"Collectivism" — he spoke the word, as if a wedding vow.

Mamdani said it, he highlighted it: "We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism." He promised it. He attributed warmth to it.

The link goes to my post yesterday with that quote as the title. In the comments, I wrote: "He's saying the words that have been left unsaid in the past. In that way, he's like Trump."

Who are the other American politicians who might have said "collectivism" — in a positive way, not as a way of criticizing somebody else? Bernie Sanders, who swore in Mamdani, doesn't use that word.

This blog has a 22-year archive, so I did a search to see how "collectivism" has figured into our discourse. I found 14 items, and I don't think any of them count as a positive use of the word in the style of Zoran Mamdami. 

Here are all the past occurrences of "collectivism" on this blog, in chronological order:

American history question of the day.

In which American presidential election were the major party candidates the least well-educated?

I have an idea of what the answer might be but don't know for sure. Trump famously said "I love the poorly educated"...



... but what does the label mean and who gets it? For the purposes of my question, I would consider the level of education reached, the quality of the educational institutions, and the difficulty and sophistication of the program pursued.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lloyd W. Robertson said:

I think you have to speak of different eras. Before 1900, it would have seemed ridiculous to expect an Ivy League education or something similar; there were lawyers, but as traditionalguy points out, that didn't necessarily involve what we would call formal education. John Quinicy Adams was almost unbelievably well educated in the "classics," with a lot of help from "amateurs" who were themselves well educated (including in law). Polk graduated with Honors from UNC Chapel Hill. Without more checking, I would just say that was very unusual at the time.

In the 20th century you have more "Ivy League" presidents, often with a gentleman's C average. Hoover was a brilliant engineer, an early Stanford grad, and surely one of the four or five highest IQ presidents (despite being remembered for his failure in the Depression). He made a reputation for finding ore where others had failed, working in many countries, making his way through obscure documents in many languages, hiring and organizing work crews, transportation, food distribution, etc. Johnson vs. Goldwater in 1964 may indeed set the standard for "little higher/formal education" for both major party candidates.

Johnson/Goldwater was indeed the idea I had when I wrote the post.

Anyway, to make the question work, let's begin at 1900. That was William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan. (1896 was also William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan, so we could just as well say let's begin in 1896, but it would make no difference.) WJB graduated from college and law school (Union Law College, known today as Northwestern University School of Law), so 1900 is not the right answer to my question. As for McKinley, he went to Allegheny College for one year and then went back home "after becoming ill and depressed."

I thought of the question this morning because I happened to be reading about Barry Goldwater, and I was surprised to see how little education he had:

After he did poorly as a freshman in high school, Goldwater's parents sent him to Staunton Military Academy in Virginia... He graduated from the academy in 1928 and enrolled the University of Arizona. Goldwater dropped out of college after one year...

As for LBJ, he went to college, but (constrained by poverty) an undistinguished place, Southwest Texas State Teachers College.

" The psychiatric establishment should follow the American Psychoanalytic Association’s defiant lead and retire the Goldwater Rule altogether."

Argues Jesse Singal (at New York Magazine).

As Stat News reported yesterday,* earlier this month the executive committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association told its 3,500 members in an email that they should feel free to flout the Goldwater Rule... To be sure, this is a drop in the bucket in terms of the wider world of psychiatry, given that the American Psychiatric Association has more than 37,000 members...

[A] psychiatrist commenting on a public figure is simply making informed inferences based on the publicly available information, in much the same way an aviation expert might comment on a deadly plane crash without having direct access to the crash site or the details of the subsequent government investigation....

In reality, it is very unlikely that credible psychiatrists would make public statements of concern about public figures’ psychiatric well-being in all but the most urgent cases, given the potential hit to their professional reputations. Those who would take these claims too far, who would politicize vital questions of mental health, would be drowned out and ostracized by their more professionally responsible colleagues

In reality? Singal's grasp of reality is way different from mine. 76% of psychiatrists are Democrats. Their political beliefs are very likely to skew their assessment of when it's "urgent" to get the word out that a political candidate is disordered and when they should "ostracize" a fellow psychiatrist who's spoken out. What happened with Goldwater is what will happen again. Even if only 1% of psychiatrists jump into the public spotlight to opine on the craziness of Candidate X, that's still 370 psychiatrists. And how many of the rest of them — the "more professionally responsible colleagues" — will passively enjoy the damage done to the candidate they'd like to see taken down? Meanwhile, a profession that needs to be believed in is going to get its credibility undermined. And that self-interest is the driving force behind the Goldwater rule.
______________________

* I blogged that here.

