Category ►►► Presidential Campaign Camp and Porkinstance

January 25, 2012

Spring Forward, Fall Back

I see that Newt Gingrich has a new talking point, but it seems a bit -- odd:

Gingrich also talked extensively about immigration policy in Latin America, and, in a nod to Cuban-American voters, he offered to push for "Cuban Spring" if elected president.

What, Newt will push for the Muslim Brotherhood to colonize Cuba? Or is he just completely out of touch with what the putative "Arab Spring" has actually wrought in the Middle East?

Another newtron bombard from Newt "Shoot from the lip" Gingrich!

This illustrates my problem with Gingrich as nominee, an October surprise every day. In the very same article, we find this:

The former House speaker ripped Romney's immigration policy, laughing off the idea of self-deportation that Romney had suggested during a Monday night debate saying it wouldn't work.

During a debate earlier this week, Romney said he favors self-deportation over policies that would require the federal government to round up millions of illegal immigrants and send them back to their home countries. Advocates of Romney's approach argue that illegal immigration can be curbed by denying public benefits to them, forcing them to leave the United States on their own.

"You have to live in a world of Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island accounts and automatically $20 million income for no work to have some fantasy this far from reality," Gingrich said, alluding to details in Romney's income tax returns made public on Tuesday. "For Romney to believe that somebody's grandmother is going to be so cut off that she is going to self-deport, I mean this is an Obama-level fantasy."

You think Barack H. Obama's oppo research won't be able to latch onto the obvious rejoinder? Heck, the Romney campaign and even Newsmax caught on immediately:

But Gingrich's campaign has spoken of the self-deportation policy he ridiculed Wednesday.

Romney's campaign directed reporters to past comments by Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond, who said that only a small percent of illegal immigrants would likely be allowed to stay in the U.S. under Gingrich's plan. Hammond went on to say that the vast majority of them would likely "self-deport."

(And note, he is still sticking it to Mitt for being richer and more successful than Gingrich has ever been. Evidently, Newt really and truly has a great big grudge against Capitalism.)

Words pop into his head and bubble out his mouth without even a moment's pause for reflection. Can Newt Gingrich ever demonstrate the discipline to think twice before speaking?

Or even after?

I very much worry that conservatives, in their understandable zeal to find a candidate who is energetic in attacking the real enemy of freedom (Obama), will saddle us with the caffeinated squirrel from Under the Hedge -- a candidate who windmills his arms with great vigor, flailing ineffectually, producing "sound and fury that signifies nothing" -- but electoral disaster.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 25, 2012, at the time of 1:22 PM | Comments (1)

August 28, 2011

In Case I Ever Contract Mad-Cow Disease and Decide to Run for President...

New York Times' Executive Editor Bill Keller, is just about to expire; I mean, he has set his expiry date in September, when he will step down to become "a full time writer." Keller will be replaced by Jill Abramson, who, along with Jane Mayer, wrote a despicable smear-job cum character assassination of Justice Clarence Thomas titled Strange Justice in 1994.

I think she'll settle into the top Times job nicely.

But soon-to-be-but-humble-writer Keller is going out with partisan flair: He crafted a series of smarmy questions on religion, religous nuttery, and how a presidential candidate's goofy religious cult (like Rick Perry's "Christianity") might adversely impact his decision-making and rationality, leading to national catastrophe and faith-caused disaster.

Curiously, he asks his questions only of Republican candidates; I can only conclude that Keller, too, believes that the current squatter at 1600 Pennsylvania is lame duck quacking.

We already have quite a number of GOP candidates; but it's always possible that every one of them will drop out, a la Tim Pawlenty -- see? it's happening already! Thus there's a chance the resulting power vacuum will force the Republican National Conceders to search deeper down the bench for our nominee. In fact, the RNC might finally end up tapping people with zero political training, zero interest in politics, negligible mental stability, and even less experience than Barack H. Obama. That is, people like me!

When that time comes, I'm sure even we schlimazels and schnorrers will have to confront the inquisition and come up with some reasonable (and reasonably waggish) answers. Ergo (Latin for "tell the girl to leave"), firmly taking up the witty man's burden (or at least the half of it), I shall be more than happy to answer the K-man's vital questions for myself, by myself, and as always, only thinking about myself. Read on, assuming you have nothing better to do, like grooming baboons or filing your teeth.

(Keller's questions are in blue below; my answers are in regular, unadorned, manly black. Or rather in manly reddish brown, the normal, lovable, Big Lizards standard typeface color you've all come to know and loathe.)

Keller's Curiously Concentrated and Condescending Killer Questions

1. Is it fair to question presidential candidates about details of their faith?

Under some circumstances, yes. For example, it may be worthwhile to discover whether a candidate's faith requires him to sacrifice pious virgins to the Volcano God -- if for no other reason than to determine how many interns he might need in a given year. (Not that one is likely to find a D.C. intern, male or female, who met the qualifications.)

2. Is it fair to question candidates about controversial remarks made by their pastors, mentors, close associates or thinkers whose books they recommend?

Show 'nuff! And also about whether it takes more than a bicycle path disagreement to cause said candidate to change religions.

3. (a) Do you agree with those religious leaders who say that America is a "Christian nation" or "Judeo-Christian nation?" (b) What does that mean in practice?

(a) Yep.

(b) Take a look around you, clod: Our entire culture -- its laws, religious sects, recreational activities, marital habits, prandial habits, and everyday idioms and expressions all scream "Judeo-Christian." For example, the United States rarely holds auto-da-feys anymore, in which infidels are tortured to death in arenas and sporting venues, while spectators bet on which sinner will survive the longest during his the stoning; so evidently, we're not a Moslem country.

And most of us have long ago given up virgin sacrifices (see question 1 above); so it appears we are not a nation of atheistic, lefty film makers with Polish surnames, either.

As Sherlock Holmes wrote in one of his stories about the ficticious writer "Arthur Conan Doyle," when you eliminate all the incredibly stupid things in politics, then whatever remains, no matter how bizarre, must be... Well, I reckon you're usually left with a fistful of nothing. Nevermind.

Look, America is a Judeo-Christian country, see? And if you're not aware of this fact, you're unqualified to live here. Move somewhere else!

4. If you encounter a conflict between your faith and the Constitution and laws of the United States, how would you resolve it? Has that happened, in your experience?

Hasn't happened, unless it did and I missed it.

Now, if I were Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Mecca, 100%), I would have six impossible conflicts before breakfast, as my religion would demand that I overturn all democratic institutions, marry multiple wives, wage literal war upon liberty, eschew porcine delectables, cease drinking like a chimney, and remake America into a vassel state of the world Caliphate. All without giving up any of the myriad privileges that go with being a member of the World's Greatest Deliberative Body. (Wait, I think that's supposed to be the Senate; a member, then, of the World's Greatest Second-Rate Body.)

But then again, I don't CAIR.

5. (a) Would you have any hesitation about appointing a Muslim to the federal bench? (b) What about an atheist?

(a) If he was Michael Moore, darn tootin'! Oops, correction: You said Moslem, not mausoleum, right? Sorry.

What was the question again?

(b) Appointing a Moslem to be an atheist? What you been smoking, Keller?

Oh, wait; your clumsy grammar threw me off. Do you mean, would I hesitate before appointing an atheist to sit on a bench owned by the feds? Not if it was full of splinters.

6. Are Mormons Christians, in your view? Should the fact that Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons influence how we think of them as candidates?

Are Progressivists socialists? Opinions are like... well, you know the saying. Since I'm neither Mormon nor Christian, my long thought out, brilliantly articulated opinion is that I couldn't care less.

(But for the Mormons Romney and Huntsman, I would be more impressed if they were Myrmidons.)

7. What do you think of the evangelical Christian movement known as Dominionism and the idea that Christians, and only Christians, should hold dominion over the secular institutions of the earth?

Objection, question assumes a fact not in evidence: What do you mean, "what do I think?"

8. (a) What is your attitude toward the theory of evolution? (b) Do you believe it should be taught in public schools?

(a) Leaning just forward enough to be off-balance.

(b) It would be nice if something was taught in the public schools!

9. Do you believe it is proper for teachers to lead students in prayer in public schools?

Not if the prayer is, "Please God, don't let me get caught!"

Questions Keller intended for Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN, 100%)

1. You have said that watching the film series "How Should We Then Live?" by the evangelist Francis Schaeffer was a life-altering event for you. That series stresses the "inerrancy" ­-- the literal truth -- of the Bible. Do you believe the Bible consists of literal truths, or that it is to be taken more metaphorically?

My life-altering film was 2001: A Space Odyssey; and yes, I believe the aliens on the other side of the wormhole obelisk orbiting Jupiter are literally true!

We await the starchild from Sirius -- arf arf!

2. You have recommended as meaningful in your life works by leading advocates of Dominionism, including Nancy Pearcey, whose book "Total Truth" warns Christians to be suspicious of ideas that come from non-Christians. Do you agree with that warning?

The books that meant most in my life are the oeuvre of Robert Anton Wilson. Not the Wilson of the last few years before he died, when he was a foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, wheelchair-bound kook who had rediscovered his inner Hefner; I mean his earlier, funnier period.

But as for your warning, I am suspicious of all ideas. Period.

Especially those of Robert Anton Wilson (in his earlier, funnier period).

3. Last year, in a documentary produced by Truth in Action Ministries, you espoused the idea that the government is not entitled to collect as taxes more than 10 percent of a household’s income, the amount Christians are called upon to tithe to the church. Is that a goal you would pursue as president?

Heck no. As future president (and current Archdruid of the Truth Inaction Miniseries), I would never pursue a goal to set the maximal income-tax rate at 10%.

I was thinking more along the lines of setting each American's income-tax rate to his average blood-alcohol level for the year, though I admit that could disparately affect the protected class of elected officials.

4. One of your mentors at Oral Roberts University, John Eidsmoe, teaches that when biblical law conflicts with American law, a Christian must work to change the law. Do you agree? Are there examples where the Bible guides you to challenge existing secular law?

I believe conservative Christians should seek to overturn every idiotic law that conflicts with basic public sanity; and the quickest way to do this is to find the nearest liberal and smite the jawbone of an ass.

5. Another book you have recommended is a biography of Robert E. Lee by J. Steven Wilkins, who contends that the Civil War was a clash between a Christian South and a godless North. He writes that in the South, contrary to the notion that slaves were victims, there was a "unity and companionship that existed between the races" because they shared a common faith. Do you agree with Mr. Wilkins?

Mr. Keller; is the phrase "tendentious caricature" still in the NYT's stylebook?

(And while we're on the subject, did you know that the word "gullible" is not found in any dictionary?)

Questions Keller intended for Texas Gov. Rick Perry

1. A recent article in The Texas Observer questioned your relationship with the New Apostolic Reformation, which advocates the belief that Christians and only Christians should hold dominion over earthly institutions. A number of leaders of this movement were given prominent roles in the prayer event called the Response. Would you like to clarify your relationship with these leaders? Do you hope for their support in your campaign?

I have never heard of the New Apostolic Reformation Dominionists (NARDs), but I'll try to answer the question as best I can.

I try never to fool around with NARDs; they can be very sensitive, and they bruise easily. And I certainly don't want to kick the NARDs when they're down, as you seem to want us to do; they're not a bunch of nuts, they are precious jewels in the conservative family.

And I very much wish I could have more satisfying relations with all the leading NARDs in America.

But on the other hand, I'm not going wear them on my sleeve or to blow kisses at them, either. I believe the only appropriate response would be to find the nearest NARDs, take them in hand, and firmly apply pressure in a vigorous and manly way; we might thereby raise the pitch of political discussion an octave or two.

But conservatism cannot simply sit on its NARDs. We need them; and when we neglect or abuse our NARDs, the entire body of conservatism aches.

We can only get satisfaction if we keep agitating them, rattling them around in constant motion. And we cannot sever our NARDs, cutting them off from the rest of the movement. Rather, we must hurl our NARDs straight into the melting pot, grinding them togther with all the other strains of conservative thought. After all, NARDs alone can do little without the great pillar of Republicanism that sucks in mere aimless effusions and directs them into a concentrated spray of intellectual fecundity.

For we must always remember that our ultimate target is not a mere trickle of rhetorical fluency here and there, but rather a great gusher spurting straight into the mainstream of voters. We must always aim directly at those busy, little beavers whose hard work joins us all together in an eruption of national love.

Those are my thoughts on this subject; I think I'll go smoke a cigarette.

2. You have been close to David Barton, founder of WallBuilders, who has endorsed your campaign. He preaches that America is a Christian nation, that we should have a government "firmly rooted in biblical principles" and that the Bible offers explicit guidance on public policy -- for example, tax policy. Do you disagree with him on any of these points?

Sorry I can't rise to the occasion; I'm still pretty drained.

3. In 2008, Senator John McCain disavowed the endorsement of the Rev. John Hagee, after Reverend Hagee made remarks offensive to Catholics and declared that the Holocaust was part of God’s plan to drive the Jews to Palestine. In this campaign, Reverend Hagee has reportedly decided you are his favorite candidate. Are you willing to accept his endorsement of your campaign?

I would never accept the endorsement of anyone who would stoop so low as to support someone like me for president.

Questions Keller intended for Sen. Rick Santorum

1. Some voters -- you have probably encountered them -- worry that religious zeal can lead to a rejection of scientific evidence, resulting in policy proposals that are essentially faith-based. In an interview with Rush Limbaugh, you described global warming as "junk science" and "patently absurd," and accused proponents of being part of a plot to expand government control over our lives. Among scientists who specialize in climate, there is now a strong consensus that earth is experiencing a pronounced warming trend, and that human behavior contributes to it. How did you decide that on this issue you agreed with the scientific outliers? Was this an example of faith-based policy judgment?

How did you settle on the phrase "strong consensus?" Do you believe the great scientific questions should be decided by voice vote?

And if so, is this an example of your faithless-based policy judgment?

Personally, I think scientific disputes should be resolved by duels. If you're not willing to guarantee your hypothesis with your body, then we should axe your accolades and eradicate your honorifics.

2. You signed a pledge circulated by the Family Leader, an Iowa conservative group, promising "personal fidelity to my spouse." Do you think cheating on a spouse disqualifies a candidate from being president?

Depends on whose spouse you cheat on. For example, if it's Joachim Sauer's spouse, you might be disqualified on grounds of poor judgment.

If it's Bill Clinton's spouse, you might be disqualified on grounds of insanity!

Questions Keller intended for Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney

1. In your 2007 speech on religion, you said that "freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom." Where does that leave unbelievers, in your view?

In a box, with the ambiguity.

2. This year, as in the 2008 election, polls show that there is some resistance to voting for a Mormon -- including among some evangelical Christians, who have been taught that the Mormon church is a "cult." Do you sense that this prejudice is still a factor in the campaign? If so, how do you address it?

By converting to Algorism. Show the jackanapes what a real cult looks like!

3. Was your religion a factor in your decision to oppose gay marriage and civil unions?

Was your liberalism a factor in your decision to devote the last twenty-seven years of your life to using the old Gray Lady as a bludgeon to dismantle American culture?

4. Do you believe that your upbringing in the Mormon faith provided you with some qualities that enhance your abilities as a political leader?

Why yes, if gave me a great capacity for dealing firmly with liberal mor -- oh wait, did you say Mormons?

Questions Keller intended for Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman

1. Though you were reared Mormon, you have described yourself as "not overly religious." I can imagine that is doubly unhelpful in winning the votes of evangelical Christians who figure so heavily in the Republican primary season: on the one hand, many of them have been taught that the Mormon church is a "cult"; on the other, many of them are looking for a candidate they regard as godly. How do you persuade conservative evangelicals to vote for you?

By turning my microphone into a serpent that devours the other nominees, including the incumbent master debater himself. Can't get much better political theater than that!

2. If not religion, what do you use as your guide in deciding what is right and what is wrong?

At any crossroads, I always ask myself, "WWZD?" He has never failed me.

See? Now how hard was all that. I swear, I don't know what these candidates are whining about.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 28, 2011, at the time of 2:46 PM | Comments (2)

August 22, 2011

Paul Bunyan Ryan Says He's Out; Let's Take Him at His Word

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI, 96%), chairman of the powerful House Budget Committee, looms like a giant in an election year focused almost entirely on the economy; he is the only person in any branch or chamber of the government not only to craft but actually enact (in his chamber, the House of Representatives) a plan to simultaneously grow the economy and shrink the government, restoring fiscal sanity. Understandably, many seek to draft him for the presidential race -- notably lawyer and blogger Beldar (here, here, here), but the ten-gallon Texan is certainly not alone.

But today, Ryan appears to have finally closed and locked that barn door before the horserace got out; he states without equivocation that he is not running:

"I sincerely appreciate the support from those eager to chart a brighter future for the next generation. While humbled by the encouragement, I have not changed my mind, and therefore I am not seeking our party's nomination for President. I remain hopeful that our party will nominate a candidate committed to a pro-growth agenda of reform that restores the promise and prosperity of our exceptional nation. I remain grateful to those I serve in Southern Wisconsin for the unique opportunity to advance this effort in Congress."

I personally was never aboard the Paul Ryan bandwagon (neither, evidently, was Ryan himself!) I think he's great where he is right now, and I'd like to see some actual executive experience before dropping him into the maelstrom of the presidency. Beldar tried to answer that charge in the first of the three Beldar links above, but his argument was weak and unconvincing hand-waving; there really is a difference between being a congressman and being a chief executive, and Ryan ain't got none'a the latter.

But clearly, he still has a strong role to play:

Ryan has said publicly he is concerned that those currently running for the GOP nomination are not addressing long-term fiscal and economic issues in a way that makes clear the magnitude of the challenges.

And I'll go further: I would strongly support him playing that role at a higher and more effective level -- for example, as Vice President of the United States. I believe he would tremendously compliment Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who doesn't seem to have much international economic or fiscal experience, and would even be an asset to the much more financially experienced Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts; alas, much of Romney's experience is negative, falling into the "fatal conceit" of believing in big-government solutions to problems more properly and effectively solved by Capitalism, rugged individualism, and American exceptionalism. I would hope that Ryan can lead a Romney or a Perry out of the socialist wilderness and into the promised land of liberty.

I think it would be wonderful if both of the two most likely nominees made a joint announcement (after sounding Ryan out, of course) that whichever of them is nominated, he will name Paul Ryan as his running mate. But I'm not going to hold my breath for more than a couple of minutes.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 22, 2011, at the time of 2:15 PM | Comments (0)

July 5, 2011

Reagan's Eleventh Commandment... Texas Style

President Ronald Reagan used to enunciate what he called "the eleventh commandment," which was, "Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican." Obviously that cannot be taken absolutely literally, else it would mean we cannot speak ill of a registered Republican who also happened to be a bank robber. But read rationally and reasonably, it means that we shouldn't waste time tearing down Republicans just because they happen to be more conservative, less conservative, more libertarian, or more "country club" than we. Mindless destruction is the Democrats' job.

So when I read about the supposed "rivalry" between former President George W. Bush and potential presidential candidate and current Texas Gov. Rick Perry, I was skeptical; I figured the Rive Gauche media were just playing "Let's you and him fight" again. I hoped that the contretemps in a cuppa was more like this:

The rivalry has become lore in the state capital, at times bordering on urban legend. “An eight-foot alligator in the sewer,” said Mr. Perry’s chief political strategist, David Carney. Stressing that the two men were friends with more similarities than differences, Mr. Carney said, “They are in the same church, different pews.”

Neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Perry would be interviewed for this article, and people close to both said the rivalry existed far more between their aides than between them personally...

...than like this, from the same article:

But in recent years, Mr. Perry has broken politically with Mr. Bush, questioning his credentials as a fiscal conservative, accusing him of going on “a big government binge” and playing down some of Mr. Bush’s accomplishments in Texas in light of his own.

Mr. Perry’s public statements exposed a long-simmering rivalry that had been little known outside of the political fraternity here but underscores the rightward drift of the Republican Party since Mr. Bush was president. More acutely, Mr. Perry’s criticism holds potential peril and benefit for him should he decide to mount a presidential campaign, allowing him to establish an identity distinct from Mr. Bush but risking a guerrilla campaign against him by the former president’s inner circle.

Yes, of course Perry is more ideologically conservative than Bush, or especially than the latter's father, George H.W. Bush. But W. was certainly never a raging RINO, for all that he differed on issues both politic and policy with many contempo-conservatives. Such a difference resides squarely within the realm of Reagan's eleventh.

So assuming the former -- that the rivalry is more between staffers than principals -- I offer this immodest proposal; most of the onus is on the former president, who is much better known and has nothing to lose, being "at liberty," as the saying goeth. It's a three-step plan; Bush should be comfortable with n-step plans:

1. George W. Bush should call a press conference. In a scowling, angry-looking and -sounding voice, he should announce that he won't allow Rick Perry's criticisms of him to go unanswered, so he is going to respond to them right now. That should guarantee maximum coverage; the Casa Blanca press corpse -- sorry, corps -- should be salivating like Pavlov's pups at the prospect of Bush tearing a Republican hopeful a new, let us say, Angus.

2. On the ordained date, W. steps up to the podium and rattles off the main charges against him from the Perry camp: That he allowed spending to grow far too large, that he was too accommodating to those who wanted full amnesty for illegal immigrants, and that his policies were too "big government" in a number of social policies, notably education.

   Then W. says, "I regret to say that most of Gov. Perry's criticisms are true. When I came to Washington, I'd hoped to push more small government, private-sector solutions; but I came to believe that my policies were the best that I could get through Congress at that time. I still think so, but times have changed; and today I would offer very different, more Reaganesque policies than I felt able to offer during my tenure in office.

   "While Republicans controlled the House and Senate until the 2006 elections, I never had a majority of fiscal and regulatory conservatives to work with in Congress; and after that election, I had to contend with a Democratic Congress that saw every problem as evidence that the federal government was too small, didn't tax and spend enough, and didn't have enough control over the rest of us.

   "But after the 2012 election, whichever Republican is the new president will have a Congress that is much more fiscally conservative, that won't try to balance the government's budget by raising taxes on families and companies, and much more reluctant to put its thumb on the scales and declare winners and losers within the private sector. The Congress elected next year will get out of the way and allow the American economy to roar back to full strength, once the anchor of government regulation is chopped away.

   "As far as I'm concerned, the George W. Bush of today has no policy disputes with the Gov. Rick Perry of today. In fact, I would be overjoyed to see a President Perry, or a President Romney, President Bachmann, President Pawlenty, or any other Republican as President of the United States."

3. And for the last step, Bush should conclude thus: "And to that end, I am announcing here and now that whichever Republican is nominated at the GOP convention in Tampa, my staff, my friends, my fundraisers, and I will work tirelessly to elect him or her in November 2012. Because every Republican running would make an excellent chief executive, and there's not a one of 'em that wouldn't be a gift from God compared to the incumbent.

   So you asked for my response to what Rick Perry has been saying about my tenure as president... and this is it: I've listened to Perry and all the rest, and I like what I hear. As far as I'm concerned -- and I'm sure my staff wouldn't want to violate Ronald Reagan's eleventh commandment either -- I can wholeheartedly endorse any one of them. Thank you and good evening; I will not be taking questions."

As I said upstairs, George W. Bush has nothing to lose; so he is the logical person to make the first conciliatory move. If he doesn't, I will be very disappointed... just as I was at the conclusion of his second term.

I hope by now that, like Beaver Cleaver, he has learned his lesson.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 5, 2011, at the time of 5:21 PM | Comments (1)

June 4, 2011

I Like Paul Ryan, But... vol. 1

In company with Beldar, I am a big fan of the Roadmap for America's Future, crafted by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI, 96%), Chairman of the House Budget Committee; I believe it to be the best and most feasible plan for true economic recovery in the United States... in fact, the only feasible plan; and at that only feasible in the 113th (next) Congress. But unlike Beldar, I am still rather skeptical of electing (or for heaven's sake, "drafting") Ryan to become President of the United States. I just don't know enough about the man, the Commander, or the leader.

I am a bit shaken, for example, by this speech of Ryan's, delivered last Thursday to the Alexander Hamilton Society, outlining his views (Ryan's, not Hamilton's) on foreign and military policy. In particular, I am troubled by the lack of specificity, of any real plan to defeat the axis of radical Islamism, of any real understanding of what such a long war entails, and especially by the "on the one hand, on the other hand" dithering that reminds me rather disturbingly of Sen. John Kerry (D-MA, 85%).

Heck, Ryan doesn't even seem to have much of an opinion on non-economic domestic policy either, at least as far as one can tell from his official website. His interests seem somewhat limited, although if he runs, I'm sure he'll flesh them out some; his only committee assignments are the Budget, Ways and Means, and the Ways and Means subcommittee on Health -- which I presume primarily deals with health care from an economic perspective. Ryan is a green-eyeshade accountant, good on economic issues; but the presidency encompasses so much more than that!

He gives us no discussion of strategy in the long war, neither grand nor regional strategy. His only reference to our greatest cultural and wartime enemy, Iran, and its national (Syria) and extra-national extensions (Hezbollah), is almost farcical in its perfunctoriness:

In Syria and Iran, we are witnessing regimes that have chosen the opposite path. Instead of accommodating the desires of their peoples for liberty and justice, these regimes have engaged in brutal crackdowns, imprisoning opposition leaders, and killing their own citizens to quell dissent....

We have a responsibility to speak boldly for those whose voices are denied by the jackbooted thugs of the tired tyrants of Syria and Iran. [Emphasis added.]

This is straight out of Lewis Carroll:

Our Iran strategy is to verbally chastise them? And what else? What are we going to do to counter Iran's determined war against us, against our allies in the Middle East and Europe, and its existential threat to Israel?

Anent Israel, he has little of substance to say:

What we can do is affirm our commitment to democracy in the region by standing in solidarity with our longstanding allies in Israel and our new partners in Iraq.

Meaning what? Does he support or oppose a Palestinian state? With what boundaries? Contiguous, even if that means Israel must be cut in half? I wish he would just spill the beans about what he really would do, were he living in la Casa Blanca.

How about the other prong of the axis: the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and other extra-national threats to the United States and the West? He never really addresses this scourge squarely; in fact, he only mentions al-Qaeda once:

Our ability to affect events is strongest in Iraq and Afghanistan, where for the last decade we have been fighting the scourge of global terrorism. In these countries, we can and we must remain committed to the promotion of stable governments that respect the rights of their citizens and deny terrorists access to their territory.

Although the war has been long and the human costs high, failure would be a blow to American prestige and would reinvigorate al Qaeda, which is reeling from the death of its leader. Now is the time to lock in the success that is within reach.

Would anything here sound strange or bizarre coming from George W. Bush -- or Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ, 73%), John Kerry, or even Barack H. Obama? This is simply hand-waving: He recognizes that since we have troops in those two countries, we have more of a say there; that we like stable governments that respect rights; and that it would be bad if we screwed up now. It tells us exactly nothing about Ryan's strategy for the Middle East and Central Asia.

What's his plan for eliminating, or at least crippling, the wave of violent, anti-American, anti-Jew, anti-democratic, thoroughly radicalized Islamism? Has he one? Has he even thought about it?

Ryan does recognize that there's a series of revolutions going on in Arabia (or perhaps one many-headed, revolutionary hydra). Here is his prescription, such as it is:

In the Arab Spring we are seeing long-repressed populations give voice to the fundamental desire for liberty [on the one hand...]. But we are also seeing the risks that emerge when the advancement of freedom is stunted for want of the right institutions [on the other hand]. In such societies, the most organized factions often lack tolerance and reject pluralism. Decades without a free press have led many to treat conspiracy theories as fact.

It is too soon to tell whether these revolutions will result in governments that respect the rights of their citizens [on the one hand...], or if one form of autocracy will be supplanted by another [on the other hand]. While we work to assure the former [on the one hand...], American policy should be realistic about our ability to avert the latter [on the other hand].

I hate that formulation, which Kerry made famous in 2004; I suppose it's intended to sound above the fray, taking the long view, seeing all sides. But what the heck does it mean as a practical matter?

• What criteria should we employ to separate new "governments that respect the rights of their citizens" from those where "one form of autocracy will be supplanted by another?"
• Should we help the revolutionaries that appear to fall in the first category?
• If so, how? With American forces, with arms, with "advisors," with humanitarian aid, or just with brave words of exhortation?
• Should we interfere with revolutions that appear more like the latter category, say those that appear headed towards creating a sharia state ruled by Hamas or the Ikwan, the Muslim Brotherhood?
• If so, how? Merely with strong words of denunciation, with monetary aid to the existing government, with intelligence sharing and advice, or with actual U.S. troops helping put down the latest incarnation of the Moro Rebellion?

It's nice that he hopes the rebellions are led by democratic republican nation-builders; but as the saying goes, hope is not a strategy. What actual policies would Ryan push?

Ryan tells us he opposes promiscuous budget-cutting in the Department of Defense (though I'm sure we already knew that):

A more prosperous economy enables us to afford a modernized military that is properly sized for the breadth of the challenges we face. Such a military must also be an efficient and responsible steward of taxpayer dollars in order to maintain the confidence of the American people. The House-passed budget recognizes this, which is why it includes the $78 billion in defense efficiency savings identified by Secretary Gates.

By contrast, President Obama has announced $400 billion in new defense cuts, saying in effect he’ll figure out what those cuts mean for America’s security later. Indiscriminate cuts that are budget-driven and not strategy-driven are dangerous to America and America’s interests in the world. Secretary Gates put it well: “that’s math, not strategy.”

But what is Ryan's vision of the ideal military for the United States in 2013 and beyond?

• What mix of traditional combat units and units organized more for counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare does he forsee?
• What mix of expensive high-tech and cheaper low-tech?
• How much should we rely on air power versus boots in the mud?
• How much should we invest in battlefield intelligence -- including exotic (and expensive!) new intel platforms?
• What is his position on gays being allowed to serve openly in the military and women being allowed to serve in overt combat roles?

On virtually every issue other than the budget and intimately related programs, Paul Ryan's policies seem vague, if not MIA, a fluffy cloud of good wishes and skyhooks. I'm not saying he doesn't have specific visions or ideas about them, nor even that they would be antithetical to my own positions; I simply can't say, because he won't enunciate his non-economic positions with clarity and precision.

In fact, if you read the entire speech, he appears observe everything on America's plate through the crystal goblet of economic policy. For example, he is scornful of President B.O.'s proposal to cut $400 billion from the Pentagon budget (over some number of years), yet proud of his own proposal to cut $78 billion -- solely (it seems to me) because Ryan's plan, unlike the president's, is that of "an efficient and responsible steward of taxpayer dollars in order to maintain the confidence of the American people."

Well that's fine. It's nice to be fine. Who could be opposed to efficiency and responsibility anent taxpayer dollars? But given the military's function, there are other overriding concerns.

Ryan mentions grand strategy as an afterthought, never making any attempt to define it or flesh it out. He is either unaware of (or uninterested in) designing a force structure based upon the missions we expect them to undertake; he focuses instead like a laser pointer on how much we can afford to pay.

And what about non-economic, non-budgetary, domestic policies? Where does Ryan stand on vital issues such as:

• The right to self defense (on his website, he sees gun rights only in terms of "Sportsman's Issues")
• Defending DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act
• Card check (I presume he's agin' it, but has he ever said so in a policy speech?)
• The misuse of the Endangered Species Act to shut down farms, recreational facilities, factories, power plants, and suchlike
• A federal law requiring picture ID for federal elections and allowing states to implement the same requirement for state and local elections

Hard to say where he stands, as not a single one of these issues is so much as mentioned on his website.

