the anti-campaign of the anti-campaigner

[Willard Mitt Romney's] Hopes for wrapping up the nomination with a quick-strike victory, which would require a strong showing in Iowa, are fading, write Jonathan Martin, Maggie Haberman and Reid J. Epstein for POLITICO.com in a story titled Gingrich surge prompts Romney reboot

Martin, Haberman, and Epstein continue:

Romney’s comments effectively marked a public concession that the play-it-safe approach he’s held to so far this year – limiting his interviews and doing only modest amounts of retail campaigning – simply won’t cut it anymore [...]

Stanley B. Greenberg: “Recently, it has been the conservatives, the Tea Party members and the anti-immigrant groups who understand the anger with government, and rush in to exploit it—Perhaps now, with the debacle in Washington, liberals will become instinctively angry with this illegitimate government and build their politics from there”

So writes Stanley B. Greenberg in a New York Times editorial titled Why Voters Tune Out Democrats.

Caption: Ruins? I can see only possibilities. 

Many, many other centre-lefters harp on this same string ’til heart strings break, e.g.:

[…] Anything can happen, but it appears the GOP is on the verge of pulling off a political victory that may be unprecedented in American history, writes Greg Sargent in a Plum Line blog blog burst titled GOP on verge of huge, unprecedented political victory

Sargent continues

U.S. President loses the plot: turns down bi-partisan compromise on debt ceiling, again

The struggle of the U.S. political classes and many of their more active clients to suppress popular support for any plan, proposal, proposition, or even premise, that would limit the prerogatives of the welfare or regulatory state as expressed through it’s spending power, has passed into a late-phase irony, which means negation, which means a striking clarity of contrast for the only political formations left standing with a positive position in the form of a proposal, which means that the only leader left standing with any choice, any prerogative, or any agency of any kind, is the person of Speaker Boehner, the basis of whose legitimacy on this question is expressed in the negativity of a primitive refusal, the coercive deficiency of a refusés-caucus united in support of a steadfast “no”.

Caption: Lining up the straw-men

no confidence, say the GOP leaders of Capital Hill, phase (III), as the White House writes itself out of the storyline on the debt ceiling problem

House and Senate Republicans have lost all confidence in the White House to develop a good faith compromise on the problem of the debt ceiling. The result of the collapse of confidence among GOPers—as I wrote before—is a disaffection that expresses itself in stages. First in the form of Senate GOP Leader McConnell’s despairing yet ambitious “golden-bridge” to cede the prerogative of a debt-limit increase to the President in exchange for an equal level of unspecified cuts. Then it passed into the form of a great noise of competing plans among GOPers. Now it in its final phase it takes the form of the total exclusion of the Obama White House.

Caption: The ghosts of presidents past cannot help us now

a synthesis of all values: Obama and the trope of the “false choice” (ii)

Japan, the Maghreb, the Gulf, China—the world is on fire, and a new coalition of the willing rises up to will itself on the peoples of Libya in the form of tomahawk missile strikes and attacks on air defense systems in advance of larger operations the objective of which is what, precisely?—to save the rebel stronghold of the city of Benghazi?—to force Gaddafi, his graduate student son, and their mercenaries to flee so that who, or what, can wear the garland of the state? So U.S. President Barack Obama steps forward to issue a bold statement on … education.

This is tragedy long after it has passed into farce.

Caption: In too deep.

the pragmatics of Obama-era White House communication; notes, and remarks, tentative in character, speculative in content

After a decade of denouncing the Bush-era relief that will soon pass into history, Congressional Democrats have suddenly collapsed into a noisy disunity on the issue. The problem is not the suddenly unified Republican leadership. The Problem is the suspicion among progressive Democrats that their own White House has turned on them, and the conclusion drawn from the decision delivered on November 2 2010 by Democratic moderates and holders of swing districts that their electorates ruled against the assumptions that were the basis of the policies of the first 2 years of Obama’s presidency.

Caption: Mr. President? Mr. President, are you there, sir? We sort of need you up here, Mr. President.

