Predicting From An Aberration

The Lexington column in the November 12th issue of The Economist opined on a political analyst's theory that the 2008 US presidential election is a harbinger of an unstoppable Democratic-friendly demographic.

The crux of the piece is a contention by Ruy Teixiera that minorities including blacks and Latinos will comprise 54% of the American electorate by 2050 so, QED, they'll just elect Democrats as president til the cows come home.

Teixiera evidently provided many two-way analyses of the 2008 vote, cited in the Lexington column, to cement his conclusions. For good measure, a Pew Research Center report is cited supporting the prior contentions of Democratic sweeps of the newly-emerging majority of voters.

To provide a cautionary view, though, the piece cites Brookings Institute's Bill Galston, a former Clinton aide, believes that Obama's campaign team is making a serious mistake in relying on newly-Democratic states like Colorado, while running away from Ohio, Indiana and Michigan.

What I find almost laughable is that nowhere in the column does the editor's voice observe that the 2008 presidential election was singular for having an electable black candidate. And a voluble debater, at that. There's a half-hearted comment that 'Obamanania is over.'

But it's much, much worse than that.

Perhaps only an external-to-the-US editorial board or reporter could fail to understand how many whites voted for Wonderboy out of misplaced guilt over prior racial discrimination which occurred prior to their even being born. It's amazing that the popular vote spread was only about 6 percentage points.

Add to that one-off victory Obama's choice of failed New Deal-style liberal spending and business-bashing tactics and programs, and you have a sure-fire loss of votes in 2012.

The bottom line is that you'd have to be a complete idiot to base any long term voting pattern changes on the 2008 presidential election which featured the first viable black candidate from either party.

New Calculations Involving Herman Cain's Presidential Bid

As I write this early on Thursday afternoon, 13 October, Herman Cain made the front page of the Wall Street Journal for moving out in front of Mitt Romney by a few percentage points in a recent WSJ/NBC News poll of primary voters.

I've written in prior posts that it makes sense to me that GOP voters should nominate the candidate who would draw the most independent voters. But that was before Herman Cain became a realistic choice to win the nomination.

Now, that arithmetic has to be modified.

This became evident to me earlier this week, when Bill O'Reilly discussed the results of the Bloomberg GOP candidate event with Karl Rove. O'Reilly flatters himself as capable of divining the intent of voters, though he claims to be non-partisan. I don't really think he really understands Tea Party members at all. But O'Reilly proclaimed, and sort of bludgeoned Rove into agreeing with him, that Cain is too far right for most independents, while Romney is not.

Therefore, according to O'Reilly's calculations, Romney is the guy the GOP should nominate.

Not so fast, Bill.....

You see, for Cain, the equation is unique among GOP candidates. It looks something like this:

Total General Election Votes = GOP + share of independents + share of black votes.

Whereas all other GOP candidates effectively share the equation, without the red highlighted term, Cain's is different in that he can draw substantial black votes from Wonderboy.

Thus, while other candidates can, in fact, be reasonably evaluated on the share of independents they attract, since registered Republicans can probably be counted on to vote for whomever the party nominates, Cain can offset a lower share of independent voters with black voters on which no other Republican can depend.

Cain has been quite explicit about this segment, provoking charges of racism from other blacks.

But it does change the calculation for GOP voters. And makes Cain's appeal among blacks important for pollsters to begin measure. Because Cain's net additional, non-GOP voter appeal could well exceed Romney's, if one measures the disaffected blacks who, for the very first time, would have a black alternative to a Democratic national candidate, as Jason Riley noted in his recent WSJ column.

The Two GOP House Special Elections Wins

By now I guess it's old news that the two Republicans contesting special elections in a heavily-Democratic NYC district and a district in Nevada both won.

The NYC district is famous for two reasons. First, it was disgraced Anthony Weiner's home, and, second, it had been represented by a Democrat since 1923.

The national import of these election results was so great as to merit a column from Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal this past weekend. Despite her baseless tendency to ignore the venality of Wonderboy's administration and its various extremely socialist and liberal staffers, Noonan actually became bold enough to claim that these two elections mark a national dissatisfaction with the president.

Indeed, they do. It's almost impossible to believe that, with each passing week, Wonderboy unveils new taxes in hopes that they will rally lower-income voters to him, as he exhorts Congress to pass another stimulus bill. Then he goes out on the stump or commands television coverage for some speech on the same topic.

