On the eve of Iowa

I’ve said a lot about the individual candidates. Let’s take stock one more time.

Gingrich

Like Data and Lore, there are two of him: good Gingrich and bad Gingrich. Like The Three Faces of Eve, you never know which personality will emerge.

Good Gingrich is the iconoclast who challenges the conventional wisdom. Who questions a false premise. Who shakes up the establishment. Examples of good Gingrich are his positions on the federal judiciary and the so-called Palestinians.

Bad Gingrich is the pundit who contradicts himself because he talks too much, because he’s seduced by academic fads, because he lacks an ideological center. The political precession of the equinoxes.

Perry

I think Perry has good instincts. I think he’d be better than Romney. But on national and international issues, he comes across as a psychic or faith-healer who lost his earpiece. That blank look when he can't hear the backstage advisor whispering his cues.

Romney

Romney and Gingrich are a study in contrasts. Gingrich has a disturbing capacity to self-destruct.

But I prefer him to Romney. He had more of a conservative core than Romney–who has none.

Romney is less likely than Gingrich to implode. That’s both a strength and a weakness. He’s timid, cautious. Plays it safe.

The downside of being risk-averse is that he doesn’t generate any excitement. He’s so predictable and scripted. It’s like the difference between live TV (where anything can happen), and prerecorded TV–which edits out the flubs.

Romney would handle himself well in a debate with Obama. Smooth, affable, unflappable.

But is that enough? Wouldn’t that makes it sound like a discussion between two reasonable men? We need a candidate who can draw blood in a debate with Obama.

Enter Gingrich. Gingrich is scrappy. A street-fighter. He’d try to destroy Obama in debate. If he succeeded (and he has the ability to pull it off), Obama would stagger out of the debate like a battered boxer. I think that would be far more damaging to Obama’s image than a gentlemanly debate between Obama and Romney.

Ron Paul

I actually like some of his proposals. For instance, he wants to ax the departments of energy, housing and urban development, commerce, interior, and education. He also wants to let young workers opt out of Social Security and shift Medicaid and Food Stamps to states in the form of block grants.

Great ideas!

But therein lies the problem. Those actions require Congressional authorization. He’s been serving in Congress on-and-off since the mid-70s. If these proposals were doable, why hasn’t he done it by now?

Even when he’s right, he’s ineffectual. If all I cared about was ideological purity, Bachmann would be preferable to Ron.

Santorum

He’s my favorite candidate. I do think he needs to recalibrate his position on foreign policy. Nation-building was a bust. You can’t keep pouring resources down a bottomless drain. You need to show tangible results. Measurable progress.