Category ►►► Elections

November 19, 2009

If Joe Lieberman Is the Democrats' "Lindsey Graham"...

...Are we required to despise him too?

Politico notes that when Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT, 85% Dem) announced he would not merely vote against ObamaCare but would filibuster it -- at least the final motion to call the question -- he burnt many bridges back to the Democratic Party:

“My sense is that when he announced he would filibuster the public option, he was saying goodbye to the Democratic Party,” said Doug Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac University poll in Hamden, Conn. “My sense is, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

In a new Quinnipiac poll, Connecticut voters said by a 2-to-1 margin that Lieberman’s views on the issues put him closer to Republicans than to Democrats....

In an interview, Richard Blumenthal, the state attorney general, said he’s getting more encouragement from Democrats in Connecticut to consider a challenge to Lieberman in 2012. A February Quinnipiac poll found that Blumenthal would beat Lieberman by a 28-point margin.

Sounds grim, until one reads the next paragraph:

A September Research 2000 poll found that Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell would defeat both Blumenthal and Lieberman in a potential three-way 2012 matchup; the same poll found that 68 percent of the state’s voters support the public option.

Lieberman has turned into quite a Republican ally in this medicine-war for the soul of America:

Lieberman said it’s the “wrong time” to create a government insurance program, claiming it would increase the national debt, probably raise taxes and increase premiums for insurance holders.

But Democrats said that Lieberman is employing GOP talking points in distorting the virtues of a public option, noting it’s the one entity that could control costs -- by adding a major new provider to the marketplace that would force private insurers to reduce their costs.

Yes, "control costs" by using the same tactics as Great Britain's National Health Service (NHS): rationing or denying medical care; encouraging the old and feeble to die quickly to spare their children; and jacking up both taxes and federal debt simultaneously, thus making it nearly impossible even to pay for the programs already in place, let alone all the new or expanded programs Barack H. Obama hopes to institute.

I would find it sad but amusing if Lieberman were to lose his bid for reelection -- only to be replaced by a popular Republican former governor. But the important question remains begged: If we "Ned Lamont" Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC, 82%), will we retain that seat? Or would it turn out the same as when Ned Lamont "Ned Lamonted" Lieberman in 2006?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 19, 2009, at the time of 5:28 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 4, 2009

Batting .750 Ain't Bad

I must admit, I developed an emotional attachment to the NY-23 congressional race; so it got me right in the kischkes when Democrat Bill Owens topped Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman. If it's any consolation, Hoffman is much better known now than he was just a month ago; which means he may be a formidable candidate in the Republican primary in 2010 -- just a few months away -- and in the November 2nd general against Owens as well.

That was the one prediction we lost; but we successfully predicted not only that Republican Robert McDonnell would power over Democrat Creigh Deeds in Virginia -- everyone got that one right, though the margin, 18%, shocked the nation -- but also that Chris Christie (R) would prevail over the most corrupt sitting governor in the United States, Jon Corzine of New Jersey.

Hugh Hewitt is fond of writing books with the title "If it's not close, they can't cheat;" pundits (I no longer must write "pundants," now that GWB has retired) mulled that Christie would have to get at least 3% over Corzine to make up for the "fraud factor." Since CC won by a resounding 5% (or as near as makes no difference), I think the victory is safe from the Halloween undead rising from their graves to force Corzine back into the governor's mansion.

While I'm wistful that Hoffman couldn't quite overcome the anti-GOP bitterness stirred up by DIABLO Dierdre "Dede" Scozzafava, realistically speaking, it's much more important that we won two governorships. Recall that New Jersey hasn't elected a Republican since Christie Todd Whitman (is the name similarity just a coincidence?) won reelection a dozen years and five governors ago.

But wait; that only adds up to a batting average of .667. Where does the other .083 come from?

Well, I'm also counting as a signal victory what happened in Maine: Voters rejected a legislatively enacted same-sex marriage (SSM) law in by about 53 to 47. Thus in every election where the people themselves have had the chance to vote on SSM, they have voted it down. And that's not just once or twice but 31 times out of 31 elections.

Maine is not exactly a conservative state; in fact, the last time Maine voted for a Republican in the presidential race was George H.W. Bush in 1988. And Maine's two senators, while both technically Republicans, are about as liberal as can be: Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME, 12%) and Susan Collins (R-ME, 20%). (Their ADA ratings are 80% and 75% respectively, as liberal as many Democrats.)

Thus, SSM has now lost among voters in every region of the country and in conservative, moderate, and very liberal states. While we made no prediction in this race, we'll happily take the results!

All in all, some very, very good news indeed for Republicans and conservatives... and likely a harbinger of what is to come in 2010, despite Paul "Sourpuss" Mirengoff's best efforts to harsh our mellow...

Not an especially good day to be Barack H. "Oogo" Obama, though. I feel his disdain.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 4, 2009, at the time of 5:21 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 2, 2009

NY-23: New York Race - Chicago Rules, and What Dede Learned From David

As the Permanent Presidential Campaign rolls along, the most recent victims are the Republicans of New York's 23rd district... who awoke today to discover something truly remarkable about erstwhile congressional candidate Dierdre "Dede" Scozzafava -- that "lifelong Republican" who swore she would never leave the GOP -- and her seemingly inexplicable endorsement of the Democrat remaining in the race, Bill Owens, rather than the conservative Republican, Doug Hoffman.

They learned (if they read the news ) that -- drum roll, please: The betraying endorsement was engineered by the Barack H. Obama White House.

Politico reports that the administration and Friends of Barack lured Scozzafava to the dark side by playing on her senses of grievance and entitlement:

The story of how it went down began in Washington, where the White House and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee quarterbacked the effort to secure Scozzafava’s endorsement.

According to several senior Democratic officials, Rep. Steve Israel, a Long Island Democrat and DCCC official, was dispatched to meet face to face with Scozzafava in her upstate New York district, within hours of her departure from the race, to make the case on behalf of the national party. He carried the proxy of the White House and congressional Democrats.

Scozzafava, according to one account, was receptive to the entreaties after becoming a target of intense conservative opposition over the past month. The nomination of the moderate to liberal assemblywoman who was backed by the national GOP establishment had become a rallying point for conservative grass-roots activists, who argued that she was far too liberal for them to support.

“She’s devastated that these outside interests are trying to hijack her moderate wing of the party," said one New York Democrat who had spoken to Scozzafava.

Hijack? Those forces (outside or in) were trying to push the moderates aside and support the conservative wing... just as the moderates did the exact opposite when eleven GOP party bosses anointed DIABLO Scozzafava to succeed RINO John McHugh, who jumped at the chance to join the Obama administration. (For those of you who have lived in Plato's cave for some months now, RINO is of course "Republican in name only," while DIABLO, coined by Mark Steyn, stands for "Democrat in all but label only.")

Of course, by "outside interests," the unnamed "New York Democrat" meant only conservatives across the country who rallied to Hoffman's cause, and possibly Hoffman himself, who resides in a nearby district. For some reason, the specter of a far-left president and his top aides, most from Chicago, don't count as "outsiders;" and neither do other New York Democrats who reside all over the state.

What they're really saying seems clear to me: Dede Scozzafava thought the fix was in, and she was gobsmacked by the speed of the unraveling.

She was selected by the Republican nomenklatura to succeed John McHugh; sure, she was trailing Bill Owens in the polls, but that was all just for show. When election time rolled around, Scozzafava was sure the conservatives, having made their displeasure known, would hold their noses and vote for her. After all, they had nowhere else to go.

(The same dynamic had already happened with the national GOP and several big names in the party; having nowhere else to light, they smiled and nodded and gave Scozzafava their blessings.)

She would be elected, and her life would be set: She would serve several terms then be appointed a federal judge; or perhaps she would receive a succession of appointments at la Casa Blanca, culminating in a minor cabinet position... perhaps Secretary of Health and Human Services or Director of the EPA under President Biden.

Sure, this is rank speculation on my part; but her reaction to conservatives in her own district rallying to Doug Hoffman, the collapse of her own support, her whiny departure, and her immediate embrace of the Democrat tells me that she herself feels "betrayed" by her own party... and she's lashing out in angry revenge. Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.

In fact, Dede Scozzafava reminds me a lot of David Brock. Brock is a former Republican investigative writer who flipped to the Democratic side, reportedly because he was furious over being snubbed by a few conservatives at cocktail parties. (He could only name one such snubbery, by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. of the American Spectator, Brock's former employer.)

Short detour: Brock was the toast of Washington after his first and still best book, the Real Anita Hill. In that book, he took apart the self-serving portrait of Clarence Thomas' wannabe political character assassin, Nina Totenberg of NPR, exposing her as an ultra liberal, Democratic Party hatchet-girl. Brock argued (with good evidence) that Totenberg and her fellows in the anti-Thomas brigade of the "shadow government" suborned perjury by Anita Hill.

They worked hand in sock puppet with top Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee to attempt to destroy Thomas -- for the crime of being a conservative black man. Or as Emerge, a black magazine, so graciously put it -- "Uncle Thomas, Lawn Jockey for the Far Right."

Brock did yeoman work exposing this dark undercurrent of Democratic racism and dirty tricks. He rightly noted that if Republicans had tried the same vile tactic to defeat a black liberal Democratic Supreme-Court nominee -- accusing him of uncontrollable sexuality, a traditional racist attack on black men -- the screams of rage from Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and the usual ranks fo the perpetually aggrieved would have rolled three times 'round the world. David Brock was feted and petted, courted and bedded.

But after his second book, the Seduction of Hillary Rodham -- in which he was perceived as having cuddled a bit too close to his subject -- he drifted off everybody's A-list.

Gone were the invites to cocktail parties starring top congressional Republicans, the talk-show circuits, the frequent appearances as guest commentator on TV ("the Republican," given twenty seconds to counter the six Democrats who had yammered on for twenty minutes about whatever issue burned that day).

Brock reportedly flew into a Rumplestiltskin-like rage at his maltreatment, especially at parties; he flipped completely, turning not only Democrat but attack-dog Democrat. He published Blinded by the Right, an unreadable screed against everyone he had formerly worked with; and he accused Republicans of rejecting him because he was openly gay.

Of course, he was openly gay when he published the Real Anita Hill, and that didn't seem to bother Republicans. Logic is not the long suit of avatars of self pity.

I have no idea whether Scozzafava ever met David Brock; the latter quickly dropped off the radar, after the sensation of his complete betrayal and subsequent toadying up to the far left lost its novelty. But she is following the same pattern as he, and I strongly suspect for the same reason: Thwarted entitlement.

Just as Brock believed his future was set (he was going to be the next conservative icon, a literary Rush Limbaugh, and incidentally a multimillionaire best seller), so Scozzafava -- judging by her campaign, her collapse, and her subsequent openness to complete betrayal of her former party -- saw the actual vote as mere formal flummery. She had already won the seat when the boys in the back room anointed her. They promised!

It turns out, Politico notes, that Scozzafava was promised power, prestige, and support if she flipped -- especially if she formally turned her coat. Such promises are invariably part of the wooing process... and almost always disingenuously so:

Also critical was [New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon] Silver’s assurance, in a phone conversation with Scozzafava, that the state Assembly Democratic caucus would embrace her if she chose to switch parties, now viewed as a real possibility after her endorsement Sunday of Owens.

Yep. I'm sure that next year, New York state Democrats will be eager to shove aside some life-long Democrat in favor of a humiliated and crushed erstwhile Republican, hated by a huge number of voters in the district, who just lost an election that was expected to be a shoe-in. Lots of luck, Dede.

I make a further prediction: After tomorrow, when Hoffman wins the race -- or even if Democrat Bill Owens squeaks out a narrow victory -- the Chicago Left will toss Scozzafava aside like a used Kleenex.

She may think she will be showered with gratitude from the president; she may fantasize that she'll have an honored place in the pantheon of New York liberals; but the reality is that nobody ever trusts a traitor again, especially not the beneficiaries of her partisan treason. Instead, Scozzafava will be utterly marginalized and shunted aside, abandoned, and embittered... just as was David Brock. (Anybody hear from him recently? Perhaps, continuing our Rumplestiltskin comparison, Brock stamped his foot so hard, he opened a crack and fell through the Earth.)

Such is the fruit of betrayal. I can't work up much sympathy, either for the party bosses who called themselves "the moderate wing" of the Republican Party or for Dede Scozzafava herself; I'm repelled by those who see the democratic process as nothing but a necessary and annoying evil, the klunky mechanism for their own career ambitions -- and to hell with what their constituents want.

But I do feel some pity for those honest moderate GOP voters: It's bad enough to lose what amounts to a post-hoc primary against the conservatives, without having to be humiliated by the thoughtless and insulting antics of their erstwhile standard bearer. Gracious and fairminded Democrats must have felt the same sinking horror in 2000, as they watched Al Gore try to sue his way into the White House.

Perhaps moderate New York Republicans should likewise think a second time before picking the next champion of their cause.

Cross-posted to Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 2, 2009, at the time of 4:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Scozzafava Scandals

Ordinarily, I dote on every word writ by Rich Galen, cybercolumnist extraordinaire, proprietor of Mullings, my favorite non-blog blog (neg-blog?) Alas, I think he has really gone off the Newtonian end on the NY-23 race.

In today's Mullings, Rich writes the following:

The Conservatives nominated a guy named Doug Hoffman who does not live in the District, but is true to Conservative principals. [Er... sic, I think! Unless he means Ben Stein: "Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?"]

Nevertheless, the National Republican Congressional Committee and other big-time Republicans supported her on the grounds that the locals know their District and having someone like Howard [sic] in the race splitting the GOP vote might well give the seat to the Democrat Owens.

I agreed. Someone e-mailed me the other day saying that people like me who live in Washington don't understand what is going on out in the "hustings." I responded that upstate New York is as "hustings" as it gets and they picked Scozzafava.

Well, no, Rich. "They" didn't pick Scozzafava. As I documented in a previous post here, she was selected in a back-room deal by eleven county GOP committee apparatchiks. The very fact that she recently plummeted in the polls, to the point where she fell off the radar in this race -- which is the only reason she dropped out, she was afraid of making an utter fool of herself if she stuck around -- proves that "they," the actual residents of that district, did not pick Scozzafava. Her support was probably below that of "don't know/no opinion" when she stalked off in a huff.

But here is the kicker to Galen's piece:

I have spent my adult life helping to elect Republicans all across the GOP spectrum. The only vote I care about is the first one: will it be for the Republican candidate for Speaker (in the House) or Majority Leader (in the Senate)? After that first vote they're someone else's problem.

If that's Galen's lone criterion, he made a very bad decision to endorse Scozzafava. Given her subsequent betrayal of the very GOP that "nominated" (selected) her, endorsing the Democrat in the race and urging all of her supporters (both of them) to vote for Democrat Bill Owens instead of Conservative Republican Doug Hoffman, what makes Galen so sure Scozzafava would have voted for John Boehner (R-OH, 92%) -- rather than Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 100%) -- in that all-important first vote?

I think it would have been a 50-50 bet at best. Clearly, Scozzafava's liberalism trumped her party affiliation by so much that she couldn't even stand neutral; she practically fell over her own feet rushing to endorse the liberal Democrat, Bill Owens.

Given that Hoffman is no more conservative than Boehner; given that Scozzafava's liberalism is as near as makes no difference to Pelosi's; and given the former's eagerness to stab her own party in the back -- I think Galen went all-in on a three-card inside straight when he endorsed Scozzafava.

Alas, he is so off on this call, I just can't keep my lip zipped: A political party must stand for something, or it's nothing but a Alinskyite power grab. What principle (or principal) of the Republican Party does Scozzafava embody?

She's a social liberal and a fiscal train wreck. She evidently hates conservatives, one of the core groups of the GOP, with such passion that she would rather see a liberal Democrat win than a Republican who calls himself conservative, no matter how reasonable. Either that, or she was so enraged at the very idea that some peon dared interfere with her free ride to the Capitol dome, that she decided if she couldn't win, she would make damn sure no Republican would win.

That's a pretty despicable instance of playing dog in the china shop.

I don't believe for one second Galen's claim that "the only vote [he] cares about is the first one," the organizing vote. When he wrote that, he included a huge bunch of implied but unstated caveats:

• He certainly would not support a Republican who was also a Ku Klux Klansman, such as David Duke.
• Nor would Galen support a corrupt politician just because he was the Republican.
• And I suspect there are policy positions that are so outrageous, Galen would hold his nose and vote for the Democrat rather than a Republican who espoused them; for an obvious example, suppose a "Republican" ran on a platform of ObamaCare, the energy cripple and tax bill, declaring defeat and withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq, doubling all federal taxes, and enacting a federal law reimposing racial preferences on all those states that have repudiated them. I would be shocked if Galen could possibly imagine supporting such a nominee... even if he promised faithfully to vote for Boehner in the organizing bill. Oh, wait...

A political party must stand for something; and when the "nominee" (selectee) is as far outside the foundational principles of the Republican Party as Scozzafava appears to be, then even if it throws the election to the Democrat, one cannot in good conscience vote for her. Galen made the same sad error that Newt Gingrich made. Each fell into the sin of thinking of this election as nothing more than a political game and point tally, rather than what it is: a decision that could turn out to be life or death (for our military personnel, for example) and could turn out to be existential for the GOP.

There is a fine line here: We don't want to throw over reasonably good incumbents and establishment candidates running in purple districts; we don't want a policy of always supporting the hardest-right candidate in the GOP, because that could easily end up electing the Democrat, if the district as a whole is not as conservative as the candidate picked by the local GOP. More often than not in politics, the best is enemy of good enough.

But on the other hand, there are some principles that a candidate simply may not violate if he wants Republican support. While Dierdre Scozzafava is nowhere near the sludgey bottom of people who call themselves Republicans (David Duke springs to mind), she is certainly far enough down the pickle barrel -- and Hoffman is a good enough gamble -- that we should leave the DIABLO to ferment all on her own, rather than run the risk of letting her drag the party down to the depths along with her.

Galen and Gingrich should have thought a second time before leaping aboard the Establishment Express.

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 2, 2009, at the time of 5:49 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

October 31, 2009

Wow, That Was Quick: Scozzafava Drops Out of NY-23 Race

I think my predictions for the special election in New York's 23rd district are pretty safe now:

Republican Dede Scozzafava has suspended her bid in next Tuesday’s NY 23 special election, a huge development that dramatically shakes up the race. She did not endorse either of her two opponents -- Conservative party candidate Doug Hoffman or Democrat Bill Owens.

The decision to suspend her campaign is a boost for Hoffman, who already had the support of 50 percent of GOP voters, according to a newly-released Siena poll, and is now well-positioned to win over the 25 percent of Republicans who had been sticking with Scozzafava.

Heh. Dierdre "Dede" Scozzafava must have been reading Big Lizards. In our previous post, I made my predictions quite explicit:

You may or may not have read it here first, but I think I might have been the first among all those blogs I personally follow -- that would be three, counting Big Lizards -- to flatly predict that:

• The race will, in the next couple of days, come down to a two-way between Doug Hoffman and Bill Owens;
• And that Hoffman will win -- and win convincingly. Perhaps not with an outright majority, unless Scozzafava sees the "mene mene" on the wall and drops out; but a solid victory of 5-8 points over Owens, with Scozzafava in third by double-digits.

As usual, when Big Lizards predicts, we invite everyone to track our predictions and see if we know what we're talking about... or whether we fall flat on our egg.

Cross-posted to Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 31, 2009, at the time of 1:31 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 29, 2009

NY-23: Hoffman Leads - and Now It Looks Like He Really Does!

Politico now reports new polling in the NY-23 special election that shows that the previous poll by the Club for Growth, which we talked about in an earlier post, was no fluke: Even the Daily Kos's polling now sees a huge surge towards conservative candidate Doug Hoffman in the last week before Tuesday's vote.

And just as we predicted, DIABLO* (Democrat in all but label only) Dierdre "Dede" Scozzafava, the liberal Republican hand-picked by eleven GOP committee apparatchiks, as we reported in More On Dierdre "Dede" Scozzafava, has all but fallen off the radar. The race has come down to a face-off between Hoffman and Democratic candidate Bill Owens:

The latest round of polling gave evidence that Hoffman is on the rise and has pulled even with, or ahead of, Owens as Scozzafava has fallen into third place. In a newly-released poll commissioned by the liberal blog Daily Kos, Hoffman is within one point of Owens, 33 percent to 32 percent, with Scozzafava lagging well behind in third place with 21 percent....

Even more encouraging to Hoffman’s backers, the Daily Kos poll shows Hoffman is winning over more Republican voters than the GOP’s own nominee. He leads Scozzafava 41 to 34 percent among Republicans -- a sign that GOP voters are increasingly identifying with Hoffman as the true Republican candidate.

And he holds a 19-point lead among independents over Owens, 47 percent to 28 percent, suggesting that his outsider message is resonating, and that his support isn’t confined to the conservative base.

Evidence is mounting (a favorite liberal-stream media word) that far from making a "blunder," Sarah Palin had her finger on the crystal ball: Hoffman looks like a winner now, and Palin was the first Republican heavy-hitter to come out for him. (Fred Thompson was an earlier endorser; but Thompson is a spent force. As great a guy as he usually was, he is the GOP's past, not its future.)

And at last, Hoffman is getting some lovin' from "mainstream" (that is, more conservative) Republicans: Politico reports that National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) Chairman Pete Sessions (R-TX, 92%) is making it clear that the Republican conference would be very pleased if Hoffman is elected:

“He would be very welcome, with open arms,” Sessions told POLITICO in an interview off the House floor.

And former NRCC Chairman Tom Cole (R-OK, 88%) now supports Hoffman's insolent campaign against Democrat Owens and formal Republican candidate Scozzafava. Meanwhile, Hoffman's popularity is still growing among the rank and file:

Hoffman, whose campaign barely had a presence in the district as recently as two weeks ago, is getting help from a well-oiled conservative ground game, with hundreds of volunteers from tea party groups and leading conservative organizations working in upstate New York to help him get out the vote next Tuesday.

Hoffman’s campaign now has five campaign offices teeming with volunteers across the sprawling district. By contrast, Scozzafava’s campaign has just one office in her home base.

The anti-tax Club for Growth, pro-life Susan B. Anthony’s List, Eagle Forum and anti-illegal immigration Minuteman PAC all have staffers on the ground knocking on doors, making calls to Republican voters and delivering pro-Hoffman literature to churches.

You may or may not have read it here first, but I think I might have been the first among all those blogs I personally follow -- that would be three, counting Big Lizards -- to flatly predict that:

• The race will, in the next couple of days, come down to a two-way between Doug Hoffman and Bill Owens;
• And that Hoffman will win -- and win convincingly. Perhaps not with an outright majority, unless Scozzafava sees the "mene mene" on the wall and drops out; but a solid victory of 5-8 points over Owens, with Scozzafava in third by double-digits.

As usual, when Big Lizards predicts, we invite everyone to track our predictions and see if we know what we're talking about... or whether we fall flat on our egg.

 

* The term DIABLO does indeed appear to have been minted by Mark Steyn; Charles "the Sauerkraut" Krauthammer was merely the fence.

Cross-posted to Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 29, 2009, at the time of 5:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 26, 2009

NY-23: Hoffman Leads - Unless He Doesn't

In the special election in New York's 23rd district to replace Rep. John McHugh (RINO-NY, 40%), who just accepted Barack H. Obama's appointment to be Secretary of the Army, a new poll for the first time finds Conservative Doug Hoffman winning with 31%; Democrat Bill Owens comes in second with 27%, while DIABLO (Democrat in all but label only) Dierdre "Dede" Scozzafava trails badly with a scant 20% -- even less than the undecided response of 22%. (Sarah Palin endorsed Hoffman last week, leading to an additional $116,000+ in fundraising.)

All right, that's the good news; the skepticism-inducing news is that the poll was conducted by the Club for Growth, the pro-Capitalism group that has backed Hoffman to the tune of $600,000; thus the poll was conducted by the very people who recruited Hoffman and desperately want to see him doing better than Dede Scozzafava, which would bolster their argument that Republicans should coalesce around him, not her. (It's like the poll commissioned by Daily Kos that showed Bill Owens winning and Hoffman in third place.)

Too, the poll of 300 likely voters has a margin of error of 5.66%... which means that Owens is as likely to be ahead of Hoffman as the reverse (though that would still leave Dede -- does "DD" stand for Democratic Decoy? -- out of the running).

Take it for what you will; I think the poll is probably accurate, and I believe the race, in the end, will come down to Hoffman versus Owens. Scozzafava will fade as she comes to be seen, over the next eight days, as nothing but a stalking-horse for the Democrats: Her only function is to split the Republican vote.

I believe that on November 3rd, in a head to head race, Hoffman will overwhelm Owens, and the seat will go to the conservative -- for a year. What happens in 2010, however, will depend entirely on how well Hoffman serves. So it's a good shot for another fiscally conservative representative in Congress, but it's not part of a permanent "revolution" unless we can sustain the gain next year.

Oh, one other unintended consequence: I see this election as completing the marginalization of the famous endorser... but I don't mean Sarah Palin. At the eleventh hour, former Speaker, guru, revolutionary, conservative, whatever Newt Gingrich announced his endorsement -- of the stalking-horse!

Newt used to represent the cutting edge of a conservative revolution; today, he represents the failed policies of the GOP congressional establishment prior to 2006 -- the same folks who cynically picked (in a back-room deal) a out and out liberal, who agrees with Democrat Owens right down the ideological line, to replace the previous RINO McHugh.

The Gingrich endorsement of Scozzafava is just the last nail in the coffin of Newt's reputation. What a shame... I really liked and respected him in the 1990s.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 26, 2009, at the time of 12:55 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 24, 2009

Three Cheers for Palin's Latest "Blunder"!

This last June 2nd, Barack H. Obama decided he felt so comfortable and compatible with "Republican" Rep. John McHugh (RINO-NY, 40%) that he named him Secretary of the Army. This leaves New York's 23rd congressional district with an open seat; a special election is scheduled there for November 3rd, I believe, the same day the Republicans are set to win the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races.

In this hotly contested election, we have already noted that instead of a single Republican nominee, there is a very liberal Republican, Assemblywoman Dierdre Scozzafava, and a much more traditional conservative accountant running on the Conservative Party line, Doug Hoffman. (Scozzafava is the woman for whom Charles "the Sauerkraut" Krauthammer coined the acronym DIABLO -- Democrat in all but label only. Actually I don't know for sure Krauthammer personally made that up, but he is the one I heard say it.)

To her everlasting credit, Sarah Palin has become, I believe, the first major Republican Party heavy-hitter to come out swinging on behalf of Hoffman, the conservative, in despite of the New York GOP establishment's favorite-daughter selection of Scozzafava. Palin made her endorsement via her Facebook page (I hope that link works; it might require the reader have a Facebook account):

Our nation is at a crossroads, and this is once again a "time for choosing."

The federal government borrows, spends, and prints too much money, while our national debt hits a record high. Government is growing while the private sector is shrinking, and unemployment is on the rise. Doug Hoffman is committed to ending the reckless spending in Washington, D.C. and the massive increase in the size and scope of the federal government. He is also fully committed to supporting our men and women in uniform as they seek to honorably complete their missions overseas.

And best of all, Doug Hoffman has not been anointed by any political machine.

Doug Hoffman stands for the principles that all Republicans should share: smaller government, lower taxes, strong national defense, and a commitment to individual liberty.

(As this is a political endorsement, and she clearly wants as widespread a distribution as she can get, I will cross my fingers and put her entire Facebook entry into the "Slither on" extended section of this post. If she or someone else with authority objects, I will remove it; but I think this does not violate any copyrights.)

In response to Palin's endorsement (and the $116,000+ in cash it helped raise for Mr. Hoffman), a peevish blogger at the Washington Post, Stephen Stromberg, has declared it "Sarah Palin's latest blunder." He "reasons" that she will only alienate the GOP establishment and disrupt their vital mission of moving the Republican Party further to the left, so that they can finally win... not that such a pyrrhic victory would matter:

If Hoffman -- somehow -- wins with her help, she will have alienated a GOP establishment desperate to reconstruct past majority coalitions that included moderates, both because she will have hurt their cause and because they will fear her influence among true believers. In return, she might continue to appeal to some far-right primary voters in 2012, but that only gets you so far (a possible victory in Iowa, owing to the heavy social conservative vote in the caucuses there, and perhaps respectable showings in the South). In other words, in this best-case scenario, she will have begun to lay the groundwork to be the Mike Huckabee of 2012. Except in 2012, she will probably be running against, well, Mike Huckabee....

More than anything, though, Palin’s endorsement probably makes an Owens victory more likely. That would not just be a humiliation for Palin. It would be a notable loss for her party as it is trying to shake off years of electoral debacle.

Heh. I always love it when liberal Democrats give Republicans and conservatives helpful advice on getting our mojo back. (For further amusement, the blog Stromboli, or whatever his name is, writes for is titled "PostPartisan"!)

I suspect that if Palin draws the ire of liberals by endorsing Hoffman, she's on the right track. In any event, she is already alienated from the moderate-liberal, neocon, GOP-establishment leadership. But this was also true of Ronald Reagan (cf. Don Regan, George Schultz, et al): The Realists (the establishmentarians of the 1980s) hated Reagan, and some made it clear that they would rather see Carter or Mondale win than Reagan.

But at least Palin is holding the line on at least some traditional Republican principles, something beyond political calculation and Realpolitik; from her Facebook post:

Political parties must stand for something. When Republicans were in the wilderness in the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan knew that the doctrine of "blurring the lines" between parties was not an appropriate way to win elections. Unfortunately, the Republican Party today has decided to choose a candidate who more than blurs the lines, and there is no real difference between the Democrat and the Republican in this race. This is why Doug Hoffman is running on the Conservative Party's ticket.

I think this is something we need, and I highly doubt that such a stance will hurt her political future in the party; most rank and file Republicans appear to believe we need much more principle and a lot less accomodation of the hard Left, whether Democratic radicals or Republican establishmentarians.

Cross-posted to Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Here is Sarah Palin's entire endorsement of Doug Hoffman from her Facebook page (open Facebook, search in the upper-right for Sarah Palin, click her name, then click the "Notes" tab):

The people of the 23rd Congressional District of New York are ready to shake things up, and Doug Hoffman is coming on strong as Election Day approaches! He needs our help now.

The votes of every member of Congress affect every American, so it's important for all of us to pay attention to this important Congressional campaign in upstate New York. I am very pleased to announce my support for Doug Hoffman in his fight to be the next Representative from New York's 23rd Congressional district. It's my honor to endorse Doug and to do what I can to help him win, including having my political action committee, SarahPAC, donate to his campaign the maximum contribution allowed by law.

Our nation is at a crossroads, and this is once again a "time for choosing."

The federal government borrows, spends, and prints too much money, while our national debt hits a record high. Government is growing while the private sector is shrinking, and unemployment is on the rise. Doug Hoffman is committed to ending the reckless spending in Washington, D.C. and the massive increase in the size and scope of the federal government. He is also fully committed to supporting our men and women in uniform as they seek to honorably complete their missions overseas.

And best of all, Doug Hoffman has not been anointed by any political machine.

Doug Hoffman stands for the principles that all Republicans should share: smaller government, lower taxes, strong national defense, and a commitment to individual liberty.

Political parties must stand for something. When Republicans were in the wilderness in the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan knew that the doctrine of "blurring the lines" between parties was not an appropriate way to win elections. Unfortunately, the Republican Party today has decided to choose a candidate who more than blurs the lines, and there is no real difference between the Democrat and the Republican in this race. This is why Doug Hoffman is running on the Conservative Party's ticket.

Republicans and conservatives around the country are sending an important message to the Republican establishment in their outstanding grassroots support for Doug Hoffman: no more politics as usual.

You can help Doug by visiting his official website below and joining me in supporting his campaign:
http://www.doughoffmanforcongress.com/donate3.html.

- Sarah Palin

As the young, exciting candidates used to say back in the 1960s, Right on, baby!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 24, 2009, at the time of 9:59 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 23, 2009

Yes, Virginia, There Is a Sanity Clause

From the Washington Post -- which seems to be edging ever so gingerly away from the One They Have Been Pining For:

Sensing that victory in the race for Virginia governor is slipping away, Democrats at the national level are laying the groundwork to blame a loss in a key swing state on a weak candidate who ran a poor campaign that failed to fully embrace President Obama until days before the election.

Wait, you sure it's not George Bush's fault?

Okay... so Virginia voters are upset that R. Creigh Deeds didn't climb into Barack H. Obama's lap and let him stick his hand up Deeds'... well, you get the sock-puppetry picture: Voters are angry at Deeds and less willing to support him because he's not singing the Obamalujah chorus.

So that's why they're voting for the Republican, Robert McDonnell. Hey, makes sense to me!

But why is it so important to blame everything on Mr. Deeds? That's easily explained:

A loss for Deeds in Virginia -- which for the first time in decades supported the Democratic presidential candidate in last year's race -- would likely be seen as a sign that Obama's popularity is weakening in critical areas of the country. But the unusual preelection criticism could be an attempt to shield Obama from that narrative by ensuring that Deeds is blamed personally for the loss, particularly given the state's three-decade pattern of backing candidates from the party out of power in the White House.

Whoosh! Mr. Deeds goes under the bus. "That's not the R. Creigh Deeds I knew."

But national Democrats are contrasting Deeds with New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine and New York congressional candidate Bill Owens, who they say have more actively sought the White House's help and more vigorously and publicly backed its agenda. Polls show Corzine in a competitive position in New Jersey and Owens ahead, while Deeds has turned aggressively to Obama voters in recent days in an effort to overcome a significant deficit in the polls.

Let's un-vague-ify those WaPo weasel words:

• By "polls show Corzine in a competitive position," the Post means that John Corzine was being walloped by Chris Christie until mid-September, when "independent" Chris Daggett entered the race and began sucking votes away from Christie... in the polls, that is. Now Corzine and Christie are tied.

• And by "[Bill] Owens ahead" in the special election for New York's 23rd congressional district, they actually mean that Democrat Owens has a slight plurality over his two opponents, liberal Republican Dierdre Scozzafava -- whom Charles Krauthammer says is not even a RINO; she's a DIABLO, a Democrat in all but label only -- and Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman; the two split the un-Democratic vote, allowing Owens to sneak ahead with 33%-35% support.

  But if the Republicans and Conservatives can coalesce on a single candidate, that candidate would crush Owens like a bongo drum, winning by eighteen or nineteen points... even on the Daily Kos poll!

In the real world of the voting booth, I believe all three of these races will go to the Republican -- or in New York, to the Conservative Party nominee, who will, I believe, suck a huge chunk of votes away from the soft-hearted, soft-headed Dierdre "Hillary" Scozzafava. (Since the GOP establishment backs Scozzafava, a lot of more conservative Republicans tell the pollsters that they're doing the same. But once they're in the privacy of the curtained room of democracy, it will be a different story.)

In any event, regarding the pathetic Mr. Deeds of Virginia... put a sock on him, he's done. As Queen might have sung, "another one bites the bus!"

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 23, 2009, at the time of 11:31 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

August 14, 2009

Is Obama '12 the new Clinton '96?

According to John Hinderaker at Power Line, some Democrats are already comparing the reelection attempt by Barack H. Obama in 2012 to the successful reelection of Bill Clinton in 1996. I say the analogy is not just flawed but ludicrously so.

Those Democrats who see Clinton '96 as the prophetic analogy for Obama '12 miss a huge distinction: Clinton did not win reelection; rather, the Republicans threw away their chance to defeat him by nominating the Most Boring Candidate Since the Mesozoic -- Senate Majority Leader Blob Dole.

I believe Clinton was eminently defeatable that year, had Republicans simply nominated someone more dynamic, even exciting; the only excitement in the entire Dole campaign was when he inadvertently dove into the mosh pit at some campaign event.

A more fiscally conservative and dynamic GOP nominee might have kept H. Ross Perot out of the '96 race, or at least held his numbers down to the traditional 1% - 1.5% of a normal third-party candidate (Perot took 8.7% in the actual election). Then the Republican would have only had to take a tiny bit more of the vote in some key states to dethrone the unprincipled one.

(Note that Clinton beat Dole by 8.5%, more than Obama beat McCain by; yet Clinton managed only 49.9% of the vote against a weak spread. That is the mark of an electorate dissatisfied with the field.)

