It seems like just yesterday Mitt Romney released his 59-page “plan for jobs and economic growth.” That’s because it practically was just yesterday. Romney released “Believe in America: Mitt Romney’s Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth,” around the beginning of September 2011. It was even available as a free e-book on Amazon.Com. It was, as Richard Eskow put it, “the same old job-killing madness.” Implementing it, Bill Scher noted, would require “slashing the social safety net.”

That was before Romney retroactively lost the Iowa caucuses to Rick Santorum. That was before Newt Gingrich turned Romney into “The Man From Bain,” and surged to victory in South Carolina. That was before Romney found himself running neck-and-neck with a guy he had been leading by 38 points.

That’s gotta be enough to drive a guy who’s gone from “inevitable” to “in-question” more than a little crazy. In Romney’s latest economic agenda, it’s starting to show.

Romney’s economic agenda circa September 2011 consisted of a refusal to cut corporate taxes or raise taxes on individuals, an increase in defense spending, and a balanced budget amendment that would all but guarantee slashing spending on just about everything but defeat. Faced with a real possibility of losing both his home state and his “inevitability,” Republican columnist David Frum writes that Romney “threw his economic plan overboard” in a Detroit speech that “seems to have been written on the back of an envelope.”

No wonder Ezra Klein was able to sum it up in less than 150 words.

Mitt Romney is promising that taxes will go down, defense spending will go up, and old-people programs won’t change for this generation of retirees. So three of his four options for deficit reduction “taxes, old-people programs, and defense” are now either contributing to the deficit or are off-limits for the next decade.

Romney is also promising that he will pay for his tax cuts, pay for his defense spending, and reduce total federal spending by more than $6 trillion over the next 10 years. But the only big pot of money left to him is poor-people programs. So, by simple process of elimination, poor-people programs will have to be cut dramatically. There’s no other way to make those numbers work.

The devil is usually in the details, but Romney’s new four-page economic agenda is short on details and heavy on assumptions — short on details about where and how deep Romney would cut, and heavy on assumptions about how much economic growth tax cuts will yield. Is it “voodoo economics” or a wave of the “confidence fairy” dust? Probably a little from column A and a little from column B.

So, there’s a lot we don’t know. (A lot maybe the Romney campaign doesn’t even know.) What we do know is disturbing.

Taxes

For starter’s, Romney’s new plan would not only extend the Bush tax cuts, which are set to expire at the end of this year, but would also cut individual income tax rates across-the-board another 20%, reducing the top rate to 28% and the bottom rate to 8%, from 35% and 10%. In addition, Romeny’s new proposal would retain the 15% top rate for capital gains and dividends, eliminate taxes on investment income for households making less than $200,000, repeal the estate tax, and drop the corporate tax rate to 25% from 35%.

The tax cuts in the new Romney plan would cost the Treasury $4 to $6.2 trillion in “foregone revenue” over the next decade. That’s a stark contrast to President Obama’s budget, which would raise around $750 billion in revenue over the next decade, by reducing tax breaks for families making more than $250,000 a year, and individuals making more than $200,000 per year.  Romney’s campaign says that the new plan would broaden the individual tax base by limiting deductions, exemptions and credits, but offers details.

Debt

For all the noise that Romney and the remaining GOP field make about the national debt, Romney’s new budget would increase the debt. Last week, the Committee For a Responsible Budget released an analysis of the budget proposals of the four remaining GOP candidates, which concluded that all of them would increase the national debt “by massive amounts.” Each would transform the GOP into “The Party of Higher Debts,” as James Kwak says. 

The CFPB issued its analysis just one day after Romney rolled out his new economic agenda. So, its conclusions applied to the plan Romney introduced in September, which CFPB determined would have little impact. But after Romney rolled out his latest economic agenda, CFPB went back to drawing board, and released an addendum which determined that Romney’s plan would increase the debt by $2.6 trillion. The cost of the 20% across-the-board tax cut alone would be about $150 billion by in 2015. Other policies, CFPB estimates, would cost about $50 billion more.

The CFPB does note that the Romney campaign says that there would be “sufficient base broadening to make their plan as a whole … deficit-neutral.” But accomplishing that would require “would require making substantial changes to many tax expenditures, among the largest of which are for mortgage interest, charitable giving, employer provided health care, and state and local taxes.”

In other words, Romney achieves “deficit neutrality” through cuts to tax expenditures that hit middle- and working-class Americans hardest. Any benefit these Americans might get from his “across-the-board” tax cut will evaporate the moment tax breaks and expenditures that support these families are sacrificed for the sake of holding the capital gains tax at 15%, eliminating the estate tax, and cutting corporate tax rates.

Even with those offsets, Romney’s latest economic agenda would have “no measurable effect on the debt by 2021.” Best case scenario: Romney’s plan does nothing to reduce the deficit before 2021. Worst case scenario: Romney’s plan explodes the debt.

Cuts

Mitt Romney’s latest economic agenda calls for $500 billion in spending cuts by 2012, and caps non-defense spending at 20% of GDP . Keep in mind that this is in addition to reducing revenue by at least $4 trillion or as much as $6.2 trillion. Just days before Romney’s Detroit speech, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities took a look at his earlier budget proposals. Even before Romney threw in the 20% across-the-board tax cut, CBPP determined that Romney’s proposals would require massive cuts to non-defense programs. Even without balancing the budget, Romney’s agenda would require cutting non-defense programs by $637 billion in 2016 alone, by $6.5 trillion between 2014 and 2021.

There’s your “revenue neutral” budget proposal! So what if your 20% across-the-board tax cut reduces revenues by $6.2 trillion? Slash everything but the defense budget by $6.5 trillion and you’ve achieved something we haven’t seen since the Clinton era: a budget surplus, to the tune of $300 billion. By the way, this works even if it turns out those tax cuts don’t broaden your tax base. And we haven’t even talked about a balanced budget amendment. Throw that in and we’re looking at $10 trillion in cuts to non-defense spending by 2021, and a $3.8 trillion surplus. Bonus!

Great. So, how do we get there? And what’s “non-defense spending”?

Obliterating the Safety Net

Actually, it’s “non-defense discretionary spending” that we’re talking about here. It’s the “old-people programs” and “poor-people programs” that Ezra mentioned. We’re talking about spending on education, transportation, low-income programs, food stamps, disaster relief, veterans, etc. We’re talking about programs like Head Start and WIC, the food aid program for women and children. It adds up to about $145 billion for 2012, but that’s only about 4% of total federal spending.

It’s what we call the “safety net” — a combination of programs designed to keep the poor and “near-poor” from falling into economic oblivion. It’s what conservatives like Mitt Romney call an “entitlement society,” that’s “systematically destroying the work ethic, because they imagine most of it’s going to poor people who would rather depend on government than go to work, and to “government bureaucrats” who for some nefarious reason want to keep them “dependent.”  In fact, 90% of it goes to beneficiaries who are elderly, disabled

True to form, Romney flip flops even here. One minute he’s fulminating against and “entitlement society,” and the next he’s praising the safety net, and using to explain why he’s “not concerned about the very poor,” because “We have a safety net there.” “If it needs repair,” he says, “I’ll fix it.”