"Psychiatry group tells members they can defy ‘Goldwater rule’ and comment on Trump’s mental health."

The executive committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association emailed its 3,500 members, STAT reports.

The impetus for the email was “belief in the value of psychoanalytic knowledge in explaining human behavior,” said psychoanalytic association past president Dr. Prudence Gourguechon, a psychiatrist in Chicago. “We don’t want to prohibit our members from using their knowledge responsibly.”

That responsibility is especially great today, she told STAT, “since Trump’s behavior is so different from anything we’ve seen before” in a commander in chief.

An increasing number of psychologists and psychiatrists have denounced the restriction as a “gag rule” and flouted it, with some arguing they have a “duty to warn” the public about what they see as Trump’s narcissism, impulsivity, poor attention span, paranoia, and other traits that, they believe, impair his ability to lead....

“In the case of Donald Trump, there is an extraordinary abundance of speech and behavior on which one could form a judgment,” [said Dr. Leonard Glass, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School]. “It’s not definitive, it’s an informed hypothesis, and one we should be able to offer rather than the stunning silence demanded by the Goldwater rule.”

Let them speak, and then the rest of us will speak about whether they are professionals deserving of deference or human beings like the rest of us who can't keep our political preferences from skewing whatever it is we might think about some pressing issue of the day.

Go ahead, expose yourselves. Let us see all narcissism, impulsivity, poor attention span, paranoia, and other traits that impair your ability to lead.

IN THE COMMENTS: David said:

The percentage of hacks, cranks and fools in the mental health "profession" is stunningly high. And many of them are in a position to make individual lives worse.

And Michael K (who is a surgeon) said:

I personally know several who went into Psychiatry to deal with their own mental health problems. One guy was a former surgery resident who went full psychotic and started to be treated by the chief of Psychiatry at a university medial center. That chief of Psychiatry then accepted him into the residency which he finished. He was brilliant but as crazy as anyone I've ever seen.

"I wasn't that comfortable with all the psycho polemic babble. It wasn't my particular feast of food."

"Even the current news made me nervous. I liked the old news better."

Wrote Bob Dylan in his great book "Chronicles." I don't know if the Nobel Committee included that book in its reasons for giving him their big award, but I loved "Chronicles" and blogged it in detail, chapter by chapter, back in 2004. You can find all the old posts with the "Dylan's 'Chronicles'" tag.

Ah! That tag got me to a 2013 post reacting to a NYT piece by Bill Wyman (not that Bill Wyman) about how Bob Dylan could win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I said:

It's hard to believe Bob Dylan would like the Nobel Prize. It's just a topic to write articles about and to get traffic flowing wherever they're published. Remember the backstory to the song "Day of the Locusts":

"Sara was trying to get Bob to go to Princeton University, where he was being presented with an honorary doctorate. Bob did not want to go. I said, 'C'mon, Bob it's an honor!' Sara and I both worked on him for a long time. Finally, he agreed. I had a car outside, a big limousine. That was the first thing he didn't like.... When we arrived at Princeton, they took us to a little room and Bob was asked to wear a cap and gown. He refused outright. They said, 'We won't give you the degree if you don't wear this.' Dylan said, 'Fine. I didn't ask for it in the first place.'..."

Anyway, I was thinking about that line "There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke," as we were talking about the old aphorism "Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel" (which I attributed to Racine, and a commenter said was really from Horace Walpole). Bob Dylan also sings about getting a letter in which he was asked how he was doing: "Was that some kind of joke?" But there's more to comedy than jokes, so his contempt for jokes shouldn't mark him as a nonthinker, even if we take the old Walpole saying as gospel.

But back to that Dylan quote in the title. That's from Chapter 5, the last chapter of "Chronicles," blogged here (where there are links to the posts on the earlier chapters).

How people felt about Communists in northern Minnesota: "People weren't scared of them, seemed to be a big to-do over nothing." P. 271....

Dylan's favorite politician: Barry Goldwater. P. 283.

Why: "[he] reminded me of Tom Mix."

"Now, it seems to me we're up against a very different kind of a man. This man scares me."

