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FEBRUARY 9, 2011 |
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By Matthew Continetti |
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COLD OPEN |
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Republican disillusionment with the establishment candidates for 2012 is striking. The other day I caught one of Frank Luntz's focus group segments on Fox News Channel. He corralled a group of Iowa Republicans and showed them clips of potential contenders for the nomination. Who appealed to them most? None other than Newt Gingrich. The voters told Luntz that they liked Gingrich's forceful arguments, his background, and his robust defense of the private sector.
The other big winner of the focus group was Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann. One participant told Luntz that she liked Bachmann over Sarah Palin because Palin was too polarizing. Another said that Bachmann had a great personality and solid communication skills. A third said that, while "I'm a Christie guy," he liked Bachmann because she "walks the walk."
None of the participants mentioned Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty or Haley Barbour or Mitch Daniels. None of them talked about a John Thune candidacy. Obviously, one shouldn't put too much stock in a 5-minute cable television segment. Romney is still the frontrunner for the 2012 Republican nomination. But he is a highly vulnerable frontrunner. And this race is as wide open as ever.
Before the segment came to an end, Luntz asked the panelists to shout the names of their preferred candidate. The result was an incomprehensible din. But enough people shouted a particular name to make it vaguely audible. The name was Christie. |
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LOOKING BACK |
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"Ours is supremely the age of abstractions. 'Create a concept,' Ortega y Gasset said, 'and reality leaves the room.' Careful reading of great imaginative literature brings reality back into the room, by reminding us how much more varied, complicated, and rich it is than any social or political concept devised by human beings can hope to capture. Read Balzac and the belief in, say, reining in corporate greed through political reform becomes a joke; read Dickens and you'll know that no social class has any monopoly on noble behavior; read Henry James and you'll find the midlife crisis and other pop psychological constructs don't even qualify as stupid; read Dreiser and you'll be aware that the pleasures of power are rarely trumped by the advertised desire to do good."
—Joseph Epstein, "Is Reading Really at Risk?", from our August 16 / August 23, 2004, issue.
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FROM THE DESKTOP |
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Daniel Mendelsohn: "The 'Mad Men' Craze"
What job would you have on the Death Star?
Guillermo del Toro's monsters
Roger Kimball: "Liberty vs. Benevolence"
When Reagan returned to Tampico |
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QUOTE OF THE WEEK (SO FAR!) |
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"I think it is legitimate to say, then, that the Beat Generation's worship of primitivism and spontaneity is more than a cover for hostility to intelligence; it arises from a pathetic poverty of feeling as well. The hipsters and hipster-lovers of the Beat Generation are rebels, all right, but not against anything so sociological and historical as the middle class or capitalism or even respectability. This is the revolt of the spiritually underprivileged and the crippled of soul—young men who can't think straight and so hate anyone who can; young men who can't get outside the morass of self and so construct definitions of feeling that exclude all human beings who manage to live, even miserably, in the world of objects … "
—Norman Podhoretz, "The Know-Nothing Bohemians," collected in Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing (1964), p. 156. |
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LOOKING AHEAD |
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Coming up in THE WEEKLY STANDARD: articles on the crisis in Egypt, Republicans and the economy, and our review of Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. And Joseph Epstein will give his take on the Chicago mayoral race. |
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PARTING SHOT |
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Quick, which country is the world's largest manufacturer? The answer is neither China nor Germany. It's the United States.
We hardly ever hear of America's industrial might. Instead, we spend a lot of time lamenting that America no longer "makes things." We worry about the rise of China. In his State of the Union, President Obama pined for the day when a man woke up, spent the day at the factory, went home, and repeated the cycle for his entire career.
But the truth is that America still makes plenty of stuff, including aircraft, drugs, semiconductors, construction equipment, cars, and food. What we don't make are the cheap, labor-intensive goods with which American consumers fill their homes.
In a recent column, Jeff Jacoby noted that America accounted for a fifth of global manufacturing output in 2009. "In fact," he continued, "Americans manufactured more goods in 2009 than the Japanese, Germans, British, and Italians—combined." And this was despite the fact that for part of 2009 the economy was in recession.
Why do the pessimists get all the attention? Part of the reason must be that when domestic industries lose market share, they turn to politics to protect their position (think U.S. steel). Another reason is the tremendous job churn in manufacturing. Productivity gains allow American companies to make more high-equality goods with fewer workers. That leaves some people out of work. And the low-skilled employees that are most affected tend to be unionized—which means they have one of America's great political parties at their beck and call.
There's no question that the shift in American manufacturing to skills-intensive work has led to a lot of economic anxiety among Americans without college degrees. But that's not because America has a manufacturing problem. It's because America has a skills problem that needs to be addressed.
See you next week. And don't forget you can write me at editor@weeklystandard.com.
--Matthew Continetti
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