Is this the effect of a new White House realpolik developed in the aftermath of the decision delivered on November 2 2010, or White House incompetence, or indecision, in its relations with the office-holders of its own party? I would like to suggest an explanation grounded in pragmatics, and based on an assumption of conscious, deliberate action to develop a system of communication that supports the performance of a specific form of social organization—that of star and entourage, or centre and periphery

White House paralysis caused by infighting enables a “revenge of the clerks,” by way of whistle-blower site, wikileaks, so political impotence, once again, passes into an immiseration of the entire system

The whistle-blower Wikileaks site releases a cache of 251,000 U.S. Diplomatic correspondences pilfered by some angry diminutive clerk non-entity named Bradley Manning or something, an Army corporal intelligence analyst who now languishes in solitary confinement somewhere in Quantico, Virginia. As a result of the release confidences are betrayed; sensitive negotiations are compromised; intelligence sources are outed; lives are ruined, or placed in jeopardy; and the effectiveness of an entire generation of experienced, and highly-trained diplomatic personnel of all ranks, and in missions everywhere on the planet pursuing U.S. interests and protecting U.S. citizens, is undermined, and in some cases, destroyed.

[...] Battered by a scandal which seems to provide a fresh wave of embarrassment with each passing day, the US government is being forced to undertake a major reshuffle of the embassy staff, military personnel and intelligence operatives whose work has been laid bare by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks,writes Guy Adams and Kim Sengupta in a story for the independent.co.uk titled US forced to shake up embassies around the world after WikiLeaks revelations

The Obama administration was yesterday facing a crisis in its diplomatic service, amid growing evidence that the ongoing publication of a tranche of supposedly-confidential communiqués will make normal work difficult, if not dangerous, for important State Department employees across the world [...]

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Caption: Great moments in U.S. foreign policy, and presidential leadership.

And what is our beloved President’s bold and decisive response to the collapse of the credibility of his State Department, and global diplomatic corps, as executed by some other angry and diminutive clerk non-entity named Julian Assange? Our beloved President orders an administrative review of how agencies use, distribute, store, and retrieve sensitive information. Hey, I know that’s what I would do—wouldn’t you?

a portrait of the artist as an alienated and estranged young president (ii)

The free fall of the U.S. presidency continues apace. Before the free fall asserted itself in preposterous analyses that underwrote disastrous decisions like the pursuit of health care reform at any price, and in any form, the result being ObamaCare. Now the free fall assumes a concrete character in the form of indecision on key elements of the president’s own agenda, alienation from Democrats disaffected by the decision delivered by the U.S. electorate on November 2 2010, non-coordination with partners domestic and abroad, and a baffling sense of disconnect from facts on the ground as they reveal themselves whether through the media or by the White House’s own connections. What is the sum of all this, and where will these paths lead?

Caption: Desolation is the new black

National Security Advisor Tom Donilon as quoted by Chip Reid of CBSnews.com: “From the first day in Mumbai to today in Japan, I think that the United States has dramatically advanced its critical goals and its strategic interest in the region”—great moments in U.S. foreign policy

Please stop snorting with the joyless laughter of the damned for a moment and reflect on the fact that Donilon, with a straight face, and without a trace of irony, describes President Obama’s “We are now a German model export economy because I said so” tour of Asia, beginning in India, and ending in Japan, as a having dramatically advanced critical goals in the strategic interests of the region, or something. According to what possible success criteria, whether on objective or on logical grounds, could Donilon issue so apparently counterfactual a claim? The problem for the White House: he can’t, and the President’s undeserved reputation as an objective weigher of facts to support non-ideological outcomes is once again at stake.

Caption: You look like sh** is the message the White House press corps delivers to the White House after U.S. President Obama’s celebrated “We are now a German model export economy because I said so” tour of Asia

Michael Gerson of the Washington Post: “While massive state budget shortfalls are not limited to predominantly Democratic states, they are concentrated in them—’In California and New York,’ says John Hood of the John Locke Foundation, ‘the fiscal crisis flirts with bankruptcy’”

California, Massachusetts, New York—these states remained blue or turned bluer on November 2 2010, and these are also states that face towering budget shortfalls. These states have few options for relief because an opposing party that rejects further bailouts now rules the U.S. House. What will this mean for the future of progressive governance when its core assumption of growth through public sector growth so visibly, and so painfully, runs athwart the laws of physics?

Caption: Do not trifle with the laws of physics