Perhaps Romney thinks the safety net is “strong”: that it’s in pretty good shape. Of course,  it’s not.  It’s full of holes and straining under the weight of more 46 million Americans living in poverty, and the millions more rely on the safety net to keep them just this side of poverty. Millions of people are already falling through the safety net, and the recession is pushing millions more into free-fall.

Yes, we have a safety net, but it’s starting to unravel and it is in desperate need of repair. Mitt Romney says he’ll do that. But even his previous economic agenda would have ripped massive holes in the safety net.

Romney’s budget proposals would shred safety nets even more. According to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, his plan would throw 10 million low-income people off the benefit rolls for food stamps or cut benefits by thousands of dollars a year, or some combination. “These cuts would primarily affect very low-income families with children, seniors and people with disabilities,” the Center concludes.

At the same time, Romney’s tax plan would boost the incomes of America’s most wealthy citizens, who are already taking home an almost unprecedented share of that nation’s total income. Romney wants to permanently extend George W. Bush’s tax cuts, reduce corporate income tax rates, and eliminate the estate tax. These tax cuts would increase the incomes of people earning more than a million dollars a year by an average of $295,874 annually, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

By reducing government revenues, Romney’s tax cuts would squeeze programs for the poor even further. Extending the Bush tax cuts will add $1.2 trillion to the nation’s budget deficit in just two years. That’s the same as the amount that’s supposed to be saved by automatic spending cuts scheduled to start next year – which, by the way, will hit the poor especially hard.

Oh, I almost forgot. Romney and other Republicans also want to repeal of Obama’s health care law, thereby leaving 30 million Americans without health insurance.

A Narrative of Life in Mitt Romney’s America

Mitt Romney’s newest economic agenda wouldn’t just shred the safety net. It would obliterated the safety net.  Matt Hubbard, and economic adviser to the Romney campaign, called Mitt Romney’s newest economic agenda “a  narrative of the policy agenda and life under a Romney presidency.” When it comes to middle- and working-class Americans, the poor and the near-poor, Hubbard’s words are particularly prescient.

We’re back to numbers there. So let’s try to return to narrative. If Romney cut Medicaid entirely — took it from the $407 billion its projected to cost in 2016 and moved it to zero — his numbers wouldn’t work. If he then excised out all spending on food stamps — taking them from a projected $80 billion in 2016 to nothing — he still wouldn’t be there.

Romney won’t do that, of course. His cuts presumably will be distributed among many, many more programs. But that thought experiment gives you a sense of the size of the cuts he will need to make. And the reality is that he’s not got many painless places to make them. The largest spending program left to him is Medicaid, which provides health care to low-income Americans, children, and the disabled. Retirement costs for federal employees are a large pot of money, but we can’t break all those promises. Transportation infrastructure is expensive, but we will continue to need to repair our roads. And so on.

Yesterday, Bob Borosage wove an alternate narrative of life under a Romney presidency out of nine things Mitt Romney believes, reflected in his new economic agenda. It’s a narrative of life in an America where rich no longer have “too little money.”

It’s a narrative of life in an America where:

• the wealthy no longer have “too little money”
• “those blessed by being born to the wealthy few should inherit the earth”
• the world is “the oyster of corporations seeking tax havens”
• Wall Street is “free to gamble with other people’s money, and you rubes are on your own”
• the military no longer has “too little money,” where elderly workers no longer have “too much security and leisure”
• “our schools, water systems, roads and bridges, subways and trains, nutrition programs for children, Coast Guard and FBI” no longer get “too much money” and “do with much less”
• and “children must play the hand that fate dealt them. If they are the heirs to the rich, they live charmed lives. If they are born to the poor, they must rise above it “

But perhaps the best summary I’ve heard of Romney’s budget comes from Republican columnist Frum.

Compassionate conservatism has been dead for a long time. Romney’s Detroit speech cremated the remains. As a man, Romney remains far and away the most capable of the presidential candidates seeking the Republican nomination. But he has now finally eliminated the policy differences separating him from the radical congressional wing.

This summer, during the debate over raising the debt ceiling, Republicans used a clip from The Town, a movie staring Ben Affleck, to rally their caucus to support John Boehner’s debt plan … and “hurt some people.” In September, New Jersey governor promised wealthy attendees at a Koch-sponsored seminar that “pain will be inflicted” if or when conservatives implement their economic agenda.

So far, the right has been disappointed in their desire to “hurt some people.” But if it gets him the votes he needs to win his party’s nomination, Mitt Romney is willing to promise them that they will finally get to “hurt some people,” if they just get him elected. Mitt Romney is willing to promise conservatives not only that “pain will be inflicted,” but how much and upon whom. That pain will be the real narrative of a Romney presidency, at least for 99 percent of us.

The 2012 presidential election may go down as one of the strangest political seasons in recent memory, for the simple reason that the influence of the financial sector in politics, policy and the economy has caused Republicans to sound like Democrats and Democrat to sound like Republicans — usually with confounding results.

When Republicans sound like Democrats, like Newt Gingrich attacking Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital, they tend to start arguments they can’t win. When Democrats start sounding like Republicans, like Cory Booker defending Bain Capital, they tend forfeit arguments they could win. That’s because, in both cases, the politicians are arguing about the wrong things, in order to avoid the real argument  — the one America needs to have, and Americans need to win; the argument over what kind of economy we will have going forward.

Gringirch’s attack on Romney’s record confused many conservatives, who equated it with an attack on capitalism itself. Newark Mayor Cory Booker echoed the concerns of confused conservatives when he called the Obama campaigns ads attacking Romney’s record at Bain Capital a “nauseating” attack on private equity, labeling them a distraction. “It’s either going to be a small campaign about this crap or it’s going to be a big campaign, in my opinion, about the issues that the American public cares about,” Booker said.

What Booker, Democrats like him, and conservatives now lauding his diatribe ignore or don’t realize is that the issues affecting voters don’t come much bigger and don’t get much more real than the kind of capitalism Bain represents.

Bain Capitalism

As Digby said, if Romney is going to run on his Bain Capital record and tout his private equity background as his main qualification for the presidency, then his track record at Bain is fair game. I summed up that track record in my original post about his brand of “vulture capitalism.”

A former managing partner at Bain, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, made it clear that job creation was never the point at Bain.

Bain managers said their mission was clear. “I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation,” said Marc B. Walpow, a former managing partner at Bain who worked closely with Romney for nine years before forming his own firm. “The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors.”

Under Romney’s leadership, Bain certainly created wealth for its investors, no matter what happened to the companies it acquired or the the people worked for them. The Wall Street Journal’s revealing look at Romney’s time at Bain shows that 22% of the companies Bain invested on under Romney’s watch either filed for bankruptcy, reorganized, or closed their doors — sometimes with substantial job losses. As Pat Garofalo pointed out, that’s nearly one fourth of the companies Bain invested in.

