Prediction 2012

Many people might say that Obama would find Gingrich an easier opponent than Romney, but I am not so sure. Both Obama and Romney are boring, reasonable men, men who will say just about anything that a boring reasonable man would say (Obama can't trot out all the "audacity of hope" stuff again, we've been there, done that)... Gingrich is a nut... and maybe a genuine nut is just what many troubled American people, hard in the grips of nihilism, are ready for now... Somebody that breaks the mold, who takes bullshit to a level where it becomes a liberating sincerity, whose phoniness is cut from whole cloth... That may be the message the voters are sending in this serial adulterer winning handily in a southern state chockablock with Bible-beating family values Evangelicals... Gingrich says phoney, absurd, weird things, but underneath all the pond scum there lurks something "real" about him. Horribly real for many of us, but "real" nonetheless.

Parenthesis

Seaton Newslinks

My take on this is that Ron Paul, if he goes third party, will take the formerly or still idealistic voters who bought into the hope message from Obama. Many are in various stages pragmatism or cynicism, few of whom are still into idealism after seeing the continuity of Bush to Obama. Paul will take virtually no one in the Republican Party. Most of the conservative voters see him as the wasted vote of idealism or ignorance in a general if he is not the nominee. Paul is their Nader; he's only going to suck away the most ignorant and idealist of the conservative voters. Those are marginal voters anyway. 

People like me are irrelevant, we were already at the point of predicting that Obama would make no difference and actually didn't vote. We've spent 4 years poking holes in the story that's followed, which went as largely as predicted. We were not the only ones poking holes however,the story has gotten so poorly written that a pretty big audience is poking holes. Everyone watching Jon Stewart or Bill Maher on down to people reading Huffington Post and Salon and further on down to unread blogs are making sport of it. They don't take the most extreme of it, such as this blog, seriously. In fact, what starts to get taken seriously is probably about five shades back toward what is called pragmatism from here, right around the Huffington Post.  Former idealists who are just now turning into shades of pragmatism on the way to cynicism are still mostly susceptible to a new shiny horse to believe in. That would be Paul, not Obama. Obama is going to run a "horse in midstream, doing the best I can in a troubled system" theme of pragmatism this time around.

He's been making last minute overtures toward single issue idealists, but its been rather semantical. 

For anti-war sentiments, there was a pseudo withdrawal from Iraq and vague references to peace talks in Afghanistan. After the big announcement of Iraqi withdrawal, almost all the people who cared had to hear their fellow assholes that there are still enduring bases and something like 50,000 non-combat troops/mercenaries remaining. 

For the idealists of the Mac'ish, socially liberal, politically libertarian crowd, there has been dramatic discussion on legislation like SOPA that is turned into a test of ideals. Police busting in on you and arresting you for information sharing is about the worst case scenario and its what we think only happens in China. In their case, we imagine that their information sharing contains content that is inviolable, political opinions, and that makes it unconscionable that they cannot share it freely. In our case, we feel secure in our system because information of opinion and thought is free and protected, even when used to laugh about how much of a joke the system is. The police don't arrest you for calling the local party boss a nazi or fascist or making goofy posters, dressing up in costume and walking around in public or from heckling them in a comments thread at Huffington Post. The kind information we do accept as being violable is less categorical than political information, and that is general knowledge information. If you go too far in consuming some kinds of general information in the wrong ways, then you are committing a crime, and taken to an extreme, its ok to be arrested by the authorities. Incidentally, this is the kind of information that is generally accepted as inviolably free in places like China, where are our attempts to impose intellectual property law and copyright enforcement are a hilarious joke that ends with a double question mark.

SOPA's/PIPPA's defeat is a cruel joke, the celebration of its defeat as a meaningful idealistic victory from within the system is interrupted mid-sentence with the crack down on Mega-upload that seems to be every bit of the police state conditions conditions that the people buying into the SOPA debate promise it would have delivered and its defeat hath just prevented. 

It would be as if the Obama health care legislation had been defeated and within days of conservatives penning their editorials lauding the prevention of a labyrinthian system ranging from Hillary Care cynics to Death Panel fear mongers whose rhetoric we found laughable, the government did the worst of their fears and ran a few impromptu death panel camps for a couple of days in spite of the legislation's defeat. That the actual health care legislation of compulsory insurance that passed looks mostly like yet another private debt trap as a barrier to entry for the real U.S. economy along with education and mortgage debt and actually validates the premise underlying the hyperbolic conservative outcry over death panels should not be forgotten when Obama runs on his record of pragmatic idealism.

All of this is something of a keep hope alive pregame Obama's been working on and it was already having limited success because the propaganda is big and dumb in the specific ways that its target audience is obsessive and meticulous about, the ways that people with a lot of energy, too much time on their hands due to unemployment or working boring jobs that can get busy but are also mostly about filling time and finding mindless entertainment and aided by computers and access to the internet can be. The office workers get their drugs by prescription, the unemployed by description.

The incumbents marginal voter base fractures entirely with Paul, drawing off indifferent idealists and indifferently ignorant who can follow and laugh at Jon Stewart, know George Will from his baseball writing, but have only a vague clue who Paul Krugman or David Brooks are and would like to keep it there as a matter of common sense.  The George Will or Brooksian indifferent will still go Newt. The people who read stuff like Jon Stewart's book and thought his million laughs march was sublime may well go Paul. The people who may have read the equivalent of Newt's history book will still go Newt or Romney.

This puts the Republican into the winning column for this election, an election that was already and remains uphill battle for Obama because Obama's voter base is already proving hard to motivate as the idealists shake themselves out and resign themselves to not a damn bit of difference indifference. Some of these are going to get excited about Ron Paul as the real idealist as a counterpoint to Obama's false promise and the obvious joke of the conservative clowns. If they bothered to vote, they may have just cast it vaguely in Obama's direction. Now if they vote, they will vote for Paul, who represents a sort of unyielding idealism and nostalgia for America's more ordered past.

The only people the pregame is working on are former Republicans who voted for Obama like John Cole or Andruw Sullivan and their fan-base. The only thing a Paul campaign really does is put the kabosh on the whole deal, as the Maher/Cole/Sullivan/Jon Stewart demographics crack up and vote Paul / Obama. That's a pretty wide net that covers everybody from Stewart's general audience, to South Park, and every body on the internet from Andruw Sullivan to Huffington to me.

Romney looks pretty, but his religion and really badly done veneer is going to kill him in the primaries against a con man playing an honest salesman who does it with a wink and smile to let you in on the joke like Newt. A lot of conservative voters, church going, staid, faithfully married people are going to look at Newt from suburbia and think, "we'd all get away with it if we could." They look at Romney and see Al Gore in a more expensive suit. They're going to give Newt the nomination.

Paul does not affect the conservative voters, who will solidly go Newt. That he will get the added irrelevant benefit of odd votes from complete cynics like me, who would love to see a president Newt really drive the system into the ground so as to make its timeline of being able to afford the luxuries of a massive prison and military state shorter.

Its clear the establishment does not want Paul to get anywhere near the election, he's been more or less blacked out of the horse race coverage of the Republican primary in spite of being the first or second choice. Whether the voters on that side derail Newt in the primary remains to be seen, but its a long shot. Once the party recognizes that Romney is sunk in this economic climate and have him back off, its going to be Newt they support. If Newt gets it, a lot of those staunch Paul supporters in the Republican primary voter block are going to support Newt out of pragmatic lesser of two evil logic.

So I think that means either way its going to shake out, Newt will probably win. But if Paul does go 3rd party, Newt's going to win in a landslide.