But there’s no question that good economic news is what the nation needs, so it would be churlish of me to rain on the parade.

Fortunately, I don’t have to, because the sedulous statistics-gatherer @Iowahawkblog spent the day doing just that. Here are a few of the observations he made as Friday rolled along:

– UNEMPLOYMENT DOWN!!!! because 1.2 million people mysteriously dropped out of the labor force last month.

– If the labor force participation rate was at Jan 2009 level, unemployment would be 11%.

– %of population over the age of 16 with jobs: Jan 2011, 58.4%; January 2012, 58.5%.

– There are 1.5 million fewer people working today than in Jan 2009. There are 13 million more people on food stamps.

– America added 2.3 million more jobs in the last 12 months. It added 3.56 million more adults.

– Today there are 3.06 Americans employed for every American on food stamps. This is the lowest it has ever been. Ever.

Today, we’re announcing the 2012 launch of African Americans for Obama.

There’s no better time than African American History Month to consider the tremendous progress we’ve made through the sacrifice of so many—or a better time to commit to meeting the very real challenges we face right now.

Visit africanamericans.barackobama.com for more information about all the ways you can get involved—from attending HBCU organizing workshops to becoming a Congregation Captain—and say you’re ready to keep making history. Thanks, and see you out there.

Does this mean the Republican front-runner can now announce the launch of Caucasian Americans for Romney? If not, why?

Update, February 3rd: a great many people pass by here every day. Nobody has an opinion about this? Is this topic really that radioactive?

But as divisive as Mr. Obama’s presidency has been, it would be wrong (at least in part) to blame the man: the issue is systemic. We read:

What do those numbers tell us? Put simply: that the country is hardening along more and more strict partisan lines.

While it’s easy to look at the numbers cited above and conclude that Obama has failed at his mission of bringing the country together, a deeper dig into the numbers in the Gallup poll suggests that the idea of erasing the partisan gap is simply impossible, as political polarization is rising rapidly.

Out of the ten most partisan years in terms of presidential job approval in Gallup data, seven — yes, seven — have come since 2004. Bush had a run between 2004 and 2007 in which the partisan disparity of his job approval was at 70 points or higher.

There is a broadening ideological schism in American sentiment on major issues of fundamental importance: the ever-increasing scale of federal spending and scope of intrusive federal regulation; nation-building abroad; the indifference of the Federal government to most illegal immigration, and outright antipathy to states who try to act when Washington abdicates; institutionalized racial and ethnic preferences that consistently disfavor white, Anglo-European people and culture; refugee-resettlement scams; foreign aid to nations that hate us; radical multiculturalism and non-discrimination; and so on.

The rift between these two constituencies is only getting wider and deeper and angrier, and that trend isn’t going to change. So as I’ve been saying for some time now: the practical issue is not that liberals and conservatives disagree about these things — it’s that they can’t get away from each other. This seems to me little different from the religious and ethnic tensions that have torn countries apart, often violently, throughout history. Such things rarely turn out well, and I don’t expect this will, either.

“I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.”

Funny? Well, not so much, maybe. According to a tart item at the Corner yesterday by Mark Steyn, Mr. Romney actually said this in a stump speech to explain his rationale for running. I’m still trying to figure out whether the quote is genuine or not, but the fact that it even seems plausible to the many people who, according to my brief web search, appear to have taken it as genuine indicates that we have a problem here.

And of course we do have a problem here; the lack of a candidate who is both a solid conservative and capable of winning in November has me, and obviously the rest of conservative America, worried. There will be nobody riding up on a white stallion to carry the battle to Mr. Obama; it’s going to have to be Mitt or Newt (or certain defeat with Rick Santorum).