Some failed so badly that Bain lost its investments. That didn’t put a damper in returns, though. Bain produced about $2.5 billion in returns for its shareholders, out of just $1.1 billion invested. (Romney did alright, too. His campaign estimates his take during his term at Bain as anywhere from $190 million to $250 million. That’s enough for a lot of $10,000 bets.)

The LA Times piece makes it clear that Bain and its investors profited, no matter what happened to the companies in its portfolio. According to the Wall Street Journal, 70% of Bain’s returns came from just 10 deals. The LA Times article notes that “Four of the 10 companies Bain acquired declared bankruptcy within a few years, shedding thousands of jobs.” Still, Bain profited in eight of those ten deals, including three of the four that went bankrupt.

That’s the way “vulture capitalism” (as I like to call it) works. Bain and its shareholders profited in the end, no matter what else happened.

That’s the part of the story that the Gingrich movie seems to tell: what else happened. We know what happened on Wall Street when Mitt Romney came to town. A few people — Mitt Romney included — made a lot of money. Now we know what else happened on Main Street when Mitt Romney came to town.

What happened to those companies and the people who worked for them begins to read like a casualty list: 1,700 jobs lost at Dade International, more than 700 jobs lost at GS Industries, 200 jobs lost at American Pad and Paper (Apmad). After a while, it’s easy to forget that these numbers represent the lives of real people, whose job loss sent shock waves through their families and communities; people like Donny Box and Randy Johnson. 

It’s also easy to miss the point that this is just how the brand of “head I win, tails you lose” capitalism Bain practiced under Romney’s leadership is suppose to work; as the Obama campaign illustrates in a new video and slideshow about how Bain made $100 million on its $5 million investment in Ampad, even while sending the company into bankruptcy and its 1,500 employees to the unemployment line. Bain Capital made profits no matter what happened the companies in its portfolio. Nearly one fourth of the companies Bain invested in during Romney’s tenure either went bankrupt, reorganized, or simply shut down — often with significant layoffs. Seventy percent of Bain’s profits came from just 10 deals, four of which resulted in bankruptcy. 

“Extracting Value”

Romney’s factually challenged, incredible shrinking claims of being a “job creator” at Bain notwithstanding, his former Bain colleague got it exactly right. Bain wasn’t in the business of creating jobs, and Romney wasn’t in the business of creating jobs. Bain’s mission, and Romney’s job as its chief, was simply to “create wealth” for its investors. Period. 

Bain Capital and Mitt Romney were in the business of creating even more wealth for its already-wealthy investors. They were apparently very good at it, too. But the kind of wealth Bain and Romney worked to create isn’t the kind of wealth that leads to more widely shared prosperity. It’s not the kind of wealth that grows the economy, according to the CBO. Nor is it the kind of wealth that leads to job creation, according to Moody’s Analytics, because it doesn’t get put back into the economy to support existing jobs or spur job creation by boosting demand. The wealthy don’t spend their tax cut windfalls, but save them and invest them in the stock market instead; putting their money to work making money, rather than putting their money to work keeping people working and putting people to work. 

The success or failure of the companies in its portfolio were beside the point. When he’s not claiming the mantle of “job creator,” Romney casts himself and Bain as “fixers” who acquired “broken” companies and made them better —more efficient, and more profitable. But that wasn’t the point at Bain. To some extent, Bain and Romney profited from practices that were more about extracting value from its acquisitions than “fixing” them. (The language about “extracting value” is even repeated in some of Bain’s own material.)  

That’s what Bain Capitalism is about: “extracting value” with no investment in the fate of the companies in its portfolio, the people who work from them, or the communities that rely on them.

“What This Job Is All About”

Cory Booker called the debate over Bain Capital a “distraction” that threatened to make the election a “small campaign” about small ideas, instead of a “big campaign” about “the issues the American public cares about.” In his remarks at yesterday’s NATO summit, President Obama made the case for why Romney’s record at Bain Capital is relevant to a “big campaign” about “issues the American public cares about.” (And he managed it without even calling Booker a “jackass.”)

… [T]he reason this is relevant to the campaign is because my opponent, Governor Romney, his main calling card for why he thinks he should be President is his business expertise. He is not going out there touting his experience in Massachusetts. He is saying, I’m a business guy and I know how to fix it, and this is his business.

And when you’re President, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximize profits. Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot. Your job is to think about those workers who got laid off and how are we paying for their retraining. Your job is to think about how those communities can start creating new clusters so that they can attract new businesses. Your job as President is to think about how do we set up a equitable tax system so that everybody is paying their fair share that allows us then to invest in science and technology and infrastructure, all of which are going to help us grow.

And so, if your main argument for how to grow the economy is I knew how to make a lot of money for investors, then you’re missing what this job is about. It doesn’t mean you weren’t good at private equity, but that’s not what my job is as President. My job is to take into account everybody, not just some. My job is to make sure that the country is growing not just now, but 10 years from now and 20 years from now.

So to repeat, this is not a distraction. This is what this campaign is going to be about — is what is a strategy for us to move this country forward in a way where everybody can succeed? And that means I’ve got to think about those workers in that video just as much as I’m thinking about folks who have been much more successful.

The president is off to a good start on taking the debate where it needs to from here; from the particulars of Romney’s record at Bain Capital to what it represents, and the economic choices facing America. But, as I pointed out before, the business practices of companies like Bain mean profit for the investor class, and pain for the 99%. Now, president Obama needs to make it personal.

This is pretty good, but I think it’s going to have to get a lot more forceful. Obama has this habit, which you learn as a writer over time is really unconvincing. He very often makes an assertion without illustrating it, without saying why. It leaves listeners confused because he hasn’t really put meat behind the assertion.

But he is on the right track here. I don’t think this is such a difficult needle to thread. In fact he could get a lot more emotional mileage out of this sort of thing. Like how? Like so:

“The people who lost their jobs because of Mitt Romney’s creative destruction, those are precisely the people the president has to think about most. Those are the people who write the letters that I read every night before I go to bed. Those are the people who need my help the most of all. Mitt Romney and his fellow investors will mostly be just fine. I think about the other people. Governor Romney says, explicitly, has said many times, of lost jobs, that’s capitalism, that’s just the way it goes. Do you want a president who watches an American factory shut down and says, ‘Well, that’s capitalism?’”

Choosing Capitalism

“Do you want a president who watches an American factory shut down and says, ‘Well, that’s capitalism?’”

It recasts Romney’s answer to questions about bankruptcies, shutdowns, and layoffs Bain left in its wake as a Rumsfeldian “stuff happens” response to the economic consequences of Bain’s practices. Stuff doesn’t just happen. Stuff happens because other stuff happens. The debate is basically about whether we should regulate some stuff in order to keep it from happening, and what we should do about the stuff that happens as a result. 

We are, as E.J. Dionne writes, not in the middle of a national argument about capitalism versus “socialism,” but a much needed discussion about what kind of capitalism we want.

