Week in Review Part IV: Random Musings

What a race…Mitt Romney rolled in Florida, 46-32, over Newt Gingrich, with Rick Santorum at 13% and Ron Paul 7%; pretty much in line with the late polls that saw Romney surge in the final days in no small part due to his debate performance in the last two…that and $16 million in ad spending.

The Wall Street Journal editorialized on Gingrich’s failure:

“Mr. Gingrich…did not help himself with some of his own campaign arguments. In his fury against Mr. Romney, the speaker fired away in scattershot populist fashion, denouncing Wall Street, Goldman Sachs and other capitalist institutions in terms not all that different from Mr. Obama’s.

“This didn’t help the credibility of Mr. Gingrich’s theme that the race is between a ‘Reagan conservative and a Massachusetts moderate.’ Mr. Gingrich’s tax plan is better than Mr. Romney’s, but voters in Florida can be forgiven for not knowing it. The Speaker preferred to campaign against Bain Capital.”

[Today we have caucuses in Nevada and Maine. Tuesday, Feb. 7, sees more caucuses in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri. Then you have a 3-week break until primaries in Arizona and Michigan. Super Tuesday is March 6.]

What a field…Wednesday morning on CNN, Republican Mitt Romney said the following:

“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich. They’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95% of Americans, who right now are struggling.”

Oh brother. “You can focus on the very poor; that’s not my focus,” he later explained. Newt Gingrich was granted an opening: “I’m fed up with politicians in either party pitting Americans against each other. I am running to be president of all the American people; I am concerned about all the American people.”

Conservative Jonah Goldberg at the National Review was emblematic of the response Romney’s comments got.

“Every time he seems to get into his groove and pull away, he says things that make people think he doesn’t know how to play the game.”

Editorial / Wall Street Journal

“Mitt Romney was a turnaround artist in business, which is in contrast to his artlessness when he departs from his political script. Today we’ll try to decode his latest adventure in spontaneous lingua franca, and if necessary we’re prepared to make this a long-running series right through November. Like Twain said of Wagner’s music, Mr. Romney is better than he sounds….

“Asked to elaborate (on the above comments on the poor), he continued, awkwardly. ‘You can focus on the very poor; that’s not my focus. The middle-income Americans, they’re the folks that are really struggling right now and they need someone that can help get this economy going for them.’ So Mr. Romney finally got to his real point, which was about economic growth, but the wait was – how to put it? – excruciating.

“Democrats have responded by invoking Dickens at the blacking factory and worse, and if Mr. Romney came across as a less than compassionate conservative he has himself to blame.

“There’s a half-century of creative conservative thinking on antipoverty transfer programs, and it’s too bad Mr. Romney didn’t mention some of it. One note to strike is about growing dependency on government and its corrosive effect on human dignity. Refundable tax credits, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, food stamps and the like are almost 50% more generous than they were in 2007….

“Mr. Romney’s larger mistake is to think and speak in ‘class’ terms. He touts his concern for the ‘middle class’ all the time, as if he’s trying to show that a rich guy can identify with average Americans. But this is a game that Democrats play better, and it leads Mr. Romney into cul-de-sacs like saying the poor are fine because they benefit from government, while the middle class don’t. Mr. Obama will turn this into an argument for hooking the middle class on more government.”

Sebastian Mallaby / Financial Times

“(Like) George H.W. Bush…Mr. Romney has an enemy more terrible than any mortal rival: he has a problem with the Vision Thing. Despite the fuss about his tax returns, his trouble is not that he made millions as a private equity baron. It’s that managerial credentials are all he has going for him. His campaign is devoid of an animating idea.

“So here is a modest suggestion for Mr. Romney – one that allows him to be both staunchly capitalist and stirringly radical, pro-business and yet mad as hell. Mr. Romney should declare war on the central flaw of modern American capitalism; its addiction to debt. Government debt, household debt and especially bank debt should become his whipping boys. Equity-based capitalists – entrepreneurs who are willing to take the risk of owning things – should become his heroes.

“It is a good message for Mr. Romney, and not only because it’s on the mark. It would allow him to knit together technocratic insights that he espouses anyway. And it would give him the opportunity to blend his biography with his campaign pitch, playing up his strength as an equity investor while connecting with popular fury about the hangover from the credit bust.”