He does discuss immigration policy; his position is quotidian within the Republican Party, falling somewhere between Hugh Hewitt and John McCain -- e.g., he supports 700 miles of actual fencing plus a "virtual fence," but he opposes an immediate "path to citizenship" for existing illegal immigrants. Nothing here but standard positions that could be enunciated by 90% of the Republican congressional conference.

His energy policies seem adequate, though I'm not a fan of his insistance upon "alternative energy" and "conservation" (the latter means continuing to increase the CAFE (combined average fuel economy) standards by government fiat, rather than allowing the market itself to take care of the problem. Again, there's nothing original or particularly interesting here: He wants to streamline regulation of gasoline refining and nuclear power plants. I can't tell if he supports ethanol subsidies.

None of this gives me confidence that Ryan would be a leader on any issue other than the economy. None of this encourages me to call for him to be drafted into the presidential snoozeapalooza.

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 4, 2011, at the time of 3:26 PM | Comments (1)

May 26, 2011

Hesitating at the Doors of the Ryan Express - a Response to Beldar

Today, Beldar came out of the closet: He called for a draft-Chairman-Paul-Ryan (R-WI, 96%)-for-president movement.

But color me skeptical -- not of what Ryan could do in office but of his ability to capture said office in the first place, which is of primary (and general) importance.

Look, I like Paul Ryan, and I love his plan to rescue the budget and economy. But I'm nervous about him being the GOP standard bearer next year -- given that the last time anyone went directly from the House to the White House was James Garfield in 1880.

A representative running for president was of course far more common in the nineteenth century, and the House was held in much higher regard than now. Too, Garfield was a nine-term congressman first elected during the Civil War; and he served for five years as Appropriations Committee chairman. But in 2012, Ryan will be a seven-term congressman who will have served as Budget Committee chairman less than two years. So far, he has not yet shepherded a single major budget or economic bill into law as chairman; and with congressional gridlock, it's unlikely he will before the election.

He has never held any substantive job other than politics (like Obama)... though he did drive the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile during college. (I shudder to imagine Obama's campaign ads!)

Despite Ryan's current stature, on paper Ryan in 2012 could be construed as having even lower qualifications for president than did Obama in 2008, considering House vs. Senate and depending on how many bonus points he gets for his chairmanship.

(I stress this is on paper; obviously I consider him far more qualified in reality. But paper qualifications play a vital role in voters' minds, especially when most of them don't even know who Paul Ryan is.)

He would be the youngest person ever elected president, at 42 years (Kennedy was 43 when elected); Ryan would also be the second youngest ever to serve as president, at 42 years, eleven months, and twenty-two days. (Teddy Roosevelt, who became president following McKinley's assassination at 42 years, ten months, and eighteen days of age, wins that contest by only a scant month.)

Now we all know Ryan would make a wonderful president, lightyears ahead of the fellow currently polluting 1600 Pennsylvania Ave with his half-baked and half-witted Progressivism, like Will Rogers without the charm, patriotism, or rope tricks. But again the problem: Ryan will not get a chance to demonstrate his skill if he isn't elected in the first place.

My worry is that Ryan will easily be painted by the Left as an untested and unqualified callow youth, himself a radical; they will portray his "Roadmap for America's Future" as a Ponzi scheme cooked up by Republicans to dismantle Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security; and as we just witnessed in the special election in New York's 26th district, not all Republicans are on board with the "Roadmap."

I believe it will eventually be enacted into law in a post-Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-NV, 75%), post-Obama political environment; and once passed will eventually prove to have been a brilliant idea and help Republicans immeasurably. But I do not believe that it would help the GOP ticket to have the "Roadmap's" sponsor as our presidential nominee; nor would it help getting the requisite Senate pickups to pass it through that body in the first place.

Rather, I worry that voters might recoil from so many drastic changes coming all at once like that, harkening back to all of Obama's drastic changes and how many Americans have come to despise them. I just don't believe the voter will appreciate being whipsawed back and forth between Scylla and Charybdis.

So where do I stand? I think Ryan might be a very good choice for president -- in 2020, as a follow-up to the Republican who is elected next year. Perhaps by then he will have served a term as Gov. of Wisconsin, or at least served as a high-ranking cabinet member, say Secretary of the Treasury or somesuch.

For next year, there is very little chance for a superstar, celebrity, outside-the-box nominee; Gen. David Petraeus looks to be headed for Director of the CIA, thus unavailable for the top job, and I can't think of anyone else with that star power. Therefore, we have to duke it out against the incrumbent on competence, repeal, and normalcy -- that is, a traditional election run against a sitting president.

So for right now, I'd rather see a traditional nominee, someone to sooth the waters and reassure voters that everything is back to norble: a successful governor who isn't a Tea-Party activist, in other words; which more or less narrows the betting line down to Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, Rick Perry of Texas, or on a long shot, Mitt Romney of Massachusetts (dicey).

We're necessarily rolling the bones next year, because when all is said, Obama is still the incumbent president, with all the power and clout and bully pulpititude appertaining thereto. So for goodness' sake, let's not make it even harder on ourselves by taking one die (executive experience) off the table and trying to make our point with just the other!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 26, 2011, at the time of 6:27 PM | Comments (4)

August 26, 2010

Ladies and Germs, Meet the Next President of the United States...

...Unless the 2012 Republican presidential primary turns into a brawl between this guy and David Petraeus, in which case all bets are off:

 

 

In terms of ability to communicate, Gov. Christopher J. Christie of New Jersey is George W. Bush's antiparticle.

This is what we need: a strong conservative with a capitalist ideology, tons of street smarts, and the missing link from the previous president -- the ability to talk directly to the American people, explain what he's doing and why, and persuade them to follow the cause.

If Christie wins the primary and gets set to run against Barack H. Obama in the general election, I believe the Obamacle will abruptly realize that the presidency is too small a job for a demigod like him; he will exit the race in order to become the first post-American, "citoyen du monde" elected Secretary General of the United Nations.

Then Christie will crush L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (and not just by sitting on him) to become the 45th President of the United States.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 26, 2010, at the time of 7:49 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 5, 2010

The Drumbeat Grows Louder: Petraeus for President?

I sincerely believe Gen. David Petraeus is sincere: He really, really, really doesn't want to run for president.

But that's not the point, is it? Who but a dyed in the rib politician would eagerly seek a job that requires one to be "on call" 24-7, for a minimum of four years and perhaps eight? That feels like being the molten material battered between hammer and anvil? Who but a career power-monger would actually enjoy being the last word on what Americans want, need, and shall get? Who but a certifiable loon could actually desire all that pressure, responsibility, accountability; all the lies, the remorse, the grief; the heavy weight of history, and the delicious poison of power?

The question with Petraeus is not whether he wants to do it, or is running to do it -- but whether he would be willing to do it if prevailed upon by enough respected women and men on both sides the aisle. Despite all his denials and flat refusals, he has never yet said that he would not serve, even if his country desperately needed him.

Even the Daily Telegraph has noticed, in its article titled "David Petraeus for President: Run General, run":

The problem is that Petraeus appears to have no desire to be commander-in-chief. His denials of any political ambition have come close to the famous statement by General William Sherman. The former American Civil War commander, rejecting the possibility of running for president in 1884 by stating: "I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected."

Close, but no cigar. By the way, our chums across the "pond" (by which one means the Atlantic Ocean) appear to have taken that quotidian quotation from Bartlett's, refusing to succumb to the more elegant version usually attributed -- without citation -- to William Tecumseh Sherman:

If drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve.

I don't care if he didn't actually say it that way; he should have.

The conundrum for Petraeus is this: If it becomes clear that Americans truly yearn for a non-politician as president -- following the most political, partisan, and most unAmerican president in American history -- how then can patriot Petraeus refuse? There literally is nobody else with his stature, nobody else whose reluctant acquiesence would instantly vault him to front-runner status and open the floodgates of campaign contributions. Beside David Petraeus, all other pretenders to the throne (including the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave) shrink to the stature of Miguelito Quixote Loveless... or for those with no cultural memory, the size of "Mini-Me."

And yet -- we don't know the first thing about Petraeus' political opinions! For all we now, he could be another Eric Shinseki or Colin Powell, eager to further the "Europeanization" of America and knife Republicans -- and Tea-Party activists -- in the back. Yet somehow, I doubt it; I think that if Gen. Petraeus were free to tell us what he truly believes, he would be neither a liberal nor a conservative, and certainly not a Dick Cheney "neoconservative" (which I mostly find myself being), but rather a Tea Partier... whose motto would be "Taxed Enough Already," and who would be horrified by what the Left has done to his country.

I don't know if he will come 'round to accepting the plea from hoi polloi and politico alike, or whether, like Caesar, he will refuse it three times. (I hope not the latter; it didn't do J.C. a bit of good to be so dismissive.) But I have little enough interest in the professed and eager candidates already announced or rumored to be waiting in the wings that I would dearly love to roll the bones with Dr. Gen. David Howell Petraeus, PhD... if for no other reason than I would be bewitched, bothered, and bemused at the mismatch of the presidential debates between B.O. and CENTCOM.

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 5, 2010, at the time of 2:50 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 19, 2010

General Courters

Gen. David Petraeus is edging closer and closer to calling for the end of President William "Billery" Clinton's "don't ask, don't tell" policy anent gays serving openly in military service. Gen. Petraeus has not yet announced his support for dropping the prohibition entirely, but he seems on the verge of doing so:

Meanwhile, Petraeus, who was catapulted to fame by overseeing the troop surge in Iraq more than two years ago, said “the time has come to consider a change” but cautioned that the change to the Clinton-era law should be done in a “thoughtful manner,” and it should not be rendered without first making assessments as to how a change would affect recruiting, retention, morale and cohesion within the military services....

Petraeus, the most popular general of his generation, stopped short of giving his personal take on the current ban, but told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had an eight-minute prepared statement on his position regarding the repeal of the ban.

“This is not a sound-bite issue,” Petraeus said.

There are several ways to interpret this endorsement, if indeed it is one...

1. Some might argue that Petraeus is just mouthing politically correct sentiments but doesn't really mean them. This strikes me as most unlikely; he is not generally known as a PC kinda guy.

2. Some might hint that he only supports the "gay agenda" because he's sucking up to President Barack H. Obama (though perhaps a better verb is called for), hoping the president will name him Chief of Staff of the Army.

   But I don't think Petraeus has any hope or expectation of being picked by Obama for such an intensely political position; nobody knows Petraeus' politics exactly, as he quite properly will not divulge them while wearing the uniform of his country. But it's a good bet that David Howell Petraeus is considerably more conservative than Obama would want.

In addition, Petraeus is inextricably shackled to George W. Bush, who promoted him and put him in charge of the Iraq War. Given how the resident president feels about his predecessor, the idea that Obama would ever elevate David Petraeus is laughable. He would be more likely to find some excuse to cashier him or move him to a "window seat."

Eric Shinseki, Clinton's pick in 1999, is more Obama's type. In 2011, Obama will undoubtedly name a four-star who also happens to be a doctrinaire liberal who shares Obama's peculiar ideas about the use of (or abstention from) military force. Bog only knows where he'll find one.

3. The most straightforward explanation is this: Petraeus honestly believes gays can serve openly without disrupting discipline or damaging morale. If this is true, he becomes the most persuasive and authoritative voice of that policy in American history... for nobody could deny the general's leadership, command ability, and real-world combat experience.

No one can say, "What does he know about unit cohesion and the intense bonding of combat?"

This is the explanation I personally favor, that Gen. Petraeus has concluded that fears about military catastrophe, arising from removing a barrier that I consider risible and indefensible, are overblown and exaggerated -- or unconsciously fabricated post-hoc to rationalize deep prejudice.

But there is a fourth possibility that I would be remiss to miss cataloging:

4. Gen. Petraeus could be pushing this issue because he intends to run in 2012 for a promotion from Commander of CENTCOM to Commander in Chief.

He may believe he already has a solid base among conservatives, so he may be reaching out to social moderates. If Petraeus ran as an economic and military conservative -- while being less ideological on non-economic domestic issues such as gays serving in the military; outreach to immigrants who truly want to assimilate; support for basic abortion rights, though with more stringent restrictions on late-term and partial-birth abortion (even Ronald Reagan never seriously tried to make abortion illegal); embryonic and adult stem-cell research (perhaps with a prohibition on killing the embryos while extracting stem cells, see our 2006 post on the bioresearch breakthrough) -- I say he would vault immediately to the head of the class.

David Petraeus is the first general since Dwight Eisenhower to capture the fancy and imagination of the American people in a positive way. Gen. Colin Powell came close, but his war was over too soon for the public really to form an opinion. Petraeus' campaign against the One could flow from a single sentence: Petraeus led us to victory in Iraq after Sen. Obama announced we'd already lost.

The only tea leaf that points to his next address being 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is that he plans to deliver a major policy speech in New Hampshire on Wednesday, May 24th. Why New Hampshire? He currently serves at the Pentagon or in the field in U.S. Central Command, he was born and raised in upstate New York, he has no particular tie to New Hampshire. The Granite State is, however, the traditional kick-off point for presidential campaigns.

A candidate such as Gen. Petraeus is a monster-under-the-bed scenario for the Democrats. He is charismatic, articulate, clean; he has no closeted skeletons they can rattle, no ratty little scandals as city councilman or corrupt, small-town mayor; he has no paper trail of questionable compromises as representative or senator. Even a Chicago sleaze machine of epic chutzpah like Organizing for America needs something to work with; Petraeus can't even be attacked as a Mormon!

And imagine voter reaction if Obama tried to run against Petraeus by saying, "What has he ever accomplished? He's not even a politician!"

In fact, he's just as big of a headache to other Republican hopefuls. By contrast, the GOP field seems a tired retread (Mitt Romney), a callow and flighty poseur (Sarah Palin), a who-dat? unknown quantity (Tim Pawlenty), or a goofy kid brother on a 1990s sitcom ("Everybody Loves Bobby" Jindal).

In many ways, Petraeus is the anti-Obama:

• He comes from a conservative section of New York State, Orange County, which just barely gave its vote to Obama in 2008 by 51% to 48%... when the state as a whole went for Obama by 62% to 37%. By contrast, Obama is from Honolulu, Hawaii, one of the most liberal cities in the United States.
• He has a PhD from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs -- a quintessentially ivy-league university (and ultra-liberal school within that university); yet he has chosen to devote his life to commanding troops in combat -- very aggressive, bloody combat, furthering the national security of the United States. To a man like Barack Obama, this does not compute.
• Petraeus has an intensely American view of life, duty, and the world; Obama has a more "cosmopolitan" or Euro-socialist viewpoint.
• Petraeus is a decider who is always ready to act on his decisions and put his life on the line; Obama habitually avoids making decisions, preferring to be the philosopher king who stands above the fray and disdains personally to act: He leaves such vulgarities to his minions in the administration and his acolytes in Congress.
• Petraeus spent his entire career in the Army; Obama has spent his entire professional life loathing the Army.

Electability aside, if Petraeus' political positions are in line with the mainstream of the GOP, I think he would make a much better president than any of the other likely GOP candidates. I would certainly trust his understanding of our current war against the Iran/al-Qaeda axis better than any president since Ronald Reagan, who understood our war against the evil Soviet Empire.

The only slight flaw in this spiderweb of speculation is that Petraeus himself has repeatedly, emphatically, and betimes rather earthily rejected the idea of running for political office, and especially of running for the presidency. But perhaps he can be persuaded by an appeal to his sense of duty... particularly if he sees a continuing deterioration of America's national-security apparatus.

Here's hoping; beside Petraeus, the other potential GOP candidates seem drab and tedious, and I'm not at all sure any can defeat Obama in 2012 -- unless the president manages to defeat himself.

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 19, 2010, at the time of 11:26 AM | Comments (0) | 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

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

April 16, 2009

Sarah Palin and Guilt by Disassociation

Ah, the distinctly noisome bouquet tells me that the 2012 presidential campaign has been uncorked early this year...

The attacks on Sarah Palin have begun again; and as before, since none of Palin's enemies can find anything troubling or disturbing about the woman herself, they're targeting her family, especially her children, once more:

Teen pregnancy, drug charges, burglary arrests. Appearances on the "Tyra Banks Show" that resembled a Jerry Springer segment. Charges of being publicity hounds and not paying for the diapers.

The family foibles continue to play out in tabloid fashion for Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, adding unwelcome public drama for the former vice-presidential nominee as she seeks to solidify her clout within a Republican Party that is smarting from the November election and sorely in need of a leader.

But wait... before proceeding further, let's get a little mroe specific on exactly what charges Palin's opponents within the GOP and her enemies among Democrats have leveled:

• We all agree that Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol got knocked up; but that's last year's news, and it wouldn't cause a stir today, let alone in three more years.
• What's this about drug charges? Oh yes, "somebody" in Bristol's former boyfriend's family -- not Palin's family -- was arrested for something involving drugs. That somebody was Levi Johnson's mother, Sherry Johnson.
• "Appearances on the 'Tyra Banks Show',"charges of being publicity hounds and not paying for the diapers" all refer to the aforementioned Levi Johnson, Bristol's ex; he and his mother and sister decided -- without the blessing of Todd, Sarah, Bristol, or the infant Tripp Palin -- to appear on the tabloid show, goodness only knows why. (I have my suspicions, and they do, in fact, include the Johnson family being publicity hounds.)
• After the appearance, during which Levi retailed lurid accounts of his sexual exploits that are hotly denied by his former girlfriend Bristol, Sarah Palin's father accused Johnson of not supporting Tripp Palin -- his legal obligation -- and suggested that he should take some of the money he's now making off of his former association with Alaska's first family and use it to "buy some diapers."
• And burglary? That appears to be the half-sister of Sarah Palin's husband Todd. Diana Palin is married and has her own two children; she does not live with Todd and Sarah Palin.

So out of all the smoke of the allegations -- both the Democratic Party and Republican Party spokesmen puckishly decline to comment -- only one charge actually involves Sarah Palin's family. The rest involve Bristol's former boyfriend, his family, and Palin's husband's married sister.

Yes, I can see how the foibles of people distantly connected to Sarah Palin logically should damage her candidacy; after all, the bad behavior of her daughter's ex-boyfriend's mother certainly demonstrates that Sarah Palin is the hillbilly so many sources (on both sides the aisle) have insisted she is. And we certainly never see any relatives or family members of Democrats having problems... especially not the Democrat current occupying the White House; this situation is something utterly unique to Palin.

When Democrats (with GOP complicity) finish off Palin, they will surely start in on Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana. Did you know that he's a hillbubba? And he has a funny name... what's up with that?

I will certainly admit one solid slam against Palin: She clearly was not firm enough in teaching her daughter the sort of boys to avoid. If that's enough to turn you away from her future candidacy, so be it.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 16, 2009, at the time of 3:57 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

November 11, 2008

The FEC Shrugged

Obama's Brobdingnagian fundraising is simply too huge to be investigated

Politico casually drops a bombshell (and of course, tilts the story a bit towards Barack H. Obama):

The Federal Election Commission is unlikely to conduct a potentially embarrassing audit of how Barack Obama raised and spent his presidential campaign’s record-shattering windfall, despite allegations of questionable donations and accounting that had the McCain campaign crying foul.

Adding insult to injury for Republicans: The FEC is obligated to complete a rigorous audit of McCain’s campaign coffers, which will take months, if not years, and cost McCain millions of dollars to defend.

It turns out that when Obama broke his word and refused to accept public funding in the general election, the first presidential candidate to do so in the modern era, he thereby skated away from the automatic audit that accompanies acceptance of such cash; while John S. McCain's honesty in accepting public funding as he promised is exactly why he will be audited.

Worse, the very hugeness of Obama's fundraising -- over $600 million through September and probably topping $700 million overall -- means that not even the millions of dollars of questionable and completely unmonitored credit-card donations will be investigated either: The formula the FEC uses to decide on an audit takes into account the amount in question as a percentage of the total raised by the candidate. Thus, substantial and well-founded allegations of even $5 million of potentially criminal fundraising would represent less than 1% of Obama's funds raised, and therefore the FEC is not required to investigate.

Of course, the commission could still simply vote to authorize an audit, no matter what their formula says about automatic audits; but it's unlikely to trouble itself. The commission membership is deliberately kept to an equal number of Democrats and Republicans (whether or not it's fully staffed or even has a quorum); and, well, the Democratic commissioners have signalled that they're going to vote en masse against any audit of Barack Obama's fundraising practices. Thus any vote on an audit will at best be a stalemate, with three for and three against (a majority is required except for automatic audits).

So Obama will almost certainly waltz away without any audit at all, while McCain will have to spend millions of dollars defend his own fundraising practices. Surprise, surprise on the Jungle Riverboat ride tonight.

Meanwhile, it appears, astonishingly enough, that even now, Politico is completely ignorant of the real scandal of the Obama fundraising machine: They deliberately disabled fraud monitoring of credit-card donations. This despite the fact that reputable conservative blogs with hundreds of thousands of daily readers -- more than many mainstream newspapers -- have published many substantial blogposts on the issue... for example, this sequence of posts from Power Line:

1. Who is John Galt?
2. What did Della Ware?
3. ObamaFraud: Still Not News
4. Obama shrugged
5. Obama Shrugged: The Website
6. Obama Shrugged: An update
7. Obama Shrugged: Neil Munro is on the case
8. An irregular campaign

That series of eight posts represents quite a substantial and in-depth analysis of probable criminal violations not only of the McCain-Feingold fundraising laws but also credit-card fraud: The Obama campaign evidently turned off all fraud-monitoring processes whatsoever, in order to make it easier for anybody to donate any amount under any name... or even to charge donations to the credit cards of people who never authorized such charges.

You'd think such a substantial allegation of deliberate criminal fraud would deserve at least a mention in an article specifically on the possibility that Obama's campaign fundraising might possibly, but probably wouldn't be audited. But either Politico never heard a word of it... or else they're still in the tank for the One, even after he has been safely elected. Either nonfeasance or outright malfeasance; that's a heck of a dilemma that bodes ill for future reporting.

And they're hardly alone; the entire elite media has been mimicking the three monkeys (see-no, hear-no, report-no) throughout the 114 years of this campaign (except for Neil Munro at National Journal; see link 7 in the list above); and many appear determined to maintain the frantic pace of campaigning even after the campaign has ended. What started as rewriting the election is now metastisizing into rewriting history even as it's being made.

So it goes. And so it will go for the next four or even eight years... welcome to Obamaland.

I suspect there is only one solution to this problem: The GOP should likewise disable all monitoring and throw the fundraising valve wide open. We might not raise as much as Obama did, but at least we'll be at less of a disadvantage than we were this time, when we foolishly played by rules that were, in reality, "no longer operative."

If Chicago rules are the to be the new rules of the game, then we'd better begin playing by them as well. We should appoint nothing but absolute GOP partisans to the FEC, and they can deadlock on every vote on an audit of Republican candidates, just as the Democratic commissioners already do for their side.

In a bizarre way, the FEC's inaction is good: It makes the complete failure of campaign finance reform brutally clear. It's a backdoor way finally to overturn the unworkable, thoroughly discredited, and unconstitutional (no matter what the Supreme Court says) McCain-Feingold "Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act," BCRA.

Too bad its collapse must take with it the perfectly reasonable laws against donations by foreigners; but as A.E. Housman says, we find ourselves "In a world [we] never made":

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 11, 2008, at the time of 12:56 PM | Comments (20) | 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

It's Official: a Rise in "New Registrations" Means Nothing - UPDATED

If you'll recall, the big concern in the months leading up to the election was how many new voters, homeless voters, felon voters, and young voters the campaign of Barack H. Obama registered via groups like ACORN and Project Vote... millions and millions of them; in fact, a study released today by the Center for the Study of the American Electorate at American University found ten million new registrations.

But in the actual vote, this mass of new registrations did not translate into any increase in the percent of Americans over the age of 18 who voted. I'll use the total population as a proxy for the population of those over 18, because the former is easier to find. According to the U.S. Census Department, between 2004 and 2008, the U.S. population increased from 293.2 million to 305.6 million, a gain of 12.4 million or 4.2%.

And according to the study linked above, the number of voters increased from 122.2 million in 2004 to between 126.5 and 128.5 million this year; this translates to an increase of from 4.3 to 6.3 million -- or from 3.5% to 5.2%, with a midrange percentile increase of 4.3%. Thus, as Shakespeare put it, all that sound and fury appears to have signified nothing (not surprising, since it was a tale told by the idiots in the elite news media.)

In fact, there is little evidence even that registrations went up by much more than the ordinary increase in the American population would have predicted; registrations increased between 2004 and 2008 by about 4.8%, as compared to the population increase of 4.2%; the difference of 0.6% is the number of "extra" new registrations over and above what we would have expected.

The population increase alone accounts for 8.7 million of the 10 million -- leaving only 1.3 million "extra" registrations. But of that 1.3 million extra registered voters, better than one million of them failed to vote. At the midrange value, this means that all the hoopla and hullabaloo was over a measely increase of 300,000 new voters, or 0.2% of the vote.

That still might have made a difference in one or two battleground states; Obama won Ohio, Florida, Colorado, and Virginia by 200,000 votes each. But even if the extra voters were perfectly distributed only within those four states, they cannot account for Barack Obama's victory. Absent those paltry few new voters, Obama would still have won at least three of those four states -- and John S. McCain needed to prevail in all four of them (along with Indiana, North Carolina, and Missouri, the last of which McCain may still get).

Bottom line: New voters, felons, and bums did not impact the vote in any significant way. ACORN failed; Obama won the election not by bringing "new blood" to the voting booth but by doing a better job than McCain at wooing the traditional voter, the guys and gals who always vote.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 7, 2008, at the time of 7:01 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 6, 2008

Post-Mortem for the First Post-Partisan Partisan Election

I find myself curiously untheatrical about Barack H. Obama's victory last night, much as I'm appalled by his dishonesty, his radicalism, and his friends. I think I had seriously internalized that Obama was reasonably likely to be elected, so I got all the hand-wringing out my system early.

Besides, there's little to analyze there. I'm more interested in comparing the popular vote to the final polls released by the various pollsters. According to CNN, the current figures for the popular tally are 53% for Obama, 46% for John S. McCain. (We don't have complete figures, however, because the CNN site does not give actual tallies for those votes that went for neither major-party candidate; we'll have to take CNN's word for it.)

That gives Obama a 7% victory over McCain. So let's look at the final poll numbers.

Pollsters vs. voters

They range from a low of 3.5% from the averaged Battleground poll to a high of 11% from both Zogby and Gallup. The pollsters who came closest were CNN, Fox News, and Ipsos, who all appear to have called it exactly. Pew Research came close with 6%... but this was after having the spread as high as 15% (!) just a week before the election. This is an astonishing example of pollsters letting Obamania run away with their reason, then "walking the dog" back to rationality for the final polling release.

The following table ranks the polls from most Republican to most Democratic and includes both the raw difference and also the percentile difference; in that last column, for example, a pollster who predicted Obama by 11 points would have a raw differential of 4 (a predicted number of 11 minus the actual number 7), and a percentile difference of 57% -- 4 points differential divided by 7 points of actual victory:

 

Final polls, divergence from actual results

Pollster	Final Obama poll lead	Poll minus actual	Percentile difference
Battleground	3.5%	-3.5 points	-50% off
Hotline	5%	-2 points	-29% off
Rasmussen	6%	-1	-14% off
Pew	6%	-1	-14% off
CNN	7%	Direct hit	On the money
Fox News	7%	Direct hit	On the money
Ipsos	7%	Direct hit	On the money
IBD	8%	+1 points	14% off
NBC/WSJ	8%	+1 points	14% off
ABC/WaPo	9%	+2 points	29% off
CBS	9%	+2 points	29% off
Marist	9%	+2 points	29% off
Gallup	11%	+4 points	57% off
Zogby	11%	+4 points	57% off

 

First, it's very clear that, as expected, McCain significantly outperformed his final poll numbers -- and correspondingly, Obama significantly underperformed. Four polls underestimated Obama's lead, three got it right on the money -- and seven of the fourteen (half) overestimated Obama's lead. Clearly, the pollsters underestimated Republican strength in this election.

Just as in the primaries, McCain closed noticibly on Obama in the actual election... and just as in the primaries, when Hillary Clinton closed on Barack Obama, it wasn't quite enough: The big lead that Obama had built up proved insurmountable.

The Democratic victory -- convincing but not overwhelming

That out of the way, here is a comparison to bear in mind... Obama came into this election with:

• A huge headwind against Republicans in general;
• A Republican president with a job approval below 30%;
• A "wrong track" number of 84.2% (!);
• A fundraising and spending advantage that boggles the mind;
• The weight of the massed elite media behind him 137.4%;
• A complete collapse of the world financial markets -- wrongly blamed on Republicans -- just a couple of weeks before the election, with the market hitting a local nadir on October 27th, just eight days before the vote;
• A massive boost from being the first black presidential nominee with a serious chance of winning (obvously);
• A unified base that was ravenous for la Casablanca;
• And a disunited GOP base, many of whom still harbored rage over McCain-Feingold, McCain-Kennedy, the Gang of Fourteen, and so forth; many of whom pointedly voted for Librarian nominee Babar instead of McCain. (In the end, though, I believe McCain retained more Republicans than Obama retained Democrats; but I just heard that, I haven't seen the figures.)

Yet even so, Barack Obama did not do as well in the election as did Bill Clinton in 1996, the previous Democratic victory.

Obama has won at least 349 electoral votes, possibly as many as 375 (if he ends up taking both Missouri, where McCain leads by 6,000 votes, and North Carolina, where Obama leads by 14,000); and he had a 7% victory over John McCain. But in 1996, Bill Clinton won 379 electoral votes with a margin of 8.5% -- and that was after numerous substantiated allegations of corruption and wrongdoing by the president. (If McCain ends up winning either Missouri or North Carolina, then Obama will have done worse than both of Bill Clinton's elections.)

Obama's was not a landslide victory; it was more substantial than either of George W. Bush's victories, but it was still less than the average presidential margin of victory of the past few decades. There have been 27 presidential elections from 1900 to 2004; at least 17 of them (63%) have been more substantial than this year's, and possibly as many as 19 (70%).

The Democrats have definitely picked up at least five net Senate seats; but the Republican leads in three of the four outstanding races -- Georgia, Minnesota, and Alaska; the Democrat leads by about 8,000 votes in Oregon. If these results hold up, Republicans will retain 43 seats... probably enough to maintain a filibuster against the worse excesses of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid troika. (If, as some aver, Joe Lieberman switches to Republican after he is stripped of all his committee assignments from vengeful Democrats, that would bring the total up to a more comfortable 44 Republicans.)

Finally, Democrats gained at least 18 House seats, with 8 still undecided; if the parties split the undecideds, that would mean a gain of 22 for the Democrats -- nine fewer than they gained in 2006. (By contrast, Democrats picked up 52 net seats in 1930, and an additional 101 seats in 1932; Republicans recaptured 81 seats in 1938 and 54 seats in 1994. There have been many, many other elections -- possibly a majority -- where more than 22 seats changed parties.)

By all measures then, Democrats won a substantial victory Tuesday, but not an overwhelming one.

