The factional infighting in the Republican Party certainly shows no signs of abating. That's the only clear message the party's electorate sent last night, on what was supposed to be the biggest primary night of the year. This fight began a few years back, when the ultra-purists in the party (the radical wing) began calling their faction the "Tea Party," and then began making lots of noise out in the street. After the 2010 elections, Tea Partiers gained an actual foothold in the House of Representatives, and have flummoxed John Boehner ever since. This tug-of-war for party control continued apace last night, and such internecine struggles will continue into the foreseeable future. Neither the radicals nor the establishmentarians in the Republican Party have truly gained full control of the party itself. The voters are divided, and the divisions are on full display in Washington as well.

Rather than micro-examine Super Tuesday's results or predict what will happen in any of the upcoming primary contests this month (you're probably already maxed out on such analysis by now, right?), instead I'd like to take a longer view, and contemplate where the Republican Party will be headed after the 2012 election. There are three major scenarios as to how this could play out, if you'll join with me in what is admittedly some way-way-too-early speculation.

Republicans win back the White House

In the first of these scenarios, either Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum wins the Republican nomination, and then goes on to beat Barack Obama in November. Assumably, the Republicans would keep their majority in the House, and might even take the Senate -- guaranteeing them the driver's seat on Capitol Hill as well as in the Oval Office for at least the next two years.

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It's finally Super Tuesday! This year is less "super," and a month later, than Super Tuesday 2008, when 24 states voted at once. But it remains the biggest day in the primary calendar, and we've got a lot to cover.

Before we begin, let's take a quick look at where the candidates currently are. The state win count stands at:

7 -- Mitt Romney
4 -- Rick Santorum
1 -- Newt Gingrich
0 -- Ron Paul

My own personal record for predicting outcomes fell slightly over the weekend, as I came close to calling Washington state perfectly, but Ron Paul edged out Rick Santorum for second place by a few hundred votes, so I only went 1-for-3 when the counting was done. This leaves me at:

Total correct 2012 primary picks so far: 21 for 36 -- 58%.

A few technical notes before I start throwing metaphorical darts at the Super Tuesday wall. First, what the heck is going on in Wyoming? They seemingly held some sort of straw-poll vote last week, without bothering to alert the media. Today, they are apparently holding some sort of gathering which will go on for days. Some mainstream media are saying there are ten states voting today, and some are including Wyoming and putting the number at eleven. Do they have a primary? A caucus? A "primacaucus"? Or perhaps a "caucamary"... OK, the whole thing is getting pretty downright cockamamie, so I've decided I'm just going to ignore Wyoming. If the state really wanted me to make a prediction, it would have settled on some sort of normal voting process, so better luck next time is all I can say.

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Obama Above Water

President Barack Obama's job approval numbers are back "above water" (where his approval rate is higher than his disapproval number), continuing an impressive rise in the polls which began in November of last year. This is the longest run of improved public job approval Obama has managed since he got elected. Obama posted a gain of almost two full percentage points in his approval rate in February, the third-best month he's ever had in this respect (and one of the two months he posted bigger gains in was the bounce he got from Osama Bin Laden's death). He wound up the month with his approval rating a full percent better than his disapproval rating, the best numbers he's seen since last June. But this trend could be flattening out, as he ended the month of February by slipping back a bit. So in the midst of plenty of good news on the polling front for Obama, there is reason for caution as well. Call it the dark lining to a very silver cloud, if you will.

Let's begin with a quick look at the newly-updated chart:

[Click on graph to see larger-scale version.]

February, 2012

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Welcome to the 200th Friday Talking Points column!

Because of this momentous occasion, we are going to present a special column today which takes a look backwards at this column's history. Because of this, the normal weekly Friday Talking Points and the awards we normally hand out will all get pre-empted. So if you're looking for an update on what is going on in the political world, you'll have to wait until next week, sorry about that. And if this sort of retrospective doesn't appeal to you, well, there's a whole internet out there waiting, I'm sure there's something better for you to read, somewhere else.

But before we even get to our review, we do have one piece of business which cannot wait, so we will quickly address it and move on. Washington state has a caucus tomorrow, although you'd barely know it from the national news media. This is due to two related reasons: Washington is on the West Coast, which is far, far away from the media centers of New York and Washington, D.C.; and many so-called "journalists" are barely even aware the state exists. Polling is likewise thin and not very prominent in the media.

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Normally, I don't write two of these "lightweight" articles in a row, so you'll have to excuse me for doing so today (following yesterday's amusing look backwards through twentieth-century American history). But I do have what I consider a valid excuse for this slacking off: I am spending a lot of time today (and tonight, and tomorrow) preparing.... (cue drumroll)... the 200th Volume of the "Friday Talking Points" column. Woo hoo! Since we're about to get picky about grammar here today, I can finally admit that the enumeration should really be identified as the "Issue" rather than "Volume," and had I been on top of such details from the beginning, I could have more conventionally marked the passage of the column's yearly anniversary (September 14) by restarting the odometer each year ("Volume 5, Issue 1" for instance). Since I wasn't that foresighted, we are where we are... one day away from watching that odometer turn over double-zeroes for only the second time.

But enough of this preliminary blather and shameless self-promotion. Let's move along to our pet grammatical peeve of the day. One wonders, when writing that previous sentence, whether that should be "grammatic" or "grammatical," but one is going to trust one's gut feeling on this matter, hope one's gut is correct, and press on. Ahem.