In South Carolina Romney only got a centrist, upscale fraction of the voters, while Gingrich grabbed everyone to the right. I’ll assume that in the general election this same conservative base, having no other choice, will rally behind whoever is running against Barack Obama, and so will vote for Romney if he becomes the nominee. The battle, then, is for those in the middle, and I think Romney has a better shot at those in the general election than Newt does — so I think the Buckley Rule (nominate the most conservative candidate who can win) favors Romney here. But does he have a better chance at winning the center than Barack Obama? Only if he ups his game considerably. Gingrich’s pugnacious resurgence, which will seriously test Romney’s mettle should give him incentive to do so.

I hope he can manage it. One thing all of us agree on: this election really, really matters.

I thought our American readers would find this of particular interest, having paid for the stuff.

Read it here.

Detailed commentary here.

Is it November yet?

Here.

There are two questions.

First: who out of this lot would, by our lights, be the best president?

Second, and far more important for the future of the nation: who has the best chance of ousting Barack Obama?

To answer the most important question first: I think the answer is Mitt Romney. Newt Gingrich is simply much too off-putting to too many people. The reasons? There are several: his personal peccadilloes, his ostentatious vanity and haughty condescension (though of course you’re stuck with those that either way in a Gingrich/Obama contest), his petulance, his sequential fascination with a kaleidoscopic assortment of Big New Ideas, and more. (Even his portly middle, suggestive of hedonistic indiscipline, would no doubt be a liability in contrast to the imperially slim Mr. Obama.) I simply don’t think he would win, and if there’s one thing that all conservatives agree on, from the evangelicals to the Tea Party to the most socially liberal, godless “metrocons”, it’s that for Mr. Obama to get another four years in office would be a catastrophe for America. Mitt Romney, though brilliant by nobody’s assessment, looks radiantly presidential, holds his own well enough in debates, and clearly understands what all conservatives agree our next president must understand: the importance of a smaller, leaner, and less intrusive government to the preservation of America’s liberty and prosperity. It would be delightful to see Newt Gingrich shred Mr. Obama on the debating floor, but you can’t have everything, and it’s hard for me to imagine that Mitt won’t have a far broader appeal at the polls. I’ll invoke the Buckley Rule: you pull for the most conservative candidate who can actually get elected — and that’s Mitt Romney, I think.

As for the first question, about who would make the better President: for all of Newt’s brainy command of history, and his vast governmental experience, I’m still not sure that he’d be a better president. He has a tendency, rather like Toad of Toad Hall, to hop from one glittering attraction to another, and he has many enemies in Washington. I’m sure Mitt would be less of an activist than Newt — but Washington doing less looks pretty good right now, and I imagine most of his activism would be directed toward slimming the Federal behemoth, rather than dreaming up new and visionary initiatives. There’s no doubt that Mitt is far less imaginative than Newt, but that’s just as well, under the circumstances.

So: Mitt Romney it is, I guess. It’s hard to get excited about the guy, but if he can unseat Mr. Obama, that’s good enough for me.

Not everyone on the Right agrees, of course. In his latest essay, for example, Thomas Sowell makes the case for Newt Gingrich. I agree with much of what he says, as usual, but I think he overestimates Newt’s chance of victory in November, which completely undermines his argument. You can read it for yourself, here.

Not so for liberal water-carriers Alan Colmes and Eugene Robinson, who disgraced themselves recently by jeering at Mr. Santorum and his wife for the way they handled what is surely the most sorrowful calamity that can ever befall any of us in this vale of tears: the death of a child.

Mark Steyn lets them have it, with both barrels, here.

P.S. I realize that, as Ross Douthat says here, privacy is to some extent “a luxury of moral consensus”, and that Mr. Santorum has made a career of pushing politics into the privacy of the bedroom — which is a big part of the reason I don’t support him. But mocking a family over their grief for a dead son is simply beyond the pale, I think, and in another age would have been considered evidence of ill breeding.

This year’s presidential campaign is going to make Iwo Jima look like a pillow-fight. And if you thought U.S. politics were already polarized to the point of total dysfunction, Pat Buchanan argues here, just wait until it’s over — especially if Mr. Obama wins.

