There’s this narrative in left leaning and non-American press about Jon Huntsman’s failed candidacy where people say he failed to enthuse conservative voters because he wasn’t a populist and didn’t embrace the Tea Party. I don’t think this is right.

Mitt Romney isn’t a populist and hasn’t embraced the Tea Party and he’s probably going to be the nominee.

The candidates that are running as populists, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry, are losing support with their anticapitalists, un-Tea Partyesque attacks against Mit Romney. Rick Santorum isn’t a Tea Party conservative. He’s a George W. Bush compassionate conservative who doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as “personal autonomy.”

The reason Huntsman didn’t do better is because he didn’t run as a conservative from the start. He positioned himself as a right of center candidate in the belief that the country is right of center. It is. Most Americans think of themselves as either centrist or conservative. He would have done well in a general election but you don’t run a general election campaign in the primaries.

Huntsman realized this too late. Only in the final weeks before the New Hampshire vote did he start running ads that touted his very conservative record as Utah’s governor. Indeed, he may have been the most conservative man in the race given that he implemented a flat tax in Utah, reformed health care there without a mandate, enacted a school voucher program and was staunchly pro-free trade.

The mistake, I think, Huntsman made was running as an ambassador who put “country first” and not as a former conservative governor whose state was number one in job creation during his tenure. There was a real desire for a true and trustworthy conservative among Republican primary voters. None of the supposedly right wing candidates are. Huntsman is and he could have been that candidate.

Maybe he will be in 2016 if Romney loses in November.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich has emerged as the most formidable of non-Romney candidates in the Republican Party presidential primary contest. His chances of winning the conservative Iowa caucuses and South Carolina election in January seem high now but he could struggle to convince right wing voters that he best represents an alternative vision to Barack Obama’s.

Gingrich has polled at roughly 27 percent in Iowa since late November. His surge there coincided with Herman Cain’s demise during the middle of the month. The former businessman has been embroiled in sexual harassment scandals that forced him to suspend his campaign last week.

In New Hampshire, which votes in the second week of January, Gingrich struggles to topple 20 percent which is half of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s support at nearly 40 percent. In South Carolina, by contrast, Gingrich is climbing up to 40 percent whereas Romney is stuck at 20.

The presumptive nominee for months, Romney doesn’t enjoy the support of more than 25 percent of the Republican electorate nationwide. The remaining 75 percent of conservative primary voters has been busy considering alternatives, ranging from Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann to Texas governor Rick Perry. None of them quite met their standards although either could stage a comeback if (or once) Gingrich disappoints.

The onetime Republican redeemer has been dubbed the “anti-Romney flavor of the month” but if he manages to retain his momentum into the first primary contests in January, it would position him as the more credible of reactionary candidates compared to Romney who is perceived as right of center at best.

If he is to sustain his recent surge in opinion polls, Gingrich will have to build an organization in states that vote later in the process. Romney has already set up campaign offices and field operations in “Super Tuesday states,” the ten that vote on the same day March 6. Gingrich isn’t even competing yet in the states that plan to vote in February. He can’t because he doesn’t have the campaign war chest that’s necessary to expand his operation beyond the January primary states.

The Washington Post reports that Gingrich’s is one of the most heavily indebted presidential campaigns this season. “He spent nearly $3 for every $2 he raised.” Romney’s campaign, by contrast, is not in debt and raised almost ten times as much as Gingrich’s did in September, enabling him to build an extensive operation throughout the country.

Even if he comes out strong of Iowa, South Carolina and possibly Florida, a protracted nomination battle will likely make voters think twice about Gingrich’s conservative credentials.

Romney’s main challenge is to convince Republicans that he will repeal the president’s health care reform law although he enacted a similar health insurance scheme in the state of Massachusetts. Conservatives object in particular to the individual mandate that was enshrined in both legislations and forced people to buy insurance.

When Republicans fought against a Democratic effort to collectivize health care in the 1990s, Gingrich touted an individual mandate as the conservative, free market solution to reforming the health insurance market. He has also flirted with a cap and trade system to reduce pollution and appeared in a television advertisement with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi to express his concern about climate change. None of these positions sit well with the current Republican electorate which is hostile to Big Government and skeptical of the assertion that human activity is to blame for global warming.

Finally, there’s Gingrich’s tendency to overstate his own importance to American if not world politics. He told a sympathetic interviewer on Fox News earlier this month that not only did he held President Ronald Reagan “develop supply side economics” during the 1980s. “I helped lead the effort to defeat communism in the Congress,” he claimed. A dubious assertion for a man who was forced to resign as a congressional leader because Republican lawmakers no longer trusted him.