A USA TODAY/Gallup Swing States survey of the dozen states likely to determine November’s election found that Mitt Romney essentially ties Barack Obama, Romney ahead 48-47. But Obama leads Newt Gingrich, 54-40. Ron Paul only trails Obama 50-43, the same margin as Rick Santorum, 51-44.

The swing states are: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

I couldn’t disagree more with this statement from Mark Halperin in Time:

“Mitch Daniels turned down the heat on a ‘Draft Mitch’ movement with a tepid performance in his televised response to the State of the Union speech.”

As I noted last time, I thought it was terrific and the commentators I saw in the immediate aftermath thought so as well.

For the archives, Herman Cain endorsed Newt Gingrich, while Donald Trump jerked everyone around and ended up endorsing Mitt Romney.

Your heart has to go out to Rick Santorum and the medical issues facing his three-year-old daughter, Bella, who has a rare and fatal genetic disorder and almost succumbed to pneumonia two weeks ago. The former senator opted to stay in the race.

But to give you a sense of how hard it is to run for president, until his daughter’s latest issue, Santorum hadn’t been home since Christmas.

[In the interest of full disclosure, I gave Santorum a whopping $100 just out of principle, and sympathy.]

USA TODAY’s Gregory Korte looked into Paul’s 2011 final campaign-finance report and found “164 separate entries for expenditures of $1 each,” easily the most for any candidate. Paul bought value meals at a McDonald’s in three different states, and he bought office supplies from Dollar Tree, among other things.

I’m one Republican who prays we at least win the Senate and obviously hold onto the House.

I think we’re all in agreement that the rise in the cost of college has been egregious and President Obama may have hit on a good theme with his effort to rein in costs, though he left out details as to just how he would do so and what triggers would be in place. What we do know is Obama wants to tie federal campus aid to tuition policies. Obama talks of penalizing colleges who fail to provide “good value” for the money. Heck, I’ll tell you what’s good value. Getting to a Final Four, that’s good value!

[Sorry, but your editor’s Wake Forest basketball team is sucking wind again, with little hope for the future when all I want before I die is a Final Four appearance out of them, plus another Mets World Series title and a Super Bowl from the Jets. But I digress…]

Meanwhile, some university presidents weighed in on the White House’s proposal of tying support to tuition controls. Illinois State Univ. President Al Bowman calls it “fuzzy math.” The head of the Univ. of Washington, Mike Young, called it little more than “political theater of the worst sort.”

If Obama can refine his proposal, it will hit home with those responsible for tuition and room and board that rose 8.3% this school year at four-year public colleges.
Nice job by the Occupy Oakland movement. Through their wanton vandalism, they managed to alienate everyone, including their one-time supporters. What a bunch of scum.

Editorial / New York Post

“Clergymen might want to think hard before opening their doors to Occupy Wall Street – unless they like losing property.

“It’s a lesson the Rev. Bob Brashear of the West Park Presbyterian Church on the Upper West Side didn’t immediately get.

“This month, Brashear noticed that the basin and lid of his baptismal font (worth $12,500) had gone missing.

“It was the second major theft since he welcomed Occupiers to his church after their Zuccotti Park ouster: Three weeks before, his MacBook Air (estimated value: $2,400) vanished into the Occupy ether.”

[The basin was later recovered.]

“Everyone knows OWS has no regard for private property; it’s Zuccotti Park takeover made that plain. Now, it’s clear, church items are fair game, too.”
James Q. Wilson / Washington Post

“There is no doubt that incomes are unequal in the United States – far more so than in most European nations. This fact is part of the impulse behind the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose members claim to represent the 99 percent of us against the wealthiest 1 percent….

“But the mere existence of income inequality tells us little about what, if anything, should be done about it. First, we must answer some key questions. Who constitutes the prosperous and the poor? Why has inequality increased? Does an unequal income distribution deny poor people the chance to buy what they want? And perhaps most important: How do Americans feel about inequality?

“To answer these questions, it is not enough to take a snapshot of our incomes; we must instead have a motion picture of them and how people move in and out of various income groups over time.

“The ‘rich’ in America are not a monolithic, unchanging class. A study by Thomas A. Garrett, economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, found that less than half of people in the top 1 percent in 1996 were still there in 2005. Such mobility is hardly surprising: A business school student, for instance, may have little money and high debts, but nine years later he or she could be earning a big Wall Street salary and bonus.