To say the guy has a tin ear is no longer even remotely sufficient to describe his isolation from the sentiments of the broad US electorate.

But if you needed a barometer to gauge how badly he's doing across America, those two special elections would be hard to beat. One victory in a long-time Democratic stronghold, the other in a district which had just a 55 vote difference in the 2008 presidential election, but went overwhelmingly for the GOP candidate last week.

Kind of evokes Bob Dylan, doesn't it?

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows...

When Compromise Becomes A Virtue

Isn't it funny that when Democrats can't get what they want by ramming bills through Congress with majorities in both houses, they suddenly discover compromise?

Remember how, in early 2010, after Scott Brown of Massachusetts became the 41st Republican Senator in a special election, the Democrats, far from working to compromise on ObamaCare, contorted the process of passing the bill in order to avoid any compromise with Republicans, instead, ramming the bill through as a spending bill, rather than a policy-focused health care bill?

Now, during the current debt limit increase process, because Harry Reid and Wonderboy can't get what they want, they brand the newly-elected Republican Representatives and Senators who bring with them a new voter preference for fiscal rectitude and lower spending as terrorists, while they now preach compromise.

They trot out that old Washington refrain,

'The voters want us to work together to get something done. They don't understand all this partisan extremism and bickering.'

Actually, they do. And we know for a fact that voters in at least 87 House districts, the ones which elected freshmen GOP members, and a handful of states which elected Senators like Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, and other Tea Party-inclined GOP freshmen Senators, don't care about bi-partisanship which allows the free-spending liberal Democrats to continue their usual Washington ways.

What I believe we are seeing is not a new emphasis on bi-partisanship, but a fleeting moment of collaboration to do the minimum necessary to operate the federal government, until the 2012 elections sweep Democrats from their control of the Senate and, probably, the Oval Office.

Then compromise won't be required anymore- again. Only then, the GOP will be able to cut spending, borrowing, entitlements, and enact meaningful tax reform with fewer preference items and lower rates.

All without compromise.

That's when you won't hear the word compromise from House and Senate minority leaders anymore.

But I agree with Charles Krauthammer, who contended recently on Fox News that Americans need a serious, knock-down, drag-out debate about the nation's direction at least once every generation.

That's what is occurring now. The recent debt limit debates and so-called (faux) crisis is merely the opening shot in that battle.

If you can objectively observe the trends of the past four years, it's pretty clear that the election of an inexperienced, spendthrift Senator from Illinois to the presidency, along with majorities in both houses of Congress, was the breaking point.

Now momentum has moved back the other way.

As I write this at 4PM on Monday afternoon, Boehner and his leadership team has just finished their press conference. They didn't get all they wanted. The debt limit bill isn't a conservative's dream. But it at least has, as Paul Ryan asserted, changed the direction in spending at the federal level for the first time in decades.

The real heavy lifting will occur after 2012. Until then, it'll be a holding action as the GOP prevents wild spending in reaction to recent weak economic data. But the stage appears to be set now for a longer term move toward conservative values on federal spending, debt and taxes.

Dick Morris On The Undecided

I've been meaning to write this post for a week or more.

Last week, or maybe the one before, Dick Morris provided some fascinating insights on presidential election polls in one of his frequent appearances on Sean Hannity's Fox News program.

As a veritable flood of polls spew weekly, during the maneuvering over the debt limit, pundits spin the results to their particular viewpoint.

Many on the left note that no Republican challengers yet can outpoll Wonderboy. Those on the right take solace that the president's approval numbers are low and falling, his election poll results are below 50%, and it's still over a year before the election.

What Morris said is that 80% of those marked undecided in polls break for the challenger. He remarked that he used to tell Clinton this during his election campaigns, based on research Morris has done on elections stretching back to 1960.

As Morris describes it, undecided voters' dispositions toward a sitting president are like a spouse who is undecided on whether s/he'd remarry the other spouse. Simply being undecided at that point is effectively rejecting the incumbent.

Thus, most of the polls showing Republicans losing with numbers like 47% to 37% leave 16% undecided. Of those, more than 12% will go for the challenger, making the poll really 47% for Wonderboy vs. at least 49% for the Republican.

Something important to recall as the GOP field fills out and gets down to work for 2012. And clearly worrisome for Wonderboy.

