“Holocaust survivors who
for the first time were forced to eat non-kosher because Romney thought $5 was
too much to pay for your grandparents to eat kosher . . . . Where is Mitt
Romney’s compassion for our seniors?”
—Newt Gingrich Robo-Call on
the eve of the Florida Primary
We
learned several important things in Florida this week. First, we learned that Newt
Gingrich, along with being a serial adulterer and a megalomaniac, is also a
whiney-butt. Second, we learned that Mitt Romney is perfectly willing to pay
people to be bastards while he stands on the sidelines smiling. But the most important thing we learned—at least I hope
we learned it—is that extreme conservatism just doesn’t work (extreme
liberalism doesn’t work either, but we already knew that).
I refer, of course, to the bizarre robo-call
that some Floridians received last night suggesting that Mitt Romney personally
shoved pork chops and lobster down people’s throats at the Yad Vashem dinner in
downtown Boston. It never happened. Romney took an item out of an
appropriation bill that could have eliminated kosher food subsidies, but the
legislature overrode his veto. But that’s not the point.
Much more important to me is what this
line of attack says about the extreme conservative position that Gingrich is
trying to represent in this election cycle—you know who I mean, people who
think that income tax is unconstitutional, that Social Security is a fraud, and
that the universal health care bill proves that Obama was born in North Korea.
This particular constituency doesn’t think that we should be providing insulin
to seniors, much less kosher pastrami. This is exactly the sort of
“do-it-for-yourself-but-don’t-expect-the-government-to-do-it-for-you” entitlement that
both Gingrich and Romney are supposedly going to end when they get to Washington.
Both Gingrich and Romney were unwilling to stand behind their own ideologies and say something reasonably
consistent like: “This is what ‘tough choices’ are all about. If we are going
to balance the budget, we can’t give everybody everything that they want. If we
even want to make a dent in the national debt without raising taxes, we are
going to have to cut entitlements. This means Social Security. This means the
Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. And this means kosher food.”
But it will never happen. As long as
political power is awarded by popular vote, people are never going to get into
power, or stay in power, unless they give people stuff. That’s how the whole
voting thing works. People want stuff, and, as long as they hold the reigns of
government in their hands, they are going to elect people who will give them
stuff.
This is why conservatives actually
never win elections. Oh, people who claim to be conservatives win all the time,
but by the time they win the election, they have ceased to be conservatives. And
when they actually govern, they normally end up not being conservatives at all.
No Republican President in my lifetime—Nixon, Reagan, Bush père,
Bush fils—has ever actually taken
away anybody’s stuff, nor have conservative presidents come any closer to
balanced budgets than liberal ones. Giving people stuff is not about being
liberal or conservative; it is about being president or not president.
But here’s the rub: this might not actually be a bad thing.
Maybe Jewish seniors should have kosher meals. Maybe everybody should have
health care and security. Maybe, just maybe, these are the sorts of
things that government is supposed to do—the reason that people (theoretical
people at least) leave the state of nature and form civil societies is so that,
through their governments, they can do things on a much grander scale than they
could otherwise. Maybe one of the grand purposes of civil government is to give
people a mechanism for taking care of the most vulnerable members of society:
children, the elderly, the impoverished—the people that Jesus was always
hanging around with and telling us to care for.
And maybe all of this has something to do with what government “by the people, for the people, and of the people” actually means in
a modern, post-industrial nation where nobody actually has to starve, to forego
lifesaving care, or to eat milk with meat. 