But the race in 2012 will likely include several very exciting GOP candidates, including possibly Mitt Romney (in what will assuredly be an "it's the economy, stupid!" election), Eric Cantor, Bobby Jindal, and possibly Sarah Palin (though I consider that unlikely), any one of whom is far better a candidate than was Dole (yes, even Palin). Depending on how much voters blame the man sitting in la Casa Blanca for the idiocy of the Democratic Congress, Obama might well be sitting on a lower job approval in 2012 than Clinton had in 1996; Clinton was above 50% in the polls for many months prior to the November election.

I think it's a bad analogy all around; a better analogy might be Jimmy Carter, except that the 1980 race had its own distorting factor involving the Republican nominee, this time in the opposite direction: It's impossible to say whether Carter would have been reelected if George H.W. Bush had eked out a primary victory to become the nominee instead of Ronald Reagan.

The presidential election of 2008 was absolutely unique, and it may turn out that the presidential reelection attempt of 2012 is similarly sui generis. But certainly it's not plausibly modeled by the reelection campaign of Clinton in 1996; that's just Democratic wishful thinking.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 14, 2009, at the time of 2:57 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

June 22, 2009

L.A. Mayor Villaraigosa Drops Out of California Gubernatorial Race

In a stunning turn of events (well it stunned me, at least), Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who I had thought the odds-on favorite to be the Democratic nominee for governor of California in the 2010 election, just announced today that he will not run for the office. He says that Los Angeles residents are in crappy enough financial shape that he doesn't want to abandon them.

I always thought former "MEChAnista" Villaraigosa was likely to beat out Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA, 100%) for several reasons, not least of which that he would be the first elected Latino governor since we became a state in 1850, and the first Latino governor to serve since Romualdo Pacheco, who succeeded in 1875 to the office after the previous governor was elected to the United States Senate. (Pacheco served for a few months until a new governor was elected.)

As the Hispanic population of California has become significantly larger, and as Hispanic voters tend to coalesce around Hispanic candidates regardless of whether the two groups actually agree on many issues, I was more worried about a Villaraigosa candidacy than any other Democratic candidate, from Feinstein, to former Gov. Jerry Brown, to San Francisco Mayor and lawless radical Gavin Newsom, to any of the also-rans.

So who will take Villaraigosa's place on the ballot?

• With Villaraigosa out, Feinstein becomes the default front runner. She certainly has the most extensive political experience as mayor of San Francisco, state senator, and United States senator. She also came close to beating then-Sen. Pete Wilson in the 1990 governor's race.
• If anybody has a shot at displacing her on the ballot, I would guess it would be the ultra-ultra-liberal Newsom... who burst on the scene in 2004 when he unilaterally, without any legal authority, ordered San Francisco to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples (Newsom is himself heterosexual). The State Supreme Court later nullified all those "marriages"... though of course it subsequently ordered the state to start doing what it had just slapped Newsom for doing... for which the voters slapped back with Proposition 8.
• Jerry Brown is a spent force, in my opinion; the only reason he can even run is that the term limits law doesn't count gubernatorial terms served before 1990.
• There is always the faint possibility that former Lt.Gov. Cruz Bustamante will run; but he has been virtually invisible on the momentus political and economic issues facing this state recently, focusing instead on a much more urgent project: "Lose weight now -- ask me how!"

On the Republican side, I'm placing my bets on Meg Whitman, former President and CEO of eBay from 1998 to 2008. I think she would be especially strong against Sen. Feinstein:

• Feinstein will be 77 years old on election day (today is her 76th birthday); Whitman will be 54.

• To be perfectly blunt, Whitman beats out Feinstein for the pulchritude prize walking away. If you don't think that can make a difference in an election, ask President John S. McCain. All right, there were some other issues; but the visual chasm between the virile, young Obamacle and the Methuseloid McCain surely played a major role, especially with younger voters.

  Anyway, judge for yourselves -- from these two admittedly tendentious photos, which I deliberately chose to make Feinstein look awfuler than she really does, and Whitman look better than she really does:

• Feinstein has never done anything in her life other than politics. Whitman has never before done politics. I believe this is a positive, not a negative, because she is extremely well known in [stealth correction] "Silicon Valley," the high-tech sector of California. I see young people, conservatives, techies, women, and anybody who actually works a real job for a living finding Whitman's biography compelling... and Feinstein's biography dull as dishwater.
• Related to the above, Feinstein has many decades of corrupt and compromising baggage she must explain away. It has hurt her in past elections.
• Meg Whitman earned her own personal fortune by building eBay up from a handful of employees to the juggernaut it is today; Dianne Feinstein married money for her third husband, Richard Blum.
• Whitman totally neutralizes the gender issue, as both are, you know, women.
• She also neutralizes the personal-fortune issue, as she is ten times as rich as Feinstein... but unlike the latter, Whitman earned her own wealth.

• Whitman also has a better shot at winning the "I can fix the California economy" sweepstakes... though this could cut the other way, too, if voters decide Schwarzenegger's failure was due to his inexperience with stroking the Democrat-dominated legislature. In reality, he failed because the Democratic legislative majority is too busy sticking its head in an ostrich to actually help ordinary Californios crushed by the insanity of the state budgets the majority has enacted for years and years.

  But of course, any GOP nominee would have to define this issue in favor of truth, and not allow the Democrats to define it self-servingly. Again, I like Whitman better than any other Republican candidate.

• Whitman is simply a more galvanizing speaker than snoozy Feinstein.

I have to like our chances in the California governor's race a lot better today than I did yesterday. I can see the light at the end of our rope.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 22, 2009, at the time of 6:26 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 13, 2009

George Voinovich Retiring. Can We Get a Republican Instead?

George Voinovich (RINO-OH, 48%) has announced that he won't run for reelection. He joins Mel Martinez (R-FL, 80%), Sam Brownback (R-KS, 95%), Kit Bond (R-MO, 83%), and possibly Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX, 88%) in the list of Republican senators who have either announced they won't run for reelection in 2010 or, in Hutchison's case, appears ready to resign to run for governor of Texas.

Voinovich has been a thorn in the eyes of the GOP for his entire tenure as U.S. senator. Probably for that very reason, his prospects for reelection in 2010 were already dicey.

While Voinovich gives the usual phoney-baloney reasons for not running for reelection -- wants to do the work of the people instead of campaigning, wants to spend more time with his family, yak blah -- the real reason for his departure may be somewhat more prosaic:

In announcing that he would not seek another term, Mr. Voinovich avoids what could have been a difficult re-election fight. As recently as December a Quinnipiac University poll found that fewer than half of all voters in the state -- 44 percent -- said he deserved to be elected to a third term. And voters were nearly evenly split on the question of whether they would vote for him or an unnamed Democrat.

Voinovich won handily the last time he ran, winning by 64 to 36 against Mike Fingerhut; but this was in 2004, during Bush's successful reelection. He also won fairly easily the first time he essayed the Senate in 1998, 56 to 44; in that election, he "ignored" (Michael Barone's word) the attacks of his opponent, County Commissioner Mary Boyle, and ran on his record as Governor of Ohio, winning the seat vacated by American hero turned Clinton lickspittle John Glenn.

But in the new, more Democratic Ohio of 2006 (Sherrod Brown beats Mike DeWine at the peak of the Ohio GOP scandal) and 2008 (Ohio narrowly goes for Barack H. Obama as the financial "cratering" -- George W. Bush's word -- looms); with tepid polling; and with Voinovich being already 72 years old (74 when the next election is held), he evidently sees the "mene mene" on the wall.

But I'm not convinced that the public is rejecting Voinovich because, with his 2007 48% rating from the American Conservative Union, is too conservative. It's much more plausible that his low ratings derive from Republican reluctance to reelect yet another tax-hiking, gun-grabbing, war-defeatist surrender monkey RINO back to the Senate.

I'd love to see an actual Republican run to replace him in what used to be the Republican state of Ohio. The question is, can an actual Republican be elected? I say Yes, Rob Portman can -- for reasons detailed below.

The $1.2 trillion question is this: Has Ohio fallen fully under the sway of the Dark Side, or was 2008 just a "Democratic year," with the normal pattern of favoring the "out" party returning in 2010? Is a GOP election victory in Ohio even possible?

First, note that Obama beat John S. McCain there by only half the margin (4%) last year that Sherrod Brown beat Mike DeWine by (8%) in 2006. While there certainly are confounding factors, I would imagine that Obama nevertheless was at least as appealing a candidate to Ohioans as Brown... implying that the taint of the Gov. Robert Taft corruption scandal and the Jack Abramoff-related scandals in that state may not be long lasting.

Whether or not a real Republican can win, I still want to see a more conservative -- or libertarian-conservative -- nominee for the Voinovich seat than the departing man himself. At the very least, I want to see what happens, how well an actual Republican like Portman does in that state. I suspect that he will begin with an approval rating north of Voinovich's current 44%.

Rob Portman is, in fact, the supposed favorite to replace Voinovich on the GOP ticket; Portman is the former director of OMB under President Bush and a former Ohio congressman:

Among those who are reportedly angling to replace Mr. Voinovich is a former Ohio congressman, Rob Portman, a Republican who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget and United States Trade Representative during the Bush administration.

Mr. Portman has not yet announced his candidacy, but Matt Miller, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, sought to pre-empt him on Monday.

“It’s jaw-dropping,” Mr. Miller said, “that Republicans would seem to turn to a Washington insider like Rob Portman who was one of the architects of the Bush economic policies that have run up trillions in deficits and shipped jobs overseas.”

That "trillions in deficits" argument may not fly as well as a pig in 2010, after two years of Barack Obama's "stimulus" package.

Portman's last ACU rating (2004) was 88%, nearly twice that of Voinovich. Everyone seems to "expect" him to declare his candidacy today. He won all of his elections (general and primary) easily; but the second district of Ohio is staunchly Republican: Portman's successor, Jean Schmidt, even won in the debacle year of 2006 (albeit narrowly), then won reelection more substantially last year.

Even so, my intuition tells me that we're considerably better off in 2010 running Portman than Voinovich in the senatorial election, for all that we're swapping an incrumbent for an open seat.

The other states mentioned where Republican senators have decided not to run in 2010 (or in Hutchison's case, might decide to resign) seem reasonably safe to me: Only Florida went to Obama last November, and that extremely narrowly; Kansas and Texas were solidly for McCain, while Missouri remained red in the election's closest squeaker, 0.13%. But no congressional seats changed parties in MO in the 2008 election. (Several did in Florida, but they were nearly all attributable to the individual Republicans being personally enmeshed in either the Mark Foley or the Jack Abramoff scandals.) I don't see any projectable trend in those states from red to blue.

So far, at least, the retiring GOP senators have probably done us more good than bad by getting out now. I think that's certainly the case for Sen. Voinovich.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 13, 2009, at the time of 1:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 7, 2009

Coldcocked Coleman vs. Hammerin' Hal

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line has a great post up about the failings of Sen. Norm Coleman's (R-MN, 64%) post-election campaign: While failed comedian Al Franken fought vigorously to find every, last vote that could possibly end up being counted for him, Coleman's campaign sat back "a bit like an NFL team sitting on a two-point lead in the closing minutes of the fourth quarter and playing zone defense."

(I don't actually understand what that means. To me, football comprises 22 men suffering from gigantism battling each other for a peculiar, little pointy object. But I surmise from Paul's analogy that such a strategy in such a situation would be politically lame and fraught with danger.)

Here's Paul:

One overlooked aspect of the process is the different approaches the two campaigns took once the recount began. From the outset of the recount process, the Coleman campaign has been remarkably passive in its approach. They have improvised strategy from day to day and spent too much time "spinning" the Franken campaign's activities, while expecting their lawyers to protect them. They have not appeared to me to have a handle on what was happening or on what was likely to happen.

Franken's campaign recognized immediately the opportunity to "find" more votes with the "improperly rejected" absentee ballots. The Coleman campaign may have erred at the outset when it failed to initiate its own efforts or craft a countervailing strategy.

The Coleman campaign appears to have bet they could create a legal firewall that would prevent the "improperly rejected" absentee ballots from getting counted. In any event, the Coleman campaign appears to have been caught flatfooted when the Minnesota Supreme Court decided these ballots should be included in the recount subject to agreement of the parties (and also subject to the possibility of sanctions for withholding agreement in bad faith).

Actually, I bring this up to make two points, the first purely mathematical, the second purely political. Paul notes the only source of votes left for Coleman:

The Coleman campaign has nevertheless identified 654 "improperly rejected" absentee ballots from Republican counties that were excluded from the recount (and that may be included in the election contest).

This is in addition to the 130 Franken votes that were evidently counted twice. Let's assume, as is likely, that these 130 double-counts are reversed; that reduces Franken's 225-vote majority to only 95 votes.

1. How strongly must Coleman win among those 654 "improperly rejected" absentee ballots in order to overcome that remaining deficit and win the election in the end?

The answer depends upon how many of those ballots are finally counted. If it's all of them, then Coleman must win them by a 58% to 42% margin. But if only, say, two-thirds of them end up being accepted by the courts, so that the pool shrinks from 654 to 436, it will be much harder. In this scenario, Coleman would have to win that ballot pool by a somewhat larger 61-39 margin.

So Coleman must generally win those ballots by about 60-40 to have a shot at prevailing. As these mostly come from Republican-Coleman districts, that's not impossible or even improbable... but we'll see.

Now to the more interesting political point:

2. Democrat opposition to Coleman has skyrocketed, and they appear prepared to prevent him being seated even if he wins the election, court or no court. At the same time, the Democrats have softened their opposition to the seating of Roland Burris, nominated by embattled and soon-to-be-impeached Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojovich's to take Barack H. Obama's seat in the U.S. Senate; swearing Burris in as a senator now appears inevitable, and the Democrats don't even seem to be very upset about it.

First, the Burris story:

Senate officials in both parties, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly for Senate members, said there is a growing expectation on Capitol Hill that the saga will end with Burris being seated....

Burris met for 45 minutes Wednesday morning with [Senate Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid, D-Caesar's Palace, 85%, and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL, 95%]. Only days ago, both senators were arguing that Burris' nomination was so tainted that he should not be seated and would be blocked.

"Only days ago..." But think how many momentous events related to this appointment have happened in the past two or three days! For one thing, the Democrats suddenly discovered that Roland Burris is black, like Barack Obama -- and that after President-elect Obama left for Washington D.C. to be sworn at, there wouldn't be any other black senator.

Surely that's enough to cause anybody to change his mind about Burris; any political objection they had to a man nominated to a Senate seat by a governor indicted for trying to sell that Senate seat has been quashed by the abrupt realization of Burris' race, and any qualm they had about his ability to effectively legislate has been soothed by the "D" after his name.

But we see a far less conciliatory Reid in the Politico piece:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid offered the toughest language he has ever used in arguing that Norm Coleman’s career in the Senate is finished.

“Norm Coleman will never ever serve [again] in the Senate,” Reid told Politico’s Manu Raju. “He lost the election. He can stall things, but he'll never serve in the Senate.”

Taking the Majority Leader at his word, I must conclude that Reid is saying that even if the court ultimately declares Coleman the winner, Reid and his Democrats will overturn the court decision by refusing to seat Coleman. This would give Democrats one more seat in the Senate, and near immunity to a filibuster, if they can hold ranks and gain but a single GOP turncoat for cloture.

They still must contend with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT, 70%-D), of course, as well as several other nominally "conservative" Democrats elected in recent years... e.g., Jim Webb (D-VA, 85%) and his incoming fellow Virginia Sen. Mark Warner (as yet unrated); but Democrats have a much stronger history than Republicans of drowning their own ideals and principles in the ocean of "party discipline."

These two political about-faces open a brand, new phase of Democrat resistance to and aggression against the GOP, indicating that the Democratic Party plans to continue its warfare against the opposition unabated from the level they hit during the 2004 election and after, when the pandemic of Bush Derangement Syndrome swept through the Left like ebola. BDS has clearly mutated and metastisized into RDS; any and every Republican is now hated by the Democrats with the fervor previously reserved for Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and of course the idiot-savant "mastermind" of the "criminal Bush regime," Bush himself.

This is not only bad news for the country -- no respite from the Left's politics of perpetual personal destruction -- but for the incoming President Obama as well... who had clearly signalled that he planned to govern as much more a centrist than his campaign rhetoric implied. Evidently, the congressional Democrats intend a far more serious challenge to Obama from the Left than their previous acquiescence to Obama's charge to the center implied.

Given that Obama is a political tabula rasa who will probably move, like Bill Clinton, in whatever direction offers the least resistance, I think it now likely that Obama's previous moves notwithstanding, the radicalized Democrats in Congress will push him into a far more strident, shrill, and deeply partisan presidency than he intended.

Obama clearly thought to "Deleno-ize" himself -- fireside chats and liberal fascism with a smiley face. This might have allowed him to set up, for the 2010 midterm elections, the "1934 scenario," in which the Democrats, instead of losing seats (as the norm), picked up nine seats in both the Senate and the House, dropping the Republicans to 26% in the former and below 24% in the latter. But if Obama is pushed far left by the congressional Democrats, this may very well set up the "1994 scenario" of the Gingrich revolution instead.

This would be very good for the Republican Party, of course -- but woe to the country in the interim! Expect a very tense, anxious, crisis-ridden, and "interesting" (in the sense of that fictional "Chinese proverb") next two years.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 7, 2009, at the time of 4:05 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

December 21, 2008

Found: Source of All Those New Democrats

We've all been wondering -- oh, all right... I've been wondering -- whence came all those gazillions of Democratic voters who propelled the over-the-top Barack H. Obama over the top. Well, it appears that a new survey by the Josephson Institute of Ethics may have found part of the answer:

Teenagers lie. They cheat and steal, too. And they are doing it more often and more easily than ever.

That is the conclusion of the latest “Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth”, released this week by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, a partnership of educational and youth organizations. The institute conducted a random survey of 29,760 high school students earlier this year (as they have every two years since 1992) and found that the next generation of leaders have a somewhat casual relationship with the truth.

Among the findings:

• 30% of teenagers (35% of boys, 26% of girls) claim to have stolen something from a store in the past year.
• 42% (49% M, 36% F) said "they sometimes lie to save money;" I'm envisioning 14 year olds crouching down in front of the Mann theaters ticket office, and in a squeaky voice, insisting they're only 12. But in addition, 83% told their parents a lie about "something significant;" again I'm guessing, but I'd say about smoking, drinking, toking, or, er, going a little too far with their boyfriends or girlfriends.
• 64% -- nearly two-thirds! -- cheated on a test; 36% let their mice do the writing, turning in papers they downloaded off the internet. (Perhaps these are the future Joe Biden voters?)
• And to make things worse (and even more confusing), a quarter of respondents confessed that they lied about "one or two" of the questions on this very survey! Of course, that begs the question: lied which way, to make themselves sound more honest and trustworthy, or more wicked cool?

What this survey, which shows a growing trend of falsity, cheating, and amorality, tells us is that we are not only raising yet another generation of kids without a functioning moral compass, but more threateningly, a generation of kids who haven't the slightest idea that there is a real world out there where lying, cheating, and stealing not only won't get you anywhere, it can destroy your life.

I wonder how this recklessness with the truth -- heck, recklessness even with the things they make up -- affects their romantic relationships, their friendships, their own self respect? How can a person honestly, deep down, respect himself if he knows he's a lying sack of offal?

Of course such truth-challenged, reality-denying kids would be much more likely to grow into Democrat-voting young adults; the Democratic Party is the party of fantasy, denial, and situational ethics. Naturally, not every Democrat is dishonest... but the contemporary Democratic Party rewards brazen dishonesty in a way that I don't believe any previous political party in the United States has done.

Heck, look who just got elected president... and how he did it.

I firmly believe this is the result of leftist government schools (followed, after a while, by secular private and even religious schools) ceasing to teach ethics, civics, or even basic right and wrong, for fear of trampling on some kid's "right" to choose his own "values." (For that matter, even the substitution of "values," a content-neutral term, for "virtues," which implies a fixed moral code, is a terrible symptom of the disease of nihilism.)

My worthy co-conspirator in a number of projects, Brad Linaweaver, has recently coined a neologism to describe another aspect of this; he refers to members of ELF, ALF, PETA, and other such eco-nut radical activist groups as "econihilists;" I believe he defines the term to mean self-identified ecologists who are so anti-human and pro-nature that they actually ache to see the entire human race destroyed, to make room for the more "moral" species -- spotted owls, blue whales, blue-green algae, Ebola viruses, and the like. I don't think they would put it exactly that way, but that's the gist of their practical philosophy, such as it is.

Both the econihilists and the teens in the Josephson Institute's survey seem to share a deep loathing of the human race... which I can only conclude comes from a deep inner loathing of themselves. Paradoxically, I believe this self-loathing stems from the self-inflicted soul-wound of lying, cheating, and stealing; it is both cause and effect.

By being afraid to tell kids that there is a real right and a real wrong -- that some moral codes are absolute, not subject to the whim of the actor -- we may be sowing the seeds of our species' own destruction.

Perhaps it's time to tell the leftists running the nation's schools to go take a long walk on a short shrift. In my political manifesto, I shall declare that it's time for the GOP, marginally better on absolute morality than the Democrats, to seize the schools back from the dark side... "for the sake of the children." It's one of several strategic goals that the Republicans must pursue with vigor, making the case without compromise, now that we're completely cut out of the legislative and executive power.

To paraphrase Janis Joplin, "Political freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 21, 2008, at the time of 6:07 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

December 16, 2008

The Party of Pre-Americans

In today's topsy-turvy world, best described by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland --

"Let the jury consider their verdict," the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.

"No, no!" said the Queen. "Sentence first -- verdict afterwards."

-- I thought it best to present my conclusions first, then tuck all the boring explication and justification into the slither-on. This will make it easier for 95% of readers to skip the post entirely, and the remaining 8 to proceed to the argumentum already in a state fit to be tie-dyed.

Accordingly, I conclude that the Republican Party cannot survive as "the native-born American party." We have no option but to reach out to all those immigrants and children of immigrants who come here because they love America and what she stands for. Instead of discouraging or even stopping immigration, we must encourage it -- but only by the right people, those who come here anxious to assimilate, who already believe in American values, no matter where they were born. We need more, not less, immigration by folks who were already American in their hearts long before they immigrated here.

I call such folks "pre-Americans." If we don't want to repeat the same mistake with the rising population of Hispanics that we made with blacks, the Republican Party must become the party of pre-Americans. Here are the three main reasons I discover:

• Without Hispanic votes, we are sunk as a viable party;
• Without (pre-American) immigrants, we cannot survive economically;
• Nor can we win the war against the Iran/al-Qaeda axis.

All else is dicta. Please read the dicta before raining katzenjammers on us in the comments section.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that my earlier prediction was correct: The anti-immigration hysteria of some putative "conservatives" during the 109th Congress, while the immigration-reform bill was under consideration, has so poisoned the well that we may never win another national election -- unless we act immediately to undo what a few prominent Republicans did.

I'll call them the Tancredistas, not because Tom Tancredo was the leader of the opposition (he wasn't), but because his anti-immigrant rage -- not simply anti-illegal immigrant, but anti-immigrant, period -- exemplifies all that is wrong with the GOP's approach to the subject. Angry opponents of what they were pleased to call "amnesty" often demanded a moratorium on all immigration; this went far beyond mere opposition to fence-jumping and cut right at the heart of America, which has always been a nation of immigrants.

Worse, whenever any pro-legal immigrationist wondered why the Tancredistas thought we needed to curtail all immigration, the stock answer was invariably that Hispanics "refused to assimilate," or even that it was impossible for Hispanics to assimilate. Sometimes Moslems were tossed into the mix as non-assimilationers, as well; but the Tancredistas never complained about non-assimilating Europeans or Canadians. Evidently, Italians and Albanians were quite willing and able -- just not Hispanics and Moslems. (I wondered aloud about immigrants from Spain, but no one rose to clarify.)

I am quite convinced that the number of out and out racists among the Tancredistas was always very, very small. Most in the anti-"amnesty" camp believe, in their hearts, that they're only opposed to illegality, to lawbreaking, to flouting our national borders.

Alas, even the non-racists adopted exclusionary language, phrases that could hardly be distinguished from those signs during Jim Crow that read "No dogs, Jews, or Coloreds allowed." This sort of cold, harsh language was frequently coupled with irrational arguments: A few La Raza activists parading through Los Angeles carrying Mexican flags and chanting "Aztlan!" were equated to the entire Hispanic population of the United States, for example; any method of regularizing illegals already living here was dubbed "amnesty," even if it involved punishment; and any call to reform the legal immigration system was rejected as "selling out to Ted Kennedy."

Tancredistas offered increasingly pugnacious counterproposals:

• Closing the borders (that permanent "moratorium" on immigration)
• Mass round-ups and deportations
• Kicking "illegal" children out of school
• And denying citizenship to the children of illegals, even if they were born in the United States

All of this energetic and frankly over-the-top anti-immigrant activism has convinced a great majority of American Hispanics, both immigrants and first- or second-generation native-born Americans, that the Republican Party hates them and wants to deport them all -- not just the illegals, but those here legally as well. I believe that most of those I'm labeling Tancredistas (let alone other Republicans) don't really want to deport legal Hispanic immigrants. But that's the way it comes across; and in politics, perception is just as important as reality.

Democrats constantly try to hang a label of racism on us; they hoot that the GOP cannot survive as "the white party." That's certainly true, but it's a vile smear, well befitting their general approach to life: "It's not how you play the game, it's whether you win -- and utterly destroy your opponent." I've never heard anybody inside the Republican Party suggest we should be "the white party."

But a more appropriate and accurate variation on that vile, racist, anti-GOP slander is also true: We cannot survive as "the native-born American party;" we must, must reach out to those who come here wanting to become Americans, those who come here anxious to assimilate, those who come here with American values, no matter where else they had the misfortune to be born. Let's call these folks, those who were already American in hearts and minds even before coming here, "pre-Americans": We must rebrand the Republican Party as "the party of pre-Americans." (Note, I'm not saying exclusively pre-Americans.)

Once our immigration laws become more rational, predictable, and fair, then and only then we can equate pre-Americans with legal immigrants. But our laws are neither rational nor predictable nor fair; they are arbitrary, capricious, and unjust to a staggering degree. (Their only virtue is that they're nowhere near as irrational, unpredictable, and unfair as those of every other nation on the planet.)

Thus, the first step in rebranding the GOP is for the GOP to unify behind a legal-immigration reform law -- which could be separate and distinct from a decision on what to do with illegal immigrants already here, about guest workers, and so forth. The sole purpose of the legal-immigration reform law should be to make the system:

• Rational. Agents should decide who gets residency and citizenship on the basis of assimilability and American values, not irrational criteria such as country of origin or whether the applicant has a cousin with a green card.
• Predictable. Applicants must know in advance how likely they are to gain residency or citizenship... and more important, what steps to take to increase their odds. Thus, those who really want to become Americans and are willing to work for it will have a clue what to do.
• Fair. Agents must decide based upon the individual applicant, not some larger group over which he has no control and may disagree vehemently ("Sorry, we've already admitted our quota of PhDs; we're only admitting plumbers now"). They must also decide based upon known and published criteria that do not change from day to day, depending on which agent or office the immigrant happens to get.

Reform is a good first step, but it's not sufficient to woo back Hispanic Americans who feel betrayed by the GOP. In politics, it's not just what you say but how you say it. Too many Republicans picked an incredibly toxic way to argue against a plan they thought too generous towards illegal aliens... and the words they used convinced tens of millions of immigrants and children of immigrants that they were unwanted nuisances polluting the precious bodily fluids of the United States.

This reaction may be unfair; reality often is. However, given John S. McCain's dismal performance among Hispanics in November -- he was equated with the Tancredistas by a series of Spanish-language ads run by Obama, despite McCain being the leading Republican voice for immigration reform -- it's almost undeniable at this point that the GOP "brand" among Hispanics and other ethnically foreign populations within the country is more unpopular than New Coke.

Therefore, we not only must support significant reform of the legal immigration system, we must start to rebuild our relationship with, in particular, Hispanics. Having given them the impression we were spitting in their faces, we must now show regret for the intemperate language used and begin using much more inclusive language in the future.

There is no need to compromise on the fundamental requirement of controlling our borders; but we must finally recognize that most illegal immigrants are not "criminals," not in the commonly understood sense of a convenience-store robber or a carjacker. Most are simply responding irrationally to an irrational and unjust immigration system. Correct the system -- which we should do anyway for our own reasons -- and we'll see a huge drop in illegal entries, as those pre-Americans who rationally should be admitted are allowed in legally.

But it is important to show sympathy and support for those "huddled masses yearning to breath free" who desperately desire to become real Americans -- those that already have the distinctive American values and virtues. Instead of talking about a moratorium on immigration (which comes across as "There are too many of your sort here already"), we must say, in essence, "While it's important to enforce our territorial integrity, we understand that many folks see America as a 'shining city on a hill,' and we'll do everything in our party's power to open the gates to all those who are truly American at heart... no matter where they were born."

Then actually do it.

When the legal immigration procedure is more rational, predictable, and fair, the honest will use it rather than trying to swim the Rio Grande. With a much smaller rate of illegal border crossings, we could focus much more attention on those who still feel the need to sneak into the United States; likely, there is a very good reason why they cannot immigrate legally. And we would be able to use harsher, more authoritarian means to crack down, since (again) when the honest can enter honestly, only the dishonest persist in entering dishonestly.

Not only do Republicans (and the nation) need pre-American immigrants for economic reasons (they're far better for our country than "guest workers" who feel no affiliation or affinity with the United States), but they would also benefit and strengthen American borg culture, as has every other wave of immigration. American immigration has always been another example, besides Capitalism, of the "creative destruction" that signals a nation rising, rather than the cultural stagnation that betokens a nation in decline. And that's something we desperately need, as we're engaged in a true Kulturkampf (and I don't mean against American liberals).

We're at war with a vicious culture that worships a murder-totem who demands endless human sacrifices; that militant Islamist culture wants to overwhelm the West and institute so-called "sharia" law, enslaving both Christendom and the rest of Islam to its bloodthirsty death cult. All Western, Judeo-Christian and anti-militant Moslem cultures must join forces to defeat the Moloch worshippers.

We cannot retreat into ethnic enclaves and still win that war. Yes, admitting massive numbers of pre-American Hispanics will change American culture... just as did admitting massive numbers of Russians, Poles, Chinese, Irish, Catholics, Jews, and of course Africans. Allowing anyone other than British Anglicans or German Lutherans, the dominant groups when the country was founded, to become American necessarily changed American culture.

But there's nothing inherently wrong with changing American culture; what matters is how it's changed. And there is nothing within traditional Latin-American culture that's incompatible with the deepest American values; it's not like admitting tens of millions of Ayatollah-Khomeini followers. If anything, Latin-American values of work, family, and entrepeneurship are a perfect compliment to the corresponding Republican (and American) values.

The same could have been said of black values back before the civil-rights era... and had we taken the route of eliminating institutionalize state racism, empowering individuals through Capitalism and home-ownership, and raising victims of discrimination up to meet the universal standards (instead of lowering the standards to make it easier for the class of all blacks to exceed them), then I believe we would have a black voting population today that cast its individual votes on the basis of individual opinion, instead of a black voting population that is wholly captive to a single party -- one that does not have the best interests of individual black families at heart.

Ergo, if we don't want to repeat the same mistake with the rising population of Hispanics, the Republican Party must become the party of pre-Americans. I reiterate the three reasons, in increasing order of importance:

• Because without Hispanic votes, we cannot survive as a viable American political party;
• Because without pre-American immigrants, we cannot survive economically;
• Because without pre-American immigrants, we cannot win the war against the Iran/al-Qaeda axis.

It's long past time to swallow our pride and accept the inevitable: There are going to be millions of Latin American immigrants into the United States annually for the forseeable future. The only question is whether they come in through the gate or over the fence... and whether we make it easy for the law-abiding and hard for the bad guys by reforming our broken system -- or do nothing, leaving it equally easy for everyone, righteous or rotten, to enter anywhere and everywhere.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 16, 2008, at the time of 8:25 PM | Comments (41) | TrackBack

December 15, 2008

Standing Tall Against Standards

(I feel a bit like I'm poaching on the home turf of Power Line and Captain's Quarters Ed Morrissey's Hot Air posts; but it is a national story. Honest!)

In the drawn-out Senate race still crawling along in Minnesota, the battle lines have at last become clear: Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN, 64%) wants clear statewide standards before considering rejected absentee ballots -- while failed comedian Al Franken has gone to court to reject all standards and allow local Democrats to decide which absentee ballots to accept and which to reject.

From the first story:

Sen. Norm Coleman’s (R) campaign has asked the Minnesota Supreme Court to issue a stay in a decision Friday by the state’s Board of Canvassers that could significantly sway the razor-thin margin in Minnesota’s still-undecided Senate race.

The Board recommended that Minnesota’s 87 counties open and count absentee ballots that were disqualified for no stated, legal reason. The Coleman campaign said Monday it had asked the state’s highest court to put a halt to that count until it could determine uniform standards for counting the ballots, estimated to number more than 1,000.

"The Supreme Court ought to direct the local officials to step back, take a breath, and allow the Court to set a uniform standard," Coleman campaign attorney Fritz Knaak said Monday in a conference call.

And here is the response from the Franken campaign to Coleman's call for uniform standards, as reported in Politico's second article:

Democrat Al Franken’s campaign on Monday accused Sen. Norm Coleman’s (R) campaign of trying to halt the recount in the state's contested Senate race and disenfranchise Minnesota voters whose absentee ballots were improperly disqualified.

"The Coleman campaign went to the state’s highest court to stop the counting and overrule a unanimous decision by the canvassing board," Franken campaign attorney Marc Elias said in a conference call Monday.

The state's Board of Canvassers recommended on Friday that counties to open and count more than 1,000 absentee ballots they said were disqualified for no stated, legal reason. The Coleman campaign filed a suit with the Minnesota Supreme Court asking the court to stop counties from tallying the ballots until the Court can establish a uniform standard for reviewing the uncounted ballots....

Franken’s campaign accused Coleman’s suit of really trying to overturn the board’s decision last week, and prevent the votes from being counted. Elias said that a clear, uniform standard for counting the ballots already exists in the Minnesota election code.

"Norm Coleman didn't get his way on Friday, so he's suing to stop the counting of lawful ballots and disenfranchise voters who did nothing wrong," Franken spokesman Andy Barr said. "That may be characteristic of his approach to this entire process, but it's entirely un-Minnesotan."

(How long before Franken's charge that Sen. Coleman is "un-Minnesotan" metastisizes into accusing Coleman of being unAmerican?)

The contrast could not be clearer... and it exactly mirrors the central argument in Bush v. Gore, the 2000 Supreme Court case about counting, recounting, and revoting the votes in Florida: The very reason that seven out of the nine Justices voted to stop the chad-count was that there were no uniform statewide standards; the precincts simply made ad-hoc rulings higgledy-piggledy. (Which meant in practice that conservative precincts tried to be unbiased and neutral, counting every legitimate vote; while liberal precincts decided their mandate was to count every Al Gore vote, legitimate, illegitimate, or imaginary.)

As Dennis Prager frequently notes, clarity is often more important that agreement; now at least everyone in the country clearly knows where Franken and the Democrats stand!

I'm now in a position to predict that this race will not be settled by January 6th, when the Congress is seated, nor on January 20th, when we swear at the president-elect. I'm not even sure it will be settled by the 2010 election. Al Franken and the Democrats plan to drag this out "forever and a day," on the theory that a 58-41 majority is better than a 58-42 majority -- so they'd rather force the seat to remain open as long as possible.

Democrats: "Holding firm against the courage of any convictions whatsoever!"

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 15, 2008, at the time of 4:54 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 3, 2008

Has Al Franken Snapped?

The campaign of failed comedian Al Franken has just made an astonishing announcement: They now claim that Franken is ahead of Norm Coleman (R-MN, 64%) in the recount:

Minnesota Democratic Senate candidate Al Franken’s campaign said Wednesday that the comedian has taken the lead in his race against Sen. Norm Coleman (R).

Franken’s lawyer, Marc Elias, has been pressing for the media to focus on the campaign’s internal vote totals of the recount, which as of Wednesday showed Franken opening a lead of 22 votes.

Of course, nobody else sees Al Franken with a lead; he would have to use a very special metric to arrive at that conclusion... and of course, he does. This is the key:

The media have reported that Franken trails in the recount by around 300 votes, but that includes challenged ballots. Coleman’s campaign has challenged several hundred more ballots than Franken’s, but the vast majority of challenges are generally rejected.

Elias argues that, since most challenges will be invalidated, a more accurate count would not include those challenged ballots.