Karl Rove On Wonderboy's 2012 Re-election Prospects

Karl Rove wrote a fine piece in his Wall Street Journal column last week concerning Wonderboy's standing with various demographic groups, relative to his 2008 numbers. Rove's contention is that the relatively slim 6% margin of victory may be easily overwhelmed by the cumulative effects of Wonderboy's poll numbers among various voting segments- minorities, women, income, age groups, etc.

I think Rove is correct. Being a national political figure, Rove isn't really in a position to write something which I suspect he believes, but can't publicly express. But I can.

I believe many white independent moderates and slightly-liberal or moderate Republicans, especially those with college educations or more and above-average incomes and/or wealth voted for the Junior Illinois Senator out of guilt and a misplaced sense of the importance of imagery.

Given the chance to vote for a black (Democratic) candidate who wasn't Shirley Chisolm (the true first black presidential candidate), nor Jesse Jackson, those whites jumped at the chance for personal and group cleansing of their presumably-inherited racial guilt for past American enslavement of blacks.

After all, as Joe Biden said of Wonderboy, he speaks well and he's "so clean." Yes, the president dresses well, cracks jokes and appears hip and cool.

In opposition, a cranky John McCain ran one of the worst presidential campaigns in memory. Unlike the voluble, energetic challenger to George W. Bush of 2000, the 2008 vintage McCain reminded you of your ornery grandfather. Then there was that stupid campaign suspension to run back to Washington during the financial crisis. Until then, he was actually slightly ahead in the polls.

Between Wonderboy's counting on nearly every black vote, which wasn't seen by the media as racist, as it would be for a white to get all the white votes, the guilt felt by educated, wealthy whites, and McCain's personality and campaign mistakes, it's a wonder that the margin of victory for the First Rookie was only 6%.

I don't know the numbers- Rove would- but I believe that a good deal more than 6% of the electorate will be whites that won't need to feel that guilt anymore, and from whom the magical Obama pixie dust of 2008 has been shed.

Without the need to vote for the first seemingly-presidential-looking and -acting black, these whites, who may comprise as much as 10-15% of the voting electorate, are more likely to back any credible opponent of the current Oval Office occupant's who has presided over a worsening economy and unemployment numbers.

Race and racially-based voting isn't something your average, high-profile professional political handler or operative can risk discussing in public media venues. But any thinking person who follows politics knows it exists, that it affected the outcome of the 2008 election, and that it's absence in 2012 could well be enough, on its own, to doom Wonderboy's bid to become a two-term president.

The Verdict On the NY-26 Congressional Race

Earlier this month, I wrote a post discussing the NY-26 District Congressional special election.

Kim Strassel had done a great job reporting on the details of the coming election, including a spoiler Democrat-turned-faux-Tea-Party conservative, a timid Republican and a vicious attack-dog Democrat.

Well, the Democrat won with 47% of the vote. The spoiler, Davis, got 9%, while the Republican received 43% of the vote. Hardly a wholesale rejection of Paul Ryan's Medicare ideas, is it?

While Strassel's point, which I reiterated, was that firing-line GOP House candidates have to be equipped to argue Ryan's points and plan, it seems to me that there's another point to be made here.

Remember how another NY special election within the last two years went Democratic due to a hissy fit by local conservatives over the choice of the Republican candidate?

I think Republicans had better decide whether they embrace Tea Party sensibilities of spending cuts, lower taxes and serious entitlement reform, or not. Because if they do, then some old-line liberal GOP candidates are history.

New York is a good example of this sort of choice, because, as a Northeastern state, it tends to elect moderate-to-liberal Republicans. So Tea Party values really give party regulars angst.

Well, things happen for a reason, and what should happen, usually does happen. If a lot of Congressional districts with moderate Republican party hacks continue to ignore genuine Tea Party conservatives, then the House GOP majority might either shrink, or vanish completely again.

Beyond making sure that each GOP House candidate is prepared to explain, defend, and vigorously sell the Ryan agenda, the various local GOP party pols have to decide which side of history they are on.

If too many continue to choose the supposedly-safe middle ground, they'll be swept out. Maybe a few more years of Congressional Democratic control is necessary to convince Americans that entitlement reform is no longer a choice- it's a necessity.

If a lot more GOP party operatives don't get religion on Tea Party values soon, that's what they are going to be enduring come 2012.

Wonderboy's First Term Millstones

William McGurn wrote a thought-provoking piece in his weekly Wall Street Journal column on Tuesday of last week. In it, he drew a sharp contrast to Wonderboy's potential for a second term, and that of Slick Willie's.

