Morning Jolt - Booker, Book, Book

NRO Newsletters . . .

Morning Jolt

. . . with Jim Geraghty

May 22, 2012

In This Issue . . .

1. Shocking News: Some Democrats Seem to Like Wall Street Donors, Aim to Avoid Demonizing Them!

2. Jolt Book Talk, Part One: The Tyranny of Clichés

3. Jolt Book Talk, Part Two: Phil Klein's Conservative Survival in the Romney Era

4. Addendum

Here's your Tuesday Morning Jolt!

Enjoy.

Jim

1. Shocking News: Some Democrats Seem to Like Wall Street Donors, Aim to Avoid Demonizing Them!

Booker, Harold Ford Jr., Steven Rattner . . . at this rate, we may never see Republicans criticizing Obama in Romney's ads.

Booker is not the only Democrat to question the aggressive, negative portrayal of Romney's work in private equity. Former Tennessee Rep. Harold Ford Jr. said today he agreed with "the substance" of Booker's comments and "would not have backed out."

"I agree with him, private equity is not a bad thing. Matter of fact, private equity is a good thing in many, many instances," the Democrat said in a separate appearance on MSNBC earlier in the day.

Former Obama administration economic adviser Steven Rattner made similar comments last week, calling a new Obama campaign TV ad attacking Romney's role in the bankruptcy of a Bain-owned steel company "unfair."

But hey -- the Obama campaign has their best folks on this!

One criticism of the Bain attack has been the notion that it's hypocritical for the President to attack Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital, yet raise money from private equity donors like Blackstone Group president Tony James, and top Obama bundler Jonathan Lavine, currently a managing director at Bain. It's an obvious line of attack that's been kicking around for a week now, and was the subject of Anderson Cooper's first question to Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt on tonight's AC360.

"How can President Obama attack Mitt Romney on his time at Bain, highlighting only times when Bain cost companies jobs, and at the same time hold high priced fund raisers with the head of another private equity firm that's done work with Bain, the Blackstone Group, there are people who have worked at other private equity firms in his own administration?"

LaBolt started off right, explaining the pertinent point that Mitt Romney himself has bragged about job creation as a "corporate takeover specialist" at Bain Capital, when job creation is about as central to private equity as fertilizer creation is to dairy farming.

But even as Cooper tried to get him to answer the hypocrisy question, LaBolt plowed right through him with more talking points. Five or six times, Cooper tried to get LaBolt to answer that one question, only to be met with uninterrupted talking points, or naked subject changes.

Step back! This man's a professional!

2. Jolt Book Talk, Part One: The Tyranny of Clichés

Two small confessions to make: I was elated when I first heard that Jonah's second book, after Liberal Fascism, would be funnier and more lighthearted. This is not to say I didn't love Liberal Fascism; you can make the argument that it is the most influential, discussed, and debated book by a conservative in the past decade.

But the man who wrote Liberal Fascism wasn't really the Jonah we came to know and love since he popped up on our political and cultural radar screens back in 1998. I have a limited amount of time to allocate to book-reading. So I'm not often eager to read about politics in my off-hours, and I wasn't always eager to grab and finish a dense, fascinating, detailed and intellectually rigorous review of a century's worth of political philosophy. Liberal Fascism was fascinating, eye-opening, thought-provoking . . . but it wasn't always a fun or quick read.

But after hearing that The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas would be closer in tone to the old Goldberg File, the next preview was less reassuring. When Jonah started describing that the book was inspired by his talks on college campuses, and that the tome was his attempt to dismantle radical arguments that are hidden in homespun aphorisms, I was initially a little . . . deflated.

Of course empty-headed college students rely on empty clichés to make their arguments; this is what makes them empty-headed! I wondered if it was a reflection of how much time Jonah spends on college campuses, that he would consider liberal clichés to be the problem most worthy of book-length analysis and counterargument. Perhaps I travel in very sheltered circles, but I don't actually encounter many people who genuinely believe the notions Jonah tears apart in this book, like, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," "Violence never solves anything," and "Better ten guilty men go free than one innocent man suffer."

Thankfully, Jonah gets past the here's-the-latest-vacuous-argument-that-some-nose-ringed-progressive-did-during-the-Q&A-on-my-last-speaking-engagement section pretty quickly. Although the beating-up-tomato-can phenomenon crops up in slightly different form periodically through the book; sometimes it feels like Jonah is looking for logic where there is none to be found, mocking glaring contradictions in the arguments of Barbra Streisand and Andrew Sullivan.

But The Tyranny of Clichés has plenty of "how come no one ever taught me this" sections, including the surprising revelation that Marie Antoinette's "let them eat cake" statement, if ever uttered, meant the precise opposite of its perceived meaning today. Then there's a chapter which ought to be called, "Everything You Think You Know about Witch Trials, the Inquisition, and the Crusades Was Wrong." I knew The Da Vinci Code was an epic-length crock of [bad word], but here Jonah finds a target really worth his time and wit, the popular culture's ability to instill beliefs and conclusions that are astonishingly erroneous and distortions of actual historical events.