“Mobility is not limited to the top-earning households. A study by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis found that nearly half of the families in the lowest fifth of income earners in 2001 had moved up within six years. Over the same period, more than a third of those in the highest fifth of income-earners had moved down. Certainly, there are people such as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates who are ensconced in the top tier, but far more common are people who are rich for short periods.

“And who are the rich? Affluent people, compared with poor ones, tend to have greater education and spouses who work full time. The past three decades have seen significant increases in real earnings for people with advanced degrees. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that between 1979 and 2010, hourly wages for men and women with at least a college degree rose by 33 percent and 20 percent, respectively, while they fell for all people with less than a high school diploma – by 9 percent for women and 31 percent for men….

“The real income problem in this country is not a question of who is rich, but rather of who is poor. Among the bottom fifth of income earners, many people, especially men, stay there their whole lives. Low education and unwed motherhood only exacerbate poverty, which is particularly acute among racial minorities. Brookings Institution economist Scott Winship has argued that two-thirds of black children in America experience a level of poverty that only 6 percent of white children will ever see, calling it a ‘national tragedy.’….

“Reducing poverty, rather than inequality, is also a difficult task, but at least the end is clearer. One new strategy for helping the poor improve their condition is known as the ‘social impact bond,’ which is being tested in Britain and has been endorsed by the Obama administration. Under this approach, private investors, including foundations, put up money to pay for a program or initiative to help low-income people get jobs, stay out of prison or remain in school, for example….
“As Harvard economist Jeffrey Liebman has pointed out, for this system to work there must be careful measures of success and a reasonable chance for investors to make a profit. Massachusetts is ready to try such an effort. It may not be easy for the social impact bond model to work consistently, but it offers one big benefit:

Instead of carping about who is rich, we would be trying to help people who are poor.”

How else to describe the winter of 2011-2012? How about the 3rd least snow for the lower 48 going back to 1967? Bismarck, N.D., 1/5th the normal amount. Chicago is having its warmest winter in 80 years. The weather here in Murray, Kentucky was spectacular on Thursday. Beautiful sunshine, 60 degrees. Everyone was walking around in t-shirts.

Meanwhile, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow so six more weeks of winter golf!

But Fort Yukon, Alaska hit a record -66 last weekend.

Good news…the Dallas-Fort Worth area is officially out of drought for the first time since July, though nearly 60% of the state still remains in dire shape.
So why am I in Murray, Kentucky? Each year I pick a college football or basketball team to follow (seeing the sad state of my alma mater’s squads), and I take a flyer early in the season and get tickets. In the past this has meant trips to the likes of Oregon, San Diego State, Davidson, and Idaho; in this last one to see Boise State but in Idaho’s unique field house.

Early on in the current college basketball season, though, I decided Murray State had a chance to run the table and so I got a ticket to a Racers game, which was Thursday against Southeast Missouri State. It turned out to be a fabulous contest, with the Racers finally getting their act together in the second half to remain undefeated and possibly improve their No. 10 AP ranking another notch next poll.

The population of Murray is in the 18,000 neighborhood and to reach it you fly to Nashville and drive about 2 ½ hours. Or you take a 50-mile detour like I found myself doing on Wednesday. You know that bridge that’s out? The one that made the national news when an ocean-going caliber vessel, tooling down the Cumberland, plowed into it? The thing is the boat was carrying missile parts.

Anyway, I thought the bridge wasn’t part of my travel plans, until I learned it was. So I got to see a little more of Kentucky than I thought I would.
On Thursday, before the game, I went down to Ft. Donelson, scene of the first major victory of the Civil War for the Union and a place where Ulysses S. Grant began to really make his mark. If you’re a Civil War buff, you have to go.   
 
So that’s my story for this week and I’m sticking to it.

Pray for the men and women of our armed forces…and all the fallen.
God bless America.

Gold closed at $1740…unchanged
Oil, $97.84
Returns for the week 1/30-2/3

Dow Jones +1.6% [12862]
S&P 500 +2.1% [1344]
S&P MidCap +3.1%
Russell 2000 +4.0%
Nasdaq +3.2% [2905]

Returns for the period 1/1/12-2/3/12

Dow Jones +5.3%
S&P 500 +6.9%
S&P MidCap +10.5%
Russell 2000 +12.2%
Nasdaq  +11.5%

Bulls 48.9
Bears 29.8 [Source: Investors Intelligence]