In explaining with America needed his leadership, Gingrich told a stunned Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in 1994 that he didn’t want his “daughter and wife raped and killed” in a country that had collapsed. He added, “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.” Gingrich was at the time married to his second wife whom he cheated on a couple of years later with the woman who’s currently his spouse and twenty-three years his junior.

Despite being a career politician for decades and later a commentator and lobbyist who was actively involved in national politics for twenty years before he announced a presidential run, Gingrich told Radio Iowa this month that he was “the most experienced outsider in modern terms” and willing to “challenge the establishment” without regard to “Republican or Democratic political correctness.”

Gingrich’s chances of securing the nomination hinge on conservatives’ willingness to delude themselves and believe that this time, he’s different. If his rhetoric is any indication, it’s the same old Newt though.

Dr Donald Berwick is gone. The man who was appointed by President Barack Obama last year to head the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services would not be confirmed by Republicans in the Senate so the administration is nominating his deputy instead.

The White House deemed it “unfortunate that a small group of senators obstructed his nomination, putting political interests above the best interests of the American people,” but from this blogger’s perspective, it’s exactly the interests of the American people they had at heart.

This was the man who professed any health care plan “that is just, equitable, civilized and humane, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate.” Good health care, he stressed, “is by definition redistributional.”

So he loved Britain’s collectivized health care system which he described as “not just a national treasure” but “a global treasure” that should serve as a model for the “bloated” American health insurance market. The United States, he added, were trapped in “the darkness of private enterprise” whereas the British model was “generous, hopeful, confident, joyous, and just.”

Which is odd given that Britain’s ombudsman determined this year that the very system was “inhumane” and failed to meet “even the most basic standards of care.”

But wait, it gets worse. Berwick lamented the fact that “the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out there.” He foresaw the need for what he called “a very difficult democratic conversation,” adding: “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care. The decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”

Suddenly, Sarah Palin’s “death panels” didn’t seem so preposterous when Berwick’s nomination was announced. This man shouldn’t be anywhere near making health care decisions for anyone. Good riddance indeed!

With all President Barack Obama’s lambasting of Republicans for supposedly “putting party before country,” I honestly hadn’t expected a Democrat to criticize conservative lawmakers more vehemently for their “intransigence” before the election but Senator John Kerry did on NBC’s Meet the Press today.

Republicans, said Kerry, had made “the calculation politically” to block a comprehensive deficit reduction effort “to wait until next year and just write their own deal.” The implication here being that Republicans would rather let America suffer another downgrade (a very real possibility) and leave the nation in uncertainty for a year than compromise with Democrats who, according to Kerry, were prepared to consider “huge, hard, tough, horrible reductions” in entitlement spending in order to get a deal.

Arizona senator Jon Kyl, who preceded Kerry’s appearance on Meet the Press, said Republicans had actually put $250 billion in additional revenue on the table if it could be achieved by eliminating tax deductions and lowering the rates. It should be remembered that no industrialized nation besides Japan has a higher corporate tax rate than America.

Kerry said that wasn’t true though and he lamented that Republicans weren’t “living up to the sacrifice” nor “the level of commitment” shown by American soldiers who gave their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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So this is leadership. Reuters reports that President Barack Obama plans to announce on Thursday that his administration will explore an alternative route for a Canada-Texas oil pipeline, delaying final approval until after the 2012 presidential election.

The $7 billion Keystone XL project is designed to carry oil—the equivalent of more than a million barrels of oil per day—from tar fields in Alberta to refineries and ports along the Gulf of Mexico. Its construction will be a huge boost to American construction and industry in the state of Texas which is why unions, traditionally a Democratic voting bloc, were in favor.

Environmentalists however, another key constituency for the president’s reelection effort, opposed the pipeline because, they say, tar sands are “dirty.” No matter that their exploitation will continue in Canada whether America builds the pipeline or not.

In June, the Republican controlled House energy committee had pushed legislation that would force the administration to expedite its decision on the Keystone project.

But of course, it’s the Republicans who are “putting party before country” and are more concerned about their election prospects than creating American jobs. No, the president, he is “laser focused” on employment.

Supposedly inspired by the Arab spring, a protest movement has swept Manhattan’s Financial District in recent days in an attempt to “Occupy Wall Street.” Although the protesters don’t appear to have specific plans or demands, they are outraged by what they perceive as greed in the financial industry and economic inequality throughout the United States.

In her treatise of the 1960s student uprising at the University of California, philosopher Ayn Rand recognized that the protesters there weren’t necessarily driven by a particular ideology either, rather by a desire to “take over.”