IN THE COMMENTS: Clark points to the Hillary Clinton ad from July that is adapted from the LBJ ad:

"'I’d like to burn you at the stake!' growled Betty Friedan at Phyllis Schlafly during a public debate over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) at Illinois State University in 1973."

"Friedan and other feminists were unnerved by Schlafly. She was as sophisticated and accomplished as they were, but profoundly antifeminist. They tried everything to pass ERA and defeat Schlafly, from bribing state legislators to using witchcraft, but to no avail."

Did Friedan really growl or was that humorous hyperbole? I need the video or at least the whole context, which I can't get from the New York Times either, where I first saw this burning-at-the-stake business:

On the left, Betty Friedan, the feminist leader and author, compared her to a religious heretic, telling her in a debate that she should burn at the stake for opposing the Equal Rights Amendment. Ms. Friedan called Mrs. Schlafly an “Aunt Tom.”

I'm reading that today because Phyllis Schlafly has died — after a long public life and at the age of 92. Let's keep reading:

Mrs. Schlafly became a forceful conservative voice in the 1950s, when she joined the right-wing crusade against international Communism. In the 1960s, with her popular self-published book “A Choice Not an Echo” (it sold more than three million copies) and a growing legion of followers, she gave critical support to the presidential ambitions of Senator Barry Goldwater, the hard-right Arizonan who went on to lead the Republican Party to electoral disaster in 1964, but who planted the seeds of a conservative revival that would flower with the rise of Ronald Reagan....

Many saw her ability to mobilize that citizens’ army as her greatest accomplishment. Angered by the cultural transformations of the 1960s, beginning with the 1962 Supreme Court ruling prohibiting state-sponsored prayer in public schools, her “little old ladies in tennis shoes,” as some called them, went from ringing doorbells for Goldwater to serving as foot soldiers for the “Reagan revolution.” 

Little old ladies in tennis shoes... that really was a standard expression, the contempt of the time for the little people, who were openly called little. Back when older women could be frankly minimized as "old ladies." But we still sort out women according to their shoes. And it's less meaningful to be caught wearing sneakers.

According to William Safire's "Political Dictionary," the term "little old ladies in tennis shoes" was "coined in 1961 by Stanley Mosk, then the Democratic Attorney General of California, in a report on right-wing activity." It was then used to attack supporters of Barry Goldwater, specifically the "resolute, intensely dedicated women's group — Western (or at least not Eastern urban), unsophisticated, often white-haired and wearing rimless eyeglasses. They were called 'the little old ladies in tennis shoes' with considerable disdain." Safire tells us that that in 1966, when Reagan was campaigning for governor in California, he recognized the "sexism and ageism" in the phrase and flipped it into a joke, addressing crowds with "Gentlemen — and 'little ladies in tennis shoes.'"

Anyway, goodbye to Phyllis Schlafly. I wasn't on her side in most of this, but I respect the hard work and the strong voice throughout so many decades in the ongoing debate about the kind of America we want.

"In your guts you know he's nuts."

From LBJ Library (photos taken at a visit in 2007) — a reminder of what presidential politics were like in the 60s. Goldwater (1964) was crazy:



And the Democrats (in 1968) presented themselves from the female perspective:

Politico talks to "two of the geniuses" behind LBJ's presidential campaign ads to find out what Hillary could do to beat Trump.

To me, those old ads look primitive, emotional, and evocative in a way that's more like what Trump is putting up against Hillary, but maybe that's Politico's point. Hillary needs to reach down past reason and scare the bejeezus out of people.

Here's the Trump ad that I think most resembles the old LBJ ad with the daisy:



Here's the LBJ ad:



From the Politico article:

Sid: Instead of having Hillary just stand in front of the camera as a talking head, they should do what we did — really, just illustrate what Goldwater said. When he said the United States would be better off if we sawed off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea, we just illustrated that and showed how ridiculous that was. We had a hand come out of the water and saw off the Eastern Seaboard, which just crunches off and flows out. The image was so ridiculous that it just showed how ridiculous his thinking was.

Here's that ad:

"I don't want to put anything on top of that. I don't want to put Obama drinking beer on top of that."

I say, referring to the previous post, a tribute to Barry Goldwater's acceptance speech, 50 years ago today, after Meade emails me a MarketWatch article — "Right and left finally agree: Obama has checked out" — with this photograph:



And Meade says: "Except that it's kind of related."