Ballot propositions

I had three priorities in this election; two succeeded, one failed:

• The election of John McCain (failed);
• Holding onto enough Senate seats to allow the GOP to filibuster the most egregious of insane Democratic proposals (appears to have succeeded);
• And the passage of California Proposition 8, the restoration of the traditional definition of marriage, after our rogue state Supreme Court decided to cram same-sex marriage down our throats (definitely succeeded).

That last is on the list because I believe traditional man-woman marriage is a cornerstone of Western civilization; I will be happy to debate Patterico -- or anyone else with a similar standard of rationality, honesty, and decency as he -- on its importance, but for now, I'm just very happy that it won, even in a down year for Republicans and conservative causes in general.

But in fact, conservatives fared quite well on our ballot initiatives here, except for Proposition 4, which would have required parental notification before minors could get abortions. For such a liberal state, California is still pretty conservative. The release-a-thug initiative failed big time, as did the global-warming "renewable energy" initiative; another victims' bill of rights initiative passed; and the bond initiative to pay people to buy "alternative fuel" vehicles was crushed.

There were no conservative issues with which I took issue this time, so I could stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with movement conservatives this time.

The only stupid-goofy initiative was the PETA-inspired, if not actually PETA-backed (I have no idea) free-range chickens initiative, which passed almost 2-1. Proposition 2 mandates that "calves raised for veal, egg-laying hens and pregnant pigs be confined only in ways that allow these animals to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely," with a few trivial exceptions. It sounds great -- but is it necessary? Is there really a problem? Is this even a current issue?

I voted against it for two reasons: First, we have no idea if this is necessary, because none of us has the relevant knowledge of current practices. Those who do -- farming communities -- seemed mostly opposed.

Second, this initiative was sold entirely on the basis of raw, seething emotion, complete with a "smoking gun" videotape propagated virally, showing chickens being abused.

The YouTube was produced by Mercy for Animals, founded by a "super PETA volunteer; MFA's statement of purpose is:

Mercy For Animals (MFA) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit animal advocacy organization that believes non-human animals are irreplaceable individuals who have morally significant interests and hence [sic] rights, including the right to live free of unnecessary suffering. MFA is dedicated to promoting nonviolence towards all sentient beings through public education campaigns and demonstrations, undercover investigations, and open rescues.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) also produces videotapes that it propagates virally; and many have been revealed as either very old (decades out of date on treatment), creatively and tendentiously edited, or even containing completely fabricated sequences. This doesn't prove that Mercy for Animals' YouTube is similarly propagandistic... but I think it's a pretty good bet.

Patterico totally bought into this video, embedding it on his site; but the video consists of a series of images (many of them repeated) of some chickens being killed and some chickens with injuries, while an MFA narrator tells us about all sorts of chicken atrocities observed by an "undercover" MFA "investigator." But such investigators (or even the narrator, for that matter) are about as impartial and believable as a charter member of Klanwatch "investigating" racism and incipient Naziism at a local NRA chapter.

Patterico sees that movie as dispositive. He may be correct, he may be wrong -- I don't know, and neither does he, because there is no way to check out MFA's claims unless we, ourselves, go "undercover" in an egg factory... or rather, many egg factories, so we can compare them; else we have only Mercy for Animals' word that this is really a problem, that these images are current, that they are widespread, that they spread disease, and so forth. I doubt that Patterico (and about 2/3rds of California voters) did so before jumping wholeheartedly aboard this bandwagon.

For that matter, much is made in the video of killing chickens by holding them by their feet and shaking them vigorously, to break their necks. They show images of such chickens still thrashing about after being allegedly killed. But in the first place, we all know that chickens can thrash and even run around even after being decapitated; and if Patterico doesn't like chickens killed in that manner, how would he prefer them killed? I know he's not a vegetarian.

But let's leave the realm of animal-"rights" hysteria and return to the very real issue of the survival of traditional marriage. With 100% of precincts reporting, the quasi-final tally on Proposition 8 is 52.5% yes, 47.5 no; no recount is going to change a five-point result, so I'm quite confident that the California constitution now formally recognizes only the traditional definition of marriage.

(To quote Larry Elderberry, "and now, the big butt...")

But, it will doubtless take several months before this result becomes final. Several things will happen in the interim:

1. A state-court case will be filed to declare the constitutional amendment unconstitutional; this will be thrown out of court.
2. A federal case will be filed in district court to declare Proposition 8 unconstitutional according to the United States constitution; the plaintiffs will judge-shop, and the judge will find in their favor, nullifying the initiative constitutional amendment just passed.
3. On appeal, I cannot say what the three-judge panel of the 9th Circus Court of Appeals will do; it depends upon the makeup of the panel.
4. But regardless the decision, it will be appealed to the entire 9th Circuit sitting en banc, and they will overturn the district-court judge's decision, restoring the just passed initiative.
5. This decision will be appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which will deny certiorari. At that point -- and not until then -- it will become official.

I'm very glad that Arnold Schwarzenegger is our governor; he is a socially liberal Republican who personally supports same-sex marriage... but he has a history of upholding the rule of law on this very issue.

If we had a Democratic governor such as Cruz Bustamante, I have no doubt that he would simply ignore the initiative as if it had been merely a bad dream. We would have to find someone with standing to sue to force California to follow its own constitution.

Still, I feel sad and angry: A bunch of very nice and totally sincere same-sex couples who "got married" after the California Supreme Court decision will find their supposed marriages abruptly nullified, causing them to feel very understandable pain. But it's their own fault: They foolishly trusted radical "progressives" who told them, to hell with what voters want; the people will think what we, the anointed, tell them to think!

I feel sorry for those same-sex couples who just wanted to get married. They knew (or should reasonably have known) that the proper way to change the secular institution of marriage would be to qualify a clean initiative onto the ballot to overturn the year 2000's Proposition 22 -- which had the exact same wording as Proposition 8, but created only a law, not an amendment to the constitution. If such a clean initiative passed, we would have enacted same-sex marriage through the ballot box (and would be the first state to do so). This is the only valid way to change such an important principle of American culture... by the vote.

But many same-sex marriage supporters allowed themselves to be suckered into a dirty short-cut. Probably, they were convinced by the Left that there were so many bigots and homophobes in California (that bastion of conservatism) that the only way they could win was to force the decision through the courts. In any event, now it's a part of the California constitution... and all because professional political proponents of same-sex marriage (and in many cases, polygamy, polyandry, incestuous marriage, and eventually, the abolition of legal marriage altogether) decided to force it on the state, "whether you like it or not," as San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom triumphantly crowed during an earlier attempt.

I cannot tell you how grateful I am to the California electorate, which rejected the vile, slimy no-on-8 campaign... culminating in that despicable video assault that depicted the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints -- by name! -- invading the house of some poor lesbian couple, trashing the place, and tearing their marriage certificate in half, while laughing at the pain they're causing.

What religious bigots. What bastards. I revel in the pain felt by the anti-religion, anti-democracy, and anti-marriage activists, even as I feel the pain of ordinary same-sex couples, a pain I ascribe almost entirely to the moral depravity of everyone who applauds judicial imperialism "for our own good."

But that wasn't the only state proposition that went in a direction away from Liberalism; here are a few other initiatives that appear victorious, from the CNN elections website:

• A ban on same-sex marriage in Arizona and Florida, as well as California;
• A ban (or at least limitations) on "unmarried 'sexual partner[s]'... adopting children or... serving as foster parents" in Arkansas;
• A bill to end affirmative action in Nebraska. A similar bill in Colorado is trailing by 14,000 votes with 92% of precincts reporting; but for some unfathomable reason, the Colorado Secretary of State Election Center website does not report any election results, or if they do, they hide the fact. Evidently, it never occurred to the secretary or his web designer that viewers might, you know, want to know how things turned out.

In conclusion

So take heart, mateys; it was a bad election, but it probably won't be catastrophic. Don't throw yourselves into the Komodo dragon pit -- at least not just yet.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 6, 2008, at the time of 1:14 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 4, 2008

No Last Minute Surge for Obama in States; Lizardly Analysis Unchanged

In the final state polls released today, there were no significant changes in either direction. Therefore, our analyses over the last few days still hold. The three electoral stages are:

1. After polls close in the Eastern time zone, watch Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
2. After polls close in the Central time zone, also watch Florida.
3. After they close in the Mountain time zone, keep an eye on Colorado.

John S. McCain needs to hold Ohio, Virginia, and Florida; then he needs to take either Colorado or Pennsylvania. That's the likeliest route to victory.

If Barack H. Obama can take Virginia, Ohio, or Florida, he will probably end up winning... unless McCain takes Pennsylvania and Colorado.

The wild card is Minnesota: Most polling puts it out of McCain's reach, but the most recent poll there by Survey USA -- which typically leans a bit to the left -- has it a 3-point race. If this isn't just a polling fluke, then Minnesota could be an opportunity for McCain to replace Colorado, if necessary.

I've read in several places that the elite media have declared that they plan to call the election at 8:00 pm Eastern time -- presumably whether it's callable or not. The implication is that they feel comfortable enough wallowing in the wake of the red wizard that they just don't care if everyone knows whose side they're on. But this may be an exaggeration or sheer bravado; we'll have to wait and see.

Frankly, I'm skeptical of the prediction that, assuming McCain is doing well in VA, OH, PA, and FL, the drive-by media will go ahead and falsely and knowingly call the election for the One anyway. The hit they would take to their credibility would dwarf what has happened over the past eight years and might even lead to the complete collapse of one or more major media organs.

Therefore, I expect they won't call any state early unless it's so obvious that there's no chance they could be mistaken... for example, if Obama were winning in Virginia even in the most conservative areas. But that's very unlikely, in my mostly uninformed opinion.

In any event, ignore any pronunciamentos about "Obama's historic landslide victory!" that are promulgated while polls are still open in the Pacific time zone; if made, they're meant as propaganda to demoralize Republicans, not legitimate "reporting." The media are not our friends.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 4, 2008, at the time of 11:45 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 3, 2008

Big Lizards Election Night Viewing Protocol on a Nutshed

Here's all you need to watch, in the order of poll closings:

• Step 1: John S. McCain must win Virginia and Ohio (234 electoral votes, counting the other states he's bound to win). Yes, technically he could lose Ohio and win Pennsylvania; but you know he's not going to. Just assume he must win these two states. If the media calls either of these states for Obama (after the polls close in the West, so there's a least a chance that the call is honest), the election is over. All hail the One.
• Step 2: If McCain makes it past that first hurdle, then he must win Florida (261 electoral votes). (Ditto.)

• Step 3: Assuming he gets past these three states, then it all comes down to Colorado (270 electoral votes -- winner!) and Pennsylvania (282 electoral votes -- winner!):

  - If McCain wins at least one of those two states, or both (290 electoral votes -- convincing winner!), he wins the election.

  - Contrariwise, Barack H. Obama must take both states (277 electoral votes) to win.

That's it; that's all you need watch for.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 3, 2008, at the time of 11:13 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Four Paths to Victory

Looking at the current Real Clear Politics electoral map, it seems clear that John S. McCain has four possible paths to victory. Realistically, however, each begins with winning all the states that are currently considered toss-ups. It's still possible to win if, for example, he loses Ohio but wins Pennsylvania -- but that's an unlikely outcome. (Not impossible, but less likely.)

If McCain can pick up the so-called toss-ups states, the ones that are colored neither red nor blue on the map, then the four paths to victory are these. If McCain...

• Wins Pennsylvania (Mason-Dixon says Obama by 4, Zogby says by 14), or --
• Wins Colorado (Mason-Dixon says Obama by 5, ARG says 7), or --
• Wins Minnesota (Survey USA says Obama by 3, Maxon-Dixon says 8, Rasmussen 12), or --
• Wins both Nevada (Mason-Dixon and Rasmussen say Obama by 4, Zogby says 8) and New Mexico (Survey USA says Obama by 7, Rasmussen says 10) --

Then he wins the election and becomes President-elect John McCain. Otherwise, say hello to President-elect Barack H. Obama.

We'll have a pretty good idea early in the election how things are going, because Virginia (polls range from Mason-Dixon, Obama up by 3, to Zogby, 6), North Carolina (Mason-Dixon and Zogby say it leans McCain), Georgia (all polls say McCain leads), and Florida (Mason-Dixon, Quinnipiac, and Zogby say Obama leads by only 2, ARG says 4) are all must-win states, all but the last being entirely in the Eastern time zone. If any of these is called for Obama -- after the polls close in the Pacific time zone, of course -- it's almost certain that Obama will win. But if McCain can hold them all, that's a very good sign.

(Again, beware of states that are narrowly called based upon exit polling; it's generally not representative of the entire vote.)

If they're still not being called late into the night, that too is a good indicator; in an Obama blowout, at least one of those would clearly resolve into a Democratic pickup (probably Virginia).

It's also essential that McCain win either Ohio (Mason-Dixon says McCain leads by 2; others range from Survey USA, Obama by 2, to Quinnipiac, Obama by 7) or Pennsylvania (see above), both in the Eastern time zone. If both go to Obama (again, after the polls close here in California, so we're sure the call is not a voter-suppression tactic), then that's the unmistakable sound of the fat lady's last aria.

Ergo, we ought to have a good idea by, say, eleven o'clock Eastern, as soon as the polls close in the West, whether we'll be popping champagne or sobbing into our beer.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 3, 2008, at the time of 11:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

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

November 2, 2008

Another Bright Ray of Hope - UPDATED

While Barack H. Obama pulled into a bigger (but still catchable) lead in most of the national polls, John S. McCain has suddenly started improving in the more critical state polling, bizarrely enough. Ohio is now back to being a toss-up state, with a new Mason-Dixon poll showing McCain leading for the first time in a long, long time, after nearly a week of the average leaning towards Obama.

• First, what Rasmussen is measuring is not turnout but rather the party affiliation claimed by respondents in a separate poll of adults. In other words, at best, Rasmussen is measuring total party registration (self reported) -- not what percent of each party will turn out. Thus, when they weight their polling on that basis, they're making the stealth turnout assumption that all the first-time registered Democrats and youth Democrats and such are just as likely to vote as older Democrats or Republicans who have voted every election for many years, that 6.5% more registered Democrats directly translates into 6.5% more votes for Obama. This is a questionable projection, to say the least.
• Second and even more intriguing... Rasmussen predicts a 6.5% Democratic advantage in turnout and adjusts its polling accordingly; but even so, they have Obama up by only 5%. Aren't they tacitly admitting that McCain will do significantly better in winning over Democrats than Obama will in turning Republicans to the dark side?

Now let's get back to the state polls released today...

Virginia is on the bring of becoming a toss-up (it's been leaning Obama for a while), and would already be except for one CNN poll; Nevada, while still technically leaning Obama, would also be a toss-up, except for one single-day poll I've never heard of -- Suffolk -- from a week ago.

Colorado is achingly close to being a toss-up as well; the most recent Denver Post/Mason-Dixon poll has Obama ahead by only 5 points, and Obama's overall lead is only 5.5.

If we change those states to toss-ups on the RCP electoral map, Obama drops below the magic 270 for the first time in a couple of weeks -- a stunning improvement for McCain. If the most recent polls are accurate, that means that John McCain can now win the election by only winning enough of those toss-ups, without having to take a single state where Obama has a significant lead right now.

But that's not all... in Pennsylvania, where John McCain and Sarah Palin have been campaigning heavily (against the advice of well-meaning Democrats, who have been advising McCain that he can't win there, so he should pull out), there are five polls in the RCP average; one of them, Marist, is clearly an outlier (Obama +14, twice as big a lead as the next nearest poll). Take Marist out of the mix, and Obama only leads by 5.3% in Pennsylvania -- making that state as close as makes no difference to a toss-up as well.

If we make Pennsylvania a toss-up, that leaves Barack Obama at only 243 in the electoral count -- rather, 242, since McCain is very likely to win that one electoral vote in Maine decided by a Republican-leaning district.

I have always assumed that McCain will win every state that is already a for-real toss-up in the RCP average right now, since he's a closer... and in the primaries, Obama underperformed his polling in nearly all the later races against Hillary Clinton. Thus I give McCain Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Montana, and Arizona. Those are all states that went to George W. Bush in both the 2000 and the 2004 elections; McCain has improved his standing in each of those states recently, so he has momentum; and in fact, McCain currently either leads by more than 1% or is tied (less than 1% lead for one or the other nominee) in all of those states except Florida, where he trails by only 3.3 points, within the margin of error (I don't count the addlepated Los Angeles Times poll).

Everything then comes down to four states: Nevada, Colorado, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. All except the last are states George W. Bush won twice. Obama must win two of them -- and the correct two -- to take the election away from McCain; he has to win one of either Ohio or Pennsylvania, and then he must win Colorado. If McCain wins both Ohio and Pennsylvania, or if he wins one of them plus Colorado, then he wins the race, 270 to 268.

I suspect McCain is going to win Ohio, Colorado, and Nevada, giving him a narrow but comfortable victory of 275 to 263... but he might sweep all four on a reasonably good night, making it a more convincing 296 to 242.

The real election looks much, much better today than yesterday. The country might be saved. But much more important, I might not have to pay off my gambling losses on Tuesday after all!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 2, 2008, at the time of 10:11 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 1, 2008

Another Caution: Ignore Projections Based Upon Exit Polling

This is another tip for watching the returns Tuesday night: You cannot project the winner of a state from the exit polling, becuase by its very nature, the respondent pool is not representative of the voters themselves..

The respondent pool in any exit poll of a state comprises:

• Those voters who waited to vote until election day and --
• Who voted at one of the precincts where the pollsters were polling --
• At the time of day during which they were polling --
• Who volunteered to stand still and be asked a bunch of intrusive questions that, in spirit, violate the sanctity of the secret ballot and --
• Who decided to tell the truth about how they cast their votes.

Needless to say (but try to stop me!), none of these characteristics fits the voting population as a whole. A very significant portion of voters in most states vote early or absentee; pollsters don't lurk at every polling place but only a select few; they don't stay there from opening to closing, but only as long as they have money to pay for workers; Democratic voters tend to be more eager than Republicans to talk to pollsters (they see kindred souls); and of course, the "PC effect" is at super strength when voters are being interviewed face to face, without even the anonymity of the telephone: Many people are apt to tell you that they voted the politically correct way, no matter how they actually voted; they don't want an interviewer to think them ignorant, bigoted, or unsophisticated.

Predicting how the state will turn out was never the reason for exit polling, because most good pollsters realize the two pools (poll respondents and voters) are quite divergent. Rather, it was supposed to be an informational tool for statisticians to study elections after the fact and determine why people voted the way they did.

How do they do that? It's actually interesting: Rather than using the poll to predict the actual vote -- setting the stage for losers to think "we wuz robbed" -- valid pollsters collect all the exit-poll data, then align the respondent pool to the actual vote in that precinct, rather than the other way 'round. This allows them to draw reasonable inferences about what caused voters to vote a certain way... "Voters for Barack H. Obama were most persuaded by arguments or policies A and B, while McCain voters were most persuaded by C, D, and E." This allows for a post-mortem on the entire election, giving a wealth of data and correlations to all parties.

But it's incompetence bordering on malfeasance to attempt to project from the unrepresentative exit polling to declare who will win the state. Unless, of course, the goal is to suppress the Republican vote by projecting an Obama landslide.

(Contrariwise, it's perfectly proper to project who will win a particular state based upon the partial count by precinct -- provided you know enough about each precinct and polling place to know which voting patterns correlate to victory and defeat. Michael Barone, author of the Almanac of American Politics, is particularly adept at doing this.)

So don' t be a sucker: Ignore any state projection based upon exit polling -- even if they're calling it for John S. McCain.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 1, 2008, at the time of 6:28 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 31, 2008

How to Watch the Election and Know What's Going On

Note from the Mgt: Movie Badger is a new occasional contributor to Big Lizards. It is not any of the normal contributors. It is involved in the entertainment industry, thus prefers anonymity to avoid job complications... since it emphatically is not a liberal.

Watching election night coverage can be confusing and frustrating, because reporters rarely give you a complete picture of what's going on. They want you to keep watching and think every development is of utmost importance; clarity often gets sacrificed for this end.

This is your guide of what to look for and how to determine the results of the election before the news is willing to tell you.

First, I urge you to download the Election Tracker I put together:

1. Right-click the link;
2. Select save link or save target from the context menu that opens.

This Microsoft Excel file will combine results with expected results from safe states, and give you predicted vote totals. There are lots of websites that let you do the same thing with maps, but they'll all be slammed on election night; this tracker will actually be saved on your local system, so there will be no internet-induced delays. (Plus my interface is quicker.)

If you have trouble getting the tracker to work, please leave a comment and I will try to help.

Will the election be close?

Polls range from showing a statistical dead heat to Obama with an insurmountable lead. Which ones are right, if any?

The answer is that nobody really knows. Built into every poll are the pollsters' own assumptions about voter turn-out. The pollsters all predict huge Democratic turn-out -- far more than in previous elections; but these assumptions are little more than educated guesses. They may turn out to be right, since the pollsters are the experts about this sort of thing. But there's no science behind them, and they could just as easily turn out to be wrong. Treat these predictions as having the same degree of veracity as an expert sportswriter's opinion on who's going to win the Superbowl.

There are some indications that these turn-out guesses could be wrong: In early voting, the split has been pretty even between Democrats and Republicans, and both campaigns (who have access to much more accurate polls than the public ones) are acting as if the election is close. But then, early voters aren't necessarily representative of voters in general; and strategically, it makes sense for both campaigns to act as if the election will be close, even if they think this only has a small likelihood of being the case. If the election's a blowout, nothing they do will matter at this point; so they might as well focus exclusively on the possibility that it won't be.

This analysis will allow you to determine relatively quickly whether the election's a blowout or not. If it is, you'll be able to turn off the TV at 8:30 Eastern Time, knowing that Obama's the winner. If it's close, you'll know what to look for to figure out the winner before anyone else.

Safe states

Each nominee has a bunch of safe states they are almost certain to win. The media may try to hype results from these as if they're news, but they're not. You can just check them off the list. On the other hand, if a nominee loses any of his safe states, that's huge news; that can only happen if he is losing horribly overall. If any of these states switch sides, the election is over, and you can turn off the coverage.

McCain will almost certainly win the following 21 states:

Obama will almost certainly win the following 16 states:

With these safe states, Obama has 197 electoral votes, while McCain has 163. (It takes 270 to win, but the nominees can theoretically tie at 269 each; see below for that possibility.)

In addition to safe states that each nominee will certainly win, each nominee has states that he must win; if he loses one of these, you can count the election over. (Unless the nominees start trading must-win states; but with a few exceptions, that's not very likely. Overall opinion will lean one way or the other, which ought to have a similar impact on each state's race.)

I'll take these by region, in order of when the polls close.

The East

Obama must win: Pennsylvania
McCain must win: Florida, North Carolina, Virginia*
Toss-ups: New Hampshire, one electoral vote of Maine.

If both nominees win their must-win states, then it's a close election. In that case, New Hampshire will be a good bellwether: Its four electoral votes may not determine the election, but should give you a good idea of which way the toss-up states are leaning. And there are a lot of scenarios in which those four votes could make the difference.

Maine is a safe state for Obama; but Maine and Nebraska have a different system for allocating electoral votes than all other states (which are winner-take-all). In Maine and Nebraska, two electors are chosen by the statewide vote total, but the rest are allocated district by district. This won't matter for Nebraska, which will be solidly McCain; but Maine may not be solidly Obama: One of its two districts -- therefore one of its electors -- might go for McCain. Like New Hampshire, this is a bellwether that has a slight chance of determining the election.

I put an asterisk by Virginia because it's not quite a must-win for McCain; if McCain loses Virginia but wins New Hampshire, there are still some realistic but less likely paths to victory for him. He'd either have to pick off one of Obama's must-win states, or win every toss-up. On the other hand, Obama winning Virginia and McCain winning Pennsylvania is one of the realistic swaps of must-wins; in that case, Obama's the one who's in a lot of trouble. He would have to either pick off another McCain must-win or else sweep all the toss-ups. (If McCain loses Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire, the election is over.)

The center

Obama must win: Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin
McCain must win: Indiana, Missouri, Ohio

No toss-ups or complications here. Just a simple opportunity to call the election over if one of the nominees loses a must-win state.

Mountain and Pacific states

There are no must-win swing states in these areas. Only safe states and toss-ups.

Toss-ups: Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico

Putting the math together

If each nominee wins his safe and must-win states, McCain would be leading by 260 electoral votes to Obama's 254, with 24 votes up for grabs: 4 for New Hampshire, 1 for the swing district of Maine, 9 for Colorado, 5 for New Mexico, and 5 for Nevada. As the toss-up states are announced, you can add up these numbers. McCain would need 10 points worth of toss-ups to win, while Obama would need 16.

Adjust these as necessary for any wackiness. For example, if they swap Pennsylvania and Virginia, that nets McCain 8 votes; he would only need 2 more from the toss-ups, whereas Obama would need all 24 available votes. By contrast if McCain loses Virginia and Obama holds Pennsylvania, McCain will need to win 23 of the 24 toss-up votes available, while Obama would just need to win 3.

What if there's a tie?

If it's tied 269 to 269, the first thing to worry about is a faithless elector: If someone votes differently from how his state voted, and if that ends up being determinative, it will cause a constitutional crisis that will make the 2000 debacle look like peanuts. Electors are generally chosen because they're party faithfuls -- but even the most partisan of partisan whores can be bribed or blackmailed.

Assuming we get past that minefield, and every elector votes the way he's supposed to, the election will be decided by the newly elected House of Representatives, with each state getting one vote; Democrats currently have a slim majority of delegations, which they will probably, but not definitely, hold in the election... so a tie means that Obama will probably but not definitely win. The vice president is chosen by the Senate using ordinary voting rules, and the Democrats will certainly keep their majority; so Joe Biden would definitely be selected VP. There is an outside chance that we could end up with McCain as President and Biden as VP, which would be silly.

How to know the results early

The media will know more than they're telling you. They wait until polls are closed before giving out results, and will err on the side of caution to avoid a repeat of the 2000 Florida debacle. [Or not; they've been awfully much in the tank this year. -- Dafydd.] But you should be able to get some idea of what's going on just by looking at the news anchors. If you see a lot of happy faces, that's good news for Obama. A lot of sad faces in the media is good news for McCain. (Reverse that if you're watching Fox News.)

Also, as one nominee nears the 270 electoral-vote threshold, the media will start getting more and more reluctant to call states that put a nominee over the top. But if you look at different channels, you'll see that they are calling different states. If any one channel is confident enough to call a state, they're probably right -- unless there's a freak mishap like in Florida in 2000 when some flunkie in charge of compiling exit poll data mistyped the results.) If you add up the states that different channels are calling, you may find that one of the nominees has enough to win. In 2004, I used this method to figure out the winner a half-hour before any channel was willing to declare it.

Lastly, use the tracker I made. If it's a really close election, they may not be willing to call it until the last polls close in Hawaii and the Aleutian Islands. But except for Nevada, everything in the Pacific time zone and points west is safe for one nominee or the other, so by that point the tracker should be making it obvious who's going to win.

Hatched by Movie Badger on this day, October 31, 2008, at the time of 1:18 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

October 30, 2008

...And the Elite Media Are NOT the "Fat Ladies" We Mean

I titled an earlier post Don't Give Up the Ship Until the Last Fat Lady Is Hung. I want to make it clear that each and every one of the drive-by media anchors is going to try to become a "fat lady" and sing in the landslide for the One. Let me be less poetic and more specific:

Every network (except maybe Fox News) is at some point going to erroneously call a state for Barack H. Obama (or even accurately but untimely call a state for Obama), in order to suppress GOP voter turnout in states further west... just as Voter News Service did in 2000, with the early and false call of Florida for Al Gore.

(Even Fox News jumped on the pony cart in 2000, but that was only because they too were part of VNS; I expect Brit Hume has learnt his lesson.)

Considering the closeness of Florida, no statistical analyst who looked at the exit polling there could possibly believe that Florida's result was callable -- especially not while polls in the Florida Panhandle were still open It's a statistical absurdity that a state that ends up being so close it takes weeks to decide could possibly have been clear enough to call the moment the polls closed in Miami.

That is why I have always believed that that first call, while polls in Florida were still open, was a deliberate attempt to suppress the GOP vote there... and indeed, across the nation; if a Republican voter believed that Bush had lost Florida, he would think the presidential election was over; such disheartened GOP voters would be less likely to turn out and vote.

In fact, the corrupt early call led directly to the election deadlock -- which was the single greatest factor in the Democratic Party being able to claim with a straight face that Florida was "stolen," and that President George W. Bush was not the legitimate president.

Professor John R. Lott did a statistical analysis of voting patterns in the Panhandle before the call, after the call, and after the retraction; and he concluded -- and nobody has a contradictory analysis of similar heft -- that the early call, which included the false claim that the polls were closed across the state, cost Bush at least 7,500 votes and as many as 10,000 votes in Florida. (Not to mention the vote hit that Bush took for one hour in every other state in the Central and Pacific time zones.)

In other words, were it not for those false claims, repeated many times over the next hour by every major network news team, Bush would have won Florida by 7,500 to 10,000 votes... and I doubt Gore would ever have gone to court over it. No recount imaginable would switch that many votes, so why take the PR hit for nothing?

Just think how different Bush's first term would have been without the meme that he was the "commander in thief" or the "president select!" No long count, no Supreme Court of Florida (SCOFLA) decision for the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn, no news "consortium" to revote the election, no chanting mobs.

And we had to suffer through all this why? Because the elites tried to throw the election to Gore by falsely calling Florida for Gore, when they knew for a fact it was too close to call.

Two events were required for this reptilian maneuver (let me rephrase that...) this sly, calculated maneuver to have the effect it did; the first we have no control over:

• The elite media had to be willing to throw its journalistic reputation into the Andy Gump in order to try to get Al Gore elected;
• But just as important, Republicans had to be gullible enough to be fooled into staying home and sulking, rather than going out and defiantly voting anyway.

After all, even were it true that the presidential race was lost, and that Gore -- or today, Barack Obama -- was the president-elect, there were still other races. There are representatives and senators to elect to Congress: A President Obama with 45 Republican senators is worlds apart from a President Obama with 40 Republican senators, or even 42 (we would always be in thrall to the most liberal RINOs, who would threaten to vote for cloture unless they got A, B, and C).

There are governors to elect; besides running your state, which may well affect you more directly than whatever the president does, where do you think our candidates for president and vice president in 2012 and 2016 will come from? There are state legislators to vote for, legislators who are not only the guys and dolls who enact state law but also our recruiting pool for the U.S. House and Senate.

And of course, many states have important initiatives on the ballots that can dramatically affect our culture; here in California, for example, we have the marriage amendment, Proposition 8, that would change the California constitution to restore traditional, man-woman marriage (after our state Supreme Court tossed out an earlier citizen's initiative and mandated same-sex marriage). But there are other initiatives on our ballot Tuesday:

• Proposition 4, amending the California constitution to require parental notification before a minor can get an abortion;
• Proposition 9, a crime victims' bill of rights;
• Proposition 11, changing the authority for drawing legislative districts from the legislature to a citizen committee.

The bottom line is this: Democrats prefer to win by silencing (or pre-eliminating) their opponents. We see this most clearly in Barack Obama, who has a disturbing habit of finding a way to disqualify all of his opponents before the election, thus leaving voters with only one choice -- the One. He even tried it with John S. McCain, sending his minions out to argue that McCain was not a "native born American" because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone, where his father, a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, was stationed (both McCain's parents were American citizens).

