by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
NRO’s\u00a0The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n The Race Going into South Carolina<\/strong><\/p>\n The primary race that has just started and should still be wide open is already supposedly almost over \u2014 but still isn\u2019t quite.<\/p>\n The conventional wisdom is that Mitt\u00a0Romney<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 bleeding a bit by the successful, counter-conservative anti-Bain commercials, and raising eyebrows by his play-it-safe, wooden showing in the recent debate \u2014 still has so much more organization and money that he cannot be caught. By now he has convinced fence-sitting voters that he would not embarrass them in September with either a blonde out of his past or a wacky proposal that will cause outrage but lead to little real new policy: He is not great, but good enough to beat Obama. He may be caricatured as a blue-blood Bush I, but also is trusted as a fixer who knew what he was doing, and so will profit the US the way he once profited for himself.<\/p>\n And the conventional wisdom continues that Republicans (and even Romney supporters) nonetheless sigh that sometimes Gingrich (and\u00a0Gingrich<\/a>\u00a0alone in the present field) can rise to Reagan\u2019s rhetoric in the debates and might, if nominated, repeat those occasional dazzling performances with an outclassed Barack Obama \u2014 but is otherwise too erratic and with too much baggage to win the nomination. (Everyone seems to have a Democratic or Independent cousin who at least claims that this election he\/she just might vote against Obama, but only for a Romney.)<\/p>\n And the thinking goes on that, although the current negative advertising seems to be surpassing the Obama-Clinton invective of 2008, the party will unite around the nominee as the Democrats did in 2008 and as\u00a0the Republicans<\/a>\u00a0did in 2000, and that perhaps a successful Romney will not be a Dewey\/Dole\/McCain on the stump, or an elder Bush in office (or if he proves to be, it would still be better than a second Obama term).<\/p>\n All the above seems the general narrative, but is still not quite certain. For all the hype, we are still at the very beginning, not the middle of the primaries. Gingrich still has a long-shot chance to outshine Romney again in the debate to assure the voters that the disparity is real and permanent, to have\u00a0Santorum<\/a>\u00a0and Perry exit to unify the conservative opposition, to assume his critics will forgive his insane anti-Bain commercials on grounds that they worked, to avoid another outburst or embarrassing disclosure, and to point to polls that suddenly he does about as well as Romney against Obama. Unlikely \u2014 but not impossible.<\/p>\n And behind all this looms the fact that an out-of-sight and quiet Obama has risen back in the polls, the level of suicidal invective is fodder for the Democrats, and no Republican candidate has spelled out a vision of precise policies to save America from insolvency at home and irrelevancy abroad. So there is a holding pattern of sorts, as Republican voters wonder whether Romney will have a moment of animation in a Gingrich-like debate outing, hope that all the attacks will lead someday to shaking hands and that-was-then-this-is-now unity, and pray that a candidate can energize and enthuse rather than be the least unattractive of the alternatives.<\/p>\n A Lose, Lose, Lose, Lose, Lose Proposition<\/strong><\/p>\n As he did with his probably illegal \u201crecess\u201d appointments, President Obama picked a politically advantageous time to cancel the Keystone pipeline project \u2014 while the media is obsessed with the South Carolina primary, Newt Gingrich\u2019s second wife, and Mitt Romney\u2019s investments. Yet it is hard to remember a presidential decision that had as many negatives as this one:<\/p>\n a) Jobs in tough times? Anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 high-paying jobs were lost. These were shovel-ready and private-sector, and they would have led to the real creation of wealth \u2014 the antithesis of Solyndra. How strange \u2014 we pay tens of millions of dollars for a few hundred subsidized, money-losing jobs, while passing over thousands of money-making ones.<\/p>\n b) National security? While we ratchet up the pressure on Iran, as gas prices climb, and as our subsidized wind\/solar alternatives fizzle, we hope that,\u00a0in extremis<\/em>, the Saudis can reroute their exports through the Red Sea. How strange \u2014 we cancel our own pipeline while expecting others will never do the same.<\/p>\n c) Environment? If the Keystone project raises\u00a0environmental issues<\/a>, then every other comparable one would too. It is not as if the route bisects Yosemite on its way to Big Sur. How strange \u2014 we assume that the Saudis or the Turks can build pipelines across their own lands without environmental problems, but that we, the apparently less technologically advanced, cannot. We hear that oil is \u201cfungible\u201d; if so, each barrel that we pass on, someone else less green won\u2019t.<\/p>\n d) Financial solvency? We are now almost $16 trillion in debt, and we import over $500 billion in\u00a0fossil fuels<\/a>\u00a0per year. The more energy we produce, or the more cheaply we can import it, or the more our export dollars stay in North America, where they can be easily rerouted into the US economy, the less we, the near-insolvent, must borrow. How strange \u2014 we keep passing on projects that would increase gas and oil production and availability and earn us money, but not on wind and solar counterparts that produce little energy and lots of debt.<\/p>\n