The Bain conversation has already been instructive. Romney’s friends no less than his foes have had to face the fact that Bain’s purpose was never about job-creation. Its goal was to generate large returns to Bain’s partners and investors. It did that, which is why Romney is rich.

Romney wants to focus on the positive side of his business dealings that did create jobs. He wants to brag about the companies Bain helped bring to life, among them Staples, Sports Authority and Domino’s.

That’s fair enough. But having made an issue of Bain on the plus side, he also has to answer for the pain and suffering — or, as defenders of capitalism like to call it, the “creative destruction” — that some of Bain’s deals left in their wake.

This leads naturally to the question of how creative the destruction wrought by our current brand of capitalism actually is. Since the dawn of the leveraged buyout era three decades ago, many friends of capitalism have questioned whether loading companies with debt as part of these deals is good for companies and for the economy as a whole.

What’s the alternative to the “vulture capitalism” practiced by firms like Bain Capital? What it’s called varies, I’ve heard it called “Inclusive Capitalism” and “the New Economy movement.” It’s components are just beginning to take shape, as more people envision a capitalism that better spreads the benefits of the “productivity revolution,” that regulates the worst of capitalism’s “creative destruction,” and incorporates a safety net to catch those left behind by the market.

This may be another debate in which President Obama could benefit from following Vice President Biden’s lead.

Vice President Biden’s speech last week in Youngstown, Ohio, drew wide attention for its criticism of Romney as someone who just doesn’t “get it.” But when Biden moved beyond Romney, he offered an energetic broadside against the new world of finance, and he picked the right venue to make his case: a noble blue-collar town that has been battered by the winds of globalization and economic change.

“You know the difference between having an economy that makes things that the rest of the world wants, and having an economy that is based on financialization of every product,” Biden told his listeners. “You know the difference between an economy . . . that’s built on making things rather than on collateralized debt, creative credit-default swaps, financial instruments like subprime mortgages. That’s not how you build an economy.”

This campaign isn’t just about Bain, or Mitt Romney’s past. It’s about our future. It’s about the kind of new economy we want to build. 

It comes to us all, eventually: that epiphanic, “come to Jesus moment” when the light of day finally penetrates our cloud of delusion, and undeniable reality slaps us hard across the face. That moment finally came for Newt Gingrich, who annouced that he will suspend his bid for the presidency. Tuesday night’s five-state Romney sweep apparently did what a bounced check and a penguin bite could not.

Since it’s unlikely that he’s going away anytime soon, it’s time to say “See you later” to Newt Gingrich. Oh, and “Thank you.”

Why thank New Gingrich? It’s only right to thank someone for giving a gift, especially one that keeps on giving like Newt’s viciously accurate attack on Mitt Romney’s vulture capitalist resume.

Let’s look back for a moment.

It was early in January, and Newt Gingrich was having a “moment.” We’re not talking about your garden variety “moment,” either, but one to rival the 1995 history-making, career-breaking “Air Force One” moment that got Newt immortalized on the front page of the New York Daily News. Stung by his fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, and angry at being the subject of negative ads paid for by Mitt Romney’s super PAC, Newt stomped off to New Hampshire.

Gingrich didn’t retreat to the Granite State to lick his wounds. Newt hit back with his own super-PAC-funded attack on Mitt Romney.

Thanks to a $5 million donation from a wealthy casino owner, a group supporting Newt Gingrich plans to place advertisements in South Carolina this week attacking Mitt Romney as a predatory capitalist who destroyed jobs and communities, a full-scale Republican assault on Mr. Romney’s business background. 

The advertisements, a counterpunch to a campaign waged against Mr. Gingrich by a group backing Mr. Romney, will be built on excerpts from a scathing movie about Bain Capital, the private equity firm Mr. Romney once ran. The movie, financed by a Republican operative opposed to Mr. Romney, includes emotional interviews with people who lost jobs at companies that Bain bought and later sold.

“We had to load up the U-Haul because we done lost our home,” one woman says.

Democrats have signaled that they intend to make Mr. Romney’s history at Bain a central part of their case against him if he wins the Republican nomination. But Bain has also emerged as an issue in the Republican primary, despite the party’s free market stance and business-friendly policies, reflecting the depth of public anger about the economy. At an appearance here on Sunday, Mr. Gingrich suggested that Bain’s approach was to carry out “clever legal ways to loot a company.”

… The Bain-centered campaign strikes at the heart of Mr. Romney’s argument for his qualifications as president — that as a successful executive in the private sector, he learned how to create jobs — and advances an argument that President Obama’s re-election campaign has signaled it will employ aggressively against Mr. Romney.

It was classic Newt at his bitter, angry, petulant best. And the result was a thing of beauty: a near-perfect attack ad that probably brought tears to the eyes and stirred feelings of envy in the heart of many a Democratic consultant in Washington.

To be fair, Americans United for Change got there first, with their take on Romney-as-Gordon-Gekko. But Gingrich’s 28-minute-long “When Mitt Romney Came To Town” (see it before it disappears down the memory hole) was huge. In one video, Gingrich spelled out the connection between profits on Wall Street and job losses on Main Street, and shifted the focus on the national discourse in a fashion similar to Occupy Wall Street.

I’ll put it this way: a Republican made Wall Street’s perverse business of creating wealth for the one percent, while destroying jobs for the 99% front-page news. Newt even called Romney out during the New Hampshire debate for following “a Wall Street model” where “you basically take out all the money, leaving nothing for workers.”

In 2008, Mike Huckabee said of Mitt Romney, “I want to be a president who reminds you of the guy you work with, not the guy who laid you off.” In 2012 Newt Gingrich hinted that Mitt Romney might actually be "the guy who laid you off." That’s what we call a “game changer,” boys and girls.

Newt effectively stuck a giant “Kick me,” sign on Mitt Romney’s back. At that point, the GOP primary had so many contenders that the debates resembled a right-wing political version of “American Idol,” but Romney was already considered the “inevitable” nominee. Newt focused national attention like a laser beam on Romney’s weaknesses early in the game.

Romney’s claims of being a “job creator” on Wall Street were scrutinized in the media, and undermined by Bain Capital alumni who said job creation was never the point at Bain. Former employees like Randy Johnson and Donny Box came forward, and talked about what happened on Main Street when Bain gutted companies like Dade International and GS Industries. After that, the attacks on Romney’s many other weaknesses — his top secret tax returns, his Wall Street wealth, his membership in “the top 0.001 percent,” his $101 million individual retirement account (IRA), his Swiss bank account, his secret tax shelter in the Cayman Islands, his “special” 13.9% tax rate (and how it compares with the rest of America) — became a steady drip that will only get stronger between now and Election Day.

Not long after launching his attack, Newt tried to take it all back. In a fit of pique, he not only violated Reagan’s 11th commandment, but created a perfect storm by posing too loudly questions he and his party are incapable of answering. Newt’s attack confused conservatives and bombed with right-wing bloggers, because he called into question what Ed Kilgore calls conservatism’s “cult of success.”