One of the Democrats' favorite techniques is to try to demoralize Republican voters, so they will stay home instead of voting on election day. And the easiest way to do this is to falsely claim the election is over. In fact, the Democratic Party, though its media wing (the elite news media), has already been playing the card for the last several months... don't bother voting, Republicans; Obama has the cat in the bag!

Don't be a sucker. Don't believe anyone who tells you that we've already lost, so there's no point in going to the polls and voting... not even if the person telling you this is a Republican poltroon too afraid (or effete) to fight. Do not believe any stunning Obamic pronunciamento until the last polls close in the Pacific (Hawaii and Alaska are both already in the bag -- HI for Obama and AK for McCain -- so Pacific Time is the line to watch). What an anchor has done, an anchor can aspire to do.

Here in California, the polls close at 8:00 pm PST (please remember to turn your clock backwards one hour this Sunday from 2:00 am to 1:00 am, as Daylight Savings Times switches back to Standard Time). That's 11:00 pm in the East. Anything you hear about states before that time is at least partially intended to suppress Republican voting in the West.

So don't listen. Remember AD 2000, smile quietly, and go ahead and vote. Vote early, vote often.

Just take a vow today not to play Charlie Brown to Obama's Lucy and the football, and you will have disarmed the Democrats of their most potent weapon: Republican fatalism.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 30, 2008, at the time of 5:26 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

October 29, 2008

Early Voting... One Battleground State... Where Are They?

The Las Vegas Review Journal has a story up about early voting in Nevada. The campaign of Barack H. Obama has assiduously, compulsively courted three groups in particular... and Obama hangs his campaign on the premise that these three groups can be induced to turn out in record, even staggering numbers:

Traditionally, older people, whites and people who vote consistently tend to turn out at the highest rates overall, said David Damore, a political scientist at UNLV. But this year, much has been made of the idea that the youth vote, the Hispanic vote and first-time voters would turn out at unprecedented rates, galvanized by a heightened political climate and the candidacy of Democratic nominee Barack Obama....

The idea that the electorate will be radically reshaped this year remains an open question, he said, and it's possible the Obama campaign faces a challenge turning out the untested voters it's relying on to win.

Recent polling shows Obama leading in the Silver State by varying margins. Democrats' hopes have been boosted by a tectonic shift in voter registration that has left them with more than 110,000 more registered voters than Republicans, but the GOP insists there's hope because the election will be decided by who votes and how.

Bear in mind that all the polls showing Obama leading in this battleground state are based on that very assumption by the Obama campaign -- that minorities, young voters, and first-time voters will turn out in eye-popping numbers. Pollsters weight their results according to that assumption, boosting the number of responses they receive from members of those three groups and correspondingly reducing the number of responses by older whites who have voted in every election since the Mesozoic Era.

But what if they gave an electoral revolution, and nobody came? Or at least not enough guests for a quorum. We may be about to find out how that affects the accuracy of political polling; if pollster's turnout assumptions are wrong, then the polls have consistently overstated Obama's support and understated that of John S. McCain:

Analysts have predicted that new voters, young voters and Hispanic voters will turn out in record numbers in this election. But as Nevadans continue to flock to the polls, turnout among those three groups is lagging, at least in the early going.

While turnout statewide was nearly 25 percent through Sunday, it was just 20 percent among Hispanic voters, 14 percent among voters under 30 and 15 percent among those who didn't vote in the last three elections, according to an analysis of state early voting records through Sunday prepared by America Votes, an organization that works to mobilize voters....

"I would have expected those numbers to be a little higher," Damore said. "At the same time, the people who come out for early voting may tend to be the tried and true."

Yeah, well, that's the whole point, isn't it? Democrats are relying upon untested voters of dubious enthusiasm, many of them recruited with booze or direct financial inducements by groups like ACORN, to show up and actually vote; in fact, voter registration drives have specifically urged newly registered voters to vote early, either at their local precincts or by absentee balloting.

By contrast, Republicans are relying upon those voters who have always voted in the past. Which group do we suppose is most likely actually to show up in the voting booth?

Now, it's still early in the process; and Obama's "Chicago machine" may yet kick in, even in states as far from Illinois as Nevada, Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. But if early voting in Nevada is any indication, we may be witnessing the bursting of the Obamabubble.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 29, 2008, at the time of 10:42 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

October 28, 2008

My "Two Elections" Thesis in a Nuthouse

Nothing could more perfectly illustrate my point -- that we have two completely different elections, depending on which pollster you ask -- than a pair of polls released today:

• First, we have the Gallup tracking poll with its traditional test for likely voters, in which Barack H. Obama's lead over John S. McCain has shrunk to 2%... well within the margin of error (not even counting general biases in favor of Democrats, particularly with most of the poll conducted over the weekend).
• And on the same day, covering nearly the same period, we have the Pew poll... which finds Obama's lead over McCain ticking up to fifteen points!

The poll by Pew Research would lead to Obama winning somewhere north of 400 electoral votes... essentially winning every single toss-up state, plus every state that is currently shown as leaning towards McCain (pale red) on the Real Clear Politics electoral map; that would give Obama 411 electoral votes to McCain's 127.

But the traditional Gallup poll would almost certainly result in McCain winning all of the toss-up states, plus several of the states currently shown as leaning towards Obama (pale blue) -- in particular, the Bush states of Virginia, Ohio, and Colorado, plus the conservative district of Maine; this would give McCain a 275 to 263 electoral victory over Obama. (If we headed into the election with Obama and McCain in a photo finish, McCain would probably add New Mexico and possibly Pennsylvania to his stack for a convincing 301 to 237 win.)

So one respected poll tells us it's going to be a watershed landslide for Obama, with McCain's haul being reduced to a small core in the middle of the country -- while another respected poll tell us that McCain is going to win by 12 electoral votes. Reconcile that, brother!

It is of course theoretically possible that the actual spread on election day will be right in between those two, with Obama winning the popular tally by 8.5% (and the election, of course). But my instinct tells me that it's more likely that one of these two scenarios is prophetic, while the other is flat-out wrong, based upon completely erroneous turnout predictions.

The only question is -- which is which? We'll have to hold our collective breath for one more sennight to find out, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 28, 2008, at the time of 6:48 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

October 27, 2008

Maybe Sarah Palin Reads Big Lizards...!

Earlier today, I gave Mrs. Palin a piece of my mind (I haven't many left) about what to do in response to the corruption convictions of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK, 64%). I suggested:

At the presser, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin should discuss the verdict, note that she has fought Sen. Stevens for a long time over his corruption, and announce that when he is finally forced to resign his office -- she will call for a vote to expel him from the Senate feet first, if he won't go vertically -- she will appoint David Cuddy as his successor.

A vote for Stevens, she should say, will really be a vote for Cuddy.

I'm sure she reads Hugh Hewitt's blog -- at least the Palin posts by Bill Dyer (Beldar). I envy him the invitation to either the inaugural reception or the Alaska governor's mansion that I'm sure he'll receive.

But maybe she reads Big Lizards, too; either that, or it's a case of two thoughts with but a single mind between them. For as Dyer notes, she just released the following response:

This is a sad day for Alaska and for Senator Stevens and his family. The verdict shines a light on the corrupting influence of the big oil service company that was allowed to control too much of our state. That control was part of the culture of corruption I was elected to fight. And that fight must always move forward regardless of party or seniority or even past service.

As Governor of the State of Alaska, I will carefully monitor this situation and take any appropriate action as needed. In the meantime, I ask the people of Alaska to join me in respecting the workings of our judicial system. I'm confident Senator Stevens will do what is right for the people of Alaska.

All right, it's not exactly what I suggested: She didn't overtly threaten to get the Senate to expel him nor mention Cuddy or any other successor. But Bill Dyer points out that the verdict is not official yet, not until the trial judge accepts it. Then there are the inevitable appeals, but I don't think that will delay her more forceful statement; she must only wait for the trial judge to enter the judgment officially -- meaning he concurs that the jury had the necessary facts before it to find him guilty of those charges.

In any event, Palin evidently agreed with Big Lizards that she had to jump out immediately and say something about such a massive corruption decision in her own state. So there.

...So when do I get my own invitation to the inaugural or the Juneau jubilee? Or at the very least, my invitation to the next Iditarod, starting March 7th? I don't want to have to masquerade as Beldar's manservant yet again, just to get a free chicken dinner.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 27, 2008, at the time of 11:36 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Some Interesting Polling Figures and Map Games

Currently -- before most of the October 26th polling trickles in -- Barack H. Obama is ahead in the Real Clear Politics average by 7.6%; but that includes some whoppers (in both senses of the word) from several days ago, polls of dubious character: the Newsweek poll (Obama +12) and the CBS/New York Times poll (Obama +13). Both are outliers by far; no other poll shows a bigger spread than 8 points, except for the Gallup "expanded" poll -- Obama +9 -- which is essentially a poll of registered voters, not likelies, and which I completely discount... hence do not count.

Taking only the most recent polls that include October 25th or later, Obama's lead drops to 6.2% [correction, now down to 5.3% with a couple more polls].

But I suspect that any voter who is still undecided on election day will vote for John S. McCain: Obama is the riskier candidate of "hopey changitude," as Beldar puts it; and those who are hesitating are likely those who kinda sorta want to vote for Obama but just aren't sure he's up to the job, having virtually no resume at all. In any event, if we assign all the undecideds to McCain, that tells us the best McCain can get without having to pry Obama supporters away from the One They Have Been Waiting For.

Going through the recent polls and assigning all the undecideds to McCain gives us the following numbers: Barack Obama, 50.2%; John McCain, 49.8%... Obama leads by 0.4%.

Of course, there is a certain built-in bias towards Democrats in polling; it stems from several sources:

• Exaggeration of probable Democratic turnout and a corresponding minimization of Republican turnout;
• The "self-selection" fallacy, wherein Democrats are more willing to cooperate with pollsters than Republicans;
• The "weekend polling" fallacy;
• The "PC effect." I don't believe much in the pure Bradley effect -- voters saying they will vote for the black candidate but really voting for the white candidate, due to racism; but there is clearly a tendency for respondents to falsely tell pollsters they will vote the "politically correct" way, then vote the opposite in the privacy of the voting booth. This effect is especially pronounced when during a concerted campaign to paint anyone who doesn't vote for Obama as a "racist."

Given all this, depending on how the undecideds break, it's entirely possible that McCain would actually be ahead right now in some hypothetically perfect poll. But even if Obama would still lead, it's not by very much... a couple of percentage points at worst.

In the meanwhile, it's good to remember that this is not a single election but 51 separate elections (50 states plus the District of Columbia) that will determine the electoral vote. As I've noted in the past, Real Clear Politics has a facility where one can take an Electoral College map and reassign states at will, to explore possible routes to la Casablanca.

I believe I already mentioned one such scenario: If McCain ends up winning Colorado, Ohio, and Virginia, where he is currently running slightly behind in state polling, then he will almost certainly win every state that is currently a toss up as well (especially since every toss-up state is a state that George Bush won in 2000 and 2004); that would give McCain 274 electoral votes, and he would win with four points to spare.

But here is another route to the White House... even if McCain loses Colorado:

First, read this blogpost on Virginia Virtucon about a Democratic pollster's assessment of the real status of several battleground states... as opposed to the probably biased state polls that are reported on RCP (hat tip to "Radioblogger" Duane Patterson on Hugh Hewitt's blog). The female Democratic pollster says:

[T]he results of their polling lead her to believe that McCain will definitely win FL, OH, NC, MO and NV. She says Obama definitely wins New Mexico. She said that Colorado and New Hampshire were absolute dead heats. She said she thinks there is a 55% chance Obama holds on in Pennsylvania and a 75% chance McCain wins Virginia....

Anyway, her companies conclusion is that the election will come down to Colorado, New Hampshire and the Republican leaning district in Maine, which in her opinion might very well decide the Presidency.

Let's take her at her word; here is my alternative scenario. I had forgotten that Maine is one of only two states (I believe) that split their electoral votes. Assume McCain wins all the toss ups, and that he wins Ohio and Virginia but loses the Rocky Mountain state. That gives him 265, Obama 273. But now, if the pollster in the article above is correct, McCain could win New Hampshire.

The only poll showing Obama way ahead in NH is the Boston Globe's, one of the most notoriously biased polls around. If Rasmussen (Obama +4) is more correct there -- or even Rasmussen averaged with the Concord Monitor (Obama +7), the only two recent polls besides the Globe's -- then McCain is only 4 or 5 points down in that state... or 3 points if McCain gets the undecided vote.

If McCain wins New Hampshire, that makes it a 269-269 tie. But McCain has a very good shot at winning one of Maine's electoral votes, because they split: There is a Republican-leaning district that contributes one of the four votes.

If that happens, then even with Obama taking Colorado, it's McCain 270, Obama 268... and Keith Olbermann's head explodes like the overripe pumpkin it actually resembles, inside and out.

So as I have previously said, don't give up the ship until you see the whites of their eyes; get out and vote -- and get 3-5 friends to get out and vote, too!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 27, 2008, at the time of 7:11 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

October 26, 2008

Obama MUST win!

Barack Obama must be elected president! We are told this by no less than the mainstream media, which long since abandoned any pretense of neutrality in covering the election.

We are told this by the Europeans, and pretty much the rest of the world, who will never forgive us if we don’t elect this attractive, articulate man who will make them forget how much they resent us -- if only for a few hours.

We are told this by many blacks themselves, who imply none too subtlely that to vote against this handsome young black man is the equivalent of being a bigot. Never mind that he is a socialist.

Do you doubt that? Just check out the online link where Obama was confronted by a plumber. “Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn’t it?” the plumber asked.

Obama replied:

It’s not that I want to punish your success... I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance for success too. My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody... I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.

Finally, we are told that if we don’t elect Obama president, whether or not we like his politics, that we can expect the oppressed underclass to take to the streets and do whatever spoiled underclasses do when they don’t get their way. Burn stuff, I guess.

Obama must be elected. We have no choice!

Hatched by Dave Ross on this day, October 26, 2008, at the time of 10:37 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

October 24, 2008

The Little ACORN That Couldn't

Recently, Republicans have been quaking in their boots over the oak-thewed ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and their mighty voter registration drive that netted (they claimed) more than 1.3 million newly registered voters. It's a tidal wave! We'll be swamped on election day!

But word trickled out today that, well, not quite:

On Oct. 6, the community organizing group Acorn and an affiliated charity called Project Vote announced with jubilation that they had registered 1.3 million new voters. But it turns out the claim was a wild exaggeration, and the real number of newly registered voters nationwide is closer to 450,000, Project Vote’s executive director, Michael Slater, said in an interview.

The remainder are registered voters who were changing their address and roughly 400,000 that were rejected by election officials for a variety of reasons, including duplicate registrations, incomplete forms and fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers trying to please their supervisors, Mr. Slater acknowledged....

“We were wondering how many were Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse,” said Danny Diaz, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee. “The group is really tainted, and any work they do is suspect.”

But not to worry; ACORN is perfectly willing to submit to investigation of its voter registration project... self-investigation, that is. In fact, they've already conducted just such a self-examination and discovered themselves a clean bill of health:

In interviews this week, Acorn officials said they had an extensive program to detect fraudulent applications, which included calling the registrants to verify information provided on the forms. They also said they had combed through electronic records from the group’s field offices across the country, and that their internal audit did not show evidence of pervasive voter registration fraud.

The key word there is of course "pervasive." ACORN itself estimated 15,000 fraudulent registrations; in addition, up to 25% of new registrations were actually duplicates, and an additional 5% were "incomplete." Brian Kettenring, an ACORN spokesman, says the group intends to correct its website -- which today still touts the wildly inflated 1.3 million figure -- to say they've only registered 900,000 voters... despite the fact that they have already determined that only about 450,000 are actually new registrations.

Thus they are apparently going to correct an error of 190% too high down to an error of only 100% too high; after all, "the group did not intend to be misleading," explains the New York Times. (Keep checking back on the ACORN link above to see how long it takes them actually to make this correction; will it be before or after the election?)

The ACORN affilliate actually running the voter-registration drive, Project Vote, angrily responded to the Times article:

In our interview with the Times we explained that roughly 35 percent of our registrants are expected to be brand-new voters, and another 35 percent will be Americans who needed to update their registrations. Perhaps another 30 percent will be incomplete, will fail to match in government systems, or will be from people who did not realize they were already registered. Less than 1-2 percent will turn out to be deliberately falsified by canvassers.

The Times article’s characterization is particularly disappointing since Project Vote has been open and forthcoming about these numbers throughout our drive, and in fact explained the same realities about voter registration drives to New York Times reporter Shaila Dewan for a story that appeared on June 15th of this year.

Here is an example of ACORN's forthcomingness, from their own website:

Registering to vote is one of the first steps toward becoming a full participant in American democracy and a citizen who can influence change in a community. ACORN helped more than 1.68 million citizens to register to vote in voter registration drives leading up to the 2004 and 2006 elections.

This year we have seen unprecedented interest in the Presidential election. We are proud that we have been able to capture the excitement by helping over 1.3 million citizens register to vote. This has been the largest, non-partisan voter registration effort in history. Please see our news section to read updates about our voter engagement work.

ACORN helps the people register who most need to make their voices heard in this election: African Americans, Latinos, low-income citizens, and youth. These new voters are getting involved in the election process because they want to see changes in health care, the economy, mortgage lending practices, and public schools.

I can't quite find exactly where they've been forthcoming about the fact that only 35% of that 1.3 million figure comprises new registrations, rather than reregistering people who are already registered to vote; perhaps I'm just not reading closely enough. But to be fair, they mentioned it in a quote buried deep within an interview back in June -- and yet again a scant four months later. I reckon that about covers their "forthcomingness" responsibility.

So ACORN's internal evaluation completely clears them; it's time to MoveOn. But other investigators don't seem quite so sanguine:

In Las Vegas, where state officials raided Acorn offices this month to seize records, the county registrar of voters, Harvard L. Lomax, said his workers had found hundreds of potentially fraudulent registrations beyond those identified by Acorn.

Hundreds more fraudulent registrations in one city alone (population 558,880) translates to many thousands more fraudulent registrations on top of the 15,000 already admitted to by ACORN. That doesn't sound like much, until one realizes that Project Vote has been targeting swing states where (by definition) the vote will be close: A few thousand fraudulent voters could possibly swing Ohio, Colorado, Nevada, Virginia, or Florida; if even one of those states flipped, it would without question hand the presidency to Barack H. Obama.

Regardless of the fact that ACORN turned out to be the little engine that couldn't -- at least not to the extent they're still claiming -- nevertheless, they are still the largest community voter-fraud organization in the country and Obama's favorite financial recipient and donor both. No matter how the election goes in eleven days, it's urgent that the Republican Party find a way to break the back of ACORN's illegal voter-fraud program.

We need high-level prosecutions of top ACORN officials and the "community organization" itself under RICO statutes as an ongoing criminal enterprise. Nothing less will deter its leaders... certainly not the jailing of a few low-level "soldiers."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 24, 2008, at the time of 4:26 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

October 22, 2008

Don't Give Up the Ship Until the Last Fat Lady Is Hung

Take a look at these polls listed at Real Clear Politics, as of 11:40 am PST, October 22nd, 2008; each poll was released today and covers either through October 21st or through October 20th. All trends are based on the previous poll (yesterday's unless marked) and are relative to Barack H. Obama... so +2 means 2 points better for Obama, -2 means 2 points better for John S. McCain:

• Zogby: Obama +10 (trend +2)
• AP: Obama +1 (trend -6 from October 1st)
• NBC/WSJ: Obama +10 (trend +4 from October 6th)
• Battleground: Obama +2 (trend +1)
• Fox News: Obama +9 (trend +2 from October 10th)
• IBD: Obama +4 (trend -2)
• Ipsos: Obama +8 (trend unknown -- last poll was registereds, not likelies -- probably positive)
• Gallup trad: Obama +5 (trend -2)
• Rasmussen: Obama +6 (trend +2)
• Hotline: Obama +5 (trend -2 from October 10th)

(Polls in blue trended towards Obama, those in black trended towards McCain.)

Not only are the polls all over the place -- Zogby has Obama up 10 points, AP has Obama up only one point? -- but even the trends are all over the place, from 4 points towards Obama to 6 points towards McCain.

This is a near perfect illustration of how different respondent pools, order of questions asked, and turnout assumptions all affect poll results. We cannot single out any particular poll in advance and declare that poll to be the "correct" one, while the others are more or less wrong. We simply don't know today which poll will prove to be prophetic of election day.

Obviously, Zogby and AP cannot both be accurate, but which should we believe? What Real Clear Politics does is simply take the mean average of the polls: They add up all the recent poll numbers for Obama and divide by the number of polls, do the same for McCain, and compare them. But the standard deviation here is hellish; it's like the old joke...

It's useless to average a +10 poll and a +1 poll to say that on average, Obama is 5.5% ahead. It's reasonable to suppose that Obama is "really" 8-10 points up; but it's just as reasonable, and just as accurate, to suppose that he is "really" only 2-3 points up. And if the latter turns out to be the "correct" figure -- that is, if the turnout assumptions that produced the lower figures more accurately match what happens on November 4th than the assumptions that produced the higher lead -- then John McCain has a very strong chance to win the election.

Democratic turnout will certainly be a bigger percent of the electorate than in 2000 and 2004, but how much bigger? Let's label the two scenarios illustrated by the polling above "big" Democratic turnout and "tsunami"-sized Democratic turnout. A projected big Democratic turnout yields a 2-3 point current advantage for Obama, while a projected tsunami turnout for the Democrats yields an 8-10 point advantage. Since we don't know at this point whether Democratic turnout will be merely big or a tsunami-like tidal wave, we cannot begin to guess how far ahead Obama is... or even whether he is catchable.

If it turns out to be tsunami, then nothing McCain does can change the outcome: He will lose, end of analysis. So let's look at the other scenario exclusively. Here is a very useful tool, the Real Clear Politics' "Create your own map" facility. You can click on different states, set them to either Obama or McCain, and see how that affects the final electoral count.

Currently, counting leaners, the RCP map shows Obama/Biden with 286 electoral votes, McCain/Palin with 160, and 92 votes are contained in states that are toss ups, meaning leaning one way or the other by less than five points (in fact, all but one lean by less than three points).

We're assuming, for sake of analysis, that the Democratic turnout is big, but not tsunami. If that is the case, then the structural Democratic advantage inherent in most polling means that McCain is likely to win all the states currently listed as toss ups: Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio -- all of which were won by George W. Bush in 2004 and 2000. So let's go ahead and change them on the map from "toss up" to "leaning McCain."

When we do that, the electoral vote becomes Obama/Biden 286, McCain/Palin 252. So what states does McCain need to switch to win the election?

The two that spring readily to mind are both Bush states from 2004 and 2000: Colorado and Virginia. I frankly disbelieve the polling showing Obama ahead by 5.4% in Colorado and by 6.8% in Virginia. But even if we accept those numbers, neither is very significant: Colorado is just barely out of the toss up category, and even Virginia is subject to assumptional poll fluctuation (Rassmussen has Obama up by 10, but Mason-Dixon has Obama up by only 2). Again, if we're talking the big scenario, not the tsunami scenario, then these two states are very winnable.

If McCain wins them -- taking not one single blue state, and giving up the former (slightly) red state of Iowa, which has become deep blue in the last four years -- then John McCain wins the election by 274 to 264. In fact, he could even lose either Montana or North Dakota and still win (barely).

This is why it's ridiculous to panic, despair, and resign ourselves to President Obama: Everything, even the winner, still depends upon which turnout assumption we pick; Each outcome still has support in the polls. Neither outcome is the overwhelming favorite.

So as I've said many times, it's time to put on our manly gowns, gird our loins, and pull up our socks. Let's go out there and win one for the old nipper!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 22, 2008, at the time of 5:10 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

October 20, 2008

My One Obligatory Slow-Joe Biden "Inadvertent Truth" Post

One point about the fascinating and illuminating two-paragraph "gaffe" (i.e., letting the mask slip) committed by Joe Biden yesterday. Beldar (Bill Dyer) hinted at it, but I'll make it explicit. Here is what Biden let slip:

"Mark my words," the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

"I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate," Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. "And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you - not financially to help him - we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."

John F. Kennedy became president on January 20th, 1961; six months after his inauguration -- the time frame Biden specified -- would be July 20th, 1961.

There was only on "world test" that Kennedy had to face during that period, and it was not the Cuban missile crisis (October 1962), nor the Berlin wall (which began construction in August 1961), nor even the Bay of Pigs fiasco -- which was a personal test (that JFK failed), but not really a world test; the "world" only found out about it after the fact, not before.

Rather, the only world test he faced in his first six months was the infamous Vienna conference with Nikita Khrushchev on June 3-4, 1961. Here is an excellent summary by Scott Johnson of how wonderfully that turned out for us:

The parties reached no agreement on any set agenda or proposals prior to their meeting in Vienna on June 3 and 4. The meetings were therefore confined to the informal exchange of views referred to in Kennedy's February letter. By all accounts, including Kennedy's own, the meetings were a disaster. Khrushchev berated, belittled, and bullied Kennedy on subjects ranging from Communist ideology to the balance of power between the Soviet and Western blocs, to Laos, to "wars of national liberation," to nuclear testing. He threw down the gauntlet on Berlin in particular, all but threatening war....

Immediately following the final session on June 4 Kennedy sat for a previously scheduled interview with New York Times columnist James Reston at the American embassy. Kennedy was reeling from his meetings with Khrushchev, famously describing the meetings as the "roughest thing in my life." Reston reported that Kennedy said just enough for Reston to conclude that Khrushchev "had studied the events of the Bay of Pigs" and that he had "decided that he was dealing with an inexperienced young leader who could be intimidated and blackmailed."

Based upon the impression that Khrushchev took from that dreadful performance by President Kennedy, the Berlin wall and the Cuban missile crisis followed as night follows dusk.

This is the only incident Biden could possibly have been referring to in his rambling "warning" yesterday. He goes on to prophecy that when Barack H. Obama receives his own "Vienna conference" world test -- probably a conference without preconditions with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- Obama's performance will also appear to be catastrophic:

"And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you - not financially to help him - we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right [in how Obama handles that world test]."

47 years ago, Nikita Khrushchev received the impression of a weak American president who would negotiate, bargain, wheedle, appease, even beg, all to avoid a fight he was afraid to fight. Right or wrong, that impression had terrible consequences: We almost went to nuclear war. The only reason we didn't is that Khrushchev offered a deal... he would pull Soviet missiles out of Cuba if we pulled ours out of Turkey. The Soviet Union got its deal; we lost an advantage we'd had over them, but we avoided atomic Armageddon.

Khrushchev didn't want nuclear war; the old Commie was rational. Does Barack Obama dare make the same assumption about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Obama's own running mate predicts that within six months of his inauguration, BO will face a "world test" like the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit of June, 1961... and that Obama will flunk it exactly the way Kennedy did.

Kennedy's failure nearly led to nuclear war; fortunately, the Soviets in 1961 were sane. I'm not so sanguine about the Iranians in 2009.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 20, 2008, at the time of 5:35 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

Palin Doped Iditarod Sled Dogs, and Other Possible October Surprises

Commenter Baggi suggests that the Colin Powell endorsement wouldn't be Barack H. Obama's big "October surprise" against John S. McCain, because it comes too early in the month. The true October surprise ideally materializes the last week before the election -- as when George W. Bush's DUI arrest was released a week before the 2000 election, or when Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh announced the indictment of former Bush-41 Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger four days before the 1992 election.

(And why is it that it's always Democrats who launch such surprises against Republicans, never the other way round? Of course, the essence of an October surprise is to catch the other guy falling short of his principles; so how can Democrats fall short of what they haven't got in the first place?)

Thus, Obama may still put one more shoe on the other hand. Here are some lizardian suggestions of what that bootless shoe might comprise:

• During the several years when Sen. McCain resided abroad in Vietnam, he and his dorm-mates pooled all their resources and shared them equally. Can you say "spread the wealth around" -- Comrade McCain?
• In 1946, in a 6th grade English assignment -- long after World War II had ended -- John McCain used a hurtful racist slur against our then-allies. He wrote, "When I grow up I want to be a solder because I will get to drive a tank and a jap and a airplan and kill Natzes." Apparently, McCain's violent, racist fantasies began a long time before his current campaign.
• In stunning news, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin turns out not to be eligible for that high office because she is not a "natural born citizen;" although her parents were both American citizens, she herself was born in Alaska, way up north past Canada -- not in the continental United States of America at all. Can we trust a foreigner in the highest office of the land?
• Two years ago, John McCain proposed a risky scheme to give illegal aliens a "path to citizenship." But recent research has revealed one element of that plan that McCain never disclosed to the American people: Once those illegal immigrants were U.S. citizens, under the McCain plan, they would be eligible for drivers licenses. Illegal immigrants and drivers licenses -- now which pot is calling the kettle African American?
• An independent congressional watchdog whistleblowing reform taxpayer's association has stumbled upon shocking evidence that "Senator Clean," John McCain, has allowed taxpayer money to be diverted into his own pocket for half a century. This diversion of funds went unchecked even after he was elected to the Senate. Do we need four more long years of the Republican culture of corruption?
• By now, most of us have suffered through the embarassing video of Alaskan hussy Sarah Palin, wearing little more than lipstick, parading around on stage in front of hundreds of people. But a few years before that, she went much, much farther: We have obtained photographs she allowed to have taken where she is completely nude and giggling with glee, lolling on a rug made from the skin of a bear, which her father may well have personally slaughtered. Can America afford such a wanton roundheel just a heartbeat away from the presidency?
• John McCain demands "honesty" in government economic policy. But independent researchers have discovered that he has funneled large sums of money to so-called "charities" and concealed those payments by not reporting them on his tax returns. Thousands to questionable special interests with no disclosure whatsoever. Falsifying tax forms is a federal felony. Would you cast your precious vote for a felon?
• In 1967, the USS Forrestal suffered one of the most devastating fires ever on an American naval vessel. Many know that John McCain was a young officer on that aircraft carrier; but they may not be aware that a Navy investigation subsequently found a direct connection between McCain's actions and that horrific fire, as he voluntarily taxied his A-4 to the exact spot that a supposedly "errant" missile was going to strike. When his plane was hit, rather than stay and fight the fire, McCain ran from his plane, saving himself and allowing 134 brave sailors to die while he lived. America deserves better than a man with such depraved indifference to human life.
• Many of those closest to hunter-killer Sarah Palin have noticed a frightening instability in the would-be vice president's emotional health. This instability manifests nearly every month; its symptoms include the inability to fully control her emotions, sudden anger with little provocation, distracted attention, inexplicable pain, and sudden bleeding from unknown lacerations, possibly self inflicted. Doctors have expressed grave concerns whether Mrs. Palin is medically fit to serve, given her condition. We feel sorry for anyone with such an infirmity -- but America needs a president who is healthy, emotionally stable, and mentally balanced.

Democrats are never more creative than when they're concocting bizarre charges of sex, corruption, or psychiatric disorders to lodge against Republicans... so that they never have to defend their actual policies, which the country by and large despises. I'm sure this post barely scratches the surface of what we'll see in the next fortnight.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 20, 2008, at the time of 4:07 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

October 19, 2008

The Howl of Powell; Does It Matter?