In other words, Politico reports that the Franken team is subtracting from the count all ballots that have been challenged by either side. Politico reports that the Franken campaign claims that when they do so, Franken picks up a net 320+ votes, putting him into the lead.

But there is a problem with the statement, and I don't know whether the mistake was Marc Elias's or Politico's: If it's true that "the vast majority of challenges are generally rejected," then what the Franken campaign means is that they want to count all the ballots... including the ones that are challenged, on the theory that the "vast majority" of challenges (not ballots) will be rejected.

Since the Coleman campaign has challenged more ballots than the Franken campaign, then if all the challenged ballots are added back in, Franken would pick up more votes than Coleman. That is the only calculation that makes sense (from the Franken point of view), so that must be what Elias said (or at least what he meant to say). Either Elias misspoke, or more likely, Politico miswrote.

But this opens up another can of monkeys; by suggesting this metric for determining who is ahead at any moment, Elias makes the hidden assumption that all challenges are equally invalid -- that the challenges made by Coleman against Franken votes) are no more likely to be found valid than the challenges made by Franken against Coleman votes. You follow?

This is the classic "split the difference" fallacy: You have two kids, John and Mary, and one pie. John wants to divide the pie into two equal pieces... but Mary thinks she should get the whole pie to herself. Seeing the impasse, Mary suggests she and her brother "split the difference" -- and give Mary 3/4ths of the pie.

The fallacy is the assumption that all claims are equally valid. In fact, facially, John's claim seems much more reasonable, while Mary's appears more frivolous. Further information can change this presumption: Perhaps Mary won the pie in a contest against John. In that case, Mary's claim is valid, and John's is frivolous or even mendacious. But in neither case is the proper answer to "split the difference;" the individual claims must be adjudicated.

In the present context, Coleman wants each challenge to be evaluated; but Al Franken simply wants all of them summarily rejected, thus giving him a huge chunk of votes. But what if Coleman has more challenges that are likely to be ruled valid than Franken? In that case, fewer of Coleman's claims would be rejected, so he would actually pick up votes, not lose them. It's irrelevant which side has filed more challenges; it only matters how many challenges on each side will be accepted.

Even if Al Franken has lost his mind, his campaign mangler has not. If they are calling for all challenges to be dropped, then they must believe they've made far more frivolous claims than has Coleman. Thus they expect to lose even more votes once the challenges are adjudicated, and they would be overjoyed to see all challenges wiped away, putting them on top. Simply put, the Franken campaign is not going to call for a remedy that would leave Franken in a worse position than he would be under the default remedy of deciding each individual claim on its merits.

The only fact situation that fits Franken's new metric is that far more Coleman challenges are valid than Franken challenges... and Al Franken (and Marc Elias) are well aware of it.

But every challenge on either side occurred with poll watchers from both campaigns present; Coleman's campaign watchers must know the character of all of Franken's challenges compared to their own.

This, then, is a wild "hail Mary" play; Franken has the audacity to hope that the Coleman campaign is so incompetent or so lazy, it agrees simply to hand the election to Franken, rather than go through all the fuss and bother of actually evaluating each challenge, case by case.

I ask whether Al Franken's mind has snapped because no rational person would expect his opponent to concede a race that he believes he has won, and in which he is ahead in the count. It would be like Gore demanding Bush agree to divide Florida absentee ballots equally between them; only a madman would make such a bizarre (and DOA) proposal. A sane candidate would want to preserve at least a shred of dignity, if not decency, and retain his viability for future campaigns.

Nor will this influence Senate Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 85%) to take up the progressive man's burden and try to put together a Senate majority to seat Franken, not Coleman, in January. Reid won't move on this plan; not unless he doesn't mind a seal-kill of Democrats in 2010. Nobody cares that much for Al Franken. Not even Harry Reid.

I believe the fat lady -- or in this case, the humor-impaired "comedian" -- is singing "uncle."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 3, 2008, at the time of 6:23 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

November 10, 2008

Unterschtandink Ahnold

What on earth was California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger thinking? (Don't worry, I'll tell you.)

Understanding Arnold is not easy in the best of circumstances -- and I'm not even talking about that thick Teutonic accent that he practices into a tape recorder every night. He almost epitomizes the cult of macho, and he's very pro-business; but on the other hand, he's a typical handwringing Hollywood liberal on every soft-hearted, soft-headed social issue you can imagine.

On the specific issue we're on about today, same-sex marriage (SSM), he's been all over the map: He first said he was opposed to SSM but supported domestic partnerships; in fact, in 2005 he famously vetoed SSM legislation passed by the California legislature on the grounds that the people of the state had spoken in Proposition 22 five years earlier, and the will of the people was paramount:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today delivered on his promise to veto legislation that would have given same-sex partners the right to marry, but said he would not support any rollback of the state's current domestic partner benefits.

But today, after the people spoke yet again -- this time with a state constitutional amendment, Proposition 8 -- Schwarzenegger suddenly decided that the will of the people is not paramount -- not when it conflicts with the vision of the judicially anointed. He called upon the California Supreme Court to declare the constitutional amendment unconstitutional... which I think might be a first:

Reporting from Sacramento and Lake Forest -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Sunday expressed hope that the California Supreme Court would overturn Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that outlawed same-sex marriage. He also predicted that the 18,000 gay and lesbian couples who have already wed would not see their marriages nullified by the initiative.

"It's unfortunate, obviously, but it's not the end," Schwarzenegger said in an interview Sunday on CNN. "I think that we will again maybe undo that, if the court is willing to do that, and then move forward from there and again lead in that area."

The theory, evidently, is that an amendment to the constitution is unconstitutional if it conflicts with any previously adopted section of the constitution... including whatever section it amends! If you follow this reasoning, it means that no constitution can ever be amended, except to add new rights that never previously existed. (For example, the Twenty-First Amendment is "unconstitutional" because it repeals the Eighteenth Amendment allowing the prohibition of alcohol.)

Schwarzenegger is very politically savvy; given that Proposition 8 passed handily, primarily due to the votes of Hispanics and blacks, isn't it a rather peculiar flip-flop for Schwarzenegger to undertake? What in the world is going on here?

All right, I said I would tell you what he's doing; here we go. There are a few California facts you must bear in mind:

1. California has term limits for governor, and Arnold Schwarzenegger must leave office following the 2010 election. He still has aspirations for national elective office, however.
2. At the same time, longtime Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA, 90%) has been dropping hints all over the place that she plans to run for governor in 2010, when she wouldn't have to face the Schwarzenegger juggernaut. (Her term doesn't expire until 2012, but as governor, she could appoint her successor -- as Gov. Pete Wilson did following the 1990 gubernatorial election.)
3. Here's where it gets interesting... if Feinstein is vacating her seat to run for governor, and Schwarzenegger is vacating his seat because of term limits, then it makes perfect sense for each of them to grab for the other's seat. It's the best chance for both of them to strike for an open seat, rather than trying to knock off a longstanding and popular incumbent.
4. But there's a problem: The Republican brand is at a pretty low ebb in California right now. And in any event, Feinstein is certainly not going to appoint a Republican to replace her.

So my prediction is this: Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to switch parties and then run for Dianne Feinstein's Senate seat in 2012; he might even lobby her to appoint him in her place, if he agrees to caucus with the Democrats for the first two years. Then he would endorse her and campaign for her as governor.

Even if she won't appoint him, he will still have a very good shot at winning in 2012, since whoever replaces her will not have the name-recognition and built-in base that Feinstein enjoys.

Now, it would be ludicrous for Schwarzenegger to switch from Republican to Democrat immediately after campaigning for the GOP nominee for president; so my prediction is actually that he will switch parties to independent after he leaves office, then run for the Senate two years later -- either as the incumbent, if Feinstein appoints him, or as the challenger of an unelected appointee.

Eventually however, probably after the 2012 election, I believe Schwarzenegger will caucus with the Republicans; he will become our Joe Lieberman.

The change in his stance on SSM, then, can be seen as an "olive branch" to the left-leaning independents and moderate Democrats in this state. He assumes he'll retain most of his Republican base anyway; after all, they know he's been a liberal Republican (on social issues) for a long time -- no surprise there.

So I predict that Arnold Schwarzenegger will switch to independent and run for Dianne Feinstein's Senate seat. Just remember, you read it here first!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 10, 2008, at the time of 4:09 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 8, 2008

Conservatives: Obama's Secret Army

According to the Ass. Press:

Democrats made up 39 percent of the electorate and Republicans 32 percent in a national exit poll for The Associated Press and television networks. That left the share of voters considering themselves members of the GOP lower than in any presidential election since 1980 and was a sharp contrast with the 37-37 split between the two parties in the 2004 election.

But there was virtually no change in the ideological spectrum: This year 22 percent called themselves liberal, compared with 21 percent in 2004; 44 percent moderate, compared with 45 percent; and 34 percent conservative, same as four years ago....

Then again, some voters can't be pigeonholed by ideology. For instance, one in five self-described conservatives voted for Obama. One in 10 liberals voted for Republican John McCain.

Let's hop aboard my Syllogismobile and go for a ride...

1. 34% of voters called themselves "conservatives."
2. Of that 34%, 20% voted for Barack H. Obama; that means 6.8% of the electorate both called themselves conservatives and also voted for Obama. (Would that include Christopher Buckley and his ilk?)
3. Contrariwise, only 10% of self-dubbed liberals voted for John S. McCain. Conservatives defected at twice the rate of liberals.
4. Suppose, just for a giggle, conservatives had only voted for Obama at the same percentage that liberals voted for McCain... in other words, that conservatives were no more likely to defect than liberals. In that case, half of the conservative defectors would have remained loyal, and 3.4% of votes would shift from Obama to McCain.
5. According to the most recent quasi-official unofficial tally, the popular tallies for the two nominees were 52.6% for Obama and 46.1% for McCain.
6. Switching 3.4% from left to right yields 49.2% for Obama and 49.5% for McCain. (Note McCain number higher than Obama number.)
7. Conclusion: Had conservatives defected at the same rate as liberals, instead of twice the rate, then John McCain would have won this election.

Thanks, guys!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 8, 2008, at the time of 4:36 AM | Comments (26) | TrackBack

November 7, 2008

The Great Leap Forward: How the Heck Can We Win Anyway?

It's a serious question: If a candidate like John S. McCain can be beaten by an empty suit with no experience spouting policies that "seem vague but are in fact meaningless," then what the heck are we supposed to do in order to win next time?

Surprisingly enough, I'll tell you what we should do. So there.

What's past...

In this election, each side did a great job of turning out their partisans: CNN's exit polling shows that McCain got 90% of the GOP vote, while Barack H. Obama got 89% of the Democratic vote. But Obama surged among independents by 8%, 52 to 44 for McCain. As far as ideology, Obama did somewhat better among liberals (89%) than McCain did among conservatives (78%); but again, it was the moderates that really killed McCain's chances, giving Obama a 21-point advantage, 60-39.

Clearly, Republicans are not able to appeal to independents merely by running "centrists"; it didn't work with McCain, George W. Bush, Blob Dole, nor George H.W. Bush. The last time Republicans won the nonaligned vote was with Ronald Reagan (remember those "Reagan Democrats" and "neoconservatives?") -- but Reagan was certainly not a moderate.

But on the other hand, running a staunch conservative is no guarantee of success, either, as President Barry Goldwater can attest.

Perpetual guest blogger DRJ at Patterico's Pontifications has an interesting take; I think she is correct but too specific... her thesis can be broadened a bit. She argues that what doomed McCain's candidacy was that he never presented (or even developed) a comprehensive economic policy with, one presumes, an overarching philosophy. Obama did -- however vague it was -- and that made all the difference on the issue of the economy... which turned out to be the only issue that mattered in this election.

But let's broaden this out a bit. It doesn't matter even if a candidate has a comprehensive economic policy, if he's unable to communicate it effectively to voters. And everything said about McCain's inability to communicate a comprehensive economic policy (whether or not he had one) can also be said about his inability to communicate a comprehensive policy on energy (drill everywhere -- except ANWR"), on climate change (his "drill, baby, drill" motto conflicts with his insistance that globaloney is real and the most urgent problem we face), on the war against the Iran/al-Qaeda axis (fight the war with everything we have -- but don't harshly interrogate captured terrorists, don't hold military tribunals, close Guantanamo Bay, and release the prisoners), on immigration (he argued for a process to allow eventual legalization of illegal aliens but never explained how that helps the American economy or national security).

I believe that all of those cases could have been made. Some would have required McCain to change some of his policies:

• Coming up to date about the new evidence casting much doubt upon anthropogenic global climate change;
• Admitting that oil can be drilled from ANWR without damaging the environment;
• Dropping or at least mitigating his objections to harsh interrogation techniques and agreeing that terrorist combatants should not receive civilian trials alongside carjackers and check kiters.

But other cases could have been made by more effectively explaining the very positions he already held: for example, the benefit to our economy and even our national security by immigration reform and a process of legalization of those here illegally. But the fact is that John McCain never really made any of those arguments; in some instances, such as energy and immigration, he didn't even try.

...Is prologue

He never even really articulated a long-term plan for resolving the financial meltdown, nor for dealing with the real root causes -- the "money for nothing" syndrome so evident not only in subprime lending but also in the Social Security and Medicare boondoggles. McCain really needed to tie everything together under a few simple precepts:

• Money has to come from somewhere. Ultimately, every dollar spent comes from your pockets. That doesn't mean we shouldn't spend anything; but it does mean we must be honest about how we're going to pay for things we like... including retirement programs; medical programs for senior citizens, veterans, and the poor; and rescuing American citizens from the folly of Wall Street bankers.

  We must cut expenses, or America is going to go bankrupt. And that means finding a better way to fund Social Security (privatize), reforming and revamping Medicare and other medical entitlement programs (ownership, portability, innovation, defined contribution, MSAs), and being more careful about how we inject liquidity into the mortgage market (lending rather than letting government buy -- partially nationalize -- the banking industry).

• Energy is not "free" either; all of the electricity, gasoline, and natural gas that we use to power our society comes at the expense, to some extent, of the environment. The only way to prevent 100% of all environmental damage would be to smash all the technology and go back to the way people lived in the Dark Ages.

  We cannot power our country on biomass, solar cells, and wind; but they can help somewhat in the margins, and we should pursue them, so long as it's not too expensive. That said, we must strike a balance between the environment, which we all need and which we all want to be able to enjoy, and the raw energy we need to live, work, and prosper. My administration will pursue every, last method of producing energy, but we'll do so in as environmentally friendly a way as practicable. Sometimes that will mean less energy and more wilderness; but other times that must mean less wilderness for more energy.

• Immigration also requires a delicate balance: On the one hand, we must control our borders; that's the primary duty of any country. But on the other hand, we cannot allow a population in the millions that lives inside our borders -- but as outsiders to society. On the third hand, we haven't the means to round them up and deport them... and it would kill our economy, which has come to rely upon lower-wage workers in many areas.

  The solution is an overarching policy that America is for those of any nationality who have American values: We should only admit immigrants who plan to become citizens... and only immigrants who are willing to assimilate and Americanize. No "guest workers," no hordes of immigrants who want to turn the United States into a carbon copy of whatever country they left behind. But no immigrant who truly wants to become an American should be rejected arbitrarily or without being told why, and what he can do to qualify next time.

President Who?

I believe that the next Republican nominee for president must himself have a comprehensive and consistent set of policies, driven by an optimistic and truly American overall philosophy:

• One that can easily be explained to people (the philosophy, not necessarily each individual policy);
• Whose pieces should all fit together;
• And the whole of which, while small-c conservative and big-C Capitalist, should be neither rigid nor inflexible, nor seem censorious, dour, defeatist, or gloomy.

Nor should it be some airy-fairy fantasy about getting everything for nothing when "the world all comes together as one." We need realism, optimism, consistency, and an overall guiding philosophy... coupled with the ability to fully and effectively articulate this vision to the entire country.

That is what Ronald Reagan offered, but not a single Republican nominee since then has even attempted. Instead, except for 1988, Republicans have tried to negotiate the presidency. (In 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush simply coasted into la Casa Blanca by sheer momentum of the Reaganism that he personally despised).

We keep trying to put together a coalition of special interests (military hawks, deficit hawks, entrepeneurs, free-traders, libertarians, and social conservatives), then pick one from Column A, two from Column B, and so forth. This has usually worked, but it's not reliable -- as we just saw, where a decent, intelligent man of substance by beaten by a shiny, rainbow-colored soap bubble.

I think what I'm saying is that we need to nominate a great communicator and leader, not a great compromiser; not a nominee designed to appeal to just enough members of each interest group to hold the coalition together. There's a saying that a camel is a horse designed by committee; since our last strong horse in 1980, we've nominated nothing but camels, camels, camels, all the way down.

I also agree that we should look beyond the "usual gang of idiots" to candidates outside the D.C. beltway. Sarah Palin was a great choice precisely because she was the governor of an important state that was about as far away from the District of Columbia as possible (Hawaii is too liberal). Her problem was twofold: She was too recently elected, and the McCain camp did not let Sarah Barracuda be herself; they tried to micromanage her into a John McCain "mini-me." The electorate had never heard of her before the nomination, and many moderates and independents were furious that an "inexperienced" and "out of her depth" "lightweight" was put into such an important role.

The McCain campaign really blew the roll-out; but that shouldn't hurt Palin herself in 2012, provided she follows my advice below.

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana is also a strong contender... another "beltway outsider" with real experience governing. But we could look even further afield. How about Gen. David Petraeus? If it turns out that he has a comprehensive and consistent overarching philosophy of government that fits within the GOP orbit (which I strongly suspect to be true), he might be a fantastic candidate. We already know he's a wonderful communicator.

President -- how?

But whoever is the nominee should make it clear very soon now -- no more than a year from today -- that he (or she) is going to run for president. Then he should barnstorm the country, talking to anyone and everyone: from the Elks and Masons, to the local councils of La Raza, to NRA chapters, to businesses large and small, to campus groups -- lots and lots of campus groups! -- to various forums to which women voters pay attention, to organizations of black businessmen, to churches, synogogues, and mosques, and so forth. It doesn't matter if the group agrees or disagrees with the future candidate's policies; what matters is that he makes it clear that they matter to him.

And I have one final suggestion: When the campaign starts in earnest, I want this candidate to refuse to participate in mass "debates." Instead, he should challenge every other major candidate to a one-on-one debate... and offer to pay for it.

Any opponent who refuses should be mercilessly mocked for being afraid to face the candidate. These mass "debate" events are monkey debates; they're not really debates at all but just collective press conferences. The one-on-ones that our candidate offers would be real debates, a town-hall format where, besides questions from the audience, each candidate also puts questions to his opponent.

I think voters would find this format far more interesting, stimulating, even exciting, than the warmed over mashed potatoes we get nowadays. And it would also play to the strengths of the outsider candidate, rather than consummate insiders like John McCain, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden.

In other words, a presidential election is a nonviolent war, where the stake is leadership of the free world; for God's sake, can't we plan the next one with the same intensity that we would plan a military campaign?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 7, 2008, at the time of 8:33 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack

November 3, 2008

A Different Kind of Unity

As the country collectively gets ready to point a gun barrel into the roof of its mouth and pull the trigger, it’s interesting to reflect that for most of the two years that Barack Obama has been running for president, his main theme is that he is the kind of guy who can bring us all together in love and unity.

Increasingly it is becoming clear that the Obama formula for unity is to silence those who disagree with him as much as possible -- or else to make sure that those on a soapbox aren’t able to shout their messages very far.

It never was particularly believable to begin with, given that roughly half of the country is going to object to a straight socialistic program that isn’t really different in any signficant degree from the left-wing programs that the Demcoratic party has been banging the drum on for many decades.
It’s just that this time, the country as a whole is allowing its deep disgust with the Republicans to translate into turning over the reins to what will, at best, be an extremely liberal program.

There’s certainly going to be as many people on the right objecting to Obama’s left-wing program as there were vocal left-wingers who objected to George W. Bush’s programs. Remember, Bush was supposed to be the president who was going to bring us together and be bipartisan.

Or going back even farther in history, here’s a statement that Richard Nixon made right after his 1968 win over Hubert Humphrey: “I saw many signs in this campaign. Some of them were not friendly. Some were very friendly. But the one that touched me the most was -- a teenager held up the sign ‘bring us together.’ And that will be the great objective of this administration, at the outset, to bring the American people together.”

Bring us together might acquire a similar meaning under Obama. Bring us together -- forcefully, might be more what we’re talking about. Kind of makes you wonder what Obama is thinking when he calls for a “civilian national security force,” as he did in a recent speech.

Now, that could be something perfectly innocuous, like a beefed up CERT force, funded with federal dollars and ready to help with emergencies like Hurricane Katrina; but it does set the suspicious mind ruminating.

I’m not one of those people who, when Bill Clinton was president, predicted darkly, “when it comes time for his term to end, he’ll find some excuse not to have an election,” because I know that our republic is strong enough that if a president were fruity enough to try that, he would not be obeyed.
When Congress returns to do its work under the new president, it will be interesting to see just how many of the liberals in the chamber will be true to the liberal tradition of supporting freedom of speech.

Conservatives expect -- because liberals have been pretty open about it, that there will be a strong attempt to bring back the Orwellian “fairness doctrine,” which is about as fair as infanticide is “pro life.” The purpose of regulating the airwaves in this way is to return all major media to their proper orientation, i.e. towards the Left.

Talk radio will not go quietly into that good night. And given that talk radio hosts helped orchestrate the defeat of “comprehensive immigration reform” last year, the Democrats may wish that they had done something less painful, such as stepped naked into a nest of rattlesnakes.

Still, if they have the 60 seat majority in the senate, they may be able to force it through.

That wouldn’t shut down Rush Limbaugh and company, although it might force them into exile on Satellite and Internet radio.

Once again, is a battle of this kind what Obama has in mind when he talks about bringing us all together in unity and brotherhood?

This willingness to trash freedom of expression isn’t confined to the leaders of the Democratic party. The rank and file, when polled are quite comfortable with it, especially when it is pointed out that a reimposition of the doctrine will drive shows like Limbaugh and Sean Hannity off the air.

“Bring it on!” the Left seems to be saying.

Hatched by Dave Ross on this day, November 3, 2008, at the time of 7:00 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 22, 2008

Do You Really Think Obama Will Get That "15% Bounce?"

That's what Huge Hewgitt said today, echoing what Fred Barnes said yesterday and the McCain campaign has been pushing for a week or so now. But I think it's nonsense on stilts.

Why do candidates traditionally get a bounce from their parties' conventions? Because until then, they've barely been seen by ordinary (non-activist) voters; they've popped up in occasional televised clips from some speech on the nightly news, in a campaign ad, maybe a newspaper interview. In ordinary elections, the convention is the first time that a whopping, huge segment of voters actually tunes in to see what the candidate is all about: Thus, many of them form their first impressions during or after the convention.

If the candidate has anything at all going for him, he gets a bit bounce, as people say, "So that's who he is! Nice feller." Of course sometimes, the reaction is, "So that's who he is -- what a pompous jackass!" Then you have the Kerry Phenomenon... a 1-point "bounce" in the polls (otherwise known as a 1-point dull, sickening thud).

But season we've seen wall-to-wall coverage of every last prophetic revelation by the One. The TV and radio stations follow him around with cameras and microphones, and they broadcast every utterance that trickles from his lips.

Breathes there a man or woman in America today who hasn't had his brain saturated, even oversaturated, with lashings of Barack H. Obama for the last twelvemonth? We've all been force-fed his vapid speeches, his cheap audacity, his empty-suited hope. Everybody knows virtually everything about the man -- and many of them are already annoyed at his grandiosity, his hyperinflated self-esteem -- "We are the Ones that we have been waiting for," sooth! -- and his ludicrous pretensions and self-delusions:

Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war, and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth!

Who in this last, best hope on Earth -- apart from those actively working on his campaign, who are probably already in his corner -- is burning with curiosity to see Obama give a speech? How many more are burning with exasperation that they can't hardly swing a dead cat without hitting Obama making yet another speech carried live by all eighteen networks? Who besides yellow-dog Democrats is going to breathlessly tune in to the Democratic National Convention from Monday through Thursday to be transported across Elysian fields by the transcendent rhetoric of Senator B.O.?

I have a feeling this is going to be a very disappointing "bounce" for the Democrats this year, just as I (correctly) predicted the same for 2004. I think Obama's bounce is going to be no more than a jumping flea... say, 5% at most; and it will be gone by the time the GOP convention begins on September 1st, just four days after the Democratic convention ends.

Contrariwise, a lot fewer people know anything about John S. McCain, other than the disrespectful and risible caricature pushed by the elite media and by Obama himself in campaign ads. I suspect that a lot more truly undecided voters will watch the Republican National Convention, many of them moderate Republicans, independents, and even moderate Democrats; and they will come away much more favorably impressed by McCain than they were beforehand. Therefore, McCain will get a bigger bounce from the GOP convention than will Obama from the Democratic convention.

Who's with me on this? Do you all think this is going to be a blowout bounce for Barack?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 22, 2008, at the time of 6:55 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

August 20, 2008

The McCainville Nine-Pointer

Back in June, I wrote a post, Obama Campaign More or Less Concedes Ohio and Florida to McCain, in which I finished with an obscure reference that I think needs amplification:

All in all, I believe McCain has many more paths to victory than does Obama; and I also believe that if John McCain will finally take off the gloves and start fighting Obama in the center, this will not even be a close race:

• McCain can make an excellent start by aggressively pushing to drill for oil everywhere that he has not already taken off the table -- which only includes the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and the actual coastal waters of states that reject drilling.

  That still leaves the outer continental shelf on both oceans, the Gulf of Mexico, the Bakken shale-oil formation, and other shale-oil sites. He can also push for liquification of coal, natural gas, and continue his quest for more gasoline refineries and nuclear power plants... "Drill here, drill now, pay less." Surveys show that Americans now strongly favor drilling, drilling, and more drilling;

• He can aggressively pursue a constitutional amendment to undo the horrible Supreme-Court decision last week in Boumediene and dare Obama and the Democrats to oppose it: "Obama and his Democratic friends think foreign terrorists fighting America deserve more rights than our own soldiers," he can argue;
• He can hammer Obama on the staggering taxes he plans to raise, on Obama's complete indifference to gasoline prices, his refusal to visit Iraq or meet with Gen. Petraeus before yanking the troops out, his wildly liberal stances on abortion, same-sex marriage, and guns, and his complete ignorance of how most people in the United States live and worship;
• And he can tie Obama more directly to the latter's prediction that the counterinsurgency strategy would be a complete failure and disaster: If we had followed Obama's strategy, we would have withdrawn from Iraq in defeat. Fortunately, we followed McCain's judgment... and we have pretty much won, with some mopping up left to do.

...

If McCain gets ahead of the power curve on the issues listed above, I believe this will be a 9-point election... and we won't have to worry about this or that little state: McCain will take many states that Kerry held last election.

So what do I mean by a "9-point election?" I don't literally predict that John S. McCain will win by exactly nine points; a "9-pointer" is like a "quarter pounder": It's just a name, not a precision measurement.

But I do mean that I conditionally predicted -- and since the condition has by and large been met, I now turn this into a full-scale prediction -- that McCain is going to win this presidential election by a fairly substantial margin: More than 6% nationwide and around 350 electoral votes. Maybe more.

In the entire twentieth century, how many presidents were elected by less than 5%? Only four, I believe: Woodrow Wilson in 1916, John F. Kennedy in 1960, Richard Nixon in 1968, and Jimmy Carter in 1976. There were, of course, 25 presidential elections from 1900 through 1996 (I cut it off there, not at 2000, because the 2000 election was for a term that began in the 21st century) -- so 16% of 20th-century elections were really close.

And then, 24 years after the Carter election, we had back to back "really close elections" in 2000 and again in 2004. It's not normal to have such close elections, and I don't believe we'll see one in 2008; so the only question is who ends up on top.

For a number of reasons -- none related to polling, though that too is starting to confirm my sense of flow -- I do not believe that Barack H. Obama is about to surge. In fact, I believe he already peaked, and it will be John S. McCain who surges right into the White House. Putting A and B together to get 4, I believe that McCain will win the election by more than 5%.

But in fact, Obama is a particularly bad candidate who is woefully underperforming the "generic Democrat," while McCain is very much outperforming the "generic Republican." So I'm giving him that extra edge: If I must pick a number, I'll say he wins by 7% over Obama, or 52.5% to 45.5%, with 2% going to other candidates.

That isn't a landslide, by the way; Ronald Reagan beat Carter by almost 10% and Mondale by more than 18%. Still, 7% is a substantial win with no wiggle room for Democrats to cheat or sue their way into the White House... and so decisive that they cannot even whine about it. (Well, maybe that's going too far.)

That big a win translates into a lot of close states going to McCain -- Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and many others; the Electoral College tends to magnify victory. So I predict 350 electoral votes for McCain, leaving 188 for Obama. (As a subsidiary forecast, I prognosticate that Larry Sabato's "Crystal Ball" will prophesy that Obama will win... until about a week before the election, at which point Sabato will abruptly reverse himself, jumping aboard the gravy wagon.)

Also, a substantial win in the presidential race should translate into a number of victories in the congressional races; we'll likely still lose some seats, but it won't be anywhere near the debacle that "pundants" are predicting today.

I'm staking my claim now, once again cutting against the conventional wisdom. I'm often right -- as when I predicted more than a year and a half ago that Hillary Clinton would not be the Democratic nominee; but I have certainly been wrong, as I was about the 2006 elections, when I failed to take into account the GOP's astonishing talent at self immolation.

We'll see. At the moment, I think I'm the only person predicting a "9-pointer." Even the McCain campaign is saying it will be razor-close... though I think they're just playing the expectations game. So write this day in your diary, as it will either mark the point at which the Lizard demonstrated his political prescience... or the day he went off the rails on the crazy train!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 20, 2008, at the time of 6:29 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

August 5, 2008

An Army of Apathetics: Registration Legislation and Nonvoters

The Democratic National Committee has found a "new" crusade -- that hardy, hoary perennial: voter registration of traditionally Democratic constituencies, such as blacks, Hispanics, unmarried mothers, and the homeless.

By targeting such "potential voters," notes the Wall Street Journal, groups such as ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), the National Council of La Raza ("the race"), the Urban League, and other partisan shills masquerading as civic-minded community organizers hope to pack the Senate with a filibuster-proof majority, the House with a conscience-proof majority, and propel fellow "community organizer" Barack H. Obama into the White House... all to usher in a new era of government of the downtrodden, for the downtrodden, and by -- the anointed elite.

They plan to register an additional 1.2 million welfaristas, felons, and bums before the November election; the Times jubilantly announces that the efforts have borne much fruit, reporting a shift in voter registration towards the Democrats in many states since 2005:

Well before Senators Barack Obama and John McCain rose to the top of their parties, a partisan shift was under way at the local and state level. For more than three years starting in 2005, there has been a reduction in the number of voters who register with the Republican Party and a rise among voters who affiliate with Democrats and, almost as often, with no party at all....

In six states, including Iowa, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, the Democratic piece of the registration pie grew more than three percentage points, while the Republican share declined. In only three states — Kentucky, Louisiana and Oklahoma — did Republican registration rise while Democratic registration fell, but the Republican increase was less than a percentage point in Kentucky and Oklahoma. Louisiana was the only state to register a gain of more than one percentage point for Republicans as Democratic numbers declined.

But what the Times doesn't see fit to print -- not until "after the jump," on page 2 of the story -- is that the shift away from Republicans nearly all comprises a shift not to Democrats but to "unaffiliated":

In the 26 states and the District of Columbia where registration data were available, the total number of registered Democrats increased by 214,656, while the number of Republicans fell by 1,407,971.

Thus, at most, 15% of Republicans who reregistered became Democrats; the other 85% changed to independent, unaffiliated, or some minor party. There is no significant trend towards the Democrats; more likely, reregistration is a protest aimed at the "spend everything and then some" Republicans, who controlled Congress prior to the 2006 elections.

Here is the biggest problem with the chimera of registration drives: It is so easy to register today -- with registration booths at supermarkets, post offices, malls, churches, missions, flophouses, schools, and street corners, let alone the near-automatic registration schemes like "motor-voter" -- that one almost has to consciously reject voting to remain unregistered. Thus, those people still not registered are disproportionately those who have simply dropped out of civic society.

They have dropped out, not because Bull-Connor Republicans are using whips and firehoses to prevent blacks, Hispanics, and bums from registering, but because those particular people are simply apathetic about voting. Thus, just because you register them doesn't mean they're any more likely to vote in November.

It's well known that voter turnout in the United States (unlike countries that compel voting) centers around 50%. Some localities have much higher turnout each election cycle; but in every election, a very large percentage of registered voters don't vote.

I don't think it's a stretch to posit that those qualified adults who remain unregistered until someone form ACORN rushes up to them, pushes a registration form at them, and tells them that if they sign it, they'll get money for housing... are precisely those newly registered apathetics who will not bother to vote on election day.

Why turn to something nebulous and impossible to measure like turnout among the newly registered, when there is a much simpler explanation for the 2006 GOP losses? Voters were turned off by the GOP they saw running the 109th Congress -- the Republicans of earmarks, drunken spending sprees, and Mark Foley.

But this election is about a different GOP, one that is now more in touch with the electorate than the Democrats; now the Democrats are seen as a "culture of corruption" and as wild spenders, ineffectual and inept, aristocratic, unconcerned, and aloof. It's the "Marie-Antoinette Democrats," as Hugh Hewitt now calls them, who won't do anything (or anything good, at least) about energy woes, taxes, the Iraq war, small business, or the economy in general. And there is no reason to believe that a "massive" increase in Democratic party registration (all of 3%!) presages a wholesale shift to liberalism on the part of the electorate.

In fact, the Times itself admits that one reason Democrats are doing better is that they are running candidates who are, on paper, more conservative... winning candidates like Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA, 85%) and Gov. Tim Kaine, also of Virginia. Webb ran as more conservative than incumbent Sen. George Allen... and even so, it took the "Macaca" gaffe to give Webb the narrowest of victories. And Kaine calls himself personally anti-abortion, he supports a ban on partial-birth abortion (with the Kerry exception, of course), gun rights, and is fiscally centrist.

And now Webb votes 85% of the time with the hard-liberal Americans for Democratic Action. I don't know how he would fare if he had to run for reelection this year, but he's going to have a lot of splainin' to do in 2012. And both Webb and Kaine endorse and campaign for leftist Barack Obama.

Here is another way to look at the question: If registration is such a big determinant, why is Barack H. Obama dropping and John S. McCain rising in the polls?

It's not just the horserace aspect: Look at the internals of the Rasmussen daily tracking poll, which has the candidates tied. The incredibly useful section they call "by the numbers" reports polling on specific issues and character questions:

Of the major issues, Obama is statistically ahead of McCain (outside the margin of error) only on three:

• Environment - Obama + 8
• Health care - Obama + 5
• Education - Obama + 4 (right on the edge of the margin)

In none of these three issues -- typically Democratic issues -- does Obama even top 50%.

But McCain beats Obama on eight major issues, with two over 50% (in blue):

• Iraq policy - McCain + 12
• Immigration - McCain + 9
• National Security - McCain + 8
• Taxes - McCain + 7
• Social Security - McCain + 6
• Abortion - McCain + 6
• Negotiating trade agreements - McCain + 5
• Energy - McCain + 4

The candidates are tied (within the margin) on the economy, ethics, and who can better balance the federal budget. This is vastly better than McCain was doing against Obama just a month ago, when the tracking poll had him 5-6 points behind Obama and losing on most of the issues.

We see a similar pattern on character issues:

• Who would be the better leader? McCain by 6 points;
• Who will raise government spending more? Obama by 21 points;
• Who will raise taxes more? Obama by 23 points;

And some really interesting ones... 27% see McCain as too old to be president, but 41% see Obama as too inexperienced. And respondents see McCain as believing in the fundamental fairness of our society by 70% to 15%... but they're split on the Democrat, with 43% saying Obama believes American society is fundamentally fair, while a plurality of 46% says he believes our society is fundamentally unfair.

Since the American people themselves believe our society is fundamentally fair by about 75% to 25%, that puts Obama on the wrong side by a whopping margin. Again, all these numbers were much worse for John McCain a month or two ago -- despite the fact that this massive registration drive has proceeded apace, and the gap between the number of Democrat and the number of Republicans is not narrowing significantly... whether you measure by actual registration, as the Times evidently did, or by voter perception of their party affiliation, as Rasmussen does.

