Ted Cruz's office says "in the mid-1990s, the Harvard Law School faculty included numerous self-described proponents of 'critical legal studies'..."

"... a school of thought explicitly derived from Marxism – and they far outnumbered Republicans."

That's in response to a New Yorker article quoting something Cruz said in a speech 3 years ago. (What Cruz said back then, at an Americans for Prosperity conference, was that when he was at Harvard Law School "There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.")

The Cruz spokesperson called it "curious that the New Yorker would dredge up a three-year-old speech and call it 'news.'"

Curious... there's a noncommittal word. I don't see anything wrong with digging stuff out of old Cruz speeches. He's a new character on the national stage, so it's not like old territory is being reworked. It was an inflammatory statement, and he needs to stand by it (and back it up), defend it as hyperbole, or concede he was wrong.
The New Yorker writer, Jane Mayer, was following up after Barbara Boxer had compared Cruz to Joseph McCarthy. That was pretty inflammatory too (as I said at the time). What Boxer said made it a valid line of inquiry for Mayer and not odd at all. What you say to your base will be heard by the outsiders too, and any politician needs to be prepared for that. Republicans hoping for a new star better not forget how badly Mitt Romney faltered when he had to deal with the 47% remark he'd used on the insider group. This Cruz quote is the same kind of thing. Don't minimize it.

Mayer talked to Charles Fried, the Harvard lawprof who was probably the one Republican referred to by Cruz. Fried says:

"I have not taken a poll, but I would be surprised if there were any members of the faculty who ‘believed in the Communists overthrowing the U.S. government".... Fried acknowledged that "there were a certain number (twelve seems to me too high) who were quite radical, but I doubt if any had allegiance or sympathy with anything called ‘the Communists,’ who at that time (unlike the thirties and forties) were in quite bad odor among radical intellectuals.” He pointed out that by the nineteen-nineties, Communist states were widely regarded as tyrannical. From Fried’s perspective, the radicals on the faculty were "a pain in the neck." But he says that Cruz’s assertion that they were Communists “misunderstands what they were about."

Clearly, it was rhetoric to call the Critical Legal Studies professors "Marxists" who believed in "Communist" revolution, and Cruz chose to do that at a particular place and time. Cruz is accountable for that. It's a shibboleth of the right to rely on the words "Marxist" and "Communist." It wasn't the way the lefty lawprofs of the time talked about themselves. I have a vivid memory of saying to a CLS lawprof — a very good friend, during a casual conversation — "I'd like to know about the connection between CLS and Marxism." She snapped: "There's none." I got the message: You sound right wing. It was understood that to sound right wing was to become toxic.

Here's a useful passage from the classic 1983 CLS book by Harvard lawprof Duncan Kennedy, "Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic Against the System":

Left-liberal rights analysis submerges the student in legal rhetoric, but, because of its inherent vacuousness, can provide no more than an emotional stance against the legal order. The instrumental Marxist approach is highly critical of law, but also dismissive. It is no help in coming to grips with the particularity of rules and rhetoric, because it treats them, a priori, as mere window dressing. In each case, left theory fails left students because it offers no base for the mastery of ambivalence. What is needed is to think about law in a way that will allow one to enter into it, to criticize without utterly rejecting it, and to manipulate it without self-abandonment to their system of thinking and doing.

This gun control controversy is a real gift to Republicans.

It got them out of the morose election postmortem. Now, they're in their zone. Guns! — such invigorating shift from having to talk about Mitt Romney.

Righties should be sending thank you notes to Joe Biden.

ADDED: Biden actually said: "There is nothing that has pricked the consciousness of the American people (and) there is nothing that has gone to the heart of the matter more than the image people have of little 6-year-old kids riddled - not shot, but riddled, riddled - with bullet holes in their classroom."

Like it's all a matter of the capacity to visualize gore.

If we picture a bloody mincemeat of fetuses, then do we get to take away abortion rights?

Paul Krugman is "feeling so despondent."

Why? "Because of the way Obama negotiated" the fiscal cliff deal.

He gave every indication of being more or less desperate to cut a deal before the year ended....