A key passage early in his editorial was,

"That story is this: Democrats remain in charge for the next few weeks, they have some big decisions to make and, at least for now, Mr. Boehner's relations with Mr. Obama are of far less moment than the president's relations with his own party."

The remaining Democratic liberals in Congress, McGurn points out, are about to make Wonderboy's situation worse,

"To try to get these through in a lame-duck session risks solidifying one of the chief indictments against Mr. Obama and his allies in Congress. That is their arrogance in riding roughshod over public opinion and standard legislative procedure in Congress to get what they wanted."

Amazingly, as McGurn opines, the remaining Congressional liberals, and their allies, worry that Wonderboy will ape Slick Willie, run to the center, and moderate their desired agenda in order to gain re-election.

However, he notes,

"They may not have to worry. Because Mr. Clinton's health-care plan was defeated, he could walk away from it in 1994 and start afresh. In theory, Mr. Obama might likewise move to the right and use Democratic liberals as a foil to his pragmatism. In practice, it would be hard to do while defending his health-care initiative.

In other words, there is a story well worth covering: an intramural Democratic fight about the way forward. In this fight, Mr. Boehner is a side story."

McGurn makes a very cogent point. Wonderboy can't escape the voter outrage at the health care law. So triangulation is impossible for him, without essentially repudiating his own self-proclaimed greatest legislative achievement.

Perhaps conservatives have reason already to rejoice over the 2012 presidential election.

Ending Lame Duck Congressional Sessions

Betsy McCaughey, former New York lieutenant governor and health care legislative pundit, wrote an insightful editorial in the Wall Street Journal recently entitled This Lame Duck Session Should Be the Last.

McCaughey reminds us that, prior to 1933, Congress didn't reconvene until March 3rd. The 20th Amendment cut the lame duck period by three months, leaving just a two-month stub of a session. But, as McCaughey emphasizes, back then, "no one imagined that the old Congress would return to the capital during that time."

She helpfully explains that only in extreme circumstances, such as the Korean War and WWII, did Congress ever reconvene after November elections, until two decades ago. Now, the lame duck session has become one of vindictive legislation jammed through by a party which lost on the first Tuesday of that November.

She recommends that,

"When John Boehner, the presumptive House Speaker, takes charge in January, he should introduce a bill providing that Congress will not meet between the November 2012 election and Jan. 3 2013. That simple change in the law will put the voters back where they always belong: in charge."

Fine for now. Is it each Congress' inability to bind future Congress' that prevents legislation, rather than Constitutional Amendments, from solving this problem permanently?

If so, it should be done. Along with, while they're at it, term limits on Congress and all Federal judges.

John Boehner's Post-Election Interview with Fox News' Bret Baier

Last night, Fox News' Special Report aired this interview of prospective Republican House Speaker John Boehner with Bret Baier. This link may break over time, and the clip was not on YouTube, nor downloadable, so the Fox News link is the best I can do for now.

I haven't been one of Boehner's biggest fans, and in prior posts, have argued that he needs to renounce his intention to become Speaker next January. To me, Boehner's having been part of the GOP leadership that lost control of the House in 2006 is reason enough for him to step aside and let new blood lead the House, if for no other reason than to demonstrate to the independent voters who gave Republicans their new House majority in the next Congress' House, that he and the GOP 'get it.'

That said, this interview has substantially improved Boehner's standing in my view, although it still hasn't changed my opinion about his becoming Speaker.

I was heartened by Boehner renouncing earmarks and coolly, repeatedly saying that the Republicans 'will not raise taxes on the American people.'

Very clear, succinct and positive. I think it's no small thing that Boehner refused the bait of discussing 'extending the Bush tax cuts,' which makes it sound like that is change. Instead, he echoed Glenn Beck's view that we need to not raise taxes- period. That, of course, means making the nearly decade-old tax rates permanent.

Boehner signaled unwavering agreement with voters that Obamacare must be repealed, stopped or defunded. This is a clear signal to Wonderboy that the latter's attempt to characterize any effort to repeal the healthcare bill is going 'backwards' won't fly in the House.

Boehner also rather positively implied some type of explicit approach the GOP might employ to demonstrate it is listening to voters outside the Beltway.