50 years ago today: Barry Goldwater, accepting the GOP nomination, said: "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" and "moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Here's how that looked on the front page of The New York Times the morning after. For the full text of Goldwater's acceptance speech, click forward to page 10. But do pause for a moment at page 9 where LBJ takes Lady Bird for a walk ("The First Lady was bareheaded and she was wearing a sleeveless, straight line dress with a light colored silk scarf at her throat") and for a glimpse at the future of telephone booths:



You get action when you telephone.

From the Goldwater speech — which is easier to read here — I've selected the top 10 best lines:

10. "We must, and we shall, return to proven ways — not because they are old, but because they are true."

9. "Rather than useful jobs in our country, people have been offered bureaucratic 'make work,' rather than moral leadership, they have been given bread and circuses, spectacles, and, yes, they have even been given scandals."

8. "[I]t has been during Democratic years that a billion persons were cast into Communist captivity and their fate cynically sealed."

7. "The good Lord raised this mighty Republic to be a home for the brave and to flourish as the land of the free — not to stagnate in the swampland of collectivism, not to cringe before the bully of communism."

6. "Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies."

5. "We do not seek to lead anyone's life for him — we seek only to secure his rights and to guarantee him opportunity to strive, with government performing only those needed and constitutionally sanctioned tasks which cannot otherwise be performed."

4. "History shows us — demonstrates that nothing — nothing prepares the way for tyranny more than the failure of public officials to keep the streets from bullies and marauders."

3. "Those who seek to live your lives for you, to take your liberties in return for relieving you of yours, those who elevate the state and downgrade the citizen must see ultimately a world in which earthly power can be substituted for divine will, and this Nation was founded upon the rejection of that notion and upon the acceptance of God as the author of freedom."

2. "Our Republican cause is not to level out the world or make its people conform in computer regimented sameness." 

1. "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

50 years ago today: Governor William Scranton says he'll run for the GOP presidential nomination, yielding to the proddings of the "Stop Goldwater" movement.

The NYT reports "Scranton Will Run":

With the party's San Francisco convention only a month away Senator Goldwater's advan­tage is formidable.

It has been made more so by the unconscionably long time it took Mr. Scranton and his mentor, former President Eisen­hower, to recognize that the Goldwater tide could not be stopped unless the people who stand for progress, instead of reaction, in the G.O.P. had the courage to come out forthrightly against him....

"I liked Senator Goldwater because he was a rugged individualist who swam against the political tide."

Reading the previous post out loud to Meade, I get to that quote, and he says "Bob Dylan!" And I say, "No! That's from Hillary Clinton's memoir!" The post is mostly about Hillary, but Bob Dylan is in there too. Meade thought it was something Dylan wrote in his memoir "Chronicles."

What Bob Dylan wrote was:

I had a primitive way of looking at things and I liked country fair politics. My favorite politician was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who reminded me of Tom Mix, and there wasn't any way to explain that to anybody. I wasn't comfortable with all the psycho polemic babble. It wasn't my particular feast of food. Even the current news made me nervous. I like the old news better.

I'd blogged about that when "Chronicles" came out and Meade's Hillary/Bob mixup got me looking for that old post. Searching my blog for "Dylan Goldwater," the first thing I found was this post from June 2008, about none other than Hillary Clinton.  She's everywhere! Just then, she was withdrawing from the presidential race. She gave a good speech, and I'd said: "Oh, Hillary, why weren't you like this all along?"

There's no mention of Bob Dylan in that June 2008 post. And, interestingly, the first commenter is Meade (a man I had not yet met). He quotes Hillary's "So today, I am standing with Senator Obama to say: Yes we can" and adds "Gag me." Despite Meade's tendency to bring up Bob Dylan, it wasn't Meade who dragged him in. It was a commenter named L. E. Lee who hijacked the thread to say:

"I was even more surprised that Bob Dylan said that he supports Barack Obama this past week. I do not remember Dylan ever endorsing a candidate for political office before."

Meade responded: "L.E.Lee, It's widely known that, like Hillary..., Bob Dylan was a supporter of Barry Goldwater in 1964." Lee demands evidence, Meade tells him to Google "Dylan Goldwater Chronicles," and I make a comment:

If you do that Google search for Dylan and Goldwater, I hope you find this old post of mine where -- as I elaborately blogged "Chronicles" -- I wrote:

Dylan's favorite politician: Barry Goldwater. P. 283.

Why: "[he] reminded me of Tom Mix."