He did? Funny, Rush Limbaugh kept saying Obama wanted to go over the cliff. It was his preference. The idea was to get rid of the hated Bush tax cuts and the cliff was there as a device to make it possible to blame the GOP. Back to Krugman:

The only thing that might save this situation is the fact that Obama has to be aware just how much is now riding on his willingness to finally stand up for his side; if he doesn’t, nobody will ever trust him again, and he will go down in history as the wimp who threw it all away.

The wimp?! Hey, remember when they were calling Romney a wimp?



That was back in July. Was Romney "just too insecure to be President"? Meade and I were just talking this morning about exactly that. There were 2 crucial points when Romney failed to stand his ground. He crumpled under intimidation. One was when the 47% video leaked out. Romney went beta, instead of doubling down, getting hardcore. The other was during the second debate, when he was going big on Benghazi, and Obama and Candy Crowley performed their check-the-transcript routine, and Romney deflated into oh, am I wrong?

So, anyway... is Obama just too insecure to be President?

A conversation for the end of the year.

"He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to... run."

Tagg Romney tells on his dad, Mitt.

"If he could have found someone else to take his place...  he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention."

Imagine what it would have been like if Mitt Romney had broken open and expressed all of this, but maybe that was inherently impossible. A self-effacing modesty was baked in.

In this context, here's a Ross Douthat column from last August, prompting Romney to reveal his Mormon faith:

The broader Mormon experience... could help make the case for his philosophy as well as illuminate his human core.... Conservatism sometimes makes an idol of the rugged individual, but at its richest and deepest it valorizes local community instead — defending the family and the neighborhood, the civic association and the church. And there is no population in America that lives out this vision of the good society quite like the Latter-day Saints.

Mormonism is a worldlier, more business-friendly religion than traditional Christianity, but it does not glorify wealth for wealth’s sake... Mormonism represents “our country’s longest experiment with communitarian idealism, promoting an ethic of frontier-era burden-sharing that has been lost in contemporary America.”

Imagine if all of that were opened out and shown to the American people. Well, you can't. I can't. Not in one modest man's campaign. Not with all the predictable pushback.

Ridiculous WaPo headline + photo combination.

"A detached Romney tends wounds in seclusion after failed White House bid"?

He doesn't look detached or wounded and he's obviously not in seclusion while riding a roller coaster. The text emotes:

Gone are the minute-by-minute schedules and the swarm of Secret Service agents. There’s no aide to make his peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches. Romney hangs around the house, sometimes alone, pecking away at his iPad and e-mailing his CEO buddies who have been swooping in and out of La Jolla to visit. He wrote to one who’s having a liver transplant soon: “I’ll change your bedpan, take you back and forth to treatment.”

The media never got Romney, did they? WaPo is presenting "I’ll change your bedpan" as abject and pathetic. Are they only pretending not to understand or does it truly escape them?

"'White turkey chili': That's what President Obama served Mitt Romney for lunch."

"Was this really an intentional (ungracious, gloating, etc.) slap? I'm a paranoid — but it is the sort of thing the hard core politicos I've known would find funny...."

ADDED: Just before Thanksgiving, The Atlantic published this item: "Why Does the White House Always Pardon White Turkeys?"

"Power-hungry Bay State Democrats — eyeing another potential Senate opening if U.S. Sen. John F. Kerry joins the Obama Cabinet..."

"... are quietly discussing reinstating a 2004 law that would let Gov. Deval Patrick appoint a permanent replacement to help keep the seat under party control until at least 2014."

... The move comes eight years after Democratic lawmakers stripped then-Gov. Mitt Romney of his appointment powers in an effort to keep Republicans out of the office, and three years after they changed the law again to let Patrick appoint a temporary replacement.

"Mitt Romney Is Now Officially the Most Hated Man in America."

Kevin Drum.

"We have always had these dense urban corridors that are extremely Democratic."

"It's kind of an urban fact, and you are looking at the extreme end of it in Philadelphia."

"Mitt Romney is losing 593 friends per hour..."

"... at least on Facebook today from 10 to 11 a.m. You can loiter on his page and watch them plummet by the second." That was written by a WaPo blogger yesterday:

Refresh the page – 12.08 million. Refresh again – 15 less. It would seem the defeated presidential candidate faces a problem unique to the social media age: The race may be over, but on the Internet his bid for president remains as a frozen digital relic....

