Room for Space?

 

For the relatively tiny number of us who yearn for a national space policy that engages the public's mind to explore space, the very mention of space in a presidential campaign is a good thing.  That space became the focus of a pointed exchange between former Speaker Gingrich and former Governor Romney in last week's Florida primary debate is a better thing.

The fact that space exploration is not talked about at all in the White House, except by the current occupant to punctuate his claim on a vastly more expansive and expensive terrestrial government, is a national shame.

I do much prefer Newt Gingrich to be the Republican nominee for President.  But it's not his most recent call for establishing an American lunar base that compels me to support him over Mitt Romney.  No election will turn on an issue that consumes less than 5/8th's of one percent of the federal budget.  But space is symbolic of national power, and the ease Mitt showed in his rejection of Newt's lunar base proposal is a troubling insight into the mind of the former Massachusetts Governor.

While pundits and comedians are enjoying the moment, saying that space is too far-out for a serious candidate for president, I have to wonder why something that inspired three generations in the 1960s and 1970s to believe in science and learn math so much so that it invented the information age and accelerated the ubiquity of the online economy and revolutionized telecommunications-- just to name a few-- could be so suddenly and easily become so taboo?

A president's first job is to see the path and lead Americans upon it to move the nation from one era to the next with our freedom and prosperity intact. If Governor Romney is as passive about space as he appears to be, comfortable treating space exploration like a political asterisk and a decimal point in the discretionary budget, he does not-- just like Barack Obama-- meet the first criteria of being president.

Leading and leadership are difficult qualities to predict.  George W. Bush, who became president practically on the flip of a coin (a close Supreme Court ruling that ended the 2000 Florida ballot recount), only became a leader when terrorists attacked the US with hijacked airplanes.  Were it not for 9-11, the political establishment's incarnation of "frontrunner" would have been a likeable one-term caretaker president, barely capable of the job.  Instead Bush instinctively understood the scale and character of the 9-11 attack and marshaled the resources of the nation to defeat a global menace once-and-for-all.  Bush's leadership in such a critical moment, faced with numerous options that included the murky "law enforcement" approach of his predecessor, was impossible to predict.

So when a political primary contest offers the rare clear window into a candidate's innate understanding of leadership, it's well worth a good look:

If candidate Romney's quip that anyone who came to him with plans for a moon base would be fired on the spot is to be taken seriously, what would President Romney do to the CIA Director who told him that a jihadist Iran armed with nuclear missiles was, in fact, planning to launch them?  Would President Romney call for a commission to examine his options, as he said was his "plan" for NASA?  Would President Romney look out beyond the crisis and weigh the economic costs of failing to respond to Iran, or stay focused on the Pentagon's cost-benefit analysis for a preemptive US first strike?

If candidate Romney doesn't think US supremacy in space is worthwhile, where on Earth does US supremacy matter to him?  Just because China has announced plans for a moon base doesn't mean either they will achieve them or that we need to worry in a practical sense that China will impose its will on the world from the moon.  But as a symbol of national power, or as an extension of its economic sphere to the furthest possible real estate, or as a means to inspire (versus force) its citizens to perform complicated high-risk work, going to the moon obviously means a great deal to China.  Just where would President Romney point the way for America to achieve cross-generational greatness or positively (without going to war) extend US influence?

Voters are not any time soon going to require their President to embrace exploring space as a central theme of their government nor for that matter cast their vote based on a candidate's budget for NASA.  But far from making himself "safe" by answering Mr. Gingrich's moon base proposal with a joke, the view it provides into the mind of would-be President Romney shows it is small-- too small to be President.

Night of the Long Knives

I write with fear for Newt Gingrich tonight.

The man whose name (Saturday Night Live's) Seth Meyers quipped sounded like a character from Harry Potter, is in grave danger going into the CNN Debate tonight and the Florida GOP primary on Tuesday.

The Ministry of Magic and other GOP establishment evil-doers have set their wands upon Newt, feeling threatened by the only person who ironically can save Wizardom, and send Lord Voldemort out from the White House in November.

Since his tremendous comeback in South Carolina, Newt has been pilloried and vilified by a stream of Republican attackers like no other man in modern politics.  The intensity of the attacks against the former Speaker of the House by former (and some aging current) Members of the House of Representatives-- particularly the well-scrubbed Sen. Santorum who rivals him (Draco Malfoy?) for the nomination-- showed me how little I knew when I worked for the House in the halcyon days of the first GOP majority in decades.

My own obliviousness aside, watching the GOP establishment attack Newt is frightening.  It smacks of "Operation Hummingbird," the deadly 1934 Nazi party purge better-known as the Night of the Long Knives.  As the Wikipedia article explains:

Adolf Hitler moved against the SA and its leader, Ernst Röhm, because he saw the independence of the SA and the penchant of its members for street violence as a direct threat to his newly gained political power. He also wanted to conciliate leaders of the Reichswehr, the official German military who feared and despised the SA—in particular Röhm's ambition to absorb the Reichswehr into the SA under his own leadership. Finally, Hitler used the purge to attack or eliminate critics of his new regime, especially those loyal to Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen, as well as to settle scores with old enemies.