In a move somewhat unexpected, though broadly hinted at for several days, Colin Powell, the first secretary of state of President George W. Bush, endorsed Barack H. Obama today -- while also praising John S. McCain:

Colin Powell, a Republican who was President Bush's first secretary of state, endorsed Democrat Barack Obama for president Sunday and criticized the tone of Republican John McCain's campaign.

The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said either candidate, both of them senators, is qualified to be commander in chief. But he said Obama is better suited to handle the nation's economic problems as well as help improve its standing in the world.

"It isn't easy for me to disappoint Sen. McCain in the way that I have this morning, and I regret that," Powell, interviewed on NBC's "Meet the Press," said of his longtime friend, the Arizona senator.

But, he added: "I think we need a transformational figure. I think we need a president who is a generational change and that's why I'm supporting Barack Obama, not out of any lack of respect or admiration for Sen. John McCain."

Some might think race trumped politics, but I disagree: Powell has always been a Lincoln Chafee Republican, and McCain is just too far to the right for his taste. (Actually, in the quotation above, Powell seems to be saying he endorses Obama because Obama is younger than McCain!)

In fact, virtually the entire Republican Party is too far to Powell's right, and I would not be surprised to see him reregister as a Democrat after the election, no matter who wins:

Powell said he remains a Republican, even though he sees the party moving too far to the right. Powell supports abortion rights and affirmative action, and said McCain and Palin, both opponents of abortion, could put two more conservative justices on the Supreme Court.

"I would have difficulty with two more conservative appointments to the Supreme Court, but that's what we'd be looking at in a McCain administration," Powell said.

On the other hand, Powell doesn't seem all that enthused by Obama, either:

Powell said he does not plan to campaign for Obama.

I'm sure Barack Obama has long known that he had Powell's endorsement; this is clearly the "October surprise" that the One has been planning for months, waiting for the killer moment to make the announcement.

Team Obama must believe this will be the game changer, finally putting the election away for them. The scenario goes as follows:

1. Those undecideds and even some of the weak McCain supporters have been just dying for a reason to vote for Obama; they really want to give his plan of raising taxes and tariffs during a world recession a chance!
2. The only thing holding them back has been their nervousness about whether Obama has the national-security credentials to keep us as safe from attack as George W. Bush has.
3. So now that one of Bush's top national-security cabinet officers has given Obama the thumbs up, they can relax and vote for the One they have been waiting for. Thank God he turns out to be strong on national security after all!

I don't buy this premise for several reasons:

• I don't believe anybody actually thinks Obama is as strong on national security as McCain, not even those who say so in polls: Rather, those who want Obama are willing to ignore national security. Anybody for whom national security matters is already in the McCain camp. Alas, Darryl Worley aside, most voters have indeed forgotten that we are under attack by the Iran/al-Qaeda axis, and they really don't care about (yawn) "national security."
• Those who are still truly undecided are worried about Obama's economic policies, not whether he'll keep us safe from terrorist attack -- or from Russia, China, and North Korea. The "undecideds" at this point are those who are nervous about their taxes being raised, whether they'll keep their jobs, and whether their 401Ks will survive; in short, whether Obama can handle the looming economic downturn.
• Colin Powell does nothing to allay these fears, though he sure tries in his endorsement. The problem is that he has no credentials in this area.

Does anyone? I don't think there is any financial figure who is both universally respected and associated with the Republican economic policy whose surprise endorsement of Obama could throw this election to the Democrat.

(No, Paul Volcker doesn't count: (a) Few remember him, and (b) those who do remember that he was first appointed Chairman of the Federal Reserve by Jimmy Carter, not Ronald Reagan -- and that he didn't do very well; his policies led to 20%+ interest rates that destroyed small businesses across the nation and even crippled large ones, directly leading to a significant recession in 1982-83.)

We'll know shortly which scenario rules. I'm sure the adverts were in the can long before Powell made his announcement. Within 24 hours, everyone and his monkey's paw will know that the great Colin Powell has endorsed Barack Obama.

If Obama now leaps up to double-digit leads in all the tracking polls, then I think the Obama Scenario will have been proven right after all: A foreign-policy affirmation was just what the undecideds were breathlessly waiting to see before turning en masse to Obama.

But if the bump is only a point or two, then I believe it will quickly subside, likely to a smaller lead than Obama has right now. The October surprise will turn out to be the Fall fizzle.

I truly believe this election is all about economics, not foreign policy or even national security. Whatever misgivings are keeping Obama from putting McCain away are not going to be swayed by the endorsement of a politically ambivalent, Bush-hating, Clinton-appointed former general. If that were Obama's big problem, it would have been solved long ago by the much more enthusiastic endorsement of Eric Shinseki.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 19, 2008, at the time of 1:35 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

October 15, 2008

Plungers to Left of Me, Plungers to Left of Me!

My nomination for this week's most overused and misused word was repeated again today by conservative columnist Joel Mowbray; but regardless who says it, it is a Democratic meme that is completely false:

With McCain plunging in the polls, it's not hard to see why the protesters seemed so tranquil.

Plunging? The RCP average of polling between the two candidates, Barack H. Obama and John S. McCain, has shown only a 2% move towards Obama in the last two weeks. In fact, Obama's lead is currently 7.3% -- lower than it was on the 11th (7.6%) and yesterday (8.2%). A drop of 2% over two weeks hardly counts as "plunging."

But that average includes a lot of weird polls -- such as the CBS/New York Times outlier that found Obama 14 points (!) ahead of McCain. Just looking at the major tracking polls -- Rasmussen, Gallup, Zogby/Reuters (telephone, not internet), and Battleground -- none has shown any significant rise for Obama this last fortnight:

• Rasmussen: From +6 to +5 -- up 1% for McCain
• Gallup (registered voters): From +5 to +7 -- down 2%
• Gallup (traditional definition of likely voters): From +5 to +3 -- up 2% (they're reported two "likely" scenarios over the past week; the "expanded" definition simply tracks with the registered voters poll above, they say)
• Zogby/Reuters: From +1.8 to +3.8 -- down 2% (only one week)
• Battleground: From +5 to +8 -- down 3%

During the last two weeks (or one week for Gallup Traditional and Zogby), all polls have had Obama both closer and farther ahead than he is right now.

In general, in national polling, there has been no statistically significant movement towards either Obama or McCain in the last two weeks; the major movement all occurred longer ago than that -- and comprised the loss of McCain's convention bump.

Evidently, this is some new definition of the word "plunging" of which I was previously unaware.

(Some of the state poll "averages" have produced plunging behavior; but the problem here is the paucity and infrequency of state polling, which allows for huge swings based upon a single poll. In fact, the average typically features completely different polls from week to week, making the appearance of a huge jump one way or the other -- even though each underlying poll has shown very little change.)

The "plunging in the polls" meme of course helps Obama; its purpose is to dishearten Republicans so they don't turn out -- and enthuse Obamatrons to a fever pitch, especially those whose history indicates they're disinclined actually to show up at the polls unless they're really, really, really excited about an Obama victory.

I understand why the liberal media keeps using the phrase... but why are so many conservatives and other McCain supporters falling into the trap? For heaven's sake, get a grip! Yes, McCain is behind right now; but he's not out, and the game isn't over. Obama is still only ahead by a small margin... absolutely miniscule compared to how far ahead the Democrats and media mavins expected him to be (a number clearly reflected in the goofy CBS/New York Times poll).

6%-7% can be turned around: A slight "Obama effect" combined with the traditional "Democrat effect" likely means that the real average, if such a thing could be measured, is closer to the Zogby number of 3% than the Battleground number of 8%. If so, then just a slight shift -- as voters finally take that last long look that Paul Mirengoff at Power Line expects after tonight's debate -- would leave McCain in the lead.

Let the plungers all head out to Vegas; words have meanings... and this one doesn't mean what a lot of people seem to think.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 15, 2008, at the time of 1:28 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

October 10, 2008

Buckley Beds Banality - but Will They Wed?

Buckley -- that's Christopher Buckley, of course -- has just published a brief, self-indulgent note on a cybermagazine called the Daily Beast announcing that he is going to vote for Barack H. Obama.

His "reasoning," if I may so dub his excuse-making, is obscure, to say the least. He argues that he once liked John S. McCain, but that was back when McCain was "authentic." During this campaign, however, McCain has become inauthentic (says Buckley); the only specific Buckley gives us is that McCain now says he can balance the budget in four years, when we all know that is an "unrealistic" promise. "Who, really, believes that?" chuckles Buckley.

Ergo, he will vote for Obama -- who (Buckley crisply admits) is not really as bad as he seems, because he won't really do all the horrible things he threatens:

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

So Obama is a "lefty," Buckley says, who has called for raising taxes, throwing up tariff walls, and opening the treasury of the Democratic Party to "bribe-money from the special interest groups" that he has railed against -- "disingenuously;" but worry not, because he doesn't really mean it and won't actually enact it. Its only purpose is to get him elected by promising everything. And after all, "Who, really, believes that?"

But at least Obama is authentic.

Christopher Buckley shows his hat anent the real reason he will be voting for Obama early in the piece: He is appalled by the trailer-trash Sarah Palin and will never forgive McCain for choosing her, when he could just as easily have chosen some Yalie, or even a Harvard man. Someone of the right sort, the kind one might find at the better affairs, if you know what I mean. While Mrs. Palin may be droll, you certainly wouldn't take a moose hunter home to meet "dear old mum," would you?

For a reason: My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party”....

And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can [McCain] have been thinking?

One wonders what Christopher Buckley would have made of that earlier cancer on the Republican Party, that gangly, homespun, cornpone man of halting speech and curious ugliness -- much remarked upon at the time -- who never attended Harvard or Yale (or anywhere else) and never lost his back of the woods demeanor... but who nevertheless achieved historical significance and undisputed greatness as our sixteenth president.

Mr. Buckley's father was just as elitist as the son, but pere William had the saving grace of having lived through times of crisis so visceral that the nation truly did pull together; everyone had to make terrific sacrifices, even those born to privilege.

William F. Buckley, jr. was born in 1925; the market crash occurred when he was four, and he grew up during the Great Depression. Even though his family wealth shielded him from personal privation, he could not help but see the populace around him unemployed, broke, waiting in line for bread and soup -- not because of any personal failing, but due to a worldwide economic crisis compounded by staggering government nonfeasance and malfeasance, starting under the leftist Republican Herbert Hoover and continuing under the liberal fascist Franklin Roosevelt.

Later, like nearly all men in his cohort, he served in the military during World War II -- another venue that made no allowance for wealth or privilege. Rich and poor served alongside each other, and virtually no one was exempted.

These shared experiences forced upon W.F. Buckley a deep understanding of the range of human experience... and he must have learnt from his years in the service what Thomas Gray meant in "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard": that the potential for greatness was not confined only to those who speak in a cultured drawl, bore easily, join preposterous "secret societies" at university, and summer in the Hamptons. Sometimes, the only element lacking in those who never achieve greatness is opportunity. (Imagine if John McCain had never been shot down; who would have heard of him? Greatness requires both potentiality and opportunity to manifest itself.)

Fils Christopher had no such leavening experience. He was born in 1952, the beginning of a period of great economic prosperity; he never lived within sight of otherwise fine, decent men and women struggling simply to survive.

One would think, given his birthyear, that he would have served ably and honorably in Vietnam one way or another; but he got himself a medical deferment in 1971 for asthma. (Was that the year that the Senate Armed Services Committee gave President Nixon authority to reject student deferments?) I have no reason at this point to suspect skulduggery; I've struggled with asthma, though it didn't stop me joining the Navy.

Christopher Buckley wrote about his decision in the September, 1983 issue of Esquire, in an article titled "Viet Guilt," but I haven't yet obtained a copy of that number (it's not available online, and the local libraries here close on Fridays). But the relevant point is that, unlike his "pup," C.J. Buckley never had to fight, to kill or be killed, alongside soldiers of all classes and degrees of greatness, which might have taught him that there is rarely any connection between those two qualities. There are other ways to learn it -- Gray himself never served in the military -- but that's a good one.

Thus he appears unable to consider Sarah Palin in the light of understanding. I don't know his exact reasons; but those who harbor such puzzlingly harsh feelings about a woman they barely know (if at all) are often terribly offended by her small-town origin, her participation in beauty pagents as a teen, her uncultured and sometimes disjointed style of speech, by the fact that her governmental experience is entirely local -- and very frequently by her dining on moose and tearing about on snowmachines, rather than dining on foie gras and playing squash. I cannot say for sure, of course; but it would not surprise me if Christopher Buckley looked down upon Palin, condescend to her.

I don't believe his father would have done so. In too many ways, Christopher Buckley reminds me of Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger, current publisher of the New York Times and anemic shadow of his father, "Punch."

But Christopher, having never experienced the same wide swath of life that William F. Buckley, jr. perforce imbibed, including the leavening effect of shared sacrifice for one's country, and with no financial worries, is free, should he choose, to indulge the worst excesses of lifestyle libertarianism: the idolatry of ideology; a passionate belief that all one's whims and desires are natural rights; the uncomprehending rejection of corresponding duties; the unshakable faith in one's own mental superiority; and a precious and irritating narcissism.

Not every libertarian suffers from these deep character flaws; the best recognize the danger and fight against it. But the tendency is always there and must be resisted, the way a Baptist must deafen himself to the siren song of Satan. Easier by far for the lazy man to wallow in self-serving libertinism and dub it a virtue. Having from his teenaged years cultured the habit of avoiding combat, it's not surprising that we don't see Christopher Buckley battling the libertarian Devil; his surrender to decadence appears voluntary and absolute.

For these reasons, I'm utterly unmoved by his snarky announcement that he's voting for Barack Obama; he has only lived down to my expectations. But he is right to fret about what his immediate forbears would think:

It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.

Let's take a page from Christopher Buckley himself and call this "Vote Guilt." Howeer, unlike his "Viet Guilt" failure in 1971, Buckley's moment has not yet passed; he still has the opportunity to not wallow in folly by endorsing, voting for, and even campaigning for a far-left radical, merely (I believe) to be outrageous for its own sake.

Christopher Buckley has now slept with the Devil; but he hasn't yet exchanged vows. Will he come to his senses before finding himself trapped in a dreadful marriage from which there is no divorce?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 10, 2008, at the time of 3:00 PM | Comments (20) | TrackBack

October 9, 2008

My Fellow Prisoners

In Wednesday night’s debate John McCain made a verbal gaffe in which he referred to his audience as “my fellow prisoners.” Not yet. But that comes later.

Because under even the most optimistic scenario, if either of these two boobs wins the election -- and obviously as John McLaughlin would say, the chances that one of them will become president approaches metaphysical certitude -- we are in a world of hurt.

Both are total illiterates when it comes to knowing about the many forces that shape economies. McCain, at least, has admitted his ignorance. Obama has this knowing smile, like Chauncey Gardener in Being There, that implies that he possesses some secret knowledge. But when he opens his mouth, it is obvious that he too has no idea what to do about the economic tornado that we have all been snatched up by -- but which his political allies Barney Frank and company had much to do with creating.

Pundits have been trying to figure out why the stock market has been reacting negatively even though Congress agreed to pump nearly a trillion dollars into the credit markets. The answer should be obvious: they have finally realized that Barack Obama is going to be elected president. Although on inauguration day, somewhere in Washington, Barbra Streisand will be singing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” that is not the song they will be singing on Wall Street as they watch the good times roll... away. When FDR took over an America wracked by the Great Depression, he and his advisers spent eight years tinkering with the economy yet never managed to significantly improve unemployment figures, despite throwing billions of dollars at the problem. It was WWII that solved the Great Depression, as any but the most partisan historian will be forced to admit.

We are facing the most liberal crowd since LBJ’s days taking control of the White House and Congress. These are not pragmatists like Bill Clinton, who, when confronted by policy that didn’t work, nimbly danced away and tried something else. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Obama are true believers; when they try their socialist solutions to the economy, they will not be deterred by negative consequences. Like a medieval doctor confronted by a patient who slowly loses strength under repeated blood lettings, they will be inspired to open up a few more veins.

My most optimistic scenario sees Barack Obama as another Jimmy Carter, and possibly Sarah Palin as the new Reagan. If Obama gets a filibuster proof 60 seat majority in the senate you could see a whirlwind of legislation that could so stun the electorate and harm the economy that we could see a repeat of the 1994 Republican takeover.

Remember, we continue to live in a center right political landscape; unless Obama’s solutions are different than what he is preaching right now, they will put the economy into a death spiral. The Democrats in victory have always shown themselves vulnerable to overreaching. So expect them to reimpose the so-called Fairness Doctrine and put Talk radio into orbit... quite literally since Rush and company will undoubtedly set up a resistance in exile on satellite radio, which could lead to even more overreaching by the left -- i.e. trying to extend FCC regulatory powers to satellite.

The one wild card here is the Supreme Court, which, one hopes, will get to rule on challenges to these blatant attempts at silencing dissent early on in the Obama presidency. But don't count on it.

Like Carter in 1980, even a wounded Obama will probably be able to fend off a challenge by Hillary, which means we will likely see a match up between an incumbent Obama and a much savvier, much more seasoned Palin than the one we see wowing crowds by the tens of thousands.

So, my fellow prisoners, settle in for the long haul.

Hatched by Dave Ross on this day, October 9, 2008, at the time of 4:40 AM | Comments (20) | TrackBack

October 6, 2008

Transformation Is the Only Certainty

I believe more firmly than ever that this not be a "holding action" presidential election, as were the last five; it will indeed be "transformational" -- but it's now 50-50 in my mind which way we will be transformed.

If John S. McCain is able to beat Barack H. Obama, it will not, I believe, be close; it will be because the American voters fundamentally and finally reject Obama and everything for which he and that wing of the Democratic Party stand. It will be a resounding defeat; and when the Democrats once again claim it was "stolen" from them -- racism! lies! panic! Diebold! -- they will only make themselves utter laughingstocks for a generation.

The new Republicanism will be conserative at its core but practical and reformist in its methods... a huge transmogrification away from the two Bushes, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Dwight Eisenhower, and even old Blob Dole, and back towards muscular Reaganism instead.

Contrariwise, if Barack Obama wins, it will be because the voters have so thoroughly rejected McCain and George W. Bush and Sarah Palin and the Republican Party in general that it will be a Tuesday Night Massacre, and the Democrats will probably get their fillibuster-proof Senate, thus able to enact any policy they want.

In this nightmare scenario, don't smugly anticipate another Gingrich revolution in two years; the 2008 election will not be like 1992, it will be like 1932... and we will have many years of total Democrat dominance of all levers of power, eventually even including the Court, our own 14-20 years of the New New Deal.

What will drive this choice? It will be a basic, core decision by the American people: We shall either embrace or emphatically reject the very idea of American exceptionalism, the notion that we are different from Europeans. That is why this election will transform us as a nation: We shall either cast off many of the cords from the days of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton that shackle us to the Old World, or we shall give up entirely and become a Euro-style "social democracy."

(We may eventually rise up and once again remember who we are; but last time, that uprising was delayed for nearly half a century.)

We faced just such a crisis in 1980; and after a month in which the nation held its breath, wondering which way the sky would fall, we eventually made what, in the hindsight of today, I agree was the best possible choice. (At the time, being still only an egg, I feared Reagan and hated Carter; I called a murrain on both their houses and wrote in some candidate, I forget who. Probably some Libertarian.)

Will we make the same choice next month? We're in a state of flux now, with Obama ahead by a scant handful of points -- but unable to muster a majority in any poll but the Rasmussen daily tracker. This is not yet a runaway train... and McCain's best bet is the traditional two-pronged attack:

• McCain himself must take the higher path, arguing again and again what he will do in the future to resolve the various crises that beset us from all sides (much from horrific failures of the same European states that Obama and the Democrats would have us emulate). Particularly on the economy, he must tell us in clear, unmistakable, and unambiguous terms what the McCain administration will do differently from the Bush economic policies. That is, he must persuade America that, personalities and character aside, our only hope as a nation is to reject Socialism, populism, protectionism, and defeatism -- and embrace Capitalism, free markets, freedom, and victory.
• Simultaneously, Sarah Palin must embrace the traditional role of the vice-presidential running mate and attack every element of Obama's bad character, untrustworthiness, and unfitness to serve as president. She must make rigorously certain that every attack is sustainable and provable, for any hint that she is smearing Obama (the way Obama routinely smears McCain) with false charges will destroy the Republican cause... playing, as it does, into 2006's theme of "the Republican culture of corruption." Palin's quest is clear: Even if the voters say the Democrats have the better plan, she must make them add, "but not this particular Democrat!"

This is always how Republicans must fight; sometimes the strategy wins, sometimes it loses. But if we don't employ it, if this isn't our fundamental strategy, then defeat is certain.

Buckle your breath, folks; this is going to be one wild landing. We shall either end up safe on the tarmac (albeit pointed in some impossible direction after a merry-go-round spin down the runway)... or else at the bottom of a smoking crater. And at this point, I could not even give odds which one.

All depends upon the answer to one question: Are we, those of us fighting for the Republican cause, going to be as heroic as were the "greatest generation?" If so, victory is at our finger-ends.

Or will we passively allow the bleeding-heart barbarians to overrun our country, as we did in the Vietnam war? Both choices, courage and poltroonery, lie in our history; we are bound to repeat one of them. But which?

All of us, including you, dear readers, must choose up sides now.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 6, 2008, at the time of 2:03 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

October 5, 2008

Bill Draws a Blank

Friend Lee sent me this wonderful YouTube moment. Former President Bill Clinton is being interviewed by Greta Van Susteren. (She must be a red-meat conservative, because she's on Faux News!) She asks the only Democrat since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to serve two full terms as president what the difference is between the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack H. Obama's spiritual mentor -- and David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

Here is Clinton's attempt to answer:

 

 

With friends like these, does Obama need enemas?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 5, 2008, at the time of 12:31 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

October 4, 2008

Courtesy Amnesia

Patterico is the latest to fulminate over Sarah Palin being unwilling (or unable) to recite for schoolmarm Katie Couric a Supreme Court decision she truly disagreed with -- one that was more recent than Roe v. Wade.

Palin now says she did have some cases in mind, but she wouldn't answer because she felt annoyed and belittled by the trivia that Couric was asking in place of intelligent questions. Patterico isn't buying that explanation; here is how our pal Pat ends his post:

Her explanation is not implausible as it relates to the question about what she reads.

But let’s be honest: on the question about Supreme Court cases, she either didn’t have an answer or froze. That’s fine; just admit it when asked about it. But she’s describing that answer of hers as “flippant” -- implying that she had a good answer but refused to give it out of annoyance. That makes no sense.

Again, I’m not trying to tear her down or make a stupid suggestion like calling for her to leave the ticket. I’m just saying: she didn’t fail to name Supreme Court cases out of annoyance. She seemingly didn’t know any, or froze. Either way, admit it and move on.

There is however a third and much more plausible explanation than either of those two; here is where I suspect her answer was headed, before she swallered it down (the blue text is where I diverge from what she actually said):

COURIC: What other Supreme Court decisions do you disagree with?

PALIN: Well, let's see. There's --of course --in the great history of America rulings there have been rulings, that's never going to be absolute consensus by every American. And there are--those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So you know--going through the history of America, there would be others but--

COURIC: Can you think of any?

PALIN: Oh yeah, you betcha... the one that pops into my mind first is when the Supreme Court wrongly upheld that dreadful McCain-Feingold law...

Heck, it would've topped my list! That would, perhaps, account for Gov. Palin "freezing up" while she tried to navigate her way out of that quagpatch.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 4, 2008, at the time of 4:35 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 2, 2008

McCain-Palin "All In" This Week - On Two Counts

The candidacy of John S. McCain is truly all-in today (a poker term that means betting every chip you have on a single hand)... on two fronts.

I anticipated that the polls would be much better -- with McCain a little ahead -- when this debate was held; but I was blindsided by conservative Republicans in the House voting down the Paulson-Bernanke rescue plan en masse.

On the other hand, Barack H. Obama has not managed to pull away, either; the race is still in single digits in every last poll in the RCP average -- even CBS! -- with an average Obama lead of 5.7 right now. Single digits can easily be overcome in four-plus weeks, if momentum can be flipped around towards McCain.

I believe this is one major reason why McCain hasn't been able to get any traction: The House vote against the rescue bill hurts him with both camps, the pro and the con:

1. To those who oppose the plan, McCain looks wrong, because he supports it.
2. But to those who support the plan, McCain looks ineffectual, because he couldn't even to get his fellow Republicans to support it.

If enough HRs now support the Senate-modified plan, however grudgingly, that it passes, that might well flip both 1 and 2: Supporters of the plan will believe that McCain did finally help corral the renegades; it just took a second round, during which McCain did not surrender the field. And even many opponents of the bill will have to rethink whether those who were courageous enough to vote against it last time have suddenly become cravens... or perhaps that the Senate added enough to make it at least potable from the conservative point of view.

But if the HRs again resoundingly reject the bill, they will double-down on the damage they caused last time.

I believe the House will, in fact, pass the bill tomorrow; in fact, I believe that many, many more HRs will vote for it. I have heard believable reports that a number of conservative HRs have already announced a switch in their votes on this new version.

That should help McCain... but only if voters haven't already made up their minds that he is not up to the job as president. (And if they have, then nothing would help anyway; so McCain was "pot committed" to go all in -- another poker term that means the pot is big enough and your last bet small enough that you cannot rationally fold. McCain was already so close to all-in anyway, it would be foolish not to commit the rest of his stack now.)

Another reason the polls may be down is that, after the initial euphoria over McCain's pick of Sarah Palin as his running mate, she disappointed many people in a couple of interviews, particularly the ongoing Katie Couric snippet parade. She came across as programmed to the point of not even being herself.

Because she was McCain's bold and unconventional pick, he rises or falls on that decision (as he should). Thus, if she disgraces herself tonight, she will torpedo McCain's campaign.

Now, considering the boatload of false charges, absurdist claims, and elite-media hit pieces against Sarah Palin, I agree with those who say that in the history of modern presidential and vice-presidential debates, expectations have never been lower for a candidate than they are for Palin tonight.

However, I don't think it will be enough for her simply to show up and not be a raving, creationist, gun-waving, moose murdering, gap-toothed hick who married her own brother, as she has been portrayed by the elites. Rather, I believe she must actually defeat Joe Biden in the minds of conservatives -- and she must at least battle to a tie in the minds of independents.

Sarah Palin has the talent and gumption to pull this off... but the McCainiacs must keep their grubby mitts off'n her and just let Palin be Palin. Don't make her match Biden, bloviation for bloviation; let her perform the way she has in her many previous candidates' debates in Alaska. If she does this, if she relaxes and just debates as herself, not as a Stepford Candidate, she will easily, even wildly surpass expectations; and even in retrospect, after a few days to digest, her performance will help John McCain's candidacy (and her own).

Once again, ignore the snap polls -- even if they are favorable to Sarah Palin. Look instead at what the presidential polls are saying next Thursday and Friday. If Obama still leads by high single-digits, that's bad news; if he has expanded his lead to double-digits, it's probably all over, barring some stunning October surprise.

But if we're back to dead necktie, then that is very, very good news... because it would indicate that the momentum has once again reversed and is now running towards John McCain.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 2, 2008, at the time of 2:08 PM | Comments (19) | TrackBack

September 26, 2008

The Roads Must Roll, Along With a Few Heads - slight UPDATE

Here is the bailout problem in a nutbag. There was indeed a deal before John S. McCain arrived... a completely bicameral deal between House Democrats -- and Senate Democrats. The deal also included (evidently) the White House; and the Senate Republican conference climbed aboard the bandwagon.

The outlines of the deal were that President George W. Bush gets the Paulson-Bernanke emergency rescue plan -- and the Democrats extort a number of their domestic welfare programs:

• Long-term extension of unemployment benefits, so that fewer people will go back to work;
• A "housing trust fund" that would funnel taxpayer money to ACORN and other radical groups;
• Salary caps on everyone who makes more money than members of Congress;
• A secret, back-door restoration of the ban on shale-oil development, which Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 85%) tried to sneak into the rescue bill;
• Fascistic government ownership of the banks, and so forth.

Of course, if you pore over the list above of participants in this deal, you will of course notice one missing piece: House Republicans. The House Republican conference is consistently more conservative, free-market, and even libertarian than any of the other four groups... and not surprisingly, they completely rejected this deal.

But nobody was speaking for the House Republicans; in fact, it appears that nobody was speaking to them, either. So despite the fact that McCain is a senator, not a representative, he nevertheless realized that without the House Republicans (HRs, from now on), no deal would ever be inked. Even though Democrats have a majority in the House (and no filibuster rule), they refused to pass legislation without the "cover" of a majority of the HRs along for the ride. (Which itself is a telling sign: The Democrats did not want to "own" the package.)

Thus, McCain thought it important enough to temporarily (for a few days) suspend his campaign, fly back to D.C. -- which is where his actual job is (and Barack H. Obama's too, by the way) -- and see if he could restart the dialog between the HRs and Everybody Else.

I believe every element of the House plan is worth some consideration in itself, and several would probably help the situation; but I do not believe that even all of them put together would actually resolve the illiquidity of the mortgage markets.

The core of their plan is to get the financial institutions to buy the toxic assets themselves by federally insuring them:

Under the alternative Republican plan, the government would set up an expanded insurance system, financed by the banks, that would rescue individual home mortgages. The government would not have to buy up the toxic mortgage-backed assets that are weighing down financial institutions.

They've also proposed a two-year suspension of the capital-gains tax -- which might actually be counterproductive in the short-term: These toxic assets are of course worth much less than the institutions paid for them; which means if they sell them, they would actually have a capital loss, not gain. Under the current system, they can claim a deduction for that loss; but if we suspend the cap-gains tax for two years, the financial institutions won't be able to deduct their losses.

In the long run, reducing or even eliminating capital-gains tax is a great idea. But it's not going to help in the present crisis.

In the end, I suspect the HRs will relent and compromise: They will accept the guts of the Paulson-Bernanke proposal in exchange for some significant trimming of the Democrats' grab-bag of socialist-populist goodies, particularly including the "equity stake" that the federal government would take in the affected institutions; my reading of the tea leaves tells me this is something that Senate Republicans love but of which House Republicans are very, very skeptical, for the same reasons I enunciated yesterday.

There is already some movement towards a compromise:

Cantor said that some of the "exotic sliced and diced" mortgage-backed securities at issue for the financial institutions are of such little value -- because the underlying mortgages are already in foreclosure -- that using the Republicans' preferred approach of federally insuring them is pointless. "So you've got to go with Paulson's model," Cantor said today, endorsing the federal purchase of those securities to clean up the books for financial firms in distress.

In exchange, Cantor said he is seeking some sort of assurance that that the Treasury secretary would be allowed to create an insurance program for the other mortgages, charging premiums to the firms holding securities tied to those mortgages.

There are some other proposals floating about. Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post has a very interesting one... Treasury sets up a resolution corporation (as per Paulson-Bernanke); but then instead of buying the illiquid securities with cash, they swap them for preferred stock in the new resolution corporation itself:

My own suggestion would be to structure the rescue around a new government-owned corporation that would be capitalized, initially, with $100 billion in taxpayer funds. The company would use auctions or other mechanisms to buy the troubled securities from banks and other regulated institutions, but instead of paying for them in cash, the government would swap them for an equal number of preferred shares in the new company. (Preferred shares are something of a cross between a bond and common stock.) Those preferred shares would pay a government-guaranteed dividend and could be redeemed by the government at any time. But they could also be used by banks to augment the capital they are required to maintain by regulators.