Bob Dylan song that mentions Goldwater: "I Shall Be Free, No. 10."

I provided the relevant lyric:

Now, I'm liberal, but to a degree
I want ev'rybody to be free
But if you think that I'll let Barry Goldwater
Move in next door and marry my daughter
You must think I'm crazy!
I wouldn't let him do it for all the farms in Cuba.

And that's what I said immediately this morning when Meade brought up Dylan and Goldwater: "But if you think that I'll let Barry Goldwater/Move in next door and marry my daughter/You must think I'm crazy!" Back in 2008, what I did was to go on to write another post, about Bob Dylan and Barack Obama, "What did Bob Dylan say about Barack Obama — and what did he mean?"

In the then-present, which was before dawn, I was reading the new post out loud to Meade, because I want his okay for the use of quotes from him, and the material you see above in this post seemed like it needed to go at the bottom of that post I was trying to finish. I was struggling to get to the end of the whole long string of Stringband-and-Dylan-and-Hillary-and-Althouse-and-Meade and "Fishes stop and ask me where I am bound"-sense-and-nonsense.

And Meade was piling on, saying things like:

The first President Barry was almost President Goldwater... Dreams from My Goldwater... Fishes swimming in the gold water....

By then, the sun was up, and the post was up, without the update, because the update itself would need another out-loud read, what with the additional Meade quotes. It was a new morning, and this is a new post.

Can’t you feel that sun a-shinin’?
Groundhog runnin’ by the country stream
This must be the day that all of my dreams come true

Are there fishes in the stream, wondering where you're bound? What does the groundhog say? And will the Dreams from My Goldwater ever come true?

"Layers are the onion. There is no core. And onions don't ache. And if they did..."

Meade reads aloud from last night's post about the NYT "Planet Hillary" article...



... which ends with a transmogrification of the planet image to an onion image, with "something" at the center of that globular object (Hillary), that is "aching" for the peeling away of layers. Meade puts stress on the word that was a typo.

I correct it and say, "Layers of the Onion, wasn't that an Incredible String Band album?"



Oh, yeah, it sure was. It's in my iTunes now, not that I don't have the vinyl record from back in the 1960s in the house, with that cover that wriggled when we gazed into it. You see the onion and, above it, the eye (also globular), and, above that, the planet, and above that the 2-faced, male-and-female head.

It's easier to download the album now, and I need to be able to click on relevant songs when phrases come up in conversation around here. The first song I click on is "Painting Box," and Meade picks out the line "Fishes stop and ask me where I am bound." Such a hippie image!

Did Hillary listen to the Incredible String Band when she was a young girl, back in the 1960s?

"If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: An Alternate History."

A book by Jeff Greenfield that's getting a lot of attention this week (with the 50th anniversary of the JFK murder coming up next Friday). I don't know what Greenfield came up with as he broke #4 of my "10 rules for writing about the 50th anniversary of the day John F. Kennedy was shot," but the "If Kennedy Lived" fantasy was thoroughly examined by Meade and me in August 2012:

4 reasons why Republicans don't need to feel that bad.

Chris Cillizza link-grabbingly scrounges up some hope for the seemingly hopeless:

1. The party’s superstars are coming of age.... Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) — all of whom have significantly more star power than Romney....

2. There are a historic number of GOP governors.... [including 2 Hispanics]...

3. The electoral map is bad, but not that bad....

4. History is on their side. Presidential politics in the post-World War II era tend to be defined by the pendulum effect....

On #4, I still remember the Newsweek cover that followed the 1964 election: a sick/dying/beaten-up elephant in bed. Having supported Goldwater and grasped something of the value of conservatism, I found the image truly disturbing. And I was old enough to think somewhat deeply about it. Conservatism would never get its message across now. LBJ would distribute endless gifts and the people would never be willing to hand them back. And yet, 4 years later, Richard Nixon, the loser from 4 years earlier, would arrive — the "new Nixon" — and he seemed fresh, a source of hope.

Just my luck, though, I'd leaped leftward by then. Not that I could vote. On Election Day, I was 2 months shy of my 18th birthday, which wasn't as intensely frustrating as it sounds. In those days, you had to be 21 to vote. In an amazing run of bad luck, beginning in 1972 — when, irritatingly, all the 18-to-20-year-olds got in on voting too — I voted for 5 losing presidential candidates before my choice won. There have been 5 presidential election since that one, and I've supported the winner in 3 of them. In all of those 11 elections, there was only one man who won twice with me voting for him both times. That is, I've only voted for one 2-term President and stuck with him for the reelection.