On a nutshell, in recent elections, the number of registered voters in each party does not appear to correlate to that party's fortunes in the election. I suspect that earlier models that showed close tracking were based upon the correspondingly earlier registration rules, when it actually took some effort on the voter's part to get registered; this meant that back then, a registered voter was much more likely to be politically aware and active, hence more likely to vote. Since motor-voter especially, I believe voter turnout has been lower... as groups like La Raza and ACORN are registering a great many apathetics who simply don't turn out and vote anyway.

So worry not and pay no attention to voter-registration drives among society's dregs; that's not going to have any significant effect on future elections. But what will have a very great effect are the policies and legislation enacted by the two parties... and the campaigns they craft based upon those actual facts on the ground. On that playing field, the GOP is doing much better indeed than in 2006.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 5, 2008, at the time of 7:32 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

June 16, 2008

Obama Campaign More or Less Concedes Ohio and Florida to McCain

In a telling and fairly stunning series of conversations, Barack H. Obama's campaign mangler, David Plouffe, has been telling "donors and former supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton" that Obama can win without siezing either Ohio or Florida from the Republicans. Their new strategy hinges on capturing Virginia (13 electoral votes) or Georgia (15):

"You have a lot of ways to get to 270," Plouffe said. "Our goal is not to be reliant on one state on November 4th."

Plouffe has been pitching such a new approach to the electoral map in calls and meetings, according to several people who discussed the conversations on the condition of anonymity because they were meant to be private. Plouffe confirmed the descriptions in the interview.

Plouffe and his aides are weighing where to contest, and where chances are too slim to marshal a large effort. A win in Virginia (13 electoral votes) or Georgia (15 votes) could give Obama a shot if he, like Kerry, loses Ohio or Florida.

In 2004, George W. Bush beat John Kerry by 34 electoral votes (286 to 252); so Obama would have to flip at least 18 electoral votes to win cleanly, 270 to 268. If he flips exactly 17, the race goes to the House of Representatives -- which votes by delegation, one vote per state; Republicans currently control 21 state delegations, the Democrats control 27, and 2 are split; Obama would be almost certain to win if the candidates tie 269-269. Therefore, Obama must win a net 17 electoral votes worth of states that George W. Bush won in 2004 to take the election.

Flipping either Florida or Ohio would do the trick, but only if John McCain is unable to capture any of the states that went to John Kerry in 2004 -- a very big "if." Plouffe, however, appears to be skeptical that either of those states will flip: He calls them "competitive," but plans for victory without them -- a dead giveaway. As well, there really are several "blue" states ripe for the picking by McCain:

The presumed Democratic nominee's electoral math counts on holding onto the states Kerry won, among them Michigan (17 electoral votes), where Obama campaigns on Monday and Tuesday. Plouffe said most of the Kerry states should be reliable for Obama, but three currently look relatively competitive with Republican rival John McCain - Pennsylvania [21], Michigan and particularly New Hampshire [4].

Neither Virginia nor Georgia by itself would do the trick for Obama, since he needs to flip 17. Indeed, Plouffe is also eyeballing Colorado (9), Nevada (5), New Mexico (5), Montana (3), Alaska (3), and North Dakota (3). But if McCain is running well in the center, these states will be very hard to steal from the GOP.

If McCain flips either Michigan (which went for Kerry by a scant 4%) or Pennsylvania (for Kerry by 2.5%), the race is probably over: Obama would have to flip Virginia, Georgia, and several other states -- a very unlikely scenario.

In his Southern strategy, Plouffe is relying on turning out new black voters to knock off one or more Dixie states:

The key, Plouffe told supporters, will be to register new black voters and new young voters in Virginia.

Likewise, Georgia has many unregistered black voters who could turn out in record numbers to support the first major-party nominee who is black, he argued. Plouffe said the campaign also will keep an eye on Mississippi and Louisiana as the race moves into the fall to see if new black voters could put them within reach.

But of course, the very quality of the nominee that would make him attractive to black voters in the South -- being an ultra-liberal senator who uses his race as a major campaign draw -- makes him correspondingly unattractive to white Southern voters, who will remember his deep connections to Jeremiah Wright and other black activist, anti-white demagogues.

All in all, I believe McCain has many more paths to victory than does Obama; and I also believe that if John McCain will finally take off the gloves and start fighting Obama in the center, this will not even be a close race:

• McCain can make an excellent start by aggressively pushing to drill for oil everywhere that he has not already taken off the table -- which only includes the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and the actual coastal waters of states that reject drilling.

  That still leaves the outer continental shelf on both oceans, the Gulf of Mexico, the Bakken shale-oil formation, and other shale-oil sites. He can also push for liquification of coal, natural gas, and continue his quest for more gasoline refineries and nuclear power plants... "Drill here, drill now, pay less." Surveys show that Americans now strongly favor drilling, drilling, and more drilling;

• He can aggressively pursue a constitutional amendment to undo the horrible Supreme-Court decision last week in Boumediene and dare Obama and the Democrats to oppose it: "Obama and his Democratic friends think foreign terrorists fighting America deserve more rights than our own soldiers," he can argue;
• He can hammer Obama on the staggering taxes he plans to raise, on Obama's complete indifference to gasoline prices, his refusal to visit Iraq or meet with Gen. Petraeus before yanking the troops out, his wildly liberal stances on abortion, same-sex marriage, and guns, and his complete ignorance of how most people in the United States live and worship;
• And he can tie Obama more directly to the latter's prediction that the counterinsurgency strategy would be a complete failure and disaster: If we had followed Obama's strategy, we would have withdrawn from Iraq in defeat. Fortunately, we followed McCain's judgment... and we have pretty much won, with some mopping up left to do.

David Plouffe is right, but not quite the way he imagines, when he says:

"You have a lot of ways to get to 270," Plouffe said. "Our goal is not to be reliant on one state on November 4th."

If McCain gets ahead of the power curve on the issues listed above, I believe this will be a 9-point election... and we won't have to worry about this or that little state: McCain will take many states that Kerry held last election.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 16, 2008, at the time of 3:34 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

May 14, 2008

Mississippi: All Politics Is Loco

Democrat Wins by Running for Protectionism

In Mississippi's First congressional district, a special election was just held to replace Rep. Roger Wicker (R-MS, 96%), who was tapped to fill the rest of term of former Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS, 86%). Wicker was a strong conservative who typically won his district with 70% of the vote; in 2004, President Bush won the district by 62-37, and by 59-40 in 2000. Nevertheless, the Democratic candidate, Travis Childers, won yesterday by a relatively narrow 54-46, beating Southaven mayor Greg Davis.

The first question is, Why? Is Mississippi turning liberal? Does this indicate Republicans are going to be slaughtered in 2008?

Not necessarily. First, the Democratic Party was again quite clever in selecting a socially conservative populist for its candidate; Childers is just as anti-abortion and pro-gun as the Republican nominee.

Where they differed was mostly in economic policy: Judging by the campaign "news" that Childers chose to put on his website, his main line of attack against Davis was on the issue of free trade vs. "fair" trade -- that is, protectionism. Childers pummeled Davis over the Colombian Free Trade Agreement... and he demagogued it to death, saying that if it passed, Mississippi jobs would be "exported" to South America:

Travis Childers, the Democratic candidate for Congress in Mississippi's 1st Congressional District, today signed a “No New Trade Deals” pledge outside a closed plant in West Point and stressed the need to stand up for Mississippi's working families by fighting for fair wages and bringing good jobs back to the district.

Childers called on his Republican opponent, Greg Davis, to also pledge not to support new trade deals that unfairly send Mississippi jobs overseas. So far in his campaign, Davis has stayed silent, not denying that he would be a rubberstamp for trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA that are bad for the region.

“Sadly, my opponent, Greg Davis, continues to stay silent on the most important issues we face -- keeping our jobs,” Childers said. “Greg Davis has been silent on trade in the campaign, and so I'm sure he won't stand up for our jobs in Congress.”

“As an economic leader and small businessman who created more than 1,000 new jobs in my community, I will always stand up for the needs of working Mississippi families,” Childers continued. “I have pledged to fight against unfair trade deals that send our jobs overseas and fight for fair wages so the working people of Mississippi can make ends meet.

So why did this work? Why was Childers able to ride opposition to Capitalism into the Capitol? I think we get a clue from the next paragraph in that "news" item:

Davis recently received the support of a business group known for opposing minimum wage increases and has not said how he stands when it comes to trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA. And on Davis 's Web site, he does not focus on trade, jobs or economic development.

In fact, Davis doesn't even mention them! Looking at Greg Davis' own website, under "Issues" -- which you cannot reach directly from the front page; think about that -- here is the totality of what issues Greg Davis stood for in yesterday's runoff election:

Taxes and Spending
Make the Bush tax cuts permanent. Bury the death tax. Restrain spending.

[Probably not the best idea to lead off by mentioning President Bush, but at least this is a specific policy that Davis can defend; the rest of his issues are like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.]

National Security

Support our armed forces by insuring they have the manpower and equipment to fight and win.

[This is so vague that even Democrats could say it; remember when they complained about body armor and jerry-rigged up-armoring of Humvees?]

Illegal Immigration

Protect the border. Enforce our immigration laws. Require proof of U.S. citizenship to obtain taxpayer-funded benefits.

[Democrat Childers also campaigned on taking a "tough stand to stop illegal immigration into our country."]

Mississippi Values

Defend our values. Support the Second Amendment. Stand up for the unborn.

[Childers is right with Davis on both of these vague issues, along with opposing same-sex marriage.]

Business

Advocating policies that strengthen our economy by focusing on lower taxes, a simpler tax code, fewer regulations, and less government red tape.

[Childers: "Even John McCain said that Congress has been spending like 'drunken sailors.' As someone who has been balancing a family checkbook for years and has run two businesses, this defies all common sense. As Chancery Clerk, I balanced 16 consecutive budgets. As Congressman, I'll fight for balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility."]

So what, exactly, did Republican Greg Davis do to differentiate himself from Democrat Travis Childers? In particular, what was Davis' response on the free-trade/protectionism debate?

With Childers hammering Davis on the issue, Davis desperately needed to campaign up and down the state, correcting Childers' misstatements and fabrications about free-trade agreements and defending in particular the Colombia FTA, which is before Congress at this very moment. But trade doesn't even appear as an "issue" or campaign news item on his website.

In fact, Googling for about a half hour, I couldn't find a single statement by Davis on free trade. This is the central policy attack launched against him by the Democrat, and he's evidently barely responding. This is surreal.

So what "issue" did Greg Davis run on? Oh, a huge one for Mississippi (dripping irony alert):

Davis, the mayor of Southaven, launched a new TV ad this week linking Childers with Obama and Wright.

The ad blasts the Prentiss County chancery clerk for his silence when Wright "cursed America, blaming us for 9/11...

"Travis Childers - he took Obama's endorsement over our conservative values," the ad concludes. "Conservatives can't trust Travis Childers."

(Alas, as it turns out, Davis was likewise silent about Jeremiah Wright, a fact which Childers gleefully pointed out, of course. Home run for the Democrats.)

Longtime Democratic Speaker of the House Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill was fond of saying "All politics is local;" he meant that in the end, at least in House elections, people tend to vote not on grand national issue but on local issues: city streets and county roads, public transportation, local businesses, sales and property taxes, and so forth.

There are seeming exceptions, such as the 1994 Contract With America; but even then, the contract had to be sold locally in each district. (It was, which is why Republicans swept into power then.) National goals, like requiring a 60% majority in the House to pass a tax increase, had to be brought down to the local level: Each Republican had to show voters how tax increases hurt them more than they helped.

In this case, from what I can tell from 2,000 miles away, Childers was running an entirely local campaign based on bread-and-butter district issues:

• He attacked free trade by claiming Mississippi-1 would lose jobs;
• He claimed that Davis was in the pocket of Big Oil and other special interests and argued that this meant higher gas taxes, which he claimed Davis had supported;
• He claimed that Davis had opposed funding education in the district.

In response, Davis seemed to hang his campaign on linking Childers to ultraliberal Obama and Wright. When has this ever worked? Certainly never when the local pol has never campaigned alongside the national figure and disagrees with him on numerous issues important to the region.

Didn't anybody tell Davis that neither Obama nor Wright was on the ballot in his district? If his entire campaign was to tie Childers to Obama, then he had to do something to prove that Childers was somehow like Obama... he had to find a local issue on which Childers was unacceptably liberal, then pound on it like a beatnik on a bongo.

So what is being done by the National Republican Congressional Committee, the arm of the Republican National Committee that is supposed to recruit and help elect Republican candidates for the House? Evidently nothing: Candidate recruitment is clearly lagging (especially in MS-1!) -- how many Iraq or Afghanistan war vets are running? how many popular political figures? how many experienced administrators? -- and messaging is frankly pathetic.

Here's Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK, 100%), Chairman of the NRCC, from the NYT article linked above:

Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said the party was disappointed and needed to be better prepared to deal with conservative Democratic candidates, but he warned that time is short.

“Voters remain pessimistic about the direction of the country and the Republican Party in general,” Mr. Cole said. “Republicans must undertake bold efforts to define a forward-looking agenda that offers the kind of positive change voters are looking for.”

Yeah; that would be nice.

The NRCC should set up a local task force for every, single endangered GOP congressional district, plus another for each district where the Democratic incumbent is at all shaky. Each task force must determine the major problems in its district, what the voters are most worried about. Then they must craft both policy and messaging that (a) would resolve or at least mitigate the problem, while (b) fitting within the overarching Republican philosophy of trusting individual people, families, and business owners rather than the government.

This is nothing new; in the past, the NRCC has done this very well. But I've seen little to nothing of this sort done for 2008... has anyone seen anything?

Then the NRCC should hook up with (or recruit) GOP candidates in each of these districts and work with them to merge Republican policies and messages with that of the candidate. For example, such a task force in MS-1 would have identified voter fears about free-trade agreements, and it would have developed messages pounding home the fact that Colombia can already sell all its goods here without any tariff... but American companies -- including those in Mississippi -- have tariffs slapped on them when they try to sell American goods in Colombia. And that is what the Colombian FTA would overturn, allowing Americans, even those in Mississippi, to export more products to South America.

They could have worked with Greg Davis to promote job training programs. A campaign could have pointed out that less than 10% of Mississippi jobs are export related, about half the national average. Why should this be?

Together, national and local GOP could have created a hopeful, forward-looking vision: If the state of Mississippi and the counties inside the district were to promote and invest in export industries (chemicals, paper products, and such) by lowering corporate taxes and relaxing some regulations, then with the free-trade agreements already in place, upper Mississippi would start attracting jobs and luring companies to MS-1, not "exporting" jobs and hemorrhaging businesses. They could attract both American-owned companies and also at foreign-owned companies operating in Mississippi.

That is what a local-issues campaign looks like. That is how Davis could have clearly differentiated himself from Childers. He could have presented his bold vision of a reviving and thriving local economy, versus Childers' defeatist holding action, clinging to the old economy because he's so terrified of change. Davis could have brought in more Haley Barbour and Bobby Jindal and less Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, and Jeremiah Wright. And I think he would have won; if not, at least he would set himself up for a rematch in November, if Childers turns out to be more liberal than advertised -- which is probable, as Childers "grows in office." (Like Sen. James Webb, D-VA, who now has an 85% "liberal quotient" from the Americans for Democratic Action for 2007.)

Instead, Davis went for a silly scare campaign that nobody believed (Childers is just Obama in drag!) and squandered a conservative district; and the national Republicans were no real help at all -- not in pushing Davis to enunciate policy differences, and certainly not in messaging. Wonderful job there by the NRCC.

Tom Cole had the last year and a half to "define a forward-looking agenda that offers the kind of positive change voters are looking for.” Now he has less than six months. I think it's time for Rip Van Cole to roll out of his hammock and get on the hump... we've got some heavy-duty campaigning to do.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 14, 2008, at the time of 6:33 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

February 10, 2008

Who Is the Republican Core Anyway?

In a comment on another post, commenter Caustic Conservative gloomily wondered whence would come the electioneering energy for John McCain:

I still worry about who it is that will be financing the McCain campaign, and manning the phone banks this fall. There is an energy gap to his candidacy--you see it in turnout between R's and D's--that maybe no GOP candidate could overcome this year, but given McCains prior antagonism of his conservative base could be very costly to him.

A McCain fan I know says the cure for this comes in two words: Hillary Clinton. I agree to a certain extent, but I no longer believe her candidacy is even likely at this point. If that is the best argument to get out the vote for McCain in the fall, where do we stand in the end?

Many conservatives seem to have an appalling paucity of imagination. Why do they suppose that the core of any Republican campaign must comprise conservatives? Can they really not imagine any other core Republican voters but themselves?

I know for a fact (because I knew many of them) that in 2000, a great deal of George Bush's army of volunteers were moderates, not conservatives. Remember, Bush ran not as a conservative but a "compassionate conservative," which everybody understood to mean a center-right, big-government Republican who was hawkish on taxes and some social issues (such as abortion), but who was not particularly interested in a conservative foreign policy. (That last changed in September, of course.)

Come to that, I suspect I'm far more of a core Republican than the huge majority of conservatives; yet I'm not a conservative. I actually support the Democrats on many issues; and in the past, I usually voted Democratic. But the Democratic Party has become so toxic on certain subjects I consider existential -- the war against global hirabah, for example, but also taxes, spending, same-sex marriage, energy, globaloney, and in general, their increasing captivity to socialism -- that I cannot vote for any Democrat, anywhere, anytime, until the party changes drastically.

I'll note that in 2004, I remained optimistic and encouraged people to get out and vote and even converted many of my more libertarian friends to being GOP voters -- while at the same time, hard-core conservatives (most of you know who I mean) spent the whole summer predicting utter ruin for the GOP, being roundly pessimistic, and doing their best to depress Republican turnout by saying, in essence, that Bush couldn't possibly win reelection.

With conservatives like that, who needs RINOs? (They came around later in the year; but I was consistent in my optimism and American spirit all year.)

Ever since Reagan in 1980, conservatives (with very bad memories) have flattered themselves that they are the true core of the GOP. I say "bad memories" because it wasn't even true back in 1980: the very term "neocon" originally meant a Democrat who was converted to Republicanism by the candidacy of Ronald Reagan. Remember "Reagan Democrats?" Those were Democrats disgusted by the leftward lurch their party had taken, and especially revolted by the anti-American, feckless, belly-crawling, malaise-spreading surrender monkey, Jimmy Carter, who therefore voted for Ronald Reagan instead. This, by the way, describes many of the people crowing today about their "true core" status.

(I find it particularly surreal when neocons in the original sense like Michael Medved and much of the current dextrosphere -- including many of my favorites -- rail against people like Mitt Romney for being late converts to conservatism.)

As I said earlier in comments to another post, this is a mistake: The "core" of any party comprises all those who always turn out to vote for that party, who campaign for it, and who donate to it. That is the basic definition. In some elections, nearly all of those people called themselves "conservatives." But more commonly, that core group includes both conservatives and other Republicans -- who are just as much the "base" of the party as conservatives.

From 1900 through the entire FDR era (including Truman), the GOP was more what we would today call "country-club conservatives," who had more in common with "limousine liberals" than they did with entrepeneurs, working men, and soldiers. They opposed Roosevelt's economics not on free-market grounds but on the principle of conservation of the wealthy elite; and they certainly didn't have a more aggressive foreign policy than President Roosevelt! Even the William F. Buckley of that era was quite different from the later Bill Buckley, who called himself a libertarian conservative. It was a different universe.

In the Dwight Eisenhower administration, the GOP was quite moderate. Richard Nixon was a committed anti-Communist, but he was never a conservative; that's why the election of 1960 was a dead heat: There wasn't a dime's worth of difference between Nixon and JFK on foreign policy, and the only difference on domestic policy was that Kennedy was marginally more conservative (on taxes, for example, where Kennedy was somewhat of a supply-sider; Nixon, by contrast, famous remarked, "We're all Keynesians now" in 1971.)

Thus, for practically the first three quarters of the twentieth century, until 1972 (with the exception of Barry Goldwater in 1964, a candidate for conservatives only), conservatives were on the outside looking in. The GOP was pretty much dominated by establishmentarians, moderates, Realists, anti-Communists, and what we would today call RINOs -- liberal Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller. This was "the great silent majority" that Nixon relied upon.

Conservatives like Bill Buckley spent as much time bemoaning the Republicans as the Democrats. They didn't like the GOP, but they certainly weren't going to move en masse to the Democrats, where they would have to link arms with Southern segregationists, which movement conservatives refused to do. The probably held their nose and voted Republican most of the time... but they were not the party's core; they were estranged stepchildren.

But in 1972, when Nixon was running for reelection, the Democratic Party lurched to the hard left and nominated George McGovern, a peacenik who was soft on the Soviet Union... resulting in a massive landslide for Nixon. This remained the Democratic position right up until Bill Clinton in 1992... thus, the conservatives -- terrified of the alternative -- had no choice but to join with anti-Communist moderates -- and that coalition was the core of the party for eight election cycles, from 1972 through the 1988 presidential election.

In 1976, Nixon's so-called "corruption" (it's worth reading Silent Coup, by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, for a revisionist history of this subject), coupled with the Andrew Johnson-like weakness of the appointed President Gerald Ford, led to the very narrow victory of another peacenik Communist appeaser (who sailed during the election under false colors as a foreign-policy hawk). But when voters realized who Jimmy Carter really was, he was crushed the next election by Ronald Reagan.

Yet even then, the "core" of the GOP in 1980 still included a lot of moderates and even some converted liberals. In fact, we can make this into a general rule, which should be obvious: Whenever a party has a "big tent," its core is necessarily heterogenous. But when the core is homogenous, that typically means the party is not attracting any but true believers; hence it typically loses a lot and wins only narrow victories.

Reagan's main rival in the primaries was George H.W. Bush, who -- as we all remember -- was the man who first used the phrase "voodoo economics" to describe the combination of huge tax cuts, a major cut in the prime lending rate, gigantic increases in military spending, and draconian spending cuts in non-military spending (the last was killed by Congress, alas) that we now call "Reaganomics."

During the hapless presidency of George H.W. Bush, the moderates decided that there was nothing left to tie them to the GOP: Reagan was gone, and Bush was a poor substitute. Most of them flirted with the bizarre but charismatic H. Ross Perot, in whom some saw a new Reagan; others joined with Bill Clinton. The 1992 election was a muddle; and even by 1996, Clinton still couldn't get a majority... Ross Perot sucked off some of the moderate vote. But in 1992 and 1996, only conservatives really consistently backed the GOP candidate (GHW Bush and Bob Dole, respectively); and of course it was conservatives who led the way in the Republicans' 1994 congressional victory. These three elections, plus 1964, 2004, and 2006, are the only times that the Republican core has really been completely conservative.

In 2000, Bush was the establishment GOP candidate, McCain was the maverick party straddler, and the conservative vote was splintered between Gary Bauer (religious Right), Steve Forbes (free-market conservatives), and Alan Keyes (social conservatives), with the last being the last man standing. (Pat Buchanan was a relict even back then; his heyday was as Ronald Reagan's speechwriter.)

I can make a good argument that conservatives were the core of the GOP in 2004, as most of the Bush moderates jumped ship to John Kerry; had they not, then Bush would have enjoyed the usual incumbent's advantage and won by 56% to 43%. And of course, in 2006, conservatives were the only ones to vote Republican -- which is why the GOP lost a bunch of seats.

And there you have it: Conservatives have been "the core of the Republican Party" only six times in this century or the last: 1964, 1992, 1994, 1996, 2004, and 2006; on four of those six, the GOP lost.

In all the other elections since 1900, so far as I can determine, the Republican "core" comprised a coalition between two or more groups -- sometimes including the conservatives, but sometimes not (I think a lot of conservatives probably supported the somewhat more conservative JFK over the liberal Richard Nixon). Thus, conservatives are not "the core" of the GOP except occasionally, or when they join with other groups in a core coalition.

So back to the original question: Who is going to work energetically for John McCain? For heaven's sake, he has an army of people who dote on him, and have done since at least 2000. Many of them are moderates who sometimes vote Democratic; but this time, they'll throw everything they have into getting McCain elected president.

Well, this year, just as in 1980, we're going to have another anti-American, feckless, belly-crawling, malaise-spreading surrender monkey as the Democratic nominee, no matter which of them wins. In addition, the Democrat will be either corrupt to the core -- or else a complete vapid naif with no experience whatsoever. Arrayed against her or him, we'll have a charismatic leader with a very compelling personal history of almost unimaginable courage under torture, and with a whole warehouse full of substantive ideas (which everyone will applaud partially and reject partially).

I think we're going to have a huge passel of volunteers... it's just that many of them won't be hard-core movement conservatives. Just as with Reagan.

Alas, this is all played out against the backdrop of a successful war rendered unpopular by the relentless misreporting and deliberate lying of the elite media and the Democrats. I suspect the war will be nowhere near this unpopular by November; but it won't yet be remembered fondly (that comes later, after some time for the American people to reflect). Plus, the economy will be thought to be shaky, even if it's improving: Public opinion is always a lagging indicator.

I believe, in the end, the voters will choose the charismatic leader with real ideas (love them or loathe them) over either the dull as dishwater candidate espousing the tired, old policies of yesteryear, or the charismatic but content-free orator whose politics is just as far to the left as Jimmy Carter's (and I mean the Carter of today, not the Carter of 1976).

And if McCain does win, he will win because the core of the Republican Party is once again a coalition of many different kinds of Republican.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 10, 2008, at the time of 7:42 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

February 5, 2008

A Man Who Can Get Things Done

Yeah, yeah, I know he's a Democrat... but this is one fantastic ad!

 

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 5, 2008, at the time of 12:50 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 9, 2008

Michigan Will Be - Ah - Interesting

Let's start with (you'll pardon the obscene language) the polling...

At the moment, the RCP average for MI has Mitt Romney up over John McCain by 0.8%, over Mike Huckabee by 1.3%, over Rudy Giuliani by 10.0%, and over Rip Van Thompson by 15.0%. In other words, the top three candidates are tied.

That includes polls from December; however, even if we only look at polls this year, the top three are just as tight: McCain at 23.5, Romney at 21.0, and Huckabee at 20.5. The span from top to bottom is still within the margin of error.

Now for the structural dilemma: Michigan is one of those states that has an open primary: I believe any voter, no matter what his party affiliation, can request the ballot for any party's race. In other words, not just Independents but also (I think) Democrats could, if they wished, vote in the Republican primary in Michigan.

At the same time, both Barack Obama and John Edwards (not to mention Joe Biden and Bill Richardson -- who Drudge is reporting has just dropped out) withdrew from the Michigan primary last year and were thwarted in their attempts to get back on the ballot. Thus, the only top-tier Democrat in the Michigan race is Hillary Clinton.

Because the Democratic race is a foregone conclusion (and is worth exactly zero delegates anyway, since the DNC chose to strip the state), it's entirely possible that an angry mob of pitchfork-brandishing Democrats will join the bored mob of frozen cherry-pie wielding Independents and vote in the GOP primary, just to make mischief.

But on the third hand, John McCain is not the immortal beloved of Indies in Michigan that he is in New Hampshire; so it's not clear who this potential spoil of lefties will support: If they imagine that John McCain would be the tougher Republican to beat (because he would draw more non-Republicans than other candidates), they might pour their support into his chief rival, Mitt Romney. Or into the coffers of Huckabee, reasoning that a religious zealot like him can't possibly win.

But on the fourth hand, even if McCain or Huckabee wins Michigan on the strength of non-Republican voters, that doesn't really tell us much about the future... since in the mega-states (California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ohio), none is an open-primary state, I believe. In the others, you have to be a registered Republican to vote in the Republican primary (which is as it ought to be, forever and ever, amen).

A more appropriate metric for predicting the rest of the race is to look at who wins the Michigan race among Republican voters only... particularly since the RNC cut Michigan's GOP delegate count in half, so it doesn't make that big a contribution to the overall total.

On the fifth hand (is this a centipede?), Michigan is undergoing a "one-state recession;" and in New Hampshire, McCain won fairly strongly among those who were worried about the economy, while Romney did better among those who were not worried.

On the sixth hand (I think it's a millipede), Mike Huckabee would be cutting into this same group of hardscrabble voters; if he and McCain split it, that would be good for Romney.

On the seventh hand, if Romney doesn't win in Michigan, then most likely, one of the other two top candidates will have two wins, and might vault into the lead in delegates.

And having reached the seventh hand of the seventh voter, we may as well stop here... with the conclusion that Michigan will be -- as stated -- interesting.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 9, 2008, at the time of 10:27 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Oddities and Entities of the New Hampshire Primaries...

The night of the New Hampshire primary election, CNN did something I haven't seen before: It released all its exit polling data in a slick, easy-to-read format. This gives us a fairly unprecedented glimpse into the mad world of presidential primary elections.

Exit the Republicans...

Let's start with the Republican exit polling. Here are some interesting tidbits gleaned from the (longish) whole...

• First, John McCain won both sexes and all age groups among Republicans -- except those 65 and older. Go figure.
• McCain won the votes (narrowly) of those who think debates are "very important" and those who think debates are "not too important;" but Mitt Romney won the votes (even narrowerly) of those who think debates are "somewhat important." Yeesh.

• I find this datum particularly damning: Romney won the votes of those who are "enthusiastic," those who are "satisfied," and in a different question, those who have a "positive" view of the Bush administration. Contrariwise, McCain won the votes of those whose reaction to President Bush is "dissatisfied," "angry," or "negative."

  Evidently, the elite media is still doing a bang-up job recruiting for the McCain campaign by telling the country Bush is the worst president in all of American history.

• McCain won the votes of those who think the next president should "continue" the Bush policies... and the votes of those who think the next president should be "less conservative" than Bush; Romney, of course, won the votes of those who think the next president should be "more conservative" than Bush. I think Hugh Hewitt might have something in his oft-repeated claim that McCain would take the country in a more liberal direction than Romney.
• If you're worried about the economy, you're a McCainiac; if you're not, you're a Romnoid.
• Here's a real head-scratcher: Despite McCain's deserved identification with the Iraq war (as the only candidate to advocate we switch to a counterinsurgency strategy, even back in 2006), Romney gets a huge nod (almost 2-1) from those who "strongly approve" of the "U.S. war in Iraq;" but McCain gets those who "somewhat approve," "somewhat disapprove," and "strongly disapprove." Explain that one, if you dare...!
• And finally, this is my very favorite: Mitt Romney wins among those respondents who say they "strongly favor" their candidate; but John McCain wins among those people who say they have "reservations" about their candidate!

Exit the Democrats...

Now let's spin down to the Democratic exit polls. There really are only a couple of fascinating bits here, but they're whoppers:

• Those Democratic voters who want us out of the war immediately -- went very strongly for Hillary Clinton, the gal who still talks about leaving a substantial portion of the troops in Iraq; those voters who want any withdrawal to be gradual, and those who want U.S. troops to remain in Iraq, both went for Barack Obama... the guy who talks about an immediate withdrawal. Do Democratic voters know something about these two candidates that eludes those of us on the right?
• The second funky question is this: If Bill Clinton could run again, would you rather vote for him, or for your own candidate? Among Obama supporters, 47% would vote for Obama anyway, while a scant 24% are pining away for Bill. But for Hillary supporters, only 27% would still vote for her, while a hilarious 58% say they would rather vote for Bill than Hill!

Isn't it amazing the things one can discover peeping through keyholes?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 9, 2008, at the time of 6:12 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 8, 2008

New Hampshire: Hillary Pulls Huge Upset; McCain Does Predictably

Well, another state has passed into the rear-view mirror in our breakneck drag race through the abbreviated primary season. New Hampshire is now irrelevant once more.

On the Republican side, the night started out looking like John McCain was going to swamp Mitt Romney, crushing him like a grape beneath an elephant's foot. But in the end, it appears that a later swing to Romney left the race at just about what the pollsters had predicted: McCain won by 5%, slightly more than the 3.8% predicted on today's RCP average, according to CNN with 90%+ of the precincts reporting.

The more-or-less total count (here is CNN's primary page) has McCain up 37% to Romney's 32%.

But there is no question that on the Democratic side, the pollsters were utterly flummoxed: There was no huge wave of young voters for Barack Obama; Hillary Clinton was not buried; and female voters returned to the Red Queen -- who also won among Democrats. Most specifically, although there were more Independents among Democratic voters than Republican -- 40% among Dem, 33% among GOP -- Obama's edge among Indies was obviously not sufficient to overcome his deficit among Democrats.

Hillary was supposed to lose to Obama by 8.3%; instead, she won by about 2%, meaning the pollsters were off by upwards of 10%. That's seriously mistaken, implying a completely incorrect turnout model.

Three first impressions:

• It appears that a lot more Independent voters chose to vote in the GOP race than were expected; this would explain McCain coming in slightly higher than the polls reported today, but right on the polls of yesterday: If the Independents had been only 28% of the Republican numbers instead of 33% (AP says they accounted for "about a third of Republican ballots"), the race would have ended up almost exactly where the RCP average predicted: McCain ahead by 3.8%.

  But 5% more Independents in the Democratic race wouldn't, by itself, have given Obama the 6- to 10-point victory that virtually all pollsters predicted. Thus, Obama must have gotten a smaller percentage of those Independents -- and possibly a smaller percentage of Democrats -- than were showing up in the polls, as well. (Sachi suggested that Hillary's crying jag must have worked. Say, maybe she'll cry before every primary from now on!)

• The Democrats still have somewhat of an advantage in terms of total votes cast: 258,600 to 213,400 for the Republicans. I don't know how this translates into the general election, since Independents are gaming the system.

• Among Republicans, immigration was the metric: Those who favor deporting illegals by and large voted for Romney; those who favor a path to citizenship mostly voted for McCain (I know you're shocked to hear that....)

  Among those voting Republican who named immigration as one of the nation's top issues, Romney was the big winner (which bodes well for the border states); among those who picked the economy or Iraq but not immigration, McCain did very well (which probably bodes well for big eastern states, though McCain will have to fight through Rudy Giuliani on that front).

Bottom line: The pollsters did pretty well on the Republican side but completely missed the boat among Democrats. Make of that what you will.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 8, 2008, at the time of 9:52 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

January 7, 2008

Captain Head-Fake

I have suddenly realized something sad about Michael Medved: He never was pro-Huckabee, as he appeared; I doubt he is now really pro-John McCain. What he has always been in reality... is an "Anybody But Romney" fanatic.

I now think he supported and defended Mike Huckabee only because Huckabee was Romney's chief rival in Iowa; and today, Medved has become John McCain's biggest fan only because McCain is Romney's chief rival in New Hampshire. What's sad is that there really is nothing in Romney's background, proposals, or current demeanor that would justify such desperate opposition, except for the one possibility that I prefer not to think (but am starting to be driven to wonder about): religion.

I certainly hope that's not what's driving Medved, but I have a hard time understanding his animosity otherwise. (It can't be Romney's so-called "flip flopping" for reasons discussed below. Of all people in the world, Michael Medved should be the last to object to a candidate making "right turns.")

What really convinced me was a caller to Medved's show today, and the host's non-response to the caller's challenge. Medved had gleefully noted that during one of the debates over the weekend (I think the Saturday debate on ABC), Romney said that his ads did not refer to the McCain's immigration bill as "amnesty." But during a talk-show appearance the next day, the host (Medved mentioned the name, but I've forgotten) played Romney's current ad -- which repeatedly referred to the bill as amnesty.

Medved has a point: Whether you think the bill was amnesty, as do most conservatives, or think it was actually more like a plea bargain (as I do), Mitt Romney was either lying, or he was irresponsibly endorsing commercials that he had not, in fact, seen.

But then Michael Medved took a call from a caller who offered a great "challenge": John McCain has repeatedly said that he does not now support, and never has supported, amnesty for illegal aliens. Yet a quotation surfaced last July, found and reported by Politico (hat tip to Patterico's Pontifications):

“Amnesty” now is a political dirty word – the favorite slur of the bill’s opponents. But it was not always thus. The Googling monkeys discovered that McCain himself embraced the term during a news conference a few years ago in his office in Tucson, Ariz. “McCain Pushes Amnesty, Guest-Worker Program,” reported the Tucson Citizen of May 29, 2003. The senator is quoted as saying: “Amnesty has to be an important part because there are people who have lived in this country for 20, 30 or 40 years, who have raised children here and pay taxes here and are not citizens. That has to be a component of it.” The newspaper also quoted McCain as saying: “I think we can set up a program where amnesty is extended to a certain number of people who are eligible and at the same time make sure that we have some control over people who come in and out of this country.”

