Okay, that’s old history but worth recapping for just a moment. Because now, after a week of social issues wrangling — particularly between the Obama administration and the Catholic Church over contraceptive coverage — Rick Santorum appears to be the GOP frontrunner.

Here’s a bit from the New York Times:

A survey conducted Wednesday through Sunday by the Pew Research Center shows Mr. Santorum with 30 percent of the vote among Republican and Republican-leaning voters, virtually tied with Mr. Romney, who has 28 percent. A month ago in the survey, Mr. Romney held a commanding lead over Mr. Santorum, 31 percent to 14 percent.

A separate national poll by Gallup also conducted Wednesday through Sunday shows a similar surge for Mr. Santorum. The Gallup poll also has both men essentially tied, with Mr. Romney at 32 percent and Mr. Santorum at 30 percent. A Gallup poll released a week ago, on Feb. 5, showed Mr. Santorum at 16 percent, well behind Mr. Romney at 37 percent.

He did win three (non-delegate-granting) contests, but could the momentum relate more to how starkly social issues have taken the fore?

That's an 18 year-old Whitney on the right, on a 1981 cover of Seventeen.

Whitney Houston died at the age of 48, the day before the Grammy Awards. She was found in the afternoon at a hotel where, later that night, her long time manager and supporter Clive Davis would host an awards pre-party that became a tribute. During the red carpet to Davis’s party, celebrities offered simple tributes or, in the case of actor Peter Fonda — whose best-known role in Easy Rider included him and his costars using real drugs on set for the script — ascerbic commentaries. Regarding Houston, Fonda said:

We’re all very shocked by it and saddened by it, but it’s not a surprise. It should be a lesson for every musician, but all of the people who have abused drugs over the years still haven’t been a lesson to the rest of the people who followed that same pattern, that same role. I think she was a very addictive character, and if you’re that addictive and you can’t be helped in rehab, then there’s only one person who can help, that’s yourself. She lost track of that person I think quite some time ago.

The cause of Houston’s death isn’t known yet, but regardless of the immediate cause, the public narrative of her life centers around talent, instability, and addiction. Here she is as as a pop princess in her 1985 video for
“How Will I Know”:

(A compilation by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer includes links not only to her videos, but the 2002 interview with Diane Sawyer that focused on whether Houston was battling addiction. The star hedged her answers carefully.)

There’s a scene from the movie Precious where the obese, abused black title character looks in the mirror and sees a preppie white face peering back. It speaks to a kind of self-loathing that Toni Morrison explored in The Bluest Eye, as well as the fantasy all teens engage in. My family always taught me to love my race and hair and skin, but I was an overweight nerdy girl who aspired to be one of the beautiful cool kids. When I looked in the mirror, I did not see Whitney Houston staring back, but as I fluffed my hair and put on my makeup (quite poorly!), she was who I wanted to be. She, in my eyes, was perfection. Now, with her later life and death, she is perfection undone. No one is perfect in the way the media presents celebrities (often later to tear them down); but no matter what life Houston led her talent will go down in history. Her daughter is the same age that Houston was when she did that cover of Seventeen. For her daughter, mother, and all her family friends and fans — rest in peace, Whitney. Rest in Peace.

This thirty-second nugget of campaign nonsense was originally, in its HTML code, called “Yellow Girl.” Yes, she is wearing yellow, but one might be prone to looking for double entendre considering that this ad is A) blatantly race baiting in the guise of talking China economic policy and B) hypocritical (since Hoekstra voted for the Bush tax cuts and TARP bailout while his opponent did not).

And besides all that: I’m curious where this woman is from. More likely Chicago or Long Beach than China, judging by the fake accent.

On a race-baiting scale, this uses ridiculously unsubtle racial code that is more at the level of the Willie Horton ad than anything that’s been done about African-Americans recently. Oh well: there’s still time for more foolishness in the campaign season. I hope we don’t go there.

Hoekstra’s defense of the ad:

In this weekend’s Nevada caucus, the first primary contest with a large percent of Mormon voters (26% of participants), Mitt Romney won handily by 50 percent of the total. But he strikingly won 90 percent of the Mormon vote.

During the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, African-Americans were criticized for blindly following Obama because of race. Similar charges are not being leveled, at least not to the same extent, against Mormon voters for Romney.

Humans are social animals and we all have reasons for hewing to identity and affinity groups, as well as calculations about whether and how supporting a particular candidate will affect us and our communities.

There is no question that anti-Mormon bias is going to be a factor among some Republican voters when it comes to Romney. But I’m also interested in whether and how the close hewing of Mormon voters to Romney as a candidate will be explored with the same persistence than the black vote for Obama did.

From the Washington Post

America has its own royalty, but less of it with a less robust history and a shorter timeline. We measure our royalty, such as it is, in hundreds of years; Europeans and Asians in thousands.
I bring all this up to frame Mitt Romney’s statements that have gotten him in very hot water. He recently stated: “ I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich. They’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.” Romney made those statements on Wednesday after what must have been a satisfying victory Tuesday against Newt Gingrich in the Florida Primary.

Let’s parse these figures a bit. First of all, it’s doubtful that 90-95 percent of Americans are struggling, unless they measure their personal wealth against Romney’s or other titans of industry. The official poverty rate in our nation is 15 percent. Many more people are genuinely struggling to pay their bills. Yet “struggling” is as much a psychological measure as a financial one. There are people who earn a good living who feel overextended; and people who earn nearly nothing who feel, if not secure, at least at peace.

I met one of the latter recently while giving a speech about trends in the job market. He’d been laid off from a job he’d had for three decades, shortly before retirement age. Although he hadn’t been able to find another job, he told me he was thrifty and had savings that would sustain him. I remember how clearly and proudly he said to me, “I’m a free man.”