At Ten Miles Square, Michael Kinsley puts his finger on something that probably defines Mitt Romney’s true bond with a Republican Party that otherwise would just as soon toss him on the dustbin of history: the cult of Success, with its creed of identifying wealth and status with virtue, and any concern for equality or fairness with vice.

…The cult of success is so central to conservative ideology in this country that it brooks little or no dissent, particularly in a Republican Party dependent on downscale white voters whose resentment of people poorer or darker or sicker than they are cannot be complicated by any doubt about the morality of markets. It’s no accident that the entire conservative commentariat came down on Newt Gingrich like a ton of bricks the moment he indulged in a producerist attack on Romney as a predatory capitalist. Start accepting fine distinctions like that, and the next thing you know you might be wondering if this banker or that oil executive is virtuous as well!

It’s not nice to point out what’s in the Kool-Aid, after all. That’s OK. The rest of us got the point loud and clear.

Newt may be gone from the presidential campaign, but the devastatingly accurate case he made against Mitt Romney’s bid for the White House lives on. I guarantee you’ll hear it again between now and November. When you do, think of Newt. And say, “Thank you.” After all, it’s the right thing to do.

This story about the potential merging of the Republican Super PACs is downright chilling:

Restore Our Future, the “super PAC” whose millions of dollars in negative advertising helped bury Mr. Romney’s Republican rivals, will also shift its focus to the general election, officials familiar with its plans said. The group, which raised more than $43 million through the end of February, is hoping to reach the $100 million mark by the end of the cycle.

The super PAC will also have help from Mr. Romney’s allies and backers: Jim Talent, the former United States senator and a key surrogate for Mr. Romney during the primaries, appeared at a Restore Our Future briefing for donors in New York on Wednesday.

And people involved with the group’s fund-raising have in recent days approached Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino owner whose family contributed over $16 million to a rival super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich, to consider contributing to Restore Our Future. They have also approached Charles and David Koch, the wealthy conservative businessmen who founded Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations.

Restore Our Future’s political director, Carl Forti, is also an official with American Crossroads, a pro-Republican super PAC that is planning to raise as much as $300 million to spend on the 2012 elections. Federal rules permit the two super PACs to coordinate directly with each other on raising and spending money, and Mr. Romney’s allies expect that Crossroads and other outside groups, like Americans for Prosperity, will spend up to $100 million against Mr. Obama.

Ed Kilgore quips:

I don’t know if these worthies will ever get together in a single place at a single time to discuss their common work, but if they did, it would probably feel like one of those legendary Cosa Nostra summits. We may never again see the likes of this particular combination of avarice, talent, malevolent focus and permissive laws.

I think these are all smart people with so much money that these amounts aren’t really that significant. I also think they know that Romney is a deeply flawed candidate who is unlikely to win and that Obama is not really a socialist usurper who is dedicated to destroying capitalism. So Kilgore may be on to something. It may very well be nothing more than a fancy extortion racket. I think it’s entirely possible that these fabulously wealthy billionaires are making sure the political establishment remembers who’s in charge: “Nice little political system you have here, be a shame if anything happened to it.”

Remember, the whole point of Super PACs is the threat that they will come after people who don’t toe the line. That sounds like mob behavior to me.

Each morning, Bill Scher and Terrance Heath serve up what progressives need to effect change on the kitchen-table issues families face: jobs, health care, green energy, financial reform, affordable education and retirement security.

MORNING MESSAGE: What Republicans Say About Romney

OurFuture.org’s Terrance Heath: “Whether they’ve chosen him, settled for him, or just got stuck with him, it looks like Mitt Romney will be the GOP’s standard bearer from here on, and into the general election. [During the primary,] Romney’s fellow Republicans said a lot about him. They got a lot right, too … No attack on Romney was vicious or effective than Newt Gingrich’s attack on Mitt Romney’s career as a vulture capitalist … [And] there’s the lowest hanging fruit that Romney’s Republican opponents picked, and then threw at him: the flip-flops … contraception, health care reform, political action committees, Fannie Mae, climate change, immigration, green energy, abortion…”

Obama v. Romney On The GOP Budget

President eviscerates GOP budget as “social Darwinism.” W. Post: “President Obama delivered a stern and stinging rebuke of the Republican vision for the country Tuesday, castigating the GOP as a ‘radical’ party that has strayed so far from the political middle that its policies represent an affront to core American values … Obama said the House Republican budget plan, which has been endorsed by Romney and would slash entitlements and agency spending, is ‘so far to the right’ on the political spectrum that it makes the Republicans’ 1994 Contract With America ‘look like the New Deal.’”

Romney defends budget on Sean Hannity. CNN quotes: “This is President Obama being President Obama, which is finding a way to deflect blame and to mischaracterize the efforts on the part of very thoughtful and serious minded individuals.”

Republicans ask NYT for bizarre correction of Paul Krugman. Krugman responds: “… the Ryan people want a correction, because I said that his plan purports to raise trillions of dollars by closing loopholes, but they say his plan is revenue-neutral … . The plan surrenders trillions of dollars in revenue by drastically cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy. Then it purports to make up for this loss by closing loopholes. That sounds to me like a plan to raise trillions by closing loopholes … Are they just terrified that anyone might accuse Ryan of raising taxes? Or is it just general harassment?”

Conservative Activist Judge Launches Political Attack From Bench

Conservative judge launches political attack on Obama from the bench. CBS: “… when a lawyer for the Justice Department began arguing before the judges[, 5th Circuit] Appeals Court Judge Jerry Smith immediately interrupted, asking if DOJ agreed that the judiciary could strike down an unconstitutional law … [He said] the president’s comments … ‘have troubled a number of people’ … The bottom line from Smith: A three-page letter with specifics. He asked DOJ to discuss ‘judicial review, as it relates to the specific statements of the president, in regard to Obamacare and to the authority of the federal courts to review that legislation.’”

“This is nuts,” says NY Mag’s Jonathan Chait: “Obama is not denying the right of judicial review, or threatening to disobey a ruling. He is expressing a legal analysis. The right has suddenly become hyper-protective of the judiciary’s independence …

GOP plans to dredge up old failed ideas if Supreme Court overturns health reform law. NYT: “Their approach is likely to set aside universal health insurance coverage as the main objective … Republicans are dusting off proposals that date back more than a decade: allowing individuals to buy health insurance across state lines, helping small businesses band together to buy insurance, offering generous tax deductions for the purchase of individual policies, expanding tax-favored health savings accounts and reining in medical malpractice suits … The budget office said that the [2009] Republican proposal … would have provided coverage to 3 million people, leaving 52 million uninsured.”

Breakfast Sides

Protests over USDA plan to replace federal poultry inspectors. Government Executive: “USDA wants to expand a pilot program that replaces some federal poultry inspectors with inspectors employed by the processing plants themselves … The program’s expansion also could result in the loss of up to 1,000 federal inspector jobs … protesters outside USDA headquarters on Monday, including labor union members and watchdog groups, chose to protest the change for consumer safety reasons, holding signs that read ‘Speed Kills,’…”

Federal regulators move to tighten oversight of hedge funds and private equity firms under Wall Street reform law. NYT: “The 10-member council, headed by the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, voted unanimously to adopt a rule that will designate some of those firms as ‘systemically important financial institutions,’ and put them under stronger regulatory supervision … The oversight council will now begin a three-part process of determining which firms are subject to additional scrutiny from regulators.”