From here on, what follows is an approximation of what the caller and Michael Medved said... a "squortation," my portmanteau neologism for "squirmy quotation," since I don't have a transcript. Therefore, I'm not putting anything I don't explicitly remember into "quotation marks;" I'll use 'single-quotes' instead:

'Well?' asked the caller; 'If you're going to call Romney a liar for saying he didn't call the McCain-Kennedy bill amnesty when he did -- shouldn't you also call McCain a liar for saying he never supported amnesty... when he did support it, explicitly, as recently as 2003?'

The caller even cited some talking head who read that quotation to McCain over the weekend during an interview. Yet later that same day, McCain repeated his claim that he had "never supported amnesty."

After some fumbling around, Medved finally responded thus: 'McCain's bill wasn't amnesty.'

The caller pointed out the irrelevancy of that response, which parrots what McCain says (today): 'It makes no difference whether you think the bill was or was not amnesty; what matters is that McCain explicitly supported amnesty in 2003, by name, and now says that he never supported amnesty. And said it after having been confronted with the very quotation. Isn't that just as big a lie as anything Romney has said?'

Medved: 'The immigration bill was not amnesty. I don't know why people keep saying it was!'

Medved then went on to say that this "lie" (note the actual quotation marks now), coupled with "Romney's repeated flip-flops," should probably sink the "plastic" Romney's candidacy.

Repeated flip-flops? Coming from a guy who, by his own admission (in writing!), used to be a leftist, anti-war radical and now calls himself a right-wing conservative, this is a bit thick.

If merely changing one's mind constitutes "flip-flopping," then does Medved consider himself a serial flip-flopper too? In my opinion, to be a "flip-flopper," you have to move from A to B and then back to A on some major issue of principle, shifting back and forth with every passing wind, like a weathercock.

Simply moving one time from A to B is not flip-flopping: It's evolving. It may be evolving in a conservative direction (like Mitt Romney) or a liberal one (like, say, David Brock); but it's not a John Kerry-esque flip-flop.

I've come to the reluctant conclusion that today, Medved simply will say anything to promote McCain over Romney in the New Hampshire primary. But wait; didn't he used to be willing to say anything to promote Huckabee over Romney in the Iowa caucuses?

What is the common theme here?

I find I haven't really been listening to Medved much lately; I'm put-off by his rudderless animosity and snideness towards any caller who supports Mitt Romney: Every pro-Romney argument is instantly dubbed a "Romney talking point," as if the caller must be receiving orders e-mailed from the former governor's campaign headquarters. I only tuned in today because I wasn't doing anything else at that moment. And lo! Within minutes, there he was, attacking Mitt Romney again... but this time not on behalf of Mike Huckabee, who has no chance in New Hampshire, but on behalf of John McCain, the only man with a good shot at stopping Romney.

I used to like Medved. I thought he had interesting things to say, a different perspective from the Christians who dominate talk-radio and even from his coreligionist, Dennis Prager. But recently, Michael Medved has become a crashing bore. I don't think I'll be listening to him in future.

Honestly, I think it a sad day when the Republican coalition turns on itself like a pack of cannibals... when a once-interesting conservative engages in a kind of self-immolation to stop Mitt Romney at any cost. It reminds me inescapably of the career sacrifice that comedian Mort Sahl committed in his efforts to destroy Richard Nixon; or more recently, what Al Franken and Garrison Keillor have done to their careers in order to stop Republicans generally.

It's the kind of thing I associate only with Democrats and sordid leftists; it troubles me that conservative Republicans (rather, neo-conservatives -- in the original sense -- like Michael Medved) are now aping the self-destructive strategies of their New Left counterparts.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 7, 2008, at the time of 5:08 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

January 3, 2008

Iowa Caucuses... Lizardly Predictions Part II

The predictions --

We got some things right and some things wrong. Here were our predictions:

1. Mitt Romney wins the Iowa GOP meet & greet, beating Mike Huckabee by about 6 points;
2. Barack Obama beats Hillary Clinton in the Democratic contest by less than Romney beats Huckabee;
3. On the Republican side, John McCain will be third;
4. Nobody will care who was fourth;
5. McCain will certainly stick it out through New Hampshire; but when he loses (narrowly) to Mitt Romney, he will pull out before South Carolina (but possibly after Michigan and Nevada).

The results --

The final numbers, so far as I can tell (hat tip to DRJ at Patterico's Pontifications), are as follows.

Democrats:

1. Barack Obama 93,951 - 38 percent
2. John Edwards 74,377 - 30 percent
3. Hillary Clinton 73,666 - 29 percent
4. Bill Richardson 5,278 - 2 percent
5. Joe Biden 2,329 - 1 percent (has now dropped out of the race)
6. Uncommitted 345 - 0 percent
7. Chris Dodd 58 - 0 percent (has now dropped out of the race)
8. Mike Gravel 0 - 0 percent
9. Dennis Kucinich 0 - 0 percent

Republicans:

1. Mike Huckabee 39,814 - 34 percent
2. Mitt Romney 29,405 - 25 percent
3. Fred Thompson 15,521 - 13 percent
4. John McCain 15,248 - 13 percent

The other four Republicans were not reported after a certain point; this is where they were with 93% of the precincts counted:

5. Ron Paul 11,232 - 10 percent
6. Rudy Giuliani 3,853 - 3 percent
7. Duncan Hunter 499 - 0 percent
8. Tom Tancredo 5 - 0 percent

The analysis --

1. Mitt Romney wins the Iowa GOP meet & greet, beating Mike Huckabee by about 6 points;

Dead, flat wrong.

2. Barack Obama beats Hillary Clinton in the Democratic contest by less than Romney beats Huckabee;

Aside from the prepositional phrase, the other half of this was correct. 50% correct.

3. On the Republican side, John McCain will be third;

Hm... more or less correct, as McCain and Thompson pretty much tied for third (a difference of 273 votes out of more than 100,000 cast). I'll say this is correct within the margin of counting error.

4. Nobody will care who was fourth;

Pretty correct on the Democratic side: The only person who cared who was number four was Joe Biden -- who was number four. He cared enough to drop out of the race.

On the Republican side, there really was no number four; there were two number threes, followed by a number five... and nobody really cared about Ron Paul. So I'll say this is about 75% accurate.

5. McCain will certainly stick it out through New Hampshire; but when he loses (narrowly) to Mitt Romney, he will pull out before South Carolina (but possibly after Michigan and Nevada).

TBD

So of the four predictions it's possible to judge now, I have an accuracy rate of 56.25% by my own calculations. Not great, not bad, just fair.

Did you do better?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 3, 2008, at the time of 11:24 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 1, 2008

Iowa Caucuses... Lizardly Predictions

Getcher red-hot predictions here!

I always like to make hard and fast predictions right before a measurable contest, presenting the maximum opportunity for looking like a blooming idiot.

With that cheery thought in mind, I predict:

1. Mitt Romney wins the Iowa GOP meet & greet, beating Mike Huckabee by about 6 points;
2. Barack Obama beats Hillary Clinton in the Democratic contest by less than Romney beats Huckabee;
3. On the Republican side, John McCain will be third;
4. Nobody will care who was fourth;
5. McCain will certainly stick it out through New Hampshire; but when he loses (narrowly) to Mitt Romney, he will pull out before South Carolina (but possibly after Michigan and Nevada).

Let's see if I can manage to miss all five predictions and suffer utter humiliation!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 1, 2008, at the time of 5:40 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

December 20, 2007

Today's Huckalunacy: Back to the Future? No, Forward to the Past!

Some evangelicals, such as Lee Harris at TCS (Technology, Commerce, Society) Daily, passionately believe that conservatives (and even non-conservatives such as myself) who say bad things about Mike Huckabee's campaign for the presidency, are simply haters who despise religious people. We spend our time nitpicking every word that Huckabee utters, find absurd conspiracies (such as the "floating cross" in his Christmas TV ad that was actually a reflection off his bookshelves), and even fabricate supposed faux pas out of thin air. We are the polar opposites of those believers who see Jesus in a tortilla and the Virgin Mary in a rock formation.

Not so! In fact, I knew absolutely nothing about Huckabee until I began to hear his own words. I have assumed from the git go that he is no more or less religious than that other evangelical, born-again Christian who currently occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. And everything I have attacked about Huckabee's campaign has been based upon his own words, either spoken, or in the case of his Foreign Affairs article on his deep, surethoughted foreign policy, written after careful pondering and the hiring of a skillful ghostwriter... thus all, one presumes, the considered position of Gov. Mike Huckabee himself.

So I feel no guilt for bringing to your eyes what I just heard with my own ears, on just about the most friendly venue Huckabee can possibly get: the Michael Medved show, a one-on-one conversation with a pal who has pulled out all the stops to turn his show into a virtual daily campaign spot for Gov. Huckabee.

Today, Medved began by asking Huckabee about the section of his article where he says he wants to build up the military much more rapidly than President Bush is doing. As a reminder, this is what Huckabee wrote, or at least put his name to; I include annotations from myself:

The Bush administration plans to increase the size of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps by about 92,000 troops over the next five years. We can and must do this in two to three years. [Considering that the president has just barely met his own expansion rate, how exactly does Huckabee plan to double it? Care to tell us?] I recognize the challenges of increasing our enlistments without lowering standards and of expanding training facilities and personnel, and that is one of the reasons why we must increase our military budget. [How would increasing our DoD budget cause recruits to magically appear -- and to magically get 4-5 years of training in 2-3 years?] Right now, we spend about 3.9 percent of our GDP on defense, compared with about six percent in 1986, under President Ronald Reagan. [At the peak of the Cold War.] We need to return to that six percent level. [So he wants to add another $240 billion per year to the DoD budget... if he has a plan for getting Congress to vote this -- without a staggering tax increase -- does he care to share?] And we must stop using active-duty forces for nation building and return to our policy of using other government agencies to build schools, hospitals, roads, sewage treatment plants, water filtration systems, electrical facilities, and legal and banking systems. [That would be a great idea, if we could recreate the Foreign Office of the British Empire; but when has America done such a thing in the middle of a war? The Marshall Plan came after Germany was utterly razed.] We must marshal the goodwill, ingenuity, and power of our governmental and nongovernmental organizations in coordinating and implementing these essential nonmilitary functions.

If I ever have to undertake a large invasion, I will follow the Powell Doctrine and use overwhelming force. [A force that took months and months to settle in the friendly country of Kuwait -- which had just been invaded by Iraq, thus was willing to allow us to do so. Which country in the Middle East would have been willing to make itself a target over a six-month period prior to launching our own invasion of Iraq?] The notion of an occupation with a "light footprint," which was our model for Iraq, is a contradiction in terms. [Oddly, though, it seemed to work -- as even Gov. Huckabee admits a couple of sentences later.] Liberating a country and occupying it are two different missions. Our invasion of Iraq went well militarily, but the occupation has destroyed the country politically, economically, and socially. [Destroyed it? It appears to be doing significantly better by many measures than it was under Saddam Hussein.] In the former Yugoslavia, we sent 20 peacekeeping soldiers for every thousand civilians. [And say, that's worked out well, hasn't it!] In Iraq, an equivalent ratio would have meant sending a force of 450,000 U.S. troops. [Great leaping horny toads. And where were we to get the extra 200,000+ troops? Can Huckabee the Great conjure 20 divisions out of his hat?] Unlike President George W. Bush, who marginalized General Eric Shinseki, the former army chief of staff, when he recommended sending several hundred thousand troops to Iraq, I would have met with Shinseki privately and carefully weighed his advice. [Before or after he publicly smeared you with his "advice" at a Congressional hearing?] Our generals must be independent advisers, always free to speak without fear of retribution or dismissal. [Where "our generals" includes Eric Shinseki, but not, evidently, Tommy Franks.]

Look at that -- lots of attacks on Huckabee's ideas, yet not a single reference to "knuckle-dragging evanvgelicals" or "protofascist Christian theocrats!"

But Gov. Huckabee's military naïveté is perfectly encapsulated by a pithy, sententious aphorism he just delivered on the show, which is what spurred me to write this post. Here is what he said -- transcript from my own memory (but as you'll see, it would be hard to get this wrong):

Donald Rumsfeld famously said, "You don't go to war with the Army you'd like; you go to war with the Army you have." But I say, you don't go to war with the Army you have... you go to war with the Army you need. And you don't go to war until you have the Army you need!

(Actually, what Rumsfeld said was "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." But Huckabee's paraphrase is near enough to the meaning.)

Think about that for a moment. How many things are wrong with that sentiment?

1. How do you calculate "the Army you need?"

   Huckabee would use the Powell Doctrine -- where we essentially refight World War II in every military conflict we undertake. The Gulf War was a classic force-on-force confrontation not that different from Patton's North Africa campaign or the Battle of the Bulge. But wars in the future will not much resemble those of the 20th century; and if we're still trying to fight campaigns against agile, assymetrical insurgents with the bigfooted approach of a Colin Powell -- well, look at our Iraq tactics of 2005-2006 and how effective they were.

   And for how many years could we have supported that size of a force in Iraq, by the way?

2. How long do you wait to go to war, trying to raise the Army you think you need under the Powell Doctrine?

   When Colin Powell fought the Gulf War, he had the advantage of the Reagan Army build-up already under his belt. I understand that Huckabee wants to build up our armed forces; but he's still only talking about another 92,000 troops -- in three years. But he now says we should have used 450,000 soldiers in Iraq, which is more than 200,000 more than we used. So should we have waited six years to attack Iraq?

   What kind of WMD would Saddam Hussein have had by now, had we done nothing for the last six years?

3. Where exactly would Huckabee have staged an Allied Expeditionary Force of near half a million? Turkey? Kuwait? Iran? Has the governor even thought this through? Which Moslem country was going to allow us to build up such a massive force of crusading Christians on its territory, in the era of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda?

4. Perhaps Huckabee is covertly saying he wouldn't have invaded Iraq at all; that like President Clinton, he would have been content with occasional bombing runs to "keep Saddam Hussein in his box." And when the sanctions regime collapsed under the weight of the UN's Oil for Fraud bribery scheme, we would have grimly watched -- while building our mighty, Cold-War sized Army -- as Hussein rebuilt his entire arsenal of chemical and biological weaponry.

   (Which, by the way, he might have used against neighboring civilian populations or even his own people, rather than against our soldiers... and the civilian death toll could have been much, much higher... even as high as the ludicrous Lancet guesstimate of 655,000 deaths, or the even more risible Opinion Research claim of 1.2 million.)

   If that is what Huckabee is saying, I wish he would just straightforwardly make that case, so we could confront his arguments... instead of advocating policies that would force us down that road, willy nilly, in future.

5. And what if our goal to add another 20-30 divisions were delayed indefinitely by a Congress unwilling to increase the military budget by 65%? How long do we wait before going to war... not just in Iraq, but anywhere?

   Years? Decades? Never? But even Huckabee admits that "our invasion of Iraq went well militarily."

   It seems he would preferentially never invade anywhere at all if he couldn't get enough troops to do it more or less like Operation Overlord on D-Day. This is like the king who had the largest army in Europe -- but would never fight for fear of "breaking" it.

Pace, Lee Harris, but this is why so many Republicans don't think much of "President" Mike Huckabee. Those of us who are not captive to the identity-politics of evangelism realize that electing yet another naïve Arkansas governor with no foreign policy experience to the White House is probably a bad idea during an existential war against global hirabah. Heck, the first was bad enough during the American vacation from history!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 20, 2007, at the time of 1:37 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack

December 16, 2007

Another Day, Another Huckasmear

Can't Huckabee open his yap without spewing offense?

The liberal Republican from Arkansas (on every issue, it seems, but abortion) has once again managed to say something absurdly offensive; but this time, it's truly of Kerryesque proportions. Ironically, the Huckster committed today's offensive gaffe while defending himself from yesterday's offensive gaffe: describing President Bush's foreign policy as an "arrogant bunker mentality" that is "counterproductive at home and abroad;" demanding that America do a 180 to finally become "generous in helping others;" and comparing the United States to a maladjusted high-school boy who nobody likes because he's a bully. (Paul Mirengoff at Power Line did a magnificent job of skewering yesterday's gaffe... but I've got the jump on the lads with today's!)

So after Mitt Romney tore into Mike Huckabee about this adolescent attack on the Bush administration, with the implication that a Huckabee foreign policy would more or less resemble Barack Obama's, the Huckaschmuck shoehorned himself onto CNN and gamely (or rather, lamely) tried to defend himself by saying "I didn’t say the president was arrogant; I said that the policies have been arrogant."

Oh. Well, that makes all the difference.

Then the CNN host -- unnamed in the Times story -- asked him about a piece by Rich Lowry of the National Review where Lowry compared Huckabee to Howard Dean. And here (at last!) is today's Kerryesque offensive gaffe:

Mr. Huckabee suggested that such criticism came from people whose concerns were not those of ordinary voters.

“I’m connecting to the people they don’t know,” Mr. Huckabee said, people “who are out there waiting tables and driving cabs.” He alone among the candidates, he said, had “actually had to work for a living.”

The obvious intent here is to smear his opponents by painting them as being either so upper-class and elite that they never had to work a day in their lives; they just sat around and clipped coupons. Or else they were so lazy that they just loafed, until some mysterious magic wand smacked them on the noggin, and they found themselves running for president.

By contrast, Mike Huckabee has been out in the real world, "waiting tables and driving cabs," honestly "work[ing] for a living." And he's the only one!

(This parallels the emblematic quote by John Forbes Kerry:

You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq.)

"He alone among the candidates, he said, had 'actually had to work for a living.'” Take a moment to ponder the breathtaking stupidity of that claim. Recall that he earlier claimed -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he was the only man in the race "with a degree in theology." (It seems he has been lying about having a masters degree in theology for years; it's still in his InfoPlease biography as a former governor.) Talk about your "arrogant bunker mentality..."

So let's run through the curriculum vitae of a few of Gov. Huckabee's rivals, starting with the Mormon he loves to hate...

Williard Mitt Romney

After graduating from high school and briefly attending Stanford, Romney went on mission in France. For 30 months, he traveled around France with several other LDS missionaries, trying to convert French Catholics and Protestants. But perhaps Southern Baptist minister Mike Huckabee doesn't consider missionary work to be working for a living. So let's skip ahead.

After France, Romney returned to university, this time Brigham Young U., then on to Harvard, where he earned both a JD and an MBA simultaneously. After which, he went to work for the Boston Consulting Group. Three years later, in 1978 (Romney was 31 at this time), he became a vice president of Bain & Company, Inc., also of Boston. In 1984, at the age of 37, he left Bain & Company to co-found a spin-off, Bain Capital, where he stayed for the next 14 years.

In 1990, he was asked to simultaneously return to Bain & Company as CEO, which was headed for financial collapse; he saved the company.

Then in 1998, he left both Bains to rescue the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics bid... which he did over the next four years. He turned a $379 million shortfall into a $100 million profit -- and he donated his $825,000 salary to charity during that time.

So evidently, we can conclude that to Mike Huckabee, working as a manager and an executive doesn't count as "work[ing] for a living."

Huckabee knows that Romney was governor of Massachusetts, so clearly he doesn't consider working as an elected public official to be "work[ing] for a living," either.

But maybe the problem is that Huckabee is simply envious of those born well-to-do, and he doesn't consider the work of rich people to really constitute "work." After all, Romney's father George worked his way up to CEO of American Motors by the time Romney was seven.

Maybe Huckabee meant he was the only presidential candidate who "had to work for a living," as in, couldn't rely upon an eventual inheritance and was forced to scratch for his own seed, to "root, hog, or die."

(This begs the question, though; doesn't it say something important about a person's character if he doesn't need to work for a living -- but he does anyway?)

So let's "move on" to another rival...

Rudolph William Louis "Rudy" Giuliani

Unlike Romney, Giuliani was born to "working class" parents who were both first-generation Americans. Giuliani's father Harold was convicted of assault and robbery and did a stretch in Sing Sing; after getting out, he became a Mafia enforcer for his brother-in-law, the loan shark. This is not a mob position generally regarded as wildly lucrative.

Despite this background, Giuliani managed to graduate from Manhattan College in Riverdale, a Roman Catholic college for boys in the Bronx, and then from the law school at New York University School of Law. He graduated with a JD in 1968, at the age of 24. After clerking for a federal judge, Giuliani joined the US Attorney's Office in 1970.

From 1975-1977, he worked as a Justice Department lawyer, prosecuting corruption cases; then he entered private practice during the Carter years. When Reagan was elected, Giuliani returned to the Justice Department as an Associate Attorney General, where he supervised the Department of Corrections, the DEA, and the U.S. Marshals Service.

In 1983, Giuliani was named U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. There he stayed until 1990, when he moved to private practice after losing the 1989 mayoral race; he was elected Mayor of New York City in 1993.

So I reckon we can also add "attorney" and "prosecutor" to the professions that do not constitute "work" to Mike Huckabee. Let's see who's next...

Freddie "Fred" Dalton Thompson

After graduating high school, Thompson worked for a year or so at the post office, moonlighting at a bicycle assembly plant. He graduated from college in 1964 -- the first of his family ever to attend university -- and got his JD degree from Vanderbilt on scholarship in 1967.

We already know that Huckabee doesn't consider being an attorney "work[ing] for a living;" so we'll skip over all that.

Thompson began his acting career in 1983, playing himself, oddly enough, in the film adaptation of a book about a famous wrongful-termination trial; Thompson had represented Marie Ragghianti... who had been fired for refusing to let out inmates, even after they had bribed aides to her boss, Democratic Gov. Ray Blanton of Tennessee.

Since the 1985 release of Marie, Thompson has acted in 29 movies and 150 television episodes, mostly on various incarnations of Law & Order.

All right... so "salaried actor and entertainer" is yet another in the rapidly expanding list of occupations which Mike Huckabee rejects as "work[ing] for a living." And that brings us to...

John Sidney McCain III

McCain was born to a career naval officer -- named John Sidney McCain, jr., oddly enough -- in 1936, five years after McCain, jr. was commissioned. (Most likely, McCain's father was a lieutenant at the time.) McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone.

Like most Navy brats, McCain moved around a lot during his early years. He believes he attended about 20 different schools before entering Annapolis. He graduated and was commissioned in 1958, at age 22.

McCain was trained at NAS Pensacola (naturally), becoming a Naval Aviator in 1960. He flew carriers until 1962, then served a shore tour at NAS Meridian (Mississippi) as flight instructor. He returned to carrier duty in 1966.

He began Vietnam ops in 1967, as part of Operation Rolling Thunder. Later that year, Lt.Com. McCain was almost killed in the infamous USS Forrestal fire: McCain's plane was the one struck by the misfired missile from another plane, while he was readying for takeoff; he managed to blow the canopy and climb forward, across the nose to the refueling probe, jump to the burning deck, and escape with his life. The fire killed 132 sailors, injured 62 others, and destroyed 20 aircraft.

While the Forrestal was being repaired, McCain volunteered for the USS Oriskany, which ironically enough had just suffered its own devastating fire, losing 44 crew -- including 24 pilots. The Oriskany had also lost many pilots during flight ops, so they were desperate for more aviators.

Alas, on McCain's first mission off the Oriskany, his A-4 Skyhawk was shot down over Hanoi. After breaking both arms and a leg in the SA-2 missile strike, McCain ejected. On the ground, he was beaten by a mob, had his shoulder crushed by a rifle butt, and was bayonetted in the foot and the abdomen. He was later beaten again, this time by interrogators in a POW camp.

The next year, 1968, the solitary confinement and torture began (to this day, he cannot raise his arms above his shoulders). In 1969, McCain was transferred to the "Hanoi Hilton" (the Hoa Loa Prison). He remained a POW until 1973, spending five and a half years in captivity.

The next year was spent in physical therapy and other treatment, and he was restored to flight status in 1974. McCain remained in the United States Navy until his retirement in 1981 as a Captain, adding up to more than 22 years of active-duty military service, not counting the four years at the USNA.

Guess what else Mike Huckabee doesn't think constitutes "work[ing] for a living?"

So now we know what Huckabee thinks doesn't count as "work": Being a manager or executive at a company, being a prosecutor, supervising federal agencies, being an actor or entertainer, and being a career military officer and combat veteran. I leave it up to the readers to decide how many Americans this smears with the "elite" or "lazy" tag.

So what does count as work to him? He uses himself as the exemplar of work -- "He alone among the candidates, he said, had 'actually had to work for a living.'" Let's see what that work comprised...

Michael Dale Huckabee

Like Bill Clinton, Mike Huckabee was born in Hope, Arkansas. His first job at age 14 was reading the news and weather at a local radio station.

For his next job at age 23, after graduating from Ouachita Baptist University and dropping out of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Huckabee worked for televangelist James Robison as a staffer. From then until 1991, he worked as the pastor of various churches around Arkansas, as president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention, and as "president" (whatever that means) of religious television channel KBSC (now KLFI).

Then in 1993, he took the oath as Lieutenant Governor of Arkansas. Apart from the CV above, I was unable to find any other jobs he claims to have worked -- not even on his own campaign web page. I admit I haven't read any of his books, so maybe he mentions some there.

But barring that, I think we can tentatively conclude that, while Mike Huckabee rejects business, the law, acting, and the military as professions where one might "work for a living," he evidently does count being a church pastor and running a religious television station.

Well... if he says so, who am I to disagree?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 16, 2007, at the time of 7:37 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

December 12, 2007

Yeah, I think Huck Crossed Way Over the Line

Michael Medved is frantically trying to spin another stupid thing that Gov. Mike Huckabee said. Again.

Medved seems to spend a lot of time on this; if I believed in campaign-finance reform, I'd suggest he be investigated for giving corporate in-kind contributions...

He's currently screaming about the AP article; yes, you know which one I mean:

Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, asks in an upcoming article, "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"

The article, to be published in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, says Huckabee asked the question after saying he believes Mormonism is a religion but doesn't know much about it. His rival Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, is a member of the Mormon church, which is known officially as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The authoritative Encyclopedia of Mormonism, published in 1992, does not refer to Jesus and Satan as brothers. It speaks of Jesus as the son of God and of Satan as a fallen angel, which is a Biblical account.

Assuming this isn't just a flat lie -- and I would be pretty shocked if it were, given how easy it would be to debunk -- this is akin to asking, "Don't Christians believe you can commit any sin you like, and as long as you believe in Jesus, you're forgiven?" (Actually, that last is fairer, as -- unlike the LDS smear -- it has at least a few ordained adherents.)

The AP article claims that Huckabee asked the question out of the blue, after first saying that he thought Mormonism was a religion, not a cult. Medved, however, furiously pointed out that in reality, Huckabee asked the question out of the blue, after first saying that he thought Mormonism was a religion, not a cult. Ergo, per Medved, the AP article is a dirty lie.

I confess I didn't quite follow the point.

Medved also believes that the phrase "asks in an upcoming article" would make anyone believe that Huckabee wrote the article. Maybe it's just me, but that doesn't jump out at me either.

Honestly, it really sounds to me as if the Huckster simply decided to toss a vicious smear of Mormonism into his magazine interview (by which I don't mean to say Huckabee interviewed himself; pace, Michael Medved). As even Medved admits, the governor was not responding to any question about Mormon theology; he just eructated his rhetorical question as a complete non-sequitur, then turned to another topic.

Frankly, I think this is... well, not quite despicable, I suppose, but certainly very disturbing. Such an attack furthers Huckabee's campaign theme, that voters should elect him because he's "the Christian" in the race. Well, you know, Romney is a Mormon, Giuliani is a Catholic, and McCain is a warmonger; no Christians in that lot!

I'm more and more fascinated to learn how much of this alleged Huckasurge will actually translate into caucus-goers on January 3rd. If Huckabee sails into the caucuses with a 15-point lead over Romney, but then Romney wins because his incredible organization gets more people to the actual precincts... then wouldn't that be a huge boost to Mitt "the Comeback Kid" Romney?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 12, 2007, at the time of 1:30 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

December 11, 2007

Read This Column!

I rarely do this. You know I rarely do this, and you know why: I'm far too enamored of the sound of my own typing to spend my time hyping someone else's griping.

But I have to say, just click here and read this splendid piece by Dennis Prager... and I don't say this just because I'm trying to suck up to the man (not just because).

Just a para or three, for the flavor:

It is not for this Jew to define a Christian. I only explain evangelical Christian opposition to Mormons calling themselves Christians to make the point that even as I understand their opposition to Mormons calling themselves Christian, I equally oppose voting for anyone based on his theology. Evangelicals have the right to proclaim Mormons as non-Christians, but they hurt themselves and their country if they measure a candidate's theology. They should concern themselves with a man's theology only when choosing a religious leader. When choosing a political leader, theology should not count.

The reason is -- and I have come to this conclusion after a lifetime of interaction with people of almost all faiths and writing about and studying religion -- theology does not appear to have much impact on people's values. Liberal Christians and Jews share virtually no theological beliefs yet think alike about virtually every important social value. So, too, conservative Christians and conservative Jews share virtually no theological beliefs, yet they think alike about virtually every important social value.

Meanwhile liberal and conservative Protestants are in agreement on theological matters -- both believe in the Trinity, in the Messiahship of Jesus, on Jesus being the Son of God, on salvation through faith rather than through works, and more -- yet they differ about virtually every social value. Obviously, shared theology doesn't create shared moral or social values.

It is, of course, a meditation on those evangelicals and others who call themselves Christian but don't appear to practice much Christian charity... on those men who wear their religion on their ballots, and who loudly proclaim they can never vote for Mitt Romney because Mormonism is "a cult." (What do they think Christianity started out as, during the days of imperial Rome?)

It's a fine, fine hymn which every him and her should hear.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 11, 2007, at the time of 4:01 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

December 5, 2007

Pay Attention to These Polls!

Remember earlier this month, when we warned you to Ignore This Poll? Well that's still good advice; the Zogby Interactive online poll isn't worth the paper it's not printed on.

But that's blogporridge in the pot, nine days old. As of right now, we instruct you to pay attention to these real polls, as collected by our friend and old blogmeister, Captain Ed Morrissey; they all show Queen Hillary hemorrhaging support like a New Orleans levee in a mild drizzle.

Rudy Giluliani is also losing steam, Mitt Romney and John McCain are staying about the same, and Mike Huckabee is shooting up. I suspect the last will drop again, and I don't expect him to win Iowa (turnout is much more important in a caucus state than popularity in polling); but no question, this race is tightening considerably.

If Hillary loses Iowa and New Hampshire, she's a goner. Her only real strength is the aura of inevitability; lose that, and all you have left is the grimace-inducing, anti-charismatic, lamp-hurling fishwife of a reasonably popular but inconsequential past president.

I again note for the record that I have predicted all along that Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-Carpetbag, 95%) will never be the Democratic nominee for president. I have never tried to weasel out of that prediction, and I'll stand or fall by it.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 5, 2007, at the time of 1:26 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 26, 2007

Ignore This Poll!

Don't pay any attention to this poll showing Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-Carbetbag, 95%) running behind all of her major Republican opponents in the presidential race; as enjoyable as all the hype may be, the source -- Zogby Interactive -- is completely unreliable.

Sorry to burst the bubble, but John Zogby's "interactive" -- that is, online -- polling is execrable. It's untrustworthy when it goes against Republicans; and it's equally untrustworthy when it cuts in our favor.

Here is the key graf from the Breitbart story, and the only thing you need know about the poll:

The Zogby poll was conducted online among 9,150 likely voters across the United States between November 21 and 26, and carried a margin of error of plus or minus 1 percentage point.

So yeah... among Americans who spend significant time online and are willing to answer polling questions at a web site -- Hillary now runs behind. But besides looking at an incredibly volatile group, it's also very small and highly unrepresentative of the voting population as a whole.

The Zogby online poll is very much like the infamous 1948 Chicago Daily Tribune poll during President Harry Truman's reelection campaign; the Trib conducted the poll by telephone, and it ended with Truman, newly reelected, holding up the election-day plus one edition of the Tribune with the banner headline "Dewey Defeats Truman."

And as Isaac Asimov pointed out, the poll was perfectly accurate: If the election were limited to only those people who owned telephones in 1948, then ultra-liberal Republican Gov. Thomas Dewey of New York would have won.

In the Zogby case, we do actually allow those who don't camp online -- in fact, even those who don't have computers at all! -- to vote for president; the poll is wildly unrepresentative... no matter who an individual instance of it supports.

Look, I do believe that current polling has an inherent partisan Democrat bias: They poll over the weekend, which favors Democrats; they overpoll big cities, which favors Democrats; and just in general, Democrats tend to be more willing to sit still for a call from a political pollster... Republicans are much more likely to hang up. Pollsters could fix this bias by simply asking party affiliation, comparing the percentages to the percentages in the districts in which they poll, and then weighting the responses accordingly.

But they refuse. Pollsters claim that respondents answer the party registration question not according to how they are actually registered, but according to how they feel about their party's candidates that day instead. In other words, suppose the Gallup poll calls a person who is registered as a Republican; if he likes the Democratic candidate better that day, he'll sail under false colors and claim that he's a registered Democrat. Ergo, when they get a big imbalance in favor of Democrats, that just means lots of Republicans like the Democrats better, and they're lying about their own registration to jump on the Democratic bandwagon.

I find this argument risible. For one thing, the imbalance exists even when the Republican wins the race. Do pollsters really want us to believe that Republican respondents are so down on the GOP that they falsely claim to be registered Democrats -- and then go ahead and vote Republican?

The more plausible explanation is that the heuristic that pollsters use to select samples of respondents tends to skew Democratic; therefore, they should weight their samples to match the partisan breakdown of the actual population of voters, according to previous votes. Picture this silly example: If Gallup polled exclusively at singles events, would that be a reasonable sample base from which to project an electoral winner? Of course not: Singles are much more Democratic than married couples. Alternatively, if they polled only at churches, that would be equally skewed towards the right.

It's not an exaggeration to say that the sample "makes" the poll. When the sample differs significantly from the population -- such as when it consists exclusively of people who own computers, spend much time online, and are willing to take the time to answer an online poll -- it loses all predictive value.

I do believe that Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and John McCain would actually be running ahead of Hillary Rodham Clinton Rodham if the poll samples were more accurate. Alas, nothing by John Zogby can be counted as evidence of such.

But keep watching the polls; I suspect they'll start to change as the primary process kicks off. And in particular, when the two nominees are known, that's when we'll really start seeing some movement.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 26, 2007, at the time of 2:50 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 24, 2007

More On the Clintonian Culture of Corruption

An innocuous AP story -- "InfoUSA discloses SEC investigation of company spending" -- hides deep within its bowels another serious indictment of corruption and incuriosity by Bill and Hillary Clinton about the likely criminal source of their donors' money. It's hard to believe the Clintons don't know about it -- assuming they read their own "home state" newspaper.

And even the New York Times itself goes to some effort to hide the real story from our eyes. Evidently, they're worried we might not have enough of a nuanced, sophisticated view to understand that there's really nothing to see here. But before blasting back to the dim mists of this spring, let's return to the Associated Press:

The Securities and Exchange Commission has opened an investigation into spending by database marketer InfoUSA Inc.

The Omaha-based company said in a filing Tuesday that it would cooperate with the SEC's request for documents related to expense reimbursement, transactions with related parties, some corporate expenditures and certain trades of company stock.

The company did not specify what spending the SEC is looking for, but a lawsuit two hedge funds filed earlier this year may offer some clues.

Ho-hum; MEGO; who cares... another company being investigated by the SEC, right? I never would have noticed this article had it not been reposted by Newsmax; and I never would have read it had they not given it a more revealing title: "SEC Investigates Co. with Clinton Links."

(As always with Newsmax, I distrust their objectivity; so when they post a story on their site, I always hunt for a more authoritative source. Since this International Herald Tribune version is word-for-word identical to what Newsmax reposted, I believe this is what AP actually moved on the wire.)

Reading further into the article, we see that AP unquestionably buried the lede; recall, the SEC is investigating InfoUSA because of allegations that surfaced in a lawsuit filed by a couple of hedge funds:

The lawsuit also questions why [InfoUSA founder Vin] Gupta used private jets to fly Bill and Hillary Clinton on business, personal and campaign trips, and why Gupta gave Bill Clinton a $3.3 million (€2.2 million) consulting contract.

According to the lawsuit, InfoUSA has spent nearly $900,000 (€607,533) since 2001 flying the Clintons to domestic and international locations and political events.