While in tonight's debate you won't hear Newt Gingrich compare the attacks on him to a murderous purge that draws an allusion between the GOP and the Nazis, but make no mistake-- the cannibalism by aging liberal Republicans against Newt by "icons" like Sen. John McCain and Sen. Bob Dole (membah him?) do no good for the Republicans chance to defeat Barack Obama, let alone their "choice," the liberal Republican Governor from Massachusetts, Mitt Romney.

Depending on Newt's performance tonight, the Florida Primary will be decided and likely so his campaign for president.  Tonight's debate isn't itself the Night of the Long Knives, but the mobilization of lesser GOP elites against Newt Gingrich this week has been terrifying.

The President's Last Supper

President Obama's last State of the Union address to a Joint Session of Congress ran over 65 minutes not including pageantry. It was a painful menu of new dishes combined with reheated leftovers.

Substantively, it was an expensive night out.  The list of new spending proposals was so exhaustive I lost count while trying to estimate and add up their costs.  But no sooner than I approximated another trillion dollars in new US debt, thinking this will never fly, the President offered how he planned to pay for it all.

Cloaked in notions of equity and fairness the long last feast droned on until finally when the check arrived-- tabulating Obama's gluttonous smorgasbord of cocktails, snacks, 3 appetizers, 2 salads, four main courses, a cheese board, dessert trolley, coffee, mints and after-dinner drinks-- whereupon the President belched from having stuffed his face full:  "Don't worry, it's on them."

Never mind the 30% minimum tax proposed for those earning over $1 million can't come close to covering the tab.  Was the State of the Union feast-fest just a "dine and ditch" operation, stiffing the waiter to eat the loss while the President and his party sneak out the back?

Not so, says the President.  He looked around the table and asked everyone to chip in so our kids aren't left with even more debt from previous "dinners."  He turned to those making more than $250,000 to chip in first with higher taxes.  Silence.

And that's when someone at the far end of the table asked the innocent question: "Who ordered all this crap anyway?"

About last night: Hell hath no fury

Where would Shakespeare beginith?

Going into the last debate before South Carolina's pivotal primary, I knewt that Gingrich would be asked about the revelations of his second wife, that Romney would be asked to release his tax returns, that Santorum would claim ideological purity, and Paul would sound zanier than ever.  Though I was not far off by the time the sparring match ended, I did not expect to see so much blood on the carpet.

Gingrich was delivered a gift by his former wife, Marianne, whose interview on ABC's Nightline was set to air later in the night.  But when CNN's John King made this ominous spectacle the opening topic, Newt swung at the curve ball and hit it out of the park, defining the moment as beneath the voters' expectations of dignity for a US presidential debate.  He handled it perfectly by both attacking the question and giving a full-throated denial of his ex-wife's principal allegation that he had asked her for an "open marriage."  That the rest of the debate was nevertheless generally undignified doesn't matter.

Least dignified was Rick Santorum's attack on his former mentor, Gingrich, who saw fit to accuse the Speaker of the House whom he served with, (and without whom Republicans like him would have been permanent back-benchers had it not been for Gingrich's campaign strategy in 1994), of being "grandiose."  Like the question about the scorned Marianne's interview, Gingrich swung back sharply and without a trace of condescension at his ungrateful protege.  Santorum did not retreat gracefully, but instead launched back into a bunch of inside baseball about Newt's seeming to go along with the House Post Office and House Bank scandals (not true to my recollections) as a member of the GOP caucus before becoming Speaker of the House. Gingrich did not dignify Santorum's ridiculous boasts of post-traumatic clairvoyance with a reply.

That Rick Santorum's political ascension in the House was owed to Gingrich's professorial support of the young freshman from Pennsylvania seems, like Marianne's happier years married to Newt, all but forgotten in the heat of last night's passion play.  Santorum as much as admitted his own astonishment at being able to stand among the final four candidates, his most truthful statement of the night.  Mrs. Gingrich, in the full interview on ABC, likewise revealed she and her husband were quite happy together before he became powerful.

The only thing that could make the GOP primary take the turn it risks taking, into a Shakespearean tragedy, would be for Santorum to begin believing in his own outwardly unfounded ambitions and in so doing destroy the last remaining chance the GOP has to stop Mr. Romney or vanquish Mr. Paul.  Voters appear to accept, even to prefer, their candidates with personal flaws.  If Gingrich wins the South Carolina primary on Saturday, we'll know that much for sure.  And though I do admire Santorum's gumption, youth, and his positioning himself as the Jack Kemp of his generation as the "blue collar" Republican by eliminating taxes on manufacturing companies, his impetuousness otherwise is striking.

Alas, poor Yorick, we are only upon the end of the First Act.  If in the Second Act, the "junior partner," (as Gingrich called Santorum once, doubtlessly angering the young turk), continues to bloody his mentor's chances, the spectacle of a Romney nomination will grow more and more ominous.  A bloody battle between Santorum and Gingrich will kill them both by the end of the Second Act. And without denominating right here all of why that would be fatal to the GOP in November, the "inevitable Romney" presence will cast such a pall over the conservative landscape, it sets the stage for an unthinkable Third Act ironic twist: Ron Paul will magically rise from obscurity and senselessness to become the only viable alternative.

So if last night's debate was the stuff of vengeful avarice, full of intrigues and unsaid scores waiting to be settled, brimming with barely-controlled greed and bomb-making petulance-- know this: it's not a comedy any more.