You don't get such a sense of personality cult with the Ohio Representative as with Frisco Nan or Gingrich. Of course, the context is much different. How odd, that Boehner's GOP House majority won't be such an oasis after a long dry spell of control of the House, but, at the same time, is a larger wave of incoming GOP freshmen than in 1994.

Overall, I think Boehner gave a really terrific interview.

Wonderboy's Post-Election Excuses

I was working on some posts while listening yesterday afternoon to Wonderboy's post "thumping" 1PM address and press conference. Only I guess he called it a "shellacking." It's one of the very few times I could tolerate his voice for so long.


It was quite a treat, I must admit, to see and hear him devoid of his usual arrogance.


His opening remark was amazing. He first expressed regret that 'so many fine public servants' would be leaving Congress or other political jobs. He defended the defeated Democratic Congressional and Senatorial members as having made difficult, career-ending votes that had to be made.


I guess Wonderboy missed the part of the Tea Party movement which is incensed with career politicians spending us into oblivion.


After trying to put his usual 'miscommunication' spin on the House blowout, Wonderboy then inexplicably began to try to describe his economic plans by way of electric cars and green technology. Try as they might, reporters could not get the First Rookie to acknowledge that voters across the country had repudiated his program and so-called leadership.

In his remarks and responses to questions, he continued to show his tin ear, professing the now tired explanations that: a) nothing was his fault, he inherited the biggest mess in American history besides FDR; b) things were much better, but people don't realize it, and are ungrateful, and the fact that voters don't yet realize how well he's fixed things is his fault, and; c) there's no need to change direction, just communicate better.

Truly amazing how dense and arrogant this guy is, isn't it? His party suffers the worst loss of House seats in more than 50 years, loses at least 6 Senate seats, including his former one, as 2 races remain to be determined, plus a solid Democratic seat earlier this year (Scott Brown in Massachusetts), and he thinks it's all just a slight misunderstanding due to his miscommunication of how well life in America has become under his socialist regime.

The Election's Aftermath

By now, everyone knows that the Republicans, thanks to Tea Party activism and general voter outrage at the administration's and Congressional Democrats' socialist legislation and excessive spending of the past two years, retook control of the House with a net gain of some 66 seats. By Fox News' count, the largest change of seats in the House since 1946. The Senate saw GOP gains of 6 seats.

Not accidentally, several media pundits weighed in yesterday with advice on how Wonderboy can rebound from the anticipated, now real "thumping," to use George W. Bush's term, the president and his party took at all governmental levels.

The Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib wrote extensively on how Reagan came back from the mid-term losses of 1982. CNBC held a panel in which they once again (over)used the analogy of Wonderboy as national CEO and Congress as his 'board of directors.' Various organizational behavior mavens, including Yale's Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, chimed in with their views. As you might expect, the two most frequently-mentioned 'solutions' for the current administration is to triangulate/compromise with the newly-empowered House Republicans, and to focus on economic and job growth.

Seib at least noted that Reagan's Republican's didn't lose the House, but merely seats in the House. And only about 25, at that.

There's a problem though. Whether you believe our First Rookie is capable of compromise- and it seems like he's not- his basic values run to socialism, not capitalism.

So if he can't compromise on economic issues, and his are, as we have seen, wrong-headed and prone to fail, he can't really do what the various observers recommend.

Everybody seems to have missed this point. Reagan's approach worked because, well, as Seib at least acknowledged, it led to economic and job growth unrivaled in decades. Now, we have the reverse, and no prospect in sight for anything remotely Reaganomic. Even the decade-old Bush tax cuts are to become Obama tax increases in two months.

My point is, I don't think this president can or will compromise his few, core, socialistic values to re-ignite robust US economic growth.

That said, all the pundits mouth the 'compromise' platitude. Even Frank Luntz' focus group on Fox News last night nearly universally called for Congress to simply 'get the job done,' and 'listen to us.'

How do you get compromise when one party has dumb, unworkable ideas, and the other wants to change that?

Boehner's speech last night at least noted one important fact come January. Something Gingrich found out the hard way as Speaker.

The president has to lead, because his veto of divided-chamber legislation makes the House unable to enforce its majority's will. It's true that the new GOP House majority can de-fund and selectively hamper various programs, perhaps even including Obamacare. But it can't lead the country.

Where this will all shake out is anybody's guess. But I suspect that even if Boehner isn't sufficiently astute to avoid Gingrich's mistakes, having Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and other GOP House "young guns" on his team will go a long way to prevent a rerun of the 1990s government shutdown while Gingrich faced off against Clinton.

