elections

In the Department of No Surprise, we report this week on the excommunication from polite conversation of one Ron Paul, the odd-man-out candidate for the Republican–presidential nomination. Odd man, because Paul is just his own oddly compounded self and stays that way.

Half the fight against bigotry might just lie in showing up. When Abraham Hassan stood up at Thursday night’s CNN debate, he introduced himself as a Palestinian-American and a Republican. Plainly, that’s not what I expected to hear.

Though Gingrich got clobbered in today’s Florida primary, his echoing of the US Bishops’ war on religion talking point is likely to make it all the way to the 2012 election.

Of course, in today’s pussy-footing, self-censoring public talk about religion, we never ask how Isabella feels about being the occasion for edifying “sacrifice” by the Santorums? It is fine for Rick Santorum to tell us how such sacrifice has deepened his faith, strengthened the bonds uniting their family, and so on. Good for him. Moreover, Santorum would want no pity from me. He identifies with the uplifting narrative of sacrificing for the sake of others, protecting the weak, championing “life,” building character by overcoming adversity, seeing blessing where others see only curses, and so on. But I find all this attention to the suffering and sacrifice of Rick Santorum more than a little self-centered—a kind of spiritual egoism.

The Reagan era was supposed to have ended in November 2008—killed off by 30 years of flat wages and capitulation to Wall Street leading to a colossal financial crash. But today the Reagan era is enduring in stranger forms than ever.

David Barton’s post, “ America’s Most Biblically-Hostile President,” details a theme that has become known to the public largely through the Gingrich/Santorum bloc: that Barack Obama has led the most actively anti-Christian administration in American history. But given Obama’s frequent Christian testimony—explicit enough to make most founding fathers uncomfortable with its public expression of private matters—how can this view be so widely held?

Game Change reveals what no one else apparently has the chutzpah to say: that Sarah Palin was the opening salvo in the the dissolution and destruction of the Republican Party.

How did Rick Santorum roll over Mitt Romney in all those primary states? Where did the energy come from? While pundits still insist that he won’t topple the moneyed Mitt—whose campaign still generates about as much excitement as the winter sport of curling—Santorum is holding onto the spotlight long enough to put religious populism front and center.

“I think today’s anxiety about Mormonism can’t be compared to that of the past. The anti-Mormonism that was nearly universal during Smoot’s era is now a tradition maintained by a very small slice of the American population. The Republican primaries gave that small slice a megaphone: the artificial loudness of their voice makes people overestimate their number.”

Politicians as clergy? Save us.