South Carolina has picked the Republican nominee in every primary since the Reagan era began in 1980. It will do so again this year. So we were told by the chairman of the UW Communications (journalism) Department on Wednesday night, in the first of a series of five lectures analyzing the 2012 election campaign.
If so, Mitt Romney's looking good. As of now, at least, he seems to be the obvious front-runner in South Carolina. He also appears to be the best hope for the Republicans in the general election -- a conservative who doesn't make the hair of 70 percent of the voters stand on end, one who can perhaps beguile many moderates and independents into casting their votes for him.
The wild card in South Carolina, however, is a specter from past electoral wars - Newt Gingrich. With millions of dollars in a Super PAC fund, Newt has launched a $3.5 million advertising campaign designed specifically to destroy Romney's viability as a candidate.
By all accounts, the television advertising is devastatingly negative. As Krystal Ball [sic] writes on The Atlantic's website:
Newt hopes to scream at the general election voter that Mitt is such an unbelievably heartless, cold, greedy person that the party that calls ketchup a vegetable and wants to throw people off unemployment during the worst recession since the Great Depression finds him heartless.
Ball labels this advertising barrage as "The Newtron Bomb." She suggests that only Newt Gingrich could get away with such vilification -- any Democrat who made the same arguments would be pilloried as vicious, unfair, and mean-spirited.
Newt's advertising is designed to persuade South Carolina voters that Mitt would be unelectable if nominated; in the process, he may in fact be making him exactly that. Why would Newt -- whose hopes for the nomination must seem remote, even to himself -- do everything possible to cripple the party's front runner? Ball has an answer to that question as well -- Newt's motive is not the good of the country or the success of the Republican party. His motive is, simply, personal revenge.
Early on, Gingrich asked Romney to agree to a campaign free of negative ads. Romney declined. Gingrich got burned by Romney's negative advertising. Gingrich's hostility is now implacable.
A Gingrich TV commercial made available today ties Romney to other Massachusetts public figures -- ones presumably not popular in the Palmetto State. Most devastating of all, the commercial shows clips of both former Democratic candidate John Kerry and Mitt Romney speaking in French. The voice over: "And just like John Kerry -- he speaks French, too." How elitest can a candidate get? How appalling is fluency in French by a presidential candidate in this year of Republican populism?
As a Democratic partisan, I have to admit to a certain pleasure in watching the opposition tear itself apart for as long as possible, and especially in watching Republican attempts to destroy their most potentially successful nominee. On the other hand, it's frightening to watch one of our two major parties systematically eliminate every presidential candidate with any sense of moderation, sophistication, and complexity of thought. After all, the Republicans might always win, even with a pathetic candidate, if the economy stays bad. The normal tendency of the American voter is to blame discontent with the nation's direction on whichever party happens to occupy the White House.
Thus Nixon won in 1968, in voter reaction to the "hippie movement" and anti-war demonstrations. And we all know how that turned out.
"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," as Newt Gingrich would never say. Let's hope history does not repeat itself -- not this time.
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