The new House GOP leadership is probably better positioned and informed to effectively deal with the split-power government which will sit in Washington come late January.

Frisco Nan & Funding Sources

It's pretty rich that House Speaker Frisco Nan claims that 'everything was fine, then all this unidentified money came into GOP coffers,' or words to that effect.

Several significant red herrings have been tossed out by leading Democrats, e.g., the Chamber of Commerce allegedly spending foreign donations in political campaigns, various private, soft dollar conservative organizations spending on behalf of GOP candidates, and more teeth gnashing over the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision.

However, Karl Rove displayed an informative piece of paper a few days ago on Neil Cavuto's Fox News program. On it, he sketched out the total spending for both parties from various sources, showing that friendly union campaign spending on behalf of the Democrats brought that party to something like $300-400MM more in contributions than that spent for Republicans.

It's so typical that Nan & Co. raise specters of possible campaign funding rules violations and bemoan Citizens United, while their union buddies take full advantage of that decision to actually borrow money that their members dues' must repay, in order to spend it on Democratic candidates.

Wouldn't it all be simpler if McCain-Feingold and other, earlier complicated campaign funding laws were repealed, in favor of simply forcing the immediate publication of donors, while dispensing with all the other rules?

Like it or not, campaign donations and sympathetic communications constitute a form of free speech. I don't trust any Congressional attempts to limit that, because those attempts are inherently biased in favor of the sitting members who pass such legislation.

Andrew Cuomo's Forgotten Past

I'm simply amazed that New York Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo has been able to distance himself from the damage he personally caused as Bill Clinton's HUD secretary.

Perhaps only Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad bear as much personal responsibility for the recent housing finance crisis and the financial meltdown it triggered.

Cuomo's ineptitude was reinforced by a recent article in the Wall Street Journal entitled Audit Faulted Cuomo's HUD Overhaul.

Within the piece, details inform us that,

"The Inspector General's audit report also claimed that senior officials under Mr. Cuomo sought to impede investigators examining the program and took the unusual step of asking the Inspector General's office for the names of HUD employees who spoke with auditors.

Several HUD employees "feared reprisal" and urged investigators to keep their communications confidential, according to the audit report."

Further on in the article, Cuomo's attempts to get these names, and the excuses offered by his minions, are provided. It makes for incredibly transparent and disturbng reading,

"Saul Ramirez, a deputy secretary under Mr. Cuomo, said the requeset for the names was "standard procedure" and intended to help headquarters  organize the schedules of field staffers involved in the auditing process."

It's a non-answer answer, isn't it?

But, moving back to the big picture, it's simply incredible to me that Cuomo has so successfully danced away from his culpability for the housing mess. And now wants to run an entire state.

It's probably a mark of the inadequacy of political opposition in New York that none of Cuomo's opponents seems to have bothered to connect the dots and hang this liability around the son of a former governor of the state.

Which I guess demonstrates that New York has a bad habit of selling its Senate seats to carpetbaggers and allowing for way too much plutocracy and cronyism in important elected state positions.

Karl Rove On Wonderboy's MidTerm Campaigning Ineptitude

Karl Rove wrote a nice piece in his weekly Wall Street Journal column the other day regarding Wonderboy's recent campaigning mistakes.


Why should we be surprised with Rove's assertions that Wonderboy is now making horrific mistakes in his midterm electioneering? Think about how the First Rookie got to the White House.


Prior to running for President, he'd only run once for federal office. That was when he bushwacked his mentor to get the Democratic Senate nomination, then happily stood by and allowed his Republican opponent's sealed divorce records to be used in the campaign. His comment when they appeared in the Chicago dailies was something like,


'When I heard/read about the divorce records, I went to get fitted for my swearing-in suit.'


Almost immediately upon arriving in the Senate, he began running for President.


This guy hasn't had a seriously issues-based, non -race-based campaign yet. Why should he know anything about presidential campaigning for other Congressional members?

Isn't his entire appeal and character based on- himself? His anointed minority ascension to the nation's and free world's most powerful job?

Can this guy even identify with anyone else deemed so far beneath his magnificent self?

Rove's editorial included some pretty terrific passages, including these,

"Last Saturday at a West Newton, Mass., fund-raiser, the president said, "facts and science and argument [do] not seem to be winning . . . because we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared."