The beauty of this arrangement is that, rather than protecting taxpayers by having the government take an ownership stake in hundreds of privately owned banks, it would be the banks that would own a stake of the government's rescue vehicle. The government would suffer the first $100 billion in losses from buying and selling the asset-backed securities, but any further losses would be borne by the other shareholders. And should the rescue effort actually wind up making a profit, then the banks would share in that as well.

I don't believe this would have happened without John McCain's presence: It took the support of a man so universally respected on the Republican side, even by those Republicans who frequently oppose him -- ironically, the very same House Republican conservatives whose cause he champions today -- to get the corrupt Democrats and the blowhard Senate Republicans to pay their House brethren any attention at all.

My guess is that many of the HRs' proposals (and several proposals of other critics, such as Pearlstein's "preferred shares" swap) will be rolled into the plan; much of the Democratic garbage will be stripped out; and the guts of the Paulson-Bernanke plan will be enacted with near universal support in both the House and Senate, to be signed by the president into law.

The liquidity crisis will be averted; companies will stop going under; the stock market will rebound (it hasn't dropped all that much, really); the Democrats will be exposed (well, by us, at least) as the venal rats who caused the problem in the first place; President Bush will seem a bit more presidential; John McCain will seem a lot more presidential.

The biggest loser will be, I think, Barack H. Obama, as more and more voters start to ask -- "Who is this guy anyway?"

And he'll lose tonight's debate, too.

UPDATE:

These two videos are making the rounds; they fit so perfectly here, I just have to include them.

First, here is the blunt Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO, 96%), official negotiator for the HRs in the Big Blowout, discoursing on how helpful John S. McCain has been during the negotiations, appointing himself Speaker to Animals... that is, guardian angel for the House Republicans. Watch this one first...

 

 

Now, here is the "same" video -- as creatively edited by the Barack H. Obama campaign, or some surrogate. Notice a few very subtle excisions, almost too small even to notice:

 

 

Team Obama is pointing to the truncated video to claim that even Roy Blunt agrees that McCain has been nothing but a roadblock, toppling a done deal and plunging America into a dark night of the financial soul.

Want to know just how corrupt, mendacious, and dishonorable is the campaign by the One We Have Been Waiting For, campaigning by what we call "Chicago rules?" That's how.

If in fact they have nothing to do with this disgraceful knife-job on Blunt's praise, there is a simple way to show it: The campaign can denounce this bearing of false witness. Let's see if any such denunciation forthcomes.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 26, 2008, at the time of 6:03 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

September 24, 2008

John McCain Chooses Sarah Palin... Again

Today, John S. McCain announced that he will suspend his presidential campaign for a few days, so he can return to Washington D.C. and -- funnily enough -- work on the people's business; to wit, participate in the negotiations on the Paulson-Bernanke rescue proposal.

The announcement knocked the Barack H. Obama campaign, the Democrats, the congressional leadership, and the elite news media (to the extent that those are not simply synonyms) back on their heels... like walking up an unlit stairway and taking that last step that isn't there. They scrambled around like prats, denounced McCain, called it a "political stunt," contradicted each other (and themselves two minutes later), and in general, ran around like chickens with their legs cut off.

In other words, just exactly what they did when McCain named Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate.

The decision by Sen. McCain to return to the Senate and worry about the country before his own political interests is the same bold, maverick move as the Palin choice... and it tells us once again, if more proof were needed, who the real "change agent" is in this campaign: Consistently, from the moment the Democratic primary was settled, John McCain has been the leader and Barack Obama the reactionary, either following or angrily denouncing. Today was a "denouncing" day:

Some Democrats reacted skeptically to Mr. McCain’s surprise announcement, charging that it seemed like a political ploy to try to gain the confidence of voters concerned about the economy.

“What, does McCain think the Senate will still be working at 9 p.m. Friday?” Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania said in an interview, referring to the scheduled start time of the debate.

Yes, actually, I think he does. Or they should, for God's sake.

“I think this is all political -- I wish McCain had shown the same concern when he didn’t show up in the Senate to vote on the extension of the renewable energy tax credit.”

Oh yeah. That was certainly a comparable emergency.

Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who is leading House Democrats in negotiating the bailout deal with the administration, was dismissive of Senator McCain’s announcement. “It’s the longest Hail Mary pass in the history of either football or Marys,” Mr. Frank told a group of reporters outside the House chamber.

Great leaping horny toads. Is Barney Frank, of all people, calling John McCain a Mary?

Meanwhile, Obama at his presser was reduced to hemming and hawing that he didn't know whether he would go to D.C. even for the vote; he allowed as how he might go... if his own party thought he was "needed" and wouldn't be a superfluous bump on a log.

This is a truly bizarre response: We know with certainty that the next President of the United States will be either John S. McCain or some fellow named Barack H. Obama; I think we also know to a fare-thee-well that it will fall to the 44th POTUS to implement this legislation, considering how close we are to the next term. So of course both presidential nominees are "needed" -- even the One -- because it does no good for Congress to enact legislation that the One or the Other rejects, because then it will just be slow-rolled into oblivion.

All parties to the final implementation must be represented: congressional Democrats and Republicans, Obama, McCain, President Bush, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, and of course, financiers and banking executives, consultants, and other experts. And none should be allowed to vote "present."

I believe this will be another turning point in the election; it will take a few days to sink in (Palin's effect was immediate), but it may be more long-lasting: The shock of Sarah Palin's investiture was electrifying, but the amour was soon damped out under the relentless resistance of the elite media, probing, poking, prying (and preening at their own perspicacity). I believe Palin will continue to lift the campaign; but we no longer hear so many hosannas (to Mrs. Palin's probable relief) as we settle into the daily grind of the final days.

But McCain's simple ode to the country, his country, will resonate more quietly but echo longer and deeper into the campaign. I don't recall any other candidate suspending his campaign so close to the finish line, just for a few days, and just to do the people's business.

You remember the people, don't you? Us, the living, the demanding, the voting?

But in the clutch, Barack Obama was not so gallant. When the spotlight suddenly shone on the One, he froze, like a -- like a young actor on stage in his first improv, lips moving but mind a blank. Like a beach bum watching in horrified fascination as the eight-story tidal wave washes up to engulf him. Like a hobo sleeping on the railroad tracks, waking up to the fearsome scream of the Midnight Special, too hypnotized even to roll to one side.

Obama baubled, fumbled, stumbled; he stood aloof, so painfully befuddled... until the president personally summoned him to join Bush and McCain in the White House. Reluctantly, like a young wastrel ordered home from wanderjahr, scuffing his feet, Obama slinks back to the ringing of the klaxton, the tumble of the drum. And much of the pixie dust is scraped from his butterfly wings.

John McCain demonstrates himself not only to be the man of change in this race, but the man in this race. Planned or not -- and everything in a presidential race is planned -- it was a brilliant political chess move, not least because it shines the light of reality on the shadowplay of Obama's silver-screen candidacy.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 24, 2008, at the time of 11:58 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

September 17, 2008

Sub-Prime Crisis On a Nutshell: Corrupt Democratic Mortgage Manipulation

The good: President George W. Bush; Sens. John McCain and Phil Gramm; Senate Republicans.

The bad: Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton; Sens. Chris Dodd and Barack Obama; Congressional Democrats; the propagandistic "news" media.

The cowardly and flummoxed: House Republicans.

All else is dicta. (Dicta follows below.)

I hope you have all taken note that Barack H. Obama has been rising in the polls and is now ahead of John S. McCain on several major tracking polls. If McCain doesn't do something quick, we will head right back to where we were six months ago, in early March, with Obama consistently leading by 5% in the polls. Obama could win and Democrats take huge majorities in both House and Senate.

If you're wondering why this is happening now, it's unquestionably because McCain is losing again on the economy -- what with the whole ongoing, slow-motion collapse of the entire charade of "sub-prime mortgages"... which the Democrats, aided by the elite media, of course, have blamed entirely on President George W. Bush -- and on McCain. This allows the Democrats to campaign on fear, their favorite "issue."

Economic fear drove the huge sell-off on the stock markets today. Money panic drives people to the Democrats, who promise to "tax the ultra-wealthy" and give that money to everybody else. If McCain doesn't calm voters down immediately, he will lose.

At the end of this post, I suggest that McCain cut a new commercial with him speaking directly to the American people, himself. This is what I suggest he say:

For the rest of the story, please click the Slither On.

Where things stand

John McCain must speak directly to the American people about the economy, lest Obama and the Democrats get a chance to "define" McCain as an old, out of touch beltway boy. Voters can see that we're in the midst of a collapse in the mortgage market, as lender after lender (and now insurers, like American International Group) goes belly-up or must find a buyer; and folks want to hear what McCain himself has to say.

But perhaps the public doesn't understand -- as I didn't until this month -- just how much of that collapse was in fact orchestrated by the socialist hijinks of congressional Democrats (including Obama), by Bill Clinton, and by Jimmy Carter: Between them, they forced banks and S&Ls into the volatile and risky sub-prime market; and then the Democrats repeatedly prevented any attempt by congressional Republicans (and by President Bush) to oversee and regulate that market.

Why would they do this? First, because Democrats have long been getting huge campaign donations from banks and other mortgage lenders; in fact, the top two recipients of such money are Sens. Chris Dodd (D-CT, 95%) and Barack Obama. Both subsequently encouraged exactly the sort of loan speculation they now decry, an act that reeks of corruption. In addition, many former members of the Clinton administration, including Franklin Delano Raines, former Commerce Secretary William Daley, and Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick (of "Gorelick's wall" infamy), ended up running Fannie and Freddie or lobbying for them... and incidentally raking off tens of millions of dollars for themselves.

But the real culprit in this collapse isn't just Democratic corruption; it's the leftist demand to increase minority home ownership by lending low-income borrowers more money than they qualify to borrow, with higher mortgage payments than they are able to pay. That is, offering mortgages that violate the most basic rules of banking, as a form of "housing welfare." That is the crux of this very real, but very specific crisis.

What caused the sub-prime mortgage crisis?

One of the most evil, anti-capitalist movies ever made is also one of the most beloved by audiences and critics (including supposedly capitalist critics and pundits such as Michael Medved and Hugh Hewitt): It's a Wonderful Life, directed by liberal fascist Frank Capra and starring conservative Jimmy Stewart.

In that movie, George Bailey (Stewart) is shown to be a great guy because he offers mortgages to people who cannot afford to pay them -- and then lets them slide on their payments without foreclosing. Such a wonderful life! (Well, not for the bank's investors; and not for the depositors, when the bank fails -- as it inevitably will do.) In a sense, then, Philip Van Doren Stern (author of the short story, "the Greatest Gift," that was the basis for the movie) invented the utopian idea of "sub-prime mortgages."

It's a Wonderful Life makes great theater but lousy economics, and the financial events of the past few months illustrate why.

The primary rules to prevent the collapse of banking are (1) not to lend money to unqualified borrowers -- you can't give a mortgage to someone who cannot possibly pay it -- and (2) to maintain a sufficiently high cash reserve that people who need to draw out all their money can do so -- the bank can't lend out all its depositors' money. But those rules make it more difficult for the poor (disproportionately minorities and Democrats) to obtain housing loans: They're restricted to much smaller mortgages for a smaller percentage of the total cost of the house; and because the bank can't lend out every penny, it must pick and choose to whom to lend.

This infuriates liberals, who believe the very purpose of a bank is to give the poor a chance to own their own home (even without pulling themselves out of poverty first). Thus, liberals have long championed a supposed "reform" that is actually an element of unbridled liberal fascism: That government should force private banks to make bad loans to Democratic constituents, under threat of massive fines from the SEC... or even loss of their license.

Democrats in Congress forced that act of semi-nationalization on the banks as long ago as 1977, where they pushed through Congress the anti-capitalist, Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. That was the year that was: Democrats in the 95th Congress, still surfing the tsunami of Watergate, enjoyed a 61% majority in the Senate and a 67% majority in the House; and in Jimmy Carter, they had the most left-liberal Democrat in office since FDR. It was the perfect storm of socialism.

The umpires strike back

In 1999, Republicans, who by then controlled the House and Senate, tried to do away with that horrible piece of utopianism. Sen. Phil Gramm, then chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, offered a sweeping deregulation of the financial industry (S. 900, later called the Financial Services Modernization Act, FSMA). It was true deregulation that left the financial institutions free to decide what activities to engage in and with whom, but left them accountable for their actions; and it explicitly removed the CRA mandate to offer mortgages to poor people who couldn't afford them.

Democrats voted en masse against this version of the FSMA, with only one Democrat -- Sen. Ernest F. Hollings -- voting for it. Nevetheless, it passed the Senate by 54-44; every single Republican voted for this clean version, including John McCain. But President Clinton threatened to veto the bill for that very reason: He wanted to strengthen the CRA, not gut it! Clinton wanted to make it even easier for low-income borrowers to get a mortgage... and even easier to find somebody else to make the payments (while the borrower kept the house) when the inevitable happened. So President Clinton made it clear that the bill, as passed by the Senate, would never become law:

Administration officials say the President would veto the Senate version because it would dilute requirements that banks make loans to minorities, farmers and others who have had little access to credit. The legislation also contains provisions that have been criticized by Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin because they reduce his department's oversight of banks.

But privately, some Democrats and Administration officials say that Mr. Clinton might agree to legislation if the objectionable provisions in the Senate measure were watered down or eliminated when the House and Senate negotiate a final bill in conference.

Alas, that is exactly what happened. Throwing gasoline to the winds, Senate Democrats insisted on retaining the It's a Wonderful Life provision, Jimmy Carter's CRA; the final version of the FSMA, passed in 1999, still compelled banks and S&Ls to issue sub-prime mortgages. The provision was inserted during the House-Senate conference, and no senator or representative ever got to vote for it... very similar to an earmark, except it was designed to protect Democratic votes (the poor and irresponsible being their natural constituency), rather than enrich some particular Democratic crony.

Shamefully, the Senate Republicans eventually agreed to this version, which passed 90-8. The only Republicans who did not vote for it were Richard Shelby (R-AL, %), who voted Nay, and John McCain, who did not vote.

I suspect McCain wanted to vote Nay, but he did not want to oppose his longtime friend and ally Phil Gramm -- who voted for this version, since it did contain most of the deregulation he wanted. Gramm and the other Republicans who went along probably thought the sub-prime lending was just a small "bone" they'd thrown to the Democrats.

But it was exactly this Democratic bone that led to the current collapse, the Law of Unintended Consequences in full cry.

President Bush tries to reform Freddie and Fannie

Fannie Mae (Federal National Mortgage Association) was part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal; founded in 1938, its purpose is to buy mortgages from banks and savings & loans to inject more liquidity (cash) into the mortgage market. In other words, it's a legal way for the government to pump more money into the banking industry... exactly the sort of government intervention in the market that is rightly dubbed "liberal fascism." It was turned into a quasi-private corporation in 1968, to get it off the government accounts due to its perennial shortfalls. (This sort of quasi-private company is called a "government sponsored enterprise," or GSE.)

Freddie Mac (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation) is another GSE, this one founded in 1970; its purpose is to create the illusion of competition with Fannie Mae. Fannie and Freddie have been in near constant financial deep water for decades because of their very nature -- but especially after they became the primary avenues for implementing Jimmy Carter's vision of housing welfare, the CRA.

As of September 7th, 2008, both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were placed under conservatorship of the federal government, due to extraordinary mismanagement by the former members of the Clinton administration who have been running the two GSEs.

In 2003, Bush proposed a major reform of Freddie and Fannie. Specifically, he wanted regulation to be put under the Treasury Department, which would tighten the lending rules... again, trying to bring some capitalist rationality to Carter's CRA. But again, the Democrats threw themselves athwart fiscal sanity and cried "stop!" As the New York Times reported:

Significant details must still be worked out before Congress can approve a bill. Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.

''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.''

Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.

''I don't see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,'' Mr. Watt said.

Bear in mind that to Democrats, "affordable housing" is code for giving Democratic constituents mortgages that they cannot pay to buy houses they cannot afford -- with the proviso that when they default on their loans (as so many do), you, the American taxpayer, will pick up the tab so that other fellow can keep his house.

Bush's reform attempt went nowhere, due to lack of congressional support, primarily by Democrats but without much help from Republicans, either. (In this sense, it was very much like Bush's attempt to reform Social Security. Thanks, GOP Congress!)

Republicans' last shot at averting the looming disaster

Republicans, including John McCain, made one more valiant effort to stave off the implosion that he and others actually foresaw; in 2005, just three years ago, McCain joined as a co-sponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005.

The bill sought to shift authority over Fannie and Freddie from HUD -- which historically pushes lenders towards quasi-socialism and liberal fascism, including the It's a Wonderful Life provision -- to an independent agency, the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Agency.

McCain spoke powerfully in its favor; but Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd killed it in the Senate Banking Committee, in which he was ranking minority member. (Thanks, Senate parliamentarians!)

Bottom line

Here are the "straight talk" bullet points you need to know about the sub-prime mortgage crisis:

• Starting three decades ago, Democrats have used every parliamentary trick in the book to construct exactly the system we have today, where banks are bullied into making bad loans to borrowers who cannot afford them; then they sell those bad loans to Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae; and when a borrower defaults, taxpayers pick up the bill for the defaulter's nice, new house. This amounts to housing welfare for Democrats;
• Republicans have tried repeatedly to kill that program, warning that such an anti-capitalist practice can only result in a complete, diastrous collapse;
• Democrats "denounced" those warnings as "exaggerated." Because of the arcane rules in the House of Representatives and especially in the Senate, Democrats have repeatedly managed to squash those attempts at real reform -- whether they were in the majority or the minority;
• Now that the warnings are proved prescient, and the collapse is underway and impossible to conceal any longer, Democrats point their fingers at President Bush, John McCain, and Republicans in general -- "Look what you made us do!"
• Democrats pretend that the collapse was caused by a lack of regulation and government control -- when it was actually caused by overregulation, amounting to quasi-nationalization of mortgage lenders, vigorously pushed by Democrats in 1977, 1999, 2003, and 2005 -- the It's a Wonderful Life provision;
• Democrats pretend that John McCain was pushing for complete deregulation of Fannie and Freddie, when in fact he was pushing for greater oversight -- but favored the rescinding of the particular Democratic provision that has now led to the collapse. Barack Obama and Joe Biden have consistently supported this provision -- and now blame McCain when its inevitable, predictable, and predicted consequences come crashing down upon us.

What's to be done, then?

Very simple: It's time for some straight talk from Mr. Straight Talk himself.

So far, McCain hasn't said anything stupid about this crisis. But he hasn't said anything smart, either. In fact, he has barely said anything at all.

John McCain needs to move and move quickly. He needs to jump out in front of this issue and not allow himself to become "Katrina-ed." McCain needs to cut a commercial; and taking a page from his opponent, he should simply talk straightforwardly to the camera and say something along the following lines:

I agree we should let John McCain be John McCain; but for God's sake, can't he be John McCain a little faster and louder, please?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 17, 2008, at the time of 10:55 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

September 12, 2008

Raking Whoopi

Today, John S. McCain was a guest on the View, where he has in the past been treated more kindly -- when he was nought but a maverick Republican tweaking President George W. Bush's nose. Now that he is the Republican nominee for president (and leading in nearly all the polls), it's a whole different kettle of horses.

Among the challenging and deranged questions he was asked, the best of the worst came from noted political scholar and seasoned electioneer Whoopi Goldberg, now ensconced in the Rosie O'Donnell memorial deep-analysis chair. During a discussion of the types of federal judges McCain would name, bouncing off of the overly obvious Roe v. Wade "crisis," the following hijinks ensued:

Alas, McCain did not really respond to Whoopi Goldberg's "question;" he seemed a bit stunned by the audacity of her stupidity, and he just placated her, telling her it was a good point and he understood. He all but patted her head, the way one would a child who was particularly thick.

So we lizards must take up the smart man's burden and explain, in words of few syllables, what is so terribly wrong with Ms. Goldberg's argument... for argument it was; it certainly was not an actual question to which she wanted an answer.

Goldberg, like most liberal Democrats, is confused about judges, John McCain, and the Founding Fathers; she imagines that a judge who is a "strict constitutionalist" -- an expression I confess having never heard before -- wants the Constitution returned to its pristine condition as written in 1787, before even the Bill of Rights was added.

I supposed it's barely possible that there may be a lawyer or law professor somewhere in America who wants such a thing; it's a big country. But certainly such a static thinker would not have been found among the Founding Fathers themselves. We must recall the Founders were rather revolutionary thinkers.

The Founders of our republic never intended the Constitution to remain changeless; that is why they included an elaborate amendment process to change it, which has successfully been invoked 27 times in the last 217 years -- an average of once every eight years (or once every 12 years, if you count the Bill of Rights as a single agony in ten fits).

One of those changes was the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified 143 years ago, which reads in toto:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

As this more-or-less duly enacted amendment* would allay Ms. Goldberg's fears about "being a slave" once more (perhaps she believes she was a slave in a previous life), the only logical explanation is that she thinks the judges that "President" McCain would appoint reject that amendment as marring the original beauty of the Constitution. In fact, I suspect that all hysterical Democrats think that's what "strict constitutionalist" judges believe. It's one of the sure signs of hysterical dementia.

In the real world, however, judicial conservatives and strict constructionists -- terms I am more familiar with than Whoopi Goldberg's term -- have no desire to roll the Constitution back to what it was the day it was ratified in 1789. They don't reject subsequent amendments; but they do insist upon ruling on the basis of what is actually in the Constitution today: the original text, all constitutional amendments that have been ratified, plus the actual words of relevant statutary law. Where none of the above decides the case, then judicial conservatives turn to previous interpretations and understandings of the law from court precedent; this is to resolve ambiguities, contradictions, and countervailing rights or interests.

A judicial conservative asks only that changes in the Constitution come about by the amendment process the Founders carefully enunciated in the document itself.

By stark contrast, the sort of judge supported by Democrats like -- well, like Whoopi Goldberg -- do not rule on what's actually in the Constitution; instead, they rule on the basis of their own personal gut feelings, which they would insert into the Constitution if only they could. Since they can't, however, they pretend it's there anyway and rule according to their whim du jour. That, as I understand it, is the difference between a strict constructionist/judicial conservative and a judicial legislator.

But you know I'm not a lawyer; I'm just playing sea-lawyer here. So if some lawyer who actually knows what he's talking about (unlike me) wants to correct my quickie definition, please feel free. Beldar, Patterico, and XRLQ, this means you!

I wonder if Whoopi Goldberg reads Big Lizards? Nah; can't picture it.

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* Yes, I know that some or all rebellious Southern states had not been readmitted to the Union and Congress when the 13th Amendment was ratified; tough. They may have gotten the short end of the totem pole, but they buttered their own petard, and now they can smoke it.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 12, 2008, at the time of 9:21 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

September 11, 2008

Obama and the Old Switcheroo? Not a Chance.

From several unrelated sources, I have heard or read the suggestion that Barack H. Obama might dump the ineffectual Slow Joe Biden -- whose only accomplishment is breaking the world record for stupid verbal gaffes (in the United States Senate, a remarkably tough league!) -- and name Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-Carpetbag, 100%) instead as his running mate.

Alas, I don't think there is a chance in a thousand that Obama will dump Biden for anybody... and most especially not for Hillary. He's savvy enough to realize that if he did, he would lose even worse than he's already likely to do.

Several reasons:

Judgment day

It's not that making such a switch "reeks of desperation," as some suggest. That might have been the case had he picked her first; but to dump his first pick and grab for Hillary now would raise a far more serious question about Obama's fitness: Such an obvious U-turn screams "bad judgment," which is already the biggest slam against him.

When a gaffe plays directly into the gaffing candidate's worst quality, it resonates out of all proportion:

• John F. Kerry's two most questionable characteristics were deferring to the world community, rather than putting America first, and his inability to make up his mind. Thus his own statements -- calling for a "global test" for U.S. policy and his boneheaded explanation that, "I was actually for the $87 billion before I was against it" -- became the two defining moments of his campaign.
• The issue that most dogged George H.W. Bush was whether the man who called Ronald Reagan's tax cuts "voodoo economics" in 1980 was any more committed to them as president; so his "read my lips, no new taxes" promise, followed by a big tax increase, sealed his doom in 1992.
• And the biggest question voters had about Michael Dukakis was whether he was qualified to lead American forces in the event of war; his "bobblehead" ride in a tank, as it served left and right, wandering aimlessly, destroyed his shot at the White House.

In this case, Obama's Achilles' heel is the question of judgment: Dumping his running mate only a couple of weeks after naming him conjures up memories of Gerald Ford -- remembered (wrongly but strongly) as a bumbler who was as clumsy in his judgment as he was on his feet.

(Yes, I know he was an athlete and his proclivity for tripping was greatly exaggerated by Chevy Chase; but I'm talking about perception not reality.)

All the cows come home to roost

Others argue that picking Hillary would bring back all those disaffected former Hillary Clinton supporters, who were only turning to Sarah Palin out of disappointment at not getting the gal they really wanted.

If Barack Obama had picked Hillary first, that might have helped him, if he could overcome the "desperation" charge. But to first pass her over, and then, to dump Biden and pick Hillary only after John S. McCain picks Palin... well, not only would that not bring back those PUMAs ("Party Unity My Ass") who are now jumping ship to McCain -- the blatant disrespect for women inherent in such a cynical ploy would accelerate the trend.

Picking a powerful, self-made woman as running mate is exciting and galvanizing to the many women who believe -- not without some justice -- that one major reason no woman has ever been elected vice president or president is that a lot of people, especially the "old boys" in the upper ranks of government, really don't believe women as a class can handle the job.

But to dump one's first VP pick, a man, and quickly stick a woman on instead -- to "counter" the woman that your opponent chose -- is tantamount to saying, "You chicks are only supporting McCain because you want to vote for a women. Fine. Here! Here's your lousy woman! Now you can vote for me."

It shows contempt for female voters. Rather than reaching out to a qualified woman -- as McCain did -- Obama would be turning to a woman he already rejected, who he didn't even think was worthy of being shortlisted, just because she is female; and he thinks he has to have his own token woman to lure lure female voters away from his opponent.

What he said

Finally, such a defensive reaction would transform Obama from an "agent of change" into the Sour Kangaroo's joey from "Horton Hears a Who"... the baby kangaroo whose only line is -- "Me too!"

What is Obama supposed to say in his announcement? "I know I should have picked her earlier, but I was too cowardly and sexist to do so. But now that John McCain has blazed the trail, I'm going to run right up behind him and slap his butt." (In a manly, congratulatory way, I mean.)

A mighty wind

Some suggest, however, that it doesn't matter what Obama does, because the mainstream media will always have his back; they will defend any decision he makes, so it won't hurt him.

Yes, the elite media would frantically spin such a switch; but we mustn't fall into the trap of many Republicans who have an unexamined assumption that the media are not only all-in for Obama, which is true -- but also all-powerful at achieving their goals, which is provably false: If they really had that power, don't you think they would have managed to defeat George W. Bush at least once?

So far, the elites have been spinning and spinning the meme that Sarah Palin is an inexperienced, incompetent, gun-clinging, earmark-hugging, animal-murdering, secession-supporting, child abusing, rabid, fascist, right-wing, creationist, Jeebus Crispie, book-banning lunatic. How has that project worked out?

You can fool some of the people all the time -- but they're already Democrats

Such a transparent switcheroo would make Obama look so small, so sexist, so reactionary, that he would lose whatever shred of credibility, gravitas, and "presidentiality" he currently retains. He is an intelligent man; he's not an idiot. He realizes this; and that is why he will never even consider dumping Slow Joe for Hillary.

Barack Obama will stick with his first choice and just try to get lemonade out of a sow's ear.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 11, 2008, at the time of 5:22 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

September 9, 2008

Obama's Macaca Moment: It's a Gaffe, Gaffe, Gaffe! UPDATED

Studiously avoiding all buoyancy, pneumatic, and materials-science analogies, the presidential campaign of Barack H. Obama certainly appears to be in trouble. One symptom of failing candidacies is the tendency to magnify the external problems with personal mistakes, misjudgments, and gaffes.

Here is the newest... and it could well become a seam-splitting, steam-leaking, presidential amibition-sinker:

With voters craving change and Obama offering it, McCain has started pushing hard to reclaim the reformer mantle he owned eight years ago. His running mate, Sarah Palin, has energized his conservative base while attracting droves of white women to the Arizona senator's candidacy. The GOP ticket has soaked up a great deal of attention over the last 10 days, between Palin's selection and the party's convention.

That has left Obama, the change candidate of the primaries, spending much of his time explaining to voters why McCain and Palin don't deserve the label....

"You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig," he said to an outburst of laughter and applause from his audience in Lebanon, Va., Tuesday. "You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, but it's still going to stink after eight years."

Obama left himself some squealing room; but as indicated above (and in all other accounts of the gaffe), his audience in Lebanon, Virginia certainly understood him to be referring to Palin's quip at the Republican convention that the only difference between a hockey mom, such as herself, and a pit bull was "lipstick" -- thus, the "pig" in Obama's ungentlemanly, snarky riff was Sarah Palin herself. (McCain is obviously the target of the "old fish" that stinks after eight years insult.)

Obama insists he didn't mean that Gov. Sarah Palin is a pig; he was talking about the "reform" slogan of the McCain-Palin ticket. But he's not such a fool that he didn't know how the audience, both immediate and over TV, would take it.

Besides, it was only the first hoggish reference the Democratic nominee made; later in the same event, after hearing the audience's reaction to Obama's first Palin/pig joke, he essayed another porcine jape:

Hogs were a theme of Obama’s town hall. Later in the event, while discussing the No Child Left Behind policy that puts stress on teachers to test students, he made another swine reference. “There’s a saying in Southern Illinois that you don’t fatten a hog by weighing it. You can weigh it everyday, that’s not how you fatten it up,” Obama said.

Well, no; but that is how you decide whether it still needs more "fattening up." This attack doesn't even make sense; has anybody argued that giving a student a test, by itself, educates him? So far as I've seen, proponents of No Child Left Behind argue that testing a student allows the school and parents to track the student's progress, so you know whether he is learning -- or whether he needs urgent attention so he won't fail.

Is that really such a difficult concept?

But the real point is this, from the AP article:

Even so, the Illinois senator's focus on bringing down McCain and Palin underscores the worry among some Democrats that the Republican ticket is gaining, and in no small part because of the addition of the first-term Alaska governor who is the first Republican woman on a presidential ticket....

Democrats, if not Obama himself, seem unsure how exactly to go after Palin, and some Democratic strategists say they hope Obama will assign Biden the task of countering Palin, rather than do it himself.

McCain has jumped to a tie or lead in national polls, depending on the survey, with Palin helping to drive the gains, particularly by solidifying the conservative base and attracting swing voters as well as a slew of white women.

A "gaffe" is defined not by the intentions of the speaker but by the reactions of the listeners. Everybody in that audience "heard" Obama call Sarah Palin a pig and John McCain a rotting fish; if B.O. didn't realize it before speaking, he must have figured it out -- being the smartest man in the universe -- when the audience roared, laughed, and applauded. And the McCain campaign is making the most of it... as they should.

