Capitalism, mistresses, and democracy

View 709 Thursday, January 19, 2012

Rick Perry withdraws, endorsing Newt. We are down to Romney vs. Gingrich, with Santorum as the non-Romney spare tire. It now appears that Santorum won the Iowa Caucus by a few votes, correcting the announcement that Romney had won it by 8 votes. Romney won the New Hampshire primary. If Gingrich wins South Carolina, as is now expected, it will remain a horse race.

Perry’s withdrawal was not unexpected. His concession the night of the Iowa caucuses sounded like the prelude to closing the campaign, but apparently he was persuaded to stay on in the hopes that Gingrich and Romney would cancel each other out with a stream of negative ads, leaving Perry and Santorum to fight it out.

Tonight we have another Republican debate scheduled. I’ll probably miss it. It may be critical for the future of the nation.

Then on Nightline tonight, after a day of teasers, ABC is going to run an interview with Marianne Gingrich in which the headline item is that Newt Gingrich wanted an “open marriage,” which she refused. Rush Limbaugh is saying that the effect of this in unpredictable but that it will depend in part on how well Marianne comes off in the interview when it is aired. I can tell you that. Marianne will come off very well. She always does and did. I always liked her when I was more closely associated with Newt Gingrich, and so did everyone else I knew.

The only open question I know of here is how new any of this is. Everything in that interview has been known since the last millennium, so the interview is more a reminder than an education. Newt Gingrich has not been running as an exemplar of marital integrity. I would guess that at least half of the Presidents of the United States had mistresses at one time or another before becoming President, and a substantial number during and after their Presidential terms. Some seem to have used the White House for assignations. Newt’s transgressions have long been admitted, and indeed he resigned from the House when this one became public. That was in the last Millennium. One wonders just how many actual voters find this new and disturbing, as opposed to those who feign shock and astonishment for other political purposes.

I suspect that this ‘news’ was sprung in a desperate attempt to bolster up Romney, whose star has been falling lately. We’ll see. These firestorms will probably push Santorum up to a position of prominence, and it will then be his turn for destruction. Meanwhile neither Gingrich nor Santorum has any money. And the Wall Street Journal has done a piece called Bain Capital Saved America which is worth paying attention to. Those were exciting times that changed the world.

My position remains the same. I would prefer anyone on that stage to Barrack Obama. We do live in interesting times.