In “The Cashing-in: The Student Rebellion,” published in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966), Rand pointed out that the number one complaint among the “rebels” at Berkeley was that their universities had grown “too big” just as the nation’s banks today are deemed too powerful.

As if they had mushroomed overnight, the “bigness” of the universities is suddenly decried by the consensus as a national problem and blamed for the “unrest” of the students, whose motives are hailed as youthful “idealism.”

Excepts the students had no ideals, according to Rand. They had hardly been taught to think. They were the products of a modern philosophy that negated reason and told young adults that there was nothing certain in life. They came out of school into the world with the following sediments in their brains—”existence is an uncharted, unknowable jungle, fear and uncertainty are man’s permanent state, skepticism is the mark of maturity, cynicism is the mark of realism, and, above all, the hallmark of an intellectual is the denial of the intellect.”

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There’s an old myth in Russian politics that’s shielded whoever occupied the Kremlin since the days of the czars from personal criticism. It holds that the ruler himself is never to blame for the terrible policies of his administration. The czar, according to this myth, is ever the fatherly good doer but surrounded by unscrupulous advisors who are conspiring to make life as hard as possible for the ordinary working man.

A similar myth is in the making with regard to President Barack Obama.

Heralded as something of a redeemer who would repair all that ailed America after eight years of conservative government, Obama, cerebral and “cool,” was never the impassioned reformer his supporters wanted him to be. Instead, he is regarded as close to a failure now despite enacting the very sweeping financial and health care reform legislations the left demanded.

While urging compromise and pragmatism from “intransigent” Republicans, Obama occasionally asserts himself in the face of their opposition—usually only to backpedal soon after. He denounces them for “putting party before country” and complains that Republicans are attempting to block him every step of the way, whatever he’s aiming to accomplish—only to give in at the last possible moment. Whether it’s on extending low tax rates for wealthy Americans, achieving hundreds of billions of dollars in deficit reduction or canceling new environmental regulations, the president seems willing to meet Republicans more than halfway yet can’t resist chastising them for forcing him to.

This apparent discrepancy between the president’s rhetoric and his actions is explained away by The Washington Post‘s editors according to the “good czar” myth. Obama, they write, displayed “common sense” and “retreated quickly and graciously” from a stunt that was concocted by his idiot staff when they scheduled a major presidential address to conflict with a Republican televised debate on Wednesday.

Perhaps The Washington Post knows for a fact that the president had nothing to do with the scheduling of his address but if that were the case, surely, it should have been reported as a news story? Suppose the president asked for a joint session of Congress to deliver a jobs speech and let his advisors pick a date without his approval or interference!

Far more likely is that the president knew full well what he was doing: trying to unnerve Republicans only to retreat, as he always does, when everyone else recognized the move for what it was—a political stunt.

The only amazing thing in this story is The Washington Post‘s refusal to believe that the president acted like a normal politician instead of a good czar.

Leftists are lining up to blame the riots that began in London last week after the fatal shooting of a man by police but quickly spread to other parts of Great Britain in the days thereafter on the austerity measures that have supposedly been implemented by the Liberal-Conservative Government. That is “supposedly” because whereas cuts have been planned, most have yet to be enacted.

Writing for Foreign Affairs, Matthias Matthijs observes that the London riots are “set against the backdrop of Britain’s ongoing fiscal and sovereign debt crisis and the coalition government’s politics of austerity. They illustrate the critical connection between class politics and fiscal retrenchment,” he suggests.

The problem with [slashing public expenditure] is the unequal burden that such cuts put on various parts of the United Kingdom’s income distribution.

Whereas the country’s top earners can afford alternatives to state largesse and thus do not feel the weight of fiscal austerity, fiscal retrenchment hurts those at the bottom who directly rely on government services such as welfare, public education and transportation.

Nowhere throughout his article does Matthijs bother to mount an intellectual defense of the welfare state that has so obviously failed in Britain. Nowhere does he suggest how the country might otherwise emerge from fiscal ruin if not by spending cuts that “hurt” the poor. Nor does he offer any evidence for his preposterous claim that somehow, budget policy compelled the dissatisfied youth of London to riot and plunder.

Time‘s Tony Karon similarly blames a retrenchment of the state for the unrest without backing up his claim. He believes that “an Austerity Intifada is sweeping Europe” because “neoliberal economic policies have funneled most of the wealth created in recent decades to a small, already wealthy elite, while shrinking the middle class.”

Whether they respond with disciplined protest or nihilism and criminality, millions of young people in Europe today see playing by the rules of the socioeconomic and political status quo as offering them no decent future.

