Citizens Divided via SuperPac

As anti-Romney billionaires fund SuperPacs in support of Gingrich, Huntsman and Santorum, it's obvious that the Citizens United decision has remade the political playing field.  What has traditionally been big money in campaign finance  -- say, $15 million in a quarter raised by a candidate for a major-party presidential nomination -- is chump change to the likes of Sheldon Adelson, Foster Friess and Jon Huntsman, Sr. (their contributions thus far may reach only a large fraction of that level, but give them time). Any candidate who shows a pulse can be insta-funded; any attack that suits a billionaire's agenda can be micro-targeted or broadcast.  A nomination that would be wrapped up under the old rules may not still be competitive - -but the level of advertising attack that Romney and Gingrich have sustained or will sustain is unprecedented in a primary race.

In some cases, American voters have shown some antibodies against campaign advertising (see: Huckabee, Iowa; Santorum, Iowa).   We're going to have to develop stronger ones. Perhaps the barrage of internecine attacks will be self-cancelling.

Or maybe, just maybe, if enough Republicans are gored and gutted this cycle by SuperPacAttacks, we'll see a new round of campaign finance reform.  Especially if they destroy their nominee.

P.S. How about a billionaires' truce? Warren Buffett, on behalf of Obama, promises to match all SuperPac funding on the GOP side -- and they all agree to keep their money instead.

Once again, the attacks on Romneycare fall harmless

In this debate, finally, Romney's rivals tried to sustain a collective attack on the health insurance program he designed and implemented in Massachusetts. Someone (Gingrich, I think) charged that it jacked up healthcare costs in Massachusetts, which have indeed risen at faster than the national rate (as they did before the plan was implemented). Someone else (Perry, I think) charged that Romney had held the plan up as a model for the whole country -- rehashing an excision between editions of Romney's campaign book -- and others piled on.

Once again, however, what nobody managed to do was to spell out the extent to which the Affordable Care Act was modeled on Romneycare-- that the national plan borrows the subsidized exchanges composed of private health plans conforming to minimum coverage rules, with the whole structure made economically viable by the individual mandate and the employer mandate.  Romney was again allowed to emphasize that he created a free market solution for the uninsured, though he didn't get around this time to the lie that the ACA is by contrast "government controlled," as if it weren't structured the same way. Gingrich even threw Romney a bone, asserting that Romneycare "wasn't as bad" as Obamacare without detailing how they were different, or similar.

Of presidential candidates and Langston Hughes

There's an irony behind the irony of Rick Santorum accidentally borrowing a campaign slogan from Langston Hughes:

Santorum by and large stayed on message but was tripped up a bit when a student asked him if he knew that the choice of his slogan, "Fighting to make America America again," was borrowed from the "pro-union poem by the gay poet Langston Hughes."

"No I had nothing to do with that," Santorum said. "I didn't know that. And the folks who worked on that slogan for me didn't inform me that it came from that, if it in fact came from that."

The really funny part is that Obama's favorite trope about America, his constant recourse to the paradox inherent in the phrase "a more perfect union," is embodied, in a bitterer vein, in Hughes' poem.

Let America be America Again. is a poem of fathomless pain, an anthem of the excluded. It begins with a pious, nostalgic wish that meets a harsh (anonymous) counterpoint:

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)