Brewing battle over student loan rates. Politico: “The White House and Democratic lawmakers are scrambling to find funds to stop an expected doubling of student loan interest rates this summer, arguing that they’re heading off another potential blow to the economy. But the new House GOP budget doesn’t include the $6 billion needed … At a time when the Federal Reserve is basically giving banks money for free, Treasury bonds are being sold at 2 percent and mortgage rates are 3.8 percent, Democrats say it’s outrageous to make college students pay 6.8 percent … to maintain the cheap loans, another higher-ed program would have to face the chopping block, said [GOP spokeswoman] Jennifer Allen…”

State and local governments may start hiring soon. Bloomberg: “After four years of shuttering fire houses, cutting school budgets and firing teachers and police, these governments are starting to steady as tax revenues rebound. Public employment at all levels declined by just 7,000 in the first two months of this year, well down from the 22,000 monthly average in 2011 … State and local tax revenue rose 4.5 percent last year, the biggest gain since 2006, and property taxes have increased for two consecutive quarters … Government employment has declined by 689,000 jobs since April 2009 after increasing by 756,000 the prior three years…”

In The Washington Post, columnist Matt Miller gleefully notes the parallels between President Obama’s campaign and that of President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign. Then, Republican opponent Bob Dole was lashed to the radical then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich budget; now Mitt Romney to the extremist budget of House Budget Committee chairman Rep Paul Ryan.

Clinton won re-election as the populist defender of “M2E2″ – Medicare, Medicaid, Education and the Environment – railing against the devastating cuts called for in the Gingrich budget. Obama has set himself up to run as the defender of M2E2 again – Medicare, Medicaid and Everything Else that Ryan would literally gut to pay for his tax cuts for the rich.

For Miller, an Obama victory, like that of Bill Clinton, then holds the tantalizing possibility of treacherous “progress” in the second term:

“Does any of this mean an Obama returned to office on these terms can make substantive progress in a second term? Perhaps. Clinton was poised to do big Nixon-to-China entitlement reforms with the GOP until the Lewinsky mess exploded. Obama, one assumes, won’t be facing such land mines.”

For progressives, this summarizes a shroud that hangs over the race. Obama recaptures his voice as a populist champion of change. We rally to his side. And then upon election, he uses the mandate not to defend M2E2 and progressive taxation, but for cutting another “grand bargain.” He’ll aim for earning elite approval by signing off on cuts to Medicare and Social Security, education and vital investments in exchange for “tax reform” that lowers rates while removing “loopholes.”

Does a second-term Obama see his legacy on the scale of Reagan – that he ends the conservative grip on our politics, and begins an era of progressive reform in which government stands with the many and helps to rebuild a broad middle class, and revive the Dream? Or does he see his legacy as doing “big Nixon-to China entitlement reforms,” embracing the elite consensus, and sustaining a conservative era of constrained government and growing inequality? Will he be the progressive president who revives the American dream or the New Democrat who buries it?

Conservatives worry about Mitt Romney’s Etch-a-Sketch strategy – that he’s wearing conservative garb for the primaries but will “reset” into moderate country-club Republicanism for the general election. Progressives worry that Obama will lead the progressive charge in the general, but abandon it once returned to office.

Beltway conservatives like Grover Norquist worry less about Romney in office. They believe the Tea Party-dominated House will set the agenda; any Republican president will have to sign whatever survives the Senate.

Progressives don’t have that solace. We not only have to retake the House – a vital mission this fall – but we have to overcome the diminished but still kicking Blue Dog/New Dem rump groups in the House caucus, the corporate wing of the party always ready to cut a deal with the powers that be.

When he was running for election in 2008, Obama noted how Reagan, unlike Clinton, had been a transformative president, indicting he’d prefer to be like the former, not the latter. If he wins re-election, still a heavy pull, he will face that choice. A transformative president or a treacherous one. And while his voters will mobilize behind the former, there are a lot of New Dems, as Miller shows, eagerly anticipating the latter.

That’s why progressives have to keep building independent movements. We need an independent political capacity to elect progressive champions in Democratic primaries and to take back the House. We need an independent movement to challenge the limits of the debate, as We Are One did in Wisconsin, and Occupy Wall Street did across the country. We need independent mobilization to drive change — from taking on the entrenched interests in Washington (the oil companies, the insurance and drug companies, the big banks) to curbing money in politics, and demanding progress on basic rights — decent jobs, affordable health care, world class public education, secure retirement.

Central to the effort will be rallying to Obama as he takes on a right growing ever more loony. Central to it will be organizing independently to support Obama if he chooses to be transformative and confront him should he go the other way.

So I’ve been wondering here lately about why these campaigns cost so much more than they did just a few years ago. What are these Super PACs spending all their billionaire contributions on anyway?

Well, surprise …

The Red White and Blue Fund, a “super PAC” backing the presidential bid of Republican Rick Santorum, paid more than half a million dollars last month to a newly formed direct mail firm.

The owner of that company?

None other than Nick Ryan, a former Santorum aide — and founder of the Red White and Blue Fund.

Ryan’s dual roles spotlight how political operatives behind the super PACs can take advantage of the mammoth donations streaming into the funds and the lack of oversight. Of the $1.5 million that the Red White and Blue Fund spent last month, a third — $570,000 — went to Global Intermediate.

[…]

Winning Our Future, a group backing former House Speaker Newt Gingrich that has been buoyed by $11 million in donations from casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his family, paid its president, Becky Burkett, $206,000 in January for executive management and fundraising services, according to campaign finance reports filed this week. Gregg Phillips, the Austin-based consultant who serves as the super PAC’s managing director, got $90,000.

Winning Our Future spokesman Rick Tyler said the super PAC pays its staff for “fundraising successes.” Tyler said the payments Burkett and Phillips received in January included compensation for work they did in November and December, before the super PAC was launched on Dec 13. He said their salaries were determined by the super PAC’s “senior leadership” — which consists of himself, Burkett and Phillips.

What a nice scam. I suppose Adelson and Foster Friess don’t care because, to them, the donations themselves are tip money and this amounts to parking meter money. But still, you’d think that at some point they might balk at being seen for the fools they are. They do have egos.

OK. I’ll admit it. Newt Gingrich got me on this one. I walked into the CPAC 2012 conference this morning with my guard down (first mistake), and picked up what I thought was up updated schedule of events for the main ballroom.

Then I read it.

Ouch. “Rick Santorum (PA) ‘In Defense of Big Labor’”? “Ann Coulter, ‘Three Cheers for Romneycare?” “Mitt Romney, Author of Obamneycare?”