Has this previously been disclosed by the Clinton campaign? On its face, it would seem to violate campaign finance rules banning corporate (and union) political "in-kind" contributions to members of Congress. And that three-million dollar "consulting" contract to Bill Clinton could easily be seen as an end-run around the ban on direct corporate contributions to federal campaigns -- hey, it's not for Hillary, it's for Bill!

The Clintons insist that they did disclose and "reimburse" InfoUSA, and its Clintonista founder Vinton "Vin" Gupta, for some of its contributions, according to the New York Times version of the AP story; though so far, this is based entirely on the Clintons' word:

Mr. Gupta has been a major donor to Democrats and gave at least $1 million to Mr. Clinton’s presidential library in Arkansas. Mr. Gupta also took part in a June fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton in Manhattan.

A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton said in May that all the flights connected to InfoUSA were reimbursed and disclosed in accordance with Federal Election Commission and Senate ethics rules.

Note that Hillary Clinton's campaign only claims that they reimbursed the air transportation; they say nothing about reimbursing or returning the multi-million dollar contract... to Bill Clinton. But Gupta has a long history of financial support of the Clintons, both as fundraiser and individual contributor, which bought him a night in the Lincoln bedroom and not one, not two, but three offers of appointment by President Clinton, only the last of which -- to the board of directors of the "prestigious" John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts -- did Gupta accept.

But the truly damning part of the AP story linked at the top is what else InfoUSA has been doing. Take a gander:

The company has come under scrutiny for its policies concerning the sale of personal information.

The New York Times reported in May that InfoUSA, which compiles consumer information and sells it to direct marketing companies and others, sold the names of senior citizens, including millions with Alzheimer's disease and others whom it identified as gamblers, with labels that said things such as, "These people are gullible."

The company has denied those allegations and said it does everything it can to ensure it does not do business with scam artists.

Curiously, this nugget did not find its way into the Times' version of the AP story. But perhaps they weren't aware of it?

That defense is a tad unlikely, when one reads this other NYT article, published way, way back -- in May of this year. The Times published what must be the definitive, multi-page article on the despicable, criminal behavior of InfoUSA (one of a series on corrupt corporations)... and gives us a much clearer view of the sort of folks who become top donors to Hillary Clinton's presidential and senatorial campaigns, and of course to Bill's campaigns and his presidential library (though the earlier NYT article leaves that part of the story unmentioned):

Bilking the Elderly, With a Corporate Assist

The thieves operated from small offices in Toronto and hangar-size rooms in India. Every night, working from lists of names and phone numbers, they called World War II veterans, retired schoolteachers and thousands of other elderly Americans and posed as government and insurance workers updating their files.

Then, the criminals emptied their victims’ bank accounts.

A 92 year old veteran of the Army during World War II, Richard Guthrie lost his entire life savings to thieves from India. And where do you suppose they got Guthrie's name and the idea that he would be a prime target for their scams? I'm sure you never saw this one coming...

Mr. Guthrie, who lives in Iowa, had entered a few sweepstakes that caused his name to appear in a database advertised by infoUSA, one of the largest compilers of consumer information. InfoUSA sold his name, and data on scores of other elderly Americans, to known lawbreakers, regulators say.

InfoUSA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. “Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change.”

Would the Clinton campaign consider "reimbursing" Mr. Guthrie, and all of his fellow "gullible" elderly, sick veterans and other victims?

The thieves would call and pose as government workers or pharmacy employees. They would contend that the Social Security Administration’s computers had crashed, or prescription records were incomplete. Payments and pills would be delayed, they warned, unless the older Americans provided their banking information.

Many people hung up. But Mr. Guthrie and hundreds of others gave the callers whatever they asked.

“I was afraid if I didn’t give her my bank information, I wouldn’t have money for my heart medicine,” Mr. Guthrie said.

Most of these listsellers, certainly including Mr. Gupta's InfoUSA, are well aware that they're selling to thieves and con artists; but they continue to do so, even after law-enforcement authorities warn them -- repeatedly -- who their "clients" really are. It's crystal clear to enforcement agencies that companies like InfoUSA know exactly what they're doing, and also know that the odds of them being convicted in court are quite low.

Perhaps especially if they have influential politicians in their back pockets.

Although some companies, including Wachovia, have made refunds to victims who have complained, neither that bank nor infoUSA stopped working with criminals even after executives were warned that they were aiding continuing crimes, according to government investigators. Instead, those companies collected millions of dollars in fees from scam artists. (Neither company has been formally accused of wrongdoing by the authorities.)

“Only one kind of customer wants to buy lists of seniors interested in lotteries and sweepstakes: criminals,” said Sgt. Yves Leblanc of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “If someone advertises a list by saying it contains gullible or elderly people, it’s like putting out a sign saying ‘Thieves welcome here.’ ”

Naturally, this being the world of the elite media, there is no mention of the Clinton connection in the Times article about the horrific scams committed by thieves working hand in glove with InfoUSA. They never even mention that InfoUSA is run by long-time Clintonista Vin Gupta, or the efforts Bill Clinton made to get him on the government payroll.

But even creepier, the Times' version of the Associated Press article on the SEC investigation of InfoUSA -- which discloses the fact that founder Gupta is one of the Clinton's most prolific and reliable donors and fundraisers -- completely omits the following paragraph from the AP story and other papers' versions (e.g., the IHT version linked above):

The New York Times reported in May that InfoUSA, which compiles consumer information and sells it to direct marketing companies and others, sold the names of senior citizens, including millions with Alzheimer's disease and others whom it identified as gamblers, with labels that said things such as, "These people are gullible."

So the New York Times printed two articles about InfoUSA:

• The first discussed how InfoUSA criminally preyed upon "gullible" elderly victims, including veterans and Alzheimers patients -- but didn't mention the Clinton connection;
• The second, published six months later (when the first article would have dropped into the memory hole), discloses the deep Clinton connection to InfoUSA through founder Vinton Gupta... but never mentions the earlier investigative report on InfoUSA's aiding and abetting of criminals who prey upon senior citizens.

One would think that a top Clinton donor making millions of dollars by knowingly selling victim-lists of "gullible" elderly and/or sick vets to heartless con artists, who then bilk the victims out of their life savings, would qualify as part of "all the news that's fit to print;" but evidently, when it comes to the Clintons, the motto mutates to "all the news we see fit to print."

If blogs came with soundtracks, I think I would insert the infamous clip of Hillary cackling madly, as heard on Hugh Hewitt's show and your local "internets."

But of course, this is just another eddy of the cylone of coincidence that forever swirls around the Clintons, which always fascinates but never illuminates: from astonishing luck in cattle futures to mysteriously vanishing Rose Law Firm billing records (which reappear, equally mysteriously, in the residence wing of the White House), to the amazing number of pardoned felons -- like multi-millionaire Marc Rich -- who just happened, by merest chance, to have donated huge sums to the Clinton Presidential Library.

Nothing to see here, folks; it's time to move on...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 24, 2007, at the time of 4:39 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 17, 2007

Blood's a Rover

Over on his own blog, frequent commenter Rovin asks what I think the impact of immigration, illegal aliens, the failed immigration bill last year, and the drivers' licences for illegals position of the Democrats will be on the 2008 elections.

In general, I think it cuts slightly against the GOP right now, mostly because if they had passed the bill, they could have beaten the Dems about the head and shoulders for not building the wall. But immigration will not determine this election.

As it stands, if the GOP attacks the Dems for not building the wall, the Democrats can respond that when the Republicans controlled congress, they couldn't even pass an immigration bill with Democratic help. That reminds us of other GOP failures -- such as the failure to rein in spending -- that hurt the Republican argument that we're the adults.

The drivers' license question will not hurt any Democrat with Democratic voters; a few independents might be annoyed, but they won't base their vote on the question. GOP voters might be somewhat more motivated to head to the polls, increasing turnout. On this particular aspect (drivers' licenses for illegal aliens), slight benefit to the GOP.

Look for the Dems to propose a bill similar to what the GOP rejected in 2006, but with real amnesty (not the fake kind that conservatives pretended to find in the previous bill) and with little to no border security provisions. When the Senate GOP filibusters it, the Dems will try to ride that into electoral gain: "The Republicans won't even meet us halfway on immigration... it's 'my way or the highway' to Mitch McConnell!" This will help drive Dems to the polls; slight advantage to the Democrats on this particular aspect.

Added together, they mostly balance out with, as I said, a slight edge to the Democrats.

But I believe this election is going to be dominated by the Great Game being played out right now, where our military is winning a tremendous victory in Iraq -- while the Democrats are desperately trying to force defeat upon us by starving the Army. If the eventual Republican candidate can frame this issue properly, it can inflict a catastrophic blow not only on the Democratic presidential candidate (presumably Hillary) but upon Democratic swing seats in Congress.

The theme should be "they're trying to force another Vietnam-style, manufactured defeat on us, just like they did in 1974."

The biggest danger to the GOP is not that we'll sound alarmist; threats to national security are so serious in people's minds that they won't hold mere alarmism against us, so long as we don't sound hysterical. The biggest danger is that the GOP might be bullied by Democrats and their press gang into muting itself on this issue, so as not to sound "extreme."

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice -- a marvelous saying I just made up. (I'm thinking of making up another one that goes, "Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue," but I haven't decided yet.) Let's grab the bull by the tail and look the facts in the face: I don't mean this personally or with any disrespect, but the Democrats surrendered to the Communists in 1974, and now they're trying to surrender to the militant Islamist terrorists in 2008.

In fact, I would love to see the following scenario play out during a debate between the Republican and Democratic nominees: They start arguing about national security. In a desperate ploy to save the Democrat, CNN's Wolf Blitzer asks a stupid question about global warming or some such asinine subject.

And the Republican, instead of answering, says... "If you don't mind, Wolf, we're having a serious discussion about national security. Sen. Clinton can decide which question interests her, but I'm going to stick with the important issue." Then he goes back on the attack against the defeatist Democrats, completely ignoring the global warming stupidity.

Heck, he could go ahead and make nearly the entire debate about national security... why not? Nobody ever won a war by "wishin' and hopin'." You win wars with brains, guts, and steel: the intelligence to come up with a winning strategy; the will to implement it and ride it all the way; and enough men and materiel to achieve victory.

Where are the Democrats on any one of these three utterly necessary resources? They have no plan for winning, no stomach for the fight, and they want to starve the Army to buy health insurance for the entire middle class.

Bang on the theme; force the Democrats to defend their wretched record. Be loud enough that they cannot just walk away. Force them to make the argument that imperialist America is causing all the problems in the world... it will only reinforce what we're saying about Democratic America-hatred.

If the Dems want to argue about who really lost Vietnam, great! That's a fight we can win. And far from being ancient history, we can bring it into the present by pointing out that they're doing the exact, same thing today.

Our "Sister Souljah" moment will come when the GOP nominee has the guts to talk directly to American Moslems and call on them to join the fight against terrorism and extremism in the name of their religion:

And demand that the Democrats join in this call for national wartime unity. Make them squirm.

If they ignore the issue, then the GOP nominee should accuse them of starving our troops and not even caring how many get killed because of their fecklessness. "Pelosi, Reid, and Hillary Clinton won't even debate the issue... it's not important enough to them. They only want to talk about defeat -- and how much they can raise your taxes to buy more pork."

The lay-off notices that the DoD is going to have to start sending out to civilian employees of the military and to defense contractors, if the Dems keep up this tactic, will deal the Democrats yet another body blow: "The Democrats are forcing the military to shut down, all because they hate George Bush more than they love America."

I'm actually getting a bit more confident about the Congressional elections; I've always been confident about the presidential election. I assumed that the Dems would have learned their lesson and started listening to folks like Rahm Emanuel and John Podesta; instead, they're still listening to Nancy Pelosi and MoveOn.org.

1. The more we win in Iraq, the more desperate they become to force a loss;
2. The more desperate they become to force a loss, the more obvious they are;
3. The more obvious they are, the easier it will be to portray them as cowardly and unAmerican in 2008.

I don't understand why they're doing this; but for as long as they continue, we need to pound on them for betraying American soldiers in the field. It's a powerful theme and one they'll be hard-pressed to refute (original definition).

At some point, if they stop, then we can sound the theme that "we forced the Democrats to come to their senses at long last; now let's hope the damage they did to our military can be reversed, before it's too late."

Follow-up with a series of GOP proposals to support the war and help the troops, and let's see how far we can push them -- incidentally pissing off their anti-American base and depressing their turnout.

I know this isn't the analysis that Rovin was looking for; but honestly, because of the stunning success of the Petraeus counterinsurgency, immigration isn't going to have much of an impact on the presidential or Senate races. It may have a larger affect on congressional and gubernatorial races; but those will be driven by unique, local situations impossible to analyze unless you're living in the middle of them.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 17, 2007, at the time of 4:31 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

October 30, 2007

Dem Prez Candidates Find Unanimity - Opposing Presidential Authority!

Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL, 95%), Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-Carpetbag, 95%), and ex-Sen. John Edwards have three things in common:

• Each is a current (or former) member of the Senate;
• Each is running for president... a.k.a. "chief executive";
• Each claims he wants presidential power curtailed, making the president little more than a congressional catspaw.

How's that last one again? I think Hillary expressed it best (with a hat tip to Real Clear Politics):

The Attorney General is the chief defender of the rule of law in our country. After Alberto Gonzales's troubled tenure, we cannot send a signal that the next Attorney General in any way condones torture or believes that the President is unconstrained by law.

What exactly does this mean? The Democrats made the meaning explicit a few days ago, as we faithfully reported in Mucking About With Mukasey: When Democratic senators write "condones torture," you should read "refuses to declare the use of waterboarding anathema, forbidden under any or all circumstances, no exceptions."

Attorney General Designate Michael Mukasey, in his Senate confirmation hearings, has so far refused to declare waterboarding to be torture or to agree to forbid the president to order it (though how Mukasey -- who works for the president, not the other way around -- could enforce such a ban is left hanging). Thus, Clinton and Obama have both declared they will not vote to confirm him. Can't have an Attorney General who thinks the president is "unconstrained by law!"

But wait -- how is waterboarding related to the "rule of law," of which the Attorney General should be "the chief defender?" No bill declaring waterboarding to be an act of torture has ever been enacted into law in the United States. In fact, Congress has never sent such a bill to the president to be vetoed. While "torture" is banned, it is left up to the president to determine how to execute that law -- specifically, to determine what does and does not constitute torture, using broad guidelines contained in various acts and treaties.

But these Democratic candidates want to remove that task from the president's plate. Rather, they want the president's understanding of the laws banning torture -- Title 18, part I, chapter 113C, § 2340 of the United States Code, for example -- to shift with every shift of the majority wind blowing from Congress, without the tedious necessity of Congress passing bills that the president is willing to sign... or (in a pinch) overriding the president's veto.

What these candidates demand is that President Bush declare waterboarding torture for no other reason than that a majority of Congress considers it torture -- as if the president himself should have no say in the matter. The so-called Commander in Chief and Chief Executive becomes a congressional spokesman, fit only to echo the understanding of the law as enunciated by congressional leaders.

The president thus becomes Chief Executive Secretary to the majority leader of the Senate and the squeaker of the House.

On a related point, recall that Democratic senators routinely ask judicial nominees, during their confirmation hearings, how they will rule on various cases. In particular, they invariably ask nominees to federal district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court whether they will uphold a woman's "right" to get an abortion, with the clear understanding that if they will not, or if they refuse to answer, that senator will oppose their confirmation. This is just as improper as demanding that an incoming Attorney General agree to congressional policy decisions that will bind the president as a condition of his confirmation; and it indicates a very disturbing pattern:

Democrats evidently believe that, while we have three coequal branches of government, one is more coequal than the others.

But it's not just my inference here; we can take the direct word of John Edwards. While Edwards has become almost a fringe candidate, he speaks for a great many other Democrats in the Senate and House. In his own statement rejecting Mukasey (though he has no say in that question), he included this paragraph:

Mukasey has also said that the president doesn't necessarily have to abide by acts of Congress. We need an Attorney General who will put the rule of law above the administration's short-term political interests, and Mukasey has already shown that he's unwilling to do that.

Sadly, Edwards actually appears to believe that a president must "abide by acts of Congress"... all of them. (The statement makes no sense unless we assume that Edwards meant to allow no exceptions; if exceptions are allowed, then anything can be an exception!) But what if a runaway Congress enacts a patently unconstitutional law? Must the president abide by it anyway?

Here is the scenario: Suppose John Edwards becomes president; and because of the Silky Pony's feckless policies, we are hit with another terrorist attack -- but this one is a widespread, distributed attack on America's malls. In 12 Gallerias across the country, a series of coordinated bombings kill 23,000 last-minute shoppers during Christmas week.

Al-Qaeda swiftly claims credit for the attacks, and within a couple of days, the attacker are identified; all are Arab Americans. In a spasm of rage, Congress passes a law ordering the immediate arrest and detention of all Americans of Arabic descent. President Edwards valiantly tries to stop the madness, but Congress overrides his veto.

He is now faced with a constitutional crisis: The act is clearly unconstitutional and should be overturned when the courts get around to hearing it. But they're in no hurry, just as they were not in 1942. So should President Edwards go ahead and implement this obviously unconstitutional act of Congress? Or should he exercise his authority -- and duty -- as a coequal branch of the government to ignore the act, on his own authority?

The point of the exercise is that "the law" is not solely determined by statutory law enacted by Congress: It also includes the Constitution, the bedrock law of our government, along with caselaw.

Likewise, Congress is not the sole arbiter of what the Constitution and the law require, either. The Supreme Court obviously plays a role; but so too does the president, in his capacity as the executor of the laws of the land -- including the most basic law, the Constitution of the United States of America.

But while Congress seems willing to include the Court into the club of those who get to determine what is constitutional, it is equally pleased to include the president out of that fraternal order. And since many senators also believe they should only confirm judges who agree in advance to decide certain cases in favor of the senator's position, these members of Congress quite clearly believe that Congress should be preeminent in determining what "rule of law" means. This tendency crosses party lines, by the way; cf. Sens. Arlen Specter (R-PA, 43%), Lindsay Graham (R-SC, 83%), and everyone on the Gang of Fourteen.

This is almost an attempt at a slow-moving, bloodless coup d'état... well, "bloodless" in the sense that they do not openly espouse killing the president; but they do push policies that are likely to get a lot of Americans killed, in the guise of protecting their "civil liberties." From Hillary again:

We need to restore the nation’s confidence in the Department of Justice. The Department must once again defend our Constitution and the rule of law without regard to ideology and partisanship. And we need to protect the country from terrorism while also respecting Americans’ civil liberties.

It's not quite clear to me how waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- a Kuwaiti on the lam, who was captured by Pakistani troops in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, with or without CIA participation, and was transferred to CIA custody -- impacts "Americans’ civil liberties." Perhaps Hillary Clinton will elaborate when she's asked that tough question during tonight's Democratic candidates' debate. [Note for the irony impaired...]

In fact, I do not believe there is any evidence that any American citizen or legal resident has ever been waterboarded in order to obtain information. However, we have waterboarded many American soldiers and CIA interrogators as part of their training for either resisting that interrogation technique (in the case of soldiers) or using it on captured terrorists (in the case of CIA interrogators).

Also, at least one reporter, Fox News Channel's Steve Harrigan, voluntarily underwent three of the reputed five stages of waterboarding for a video report. Harrigan pronounced it "torture," but he also noted that just a few minutes after each session, he felt perfectly fine -- which makes his pronouncement a bit dicey, as all definitions of psychological torture I've seen, including the legal one above, require "prolonged mental harm" resulting from the session.

Others who have undergone it, including many military and CIA personnel, say it's not torture. The point is not to prove one way or another (though I believe it is not torture, and I would happily undergo it just out of curiosity) but to prove a much easier point: That waterboarding is a controversial issue with people of good faith and strong experience landing on both sides.

In other words, it's a perfect candidate for a case by case determination whether it's legitimate to use waterboarding to obtain intelligence information, based upon the criticality of the information sought, the particular person it's sought from, and any prevailing exigent circumstances. Implementation like this is precisely the purview of the Executive branch, not the Legislative -- which creates one size fits all rules for everyone -- or the Judiciary -- which decides ex-post facto whether information gathered can be used at trial; nobody has ever attempted to use a "confession" obtained by waterboarding in court as evidence at the confessor's criminal trial.

Whether or not to use waterboarding to obtain critical intelligence is a job for Super President, not Glacially Ponderous Judge or Mealy-Mouthed Congressman. But to the top three Democratic candidates for Chief Executive Secretary of the United States Congress, branches one and two need only ask Congress what they think, and then rubber-stamp the congressional leadership's decision... the president as puppet.

I wonder: How much of this do they truly believe and would actually follow through on if elected... and how much is just electoral hype in the never-ending Democrat hit single, "The Bushies Have Bushwhacked America"?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 30, 2007, at the time of 6:26 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

October 26, 2007

Cheap-Jack Way to Get Another Post Up

I really love this advert -- taken from the best line of the most recent Republican candidates' debate:

You can see it in all its glory (and embed it, whatever) here.

Say, look at that -- a three-minute post! (Hat tip to Paul at Power Line, who also used it as a cheap-jack way to get another post up. But we are all honorable men...)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 26, 2007, at the time of 5:50 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 25, 2007

Jindal Bells Ring In a New Era

In a stunning victory that few expected so early in the Louisiana election process, Rep. Bobby Jindal won election as governor last Saturday (October 21st, 2007) by garnering more than 50% of the vote in a crowded field. Jindal will be the youngest governor in the United States at 36 years old.

(And contrary to apparently widespread belief, Jindal is eligible to run for president, as he is a native-born American, not an immigrant._

Our previous Jindal Bells post is here.

What may also be unexpected is the way that Louisianans have faced up to the catastrophe that is the current governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco; they now embrace the view that the Katrina disaster was largely a failure of state, not federal response:

Mr. Jindal’s victory over a state Democratic party weakened by perceptions of post-hurricane incompetence and corruption was expected, as he has had an overwhelming lead in polls for months. The incumbent, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, hurt by stumbles after Hurricane Katrina, did not seek re-election....

Mr. Jindal campaigned as a cautious reformer, promising a more ethical government, for example, with greater transparency from lobbyists and legislators. His extensive résumé helped him project an image of competence, as did his detailed if conventional policy prescriptions — both evidently appealing to voters here weary of missteps in government since Hurricane Katrina.

While it may be easy for those "on the spot" -- in Hollywood, Chicago, and DC -- to spout the traditional Democratic "Katrina Truther" storyline of a heroic Gov. Blanco begging for help from a cold and callous Bush administration determined to permanently evacuate all the blacks out of New Orleans (failing that, to drown them by blowing up the levees)... those ordinary people actually living in Louisiana cannot help contrast the cleanup, reconstruction, and building efforts in the Pelican State with that of neighboring Mississippi (the Magnolia State, in case you're interested).

While Mississippi has done a fairly good job of rebuilding -- enough so that the elite media seems uninterested in reporting on the progress -- Louisiana has lagged, and its citizens have noticed. But the lag is not universal; it's much worse on projects controlled by state and local authorities than on projects paid for and run by private individuals or companies -- and don't think the residents haven't noticed that, too:

Two years after the devastating floods that followed Hurricane Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans, and much of the Gulf Coast, has largely taken two paths: communities that have rebuilt themselves using private funds, insurance money and sheer will -- and publicly funded efforts that have moved much more slowly.

Federal, state and local governments have struggled to speed up the release of funds and restore infrastructure. None of the 115 "critical priority projects" identified by city officials has been completed: For example, New Orleans' police superintendent still works out of a trailer, as do most of the city's firefighters. And analysts at the city's crime lab don't have a laboratory to match DNA samples.

The delays have affected the poor the most — those dependent on government assistance to rebuild their lives. While middle- and upper-class neighborhoods have rebuilt using private insurance and contacts, residents of low-income areas such as the Lower 9th Ward and Holy Cross — roughly 20,000 of them — for the most part remain scattered throughout the region, their return uncertain.

However, it's not lack of federal funds, as the USA Today article suggests; by July of 2007, Congress had already allocated $128 billion worth of tax credits, loan guarantees, but mostly direct block grants to the states affected by Hurricane Katrina. The problem, as the libertarian Reason Magazine points out, is that nobody really knows how to spend that money:

So it's not a lack of funding that's the problem. It's spending the money. Under existing laws, FEMA can't simply write checks to Katrina victims. Some recipients would undoubtedly squander their funds, and there would be widespread fraud. This isn't idle speculation. According to the Government Accountability Office, immediately after Katrina hit, about a billion dollars of emergency aid—16 percent of the total—was lost to fraudulent claims. Even legitimately obtained pre-paid debit cards given to aid Katrina's victims were used to buy champagne, guns, tattoos, and porn.

Unfortunately, the other option -- the one currently in place -- isn't any better: government micromanagement of payouts. This is where you get the [Louisiana] Road Home program's Byzantine policies, which includes dozens of dizzying, intermediate steps between filing a claim and the receipt of funds and, consequently, the plodding pace of recovery we've seen over the last two years. Because of legitimate fears that money will be squandered, mismanaged, or lost to fraud, the money sits unused.

But while Mississipians seem by and large satisfied with the actions by Gov. Haley Barbour, Lousianans did not the feel the same about Gov. Blanco. In fact, opposition to her was so intense that last March, Blanco dropped out of her own reelection campaign. Thus ends the short, hapless career of Kathleen Babineaux Blanco.

In 2003, she beat Jindal 52-48 in an election marred by very questionable eleventh-hour ads Blanco ran accusing Jindal of throwing tens of thousands of poor patients off of Medicaid when he was Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health & Hospitals from 1996 to 1998. Considering the bitterness of that race, it must truly gall Blanco that she will be succeeded by the very man she worked so hard to destroy.

Jindal was also the top vote-getter in 2003's first round of voting; but this year, he did 20 points better, actually finishing above the 50% mark; thus the first round of voting is the only round... almost unheard of for a candidate who is not the incumbent and has never been governor before.

But the main change in Louisiana politics is likely to be on the ethics front. In most people's minds, Louisiana edges out Hawaii, Illinois, and New Jersey to win the prize as the most corrupt state in the union. The image is propelled by the state's history, from Huey P. "the Kingfish" Long to Rep. William "Cold Cash" (a.k.a. "Freezerburn") Jefferson (D-LA, 60%). Long was the governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932 (and nominally U.S. senator from Louisiana from 1931 -- yes, he was both governor and senator simultaneously -- until his assassination in 1935); William Jefferson is the Louisiana representative in whose freezer the FBI found $90,000 in cash.

Jindal insists that his first action will be to clean up Baton Rouge, the state capital, and then the rest of the state government apparatus. It's an open question whether the Louisiana State Legislature, heavily dominated by Democrats in both chambers, will permit an end to the corruption they have come to accept as a mandatory perk of public office. But I have no doubt that Jindal himself is sincere and will fight hard to legitimize his state.

And then, will this young, energetic, conservative, charismatic, born-again Roman Catholic Indian American run for the presidency? If so, he will make a formidable opponent to whichever old, entrenched, left-liberal, peacenik the Democratic Party nominates that cycle.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 25, 2007, at the time of 6:27 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

October 19, 2007

An Inconvenient Demographic Truth

Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL, 95%) is on a tear. He demands the arrest and execution -- all right, he demands the firing of the head of the Justice Department's civil-rights division, John Tanner, for allegedly racial comments Tanner delivered at the National Latino Congress. According to Obama, the comments were "patently erroneous, offensive and dangerous, and they are especially troubling coming from the federal official charged with protecting voting rights in this country."

(John Tanner of the DoJ is not to be confused with Rep. John S. Tanner, D-TN, 55%.)

So what, exactly, did the hapless Tanner say that got Sen. Obama so het up? This is according to AP, which got it from YouTube:

John Tanner's remarks came during an Oct. 5 panel discussion on minority voters before the National Latino Congreso in Los Angeles. Tanner addressed state laws that require photo identification for voting, saying that elderly voters disproportionately don't have the proper IDs.

"That's a shame, you know, creating problems for elderly persons just is not good under any circumstance," Tanner said, according to video posted on YouTube. "Of course, that also ties into the racial aspect because our society is such that minorities don't become elderly the way white people do. They die first.

"There are inequities in health care. There are a variety of inequities in this country, and so anything that disproportionately impacts the elderly has the opposite impact on minorities. Just the math is such as that," Tanner said.

So was Tanner's remark evidence of a deep-seated bias against minorities? Is Tanner, as Obama so clearly suggests (though he's too slick to openly accuse), a racist? Judge for yourself:

When I watch that video, and when I read the transcript, I actually get the opposite impression: I think Tanner is too closely aligned with the Democrats on the race issue. First of all, he laments that blacks and Hispanics don't have as long a lifespan as whites -- and then he immediately attributes this to "inequities in health care."

This is a liberal slogan -- "slogan," from the Gaelic sluagh-ghairm, "battle cry" -- similar to "tax cuts for the rich" or "speak truth to power." Nearly everybody who utters the phrase "inequities in health care" is either a liberal or is quoting one.

Long sidebar

What inequities are those? Is he saying that doctors look at a black patient and say, "oh, he's black -- let's not treat him?" Is he saying that surgeons operate less attentively on "minorities" than on whites, making more mistakes?

He does not even consider the possibility that the shorter lifespans could have a non-discriminatory cause: Eating and exercise habits, rate of smoking and drinking alcohol, differing cultural norms of how often to visit a doctor for routine checkups, and so forth.

Much of the lifespan gap can be attributed to poverty, particularly for blacks: As of 2006, the non-Hispanic white poverty rate is 8.2%, the Asian poverty rate is 10.3%, Hispanic is 20.6%.. and black is 24.3%, nearly three times the white rate. It should hardly shock anyone that poor people often have inadequate health care... and not for lack of federal programs to offer health care to the poor; rather, because government-run health-care facilities and government-supplied health insurance is not as good as privately run facilities and private health insurance.

So are more blacks and Hispanics poor because of racism? I suspect a tiny portion of the gap may be explained by that; but most is explained by behavior and mindset. Poverty is not "the lack of money;" people can be broke but not poor. In a capitalist country like the United States, poverty is primarily caused by a poverty mindset -- thinking and acting in identifiable ways that lead to repeated economic failure:

• Bad work habits
• Violence
• Substance abuse
• Crime
• Laziness
• Lack of education (which means lack of interest in an education, as education is widely available)
• Not being married (married couples have a significantly higher income level than singles)
• Refusal to accept personal responsibility for one's own condition

Sadly, the black culture in America today tends to encourage, to a much greater extent than the white culture, exactly these negative traits: Poor blacks aren't poor because of their skin pigmentation but because of the lousy black cultural elements they have internalized.

The proof is that blacks who don't evince such a mindset tend to do very well in society and have no obvious "ceiling" -- as testified by Sen. Barack Obama himself, as well as Justice Clarence Thomas, Secretary of State and former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell, Black Entertainment Television founder Robert L. Johnson, talk-show hosts Tavis Smiley and Larry Elder, tens of thousands of black executives, hundreds of thousands of black entrepeneurs, and the 2.5 million black families earning more than $75,000 per year... all of whom are just as black (racially) as those blacks in poverty. The difference is cultural mindset. (And notice that I didn't even bother listing any entertainers or sports figures.)

Among Hispanics, I would guess that a large portion of the poverty gap is explained by immigration status and by lack of English language skills; again, that is not racism, and it is remediable.

So let's get back to poor John Tanner (remember him? this post is all about him!) We've established that Tanner believes that the life-expectancy gap is due to "inequities in health care." This is not only wrong, it's a liberal shibboleth: If you don't loudly and frequently proclaim that racism is responsible for all the ills (in this case, literally) of minorities in the United States, I think they yank your ACLU card.

I convict John Tanner of harboring and expressing liberal ideas. If he is a racist, it's only in the liberal mode of assuming that the fate of minorities lies not in their own hands but those of their oppressors.

Was Tanner wrong?

But let's get to the meat of Obama's complaint. He lambastes Tanner's remark -- which, in case you've forgotten in all the excitement, was that "minorities don't become elderly the way white people do. They die first" -- as "patently erroneous, offensive and dangerous."

I cannot speak to whether it was offensive; if Obama says he was offended, I'll take his word for it. But being offensive is not a firable, uh, offense; otherwise, the president, the Court, and the entire congressional leadership (both sides) would be in the unemployment line.

Was it dangerous? Perhaps -- but I suspect Obama and I would disagree about which was the dangerous part: the bit about minorities not living as long as whites, or the explanation that this was due to "inequities."

So let's stick to the only Obama claim that is actually testable: Was Tanner's off the cuff remark "patently erroneous?"

AP takes a stab at answering this question:

It is well documented that black Americans - particularly black males - have shorter life expectancies than whites. But blacks do live to become senior citizens.

A black person born in 2004 had an average life expectancy of 73.1 years, about five years less than for whites, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Alas, this is risible. They look at the lifespan of blacks and whites born in 2004, who will not hit the "Social Security retirement age" of 67, typically thought to be the beginning of "senior citizen" status, until 2071, long after the period of enforcement of voter ID laws we're talking about today. But hold on, partner -- will the Social Security full-benefit retirement age still be 67 in 2071?

Hardly likely: As lifespans increase, causing a huge increase in the percent of living adults who are older than 67 (by then, they will probably outnumber working adults who are younger than 67), we will have to make radical changes in Social Security; it will collapse otherwise, for the obvious reason that one worker cannot walk around carrying two retired people on his back. Clearly, we will be forced to privatize the system; but we will also be forced to raise the "retirement age" significantly -- which makes sense in a world of people routinely living to 120 (or older).

So if it were really true that the expected lifespan of blacks born in 2004 were 73 years, that would almost certainly be less than the "retirement age" (for Social Security purposes) then. Fortunately, it's poppycock to assert that human lifespans will be so short seventy years from now. That expectation assumes that a life-expectancy curve that has been rising exponentially abruptly turned linear three years ago, and that there will be no stunning medical breakthroughs in the next seven decades. I believe it's far more likely that human lifespans will be measured in centuries by 2071.

In any event, AP completely misses the target: The question is not how long blacks will live by 2071. Tanner made his remarks this year, speaking in the present tense; and he didn't say "senior citizens" -- he said "elderly," which is quite different. He was not predicting whether minorities would tend to reach Social-Security retirement age 67 years from now; he was talking about how many lived to become "elderly" today.

Well... how many do? Again, we turn to the United States Census, the best arbiter of such questions. And let's take a stab at what "elderly" means.

I argue that 67 should not be considered "elderly" in the sense that Tanner uses the term. He isn't saying that people over 67 tend not to have drivers licenses; that's absurd. But at older ages, people do start having problems passing a drivers license vision examination; they start having difficulty driving and may lose their licenses because of too many infractions or collisions; they start being required to take driving tests each time they renew their licenses, and they can fail those tests.

If an oldster loses his drivers license, he loses his photo ID. He must make a special effort to get a new, different form of ID -- a state-issued ID card, a passport, something. The idea is that some portion will simply not care enough to get the ID, thus disenfranchising themselves.

(But of course, if the penalty for not getting new ID was the loss of the right to vote, then elderly voters -- who vote much more assiduously than youths -- would have more incentive to get the ID.)

In any event, the loss of driving ability is more associated with those over 80 than those aged 67. But let's be generous and give Sen. Obama the benefit of the doubt; let's say 70 and older is "elderly." To be 70 or older today, one must have been born in 1937 or earlier. So what was the lifespan of blacks, Hispanics, and Asians born then?

Alas, the numbers are sketchy that early; Table 27 (linked above) shows the figures for those born in 1900 and in 1950, but nothing in between. However, we can interpolate: The life expectancy for blacks born in 1900 was 33.0 years; for blacks born in 1950, it was 60.8. If we assume a linear increase, that would mean 0.6 extra years of lifespan per year of birth. Thus, blacks born in 1937 would have an interpolated life expectancy of just about 53 years.

Using the same rough interpolation model, whites born in 1937 would have a life expectancy of about 63.5 years. It should be obvious to all that the percent of blacks who are currently 70 and older will be much less than the percent of whites that old.

I don't have a similar table for Hispanics, but I would not be surprised if they fell somewhere in between white and black life-expectancy rates. Asians may well have longer expected lifespans; but they're a much smaller percent of the "minority" population of the United States.

The point of which is simply that Tanner's offhand remark -- was, in fact, factually correct: Blacks and Hispanics, as a group, do not "become elderly the way white people do;" they do, in fact, tend to die instead -- at a much larger rate than whites. It is a simple (and sad) fact of demography.