The problem for Obama is the same as the one that hounded former Sen. George Allen to defeat in his 2006 re-election campaign, also in Virginia. Allen used the term "macaca" to refer to the mole that opponent Jim Webb kept sending to Allen's campaign rallies with a videocam, hoping for something to use -- like being called "Macaca." Allen swore over and over that when he used the term (at one speech, singling out the mole, S.D. Sidarth), he had no idea that "macaca" was actually a racial slur in the Belgian Congo early in the 20th century.

The fact that nobody else in the United States was familiar with that slur either made no difference at all: Allen had clearly intended the word as an insult, a low-blow slam belittling Mr. Sidarth -- who was, obviously, of East Indian ancestory, not Congolese. And voters don't like such schoolyard taunts.

Neither will it make any difference to voters whether Obama actually meant to call the McCain-Palin ticket a "pig," rather than Palin herself; voters in the swing states will likely label the attack boorish, unmannerly, and sexist.

Obama needs to apologize immediately and plead fatigue; it's better to look old and tired than young, condescending, and pissy. But he won't; I don't think he can bring himself to be humble, especially not to the "rival false prophet" (as Scott Johnson put it on Power Line) who came bubbling up like the Swamp Thing to grab Obama's halo. If Obama goes even farther and begins exploding whenever he's asked about the comment, then he can add "paranoid and defensive" to his list of undesirable and unbecoming attributes.

Political campaigns are all about two antagonistic forces: momentum and labels. Both teams compete to see who can attach a label to both himself and his opponent (thesis), a task made more difficult the greater the momentum of the campaign (antithesis). The resulting synthesis defines the arc of the campaign.

In the early days of the primaries, Obama succeeded in attaching the labels of "ideological purity" and "change" to his campaign and the label of "old-style politics" to Hillary Clinton's; Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee succeeded in attaching the label of "old coot" to McCain's campaign but couldn't get any label to stick on their own; and John McCain made the "maverick" label his own.

But then momentum took hold. Hillary Clinton's campaign juggernaut used every dirty trick in the book to rip the self-adhesive labels from Barack Obama, and they succeeded in removing the first, the "purity" issue. Alas, that was not enough to derail Obama, because he still had the "change" label... but it was a darned close primary.

McCain's relentless campaigning on his biography, his record, and his now firmly ensconced "maverick" label produced sufficient momentum to blast away the "old coot" label; instead, he became "dynamic" and a "reformer." The graceful dropping out by the other Republican candidates and the Sarah Palin pick increased the momentum and solidified the "maverick" and "reformer" labels.

But Obama is now in danger of moving so slowly, with so little momentum, that McCain has the opportunity to attach any label he wants to the Democrat's campaign; Mr. Audacity can't get himself out of first gear and has become a more or less stationary target.

At the moment, McCain is jogging alongside Obama, trying to attach the labels of "ultraliberal," "inexperienced," and "Chicago machine" to the Democratic campaign. Obama's hit job on Palin -- calling her a pig -- accentuates the third label: I believe it will strike voters as exactly the sort of dirty pool to which the "Daley machine" would stoop.

Labels, once attached, are darned hard to tear off; you need enough momentum that they will be borne away by the wind in your wake. But Obama just isn't fast enough off the mark... and I believe the labels applied by McCain will stick.

We'll see; but the gaffes Obama is committing now are entirely unforced. They come from deep in the bowels of him.

UPDATE: See? That didn't take long:

 

 

Barack Obama can whine until the cows come home to roost that he wasn't calling Sarah Palin a pig -- he was just calling the McCain-Palin ticket a pig. But this slur has a dynamic too large to contain with a simple huck and smirk. The meme of "Obama called Sarah Palin a pig" isn't going away; it's going to stick, and it's going to hurt Obama badly.

He's not a stupid man; he knew well how his cutesy aphorism would be taken in this context. Clearly, Obama was giggling inside like a junior-high student, tickled pink at how he "got" Palin. I know that many hard-left Obama fans openly cheered and laughed when he said it (I've read their posts): They knew exactly what he meant.

Well, he baited the hook -- and now he's got a tiger by the tail. I wish him a long and consuming acquaintance with that ferocious feline of his own fabrication.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 9, 2008, at the time of 11:58 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

September 8, 2008

Final Convention-Bounce Numbers

The first completely post-GOP convention releases of the Gallup and Rasmussen daily tracking polls are now available; this allows us to calculate the net bounce from the Democratic and Republican conventions... who won the "battle of the bounces?"

As we promised, here they are:

Gallup Daily Tracking

Poll release date	Obama	McCain	Advantage
August 25th	45	45	Tie
September 8th	44	49	McCain +5

 

Rasmussen Daily Tracking (without leaners)

Poll release date	Obama	McCain	Advantage
August 25th	46	42	Obama +4
September 8th	46	47	McCain +1

 

Rasmussen Daily Tracking (with leaners)

Poll release date	Obama	McCain	Advantage
August 25th	48	45	Obama +3
September 8th	47	48	McCain +1

 

Average of Gallup and Rasmussen (without leaners)

Poll release date	Obama	McCain	Advantage
August 25th	45.5	43.5	Obama +2.0
September 8th	45.0	48.0	McCain +3.0

To summarize:

1. Before the Democratic convention began, a rolling 3-day average from Gallup found Barack H. Obama tied with John S. McCain; the same poll released today -- with all respondents having had a chance to see McCain's and Palins' acceptance speeches -- has McCain ahead of Obama by 5 points.
2. The equivalent polling numbers for the Rasmussen Daily Tracking poll (not counting leaners) finds McCain going from a deficit of 4 under Obama to an advantage of 1, again a movement of 5 points.
3. The average of these two polls shows McCain skyrocketing from a deficit of 2.0 before the Democratic convention to an advantage of 3.0 at this point. As predicted by Big Lizards, it was McCain, not Obama, who came out of the conventions with a significant net bounce of +5.0.
4. Even more spectacularly, in the polls taken entirely in between the two conventions (September 1st), Obama had received a bounce of 2.5 (from 2.0 to 4.5); thus the full bounce that John McCain received from both the announcement of Sarah Palin and the convention is 7.5 points. Obama got a 2.5-point bounce from his convention, while McCain received a 7.5-point bounce from his (hence the net of 5 points).

This is what happens when voters actually get a look at both candidates, each putting his best foot down.

I mentioned our prediction from August 22nd; this is what we wrote:

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.

We were right; he did.

But let's expand to other polls. The Real Clear Politics average of all polls on August 25th -- the last day when all polling was conducted before the Democratic convention -- showed Obama with a 1.6 lead (45.5 Obama to 43.9 McCain); today, the RCP average shows a McCain lead of 3.2 (45.4 Obama to 48.6 McCain) -- a bounce of 4.8% for John McCain. (You can find the historical average for any date by hovering your pointer over the histogram and sliding left or right until you reach August 25th; the upper part will tell you the actual averages, the bottom only tells you the spread.)

This 4.8-point bounce matches up perfectly with the 5-point bounce from the two tracking polls, indicating that they are not out of line; this is real movement being picked up across the board.

Here is another point to mull: In this campaign, John McCain has been a "closer;" he went from a big deficit to victory at the end. McCain's primary campaign was dead in the water by July of 2007; but he came roaring back, of course, winning in Florida, New Hampshire, and North Carolina just six months later. The next month, he won a majority of states on Tsunami Tuesday, knocking Mitt Romney out of the race a couple of days later.

Barack Obama, by contrast, started out way ahead; but then it was Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-Carpetbag, 100%) who came back strongly, almost taking the nomination away from the One. In fact, were it not for the huge lead that Obama had built up in early caucus states that were "winner take all," Clinton would almost certainly have been the nominee.

McCain is already ahead; if the general campaign follows the same pattern as the two primary campaigns, then John McCain will expand his lead before the final vote.

McCain is now in very good position not only to win the race but to do so convincingly, something that President George W. Bush could not do in either of his two victories: In 2000, the vote was dead even; and even in 2004, he won by only 2.4% nationwide. In neither case did the president even crack 290 electoral votes out of 538 possible: 271 in 2000 (one point more than the smallest majority possible) and 286 in 2004.

By contrast, in Bill Clinton's two elections, he achieved 370 electoral votes in 1992 (receiving 5.6% more total votes than President George H.W. Bush) and 379 in 1996 (8.5% ahead of Sen. Robert Dole).

If McCain wins this election by, say, 6-7 points, he will almost certainly receive more than 300 electoral votes, probably more than 350; with no significant third-party candidate, to suck away votes, he will be at 53%; and he will definitely have coattails in the House and Senate races.

That would be a resounding victory. Though it will not silence the Democrats -- they will once again claim the election was "stolen" from them (this is so obvious, I don't even count it as a prediction) -- it will indelibly pin a powder-blue "L" on their frocks... L for liberal; L for loser.

Time to replace our dilithium crystals, recharge our ki, and redouble our efforts; let no one rest until John S. McCain charges across that finish line.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 8, 2008, at the time of 4:08 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 6, 2008

Interim Progress Report on Convention Bounces

Today is the first day that Gallup and Rasmussen daily tracking polling includes some respondents (one third of them) who saw (or could have seen) John S. McCain's acceptance speech on Thursday. These polls are each three-day rolling averages; thus today's poll release includes polling from Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday; but the Thursday polling ended before McCain's speech, so only the Friday polling reflects any bump that might give him.

The last polling release where all polls were conducted before the Democratic convention was Monday, August 25th; the first polling release where all polls will have been conducted after the Republican convention ended will be Monday, September 8th... so consider this a "progress report" of sorts.

For the Gallup numbers, go the linked page and hover your pointer over the trend lines to see the results for each day. The Rasmussen numbers are found here.

We also have final numbers on how many viewers tuned in to watch each convention. Let's jump right in....

Tracking poll numbers and averages

Gallup Daily Tracking

Poll release date	Obama	McCain	Advantage
August 25th	45	45	Tie
September 6th	47	45	Obama +2

 

Rasmussen Daily Tracking (without leaners)

Poll release date	Obama	McCain	Advantage
August 25th	46	42	Obama +4
September 6th	46	45	Obama +1

 

Rasmussen Daily Tracking (with leaners)

Poll release date	Obama	McCain	Advantage
August 25th	48	45	Obama +3
September 6th	49	46	Obama +3

 

Average of Gallup and Rasmussen (without leaners)

Poll release date	Obama	McCain	Advantage
August 25th	45.5	43.5	Obama +2.0
September 6th	46.5	45.0	Obama +1.5

To summarize:

1. Before the Democratic convention began, a rolling 3-day average from Gallup found Barack H. Obama tied with John S. McCain; the same poll released today -- with two-thirds of respondents not having had a chance to see McCain's acceptance speech and one-third not having had a chance to see Sarah Palin's speech -- has Obama ahead of McCain by 2 points.
2. The equivalent polling numbers for the Rasmussen Daily Tracking poll (not counting leaners) found Obama going from an advantage of 4 over McCain to an advantage of 1.
3. The average of these two polls shows Obama dropping from an advantage of 2.0 before the Democratic convention to 1.5 at this point. He has already lost ground and is likely to lose more, as more respondents will have had a chance to have seen McCain's speech.

We will, of course, post the final results on Monday.

Nielsen ratings of both conventions

Nielsen has released the ratings for the two conventions; the ratings are the total number of televisions tuned to each show, calculated from the "Nielsen boxes" on some large number of viewer's TVs that accurately measure whether the TV is turned on, and if so, to what show it's tuned. (It cannot measure whether the viewer is actually paying attention or even watching. Surprise, surprise.)

Here are the Nielsen ratings; the operative number is "Persons 2+" for each day... that is, the total number of persons over the age of 2 who watched (I'm not sure how they calculate that, but it's the same formula for each party's convention):

Nielsen ratings for each convention

Convention	Nominee speech	VP speech	Daily average
Democratic	38.4 million	24.0 million	30.2 million
Republican	38.9 million	37.2 million	34.5 million
Advantage	McCain + 500,000	Palin + 13.2 million	GOP + 4.3 million

(For the "daily average" figure, found on page 2 of the PDF, the operative number is persons 2+ in the "Live + Same Day" column, meaning those who either watched live, or who watched a recording of the events on the same day (as I did).

So as spectacular as were the ratings for Barack Obama's acceptance speech, John McCain's acceptance actually beat the celebrity Democrat... and for that matter, even Sarah Palin came very close. Combining the presidential and vice presidential acceptance speeches, the Republicans outdrew the Democrats by 13.7 million viewers.

How could that be? How could John "McAncient" beat "Britney" Obama? I suspect voters are starting to wake up to the realization that fame (or infamy) is not the most important issue: They have evidently begun seriously to consider judgment, accomplishment, managerial skills, courage, and character instead.

Barack Obama may win the "George" trophy -- the political equivalent of the Oscar, the Grammy, the Hugo, or the Edgar; but that's not why we're holding an election a scant 59 days from today.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 6, 2008, at the time of 7:08 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 4, 2008

McCain's Thing: Much Better Than I Expected (Updated)

I surprised myself by how much I liked the speech. Part of my satisfaction was actually relief; "prompter" speeches are not John S. McCain's forte. But I found it more Reaganesque than any speech I've heard him give... in fact, more than any speech I've heard anybody give since Reagan himself.

I particularly appreciated the retelling of his POW history, but this time with a completely different theme: How his long captivity changed him from a narcissistic, jerky nasal radiator into a real mensch, a grownup, a man of humility and recognition of a cause larger than himself, and therefore a man of sagacity. I'd heard the "McCain as war hero" meme many times in this campaign, but this is the first time I've seen this version.

I liked it; it finally connects in a visceral way to the growth of his character (which, as I pointed out in a previous post, grew even more in just the last few years).

But what impressed me the most intellectually -- as opposed to what merely moved my emotions -- was the "laundry list" section in the middle; he articulated, whether by accident or design, almost every conservative theme that I share with you guys, while avoiding those that merely irritate me.

I may well be close to the target audience of McCain's speech, even though I'm already a committed anti-Barack H. Obama voter, which of course means a committed GOP voter: I'm not a conservative, yet I share many conservative values; I'm libertarian (though not Libertarian) but nevertheless believe in a robust and preemptive national defense; and I really want to hear how McCain, or any other GOP candidate, plans to get the damned government off our backs so we can get on with living long and prospering.

In that section, McCain came out foursquare for:

• School choice, to bring a kind of "free market" to educational opportunity;
• Expanding energy production, including drilling for oil and gas, using clean coal, and building nuclear reactors -- the only energy sources that will actually make a difference over the next 50 years;
• Vetoing any earmark-laden bill that lands on his desk. I don't fool myself that we can cut off every ear; but at least, with a president so hostile to them, they can be kept to a dull roar. And, as McCain promised, made very public;
• Making health insurance portable, so we don't have to stick in a lousy job we hate because we can't afford to lose the insurance;
• Cutting taxes and spending (no explanation necessary);
• Job retraining -- I loved the line that, instead of trying to recreate old-economy jobs that are never coming back, we'll train people for new-economy jobs that are never going away.

That's one heck of an audacious domestic agenda; the only policy I missed was 100% privatization of Social Security and Medicare, but I can certainly understand why that would be too controversial to discuss in a nomination acceptance speech.

Also notable was the absence of pandering:

• No call for a massive bailout of idiots who got in trouble by taking bigger mortgages than they could afford (or of the banks and S&Ls that talked them into it);
• No pledge to increase the minimum wage to a "living wage," as if teens working the popcorn counter at the local movie theater should be able to support a family of four on that paycheck;
• No paean to a new immigration-reform bill. I fully expect -- and hope! -- there will be one; but that can only be worked out during a non-election year, as the negotiations will be as tenuous and delicate as gossamer. This isn't the time -- so he wisely left it out;
• And no call for a vast increase in the number of species mollycoddled by the Endangered Species Act, no demand for ever more stringent EPA red tape -- and not a single mention of a vast, new Department of Anthropogenic Global Climate Change! In fact, I don't think he even mentioned global warming, or if he did, it was in passing (and quickly passed).

McCain had so many options available to royally screw up this opportunity, wounding his candidacy and forcing us to spend the next few weeks playing damage control; somehow, he dodged them all. In fact, I believe this speech actually advanced his candidacy -- and I predict a fairly substantial bounce (which won't show up in the Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls until Saturday, since they stopped polling today before McCain's speech ended.

(However, tomorrow is the first day we'll get to see whether there is a Sarah Palin bounce from yesterday's speech.)

All in all, I am in reasonable raptures... no matter what the Fox News panel said. (They seem to have yawned their way through it; shockingly, every single person who opined on the speech tonight is a metaphorical "Beltway boy" -- Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke, of course, but also Mara Liasson, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Howard Wolfson, Chris Wallace, Jim Angle, and Brit Hume.)

I'll bet this speech plays a heck of a lot better in the real world than it does inside Pundistan.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 4, 2008, at the time of 10:22 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

September 3, 2008

Sarahphobia: Fear the Teddy!

First, John Hinderaker at Power Line posted about a Peggy Noonan column in which she noted that John S. McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, "could become a transformative political presence;" Noonan goes on to say, "So they [the feminist Left] are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick."

In response, Paul Mirengoff demurred:

Noonan notwithstanding, the Democrats I know don't see Palin as a "real and present danger to the American left."

Alas, I believe that Paul is out of touch with the today's mainstream Democratic activist.

The response among lefties to Palin's selection has been so over the top, so bizarre, so disturbing, that I now fully understand the genius of Charles Krauthammer in "diagnosing" a new delusional thinking called Bush Derangement Syndrome. These are the people that Noonan is talking about. They are the New Left in full squeal. (They don't call themselves that; most think they're centrists, but only because they define the "center" as running right through their own belly buttons.)

They do not of course overtly say that Sarah Palin is "a real and present danger to the American left;" but their viperous attacks upon her sink to levels far worse than what they say about McCain -- which itself is far worse than anything they said about Bush (hence the term "progressives;" their attacks grow progressively viler) -- belie their overt claims that Sarah Palin will "sink the fascist ticket."

If they really thought that, they would applaud her selection and encourage her to speak out at every opportunity. Instead, they lament the stupidity of the Jesus freaks they think will elect her for no reason other than theocratic yearnings.

Over two days, for example, there were more than a hundred posts on a bulletin board I read, in several threads, exploring how the campaign would be affected by the "fact" that Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy in order to shield her daughter Bristol; they finally concluded that such deviousness clearly proved that Palin was "unfit to serve," and should immediately be dropped from McCain's ticket.

But when the actual facts emerged, when they finally realized the biological impossibility of a pregnancy that began a month before the first one ended, they finally, grudgingly, let go the absurdist allegation about the faked pregnancy.

...And then promptly concluded that the real facts -- that Bristol and Levi had gotten pregnant, had decided to keep the baby, and decided to get married -- was even stronger evidence that Sarah Palin was "unfit to serve." She was obviously a horrible mother; her fanatical "abstinence-only" program clearly was a disaster; and in fact, Bristol's pregnancy showed the moral bankruptcy of the entire population of religious people in America -- for which population the New Left has various colorful epithets.

Paul knows too nice and rational a group of Democrats. Even having been a leftist activist himself 35-40 years ago -- I know John was, and I think I recall Paul was as well -- I don't believe Paul understands the depth of insanity of today's D-activists.

Honestly, it's worse than in the 60s-early 70s: We have our own version of Weather Underground in ALF and ELF and the various Palestinian and militant Islamist groups embraced by the Left; but the madness extends much farther today than it did during the Vietnam war, stretching right up into the Democratic leadership in Congress and the Democratic nominee for president.

Even George McGovern was not as loopy in 1972 as Barack Obama is today; for one thing, McGovern was a war hero (B-24 bomber pilot in WWII), and a true, if misguided, patriot; if a preacher had said "God damn America" in McGovern's presence, he would have hauled his family out of that church and never set foot in it again. I don't recall McGovern ever trying to justify the 9/11 attacks by pointing to America's own putative perfidies.

In 1973, the Democrats in Congress legislated defeat in the Vietnam war; they attempted to do it again during this war -- and this time, they didn't even have the fig leaf of a corrupt, lying president. They had to manufacture one by calling every mistake or policy difference a "lie" that amounted to a "crime against humanity." Taking a page from William Randolph Hearst, they more or less told their dirty-tricksters, "you supply the protests, we'll supply the lies."

And lie they did and still do today, bearing false witness against John McCain -- e.g., fabricating the charge that McCain had said he wanted us to fight the Iraq war for a hundred years (lefties, including those in Congress, started calling Iraq the "Hundred Years war"). And just yesterday, Mark Bubriski, an official spokesman for the Barack H. Obama campaign, falsely asserted that Sarah Palin was a Pat Buchanan supporter -- and then even more falsely asserted that Buchanan was a "Nazi sympathizer," making Palin a "Nazi sympathizer" as well.

The Left is even madder, even more reckless of the truth, and even more prone to lying in their teeth today than back when they were doing the bidding of their Stalinist and post-Stalinist masters in Moscow. Back in the Vietnam era, the New Left were the footsoldiers; but the Old (Soviet-inspired) Left were in charge... and the latter kept the former in check -- most of the time. When they failed, when the tools broke out of the toolbox and began smashing up the joint, it was a rare enough event that it was memorable -- the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests, for instance.

But today, when "anti-violence" protesters hurl bags of sand and cement down onto buses from a highway overpass and attack a schoolbus full of Cub Scouts, rocking it back and forth and terrifying the children inside, it doesn't even warrant an editorial -- let alone a call for restraint.

Today, the New Left inmates are thoroughly in charge of the asylum, and they recognize no limits beyond which they shall not go. Sarah and Bristol Palin are starting to find that out, as is John McCain, e.g., in the claims that the torture inflicted upon McCain -- by the erstwhile Vietnamese allies of the forbears of today's Left... "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!" -- that the torture McCain experienced itself renders him "unfit for service," because it must surely have emotionally unbalanced him!

Oh, yes; they fear Sarah Palin. They fear her for three reasons:

• They're so mired in identity politics themselves, they cannot imagine that the rest of us are not; thus, many on the left believe that even Democratic women for whom abortion is a sacrament will vote for McCain because he has a woman on his ticket. (Which may well be true of women on the left, but the rest of them will vote for the person they consider best for the presidency.)
• More generally, they fear any strong woman who rejects what Noonan calls "Abstract Theory feminis[m]," just as they fear Clarence Thomas and Ward Connerly far more than they fear Antonin Scalia or Gary Bauer: Apostates who leave the liberal reservation represent a much greater threat than outsiders, because they can become trailblazers.
• Finally, I believe Dave Ross is right: Democrats fear Palin because she exposes their own inadequacy, their own cowardice... because she's more of a man than they are.

The attacks on Palin are not simply overblown, they're overwrought, hysterical, desperate. They are of a completely different character than the partisan savaging of McCain and the ideological hatred of Bush. If I had to characterize the Palin attacks, I would say they exhibit the wild, out of control rage of a man lashing out at the female friend who caught him cheating on his wife: Equal parts guilt projected as anger, fear of the consequences if she talks, and a deliberate warning (threat) that she had better keep her mouth shut if she wants to stay healthy.

Don't be deceived by the innate desire to see everyone as more or less rational; Democrats and especially leftists deeply fear the teddy, Sarah Barracuda. It has become a sick fear, driving them to stop her by any means necessary.

We have already seen Bush Derangement Syndrome; now we have to deal with Sarahphobia. Can't someone please get the Democrats the help they so urgently need?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 3, 2008, at the time of 5:28 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

A Female T.R.

She’s a pistol, and she’s packing one. Just as it took Nixon to go to China, apparently it takes a Republican to name a truly appealing woman to a national ticket. And she’s just as combative as any Democrat woman has ever been, except that she’s not afraid to wear skirts. That may be because she actually looks good in one.

Republicans have never had a problem supporting strong women, we just don’t like them to remind us of our ex-wives or mothers-in-law. Consider, if you must, the Geraldine Ferraros, Hillary Clintons, Barbara Boxers and Diane Feinsteins. They make a vow of celibacy seem appealing.

Sarah Palin, on the other hand, reminds you of the dish that you always wanted to steal a kiss from, except that Governor Palin could kick your butt!

I was sitting at a barbecue with five men on Saturday whose combined ages were probably about 400. One of them looked over at me and remarked. “We’re forming a club of guys who think that Sarah Palin is hot!”

Of course, it’s always been a canard that the GOP was hostile to women and minorities, despite the misinformation campaign that the Democrats have waged all these years. The first woman named to the Supreme Court was nominated by a Republican. The first and second black secretaries of state have been Republicans. Bobby Jindal, the incredibly competent governor of Louisiana, an Indian (of India), is wildly popular among the GOP.

John McCain (who, I want to remind everyone, including myself, that I still hate) is well known for his admiration of Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, before he was named to be McKinley’s vice president -- in part to get him out of the hair of the New York political establishment -- was, among other things, a passionate outdoorsman and practitioner of the strenuous life. He was a reformer who wasn’t afraid to go after anybody, who made enemies right and left, who took on the powers that be and, largely, beat them up. He littered the New York political scene with his broken enemies. He was also a devoted husband who reputedly never looked at another woman, and had tons of kids. And he was a war hero.

Whom does this remind you of?

That’s right. Sarah Palin is a female T.R. She’s such a good shot that she dismissed her state police guard since she figured she could probably wing anybody who tried to mess with her. When warned that the next few weeks could be rough, she is said to have remarked that in Alaska they have a saying, “the difference between a hockey mom (which she is) and a pit bull is the lipstick.” She is a former beauty queen. She loves to hunt big animals. She is an athlete who supposedly earned the nickname “barracuda. ” She is, in short, a man’s man. Except for the beauty queen part.

Although probably the best example of her innate toughness is that she consciously chose to bring a Down Syndrome child to term and raise him. Oh yes, she also has a son going to Iraq to fight.

So, don’t expect her to be ruffled by this kerfuffle about her 17 year old unwed daughter being pregnant, or the fact that she dismissed a state police commissioner who refused to fire a state trooper who happened to be her brother-in-law and happened to have threatened her sister with violence. This is Alaska, the final frontier, after all. I’m surprised she didn’t shoot the miscreant personally.

Yes, her family has a past. But don’t tell me, and don’t tell the great majority of blue collar, pickup truck drivin', beer drinkin’, church goin’ Americans she is likely to appeal to, that her past doesn’t compare well with the effete Barack Obama or his mouthy surrogate, Joe Biden. Let the games begin!

Hatched by Dave Ross on this day, September 3, 2008, at the time of 4:42 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

John McCain: Change We Can See (Blind "Belief" Unnecessary)

A McCainiac commenter to Big Lizards noted -- well, crowed is the better word -- that I had long opposed John S. McCain's nomination and had supported Mitt Romney; but now, Mr. Commenter notes, I won't even support Romney for vice president. Isn't that hypocritical?

The exact charge is easily answered: If Romney had won the nomination, his best choice for running mate wouldn't be John McCain, either. The running mate must complement the presidential nominee... and Romney's fitness to be president doesn't translate into rightness as vice president. (I have always thought stupid the traditional Republican tactic of the winning candidate picking his bitterest rival as his vice president; that's as bone-headed as, say, John Adams picking Thomas Jefferson.)

But the snarky comment did start me examining why I consistently disliked McCain back in 2004-2006, and off and on through 2007 -- but actually started liking him as 2008 rolled along. Am I simply rationalizing, since he won the nomination? If so, I'm in good company; an awful lot of people have made the same mental journey anent McCain... some from considerably farther away.

But as I pored through old Big Lizards posts, I realized with pleasant surprise that I am not the one who moved: The mover here has been John McCain, who quite simply became a better Republican and better candidate. He evolved; he grew in office (actually, in campaigning) -- but in the proper sense of that term.

Let me tell you how; but first, it's critical we discriminate between two different kinds of "changing one's mind":

• A flip-flop is a policy reversal made solely for political reasons, whether macro-politics (an election or fund-raising) or micro-politics (to align yourself with you boss, your spouse, your friends).

  For example, Barack H. Obama violently opposed the very idea of the Iraq war in 2002. But then in 2003, when we appeared to be winning and sentiment for the war ran high among voters, Obama argued that we should stay and finish the job; to leave prematurely would be catastrophic.

  However, the next year, we appeared to be losing -- and the public turned hard against the war... and Obama returned to his 2002 position that the war was a horrible mistake from the beginning, and that we should just pull out immediately, and damn the consequences.

  That is a perfect example of a flip-flop.

• A policy evolution generally means a reversal made because of a bona-fide shift in how one thinks about the issue.

  You may change your mind because the fact-base your previous position relied upon has shifted (to quote John Maynard Keynes, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"); or because somebody has made a new and persuasive argument; or because you have simply thought it through a second (or thirtieth) time and surprised yourself with an epiphany.

  For example, a man might fight for socialism in his callow youth, then undergo an economic "road to Damascus" moment and turn more conservative and capitalist in his maturity. This isn't a flip-flop, it's wising up.

The point is that changing policy is not ipso facto evidence of hypocrisy, flip-floppery, or shallowness; it depends how you changed -- and why. With that bit of pedantry out of the way, let's MoveOn.

The commenter's point begins with a small nugget of truth... but then he goes so far overboard that this tiny kernal of validity is buried under an avalanche of nonsense.

I did dislike, even despise John McCain -- back in 2004-2006; but not "around Feb/March 2008," as the commenter suggested. I felt that way because at the time, McCain was doing fairly despicable things.

First, he held a number of policy positions that could only be described as frankly Democratic, in the worst sense: The BCRA was fresh in our minds; then there was the Gang of 14, which prevented good judicial picks from being voted upon by preserving the "judicial filibuster." He opposed drilling anywhere, anytime, for any reason. And of course, he fought against the Bush tax cuts with ever fiber of his being, not only after they were proposed but even before Bush was elected, during the 2000 campaign.

Since then, however, McCain has reversed himself on several of these issues; this is why I made such a fuss above about the distinction between flip-floppery and policy evolution: I believe each of McCain's reversals is sincere, an actual evolution of his thinking; for in each case, subsequent experience has proven McCain's earlier position wrong.

• He now sees the need for more judicial conservatives on the bench, likely because he watched as Justice Anthony Kennedy played "swing vote," taking the Supreme Court into uncharted waters, where there be dragons.
• He now supports drilling everywhere except ANWR -- now that gasoline prices are skyrocketing and ruining the American economy. (And I have high hopes that Sarah "Barracuda" might lead McCain to the light on drilling in a tiny flyspeck of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge... the part of it that was specifically set aside for drilling when ANWR was first created.)
• And he has "come to Jesus" on tax cuts, realizing that funding more and more government programs is not as important as letting the people who created the wealth, at all income levels, keep more and more of their own money.

(I believe he was also right on a number of issues where others were wrong, including immigration, but notably the Iraq war -- specifically the counterinsurgency we implemented on McCain's insistence; I didn't really understand McCain's position, its similarity to my "whack a mole, plug the hole" strategy, until late 2007.)

But my objection wasn't just to policy differences; after all, Rudy Giuliani's policies differ more from mine than do McCain's, and I never despised Giuliani. My real objection to the earlier McCain was his character.

McCain spent most of his time bashing George W. Bush, even to the point where I believed in 2004 that the senator was trying to elect John F. Kerry (D-rich widows, 95%); he certainly went to the mattresses defending Kerry from the charges of the Swift-Boat Vets -- and sliming the SBVT in the process. This was below and beyond what was needed to stand up for vets; after all, by definition, the Swift Boat Vets were also Vietnam vets... just like McCain and Kerry. And brutally bashing the president during his reelection campaign was completely over the top; I am as certain today as I was then that it was entirely personal (see below, the South Carolina incident of 2000).

