Infinite Loop

"Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky."

（同发于 「正谈网·All Things Political」 ）

For a while, Newt Gingrich was on top of the world. Having survived a low point where nobody had expected him to rise up again, he crushed Mitt Romney in the “winner-take-all” South Carolina primary by a comfortable margin. But it didn’t last long. All of sudden, it was as if his victory had sent a wake-up call to all in the Republican party who had no faith in him of being able to compete with President Obama in the general election, and the former Speaker was soon buried by an avalanche of negative ads and scathing op-eds coming from the GOP establishment, which literally propelled him out of the race into the same ineligible-club where Ron Paul had always been. Now, it may seem, the same fate is about to fall upon Rick Santorum, who is the latest—and almost surely the last—non-Romney star candidate embraced by the conservative voters, as the Washington Post reports this morning that Romney gets some new endorsements from several prominent GOP leaders. However, I think there is a fairly feasible chance that Rick Santorum would be able to survive this and better yet, as this race develops in its current course, capitalize on this disadvantage and turn it into his own strength.

To begin with, Santorum is liked by GOP voters, a quality one can say neither of Gingrich nor of Romney—and democracy is by definition a popularity contest. Sure, this is before Romney’s campaign starts kicking off its money machine and airing tons of negative ads, but there is no affair about him yet in sight that is serious enough to sink his campaign. Granted, his views on homosexuality, on women, and on a lot of other social issues make him ripe of loopholes to attack and essentially “un-presidential.” But the thing is: it’s not the general election yet! By attacking Santorum on those fronts in attempt to point out his ineligibility, the Romney team might as well remind the conservative voters just how much he shares and stand for their values and how little Romney does in contrast (as covered in the previous post ). More strikingly, some polls have now shown that Santorum is tied with or even trumping Romney on a national level, making it more urgent for Romney’s campaign to react before this surge gains more momentum.

Besides, there is another dimension to this likability dynamic, articulated nicely by Peggy Noonan in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed . The Romney campaign has polished an over- calm, mature, always-smiling, textbook-look-presidential-candidate that is so well-manufactured that people start to sense a disconnect between this president-wannabe and themselves and begin to question his motives for running for president. Meanwhile on the other hand, Santorum is flawed yet engaging, with the courage to stand up for and the passion to protect his traditional beliefs in a time of crisis and fast change. That said, even though a wave of nasty attacks would without a doubt leave him with terrible wounds, it would also, should he survive, demonstrate just why he runs for president. If the race ever comes to that point, I believe, it will be favorable for Santorum. Unlike Whoever versus Obama, this is not about what’s wrong or what’s right, it’s not about what I believe in or what you believe in or even what Americans believe in; it is not a cultural war per se, but an authenticity war. Why do you run for president? Do you do it because you feel the urge to protect what we believe in? Or do you run out of your own aspiration? Mitt Romney, with his long record of flip-flops on social issues, or as David Remnick calls him, “a vaporous and shifting mirage,” has already spent every credit of authenticity with the conservative voters.

But what does that do with the endorsements Romney gets? Well, when it comes to cultural issues, modern American conservatism is always coupled with some sort of victim mentality, in that there has been a widely accepted quasi-conspiracy theory that the blue states liberals are encroaching traditional American values at an exorable pace (there are many theories trying to explain this. Telling from the increasingly popular rhetoric among Republicans of equating “Europe” almost with “Soviet”, my bet is partially American exceptionalism). The GOP has always made a good use of this sense of being suffocated of voice, as they garner mostly conservatives in its ideology camp. In fact, this effect may have just manifested itself not too long ago. According to many polls, it was in a large part Newt Gingrich’s performance in the Republican debate that helped him win South Carolina. And the most memorable—and most covered—moments were when he denunciated the CNN moderator for asking about his marriage, by doing which he managed to frame the situation as a battle between him, as an individual, and the irresponsible destroying-American-public-discourse liberal media. This is a trick, as an authentic Tea Party candidate, Rick Santorum can pull, especially in a time when anti-incumbency sentiment is at record high. It would categorize Romney not in the corner of left-wing liberals but of the elitist group within the Republican Party. By evoking the emotion of losing grip of their country among conservative voters to the exorable force of the liberal elitists, Santorum has a chance of relating the inevitability of his campaign’s death sentenced by the powers that be to the number one reason that makes right-wing Republicans drive to the voting booths. To survive, the persecuted must stick together.

Of course, for all this to play out the trajectory of the race ought to stay in a certain direction, which is quite a precarious bet on this unprecedentedly volatile primary season. So far, nevertheless, things seem to have been going according to the scripts. Mitt Romney’s recent repeated attacks on the administration’s rule on the employer insurers to provide contraception coverage without raising premiums for employees have been labeled by many commentators as “insincere,” drawing more and more attention to his weakest spots, while Santorum moves up steadily in all the polls. The administration’s newly released budget plan, however, would probably cut Mr. Romney some slash by hogging the news cycle for a couple of days. Whether it will linger long enough to divert the conversation is of no certainty. We’ll see.