Newt is a bitter, bitter man. And if he saw the welcome Santorum got when he stepped out on stage, or saw the number of Santorum stickers on the lapels of CPACers, he’s may be beyond bitter.

If this has all gotten under Newt’s notoriously thin skin (think Air Force One, 1995), then Newt’s speech this afternoon is really going to be fun. After all, there’s nothing more entertaining than a ticked-off Newt Gingrich. He doesn’t just go off-script. He rips up the script and starts making spitballs.

I’ll be sure get a good seat. Just not in the first few rows

Just in case you missed the news, “Insider trading” is back. It’s even bipartisan. Well, the truth is that it never really went away after its heyday during the 1980s, when Gordon Gekko served as a stand-in for era villains like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky. It launched more investigations in the 1990s than at any other time, except for the 1980s.

In the “aughts,” the names and players changed, but the “inside game” remains the same. Now, Raj Rajaratnam and Martha Stewart serve as stand-ins for Milken and Boesky. Gekko even returned to the scene, getting out of prison little more than year before Rajaratnam began serving his own prison sentence. GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney could even be called a stand-in for Gordon Gekko, in the 2012 presidential election. (But Newt Gingrich could be a runner-up for that spot.)

Not only are insider trading and inside traders back, but they’re not just on Wall Street anymore. They’re all over Capitol Hill, and apparently have been for a while. Naturally, now that it’s news, there’s a bill to ban congressional insider trading —the Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge Act, a/k/a the STOCK Act.

Naturally, this has led to efforts to block the STOCK Act in the House of course, after the Senate passed it by a vote of 93 to 2.

That lawmakers have to go out of their way to pass a law prohibiting them from engaging in insider trading with information they come by as a result of being lawmakers, is revealing. But the hoo-rah over the STOCK Act misses another related, and perhaps even bigger, problem.

It fell to Jack Abramoff, of all people, to point this out in an appearance before Public Citizen.

Consider, too, his case for ending the revolving door between K Street and the government. Abramoff described his practice of “featherbedding” — making job offers to chiefs of staff in Congress. “I started to notice pretty quickly that the second I said that to them,” he said, “they were so incredibly complimented, that from then on anything I asked was just absolutely granted.”

As word of the job offers spread, “it seemed 90 percent of the people I dealt with up there wanted to come work for me.” Often, “they planned to go with me in a year or six months but from that entire period of time they really worked with me anyway. . . . That was an incredible way to control a congressional office.”

Consider, as well, Abramoff’s explanation of how lawmakers are bought. “What you need to do as a lobbyist is not buy votes,” he explained. “What lobbying is about in large part is becoming friends with them,” raising money for them, and providing them with “a stream of goodies that led to an ability to ask them back for stream of goodies the other way.”

His criticism has apparently struck a nerve on K Street, because the American League of Lobbyists has been trying to rebut it. “I’m not even sure you could qualify Abramoff as a lobbyist,” wrote Paul Miller, the group’s president. “I would call this a criminal.”

A word to the American League of Lobbyists — we have a saying down south that might apply here: “A hit dog will holler.’ To put it another way, going out of your way to say “He’s not talking about us. That’s not what we do,” pretty much confirms that he is talking about you and that what he’s talking about is what you do.

Abramoff, if nothing else, probably knows whereof he speaks. His remarks fill in another part of the bigger picture (of which Citizens United is another part) of government of, by and for the 1%.

I wrote earlier that Newt Gingrich’s campaign is one of mutually assured destruction for the GOP. No one, I wrote, has to lift a finger to destroy Newt Gingrich. Just stand back, give him room, and he’ll do it himself. The thing is, you want to stand way, way back — otherwise Newt’s liable to try and take you with him. The problem for the GOP is that they can’t put enough daylight between themselves and Newt. And even if they manage to do that, they’re still stuck with Mitt.

The latest self-destruction of Newt Gingrich will be televised. If he’s able to carry on after losing the Nevada Primary to Mitt Romney, and make good on his promise to campaign all the way to the convention in Tampa, we can look forward to more performances like his post-Iowa temper tantrum, his post-Florida flame-out, and his bizarre concession-speech-cum-press-conference after Nevada.

Maybe Newt really is banking on a Super Tuesday southern revival strategy, but given his campaign’s still $600,000 in debt and he’s pretty close to losing his sugar daddy to Mitt Romney, even Newt know his candidacy is largely theoretical at this point. The thing is, for Newt it’s not about winning anymore. That makes him dangerous to the GOP in at least a couple ways.

Personifying the Politics of Personal Obstruction

First, Newt personifies the politics of obstruction the GOP has practiced since 2008, and ratcheted up after 2010. In fact, Gingrich practically invented it. Just by being Newt, he draws a parallel to the debacle of government shutdown that he promoted and presided over as speaker. Just by being Newt, he serves as a reminder that while Republicans have thus far avoided another shutdown, they have nearly brought our government to a standstill since 2010, rendering it ineffective in the midst of a crisis.

There is no greater pathology in today’s Congress than obstructionism, from Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) refusal to raise the debt ceiling in July to Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) taking disaster relief funds for Hurricane Irene hostage. Both parties have long used Congress’s procedural rules to promote legislation they favor, but Gingrich created something new. “There is the assumption—pioneered by Newt Gingrich himself, as early as the 1970s—that the minority wins when Congress accomplishes less,” Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD), the number-two Democrat in the House, explained in a 2009 speech at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. “Gingrich’s proposition, and maybe accurately, was that as long as…our party cooperate[s] with Democrats and get[s] 20 or 30 percent of what we want and they get to say they solved the problem and had a bipartisan bill, there’s no incentive for the American people to change leadership,” Hoyer told the Washington Post after the speech. “To some degree, he was proven right in 1994.”

In many ways, the obstructionist minority that Hoyer faced two years ago was following a playbook written by Gingrich over a decade earlier. Gingrich, in fact, took the debt ceiling hostage fifteen years before Boehner did, demanding huge, partisan cuts. In that case, the GOP backed down after President Clinton vetoed their spending bills and Moody’s warned of a credit downgrade. When Boehner refused to raise the debt ceiling, the threat of default lowered the US’s credit rating and was resolved by an complicated process involving a “supercommittee” and a two-step raising of the debt limit over a year. And it was Gingrich who, in one of his first acts as Speaker, patented the practice of refusing to approve disaster relief funds if they weren’t offset with spending cuts. Gingrich even held out after the Oklahoma City bombing later that year, prompting the Philadelphia Daily News to write, “Even Newt Gingrich must lose a little sleep at the idea of making political hay out of the mini-civil war that struck Oklahoma City.”

Of course, Gingrich’s greatest act of obstructionist brinkmanship was the 1995 and 1996 government shutdowns. Thanks to his refusal to concede on spending on social services, the government closed for five days in 1995, longer than the previous eight government shutdowns, and for a whopping twenty-one days a year later — the longest shutdown in history. Thanks to Gingrich’s obstinacy, health and welfare services for veterans were curtailed, Social Security checks were delayed, tens of thousands of visa applications went unprocessed and “numerous sectors of the economy” we negatively impacted, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Republicans still haven’t drowned the government in a bathtub. But they have slipped it some Ambien and started running the bath water, using a political playbook that Newt Gringrich wrote.