In fact, in general, the McCain of 2004-2006 slimed anybody who disagreed with him. Back then, his hysterical temper was in full display (again, more on that later), and so forth. I considered him -- at that time -- burning with presidential fever but unfit for the office.

In August of 2006, I summed up what I disliked about McCain and why he differed from Giuliani, who had similar political positions. About McCain, I wrote:

• The man is untrustworthy;
• He stabs friends in the back;
• He has a volatile, at times uncontrollable temper;
• He holds a grudge longer than Richard Nixon did;
• And he believes the absolute, bloody worst about anyone who disagrees with him.

I concluded the piece thus:

The primary "values and philosophies" demanded [by Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics] are not found in either man's position on the issues Bevan examines, but rather in both men's characters in a time so fraught with peril. Everything I know, I learned from Zorro, including this: "No man can govern others until he has first learned to govern himself." John McCain cannot even govern himself; I will not trust him with my country.

However, as the facts change, I change my opinion; and McCain evidently took to heart much of the criticism that was launched against him by fellow conservatives. It took a while, but he slowly reformed the worst elements of his character... and that was probably the hardest reformation he has ever undertaken.

As he did, he began to win me over. I didn't really notice it at first. I always admired his feistiness and refusal to quit and accept defeat; but it only gradually dawned on me that the gaps between McCain doing something stupid and offensive were getting longer and longer.

John McCain had one more serious lapse in late January, 2008; I took him to task (in harsh terms) here:

If this report is true -- and it certainly seems to be -- then John McCain has done a despicable thing... and has made it clearer than ever that in his heart, he is a Democrat -- and in the Clintonian mold:

John McCain accused Mitt Romney of wanting to withdraw troops from Iraq, drawing immediate protest from his Republican presidential rival who said: "That's simply wrong and it's dishonest, and he should apologize...."

I was quite angry about the false accusation McCain leveled at Romney; it was uncalled for, and it appeared to be a flat lie. But what bothered me most was that I had begun to admire McCain -- and he suddenly reverted to his older, colder self. I concluded with temper-driven intemperance:

I can draw only two possible conclusions from this shameless attack on Mitt Romney by John McCain:

1. Either Mr. "Straight Talk" has demonstrated that he will (if he gets desperate enough) stoop to fabricating accusations against his enemies... that is, to flatly lying about them;
2. Or else, that John McCain rejects the Petraeus plan as a betrayal and believes there should never be any drawdown in Iraq; in addition, he doesn't want even internal, secret milestones to gauge our progress there... McCain will simply know, via mystic gnosis, how it's going and what to do next.

That is, John McCain wants us to maintain our current level of 160,000 troops in Iraq indefinitely, no matter what the facts on the ground may be, and no matter what the commanding generals in the field would prefer. I can only conclude that under a John McCain presidency, Navy Captain John "Full Throttle" McCain will simply overrule his own generals and admirals based on his gut feeling and micromanage the war, as Lyndon Johnson did.

Conclusion number one means that McCain is fundamentally dishonest. Number two means that, despite his military leadership being the only real selling point he has ever had, he would in fact be a catastrophic Commander in Chief.

I wonder which conclusion is correct?

Neither, as it happens; there was a third alternative I should have considered: Back when "Hotspur" McCain was unable to govern his temper, he made many false accusations; but he didn't realize they were false, because his biliousness got the better of him and he spoke without thinking.

For an earlier example, back in 2000, some nitwit launched a vicious, dirty, push-poll attack on McCain in South Carolina, spreading the lies that McCain had "fathered a black child," that he was gay (yes, I know they contradict), that Cindy McCain was a doper, and so forth. McCain leapt to the conclusion that Bush was behind it, despite the complete lack of any evidence pointing that way, the lack of previous instances where Bush had done any such thing, and Bush's repeated denials. It was years before McCain finally let his rage at that supposed attack subside.

Thus, it is entirely possible that McCain heard something Romney said -- and leapt to the conclusion that Romney was calling for withdrawal. All Romney had said was that he hoped the White House and the Iraqis had their own secret timetables, so they could tell whether the counterinsurgency was working; McCain seems to have misheard or misunderstood this to mean Romney was demanding public timetables for withdrawal. Thus, John McCain wasn't lying... he was just grossly negligent and evinced what came perilously close to a reckless disregard for the truth.

But just a few days later, I realized it wasn't a reversion; it was a one-time lapse... and in fact, it was the last such; ever since January, McCain has not allowed his Vesuvian rage to leap up his throat and throttle his brain. At the end of January, even before Tsunami Tuesday (on February 5th), while Romney was still a viable candidate (I voted for him in California), I wrote the following, calling McCain's charisma his "greatest asset":

I believe Mitt Romney would make better decisions as president; but John McCain would be much better at explaining those decisions to the American people. Communicating with ordinary Americans has, of course, been the bête noire of the current president, and we see how vital that skill is....

So I take heart in the fact that, even though I still think Mitt Romney would be the better policy maker in the White House, John McCain is considerably more likely to keep the property in Republican hands.

And who knows? I strongly suspect his ability to connect with, and therefore communicate with the American people will actually make McCain more effective at selling the 80% of his policies that actually match those of mainstream Republican conservatives -- than a candidate who is with them 100% of the time, but just can't move people the way McCain can. In other words, McCain will probably end up being a more effective conservative Republican president than any of the current flock of actual conservative Republicans.

It's a sobering thought, but one that is hard to deny. Such is the power of the greatest asset.

Again, Mitt Romney was still a viable rival to McCain at this point; it wasn't until two days after Tsunami Tuesday that Romney suspended his campaign. My post then hardly fits the bill of someone who thought "that McCain would be a disaster and Romney would be a triumphant march to the WH," as Mr. Commenter wrote.

The commenter's memory of the contretemps is largely irrelevant; but I'm glad he brought it up, for it gave me a chance to review my past posting and realize how far John McCain has come in making himself -- for want of a better term -- a "kinder and gentler" campaigner. I am convinced that the McCain of two years ago would absolutely have picked Joe Lieberman (I-CT, 70% D) -- or at least Lindsey Graham (R-, 83%) -- as his running mate... not Gov. Sarah Palin.

And that, I believe, is why so many conservatives, who once despised him, now embrace him: Not because they have changed what they demand in a presidential nominee, not because they are hypocritical or simply pragmatic, but because McCain himself, like good cheese, has finally mellowed with age.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 3, 2008, at the time of 4:47 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

September 1, 2008

The Verdict Is In: McCain Chooses "Transformative" Over "Kicking the Can"

I think John S. McCain (or his staff) must have been reading Big Lizards back in March. If so, they can't have missed our pair of posts on selecting a running mate, in which we argued that McCain must eschew the "known quantities," like Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, or Rudy Giuliani... and instead pick his VP with a wow factor in mind; only then can the 2008 election be transformative, not simply kicking the can down the road:

• Romney: My Fave for the Nomination, But a Mistake for VP
• Transformative Elections vs. Kicking the Can: a Sermon

In those two posts I tried to develop the concept of a transformative election: one that established a new direction for a party, ferrying it into the future. A transformative election required two criteria:

• A new, future-looking direction, taking the party away from yesterday and towards a new tomorrow;
• A significant enough victory that the candidate who embodies that new direction -- whether the president, vice president, or both -- has a mandate to move with authority to establish it.

Here is how I phrased it, from the first post:

What are we looking for? Maybe someone a little bit dangerous, a man or woman who sometimes is the story, just as McCain often is the story. A William Jennings Bryan, a George S. Patton. But young enough that he or she could plausibly follow McCain as president in four or eight years -- so nix on Bud Selig, who is actually older than McCain.

And from the second:

Simply put, if Republicans care about the future of the party, we cannot afford yet another narrow presidential victory. Of course it's better than a narrow loss; but it does nothing to build the brand. People are drifting away, because there is no longer anything exciting or daring about being Republican -- as there was in the 1980s.

We're losing the vision edge to the Democrats in the twenty-first century. You always must bear in mind that the Left has an automatic edge on "vision," because they're entirely defined by their vision of utopia and bringing about heaven on earth, right here and now.

This is a huge draw, especially to the young, as Jonah Goldberg argues in Liberal Fascism: Yutes always want to believe there is something sui generis about them that makes them uniquely qualified to rule the world. We on the anti-liberal side must first batter down this autogenerated conceit before showing them why our philosophy is more exciting.

Narrow victories like 2000 and 2004 do little to awaken people to the implicit failure of progressivism, and to the alternative philosophies out there... Capitalism, conservatism, and individual and family responsibility, as opposed to statism and "it takes a village (or a nation) to raise a child." With an unorthodox candidate like John McCain, we have the opportunity to wrench this election out of the normal mode on the Republican side... and we're fools if we don't roll those dice.

But I want to focus like a Fresnel lens, pulling in all the disparate threads and sending them off in parallel: Exactly what "newness" is it that John S. McCain brings to this election, and how could Sarah Palin use it four years hence to rebrand the Republican Party?

Principled pragmatism

Pragmatism has historically been associated with socialism -- code for the unprincipled will to power. Jonah Goldberg equates the fascist and liberal fascist appeals to pragmatism to mindless motion, to the socialist mantra of "action, action, action!" Constant movement prevents the masses from thinking but offers the illusion of progress; they have no idea where they're being driven, but by God they'll get there quickly! The mob depends upon its leader, who of course mercilessly exploits the rabble' brute energy.

Contrariwise, the Republican and conservative philosophIes have always been about principles, not pragmatics. I would even say we're sometimes too principled for our own (and everyone else's) good. To over-oversimplify, the utopian-socialist impulse is towards chaos reigning supreme, while conservatism all too often degenerates into "stasis über alles." In practical terms, the GOP is known derisively as "the party of orderly succession;" it's what gave us George H.W. Bush in 1988 (and almost in 1980) and Blob Dole in 1996.

McCain's great insight is that the two philosophies don't contradict, they complement each other. Pragmatism without principle is indeed utter chaos; this is what we see from Barack H. Obama, where, like Walt Whitman, he contains multitudes of contradictions. You never know what Obama will do from one moment to the next, because he is guided only by political calculation of the moment. When the parting on the left becomes the parting on the right, he turns on a dime and gives two nickles change, flipping from calling the Iraq war a crime against humanity to saying we need to stick it out until we win to saying we need to pull out immediately, no matter what the cost of defeat.

But on the other shoe, principled stances without practical means of implementing them equal magnificent failures. Ronald Reagan understood this; and he was the last transformative president of either major party: Politics is more than the art of the merely possible; it must be the art of the workable. McCain gets it, while most Republicans in the House and Senate do not. Time and again, John McCain looks at all possible options and picks therefrom those which have plausible paths to victory, discarding the rest as childish utopianism.

Sometimes this means raising the pot with the worst hand, believing that the hand will improve, as he did by talking President George W. Bush into authorizing the Iraq counterinsurgency. Sometimes it means folding a busted hand without losing too many chips, hoping for a stronger hand tomorrow -- as he seemingly did on the issue of judges. And yes, many times I have disagreed with McCain's vision of what is realistically achievable: He was clearly right on Iraq, but I still believe he was egregiously, madly wrong with his "Gang of 14."

Regardless of whether we agree with his analysis of any one particular issue, McCain's philosophy is clear: He believes that even if X is the most principled cause, if there is no plausible way to implement it, and if repeated attempts cause Republicans to lose power, then how does that advance cause X?

Reaganless Reaganism

It amazes me that we really haven't taken such an approach since Reagan. Reagan famously said that if half-a-loaf were all he could get, he would take it -- then use that as a springboard to try for the other half. But Reagan, recall, was followed not by a Reaganite but by the man who dubbed Reagan's economic ideas "voodoo economics," George H.W. Bush. Then Clinton, who obviously wouldn't follow in Reagan's footsteps, and then George W. Bush.

Bush-43 came closer than either of his two predecessors; but I think he might have been trying too hard to be different from his father -- and instead of harkening back to the Reagan style, Bush-43 tried (in his first term) to go for the pure principles of conservatism (with some concessions made for it being "compassionate" conservatism), rather than marrying principles to pragmatic considerations. Then in his second term, he pendulumed back towards too much pragmatism -- particularly on foreign policy (except Iraq).

In the meanwhile, after Republicans took over Congress after the 1994 elections, they seem to have driven the party into an "all or nothing" stance anent conservative principles: If we can't get everything, then we'd rather have nothing at all. We saw this most clearly in the debate over the immigration bill, where hard-core conservatives killed the entire bill -- thus assuring crushing levels of illegal immigration into the forseeable future -- rather than allow even one, single illegal-immigrant to come out of the shadows without having to flee back to Mexico or El Salvador or Venezuela first.

As a statement of principle, it was consistent, clear, and unambiguous; as a workable policy, it was a colossal failure.

A mighty wind

We see the Reaganesque approach today, I say, in McCain's response to Hurricane Gustav threatening the Gulf coast during the Republican National Convention. John Hinderaker at Power Line is in a lather about McCain kow-towing to the Democratic line on Hurricane Katrina by "cutting back" on the GOP convention this year. John writes:

This preemptive hurricane hysteria reflects, of course, the unfair beating the Bush administration took over Hurricane Katrina. Liberal reporters were worried about the ascendancy of the Republican Party, as President Bush had been elected the preceding November with more votes than had ever been cast for a Presidential candidate. As a result, reporters and editors were not above misleading and outright fabricated reports of events in New Orleans, as long as such reports could be twisted to reflect badly on the Bush administration.

When, in the following days and weeks, it developed that much of what television networks and newspapers had reported about Katrina was false, there was no investigation into the sources of this journalistic malpractice. Rather, the facts were quietly buried and the myth of Bush indifference lives on.

The Republicans would be much better served to proceed with their convention as scheduled, but devote some prime time to revisiting Katrina and rebutting the false claims that have circulated for the last three years. [Emphasis added]

Hinderaker's diagnosis is naturally correct; of course McCain is thinking of Hurricane Katrina. But Hinderaker's prescription, just bulling ahead with the presidential bacchanal as planned, would be disastrous: Imagine the elite media broadcasting images of the usual celebrating and clowning at the convention -- accompanied by bursts of "rebutting the false [Katrina] claims," that would come across as self-righteous and peevish lectures -- juxtaposed with heart-rending images of towns and cities being destroyed (maybe even split screen!)... with frequent interruptions from elite anchors warning, in sepulchral tones, of devastation "even worse than Katrina."

It would be like 2005 all over again. And again. And again.

But if the entire convention has a somber but hopeful tone to it, urging Americans to help out -- to donate blood and money, to send food, to open their houses to any refugees -- with politicians all talking endlessly about emergency plans and delegates having to return home to see to their families, and all the speeches altered to highlight the best of American generosity and common cause... can you not see, on the crassest level, how much better theater it will be, how much more effective to the larger cause?

(On an even cleverer tactical level, it gives us the perfect opportunity to forgo a speech by the widely and deeply unpopular president and vice president -- without it appearing that we're dissing George W. Bush or Dick Cheney. The pending natural disaster gives us an ironclad excuse. And if we get really lucky, Democrats will repeatedly accuse McCain of cutting back on the convention as a political ploy. The Democrats will thus appear as paranoid weirdos, and we'll win a second round.)

This, I believe, is what Reagan would have done under similar circumstances... because he truly cared about people (as McCain does), but also with the deep understanding that a curtailed GOP convention that almost turns into a telethon for the hurricane victims (as John suggested, not entirely seriously) will serve us much better politically than a typical quadrennial nominating circus. It's what voters love most: Americans coming together to help those in need.

Back to the future

So John McCain's "new" idea is to return to a process that worked extremely well, for the most part, in the early to mid-1980s: Establish strong conservative and Republican principles, but then be pragmatic about achieving as much of them as possible.

(In an ironic twist, one of the few areas where the Reagan technique failed utterly was amnesty for illegal aliens. But we learned a lot from that bitter betrayal by the Democrats; and the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006, which spawned from the ashes of 2005's McCain-Kennedy, was carefully written to avoid that particular pitfall.)

Reaganism prevailed primarily because of his own overwhelming charisma and indominable will; his success was largely personality-driven. But when Reagan left office, many of his reforms (e.g., tax cuts and tax-code simplification, his military buildup, his firm line against Communist states) were undone by subsequent presidents and Congresses: They had been held in place only by Reagan himself.

McCain has a lot of charisma, but certainly not at the level of Ronald Reagan. This means that for McCain to succeed, he will have to do so by force of argument, not force of personality. (If Reagan is George Washington, the McCain must be more like John Adams.) The upside is that, should McCain succeed -- which I think he will -- his success will be longer lasting... it will survive his retirement, which was not true of many aspects of Reaganism. I believe McCain will be able to craft pragmatic but principled compromises that will last generations.

This is especially true now that he has chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate. More than anybody except perhaps Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana (who was not available), Palin embodies the exact kind of principled conservative pragmatism and reform that Ronald Reagan demonstrated but could never pass along -- very possibly because Reagan, for his own VP, he followed the traditional route of picking his closest competitor for the nomination. If so, it was a failure of nerve that undid Reagan's legacy.

McCain has enough experience to be a plausible candidate for president today; Palin will accumulate enough experience to be a plausible one in 2012... as will Jindal, though by a different route (four years of governorship). I expect the Republican nomination battle between Jindal and Palin will be a clash of the titans.

If McCain beats Obama by a substantial margin, as I anticipate, accompanied by Sarah "Barracuda," then they will truly transform the Republican Party and conservatism, finally and irrevocably establishing their direction for the first decades of the twenty-first century.

Thank goodness McCain didn't pick a "known quantity" like Romney or Pawlenty.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 1, 2008, at the time of 6:49 AM | Comments (17) | TrackBack

August 29, 2008

Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin, How's By You? How's By You?

Over on Power Line, both John Hinderaker and Paul Mirengoff have reacted very negatively to hints that John S. McCain may be about to select Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Both are long-time boosters of Mitt Romney, and recently both have been hopeful that either Romney or Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty would get the nod. Alas, I believe both Power Liners may be allowing their perfectly respectable bias in favor of Romney and Pawlenty to taint their reaction to Palin's political and substantive potential. (If the lads at Power Line have any flaw at all -- and I'm not sure they have -- it's an almost irresistable tendency towards conventional thinking.)

What John and Paul see as a mere stunt, equivalent to Walter Mondale picking Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, could instead be seen by voters as a very exciting selection. It doesn't smack of "desperation" or a "Hail Mary," as John predicts, so much as a willingness to make a bold statement of change.

As I read through Palin's Wikipedia entry, I'm struck by how many elements of her life and career would play extremely well in the campaign:

• She's very pro-life and very conservative on many issues, but she is not a scary hard-core conservative.
• She ran an extraordinary campaign, knocking off the incumbent governor and former senator Frank Murkowski in the primary, then walking all over the Democrat former governor Tim Knowles with hobnailed boots in the general. And she did all this in the teeth of a deliberate and vindictive effort by the Alaska GOP establishment to engineer her loss... even though that would mean the Democrat's victory.

• One of the Democrats' traditional attacks on Republicans -- and the Republicans' worst nightmare recently -- is ethics; Palin owns this issue, having ridden it into the governor's mansion (probably a Quonset hut; this is Alaska).

  She went against her own, highly corrupt Alaska Republican Party to do so (which is why they worked to defeat her, even in the general election: The old guard was enraged). Since then, she killed Sen. Ted Stevens' (R-A, 64%) "bridge to nowhere," rejected earmarks slated for Alaska, and gained an enviable reputation of honesty and independence from monetary interests.

• She's especially good on energy issues, which is either the hottest (sorry) or second hottest campaign issue this year. She supports drilling everywhere; but she's also a global-warming gal. This doesn't impress me, of course; but it's certainly more in tune with the electorate today than am I.
• She also happens to have a stunning approval rating in Alaska... upwards of 80% or so.
• Sarah Palin would simply remove the Democratic issues of ethics, energy, and especially "change" from the campaign. What will that leave them?

I think she would be an excellent running mate. To forestall the accusation of "affirmative action," McCain should openly admit that the fact that she was female influenced his decision; but he should reiterate over and over that his bottom of the ticket pick is certainly more qualified to the presidency, in terms of executive experience, that the Democrats' top of the ticket.

I picture McCain saying something like, "I started thinking about Sarah while Sen. Clinton was still battling Sen. Obama for the nomination; it's about time we broke one or the other longstanding electoral barrier by guaranteeing either a black president or a female vice president."

And besides... Palin stands for something -- and she has excellent judgment.

He could also turn her relative lack of significant experience into a positive: "At least, between the two major parties, we'll have somebody running who isn't a member of the world's most exclusive club, the old-boy network of the United States Senate!"

I don't know how well she debates, but Joe Biden is no powerhouse there. The attacks he would make are very predictable, and she can be drilled (sorry) on the answers. For example, if he demands, "When have you ever dealt with a foreign leader, voted on going to war, or held committee hearings on a proposed treaty?" then she can respond, "When have you ever met a payroll, balanced a budget, or authorize a new oil pipeline?" She'll get the cheer -- not he.

If Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska turns out to be McCain's pick, she will energize the campaign and attract a lot of younger voters, voters who will probably be repelled by the ultimate "Beltway boy," Joe Biden. And while she doesn't strike me as immediately plausible as president, neither does Biden or Obama himself; but give Palin a term or two as vice president, and few would deny that she would then be qualified to run for the big office herself (assuming she acquits herself well at the Naval Observatory).

Then Sarah Palin and Bobby Jindal could run against each other; and if the former wins the nomination, the latter could serve his own turn on the griddle.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 29, 2008, at the time of 8:11 AM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

August 28, 2008

Some Very Heartening Numbers That Aren't Getting Nearly Enough Attention, You Know

Most of the polling buzz seems to center around the Gallup tracking poll -- which for the first time during the Democratic National Convention shows a small bounce (up to +6) for Barack H. Obama. But there are some other numbers that belie the idea that the convention has spawned a significant -- or even noticible -- surge towards the Democrats (yet).

Gallup notes that the pre-convention tracking poll found Obama and John S. McCain in a dead-even tie, 45-45; so this represents a 6-point bounce on this particular poll. But -- and this is a very big but -- Obama's support still remains below 50%; he has a 48-42 lead over McCain.

This is significant because, in the history of this tracking poll, from the end of March until today, Barack Obama has never been above 50%; and John McCain has never been below 40%. In fact, Obama was up to 49% in late July -- a point higher than today -- and McCain was a point lower then. So the so-called "bounce" is still within the cosmic background noise of this particular poll. (And bear in mind, Gallup is polling registered voters, not likely voters; we have no idea how much of the increased support comes from people unlikely to translate that mini-surge into actual votes two months hence.)

It's entirely possible that tomorrow -- or by Monday, when the first fully post-convention number are released -- Obama will be up to 54% or 56%; nobody has a working crystal ball (especially not Larry Sabato). But at the moment, at least, Obama is doing no better than he generally has in the months before the convention.

And this is only one poll: According to Real Clear Politics' polling aggregation today, the other major tracking poll, Rasmussen daily tracking, shows no bounce at all so far. In the final three-days before the convention -- the poll released on Monday the 25th, showing polling from Friday, Saturday, and Sunday -- Obama was ahead by 4% (46-42) without leaners and 3% (48-45) when leaners were added in. The poll released today shows Obama ahead by only 1% (45-44) without leaners -- and dead even (47-47) with leaners added. Thus according to Rasmussen, Obama's lead has declined by 3% during the convention (again, so far).

As with the Gallup tracking poll, Obama has never been above 50% going all the way back to early June (not including leaners; he had three days of exactly 50% in early June if you include leaners). Similarly, he has enjoyed an 8% or 7% lead many times in that tracking poll... far better than the 1% (0%) he has right now.

We also have some puzzling non-tracking, pre-convention polling. The USA Today/Gallup poll in late July had McCain up by 4; and just before the convention, it had Obama up by 3, a 7-point gain for the One; but over that same period, the CNN poll had Obama up by 7 in late July, and just before the convention, it had them dead even -- a 7-point loss for Obama! Such the "science" of polling.

But I find some other numbers even more encouraging: the polling on the "generic congressional vote." This number derives from pollsters who ask variations on "do you plan to vote for the Democrat or the Republican in congressional races this November?" with no specific candidate names mentioned. It measures party strength... rather, it measures people's feelings about each party's "brand name."

Democrats usually do much better on this poll -- especially this far out -- than they end up doing in the election itself. And even the raw election numbers favor Democrats more than the actual results do, since the raw data include huge leads for seats with Democratic incrumbents.

At the moment, averaging across all polls conducted entirely within this month, the Democratic advantage on the generic poll is in single digits, a scant 8.4%. To put this in perspective, for all the polls conducted in July (in whole or in part), the generic advantage for Democrats was 12% -- it has dropped 4% in one month. This includes polls that have not yet been released this month, such as the AP/Ipsos, which might come in stronger for the Democrats (AP usually does); but even comparing the August polls to the previous versions of the exact same set of polls (USA Today/Gallup then and now, Fox News then and now, NBC-Wall Street Journal, Battleground, Rasmussen), the generic advantage for Democrats was 11%... so it's at least a 3% drop no matter how you cut it.

This is very, very important; even if McCain is elected president, if there is a huge surge of Democrats into Congress, he will be forced to work with them and will perforce shift left; if there is not -- if Republicans in the Senate still have enough reliable members to filibuster, for example, and if there is no chance of a veto-override in either the House or Senate -- then more than likely, ultra-liberal legislation won't even land on President McCain's desk.

Finally, one more number that made me smile. The RCP average of President George W. Bush's job approval is now up to 30%, having been as low as the mid-twenties earlier. He's on a roll!

(Congress, led by Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid, D-Caesar's Palace, 85%, and Squeaker of the House Nancy "NARAL" Pelosi, D-Haight-Ashbury, 93%, is now down to an RCP average of 17.3% approval. If this number continues to drop as we approach the election, I'll have to ask -- is it possible for measured job approval to be a negative number?)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 28, 2008, at the time of 5:40 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Ditto

Here's an eye-opening comparison. First, read this:

The international community collectively held their breath waiting for the reaction of Russia after the savage, brutal, criminal attack by Georgia on South Ossetia. After having offered a cease fire in hostilities, the back stabbing Georgians immediately violated the cease fire, invading South Ossetia and causing massive destruction and death among innocent civilians, among peacekeepers and also destroying a hospital....

Georgian troops attempted to storm the city [Tskhinval] much as Hitler‘s Panzer divisions blazed through Europe. Also noteworthy is the fact that Georgian tanks and infantry were being aided by Israeli advisors, a true indicator that this conflict was instigated by outside forces....

Relating what has become common practice among war criminals, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reported: "A Russian humanitarian convoy has come under fire. Panic is growing among the local population, and the number of refugees is increasing. There are reports of ethnic cleansing in some villages... The situation is ripe for a humanitarian catastrophe...."

Ask anyone in the Caucasus region, and they will tell you never to trust a Georgian because they would shake your hand with a smile and then stab you in the back. On Friday morning, we saw a perfect example of this treachery, when hours after declaring a ceasefire, Georgian military units launched a savage attack on the civilians of South Ossetia.

Hours after Georgia President Mikhail Saakashvili, the pro-western Washington-backed anti-democratic stooge (attacks on opposition policians in Georgia are rife) declared a unilateral ceasefire, the Georgian army lanched a savage attack on the capital of the province of South Ossetia, Tskhinvali, with tanks and infantry, while the air force bombed a village and strafed a Russian humanitarian aid convoy.

And now tell me if you don't detect a certain similarity of style here:

Tonight, WGN radio is giving right-wing hatchet man Stanley Kurtz a forum to air his baseless, fear-mongering terrorist smears. He's currently scheduled to spend a solid two-hour block from 9:00 to 11:00 p.m. pushing lies, distortions, and manipulations about Barack and University of Illinois professor William Ayers.

Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of political discourse...

Kurtz has been using his absurd TV appearances in an awkward and dishonest attempt to play the terrorism card. His current ploy is to embellish the relationship between Barack and Ayers.

Just last night on Fox News, Kurtz drastically exaggerated Barack's connection with Ayers by claiming Ayers had recruited Barack to the board of the Annenberg Challenge. That is completely false and has been disproved in numerous press accounts.

It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy character assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive ranting on our public airwaves. At the very least, they should offer sane, honest rebuttal to every one of Kurtz's lies.

The first is a pair of propaganda pieces anent the Russian-Georgian war, taken from Pravda, as you probably guessed. The second is an e-mail sent out by the Barack H. Obama campaign to activists in Chicago.

One thing is clear: Those many years Obama spent poring over the purple prose of Saul Alinsky have certainly paid off.

But what has the rest of us gotten ourselves into?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 28, 2008, at the time of 6:46 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 27, 2008

That Ain't No "Temple"

The Weekly Standard published this photograph of the set for Barack H. Obama's grand speech Thursday night at Denver's Invesco Field:

Everybody, including the Standard, has described this set as "a miniature Greek temple;" the post above is titled "the Temple of Obama." Alas, everybody but me has it all wrong.

Here is a zoom on that section of the photograph showing the ersatz colonnade:

That's not a Greek temple at all. But it certainly seems quite familiar, doesn't it? Imagine viewing it from the grandstand... do you get it?

If you're still uncertain, take a look at this picture. See any similarities?

Yes sir, having previously designed his own Obamic presidential seal, B.O. now constructs his own, private White House. But like everything else in Obama's campaign, it's nought but a pretty facade with nothing behind it... half of a soap bubble.

There's a moral in here somewhere, but darned if I can suss it out. However, I do wonder what comes next. Starting next week, will Obama begin delivering his airy-fairy, canned speeches from his very own knock-off of the Oval Office?

I'm reminded of the Seinfeld episode where Kramer rescues the set from the old Merv Griffin Show from the dumpster, sets it up in his living room, and proceeds to create mock talk shows with Jerry, Elaine, and George, just as if he really were Griffin (a weird and bizarre Griffin). Eventually, Kramer becomes so consumed by the fantasy that he cannot stop.

Isn't there something more than a little creepy about one of the two major candidates spending hundreds of thousands of campaign dollars playing "dress-up" with the trappings of the presidency?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 27, 2008, at the time of 6:18 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

August 26, 2008

Doesn't Anybody Have Obama's Cell?

According to Real Clear Politics, Team Obama just released a press statement that begins thus:

I condemn Russia's decision to recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states and call upon all countries of the world not to accord any legitimacy to this action. The United States should call for a meeting of the United Nations Security Council to condemn Russia's decision in coordination with our European allies. The U.S. should lead within the UN and other international forums to cast a clear and unrelenting light on the decision, and to further isolate Russia internationally because of its actions.

I am astonished that Barack H. Obama still, even today, doesn't know that Russia is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council... and as such has veto authority over any "condemnation" the United States might push in the UNSC. Evidently, even after his last UN-Russia gaffe, nobody on his campaign staff picked up the phone and called the principal to enlighten him.

Alternatively, perhaps the One is so enlightened anyway that such illuminating calls from the rabble are discouraged.

I also find it illuminating that even now, the only concrete action Obama suggests to put some teeth into his condemnation is to call an international forum and wag our finger at Vladimir Putin. Perhaps the One We Have Been Waiting For has been spending too much time with the One Who Did Not Have Sex With That Woman.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 26, 2008, at the time of 1:40 PM | Comments (12) | 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