Maybe the sudden follower fall-off supports criticism that Romney was not terribly well-liked by his party’s base and those partisans are now looking for new party leaders to follow. (Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has seen a modest jump.) The dropping-off effect also has not afflicted lesser profile third-party candidates. Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson’s Facebook friend count rose during the same period that Romney’s fell. So did that of Green Party candidate Jill Stein. On Thursday, Stein was already posting again: “Our social movement is growing but there’s no time for rest,” she wrote. “Democracy doesn’t just happen on election day.”

Well, yeah. Stein and Johnson each embody a movement that goes forward. In fact, they only embodied a movement and were never possible winners. Romney was only ever a candidate and never any kind of a movement. There's nothing to follow now — even if you actually like the guy. But I'm sure many WaPo bloggers and others enjoy thinking that nobody ever liked Mitt Romney. And now everyone who ever Facebook-liked him is quick to unlike him, like liking him is like liking the unlikeable kid in high school which will get unlikeability on you. It's just Facebook. Well, but maybe that is how Facebook feels. You have your page, with the things you "like," and that makes a picture of you, a picture you must craft and edit to project likeability.

"If you’re in the con game and you don’t know who the mark is … you’re the mark."

An old David Mamet quote, deployed in the second-to-last sentence in an article titled "Campaign Sources: The Romney Campaign was a Consultant Con Job."

"After three decades of remarkably seamless career hopping — from Bain Capital to the Olympic Games..."

"... from governor of Massachusetts to constant candidate for president — Mr. Romney is now a restless chief executive with no organization to run."

He was heard to say, last Tuesday night, "I will not fall off the map."

"It appears Mitt Romney's campaign prepared a transition site in the event that he won."

Screen shots... of what might have been.

AND: Romney "was shellshocked."

"President Obama’s post-election offer to sit down with vanquished GOP rival Mitt Romney has spurred talk..."

"... of a possible White House role for Romney, a move that could help calm jitters on Wall Street and warm the partisan chill on Capitol Hill."

"Advisers to Mitt Romney insisted Wednesday that they were surprised by the scale of their loss to President Barack Obama..."

"... while big-time GOP donors griped about the campaign’s unflinching confidence in the final stretch."

“They ran a 20th century campaign in the 21st century,” said one Romney bundler, frustrated that the campaign made assumptions about the youth vote and voter intensity that didn’t pan out. “The anger is that they were entrusted to do certain things. It’s not like they were paid a $5,000 retainer to get a few dozen articles in an inside-the-Beltway paper. This is the major leagues.”...

"There were a lot of Republicans who were on calls that the campaign was having led to believe we had shots in Pennsylvania and Minnesota,” one Republican operative supporting Romney said. “I think Republicans are split right now between confused and shocked, and also I think they are wondering did the Romney campaign have numbers we didn’t have.”

In starker terms, the source questioned: “Was last week a head fake, or were they just not that smart?”

Boldface added.

The NY Daily News endorses Romney.

It endorsed Obama in '08, but it doesn't always endorse the Democrat. It endorsed Bush in 2004.

Here's today's endorsement.



Interesting halo effect around Mitt's head. I thought that was reserved for Obama.

Vote — for revenge... or love?

This clip neatly embodies a reason why I believe Romney will win. He feels like optimism, and Obama — who once owned the word "hope" — seems petulant, divisive, and ungrateful.

ADDED: On love and revenge, read Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech on Accepting the Nobel Peace Prize:

Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

AND: Here, for comparison, is Barack Obama's speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, over which we will puzzle forever. What was it for? He didn't mention revenge, but he did mention King and he did mention love:

The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached – their fundamental faith in human progress – that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.

Irrelevant benefits to Obama's losing the election, #1.

I write "#1" with confidence, as if I know I'll have additional reasons and this post is the first in a series.

"Irrelevant," because these will not be reasons that ought to have any influence on whether you should vote for Obama or not. (If you want to know what I'm doing and why, that post was yesterday.)

So here's the reason: It will be interesting to see what Obama does with himself if he is suddenly plunged into the circumstance of not being President. If Romney loses, no one will watch him, seeing what he does. He'll melt back into the general population. He's 65 years old. His accomplishments are accomplished. And if he never makes it to the presidency, he'll be a former candidate, not a former President. He doesn't even go back to an existing public office.