In a penetrating piece in the New York Times Magazine on Oct. 12, Peter Baker profiles a president who "believes he is the smartest person in any room," according to one prominent Democratic lawmaker. He and his aides think that the core of their difficulties is "a communications problem" and the result of a "miscalculation" that the president could "forge genuine bipartisan coalitions."


Then there is this priceless quote involving a Democratic Representative,


Earlier this year Rep. Marion Berry of Arkansas warned moderate Democrats of a midterm bloodbath comparable to 1994. "Well, the big difference here and in '94 was you've got me," he reported the president as having said. "We're going to see how much difference that makes now," Mr. Berry added. Yes, we will."



See what I mean?

It would seem that Wonderboy is so arrogant as to miss the reality of his own shockingly fast rise to power, and the uniquely temporal reasons for it. Thus, he can't really understand any politics that isn't about his personality or race or presumed unrivaled intellectual brilliance.

Rove is correct in assessing the president's Congressional campaigning shortcomings, but it shouldn't really come as any big surprise.

NY's Gubernatorial' Candidates Debate

Since I live near, but not in, New York, I see a fair amount of news coverage of the state and city. But the recent antics at a joint appearance/debate among seven candidates to govern the state drew national coverage.

I don't claim to know the names of all seven. Only Paladino and Cuomo.

But to me, the funniest line by far was by another white male candidate who said, to paraphrase,

'My qualifications are that I haven't been arrested for prostitution, I'm not a felon and my dad wasn't governor of the state.'

Hilarious. Now I just want to know which candidate is the felon. I would think that would disqualify one for governor of New York. Perhaps it was only being charged with a felony.

More Biased "Reporting" On CNBC By Ultra-Liberal John Harwood

This morning's appearance by "Red" John Harwood on CNBC, in my opinion, really cemented his reputation as a totally-biased, unscrupulous liberal so-called reporter.

On the subject of California gubernatorial candidate's now-famous remark, in which he called his opponent, Meg Whitman, a whore, Harwood manipulated it as follows.

Speaking on camera as a reporting contributor to the early morning CNBC program, Harwood breathlessly explained that, when he 'offered Whitman the chance to dismiss the whore comment' in favor of 'issues like jobs,' she pointedly remained silent!

Wow! Stop the presses!

Harwood, usually one to use whatever character issues he finds necessary to impugn conservative or GOP candidates, grew animated when describing how Whitman refused to ignore Brown's nasty name-calling. His face all lit up, Harwood delighted in telling viewers that this means Meg Whitman is putting stories about Brown's antics ahead of 'real issues' in the California gubernatorial campaign.

Notice he didn't even go near Brown's character nor inappropriate behavior. No, he did as much as he could to turn the slur against Whitman back on her!

You truly can't make things like this up. Harwood's twisted, hopelessly-biased coverage of politics exceeds anything fiction could approach.

How Democrats Characterize Tea Partiers & Their Sympathizers

In its lead staff editorial Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal provided some precious quotes from Wonderboy and John Kerry excoriating voters for their lack of intelligence, ability to be duped, racism, extremism and bigotry.


Specifically, the piece noted,


"Said Mr. Kerry, "We have an electorate that doesn't always pay that much attention to what's going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what's happening."


Ah, this would be the Cass Sunstein school of thought, i.e., identifying voters and consumers as Homer Simpson types- his exact reference- who need to have decisions made for them. Because they are too stupid to exercise their own freedom of choice.


Then it continued,


"This week President Obama chimed in with another uplifting message about the American electorate. Mr. Obama told Rolling Stone that the tea party movement is financed and directed by "powerful, special-interest lobbies." But this doesn't mean that tea party groups are composed entirely of corporate puppets. Mr. Obama graciously implied that a small subset of the movement is simply motivated by bigotry.


The President said "there are probably some aspects of the Tea Party that are a little darker, that have to do with anti-immigrant sentiment or are troubled by what I represent as the President." The tea party is now supported by a third of the country in some polls."


Nice, huh? Anyone who disagrees with Wonderboy is either a powerful, special interest lobby. Like, oh, SEIU or the UAW?


No, no. Those sorts of powerful special interest lobbies are okay. It's the ones that disagree with the First Rookie who are suspect and, well, guilty of being bad.


But if you aren't in that group, then you're probably just a stupid bigot or anti-immigration pitch-fork type. You know, someone who maybe clings to "your guns or religion." Remember that precious campaign remark by Wonderboy?