（同发于 「正谈网·All Things Political」 ）

Just when everyone assumes Mitt Romney has secured the nomination with first Florida and then Nevada in his pocket, Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania Senator, who beat Mitt Romney by slim margin in Iowa not long ago, shakes the GOP race field again by winning both Minnesota and Colorado caucuses in addition to a non-binding primary in Missouri, a performance exceeding almost everyone’s expectation. So it is time to ask the old question yet one more time: just how strong is Mitt Romney’s position in this race?

Evidently it was a bad night for Romney, who had enjoyed decent numbers in the polls just before the vote began but ended up eventually losing Colorado, which he had won in the 2008 primary, and an embarrassing third place in Minnesota, falling behind Santorum by double digits. Nonetheless, the situation does not seem to be as severe as it appears. To be fair, Romney invested little effort in these three states compared with that in Florida and Nevada, while Santorum went almost all-in on them, which has turned out to be a wise move. Some see this lack of investment as the result of the Romney campaign’s backfired attempt to lower expectation; some other regard it as purely folly of him to play complacent with others going full speed. Either way, it is fairly safe to say that the results would have been dramatically different had Romney taken the process seriously. Besides, the delegates in Minnesota and Colorado are unpledged and the votes in Missouri non-binding. It might well have been a businessman’s instinct, an asset Mr. Romney touts most often, to allocate resources efficiently, i.e., to spend only where the expense seems to yield the most, that made Romney to have committed such a mistake. After all, he is inarguably the front-runner and has just solidified that position by crushing the mendacious former speaker. It appeared at the time, just as everyone assumed, there would not be another non-Romney surge after the downfall of Newt Gingrich, and the only thing he needed to worry about was the president.

What’s more interesting about this unexpected upset, I think, is that it not only reveals once again the hard truth Romney campaign has been unable to escape but the tactics they are employing in attempt to solve the problem. The problem, of course, is Romney’s rift with the far-right conservative voters. One can come up with a thousand reasons why he has yet to be able to appeal to them, such as this amusing uncanny valley theory proposed by Brian Fung at the Atlantic , but the truth is simple: Mitt Romney is by many measure a moderate. While with his almost stereotypical business ethics (don’t you just love the term?) he has readily flip-flopped numerous times so as to cater to the conservative base, he still can’t say in front of a thousand-people crowd that the earth was created six thousand years ago without blinking his eyes. And  if one looks closer at his positions on many issues, he will find that Mr. Romney is not that distinguishable from his enemies across the aisle(remember the universal health care in Massachusetts?) except for when it comes to cutting taxes for the rich. So to beat Barack Obama in the general election, which is reasonably a thing to be on his mind, the key is independent voters, especially with the number of people identifying themselves as “independent” on the rise as the political atmosphere gets increasingly partisan. While the Tea Party has now been acknowledged by many as a non-negligible political force and probably the most vibrant faction in the Republican party, Romney’s tactic has long been largely to alienate himself from their positions, many of which are just too extreme for most independents. In fact, Romney has throughout the race repeatedly attacked “Tea Party candidates” like Michelle Bachman and Herman Cain on the eligibility grounds, arguing he is the only sane person in the room that has a chance of kicking Obama out of the White House. No wonder the tepid enthusiasm among conservative voters, who has been disappointed by one after another anyone-but-Romney candidates that have been shot down because of various disqualifying (sometimes almost comically) characters.

To put things in perspective, Romney has spent tremendously more money than Santorum yet has won fewer states. And of the states where he did claim victories, they came with the cost of running extravagant negative ads before the vote—though money is never a problem for Romney and indeed shows his advantages over other candidates as the front-runner. Nevertheless, despite all these unfavorable by-products, a win is a win, and he is still in a great shape others envy. He’s leading in polls by double digits in Arizona and Michigan, where the next Republican caucus will be held, his share price at Intrade dwarfs others by orders of magnitude, and FiveThirtyEight projects that the probability of him winning in both upcoming primaries hovers around 90 percent. This promising prospective proves that the philosophy of the Romney campaign has been right. When you are in a nomination race the goal is to be nominee, and the nice little thing about democracy is that you don’t have to be liked by everyone to be the winner. At the end of the day, the ends justify the means. It always has been.

However, this plan to ultimate victory hinges on a very crucial assumption: that the marginal gains of appealing to the independent voters instead of conservatives suffice to compensate the costs of the enthusiasm gap among the right-wing base it creates. To put it in plain language, many other complicating factors assumed constant, the resentment for president Obama the Tea Partiers have need to outweighs that for Mr. Romney. In the current political environment, to be fair, this bet appears to be one Mitt Romney needs to take in hope to become the president, if not the Republican nominee. Unfortunately, recent news seems to be unfavorable to this strategy. The latest labor statistics show that the economy is finally recovering in terms of employment. Should that trend continue, the biggest obstacle for Obama’s re-election bid would resolve—and so would Romney’s biggest selling point. And ideology has never been the business executive’s strong suit. On the other hand, though the GOP is well-known for its entrenched unanimity, the turnout rate of Republican primary voters have been noticeably lower than in 2008, another manifestation of the significance of conservative wing of the Republican party. The good news—for us political junkies but Mr. Romney—is that were it really to be Romney versus Obama with the economy improving, it would be interesting to see whether it’s economic or philosophical factors that play a bigger role in a democratic election.