When's the last time the worse looking of the 2 major party candidates won the Presidency?

A question I raise in the comments to this morning's body fat post.

Here's a list of all the candidates through American history. I'd say the answer to my question is 1976. But Jimmy Carter had a big smile that people responded to, and Ford had reached the presidency via Richard Nixon, who was quite unattractive, and people saw Nixon through Ford. That is, I could wriggle out of conceding that the "last time" was as recently as 1976. But what's the point? We get stopped at the next notch, 1972. Nixon was distinctly less pretty than George McGovern. Nixon was also less pretty than Hubert Humphrey in 1968, not that Humphrey was at all cute. 1964 was also a clear case of the uglier guy winning, LBJ being perhaps the ugliest President ever, and Barry Goldwater looking quite good. One more step back and we get to 1960, the strongest case I remember seeing beauty boosting a candidate across the line. And everyone talked about it (and still talks about it).

It's interesting that after that 1960 beauty contest, we got our spate of the uglier candidate winning. Why? The ugliest man ascended to the Presidency after the assassination of the handsome idol, and it was not odd that he was elected shortly thereafter. It took almost 20 years for us to revert to choosing the handsomer man, but ever since — more than 3 decades — we've chosen beauty.

This year, the GOP has made a strong choice in the beauty contest. It's not clear who's handsomer. Of course, it's clear if we average in the VP component, but the VP beauty boost is an iffy proposition. It didn't work — at least not enough — for John McCain or John Kerry. But I'm thinking if only Gerald Ford had picked someone prettier than Bob Dole....

Ron Paul's new anti-Newt ad.

That's hardcore. But is it unfair? Fair or unfair, it's what's coming if Newt is the nominee.

In that vein, here's Erik Tarloff in the Atlantic:

In my lifetime, I can recall only two presidential candidates who were patently anathema to their respective parties' establishment: Barry Goldwater and George McGovern. In both cases, the system sputtered and malfunctioned. Otherwise, the more extreme contenders have all been derailed before they could pose much of a threat.

My prediction is, that's what's going to happen to Newt Gingrich. He may have the wind at his back right now, but one way or another, he will be brought down. Opposition research will be leaked to compliant news outlets. Devastating anti-Gingrich commercials will be produced by campaigns that have no chance of winning. 

Like Ron Paul?!

People who have served with and under Gingrich will trash him in public. Personal scandals will be revisited, with new and uglier details provided. Reputable conservative newspapers and magazines will run editorials questioning his fitness. Much of this has already started to happen, and I'm willing to wager we ain't seen nothin' yet.

Okay, but Ron Paul is on his own. He's at least as "patently anathema" to the establishment as Newt.

Also in the Atlantic, from Elspeth Reeve: "Newt Gingrich's Women Problem":

There's a group of Republicans eager to nominate a Not Romney candidate but having trouble embracing Newt Gingrich: conservative women who don't like his history of adultery....

Former Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott told Politico that while Romney might have a hard time selling himself to southerners, when he gets in a room with them, he can win them over. Lott "recalled that Romney had successfully worked the room during recent campaign stops in Mississippi: 'The ladies loved him.'"

Oh? But Erik Tarloff says "there's something positively repellent about" Romney.

He combines a sort of feigned bonhomie with an air of profound, pervasive superciliousness.  His public self in fact mirrors his politics, opportunistic and inauthentic.  He's always reminded me of a very specific type peculiar to American educational life, one familiar, I should think, to most American males of a certain age:  The Boys' Vice Principal.  The one who pretends to be a regular guy, who kids around in the halls and sometimes permits himself the odd "Damn!" or "Hell!", but will bully you into doing something you don't want to do with a false smile of feigned friendship, and who will cheerfully, and with a little too much zeal, deliver stinging corporal punishment on your ass when he deems it appropriate.

Uh... okay. Well, that seems to be some wacky "male" perspective. The ladies loved him.

Paul Krugman denounces "the cult of balance, of centrism."

It's "a true moral failure," he says:

We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent...

Etc. etc. You know the argument. It's quite familiar really. I remember it from 1964:

"I used to worry that Sarah Palin would be the Barry Goldwater of 2012. My bad. Paul Ryan is the Barry Goldwater of 2012."

Frum yanks your chain.