Of course, the remark about resenting what he 'represents as President' is a thinly-veiled accusation of anti-black racism. You can't disagree with his policies, in his view, because that is simply being bigoted.


You either agree with everything Wonderboy says and does, or you are a racist.


See how easy that is?


Tea Party= disagree with Wonderboy = racists.


The editorial noted that at least Biden wasn't crying about the Tea Partiers, instead sounding this theme,


Vice President Joe Biden recently urged the party's base to "stop whining" and "buck up," a message echoed by Mr. Obama in his Rolling Stone interview. The President demanded that his supporters "shake off this lethargy," warning that it would be "inexcusable" for liberals to stay home on Election Day.



Mr. Obama added that "if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place." Making the case for left-wing voters to show up in November, Mr. Obama told Rolling Stone that he is presiding over "the most successful administration in a generation in moving progressive agendas forward."


And that calls to mind something I've seen on two cable news programs in the last two days. Democrats, whether party leaders, elected officials, or merely 'strategists,' all claiming two things as "facts,"
 
1. Recent polls actually show little in the way of Democratic House losses.
2. Anything can happen in five weeks. It's a lifetime in politics. So all these polls are meaningless.
 
Both sentiments are calculated to do one thing, and one thing only. Lie about reality and inspire Democrats to get out and vote. If Democrats see a lopsided, independents-led landslide for GOP candidates at all levels, they will feel powerless and just stay home on election day.
 
It's one thing to mobilize your base in a positive sense, as Wonderboy is at least doing. It's quite another to lie to an audience, as Pennsylvania's Democratic governor, Ed Rendell, did on CNBC Wednesday morning, and simply claim that polls are meaningless and the Democrats aren't in trouble at all.

I guess the conclusion you must draw is that, when a political rout is likely, you have to assume the party about to be routed will simply lie about anything in order to try to mislead the public at large and, especially, its own party base.

Another Example of The Hazards of Government Intervention In The Private Sector: Harry Reid's Green Energy Donors

Last Wednesday's Wall Street Journal published a staff editorial detailing one of the negative consequences of allowing government to direct economic choices in the private sector.

The case in point is Harry Reid's new financial donors from the "renewable energy" sector.

As the editorial notes,

"The companies that belong to the American Wind Energy Association or the Solar Energy Industries Association (among the fundraiser's hosts) produce costly products that can't compete against traditional fuels. Their business plans are written around Washington subsidies and mandates. They're obviously worried a Republican majority might pare back the grants, loans and tax credits, in the name of cutting government waste."

This is what happens when government gets into the business of funding specific technologies or sectors with subsidies, rather than contracting for competitive bids without subsidies.

The editorial also notes,

"Mr. Reid has been a strong advocate of this transfer, and the industry is showing it knows how to give back."

Essentially, allowing government at any level, including states, to use government, i.e., taxpayers' money, to directly fund private enterprises, invites reciprocal bribery in the form of campaign donations to help the benevolent elected officials remain in office, the better to keep the gravy flowing back to the private companies.

It's corruption, pure and simple. And sort of embezzlement, in that public money is appropriated by an elected official for a favored few private entities, knowing they will repay her/him directly through campaign contributions.

Do you think that's why the Constitution mandates that Congress' laws must apply to all citizens, and never just a select group?

Carly Fiorina, Lucent & The California Senate Election

I get a huge number of hits on my first two Carly Fiorina-related posts concerning her past at Lucent.

At the time that I wrote them, Fiorina was locked in a death struggle for the GOP Senate nomination in California. I thought it worthwhile to remind Republican voters just how thin is the corporate "success" story on which all of Fiorina's appeal had been based.

But, for better or for worse, Carly won that primary. Yet, the hits keep on coming to those posts.

So let me state, for what it's worth, unequivocally that if I were a California resident/voter choosing between Fiorina and Boxer in the upcoming election, I'd vote for Carly.

Despite her dubious corporate achievements, and unprovable but suspect involvement in the Lucent sales forecasting caper, those are now moot points.

You have to ask yourself which candidate will do a better job cutting government spending and scope as the next California Senator. And that's indisputably going to be Fiorina.

You can worry in six years about her entrenchment, abuse of power, etc. But, in the current environment, if Christine O'Donnell, with fewer life accomplishments than Carly, can run as the GOP Senate candidate in Delaware, why not elect Fiorina over Boxer in California?