We are entering a phase of the Republican nominating process where the actual delegate counts are garnering more and more press attention. Because of this, the wonky details of the contests themselves -- be they caucus or primary -- are being scrutinized more closely than they (so far) have been.

Which brings us to our point: the phrase "winner take all" is just wrong. Many news and polling organizations have begun using this phrase to differentiate states which award all their delegates in one bloc to the winner of the state vote from states which apportion their delegates proportionally. But the phrase is seriously lacking an "s" in there, somewhere.

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[Note: This article is about a bit of sexism from America's past. It will quote sexist passages from days of yore, and deals with a subject that cannot escape the label of sexism. I say this up front, as a warning to readers, but it really is (and was) all in fun, so I hope most of you will take this in the spirit it is being offered.]

Leap Day has been around for over 2,000 years. At some point -- possibly as far back as Medieval times -- a European tradition emerged for this once-every-four-years event: it was the one day when women could propose marriage to men. In America, this got confused and conflated with Sadie Hawkins Day, which actually had its origins in the Lil' Abner comic strip (the original of which ran in November, not February). You can read about this long Leap Day tradition elsewhere, if you're interested in the larger history of the day.

But there's another Leap Day tradition in America, from a suburban Chicago city. Aurora, Illinois used to be famous for its Leap Day fun, when the unmarried women took over the town and arrested all the unmarried men for the "crime" of being a bachelor. Yes, you read that right.

The town's takeover was an orderly one, complete with an election for the one-day chance of any eligible woman to be mayor, police chief, or fire chief. Any single woman who didn't win the election for the top jobs still had the chance to participate, as police officers and doing other city jobs. Eligible men were arrested all day long, dragged to jail, and forced to pay a fine before they were let loose.

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It's that time once again, kiddies, when we gather 'round the virtual fireplace and throw a few darts at the wall to predict the outcome of today's Republican primary races. Feel free to join us here tonight as we sit back and watch the results come in!

First, let's review where we are in the "calling the winners" sweepstakes. Last to vote was Maine, which I am proud to say I called 3-for-3 correct. Woo hoo! I'd also like to publicly thank the ChrisWeigant.com Maine "man on the ground" (our "Maine man," in other words...) [...pause for audience to groan...] for assisting me with this pick, as (all kidding aside) his advice was spot-on.

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While everyone knew that the Republican primary candidates would all be displaying plenty of "Obama Derangement Syndrome" during the campaign, this week the rhetoric took a bizarre tangent which might be called "Apology Derangement Syndrome." The concept is not only laughable, it is easy to prove what rampant and stinking hypocrisy those espousing it are truly guilty of displaying.

First, the facts of this tempest in a teacup (at the Mad Hatter Tea Party which the GOP primary process has devolved into). In Afghanistan, a Koran was burned in a trash-burning pit. Details are sketchy, but at least one Koran (possibly others, possibly other Islamic religious books as well) was at least partially burned. Details have not been forthcoming from the military, but apparently someone in charge of the library for Afghani prisoners decided to take these books away from the prisoners, possibly because the prisoners were breaking the rules by either communicating (by writing in them) or spreading jihadi slogans. Whatever the reason, the person responsible ordered that the books be disposed of. Trash is commonly burned on the base, and nobody apparently thought twice about tossing the books on the "burn pile." When the people doing the actual trash-burning threw them on the fire, Afghan workers noticed and put a stop to it. Those are the facts, such as they are. The U.S. military is investigating the incident, so perhaps more solid details will emerge in the future.

President Barack Obama then did what any United States president would do in such a situation: he apologized to Hamid Karzai, the leader of Afghanistan.

The Republican candidates (who are not named "Ron Paul") saw this as a political hot button, and immediately denounced Obama's apology. Newt Gingrich was pithiest, calling Obama an "appeaser" and stating "It is Hamid Karzai who owes the American people an apology, not the other way around."

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"When the going gets weird," Hunter S. Thompson famously said, "the weird turn pro."

This quote has been running through my head all week. It's been such a weird week, in fact, that I even wrote a column praising a Mitt Romney campaign ad. Weirdness abounds, in other words. Well, I was really just wonkily praising the cars in the ad, but still....

Speaking of weirdness, we had what could be the final Republican presidential debate. In it, the three top Republican candidates explained how they were going to -- simultaneously, mind you -- both bring down the cost of gasoline and bomb Iran. This qualifies not just as weird but downright bizarre. I mean, how stupid do they think the American public is? Well, I suppose it's just the Republican primary electorate, but even so....

When the going gets weird, the weird run for president, apparently.

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A tectonic shift is in process in American politics, and while individual incidents occasionally draw attention, the larger continental drift is usually not in focus. Because Democrats have started winning the so-called "culture wars."

The culture wars (at least, the modern incantation of them) began roughly in the 1980s, with the rise of the Religious Right (or the Moral Majority, as they liked to call themselves back then). Since then, sometimes the battles are fought out in the open, and sometimes there is a lull in the fighting; but over and over again Republicans (mostly successfully) used "wedge issues" to divide the Democratic rank-and-file, and thereby win elections.

"Culture war" is a polite way of saying "war over sex," of course. The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s generated a backlash, to put it another way, and we began calling this backlash the "culture wars." But all of these issues had one common thread -- sex. Gays were a big target. So is abortion. And now, increasingly, so is contraception.

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