Category ►►► Elections

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!