The national debt is likely to balloon under tax policies championed by three of the four major Republican candidates for president, according to an independent analysis of tax and spending proposals so far offered by the candidates.
The lone exception is Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who would pair a big reduction in tax rates with even bigger cuts in government services, slicing about $2 trillion from future borrowing.
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But none of these delegate counters properly estimate how the caucuses will allocate their delegates. According to the Paul campaign, Ron is well positioned to win 50% of the delegates in Iowa, 75% in Minnesota, 50% in Colorado, and 75% in Maine. So what is likely to be the true delegate count once the caucus states select their national delegates?
Add together the bound delegates from New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, and Nevada, and extrapolate the caucus states’ delegates using the Paul campaign’s estimates and you get:
Total Delegates (IA, NH, SC, FL, NV, MN, CO, ME)
Romney: 93 (6, 7, 2, 50, 14, 2, 7, 5)
Paul: 82 (13, 3, 0, 0, 5, 28, 17, 16)
Gingrich: 29 (0, 0, 23, 0, 6, 0, 0, 0)
Santorum: 25 (6, 0, 0, 0, 3, 7, 9, 0)
Unpledged: 14 (3, 2, 0, 0, 0, 3, 3, 3)
When Rick Santorum’s nephew endorsed Ron Paul in an op-ed in The Daily Caller this week, he wrote: “If you want another big government politician who supports the status quo to run our country, you should vote for my uncle Rick Santorum.” Santorum respectfully and lovingly dismissed his young nephew’s endorsement. The senator said his nephew was just “going through a phase,” and later added: “I am a Reagan conservative. I am not a libertarian. And the people who are calling me a big government guy are libertarians.”
In an interview with Reason magazine in 1975, Ronald Reagan said:
If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism … The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.
Says Santorum: “I fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican Party and the conservative movement.”
Santorum is not a Reagan conservative. Not even close.
It surprises people when they learn I’m not a libertarian. As Ron Paul’s official campaign blogger, I’m often perceived as being a libertarian and I am no doubt sympathetic to many libertarian views. But ultimately I’m a traditional conservative — a limited-government constitutionalist of the Barry Goldwater variety. That said, I’m no more offended at being called a libertarian than a heavy metal fan is when called a rock n’ roller — both terms represent far more synthesis than antithesis. Santorum has no comprehension of this basic philosophical and historical truism.
Being against big government does not represent the totality of American conservatism, but it does represent what Reagan called the “heart and soul” of conservatism. Reagan recognized that the “desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom” was indeed libertarianism but that it was also conservatism. This observation was fairly commonplace on the right during Reagan’s time, when “conservatism” was still more of a substantive philosophy than a Republican marketing tool. For example, in his book “Flying High,” a memoir about the 1964 presidential campaign, William F. Buckley repeatedly refers to Goldwater’s philosophy as “libertarian” and his famous book “The Conscience of a Conservative” as a “libertarian tome.”
So, were Reagan and Buckley wrong about libertarianism’s kinship to conservatism — or is Santorum correct to treat libertarianism as something alien to conservatism? This depends on your definition of that term.
Let’s begin with Reagan’s definition. In addition to calling libertarianism the heart of conservatism, Reagan believed that the American right was a three-legged stool consisting of social conservatives, national security conservatives and economic/libertarian conservatives. Lose a leg and conservatism loses a lot, or so Reagan believed.
During the George W. Bush era, social and national security conservatives were represented well, while the economic/libertarian leg of the American right was virtually non-existent. Conservatives now look back and wonder how a Republican president could have spent so much money. They needn’t wonder long. The notion — which has been advanced by Santorum, Mike Huckabee and others — that libertarian influence in the Republican Party poses a problem is absurd. It was the lack of libertarian principles that defined Bush’s “deficits don’t matter” GOP. “Libertarian influence” in the Republican Party is a problem only if one thinks the national debt is not a problem. Before the tea party and Obama, few Republicans seemed to think it was.
And Santorum was their leader. Writes The Washington Examiner’s Timothy P. Carney:
As a member of Senate leadership, Santorum literally was an agent of the GOP establishment during passage of No Child Left Behind, the expansion of Medicare, and the overspending of the Bush era.
Red State’s Erick Erickson is even more explicit:
Rick Santorum is a pro-life statist. He is. You will have to deal with it. He is a big government conservative. Santorum is right on social issues, but has never let his love of social issues stand in the way of the creeping expansion of the welfare state. In fact, he has been complicit in the expansion of the welfare state.
Santorum not only rejects Reagan’s concept of conservatism as a three-legged stool, he admits he is eager to kick out the libertarian leg. When Santorum says, “I fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican Party and the conservative movement,” he is essentially saying that he fights strongly against what Reagan considered the integral core of American conservatism. This is not to say that Reagan or even Goldwater were libertarianism personified — only that any person who calls themselves a “Goldwater” or “Reagan” conservative also must be a libertarian to some degree in their philosophy. Goldwater would have likely agreed with this sentiment. Reagan certainly did.
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The unmistakably brilliant Buchanan leaves MSNBC:
In the 10 years I have been at MSNBC, the network has taken heat for what I have written, and faithfully honored our contract. Yet my four-months’ absence from MSNBC and now my departure represent an undeniable victory for the blacklisters.
The modus operandi of these thought police at Color of Change and ADL is to brand as racists and anti-Semites any writer who dares to venture outside the narrow corral in which they seek to confine debate. All the while prattling about their love of dissent and devotion to the First Amendment, they seek systematically to silence and censor dissent.
Without a hearing, they smear and stigmatize as racist, homophobic, or anti-Semitic any who contradict what George Orwell once called their “smelly little orthodoxies.” They then demand that the heretic recant, grovel, apologize, and pledge to go forth and sin no more.
Defy them, and they will go after the network where you work, the newspapers that carry your column, the conventions that invite you to speak. If all else fails, they go after the advertisers.
I know these blacklisters. They operate behind closed doors, with phone calls, mailed threats, and off-the-record meetings. They work in the dark because, as Al Smith said, nothing un-American can live in the sunlight.
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Pressure is on the Maine Republican Party to reconsider its weekend declaration that Mitt Romney won the state’s caucuses.
The Maine GOP announced Saturday that Romney narrowly edged Ron Paul, 39 percent to 36 percent, in a nonbinding presidential preference poll taken during the caucuses. The margin was fewer than 200 votes.
A number of communities were not included in that poll because they had not held their caucuses in time. Washington County Republicans postponed their caucuses, originally scheduled for Saturday, Feb. 11, because of a pending snowstorm and will now meet this Saturday. Other communities across the states also have caucuses scheduled for this weekend and later this month.
All along, state GOP officials said communities knew that their votes would not be included in the final results if they did not hold their caucus by Feb. 11.
However, a review of the town-by-town results released Saturday by the Maine GOP suggests that some communities that had caucused prior to Feb. 11 were not counted. Nearly all Waldo County towns held caucuses on Feb. 4 but those towns were blank in the results released by the state party. Additionally, Waterville held its caucuses ahead of time but were not included in the results. {read the rest}
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Liberal columnist Paul Krugman recognizes what happened:
Oh, wow. It turns out that caucuses in some parts of Maine were postponed — and then told that their votes wouldn’t count. And yes, it does seem that the disenfranchised caucuses were the least pro-Romney.
So maybe Romney didn’t actually win Maine, after all.
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Kuyperian Commentary Podcast