Karon even comes close to apologizing for the widespread looting, noting that demonstrators “accuse the Western world’s bankers of doing the same to the state, demanding bailouts to save them from the consequences of their catastrophic mistakes.” Right. They did it too!

Both authors completely ignore what’s at the root of London’s riots which is an utter lack of self-esteem that the very welfarism that they insist be perpetuated has fostered over decades.

Prime Minister David Cameron hinted at this on Wednesday when he pointed out that “people [were] allowed to feel that the world owes them something” in the desolate neighborhoods that have recently been stricken with violence. The conservative leader added that a country has a “moral problem” when a “sick” part of its society believes that it has only rights and no responsibilities.

He’s right. The British rioters aren’t guided by any particular ideology or well defined frustration. Their anger has nothing to do with austerity measures that haven’t even come into effect yet! Their anxiety reflects an entitlement mentality that is under threat. They and their parents were told by generations of politicians that they had a “right” to welfare provisions paid for by the productive segments of society and now that promise is falling apart. They were never taught to take care of themselves and soon, they might be forced to.

It’s tough adjusting to reality. But that’s not an excuse to take it out on your neighbors who always did just try to make a living.

President Barack Obama and his Democratic Party would have liked to increase taxes as part of a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction. Republicans, adamantly opposed to raising taxes, especially during a time of fragile economic recovery, managed to prevent immediate tax hikes although revenue enhancement could be part of a broader plan that is supposed to be worked out by a bipartisan congressional committee later this year.

Will increasing tax rates—by repealing the Bush era cuts for incomes over $250,000 for instance—boost revenue? Probably not.

America has tried high tax rates before. Between 1951 and 1963, the highest income tax rate was 92 percent. The top capital gains tax rate approached 40 percent in the late 1970s. Yet the ratio of individual income tax receipts to gross domestic product has always remained about 8 percent, whatever the rates.

Total tax revenue has also remained constant for the better part of the twentieth century at about 18 percent of GDP.

Democrats like to point at President Bill Clinton’s second term in office when income tax revenues reached an unprecedented 9.6 percent of GDP but this coincided with a period of rapid economic expansion and a reduction in the capital gains tax from 28 to 20 percent which encouraged a much greater realization of taxable gains through stock sales.

Simply raising the top income tax rate is unlikely to bring in much more revenue. President Obama’s “corporate jet owners” are far more likely to park their cash in some offshore bank account or fiddle the books to prevent having to pay higher taxes. That may not be particularly ethical of them but “the rich” are paying more than their fair share as it is. The top 0.1 percent of income earners in the United States pay as much as 18 percent of all federal income taxes. The top 1 percent pays 38 percent while 59 percent of total income tax revenue is provided by the top 5 percent of taxpayers. The Federal Government isn’t exactly letting them “relax and count their money” even if the president thinks otherwise.

Senate Democrats have threatened to block Speaker John Boehner’s $917 billion deficit reduction plan that would raise the nation’s debt ceiling by a similar amount this year. Just what budget cuts are they willing to accept?

Republican House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan‘s budget achieved more than $6 trillion in deficit reduction over the next ten years. All House Republicans voted for his budget in April though Democrats characterized it as “reckless” because it would effectively privatize Medicare, which finances health care for seniors, over several decades. But it would also just barely balance the books by 2021 while spending increases every single year.

In the same month Republicans enacted the Ryan budget, their study committee in the House of Representatives suggested more than $9 trillion in cuts over the ten year period. Under this plan, the Federal Government would grow by an average of just 1.7 percent compared to 2.8 percent under Ryan’s proposal and 4.7 percent in Barack Obama’s budget which would cut spending by just $100 billion a year.

The Senate overwhelmingly rejected the president’s 2012 budget proposal. Not a single senator, Democrat or Republican, voted in favor of it.

After Republicans voted for the Ryan budget and pushed for bigger cuts, the president came out with a speech in which he championed a “balanced” approach—a combination of austerity and tax hikes. He claimed that he could save more than a trillion in domestic spending, including military spending, over the next decade and trim some $100 billion in health support expenditures. Obama rejected the Republican plan however, opining that it would lead to a “fundamentally” different country than the one he envisages.

The Republican Study Committee’s plans were matched by Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn this month who single handedly identified $9 trillion in potential savings. He knew that Democrats would never accept all of those cuts but urged them to at least pick half. “Half of them solve our problems,” he told CBS.

Democrats, however, didn’t even consider his proposal. Now Speaker Boehner’s plan cuts less than a trillion over the next decade—the very amount set out by the president in February. And still, it’s too much.