On the other hand, there are people who earn incomes at or near the “one percent” – i.e., roughly half a million dollars a year in income – and still feel like they’re struggling. In some cases, it’s not all a case of income envy. Our relative sense of wealth is based in part on regionalized and circumstantial expenses. If you earn a half a million dollars a year; have three kids in college who don’t qualify for financial aid; and are also supporting aging parents then perhaps you might feel a sense of anxiety. That’s not government cheese-level stress, but it’s stress nonetheless.

All that said, it’s hard to believe that 90+ percent of Americans perceive themselves as struggling, let alone actually show economic signs of struggling despite their incomes and savings. Anyone who watches television sees endless ads urging the spending of discretionary income on everything from diamond rings to Florida vacations to food at Olive Garden or Red Lobster. That implies that some people, and not just 5 to 10 percent of people, have discretionary incomes or lines of credit they use for non-essentials.

The United States is fundamentally a consumer economy (i.e., roughly 70 percent of GDP, though that number is contested by various economists for various reasons). To crib from artist Barbara Kruger, we shop therefore we are.

There will likely be entire dissertations written on Mitt Romney’s attempts to appeal to a populist voter base. While we consider that proposition, we also have to check in with ourselves, and decide what role we play in our constructions of prosperity, poverty, and class identity.

I received the following message from a contact and I am posting it for your awareness and consideration. Without attracting too much publicity, LinkedIn has updated their privacy conditions. Without any action from your side, LinkedIn is now permitted to use you name and picture in any of their advertisements.

Some simple actions to be considered:

1. Place the cursor on your name at the top right corner of the screen. From the small pull down menu that appears, select “settings”
2. Then click “Account” on the left/bottom
3. In the column next to Account, select the option “Manage Social Advertising”
4. Finally un-tick the box “LinkedIn may use my name and photo in social advertising”
5. and Save

How to inform your connections? Simple: Via Inbox>Compose message in Linkedin, you can send a message to 50 connections at once.

While CNN caught Romney for claiming ignorance of his own ad, it did not when Gingrichs aid his remarks were taken out of context. How out of context? Well, at the time, he seemed to think his own words were worthy of a Spanish-language apology. Here’s a clip of his statement and the apology.

Seems like something you’d remember in detail…

(Below, a shot of the White House’s enhanced web feed, which included charts, and humor.)

In the GOP response, Indiana Governnor Mitch Daniels called Obama’s approach “pro-poverty” and “a grand approach in trickle-down government” that held back the recovery. “Trickle-down government” was an odd phrase to use, since in some ways it implies Daniels and the GOP would want more government — a flood rather than a trickle. But the Republican Party has called for cuts, and the President’s list of new programs is likely to face steep resistance.

One of the tag lines of the speech was “no bailouts, no handouts, no cop-outs.” But was it a cop-out for the President to push a slew of new programs rather than an overarching big-think approach to ramping up the economy?

Election 2012 will be fought largely for two cohorts: swing voters and people who would not vote for the opposite party, but may not vote for their own. In the 2008 election, for example, some GOP voters sat out the election because they did not feel passionate about the McCain-Palin ticket. In that election, there was also a rise in first-time voters, particularly for then-Senator Barack Obama. This time around, with unemployment rates punishing for young Americans and African-Americans in particular, the cadre of Democratic voters could shrink compared to four years ago.

On Thursday, ABC aired an interview with Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne, who says that her husband asked her for an open marriage so he could keep the woman who is now his wife as a mistress. Gingrich excoriated CNN debate moderator John King for asking him about the infidelity, and denied the claim. Rick Santorum attacked both Gingrich and Romney, but seemed frustrated his punches didn’t land harder. Ron Paul wasn’t even in the camera shots for much of the deabte.

The most substantive moment of the night came when front-runner Mitt Romney defended not releasing his tax returns immediately.

Romney’s reluctance to release his taxes implies there’s something profoundly uncomfortable in them. Romney, who also sputtered that he’s lived in the “real streets of America,” was certainly profoundly uncomfortable answering money-related questions. The former governor and businessman offshores some of his assets — legal, but hard to sell to Main Street. As a spoof Twitter account @MittR0mney put it, “I believe in America. My money believes in the Cayman Islands.”

Gingrich connected with the crowd in ways that Rick Santorum didn’t. One irony of the present moment is that Santorum may actually turn out to be the winner of the Iowa Caucus, based on their verification system (essentially a recount). Even if a recount does show the former Senator from Pennsylvania winning the Caucuses, the delay in that information will have added to the sense that the Romney campaign is unbeatable. Well, let’s be real — it has always seemed unbeatable, but if Santorum truly was the Caucus winner, that information could have changed the way the race is playing out.

The players seem to have adjusted their game, given the shrinking candidate pool. At the latest debate, Ron Paul’s message on foreign wars and anti-terrorism didn’t suit the Red State audience who booed him down for saying, among other things, “I would say maybe we ought to consider a golden rule in foreign policy. We endlessly bomb these other countries and then we wonder why they get upset with us?” It was one of those moments where Paul, insulated by his cadre of supporters, completely misjudged his audience and the conversation. Rick Santorum, while giving an overall lackluster performance, gave wet-kisses to the gun lobby in an effort to reach the audience. Mitt Romney showed a lot of teflon when peppered about his history at Bain. The Republican voters don’t seem to love him but nor are the attacks gaining much traction with the core.

During the debate, Romney called for the end of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance laws… twisting the knife a bit in John McCain, who just endorsed him. In truth, it’s hard to make the case that citizens should be able to make fewer political donations than corporations. The solution is not to end McCain-Feingold but to legally undo some of the damage of the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court, which has flooded this year’s campaign with even more unlabeled, non-transparent money than ever.