Republicans have done this in the middle of an economic crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Great Depression; precisely the moment when the government is needed to do what the private sector either cannot or will not. How many Americans have put this much together is hard to say, but the dismal approval ratings of the Republican House suggest that more and more Americans are placing some the blame for government inaction and ineffectiveness on the Republican-dominated House, which has been singularly focused on stopping even president Obama’s modest attempts remedying the unemployment deficit and the economic crisis.

No Solutions? No Problem.

Then there’s the other nightmare Newt is giving the GOP. First he exposes the roots of their obstructionist politics. Then he exposes their utter lack of solutions, at a time when America desperately needs solutions that will turn the economy around and launch a real economic recovery.

The problem for Newt and the rest of the Republicans is that they can’t blame the fact that more Americans see economic inequality as a problem at president Obama’s feet. The Occupy movement can be credited with pushing the issue to the forefront of our national politics, but happened largely because of economic conditions that add up the three decades of stagnant wages and increased costs of living for middle- and working-class Americans, just barely covered by cheap credit that allowed families to simulate increased living standards, until the economic crisis brought the whole house of cards tumbling down.

That’s what makes it “impossible” for Republicans to talk about the kind economic inequality that Bain and other vulture capital firms leave in their wake, as a part of just doing business.

Newt has, basically, created the perfect storm for Republicans going into the South Carolina primaries, with Mitt Romney — the Man from Bain, who still smells like a Wall Street boardroom, and probably now looks more than ever to South Carolina primary voters “like the guy who laid you off.” Newt has forced the Republicans into a conversation they can’t hold, and aren’t even remotely prepared for.

The funny part is that Newt ever thought they could avoid it, and that Republicans still think they can avoid it.

I said earlier that the reason Republicans freaked out when Newt launched his attack on Mitt Romney’s days at Bain Capital was because he pretty much pointed a double barrel spotlight on two things Republicans dread discussing: economic inequality and the GOP’s lack any plan or political will to do anything about it. That’s classic Newt. On the one hand, he wants everyone to stop talking about economic inequality. Then just when the GOP’s traveling side-show of a primary race rolls into some of the most economically devastated parts of the country, inadvertently rubs everyone’s nose in it, while also making it clear that they don’t plan to do anything about it, and don’t particularly want to.

Newt exposes that not only do Republicans have no solutions for our economic and unemployment crises, but the don’t see that anything needs solving. No solutions? No problem!

The Party’s Over

Finally, there’s one problem Newt and Mitt have in common. Newt may have boasted of carrying the “tea party people” after Florida, but Romney is making inroads to the tea party. That is, Romney’s trying to court what’s left of the tea party.The lack of unity in the Nevada tea party may reflect what one movement leader had to say about the tea party: The tea party is dead.

It was the great wildcard going into the 2012 election cycle. Republican Party insiders openly worried the Tea Party might knock off the establishment presidential candidate, just as it knocked out establishment picks in the chaotic 2010 congressional races. Party heavyweights wondered whom the upstart movement would get behind and whether Mitt Romney could even get through the early states, given the once-raging Tea Party elements in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

But after months of wondering how the Tea Party would change the primary game, leaders inside the movement admit they never came in off the sidelines. For the Tea Party movement, the 2012 presidential primaries have been a bust.

“The Tea Party movement is dead. It’s gone,” says Chris Littleton, the cofounder of the Ohio Liberty Council, a statewide coalition of Tea Party groups in Ohio. “I think largely the Tea Party is irrelevant in the primaries. They aren’t passionate about any of the candidates, and if they are passionate, they’re for Ron Paul.”

That leaves Gingrich to wrestle with a Republican establishment that wants him even less than it wants Romney, and to ponder a question one “concerned Republican” in junior high posed in an open letter to Gingrich on the Huffington Post.

First, let’s take a look at your chances of becoming the nominee: National polls have you polling pretty well, but a Romney victory tonight in Nevada seals him as the clear national frontrunner. As for the next few primaries, Romney leads polls (albeit very old polls) in all except for your home state of Georgia. (Congratulations, but that’s just not gonna cut it.) Romney is not only better organized, better funded and better known, but also better liked. Delegate counts have you far behind Romney. All signs point to a clear-cut Romney nomination. So thanks for making it interesting, but there’s not much more for you to do.
  
Second, take a long hard look at exactly what you are doing to the Republican party. We get it, you are a true conservative, and you can motivate the base. But it has become very clear that the Republican establishment doesn’t like you. Sad but true, they make the real decisions. While you stay in the race, they have to try to beat you, and not Obama. With you still in the race, Obama can sit back and watch you tear into Mitt Romney for being wealthy and successful (which only hurts him among critical swing voters!). While you exist as a challenger, you take money that Romney should be spending on ads against the president. Surely, as a man who plays politics better than most politicians, you can see this.
  
The only thing that confuses me is where you think your path to victory is.

Newt is a lot of things, but dumb (usually) isn’t one of them. He’s at least as smart as a junior high student. Whatever rhetoric he spouts for the media, Newt probably doesn’t see a path to victory. Newt knows there isn’t one. Newt knows he’s not going to be the nominee, but he’s happy to be a spoiler.

Which brings us to the Super Tuesday contests of March 6, in both such industrial Midwestern states as Ohio and such never-really-deprovincialized Southern states as Georgia—among numerous others. Gingrich is clearly counting on winning several of those Southern states, while Romney’s strength lies outside the South. But as March 6 approaches, more debates will loom, and Gingrich, Santorum, and Paul will continue to pull Romney to the right. What really will keep pulling Romney rightward, of course, is the mere continuation of contested GOP primaries. That’s the significance of Newt’s continuing to hang in: It delays and makes more difficult Romney’s pivot back to the center. Since the GOP contest began in earnest in Iowa last December, dragging Romney ever further to the right, his approval rating among independents has declined almost 20 percent. The longer the contest continues, the later, and more awkward, Romney’s re-moderatification will be.  The wrath of Newt, that is, benefits no one more than Barack Obama.

Whether this persuades Sheldon Adelson to cease his care and feeding of Gingrich is anybody’s guess. By all accounts, Adelson is as cranky and impervious to establishment advice as Newt. (And as right-wing idiosyncratic: The two greatest threats to Western civilization, he told The Wall Street Journal a couple of years back, were radical Islam and card-check for unions.) Together, these two crazy coots—Gingrich and Adelson—could prolong a contest that Romney wants to end yesterday. For now, it’s not his call.

For Gingrich, this is no longer about winning. Indeed, it probably never was. It may have begun as a cynical marketing campaign by Gingrich, more about making money and selling books than moving to Pennsylvania Avenue. Now it’s a grudge match, and Gingrich is content to lose so long as he can take Romney — and the GOP’s hopes for 2012 — down with him.