if any actor today could do it, it is him). 

Churchill on America

Yesterday was Winston Churchill's birthday and in commemoration of the event, the Claremont Institute featured essays from their archives on the great man.  Steven Hayward's review of Sir Martin Gilbert's book, Churchill and America, was among the essays unearthed.  It is particularly relevant considering the current president's disdain for any talk touching on American exceptionalism.  Churchill championed American exceptionalism and "was one of the few foreign statesmen of the last century who embraced American exceptionalism and understood its importance for the world."  Here is more on Churchill:

Churchill's appreciation of American exceptionalism was arguably hereditary; he was half-American ("half-alien and wholly reprehensible," his critics liked to say). "What an extraordinary people the Americans are!" he wrote to his American mother during his first stateside visit in 1895 at age 21. Beyond America's democratic character, Churchill came to believe in what we call the American Dream. As he told Harry Truman en route to Fulton, Missouri in 1946, "If I were to be born again, there is one country in which I would want to be a citizen. There is one country where a man knows he has an unbounded future—the USA."

Churchill's thoughts on the Constitution and the principles of the Declaration of Independence are very  interesting and are worth close study.  Here is Churchill from a speech given on the 4th of July, 1918:

The Declaration of Independence is not only an American document. It follows on the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights as the third great title-deed on which the liberties of the English-speaking peoples are founded.... The political conceptions embodied in the Declaration of Independence are the same as those expressed at that time by Lord Chatham and Mr. Burke and handed down to them by John Hampden and Algernon Sidney. They spring from the same source; they come from the same well of practical truth....

As Hayward notes, this statement is good as far as it goes but the Declaration wasn't just a document for Englishman; it was a document for all men, regardless of tradition and geographic location.  Churchill may very well have believed that to be true, and his appreciation for the political science of the Federalist certainly gives credence to this view (Harry Jaffa recently recalled when, sometime in the late 1920s, Churchill was given a copy of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics by his friend, Lord Birkenhead.  He returned it some weeks later saying that it was all very good but that he already had thought most of it out for himself.  It is one more reason not to underestimate the man and that we always try to understand someone as they understood themselves.).

Churchill was one of America's great champions.  I certainly hope that the next person to take the White House continues on that tradition.

What Makes Us One People

In today's Letter from an Ohio Farmer, the Farmer talks about what makes us one people, in the sense as it was understood by the Founders when they appealed to the authority of the "one People" in the opening sentence of the Declaration of Independence and the "People" in the Preamble of the Constitution.  Here is the Farmer on what unites us: 

As I recalled in a previous letter, Thomas Jefferson once described the Declaration of Independence as an "expression of the American mind." He didn't say the American "heart" or even the American "character"—but the American mind. That’s important. Our heart feels emotion; character is made up of habits and dispositions. But the mind holds our ideas and principles—the ideas and principles that shape our characters and govern our emotions and lead us to choose to live as we do. That is what unites Americans at the deepest level, binds us together as "one People," and makes us the distinctive people we are.

Americans do certainly have important emotions and habits in common. We are famous for loving our country, for example, in a way that strikes some other people as too exuberant. And we are known to be habitually optimistic: for an American, the glass is almost always half full. But those sentiments and attitudes are the products of the ruling principles that united us in 1776 and still do today. We love our country because it stands for freedom. We are optimistic because freedom makes us think that we can do anything we set our minds to.

As Lincoln showed us, we could not simply narrow the principles enunciated in the Declaration to apply only to Englishman and English speaking peoples; that would render the principles of the Declaration nothing more than statements of custom and tradition and make it no permanent standard by which to judge anything true of false, right or wrong.  What makes us one people is our adherence to these principles, no matter our race, gender, or religion.

Evil Still Exists

Over at Ricochet, Mollie Hemingway offers up an important point that tends to be purposely glided over today:  evil still does exist.  The media seems to have a propensity to call anyone who does anything that used to be regarded as an evil act as insane; this is especially true in the case of the Norway mass murdered Anders Breivick.  In Breivick's case, however, the worst charge the media could level against him was that he was a "Christian" (Ann Coulter promptly destroyed this argument here).  Here is more on the important distinction between evil and insanity:

I've noticed how quickly reporters try to claim that any terrorist is mentally imbalanced or alienated. In a world where everyone is diagnosed as mentally ill and we pathologize what used to be called sin or evil, this is what you do. It's so much easier to call someone crazy or a victim of a child abuse or something than to deal with their evil.

But a society that is incapable of properly responding to evil, to sin, is one that worries me. [Anders] Breivik didn't start the movement that he hoped to, thankfully, but evil people will use terror even more if we don't refute it and respond to it. Norway is choosing an easy route out of this, but at what cost?

The slow elimination of the idea of evil tacitly takes away any grounding of condemnation of any act, and instead, we are lead to sympathize with the perpetrators because of the environment they grew up in or their bad upbringing.