Jonah's dismantling of the "wisdom is found in the political center" fetish deserves to be a seminar at journalism conferences for years to come, and when he starts addressing the pledges and claims of President Obama I feel like he's finally locked on a worthy target. After all, if you're turning to Barbra Streisand for guidance on wise governance, I think you're a lost cause. There's probably nothing we can do for you.

But even when it feels like Jonah is punching down at a foe that I stopped taking seriously a long time ago, he's still classic Jonah. For example, I dare you to read the following sentence and not laugh:

Saying you're being empirical, and wielding numbers like so many stage props, doesn't make you empirical, any more than me wielding a giant hammer and speaking Norwegian makes me Thor.

You're laughing because you know that upon finishing writing that passage, Jonah got out his authentic replica of Mjolnir, jumped upon The Couch, and bellowed, "Ved Odins skjegg, jeg står athwart historie roper stop!" and smashed a Paul Krugman bobblehead doll.

Finally, it's worth noting that this "review" is of the work of a man I call a friend, and I find Jonah one of the most unique, enjoyable, and irreplaceable voices in our political world today. Ever since his first reference to TK-421 back in the late 1990s, I've felt like this is the guy who gets it! and I am hoping that when he finally hangs up his laptop at the end of a long career, he's filled an entire shelf on all of our bookshelves.

3. Jolt Book Talk, Part Two: Phil Klein's Conservative Survival in the Romney Era

Phil Klein, formerly of The American Spectator and now with the Washington Examiner, released a new e-book Monday entitled "Conservative Survival in the Romney Era." I feel like such a Luddite, still buying paper books.

First, an observation: Klein is self-publishing this. It will be pretty interesting to see if a provocative concept, from a star of the blogosphere and columns, can bypass the entire traditional publishing structure.

Two of the most important arguments in Klein's brief, inexpensive book:

Should Romney be elected president, in addition to proactively pushing him to reform entitlements, health care and the tax code, conservatives will also have to be on guard against efforts to expand the role of government. One of the most pernicious ways Republicans tend to do this when in power is to conflate being pro-business with being pro-free market, a phenomenon my colleague at the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney, has consistently documented.

Secondly . . .

One of Romney's biggest selling points is that he's a businessman who knows how to create jobs. This is all well and good, but only so long as he recognizes that the president is not the CEO of the economy. It isn't his job to subsidize certain businesses and encourage the growth of others by manipulating the tax code. It isn't his job to "run" the economy, but rather to remove barriers, so that individuals and businesses can prosper. The president should create a business-friendly environment, but shouldn't become a partner with private businesses.

It's fair. But many conservatives may not want to hear this right now. (There's no point in fans of Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, or Newt Gingrich asking where Klein was with this argument during the primaries; nobody has spotlighted the unsavory parts of Romney's record more than Klein, in a tough but fair way. Klein doesn't hate Romney or even dislike him; he just doesn't trust the former governor any further than he can throw him.)

Klein concludes,

Over the course of the Republican primaries, there was always a segment of conservative readers who took issue with my critical reporting and analysis of all of the presidential contenders. I expect this backlash to become even more intense whenever I criticize Romney during the general election. To this group, the thinking is that the liberal media will always be rough on Republican candidates, so the function of the conservative media is to provide more positive coverage. But when I apply my own mirror test, I come to a different conclusion.

A major presidential candidate has consultants, advisors, strategists, communications officials and staffers who are all paid to spin for him. He has an advertising budget to get his message out. Once he becomes the nominee, he has an entire political party behind him and hundreds of millions of dollars to spend promoting his cause. Should he get elected president, he'll have an entire bureaucracy behind him to advance his version of reality. In short, there are lots of people out there whose job it is to make politicians look good.

Journalists should consider it our duty to cut through any attempt to obfuscate the truth and hold those in power, or seeking it, accountable. The only twist for conservative journalists is the added mission of holding politicians in both parties accountable from the right.

That's completely right . . . and yet, harder than it seems. The general election has been underway for about a month, and we've already heard about Mitt Romney the dog-abuser, the high-school bully, the merciless corporate raider, the strange-religion believer, the archaic Cold Warrior, and the man who would hesitate to kill Osama bin Laden. A serious policy objection to Romney from the right is worth making, but let's keep in mind that many of those objections are probably going to get lost in the noise of a political-campaign environment.

After a long and furious primary, I'm not exactly bubbling with enthusiasm to have Phil reminding us all of all the ways Romney may frustrate and disappoint us. Primaries are one of my least favorite times of the political calendar and the general elections may be one of my favorites, when everybody I like in the political world is finally metaphorically shooting in the same direction.

4. Addendum

Exurban Jon observes, "All the progressive types screeching over Cory Booker's heresy? Last week they were whining that conservatives were too intolerant of Dick Lugar."