Clearly, even if a voter-ID bill had a significant impact on the enfranchisement of older voters, it would have a less-significant effect on blacks and Hispanics -- because fewer of them live to be elderly. And no scientific study I've heard of shows that whites and "minorities" of the same age have different rates of photo-ID possession.

Final thought

But somehow, I doubt that matters; nor does the strong likelihood that John Tanner, "head of the Justice Department's voting rights division," is in fact fairly liberal. I believe what really upsets Obama is not that small thing Tanner said in service to making a point about alleged and unnamed "inequities" in health care.

Rather, it is this:

Obama also criticized Tanner for clearing [approving] a Georgia law that requires voters to show government-issued photo IDs at the polls. It was upheld by a federal judge last month.

Opponents say photo ID laws will disenfranchise minorities, the poor and the elderly who don't have driver's licenses or other valid government-issued photo IDs. Supporters of such laws say they are needed to prevent voter fraud.

The Left profoundly believes, as an article of faith, that not only do voter-ID laws discriminate against minority voters... but that such discrimination is the core intent of conservatives who promote such laws.

Democrats and liberals believe that voter-ID laws will hurt them at the polls; which is true enough, since without the votes of aliens, felons, repeat-voters, and the dead, many fewer Democrats would hold office. But this doesn't require Republicans to be racists, as none of these types of people is a legitimate voter anyway.

But what the Left actually believes is that, for some odd and never explained reason, blacks, Hispanics, and single women don't carry drivers licenses. So any voter-ID law would turn away many valid voters who tend to vote Democratic.

I have no idea why liberals think that; perhaps it's the soft bigotry of low expectations rearing its ugly head again. But if true, and if that really were the intent of conservatives, then it would be reasonable to call conservatives racists and sexists.

The conservatives I know, however -- and even those liberals who support voter-ID, such as (I believe) John Tanner -- do not believe that such laws stop blacks, Hispanics, or single women from voting; rather, they believe it stops fraudulent voters from voting. There is no evidence at all that John Tanner is a racist... even though he supports voter-ID laws and even approved the one in Georgia.

But reality doesn't really matter, does it? Under the Democratic definition of racism, a person is a racist if his "victims" feel as if they have been racially abused, no matter what the "victimizer" did or did not do. As Alexander Meiklejohn said (or at least, it has been attributed to him), "Some crimes are so heinous that not even innocence is a defense."

So brace yourselves for another hellstorm of hysteria from the Left, led in this case by Sen. Barack Hussein Obama, the man who would be America's second black president.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 19, 2007, at the time of 7:40 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

October 12, 2007

The Shia Awaken

We've talked about this in previous posts -- for example, in The "Don't Make Waves!" Theory of Iraqi Politics -- but it occurred to me as soon as I began hearing about the "Anbar awakening" that the same dynamic would apply to the Shiite areas of Iraq: In short order, the Shiite militias were sure to go overboard in their thuggish, homicidal zeal, and begin brutalizing the Shia... just as al-Qaeda in Iraq did against the Sunni. At that moment, time would be ripe for a "Shia awakening," where Iraqi shia would turn on the militias that presume to speak for them.

Surprise, it's starting to happen... and even the New York Times has sat up and taken note:

In a number of Shiite neighborhoods across Baghdad, residents are beginning to turn away from the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia they once saw as their only protector against Sunni militants. Now they resent it as a band of street thugs without ideology.

The hardening Shiite feeling in Baghdad opens an opportunity for the American military, which has long struggled against the Mahdi Army, as American commanders rely increasingly on tribes and local leaders in their prosecution of the war.

The Times does a remarkable job (for the elite media) of fairly and in unbiased fashion describing the mechanism of Shiite discontent (apologies for the long quotation):

In interviews, 10 Shiites from four neighborhoods in eastern and western Baghdad described a pattern in which militia members, looking for new sources of income, turned on Shiites....

The street militia of today bears little resemblance to the Mahdi Army of 2004, when Shiites following a cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, battled American soldiers in a burst of Shiite self-assertion. Then, fighters doubled as neighborhood helpers, bringing cooking gas and other necessities to needy families.

Now, three years later, many members have left violence behind, taking jobs in local and national government, while others have plunged into crime, dealing in cars and houses taken from dead or displaced victims of both sects.

Even the demographics have changed. Now, street fighters tend to be young teenagers from errant families, in part the result of American military success. Last fall, the military began an aggressive campaign of arresting senior commanders, leaving behind a power vacuum and directionless junior members.

“Now it’s young guys — no religion, no red lines,” said Abbas, 40, a Shiite car parts dealer in Ameen, a southern Baghdad neighborhood. Abbas’s 22-year-old cousin, Ratib, was shot in the mouth this spring after insulting Mahdi militia members.

“People hate them,” Abbas said. “They want them to disappear from their lives.”

A mouthpiece for Iranian puppet Muqtada Sadr carefully explained that all of the Mahdi Militia members committing criminal violence against Iraqis are actually -- by that very act -- not members of the Mahdi Militia... a useful and fluid redefinition that allows the militia to slough off all accountability for the violence that continues, albeit at a much slower rate.

And as Sachi has argued many times in this blog, when Sadr does return from Iran (like the Turkish ambassador to the United States, Muqtada Sadr was withdrawn to his host country Iran for "further consultations"), he will not only find that the remnants of the Mahdi Militia don't want him or any of his "loyal lieutenants" back, but that there's no more militia to return to anyway.

I may as well go public with a bold prediction I have privately made to several friends: Big Lizards predicts that the Iraq insurgency is going to collapse much faster than anyone has publicly dared suggest. First AQI dangles at the end of its rope (there's a nice visual); now the Shia turn on the Mahdi and Badr militias. So who's minding the insurgency?

The collapse of the insurgency would have happened much earlier, in my opinion, were it not for the intervention of foreign forces. No, I don't mean the United States and the Coalition... I mean Iran's aggressive warmongering and the foreign hirabis from central al-Qaeda. Both Iran and al-Qaeda -- the latter may be funded by the former -- saw a national or ideological interest in fomenting a civil war in Iraq.

However, because of the essentially tribal -- not sectarian -- nature of Iraq, coupled with a cohesive Iraqi identity binding the tribes together, both Iran and al-Qaeda were unsuccessful; there never was a real civil war in Iraq... not even in 2006, after AQI blew up the golden-domed al-Askiri Mosque in Samarra on February 22nd. Both sects carried out a long wave of gangland massacres; but neither fielded armies or set up shadow governments.

As it becomes clear that there never will be a civil war, and that the Iraqis have turned against the joint insurgencies (Sunni against al-Qaeda and Shia against Iran), rather than being driven by fear into the arms of their Islamist "saviors," I strongly believe the principals will pull back. In the long run, neither has the resources to remain engaged in a losing war.

This will happen months before the November elections; and the victory in Iraq will play a major role. Simply put, the Democrats have some small nits against the GOP, but they're old chestnuts such as abortion and tax cuts; the only major new argument was over Iraq. In the 2006 elections, the Iraq war appeared to be a loser -- and so too were the Republicans. But they didn't lose as much as the Democrats had predicted; many voters took a "wait and see" attitude.

And good thing they did. If the war goes as I predict, and the very significant drop in violence we've seen continues, accompanied by a significant drop in the level of U.S. forces in Iraq (possibly to as low as 75,000) and a concommitent drop in American casualties, Iraq will increasingly and correctly be seen as a historic American victory.

Bear in mind, this is no guarantee that the voters will reward the Republicans: A Democratic President, Woodrow Wilson, and a Democratic Congress entered into World War I in 1917, won it handily in 1918... and in that same year, the GOP captured both houses of Congress. Two years later, Republicans solidified their congressional gains and added the presidency, all in a landslide. Even so, it's surely better for the sane party if Iraq is considered a victory, not a defeat.

Let's invite the Times to pen the Mahdi Militia's epitaph:

Ali, the Ur businessman, said he expected the Mahdi Army to be much smaller in the future. People simply do not believe its leaders anymore. “There is no ideology among them anymore,” he said.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 12, 2007, at the time of 11:11 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Le Duc Tho, Jimmy Carter, Yassir Arafat - and Al Gore?

As you've all no doubt seen, the whispers turned out to be correct, for a change: Algore, in conjunction with the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, has won the Nobel "Peace" prize.

Now perhaps someone can explain to me what on earth global warming has to do with "world peace"...

Oh, wait; here we go:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said global warming, "may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth's resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states."

Well! Who can argue with that?

Drudge has already linked to speculation that this will propel Algore into the presidential race, a possibility that Friend Lee and I were kicking around recently:

All of Gore's body language and every answer he has given to questions about running have been to discourage the idea that he would become a candidate. But for whatever reason, he has declined to make a definitive statement taking himself out of the running.

Only he knows the reason for that. Is it just to play with the press and the political community and then revel in the absurdity of all the speculation or is it because he actually believes there might be a set of events that would make is possible for him to run and win?

I assume that if Gore does decide to run, his entire campaign will more or less revolve around implementing some draconian, Luddite shutdown of industry in order to appease the Globaloney gods. Will that, combined with his status as the angriest dog in the world, be enough to knock Hillary off her pedestal of clay?

I have long believed that Hillary Clinton's only political asset is the "aura of inevitability" that surrounds her like a foggy, opalescent soap bubble; a serious campaign kafuffle could puncture it. Within the soap bubble, an old and familiar dust-devil still swirls around Sen. Clinton (D-Carpetbag, 95%), like the cloud constantly following around Pig Pen in Peanuts: a curious Clintonian cacophany of coincidence, inside of which weird things just... happen.

• A thousand dollars of aimless investment miraculously turns into $100,000 worth of cattle futures;
• Billing records vanish, then just as mysteriously reappear after the statute of limitations has run;
• The Attorney General of the United States abruptly cannot bear to appoint an independent counsel to investigate even the most well-founded allegations of gunpowder, treason, and plot;
• Documents disappear from the National Archives and are destroyed, and the miscreant -- former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger -- not only gets off with a slap on the well-padded wrist, he ends up advising Hillary on national-security issues. Son of a gun! Wonder how that just happened to... happen?

None of these incidents has any real cause, and certainly nobody is to blame; they're just -- amazing coincidences. Nobody in the elite media would dream of questioning the First Lady or the senator (now) from the great state of New York; and like Mary Poppins, she never explains anything.

But this is possible only because of the magic bubbles that others have always lent her, hiding the cacophany of coincidence: First, President Bill prevented those prying eyes, for his own reasons, by coarse and vulgar threats. Then she was shielded by being the senior junior senator from New York, with all the political power that carries.

And now, the aura of her inevitable presidency -- created by the press, the Democratic primary voters, and even the other Democratic candidates -- shields her from questions she shies from answering and arguments she shrinks from debating, even during a so-called "candidates' debate."

But now, if Mr. Inconvenient Truth decides to ride his Oscar, Emmy, and Nobel steed into the Democratic primary (campaign slogan: "Re-elect Al Gore!"), how long before his rusty sword lances that boil of inevitability? There is real bad blood between the Clintons (especially Hillary) and the Gores (especially Tipper -- mee-ow!); I think the latter believe that all the money, political muscle, and attention lavished upon the former played a major role in the latter winding up unemployed and overweight in 2001. All the king's Carvilles and all the king's Begalas were so busy getting Hillary the Roman toga she was promised, in exchange for not divorcing Bill, that they were unavailable to help push Vice President Gore over the top.

I believe there is at least a 50% chance that the Democratic race for the nomination is about to go from Clintonian coronation to globaloney Gore-gasm in sixty seconds. If Rantin' Al Gore decides to throw his head into the ring, then all bets are off.

And who knows? I might even pull an incredible victory out of a prediction I had long since written off as failed. And that would make it all worthwhile.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 12, 2007, at the time of 3:50 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

October 10, 2007

Are We Going to HillaryFare?

Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-Carpetbag, 95%) was roundly mocked for her "Hillsbury Doughboy" proposal, which she made before a forum hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus, to dig down deep into other people's pockets to send $5,000 to every newborn in America. So she dumped it as casually as she threw Billy Dale under the bus. What are black voters going to do -- vote Republican?

Now she has a new scheme to lurch America further along towards Socialism: She wants the federal government to pay $1,000 in "matching funds" every year to every (low-income) American who puts $1,000 in a fake, government-run "401K". What a wonderful, new way to create yet another government piggy bank -- in addition to Social Security -- that the liberals can loot whenever they run short!

(Nota bene: That's $1,000 matching funds to lower-income investors only -- under 60 Gs; higher-income investors, 60 to 100 grand, only get $500 per year in matching funds. $100 thou a year, and you're SOL.)

The tens of billions of dollars to fund this scheme would come from heavily taxing "large" estates. So let's think this through: We kill the rich and feed them to the poor, forcing middle-income people to liquidate family farms and family businesses, so that we can redistribute that (clearly unearned) wealth to the poor. Sounds familiar, somehow...

Let's call Hillary's new welfare program "HillaryFare" for short.

Of course, it likely wouldn't pass Congress; but that's not the point, is it? It serves to burnish Hillary's credentials with the all-important MoveOn.org, George Soros, "two Americas" crowd, thus further crippling the anemic campaign of the Silky Pony, John Edwards, and causing Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL, 95%) to become even more tongue-tied in debates:

While many Democrats would embrace an estate tax freeze, many Republicans and antitax stalwarts would oppose it, and Democrats would probably have a hard time passing such legislation in the United States Senate, where the party’s majority is currently razor-thin.

But suppose enough Democrats are elected that President Hillary is able to get this thing passed as she proposes it. Has anybody bothered to run the numbers, here?

Hillary boldly estimates that the whole pyramid scheme would only cost "$20 billion to $25 billion a year." Let's assume that half the "investors" in this government numbers racket fall in the under sixty thousand category, while the rest are between sixty and a hundred. Then the average per capita payment by the federal government is $750 per year; the total cost, allowing for about 40% in overhead costs (which is typical of government programs), would be $1,250 per person, per year.

The $20 billion to $25 billion that Hillary proposes for this, er, idea would cover only 16 to 20 million people (the way the Times writes it, it appears to be open to every person, not every family).

So what if instead, after a year or two, we have 40 million families taking advantage of the government's largess? It shouldn't be that tough to get 13% of the population to go for it; heck, even higher-income earners wouldn't sneeze at a guaranteed 50% return on investment. I would take it!

All right; with 40 million fake investors, now the cost is up to $30 billion of actual matching funds, which works out to $50 billion per year in total costs to the government. That's a lot of samoyans. But in fact, Hillary is far more grandiose -- though she keeps this part of the mathematics pretty close to her vest. Viz:

“We’ve got a lot of workers -- more than half in America right now -- without any employer-based retirement system,” she added, noting that the number included about 770,000 workers in Iowa.

Half of all workers in America: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics household data, "total employment" in the United States is currently 146.3 million (page 2, table A). So if half of those don't have an "employer-based retirement system," and those are the targets of HillaryFare -- then is she really planning on sending those $500 and $1,000 matching-fund checks to 73.15 million people every year?

That's $55 billion dollars a year just in matching funds; add in the overhead, and you get an annual price tag of over $90 billion each and every year.

But wait -- just like the Ginsu knives, there's more! Of course, the investment ceiling of the program would have to have its own growth curve; in ten years, $1,000 won't be worth what it is today. If Social Security and welfare programs are any indicator, that growth curve will be significantly steeper than the inflation index. So how long before HillaryCare is costing us $100 billion, $130 billion, even $180 billion per year in a new middle-class entitlement program?

So in addition to HillaryCare II -- where 25 year old children whose families make up to $80 thousand a year get government-run health-care plans -- the good senator more or less from New York also promises to put half the whole country on the government welfare rolls.

But all is not lost. Having learnt her lesson from the 1994 HillaryCare I debacle, Sen. Clinton now supports individual choice:

As with her biggest policy plan for universal health insurance, Mrs. Clinton cast her savings proposal in terms of choice: If Americans like their 401(k) plans and other retirement accounts, they can keep those, while those who lack any savings plan will have a chance to start one with government help and save $5,000 a year on a tax-deferred basis.

In other words, those who like HillaryFare better than their own retirement accoutns will be lured from private to public funding... just the way the new Democratic S-CHP proposal lures millions of families from private medical insurance for their kids to government-run health care. So it's not just the 73.15 million people above; we may well be paying matching funds to a bunch of people who currently do have an employer-based retirement system!

Can we go back to the $5,000 baby bounty instead?

You know, the way Hillary Rodham Clinton Rodham is going, I fully expect that by this time next year... she'll be offering to buy our children at birth and raise them in liberal incubators.

Sen. Clinton has a simple philosophy about our golden years:

“Saving in the accounts will be easy -- it should not require a Ph.D. to save for retirement,” Mrs. Clinton said.

She's right, it doesn't take a Ph.D. It takes a village idiot.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 10, 2007, at the time of 3:18 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

October 3, 2007

New Hsus for Old

So Hillary swamped the field by raising $27 million in the third quarter for her presidential coronation.

But I'm driven to wonder: How much of that money comes from actual contributers carefully weighing the alternatives and deciding on the Divine Mrs. C.... and how much comprises Norman Hsu-like bundled donations from reimbursed contributers, extorted contributers, and fake people?

Inquiring minds want to know -- and so should the Federal Elections Commission!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 3, 2007, at the time of 3:29 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 27, 2007

Identity Crisis

This term, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case turning on whether it's constitutional to demand that voters present a picture ID card before voting:

With the 2008 presidential and Congressional elections on the horizon, the Supreme Court agreed today to consider whether voter-identification laws unfairly keep poor people and members of minority groups from going to the polls.

The justices will hear arguments from an Indiana case, in which a federal district judge and a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in January upheld a state law requiring, with certain exceptions, that someone wanting to vote in person in a primary or general election present a government-issued photo identification. Presumably, the court would rule on the case by June.

Before the law was enacted in 2005, an Indiana voter was required only to sign a book at the polling place, where a photocopy of the voter’s signature was kept on file.

This issue fascinates me because it touches on a critical philosophical difference: Is it unconstitutional to require voters to undertake a series of steps before they can exercise the franchise, merely because the people most likely to be too lazy to undertake them also tend to vote for one major party more than the other? For that is the real issue here:

Writing for the majority, Judge [Richard A.] Posner acknowledged that the Indiana law favors one party. “No doubt most people who don’t have photo ID are low on the economic ladder and thus, if they do vote, are more likely to vote for Democratic than Republican candidates,” he wrote.

But the purpose of the law is to reduce voting fraud, “and voting fraud impairs the right of legitimate voters to vote by diluting their votes — dilution being recognized to be an impairment of the right to vote,” Judge Posner said. And assertions that many people will be disenfranchised, or that there is no significant voter-fraud problem in Indiana, are based on unreliable data and “may reflect nothing more than the vagaries of journalists’ and other investigators’ choice of scandals to investigate,” the judge held.

In dissent, Judge Evans wrote that the Indiana law imposed an unconstitutional burden on some eligible voters. “Let’s not beat around the bush,” he wrote. “The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.”

Of course, we already require such steps: Registering, for example -- though many activists now demand that this requirement too be done away with, allowing into the ballot booth anyone who shows up with the ability to sign his name (or someone's). But it's hard to believe that the Court would strike down an election law that includes the mere requirement that you pre-register. But that means they (and most people) accept in theory the strategy of requiring a certain degree of hoop-jumping before voting; we're only arguing about how many hoops and how high they can be mounted.

The judges on the 7th Circus split (surprise!) along partisan fault lines: Posner and Diane S. Sykes, in the majority, were appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, respectively; while the dissenter, Terence T. Evans, was a Bill Clinton appointee. And as the New York Times hastens to point out...

In general, Republicans argue that identification laws reduce voter fraud, while Democrats oppose them on grounds that they lower the turnout among people who tend to vote Democratic.

Yes: convicts, illegal aliens, folks from neighboring states, and people who already voted six times that day. The mainstay of the Democratic electorate, without whom they would be a minority party today.

I confess I have little sympathy -- well, none, actually -- for the Democratic argument: If your party is going to derive at least some of its support by pandering to the scum of the earth, then you've no right to kick and scream when the scum fails to climb out of the gutter and vote.

The Times piece seems to be fairly even-handed, so let's turn to the real issue. Democrats argue that anything that makes it more difficult to vote will necessarily reduce voter turnout; in addition, it will reduce it more among the "poor," who tend to vote more Democratic; therefore (Democrats conclude) the law is unconstitutional.

But this argument is disingenuous, because it quietly assumes that the reason fewer poor people vote is that their grinding poverty physically prevents them from doing so: They cannot get to the polls because they have no cars, or because their Simon Legree-like bosses won't allow them to leave, or because the Gaza-like hellholes where they live contain death squads that will shoot them if they try to vote.

But this is nonsense on stilts. Nothing stops the poor from voting; most live within walking distance of their polling places; they can vote in the evening; we have no poll taxes anymore; and I have never heard of gang-bangers in the Bronx or East L.A. warning residents not to vote on penalty of a drive-by.

In fact, I am utterly convinced that older, married poor people have a significantly better voting turnout than teenaged and early-twenties middle- and upper-middle-income unmarried kids, simply because the latter group has an appalling record of not voting, no matter what their income. (Which I think is actually good, because the fewer people who vote, the better: I prefer that only those who really care about the issues vote, which disincludes that lot.)

"The poor" is an inadequate term, because there are really two classes of poor: A minority of the poor worked hard all their lives; but through a series of misfortunes or nasty government policies, they lost much of what they earned and now fall under the poverty line -- widows and orphans, workers whose employer went bankrupt, taking their entire pension with them, and so forth. These used to be called the "deserving poor," meaning they deserved to be helped by the more fortunate.

But then we have the large majority, who are poor precisely because they are lazy slobs, drug addicts, psychotic, or any combination of these. This group is the "undeserving poor."

It is the undeserving poor who skew the voting statistics for "the poor" as a lump: Fewer undeserving poor vote because the same sort of person who is too drunk, crazy, or lazy to work is equally uninterested in voting. In polls, if you ask them, they would certainly be far more Democratic and liberal (even Socialist) than the average population; but it's a canard to say they support the Democratic candidate, because they never remember to get to the polls, or else they think about it but decide to drink another bottle of Thunderbird instead.

If Indiana requires a picture ID to vote, the deserving poor will happily get one, if they don't have one already (which I suspect virtually all of them do). The undeserving poor -- who may very well not have drivers licenses, since that requires taking classes and passing a test -- will use the requirement as another excuse for not voting... and good riddance. That the Democrats want to cater to this group of ne'er-do-wells, brigands, scoundrels, bounders, pimps and ho's, drunks and the wasted, is a contemptible national disgrace.

The alternative view (of, e.g., Judge Evans) is that it's always better when more people vote, no matter whence you dredge up those extra warm bodies. I suspect they would prefer a law that sent poll workers into Skid Row (or as Friend Lee puts it, "Bums R Us") and had them shake awake the passed-out hobos and ask who they want for president. But do we really want people voting who literally don't even know that presidents are elected, let alone who is running and what their platforms say?

I surely hope that the Court takes this golden opportunity to reaffirm that voting is a right -- but one that entails a duty to show at least enough commitment to get some picture ID, so we're sure it's not one of those "mainstays" above whose maxim is "vote early, vote often," or who is voting while on weekend furlough from the Indiana State Prison.

But with Justice Anthony Kennedy, you never know; it could turn into a disaster if he sides with the Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter quadrumvirate.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 27, 2007, at the time of 4:31 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

September 23, 2007

Sheer Heart Attack in Mackinac

Although Mitt Romney has seen much of his early lead evaporate in New Hampshire, he still leads the pack by an average of 4.7%, according to Real Clear Politics. He's ahead in Iowa by a whopping 16.4%. And he's the "favorite son" in Michigan, where Romney's father, George W. Romney, was governor in the 1960s; Mitt Romney leads the polls there by 7.6%.

As Hughitt has said, if Romney wins Iowa, New Hampshire, and Michigan at the very beginning of the caucus/primary parade, it will be mighty hard for any Republican candidate to dethrone him for the nomination.

This weekend, Michigan held a straw poll at what was advertised as "the biggest gathering of Michigan Republicans before their January 15th primary." So how did Romney do, exactly? According to Real Clear Politics, he beat the field by 12% -- more than half again as much as his lead in the polls:

The results, which come close to mirroring recent polls (Romney leads by 7.6% in the latest RCP Michigan Average) again show that [Fred] Thompson's rise to the top will not be easy. [Sen. John] McCain's second-place finish, despite a blow he suffered when Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox left his camp last week, may mean he still has some fight left in him, though he places fourth in the RCP Average. And [Rep. Ron] Paul, who beat out both Thompson and [Rudy] Giuliani, continues to show surprising grassroots-level support. Whether he can translate that into votes remains, however, to be seen....

Here are the official results:

• Romney 39% (383 votes)
• McCain 27% (260)
• Paul 11% (106)
• Giulaini 11% (104)
• Thompson 7% (70)
• Huckabee 3% (25)
• Hunter 1% (12)
• Brownback <1% (3)
• Tancredo 0% (0)
• Uncommitted 2% (16)

But according to another source -- Real Clear Politics -- Romney did poorly, was ill-received, and cannot generate any enthusiasm in Michigan:

Jonathan Martin reports on Mitt Romney's speech yesterday at the Mackinac Leadership conference this weekend:

In a lunchtime speech to over a thousand Michigan Republicans gathered here for a retreat, Romney cast himself as a "Republican for change" and told the faithful in a marked denunciation of his own party that the Washington branch of the GOP has lost its way....

Romney was reading from a teleprompter and punctuated his statement with emphasis -- clearly indicating that it was meant for applause. But there was none.

A bit later Martin says there was "an awkward moment when one person began to clap but nobody else in the crowd joined."

That doesn't sound like a very impressive showing, especially for a candidate who is the state's favorite son.

Oh fudge. We appear to have a tale of two Mackinacs. Will the Real Clear Politics please stand up?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 23, 2007, at the time of 2:05 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

June 28, 2007

Spin City, Here We Come

So, hardly surprising, the immigration reform bill is now dead. But before conservatives begin doing their best impersonation of Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 90%) -- pumping their fists in the air and screaming "we killed the Patriot Act immigration reform!" -- we might want to think this through a bit more intelligently.

As you know, I have supported this bill all along; but given the reality that it's dead and buried and not going to rise again until (at the earliest) 2009 (under a new Congress and a new president), I now shift gears to try to mitigate any harm the bill's failure may have on future Republican election chances.

I know that some conservatives insist that killing the bill will have only positive effects; the whole country, weeping tears of gratitude, will rally around the Republican nominees in 2008 and elect a GOP president, Senate, and House. Please pardon me if I'm a bit skeptical that such a big chunk of the electorate is now cheering for the Republican congressmen who heroically skewered immigration reform... I suppose anything's possible, but I doubt it; and that's certainly not how the media are spinning the defeat.

I believe there is a potential for a serious downside effect among Hispanic voters, who have become an increasingly important and volatile share of voters: Ronald Reagan got about 50% of the Hispanic vote in 1984, and I believe Bush got over 40% twenty years later... but those days are behind us, and we'd be darned lucky to get 30% in 2008.

But since I believe people mostly make their own luck, we need to position the defeat of this bill in such a way that we make it much more likely we'll get 30% -- which could still make it possible to win -- than, say, 15%, which would mean a stunning Democratic sweep of both houses of Congress and the presidency. (In which case, kiss goodbye to the war against global jihadism and start pining for the Bush tax rate, the 109th Congress's spending restraint, and even the border security fence.)

The elite media have already started their own spin cycle. AP's version of "the story":

President Bush's immigration plan to legalize as many as 12 million unlawful immigrants while fortifying the border collapsed in the Senate on Thursday, crushing both parties' hopes of addressing the volatile issue before the 2008 elections.

The Senate vote that drove a stake through the delicate compromise was a stinging setback for Bush, who had made reshaping immigration laws a central element of his domestic agenda. It could carry heavy political consequences for Republicans and Democrats, many of whom were eager to show they could act on a complex issue of great interest to the public.

The Washington Post version:

The vote was a major defeat for President Bush, dealt largely by members of his own party. The president made a last-ditch round of phone calls this morning to senators in an attempt to rescue the bill, but with his poll numbers at record lows, his appeals proved fruitless. Bush has now lost what is likely to be the last, best chance at a major domestic accomplishment for his second term.

Chicago Tribune (from "the Swamp," whatever that is):

For President Bush, who invested much of what little political capital he had remaining in the effort to get the bill through the Senate, it was perhaps his last chance of his presidency for a significant domestic legislative accomplishment, further accentuating his lame duck status.

Well, you get the idea; it's divide and conquer: The Democrats and their willing accomplices in the media desperately want Republicans to start attacking Bush on every occasion, setting elements of the party at each other's throat. The New York Times wasn't too bad; but many other media sources have already spun this as a terrible defeat of the impotent, lame-duck president and a victory by hard-core, right-wing conservatives. And sadly, some of the relentless attacks on the president from conservatives have been harsher than anything published in the MSM.

To be fair, harsh attacks have come in the other direction as well, particularly from Sens. John McCain (R-AZ, 65%), Lindsay Graham (R-SC, 83%), and Trent Lott (R-MS, 88%). They need to knock off the bitterness, link arms, and hotly defend all those areas where they agree with other conservatives (which in McCain's case may well be just the war!) But for both sides of the GOP, the "first rule of holes" applies. And we cannot hope to win in 2008 by attacking our own president.

Honestly, people, this is not how you win an election. Too many conservatives are pointing to the election in France of Nicholas Sarkozy, proclaiming that the way for Republicans to win in 2008 is to campaign against President Bush, to be even more stridently anti-Bush than the Democrats will be. As a campaign strategy, this is absolute nutter stuff.

The Sarkozy analogy doesn't work at all; Sarkozy didn't win because he decided to attack Jacques Chirac; he decided he had to attack Chirac because Chirac, along with hand-picked successor and prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, had embraced policies much closer to the Socialists than the conservatives (the dominant party at this time, the UMP -- Union for a Popular Movement -- contains elements of both Left and Right); and Chirac's policies, especially economic, were in tatters. But Bush has never, as a general policy, embraced "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," as Sen. Paul Wellstone used to put it.

In the last presidential election in France:

• Sarkozy won because he was running against a proud Socialist, Ségolène Royal, who edged close to Communism in some of her insane proposals.
• Sarkozy won because the French, especially Parisians, felt themselves under seige by Moslem "youths" in their own country, with daily riots and 20,000 cars torched every year.
• Sarkozy won because the French economy is in a shambles due to the Socialist policies of (among others) Chirac in his second term (he was more conservative the first time around).
• And Sarkozy had to run against Chirac, because the latter had completely tied himself to the Socialist Left... probably because he so feared Sarkozy himself.

Jacques Chirac led the opposition to anything America did to combat radical Islamism, while Sarkozy rightly understood that the West had to unite against al-Qaeda. Chirac (former member of the Communist Party), in his second term, embraced the Socialists' economic plans, including the 35-hour week and virtual ban on firing anyone, even for incompetence. Finally, Chirac is well known to be utterly corrupt; were it not for the immunity granted to French presidents, he would have been indicted years ago.

But President Bush has done none of the above. On a couple of issues (notably immigration reform and affirmative action), he has tried to bridge the gap between Left and Right. But on most issues, especially the most important -- federal judges (which is paying major dividends right now), taxes, the war against global jihadism, reforming entitlement programs, abortion, stem cell research, faith-based initiatives, and at least recently, congressional spending -- he is firmly on the side of conservatives.

Sarkozy considered most of the government initiatives of the last five years a complete failure; since they were all intimiately tied with President Jacques Chirac, of necessity, Sarkozy had to run against him.

But conservative Republicans, no matter how angry they are at Bush today, in fact agree with nearly all of his major initiatives:

• Aggressively fighting the war, expanding and rebuilding the military, and trying to transform it into a 21st-century fighting force;
• Lowering taxes and making the cuts permanent;
• Security measures such as the Patriot Act, the NSA al-Qaeda intercept program, the SWIFT surveillance program, National Security Letters, and so forth;
• Allowing faith-based organizations to fully participate in charitable governmental functions;
• Reform of Social Security, MediCare, and other entitlement programs to introduce at least some element of privatization;
• The various border-security and employer-enforcement provisions of the recently killed immigration bill, all of which Bush supports (and none of which the Democrats support);
• Appointing federal judges who believe in judicial restraint;
• Firm opposition to abortion and embryonic stem-cell research, particularly federal funding;
• Unwavering support for traditional marriage and opposition to same-sex "marriage".

The areas of disagreement, while often intense, are dwarfed by the areas of complete agreement; and in one of the areas of disagreement, federal spending, Republicans are just as complicit as the president and hardly in a position to throw stones.

We now invoke the Big Lizards self-evident article of common electoral sense: You cannot run in favor of the president's policies -- and simultaneously run against the president as an incompetent booby. If he's a booby, then his policies would be boobish... which makes you a booby for supporting them!

This poses no problem for Democrats: They call Bush an idiot, they call his policies idiotic, and they vehemently oppose both. But Republicans intend to run on most of the ideas above; they intend to point to the truly great economy as an example of Republican principles in operation; they intend to vigorously pursue the "Bush Doctrine" of holding sovereign nations accountable for what they allow terrorist groups to do on their soil, and suchlike.

How do you manage all that while "running against the president?"

The long and the tooth of it is that Republicans can only win by embracing President Bush... even while disagreeing on a few subjects important to them. In fact, even in areas where they disagree -- such as immigration -- it's political suicide to attack Bush's motives, his integrity, or to tie him too closely to Democrats... which I've seen a lot of in the past couple of months.

Folks may differ about what path to take; but John Cornyn (R-TX, 96%), Jon Kyle (R-AZ, 92%), and certainly President Bush have the same goal in mind: To drastically reduce illegal border crossings and overstaying of visas, allow in sufficient people willing to work at jobs that most Americans shun, and fundamentally reform the legal immigration policy to entice immigrants who are more assimilable and less likely to pose security threats.

Conservatives killed the bill because they believed it would not move us towards those goals; but the president pushed it because he thought it would -- not because he wants to flood the country with illegals and create an "open border" society. Republicans must not be seduced by a wish-fulfillment theory of the French election, lest we slay any chance of retaining the White House and recapturing one or both houses of Congress.

We might survive conservatives killing comprehensive immigration reform; but we would not survive conservatives polishing off the entire legacy of Pesident George W. Bush.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 28, 2007, at the time of 5:34 PM | Comments (37) | TrackBack

June 21, 2007

Picking a Blog Feud - Real Clear Politics

John McIntyre of Real Clear Politics published a post today analyzing the fallout from the potential presidential campaign by former RINO, now IINO Michael Bloomberg, multibillionaire Mayor of New York City. His basic question was who would be hurt worse by such a run: Democrats or Republicans.

I agree with his broad conclusion -- that it hurts the former more in nearly all cases -- and disagree with his thought that under the circumstance of a Mitt Romney - John Edwards tussle, Bloomberg would hurt Romney more; but I'm mainly interested in one nugget that John tossed rather nonchalantly upon the table:

What makes this more intriguing is that the likelihood of Bloomberg getting in is inversely related to the strength of the eventual major-party nominees. A Romney-Edwards general election would be Bloomberg's best hope and in the unlikely event they are both the nominees I think a Bloomberg run becomes a near certainty, with a Bloomberg presidency a possibility.

If John means a Bloomberg win is a "possibility" in the narrowest logical sense -- for example, Bloomberg would win if uncontrovertible evidence emerged one week before the election that both Mr. Romney and Mr. Edwards were on Osama bin Laden's payroll as sleeper agents -- then I have no problem with this paragraph. But if, as I believe likely, John meant that there were reasonably plausible circumstances in which Bloomberg would win the race, then I think John is dreaming (a nightmare, I will assume).

There are only two ways to win the presidency (since Bloomberg won't be running as anyone's running mate):

1. By amassing a majority of electoral votes;
2. Or in the event that nobody does, by gaining an absolute majority (26) of state delegations in the House of Representatives.

(2) is politically impossible; no state delegation except perhaps New York would vote for the independent, as they are all controlled by either Democrats or Republicans (mostly Republicans), and Bloomberg does not have any national following anyway.

So let's concentrate on states that Bloomberg could plausibly win in the general election. First of all, he must win Republican states to win the presidency: Since the Republican won the last two presidential elections, Bloomberg cannot win with only Democratic states, not even if he gets all of them.

Second, Bloomberg will not get all of the Democratic states, because many of them (big states) are very liberal and will certainly vote for a liberal Democrat over a moderate whatchamacallit: California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts alone account for 119 electoral votes, or 47% (!) of John Kerry's 252 votes; and they all went for the Democrat by more than ten points.

