Florida primary bares Republican split

By Max J. Castro

The polarization that increasingly has characterized, and virtually paralyzed, the U.S. political system now has acquired a new dimension. Added to the ever-widening chasm between Democrat and Republican, conservative and liberal, there is now a stark divide within the Republican Party itself and bitter ideological combat between self-proclaimed GOP conservatives.

Nothing has demonstrated the depth of this division as clearly as the Florida primary campaign and the fight between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney over who will walk away with the huge prize that a victory in the fourth largest state in the Union represents.
Of course, the fissure within the GOP did not suddenly explode out of thin air in Florida in 2012. Its roots go back at least to 1964, when hard-line conservative Barry Goldwater won the Republican presidential nomination, besting middle-of-the road contenders like New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, only to be trounced in the general election by Democrat Lyndon Johnson.

The 1980 primary campaign, in which Ronald Reagan beat George H.W. Bush, also exposed an ideological fault line within the GOP. But the elder Bush, a moderate by Republican standards, went on to become president in his own right, and Bob Dole and John McCain, also center-right politicians, subsequently led the Republican Party in losing presidential bids.

The current, unprecedented level of intra-party polarization in the Republican Party has resulted from the rise of the “tea party” – a response to the election and the (seriously distorted) perception of Barack Obama by the ultra-conservative wing of the GOP – and the astounding success of little-known tea party candidates in defeating even solidly conservative Republican incumbents in 2010 mid-term primaries.

In Florida 2010, the consolidation of the extreme right within the Republican Party was evidenced by the sudden political pulverization of former Governor Charlie Christ, a moderate and until then considered a rising star in Republican circles, the election of tea party darling Marco Rubio to the U.S. Senate, and the victory of Rick Scott, an unknown health care executive of dubious integrity with an ultra-right platform and over $70 million dollars to spare to buy an election.

The pattern of the campaign for the 2012 for the Republican presidential nomination has revealed, in a curious but clear way, the pull of the hard-core faction. Because they fear he may revert to his former moderate stances, time and again Republican voters have shown at best lukewarm support (Iowa) or outright rejection (South Carolina) of Mitt Romney, the favorite of the moneyed interests behind the party’s so-called establishment.

Instead, most Republican voters have opted for a succession of unlikely but reliably extreme right candidates, who together have received from two-thirds to three-fourths of voter preference in caucuses, elections (with the exception of New Hampshire, practically Mitt Romney’s home field), and polls.

Alas, for various reasons, among them extreme ignorance, negligible debating skills, personal scandals, crazy policy proposals and pronouncements, and lack of money, all of the hard-right candidates have fallen. Except one, Newt Gingrich, who beat Mitt Romney soundly in South Carolina and rode into Florida leading the polls and with what many political pundits call “momentum.” That’s a valid principle in physics but an illusory one in politics.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece for Progreso titled “Down to one” predicting Romney would ultimately win the nomination. The subsequent results in South Carolina did not change my mind. But for a few days after South Carolina, “Down to two,” became the dominant narrative among many political commentators. Now, as I write this on the Sunday before the Florida primary, the polls are showing Mitt Romney ahead of Gingrich by between 11 and 15 percent.

What happened? Several things. “Money talks and bullshit walks” says the mildly indecent but popular American adage. “Money is the mother’s milk of American politics,” ultra-cynical former Republican Senator Phil Gramm once declared (amid the 2008 financial meltdown he also said that Americans were suffering from a “psychological recession”). And Mitt has a lot more money than Newt, who has bull to spare. But cash? Not so much.

Still, the biggest reason that Florida may signal the beginning of the end for Gingrich is essentially the same one that did in all the other contenders. Or better yet, several of the reasons rolled into one package: a history of personal scandals, blatant hypocrisy, outlandish pronouncements, crazy policy proposals (a manned moon station!), scant money, and lack of organization.

Gingrich, Republican bigwigs realized, has many more Achilles’ heels than legs to stand on. His multiple, grave, tragicomic flaws make him unelectable. Indeed, all the polls show him losing big against Obama while Romney is even or slightly ahead of the president.

For Republicans, a Gingrich candidacy would mean that a president they considered all-but-politically dead because of the poor economy plus the fierce hatred of a sector of the electorate (largely based on racism and false or irrational beliefs) might rise from the ashes.

Republicans, increasingly a party exclusively of rightist whites, had come to see Obama as a virtually insignificant blip on the radar in the long march from the nadir of 1964 toward a pure “free market” society; translation, a nation completely dominated by a big business agenda driven by maximum profits and no government action to protect workers, the vulnerable, minorities, or the environment: in short, a society in which the interests of the general public would count for nothing.

They could not let Gingrich spoil their party. The “Gingrich threat” mobilized Republicans, from the moderate right-wing (Bob Dole) to the lunatic right-wing (Ann Coulter). In what looked like a concerted effort, they launched a volley of diverse accusations at Gingrich on television and in the leading newspapers.

I believe Romney would have eventually prevailed even without a helping hand from both respectable and insane Republicans. But the anti-Gingrich camp could not take the chance. And they wanted to drive the final nail in the coffin as early as possible lest a prolonged, dirty contest leave Romney so bloodied he might lose.

The Florida primary is likely to tell whether this GOP Gingrich-wrecking crew has accomplished its objective. On the eve of the election, my heart is with Gingrich because he would be easier for Obama to beat and also because I find Mitt Romney – the dastardly way he made his fortune, his perfect life and hair, his $22.5 million annual income, his 14 percent tax rate, his $10,000 off-the-cuff bet, his belief that $379,000 is “a little money,” and, especially, his opportune late-life conversion to ultra-conservatism – a total fraud, inhuman, an alien from another galaxy, and even more repulsive than Newt Gingrich. And that is saying a lot. But my mind says Romney – even if 75 percent of Republicans initially rejected him and because of the white-hot hatred of Obama among the base of the GOP, and the support of Republican business elites for Mitt. Now, more than ever, their money and Mitt’s money talk very, very loud.

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