Here.

Charles Krauthammer offers a scathing summary here.

This could get interesting.

Meanwhile, sales of the Volt for 2011 had reached just over 6,100 by the end of November, which looks to fall short of Chevrolet’s hoped-for 10,000 units for 2011. Buoyed, however, by the fact that anyone’s buying them at all (and, no doubt, by the continuing prospect of a place at the public trough for the GM snout), the company is gearing up its plant for a production run of 60,000 Volts in 2012. Order now! They’re sure to fly off the lot.

One of the consistent lessons of history, from Aristagoras to Gorbachev, is that authoritarian systems place themselves at great risk when they attempt to liberalize. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is learning this lesson today; they have unleashed forces that they have no idea how to control.

Getting people fired up about this wasn’t too hard, when all you had to do was quote the Energy Secretary’s remarks on the State’s rationale for the ban:

“We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money,” he said.

This sums up the paternalism of the big-government Left so precisely that it could probably be used with high accuracy to identify political orientation. Does the quoted remark seem to you a perfectly sensible policy statement from an unelected Federal executive? Or does it get you thinking dark thoughts about the the consent of the governed, and the Second Amendment? Form two lines, please.

Anyway, it’s a small victory, but we’ll take it. It’s too bad that Mr. Obama’s chum, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, has already closed our last domestic incandescent-bulb plant, in anticipation of a flow of consumers given no choice but to buy the more-expensive and less-popular compact-fluorescent bulbs — but chalk up one for liberty, and for the free market, nevertheless. If people actually want to buy CFLs, of course, they’re still perfectly welcome to do so.

I haven’t read the bill itself yet, but my understanding is that it also forces the White House to make a call on the Keystone pipeline project within 60 days, rather than deferring it until after the 2012 election, as the president had hoped to do. All good.

The base liked it. The New York Times, for example, has been spoiling for Mr. Obama to put up a real fight against the evil Right for some time now, and seemed pleased to imagine that their man seems finally to be getting his Irish up:

In demanding “a new nationalism,” Roosevelt supported strong government oversight of business, a “graduated income tax on big fortunes,” an inheritance tax and the primacy of labor over capital. For that, he was called a socialist and worse, as Mr. Obama observed, having endured the same.

Mr. Obama was late to Roosevelt’s level of passion and action on behalf of the middle class and the poor, having missed several opportunities to make the tax burden more fair and demand real action on the housing crisis from the big banks that he excoriated so effectively in his speech.

But he has fought energetically for a realistic plan to put Americans back to work and has been stymied at every step by Republicans. That seems to have burned away his old urge to conciliate and compromise, and he is now fully engaged against the philosophy of his opponents.

As Jonah Goldberg pointed out today, however, the Times didn’t always feel this way about Mr. Roosevelt’s view of things. In a September 30th, 1913 editorial, which was entitled “ROOSEVELT’S SUPER-SOCIALISM”, the Grey Lady’s editorial board wrote (.pdf here, if you can’t get past the paywall):

Theodore Roosevelt has now thought out and matured his doctrine of Socialism. It is not the Marxian socialism. Much that Karl Marx taught is rejected by present-day Socialists. Mr. Roosevelt achieves the redistribution of wealth in a simpler and easier way. He leaves the land, the mines, the factories, the railroads, the banks — all the instruments of production and exchange — in the hands of their individual owners, but of the profits of their operation he takes whatever share the people at any given time may chose to appropriate to the common use. The people are going to say, We care not who owns and milks the cow, as long as we get our fill of the milk and cream.

… Mr. Roosevelt’s reconstruction of society would leave it inert by destroying individual initiative, hope, and ambition, which are the foundations of progress. It is a sterile system, yet being sterile, why has constructed it? Because he knew that with his great skill he could make this Utopian dream attractive to that very considerable part of society which is the material with which agitators work: the discontented, the unsuccessful, the envious.

Well, some things do change, I guess. Others don’t.