With all that considered, one must be crudely careless to regard Rick Santorum’s surge as insignificant, even though Romney is still in a theoretically unchallenged position. One thing for sure, this race is going to be longer than a lot of people have presumed, and that leaves room for change. The next thing to watch is how much momentum Rick Santorum has gained from the victory and how well he is able to capitalize on that. Besides, how the GOP establishment is going to react to this is of a lot of curiosity. It has been argued that it was the establishment attacking Gingrich just before the Florida primary that boosted Romney to his huge victory. Santorum,  due to both his own background and the extraordinarity of Gingrich himself, surely does not have as many enemies as the former speaker in his own party.

As for Mitt Romney, the real challenge will be when the race comes again to the Midwest (he’s 0 for 3 as of now), where he has yet to solve a fundamental disconnect with the voters that has haunted him throughout the race. Only the next time, he has to take them seriously.

The world depicted in the movie Waking Life of lucid dream used to fascinate me. I saw in it the potential to offer not only a profound insight into our existence in an interdependent society but a conduit through which we can explore more deeply, and more freely, our brains and hopefully make sense of some of the mysteries of ourselves. I never pulled off that self-experiment, however, in spite of having even downloaded in preparation some clinical books on that subject (surprise, surprise, other deeply troubled people are out there), which give assorted tips to achieve lucid dream such that, as mentioned in the film, to improve the odds of having lucid dreams one ought to develop a habit to turn on and off the light switch entering a room to see if it works, or to check the watch constantly. I quickly dropped this plan after a few tries as they seemed too much like things only an insane person would do.

Nevertheless, there are times I find myself in a lucid dream without any prior deliberation. People occasionally experience that, I guess, for whatever reasons. Being aware of such a concept, I take notes of what happens in those circumstances and sometimes even try to play a little with the world around if possible to see how it may fare. Somewhat disappointing, the lucid dreams I have had (and was able to remember afterwards) seem quite different in both width and length from that described in the film, leaving little room for my “grand philosophical endeavors.” I'm not sure whether it's because those were not strictly defined lucid dream—though I indeed had full consciousness—or because I wasn't in a deep sleep status, evidenced by that I always woke up quite soon. The apparent paradox of the second explanation is that in theory we can memorize only dreams that take place not long ago before we wake up—a formal summarization, as far as I can recall, is that our sleep is segmented into several relatively short independent cycles in which dreams only span a narrow period. Anyways, here are two most significant observations I find particularly intriguing.

The first is that the dream world becomes precarious once consciousness kicks in; even worse, the more you try to control things the less there is to control. It might be that (this is just my theory) any action of choice, as long as deliberate, undergoes a process concerning an array of rational thinking such as collaborating the purpose, anticipating the outcome, calculating the consequence, which in turn contradicts the sub-conscious nature of the dream and thus undermines the world it constitutes. I remember attempting surreal things such as flying, only to be propelled into a vacuum void of nothing except for darkness as the whole dream keeps collapsing as long as I carry on that thought. Eventually there is just nothing left, no space to fly and even no platform on which to stand, so I wake up. Curiously, though, it seems that this is not inevitably the case, in the sense that I get to maintain or at least prolong the dream, so it appears, if I drop the attempt to perform a specific task, that is, willingly forgo the lucidity. But, again, it loops back to the problem that we can remember only those dreams followed by waking, and among them, naturally, the oscillations between obliviousness and lucidity in terms of our own choice, however vacillating, all end with the triumph of the latter. So the lucid dream turns out to be an antinomy in itself as lucidity only facilitates waking. How can you be awake to dream?

The second observation may not be strictly counted as happened in a dream, but surely it is closely related. It is where I find myself on the threshold of waking up, which is a much more static state than being in the dream. What's interesting is that it is always right after a regular dream so I am able to remember it in great detail, though I was not "participating" in it. Amazingly, being in that particular state, stepping right on the fine line separating the two worlds as comprehended by the same brain, I am fully, and intuitively, aware of what would happen if I choose to wake up, that everything that took place in the dream, however vividly I can recall at this moment, no matter how many times I rewind and play it in my head, will disappear. Then I wake up, can't remember a thing, frustrated, which doesn't matter.

I love/hate how they mimic real life.

几天前被提醒才记起快过生日了，原来这一年都在过本命年。

二十四岁了，还是那么弱。

只是慢慢觉得，这些都是自己，包括软弱，要接受它。

命运推给自己什么样的人，什么样的事，只要忠于自己就好了。不要对未来有期许，活在反应的当下。

虽然还是有很多不懂的地方；为什么在没有出口的原点徘徊，为什么不去努力抓住想要的色彩。

「不要让流动停止，不要被周围左右。」

很难，却只能如此吧。