When's the last time a major party candidate lost without having a political position to which he could return? Not McCain. Not Kerry. They went back to the Senate. Oh, no! It was Al Gore! He found things to do to interest, entertain, and torment us. He would not be ignored. But he was a young man — young for a presidential candidate — only 52. It's possible that Romney will undertake some grandiose project, but it's nearly impossible to picture him going Gore on us. It's safe to predict that if Romney loses, he'll gracefully concede, wish us all well, and retire into private life, within which he'll be a loving husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, doing manifold good works that will receive no publicity.

But Obama! He's only 51. He was too green to have become President when he did, and he stumbled and lost — if he loses. He had so much promise that he hit the top early, and now all that ability, brought to bear too soon, goes forward into prime years... for what?! That's what's so interesting. We'll get to see what. We only get to see what's down that path if he loses: an irrelevant benefit to Obama's losing the election.

Did Chris Christie "sudden love-in" with Obama hurt Mitt Romney?

"Sudden love-in" is the Washington Post's terminology.

There is no professed motivation for Christie’s newfound feelings for the president, other than that the two men are now partners in a massive effort to rebuild his state. Asked about the election on “Fox & Friends,” Christie said, “I have no idea, nor am I the least bit concerned or interested,” adding: “If you think right now I give a damn about presidential politics, then you don’t know me.”

I want to say Chris Christie is saying and doing the right thing, not only morally and in his own political interest, but in the interest of Mitt Romney and the GOP. Saying it's not political and acting like politics are suspended, the best approach morally, happens also to be the best approach politically.

It's good politically because it's a vivid demonstration of devotion to public service and the capacity to rise about partisanship and do the things that need to be done.

Compare the Christie's interaction with Obama to the way Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco interacted with President Bush after Hurricane Katrina. Here's how Bush described some of it in his book "Decision Points" (at page 308-309):

The initial plan had been for me to land at the New Orleans airport, pick up Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin, and survey the damage on an aerial tour. But on the Marine One flight from Mississippi, we received word that the governor, mayor, and a Louisiana congressional delegation were demanding a private meeting on Air Force One first.

The tone started out tense and got worse. The governor and mayor bickered. Everyone blasted the Federal Emergency Management Agency for failing to meet their needs. Congressman Bobby Jindal pointed out that FEMA had asked people to email their requests, despite the lack of electricity in the city. I shook my head. “We’ll fix it,” I said, looking at FEMA Director Mike Brown. Senator Mary Landrieu interrupted with unproductive emotional outbursts. “Would you please be quiet?” I had to say to her at one point.


I asked to speak to Governor Blanco privately. We walked out of the conference room, through a narrow passageway, and into the small cabin at the front tip of Air Force One. I told her it was clear the state and local response forces had been overwhelmed. “Governor,” I pressed, “you need to authorize the federal government to take charge of the response.”

She told me she needed twenty-four hours to think it over.

“We don’t have twenty-four hours,” I snapped. “We’ve waited too long already.”

The governor refused to give an answer.

Next I asked to meet privately with Mayor Nagin. He had spent four days since Katrina holed up in a downtown hotel. He hadn’t bathed or eaten a hot meal until he used my shower and ate breakfast on Air Force One. In a radio interview the previous evening, he had vented his frustrations with the federal government. “Get off your asses and do something,” he said, “and let’s fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country.” Then he broke down in tears. When I met him on the plane, Ray whispered an apology for his outburst and explained that he was exhausted.

I asked the mayor what he thought about federalizing the response. He supported it. “Nobody’s in charge,” he said. “We need a clear chain of command.” But only the governor could request that the federal government assume control of the emergency.

Maybe it makes you Mitt Romney supporters nervous to see Chris Christie working smoothly with President Obama. You need to visualize the alternative. Governor Christie is doing exactly the right thing.

Mitt Romney likes to portray himself as a Republican who can work "across the aisle," and Chris Christie is modeling that very behavior. Message: That's what Republicans do. That's a good message, speaking to the very moderates who might drift over to Obama if the Republicans created friction and rancor in the wake of the hurricane.