So the question reduces to this: How many Republican states can Bloomberg plausibly win? It must be quite a few, to make up for the liberal Democratic states he will assuredly lose. And here is the big problem: There were very few "purple" states in either 2000 or 2004. Defining a purple state as one where the spread between Bush and Kerry was 5% or less, Kerry took six purple states for 69 electoral votes, and Bush took another six for 73 electoral votes. Even if Bloomberg took them all -- itself very unlikely -- that's only 142 electoral votes, just slightly over half of what he would need.

In other words, to have any possibility of winning, Moderate Mike would have to take a number of conservative states away from the conservative Republican nominee and/or a number of liberal states away from the liberal Democratic nominee. How is that supposed to happen? Does Texas decide that Mitt Romney is too conservative, so they vote instead for that guy from New York City?

In the general election, I doubt that even New York state would vote for Bloomberg; though if he were very popular, he might split the Democratic vote there between himself and the actual nominee, handing the state to the Republicans (30% of the Democratic vote going to Bloomberg would do it, if the Republicans held their own). I doubt it would happen, however; New York liberals are not utter fools.

So respectfully, I think John's final, almost parenthetical comment -- that "a Bloomberg presidency [is] a possibility" -- is a load of peanut butter waffles.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 21, 2007, at the time of 4:14 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

June 9, 2007

Immigration as a GOP Talking Point in 2008

With the deep freeze of the immigration bill, spin season begins now. We cannot afford to wait until the Democrats establish the storyline that the immigration bill died because "Bush didn't push the radical right hard enough;" that would be politically catastrophic for Republicans candidates in the next election, branded as both extremist and feckless.

The best position to take -- and the one that, coincidentally, is closest to the truth -- is that it was Senate Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 95%), a Democrat, who pulled the plug on the immigration bill... not because there wasn't enough enforcement, but because it was becoming clear that conservative Republicans were making headway in getting more enforcement into the bill.

Democrats were upset at Sen. Ted Kennedy's (D-MA, 100%) deal to expand the list of criminal offenses that would bar illegals from getting a Z visa, which was the only reason that the similar but harsher amendment by Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX, 96%) was defeated. And there were upcoming amendments, e.g., to force the deportation of illegal aliens convicted of crimes within the United States after they served their sentences and a good shot at revisiting the issue of "sanctuary cities" -- either in this bill or (more likely) via other federal legislation. (I can picture the campaign Democrats would have to run against such a measure.)

Republican supporters of the immigration bill were far more amenable to increased enforcement measures than were Democratic supporters; Republicans such as Sen. Jon Kyle (R-AZ, 92%) were the ones who insisted upon the strong enforcement measures in the bill in the first place, including the triggers. And judging from the mood of the country, Republicans might well have been able to increase the "trigger level" for the fence, for example, to construction of the entire thing, rather than just half, before any regularization could occur.

The other element that most bothered conservatives was that the "Parole Cards" (as Kyl called the provisional Z visas) were open-ended: Once an illegal signed up and got one, there was no inherent pressure to upgrade to a full Z visa; the only pressure was that it was a necessary step for citizenship, so only those immigrants who ultimately wanted to become citizens were motivated to move any farther than a Parole Card.

But with the pressure from not only Republicans but even Democrats and independent voters for much stronger border-security measures, I think it entirely possible -- especially as the bill worked its way through the House of Representatives -- that the Parole Card would have been given an expiry date, forcing illegals who received one to take steps towards actually undergoing the deeper background check, paying the larger fine, and having the head of the household leave the country in order to apply for the full Z visa (the alternative is to be deported when the Parole Card expires -- a strong incentive).

Thus, any reasonable analysis of the bill is that, in order to pass through both the Senate and the House, it would have to become tougher on border security and enforcement in a number of ways.

And the longer the process continued, the closer it got to passage, the more the onus would be on the majority party, the Democrats, to make whatever compromises and sacrifices were necessary to drag it over the finish line: With enough modifications, even former opponents like Sen. Cornyn and Rep. John Boehner (R-OH, 88%) could defend to their constituents. With the proper amendments, the bill would become very, very hard for Democrats to kill. (No, I don't mean an amendment to strip out everything but enforcement; that would be easy for the majority to kill without suffering any pain at the polls.)

So I believe the Democrats were becoming increasingly worried about the monster they had created by allowing Kennedy to bulldoze them into agreeing to the enforcement measures, especially "triggers," in the first place. I suspect the Majority Leader was starting to think the Democrats had made a big mistake by starting this snowball rolling... and if they didn't find some opportunity to kill it, it would roll right over them in 2008.

So Reid forced a pair of premature cloture votes, knowing that even Republican bill supporters would vote against them, since they had given their word to bill opponents to give them an opportunity to amend it. And when the second cloture vote failed -- even though it did much better than the first -- Reid seized the opportunity to pull the bill from consideration... and blame President Bush and the Republicans.

I believe we must move quickly to prevent the Democrats from spinning this as some "failure" of the GOP. Let us make clear that the GOP was willing to embrace any level of security to make the bill palatable to voters... but it was the Democrats who panicked and yanked the bill in order to prevent future border-security amendments from passing.

That leaves only one culprit for the failure of immigration reform... and he hails from Searchlight, Nevada.

If the president is incapable of communicating this to the American people (likely), then it's up to the Republican candidates for president to stop attacking Bush and stop attacking those Republicans who supported this bill -- and instead fix the blame where it rightly belongs: On the Democrats who demanded a "grand deal" as their price for border security, then broke their word when it looked as though they might get more border security than they meant.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 9, 2007, at the time of 7:24 PM | Comments (21) | TrackBack

May 15, 2007

Wow, What a Difference!

In the last debate at the Reagan Library in Seedy Valley, California -- the one sponsored by MSNBC and run by Chris Matthews -- I was so bored, I practically had to go the Fred Flintstone route, resorting to toothpicks to prop my eyelids open.

But during this debate tonight in South Carolina, sponsored by Fox News Channel and moderated by Brit Hume, Chris Matthews, and Wendell Goler, I was absolutely riveted. I especially loved the "unfolding scenario" at the end; it fascinated me that John McCain railed against what he calls "torture" -- but then said he would go ahead and use it in the situation they described! Talk about having your omlet and eating a few eggs too...

I liked the straightforward way that both Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney made it clear that they would use any means necessary to extract the information about where the other bombs were set to go off; and I cringed with embarassment when fellow Californian Duncan Hunter -- I think it was he -- misunderstood the scenario to involve the use of nuclear bombs.

Best line of the night, even better than Giuliani's smackdown of that malignant troll Ron Paul, was one of the third-tier candidates, I forget which one, saying that Congress was spending more money than John Edwards at a beauty salon. He should have gone whole hog and called the erstwhile vice-presidential nominee the "Pink Sapphire." ("Silky Pony" would have done as well; but I think we're way, way past the "Breck Girl" phase.)

And now for the prizes...

• Romney gets the G. Gordon Liddy Award for most directly answering all questions put to him; if Wallace asked him, "do you know what time it is?" Romney would look at his watch and say, "Yes."
• Giuliani gets the George W. Bush Award for speaking with the most mangled syntax and sentence structure, while still somehow managing to be understandable.
• McCain's John Kerry Trophy is for the largest number of brazen contradictions between the head and the butt of the same sentence.
• Fred Thompson gets the C. Aubrey Smith Illustrious Gold Medallion for acting the most presidential, even though he wasn't there. Or maybe because he wasn't there.
• Sam Brownback gets the Claude Rains Clear Ribbon for... for -- wait, was he there?
• Wallace and Goler get a joint Charleton Heston Accolade for conspiring to make Chris Matthews sound about as serious (and bright) as a call-in to Howard Stern.
• Fox News Channel gets the Absent Minded Professor Prize for forgetting to change the broadcast schedule they send to cable companies to include this debate... which has been planned for months; this makes it tough for those of us who TiVo or otherwise digitally record shows, but I guess the geezers who run that cable network think that's a miniscule audience which can be ignored.

• Finally, Ron Paul gets the Shoe-Scraping Globule for least desirable person in the debate. His almost belligerent refusal even to recognize that the 9/11 attacks might have realigned our national priorities, coupled with his nigh-Dickensian obsession (think "poor King Charles' head") with a splendid isolationism that probably played very well -- in Benjamin Harrison's administration -- makes me long to see the back of him.

  If he absolutely must participate in the next debate, let him do so remotely from his home... under some bridge in southeastern Texas.

I'm eagerly looking forward to the next debate... I mean the one between Dean Barnett, Glenn Reynolds, and Paul Mirengoff over which nth-tier candidates will drop off first, and which ones will cling on like Kang the Merciless.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 15, 2007, at the time of 8:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 15, 2007

A Winning Ticket?

Over on my favorite blog, Scott Johnson takes a break from profiling third-oboeists in Pennsylvania Dutch oompah bands ca. 1911-1923 to enthuse about a possible Fred Thompson candidacy. His post got me speculating: I'm starting to think that a Thompson-Romney ticket might be a winning combination.

First, let's note that Thompson is 5 years older than Romney (65 vs. 60); thus, Romney saves a little face, since he can say that his time will still come.

And he may be right about that: In 2008, he will be 61; if Thompson serves two terms, then Romney could run as a former governor and sitting VP at age 69 -- not a bad presidential age at all, these days. (In November 2008, Sen. John McCain will be 72.)

If Thompson turns out to be authentically conservative, much of that good feeling among conservatives will spill over to his vice president, which would file off some of the rough edges of Romney's supposed "flip flops." And one or two terms seasoning as VP will surely help people over their morbid fear of a Mormon in the White House.

Thompson's only service in elective office is eight years as a U.S. senator; but he also served as a senior legislative aide to Republican Sen. Howard Baker, and in fact was the chief Republican counsel during the Watergate hearings.

In this wacky election, where the most senior administrator running on either side is a former mayor (New York city has a third again as many residents as Mitt Romney's entire state of Massachusetts), and where the Democratic front runners are a one-term senator, a 0.67-term senator, and a candidate whose primary claim to fame is that she used to be First Lady... I don't reckon anyone will question Thompson's experience -- at least, not in the general election.

Thompson is Tennessee's favorite son -- more even than Al Gore! -- and I can't see anyone, not even John Edwards, taking a single Southern state away from him. In fact, I think he would do at least as well as President Bush did in 2004, and that is self-evidently enough to win.

But I think the addition of Mitt Romney on the ticket could really shake up the race... as I think it will throw "America's lumbar" up for grabs: I refer to the Great Lake states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and even Pennsylvania, each of which went for Sen. John Kerry in 2004 by an incredibly narrow margin.

I think Romney can help with all four states; while he is a conservative, he is neither as brash nor as "folksy" as Fred Thompson. He's more of an "educated elitist" and of the political class, which might sooth the jangled nerves of Upper-Midwesterners and Midlanticers wary of another Southerner in la Casa Blanca. And of course for Michigan, there is also the memory of Romney's father, George W. Romney -- former chairman of American Motors and popular three-term governor.

Those four states boast 58 electoral votes between them, and taking even one or two of them could render the election of a Democrat completely impossible.

I'm not predicting anything, and I don't even know if Romney would accept being Number Two. But I'm just saying...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 15, 2007, at the time of 6:40 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

April 1, 2007

The End of a 28-Year Era

The point is only of academic interest, and only interesting to weirdos who thrive on a diet of historical anomalies, but...

Has anybody else realized that the upcoming presidential election will be the first one since 1972 to have neither a Bush nor a Dole on the Republican ticket?

Careful now, don't topple over with astonishment. Just think through every election from 1976 on, and you'll see what I mean: eight in a row.

Odd, eh?

(Slight corrections made to make the post clearer... thanks, SeanF and myself!)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 1, 2007, at the time of 4:43 AM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

March 31, 2007

Former Democrat Matthew Dowd Becomes Democrat As Election Looms!

The media madness continues, as the New York Times has found a new, er, scandal with which to bash President Bush and portray him as a hopelessly divisive figure who has destroyed America.

In a (presumably front page) story dated tomorrow, they interview former Bush "insider" Matthew Dowd -- once a Democrat, then a Republican, now a Democrat again -- who proceeds to spout every current liberal talking point to bash Bush. Alas, this does not appear to be an April Fools wheeze.

In 1999, Matthew Dowd looked at the field of presidential candidates and evidently decided that Gov. George W. Bush had the best chance of winning. Although Dowd was a longtime Democratic operative, he switched parties, joined the Bush team as top pollster, and helped elect him over Al Gore. In 2004, the Times claims that Dowd was named chief campaign strategist; but most sources say that Karl Rove held that job... and indeed, the Times agrees that Rove was Dowd's boss. Thus, I'm not sure what actual position Dowd held in the 2004 campaign... but he certainly worked to reelect George W. Bush.

But by 2005, Dowd's "doubts," which he had "suppressed," began to overwhelm him, he now says. He decided that Bush was a divider, not a uniter. Let's take a look at what precipitated those doubts...

Bush the uniter

In the beginning, what Dowd says first attracted him to Bush as a candidate was his stance on education and immigration:

“It’s almost like you fall in love,” he said. “I was frustrated about Washington, the inability for people to get stuff done and bridge divides. And this guy’s personality -- he cared about education and taking a different stand on immigration.”

But Bush's stand on both these issues is unchanged from 1999: Every budget he has submitted has pounded more and more sand down the rathole of the Department of Education; he has never repudiated the pro-affirmative action positions he took in Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 (2003) and Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003); and he is still today pushing harder than ever for comprehensive immigration reform... even trying to work with the new Democratic Congress to get it.

Somehow, that no longer counts as "hands across the aisle" with Matthew Dowd.

Bush the divider

Now, Dowd sees Bush as arrogant and divisive, refusing to listen to the will of the people... thus forcing Dowd to publicly attack his former boss (and incidentally flip back to being a Democrat, just in time for the 2008 campaign season). What are the issues that drove him over the edge?

• The September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks:

  "[Dowd] said he thought Mr. Bush handled the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks well but 'missed a real opportunity to call the country to a shared sense of sacrifice.'"

Right. Of course, we mustn't consider the numerous speeches he made doing exactly that, warning of a long twilight struggle against global terrorism, and calling on every American to show the same sort of vigilance they did in World War II; going into diplomatic overdrive to get as many nations as possible involved in the fight; pushing through laws like the USA PATRIOT Act; reforming the intelligence agencies; and ordering Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to completely redesign the military to fight the threat we face, rather than the threat we used to face when there was a Soviet Union. No "shared sense of sacrifice" there!

And one certainly cannot claim that the American people responded. After all, Bush had an approval rating fell one point short of 90% on several polls -- and it only stayed extraordinarily high for a mere ten months, until July of 2002, when it finally sank into the high 60s for good. That's peanuts compared to the response a Democrat would have gotten.

Bush managed to limp along in the low-60s right up through the run-up to the Iraq war... and then, when the war started, Bush's job-approval only went back up into the 70s -- not the high 80s. That's just bubkes!

His approval did not finally drop into the low 50s, high 40s until September 2003, when it finally became obvious that Iraq was not going to be like Afghanistan, that it was going to be a long, hard war -- just as Bush said it would be back in 2002.

I'm not exactly sure what Dowd means by saying Bush "missed a real opportunity to call the country to a shared sense of sacrifice;" an approval rating well above 70% -- which he had through much of this time -- is about as "shared" as the American electorate has ever been. But of course, I am only an egg, not a deputy chief campaign strategist, like Mr. D.

• Abu Ghraib:

  "[Dowd] was dumbfounded when Mr. Bush did not fire Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld after revelations that American soldiers had tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib." [Where "tortured" here means "frightened and humiliated".]

Fire Rumsfeld? For what, exactly? The soldiers guarding Abu Ghraib were not following any Pentagon rules when they stripped prisoners, made them wear women's underware, threatened them, engaged in mock-execution theater -- and certainly not when Spec. Lynndie England herself reportedly stripped naked and paraded before the prisoners (and her own fellow soldiers).

They were investigated long before anybody in the news found out about it; in fact, Sy Hirsch only learned of the incidents at Abu Ghraib from the report that Maj.Gen. Antonio Taguba delivered to Lt.Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. Everyone involved was court-martialed, convicted, cashiered, and sent up the river.

Yet Dowd claims to have been "dumbfounded" that Bush didn't also fire his wildly successful Secretary of Defense, who had nothing whatsoever to do with any of this... at a time when the only people calling for his head were Democrats and the elite media. (I wonder; would Dowd also suggest firing the Secretary of Defense whenever a Navy ship runs aground?)

I begin to smell a rat...

Hurricane Sheehan

Dowd wants us to believe that after Bush was reelected in 2004 as a Republican, Down was convinced that the president would start governing as a Democrat; it was his disappointment that Bush remained a Republican -- and two incidents in particular -- that sent Dowd around the bend:

He said he clung to the hope that Mr. Bush would get back to his Texas style of governing if he won. But he saw no change after the 2004 victory.

He describes the administration’s handling of Hurricane Katrina, and the president’s refusal in the summer of 2005 to meet with the war protester Cindy Sheehan, whose son died fighting in Iraq, around the same time that Mr. Bush entertained the bicyclist Lance Armstrong at his Crawford ranch as further cause for doubt.

“I had finally come to the conclusion that maybe all these things along do add up,” he said. “That it’s not the same, it’s not the person I thought.”

Naturally, the Times doesn't give us any details about the Hurricane Katrina charge; when serving up a tepid charge in a hit piece, it's always best to resort to vague rumblings about the target's "handling" of such and such; such accusations can never be disproven, unless the handling was literally perfect (which would only occur if we elected God to the presidency.)

The problem is that, when you really start to break down what the president did (and when he did it) before, during, and after that hurricane, you discover that the performance was far from being the bureaucratic disaster it is routinely (and falsely) painted by the drive-by media. In reality, the Bush administration acted swiftly, decisively, and effectively to minimize the Katrina damage and loss of life.

The mistakes they made were relatively minor, especially compared to the much larger mistakes made by soon-to-be-former Lousiana Gov. Kathleeen Babineaux Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin (who squeaked to reelection in 2006 by 52-48 in a runoff).

Were it not for the Bush administration's rapid pre-landing response and post-landing followup, thousands more people would be dead.

So what exactly was it about Bush's handing of the hurricane that so saddened Matthew Dowd? I would love to know if Dowd still believes the long-discredited urban legends of multiple murders, rapes, and cannibalism in the Superdome...

And now we really get to the meat: Dowd was stunned that President Bush refused to meet -- for a second time -- with Cindy Sheehan, during the time she had become "the angriest dog in the world" (that's a David Lynch reference, not a comment on her perfectly average looks): camping out in front of Bush's Prairie Chapel Ranch, calling him the most vile epithets, accusing him of "murdering" her son, and in general, acting like an unstable mental patient undergoing an episode.

But Bush should have met with her, Dowd says, because...? He offers no reason.

Has he even thought through what would have happened had Bush met with her? She would have berated him, hectored him, lectured him, screamed at him, insulted him and the office, issued diktats that he could not possibly obey, and belittled Bush, the presidency, and the United States -- all on national TV. This would be live, if Bush were foolish enough to allow cameras at the meeting; or if not, then later, when Sheehan would gleefully have reenacted her tantrum for the cameras.

It would have been a PR nightmare, and it would certainly have further damaged the war support, already precarious. If that really were Dowd's advice at the time (which I highly doubt), then thank God he's out of the White House. Were I a Democratic candidate for the presidency considering hiring him for the upcoming campaign, that comment alone would kill the deal for me.

It's as nutty as saying that Bush should attend an anti-war sit-in. It's not merely bad advice, it's stupid advice. But at last, this leads us into the crux of Mr. Dowd's complaints...

The war thing

It really seems to boil down to the Iraq war. But there is an aspect of Dowd's change of heart that particularly disturbs me (repels me, actually): Dowd admits arriving at his new moral denunciation of the war for reasons as personal, if not as drastic, as Cindy Sheehan's:

His views against the war began to harden last spring when, in a personal exercise, he wrote a draft opinion article and found himself agreeing with Mr. Kerry’s call for withdrawal from Iraq. He acknowledged that the expected deployment of his son Daniel was an important factor....

“If the American public says they’re done with something, our leaders have to understand what they want,” Mr. Dowd said. “They’re saying ‘Get out of Iraq.’ ”

First of all, there is no evidence the American people are saying "get out of Iraq." They're clearly saying they not happy with the Iraq war.

But does that mean they necessarily want to immediately abandon Iraq, the Iraqis, and all of our allies, leaving Iraq to complete collapse, to become another failed state -- and a new training and staging ground for al-Qaeda?

Or do the people mean they want to start seeing tangible victories?

To paraphrase Hermann Göring, whenever I hear a man say he is the vox populi -- I reach for my airsickness bag. Oh, please, Matthew Dowd; nobody elected you to lead the American people; they elected (twice) the guy you're now trashing!

But what tore it for me anent Dowd and his fabulous bag of Bush betrayals is his admission that what really turned him so strongly against the war was when "he watched his oldest son prepare for deployment to Iraq as an Army intelligence specialist fluent in Arabic."

That was when Dowd "[wrote] but never submitted an op-ed article titled 'Kerry Was Right,' arguing that Mr. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and 2004 presidential candidate, was correct in calling last year for a withdrawal from Iraq."

This is repugnant. Dowd was not particularly opposed to the war when other people's sons and daughters were bravely volunteering to defend democracy and modernity against the most horrific butcher in the Middle East, a man who supported barbaric terrorists and who was in talks with al-Qaeda to develop a closer relationship; he didn't speak up when other people's fathers and mothers were risking their lives to create a stable democracy in the heart of the Arab ummah, to try to rescue 25 million people from the hell of the Non-Integrating Gap and nationbuild them into the Functioning Core instead.

No, Down has his epiphany only when his own son nobly (and voluntarily) undertakes that same mission. My God, how humiliated that soldier must feel, now that the New York Times is about to plaster his father's grotesque road-to-Damascus conversion on Sunday's front page: his own father saying that this brave and committed soldier is on a fool's errand, has been duped, and is walking into an unwinnable disaster.

Dowd, with his vast military experience, must certainly know more than Lt.Gen. David Petraus and the troops who are actually on the ground in Iraq -- including, most likely, his own son, whom the Times did not see fit to interview (or perhaps they did, and they simply decided it was not part of "all the news that is fit to print"). Thanks again, Mr. D.

Of course, it's only a coincidence that a new election looms -- with Democratic candidates who might win. I'm sure that realization never factored into the calculations that led Matthew Dowd to reconvert back to the Democratic Party and start publicly Bush-bashing. Nor his decision to parrot back all the Democratic, anti-Bush talking points.

After all, he assures us he has no ambition to be involved in this year's presidential campaigns; and Matthew Dowd is an honorable man. So are they all, all honorable men:

Mr. Dowd does not seem prepared to put his views to work in 2008. The only candidate who appeals to him, he said, is Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, because of what Mr. Dowd called his message of unity. But, he said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if I wasn’t walking around in Africa or South America doing something that was like mission work.”

He added, “I do feel a calling of trying to re-establish a level of gentleness in the world.”

So after first being "converted" to the Republican Party by the prospect of a winning presidential campaign... now Dowd feels a "calling" back to the Democratic Party -- now that there's a Democratic candidate who might be able to win. A candidate with a message of "unity" -- and a rating from the Americans for Democratic Action of 95%, the same rating as has Majority Leader Harry Reid and Sens. Barbara Boxer, Chris Dodd, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Pat Leahy... uniters all. (Obama's rating from the American Conservative Union is 8%.)

Yes, I can see how Dowd might be attracted to such a non-polarizing figure as Barack Obama; but that doesn't explain Dowd's divisive attacks on the man he worked for, until there were no more elections in Bush's future.

This is truly sad; but it's just one more example of the biggest problem that George W. Bush had and continues to have: He has an inexplicable urge to trust liberals and Democrats in key positions and as key advisors, from liberal Republican Colin Powell as Secretary of State, to Democrat Norman Mineta as Secretary of Transportation, to Sen. Ted Kennedy as a partner on education issues and the AARP on prescription-drug policies... to Matthew Dowd as chief pollster and later deputy chief campaign strategist.

Like the scorpion and the frog, we know how that always turns out in the end.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 31, 2007, at the time of 8:53 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 22, 2007

New Kid On the Bayou

Warning: This is one of my infamous "too much time on my hands" offerings...

Yesterday, we noted that Bobby Jindal still stands a good chance of being elected governor of Louisiana, even after Gov. Kathleen Babineaux "Blankout" Blanco dropped out, to be replaced (everyone assumes) by the much stronger candidate former Sen. John Breaux.

Suppose Jindal does win this year and serves a full four years. Then suppose he runs for president at the next opportunity... how would the "child prodigy's" age compare to our youngest presidents?

First of all, we must clarify what we mean by the youngest president. There is no question that John F. Kennedy was the youngest person ever elected President of the United States. Kennedy was born on May 29th, 1917 -- the first president born in the twentieth century *. He ran for office and was elected on November 8th, 1960. (The first Tuesday was November 1st; but Congress in 1845 set the date for federal elections to the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November; thus, the election is never held on the 1st.)

John Kennedy was thus 43 years, 5 months, and 10 days old when he was elected. Nobody else even comes within two years of that age.

However, that's not the end of it. There is another way to become president besides following your own election; and indeed, when William McKinley was assassinated, dying on September 14th, 1901, Vice President Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt became president without being elected.

Roosevelt was born on October 27th, 1858; thus, he became president when he was 42 years, 10 months, and 18 days old. Kennedy became president on January 20th, 1961 -- and he had aged 2 months and 12 days to the ripe, old age of 43 years, 7 months, and 22 days. Therefore, while Kennedy was the youngest ever elected, TR beat him into the office by 9 months and 4 days.

(Roosevelt was not actually elected until November 8th, 1904, when he was a doddering ancient of 46 years and 12 days.)

So back to Jindal. He was born on June 10th, 1971. If he were to be elected president in the next election after serving a single term as governor, that would be on November 6th, 2012; and he would assume the office on January 20th, 2013: Jindal would be 41 years, 4 months, and 27 days old when elected and 41 years, 7 months, and 10 days when he assumed the office -- easily beating both Kennedy for youngest ever elected (by more than two years) and Roosevelt for youngest president (by more than a year).

But if Jindal instead serves a second successive term as governor -- which has only happened four times in Louisiana history (though some governors have served several non-sequential terms, such as Earl K. Long) -- then Jindal would leave that office in early 2016. The next presidential election would be November 8th, 2016; if he won, he would have been elected at age 45 years, 4 months, and 29 days.

That would be almost two years older than Kennedy was, but still younger than Teddy Roosevelt, the second-youngest person ever elected president. (Bill Clinton -- born August 19th, 1946 -- was elected on November 3rd, 1992, when he was 46 years, 2 months, and 15 days old.)

Jindal would, in that case, take the silver medal for second-youngest person elected, bumping Roosevelt to third youngest and Clinton out of the medals at 4th. However, because of that whole assassination thing, Jindal would only be the third youngest person (45 years old) to assume the presidency, after both Roosevelt, 42, and Kennedy, 43; Clinton would be fourth in this race as well at 46.

(If Barack Obama were to be elected in 2008, he would be 47 at both election and inauguration, far out of the running.)

In either case, Jindal would be the first former Hindu president and the first Asian.

We needn't wait for 2012; there are records poised to be made in the upcoming (2008) election as well:

• Obama would be the first non-white and the first former Moslem;
• Mitt Romney would be the first Mormon and probably the richest president;
• Hillary Clinton would be the first woman -- making her both first woman and First Lady;
• And Giuliani would be both the first Italian-American and would have the record for the most divorced president.

The first divorcé to win the presidency was Ronald Reagan; James Buchanan was the only bachelor president to remain unmarried throughout his administration, but Grover Cleveland was a bachelor until a year into his first term.

* There is some controversy about the first president born in the nineteenth century: It's either Millard Fillmore, if you count 1800 as 19th century, or Franklin Pierce (1804) if you don't.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 22, 2007, at the time of 6:51 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

March 21, 2007

Jindal Bells - Blanco Fires a Blank

Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco has just breathlessly announced that she won't run for re-election... which is about as surprising a piece of news as if George Bush announced that he wasn't going to run for re-election, either.

Fortunately for all concerned, she managed to get through the stunning revelation without crying.

This clears the path for no-holds-barred battle between Bobby Jindal and John Breaux. While it will be a much tougher contest than Jindal vs. Blanco (which would have been a landslide for the Republican), in a way, this is better: At least if Jindal wins, nobody can say he was a weak candidate who only limped in because he was up against the thoroughly detested Blanco; the win will actually mean something.

But a win is not a gimmie; Breaux is a tough candidate... and that is exactly why I'm happy that Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco has bowed out.

I know, I'm about to have my partisan credentials yanked. But I have said before that I'm a strong believer in the two-party system; and like Horton, I meant what I said and I said what I meant (an elephant's faithful -- 100%).

What's so good about the two-party system? At its best, we boil competing philosophies of governance down to the two most important coalitions, then batter them against each other until, after due consideration, one is chosen by the people in an election.

There are always many more than two sides to every controversial issue; but more than two major parties leads to electoral debacles, party sharing, coalition government, and all the woes that plague parliaments that have more than two main blocs (think of France and Italy). So we don't want three or four major parties. But on the other hand, one-party rule leads to a situation like Iraq and Syria (worst case) or Japan (best case), neither of which is an inspiring model.

But for the two-party system to work as advertised, we need several things:

1. Two articulate defenders --
2. Of two distinct philosophies --
3. Each of whom is prima facie credible --
4. To a voter pool willing to listen to both sides before deciding.

When any of those four is MIA, the two-party system skews wildly out of control. And Gov. Blanco's candidacy broke all four of those criteria, hence was a prescription for electoral catastrophe.

The voters had already tuned her out, as evidenced by the fact that, months before the election (this October and possibly November, not in 2008), Rep. Bobby Jindal (R, 92%) was stunningly ahead of the sitting governor:

The Democratic governor’s announcement ends months of speculation in Louisiana political circles, fueled by dismal poll ratings that showed her capturing barely a third of the vote against a Republican challenger, Bobby Jindal, a congressman from the New Orleans suburbs.

Her disastrous incompetence following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita meant she was no longer a credible candidate. What platform was she planning to run on -- that she promised not to be as dreadful as she was in her first term?

As the sitting governor, her primary campaign would have to be on her experience; but that was in fact a distinct negative... so she would have to fall back on some huge policy difference between her and Jindal. But the only real difference was that Jindal has a political philosophy, whereas Blanco is a political blank slate, concerned only with amasssing money for her cronies and campaign donors. She had no great initiatives, plans, or ideas; in fact, she barely even responded to the biggest one-two punch of natural disasters ever to hit Louisiana.

So no airing of two distinct political philosophies. And of course, the idea that Blubbering Blanco could be called "articulate" is not merely a joke, it's like laughing at a cripple. Next to Blanco, George W. Bush is Demosthenes.

But John Breaux is a different story. Here are a couple of contrasts to get us started:

Age vs. youth

Breaux is 27 years older than Bobby Jindal. In 1972, Breaux had his first congressional electoral victory... and Bobby Jindal had his first birthday.

On election day, Breaux will be 63, while Jindal will be 36. While Breaux has been around for decades, Jindal is something of a child prodigy: better educated than Breaux (including a Rhodes scholarship -- which, unlike the previous president, Jindal actually completed, obtaining an MA in politics from Oxford); a string of "youngest evers," culminating with a very credible and almost successful gubernatorial run in 2003 at the age of 32.

My guess is that the age difference is less important than the generational one: John Breaux was born during World War II, and he came of age during the "Camelot" era; his philosophy seems more than anything like that of John F. Kennedy.

Bobby Jindal was born in the throes of Vietnam, but he would have first become politically aware during Ronald Reagan's presidency, which lasted from when he was 10 until he was 18, his most formative years. I would be astonished if he were not deeply affected by the Gipper.

So it's Kennedy vs. Reagan in the mangroves... and I'd much rather see that than Reagan vs. Blank-out.

Philosophies of governance

John Breaux was always considered a "conservative Democrat;" that is, he supported tax increases, but nowhere near as large or as often as his Democratic colleagues. He was more or less pro-life and pro-gun, though he would nevertheless caucus with his party, even when it was run by wool-dyed liberals who were pro-choice on killing foetuses but anti-choice on killing rapists who attack you in your own home.

But I would expect Breaux, based upon history, to be more of a local-issues, retail-politics governor who probably would not intrude himself into national politics very often; think of a Democratic version of Haley Barbour, rather than a Bill Richardson, Janet Napolitano, or Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Bobby Jindal, by contrast, is much more of a committed conservative: a convert to Catholicism (from Hinduism; Jindal's parents were recent immigrants from India when he was born), Jindal is about as hard-core anti-abortion as one can be; the only exception being that he supports "emergency contraception," which many consider to be an abortificant. But his pro-life stance makes no allowances for the issue of rape, incest, or in cases where it's called a "medical necessity."

Jindal also has a 100% rating from the NRA. But the real difference, I believe, is that Jindal seems to have a larger goal than just being an effective governor; I suspect he intends to become president one day (he was born in Baton Rouge in 1971, so is legally qualified... unlike Schwarzenegger or Jennifer Granholm).

Jindal has mostly supported a pro-enforcement immigration policy; he has voted to withhold funds from the UN until they enact the Bolton reforms; voted to permanize the Bush tax cuts, the cap-gains tax cut, and the USA PATRIOT Act; and voted against setting an exit date from Iraq.

And most important to me, Jindal voted a resounding No on House Concurrent Resolution 63, the House Iraq Cut-and-Run Cri de Coeur. He was not one of the "Surrender-Seventeen."

(Neither Breaux nor Jindal has any military service, I believe.)

I believe the 2007 election will be won or lost on leadership and on ideas. I like both candidates (assuming Breaux runs; and why wouldn't he?) But of course, I'm rooting for Jindal.

So despite the fact that it will be much harder for the Republican to win with the Democratic candidate being John Breaux instead of Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, I still prefer us to win a tough race than essentially get a bye.

Contrary to popular opinion, a mandate does not come from a landslide victory; a mandate comes from an election between two good candidates, each of whom runs on a specific and well-articulated platform; the people speak, and that gives the winner the mandate to transform that platform to actual policy. With an election blowout due to competency issues, the only "mandate" the winner has is not to be as much of a cement-head as his predecessor was.

To quote a hero of mine, bring it on!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 21, 2007, at the time of 6:30 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 13, 2007

Hey - Let's Accept!

Matt Drudge is running a link to this Politico post about Air America (do they still exist?) offering to host a Republican candidates debate in four states, "tweaking" (Politico's word) Fox News Channel:

Tweaking the Fox News Channel, the president of liberal Air America Radio this morning sent a letter to the chairmen of four state Republican parties, offering to host and broadcast the state parties' upcoming presidential debates.

Agreeing to the debate “would allow Republicans to differentiate themselves from Democrats,” Air America President Mark Green wrote to the Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and South Carolina Republican chairmen in a deadpan communication provided this morning to The Politico.

This picks up on the dog's breakfast the Nevada Democratic Party and the Democratic candidates served themselves a few days ago by pulling out of a Nevada debate... because Fox News was one of the sponsors.

John Edwards, covering himself with near-Marcottean glory, was first; the Nevada Democratic Party pulled out a few days later because, according to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 100%), Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes cracked a joke at President Bush's expense, implying that Bush was too dense to know the difference between Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL, 100%) and Osama bin Laden (terrorist nutcase with delusions of godhood, 100%).

(No, I don't get it either. Why should Ailes making fun of Bush mean that Fox News questioners would treat Democrats unfairly? Somebody has slipped a cog here, and I don't think it's I.)

You know what, though? Mark Green is right! Accepting Air America's offer would absolutely differentiate us from the Democrats -- and show Republicans to be unafraid of debate, to boot.

Let's go ahead and accept... but demand a partnership with another ultra-liberal (but larger) media source, like CNN; and just like the Fox News offer, demand a mix of liberal and conservative questioners... but allow Air America to supply one.

I have complete confidence that Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Newt Gingrich, Fred Thompson, or whoever is in the debate will have no difficulty fielding a question or three from an Airhead America reporter; and that some insulting, offensive, "have you stopped preventing your wife from getting an abortion yet" question will actually enhance the appeal of whichever Republican responds to it with sang-froid.

Propaganda is a very powerful tool. Gee, I wish we had someone who understood it.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 13, 2007, at the time of 3:24 PM |