Libertarian Leanings

Dowd At Her Very Best

Maureen Dowd's column in today's New York Times is without question her best ever.  Too bad her brother wrote it.

The voters left no doubt about their feeling for his super-nanny state where the government controls all aspects of their lives and freedoms. Warning signs were up in the three elections held in Massachusetts, Virginia and New Jersey and with the noisy birth of the Tea Party. But the president, swathed in the protective cocoon of adulation and affirmation from the media and his own sycophants, soldiered on in his determination to turn our country into just another member of the failed European union — France without the food.

Republican Strategy?

Zoltan Hajnal, an associate professor of political science at U.C. San Diego, has written a book called "America's Uneven Democracy".  I found that out when I read his editorial column in the Wall Street Journal.  Based on his column there's no chance of me picking up his book.  The column is a pathetic string of unfounded assumptions, the major one being that there is some Republican strategy to ignore or attack minorities.

Relying on white support is not a new strategy for the party. In 2008, 91% of the votes that John McCain received in his presidential bid came from white voters.

The problem for Republicans is two-fold. First, whites may currently be the majority but they are a declining demographic. The proportion of all voters who are white has already declined to 75% today from 94% in 1960. By 2050, whites are no longer expected to be a majority of the U.S. population.

Second, Republicans are alienating racial and ethnic minorities—the voters who will ultimately replace the white majority and who they need to stay in power. In every national election in the past few decades, Democrats have dominated the nonwhite vote.

I'm surprised that the Journal actually printed the thing.  Among the grossest failures of his article is the absence of any explanation or support for his claim that Republicans are alienating minorities.  Professor Hajnal apparently hasn't noticed that the head of the Republican party is African-American -- Michael Steele -- and one of its most prominent rising stars is Hispanic -- Marco Rubio, Senator-elect from Florida.

On top of that, those predominantly white voters South Carolina and Florida elected the first African-American Republicans to congress since J.C. Watts, Republican of Oklahoma, retired in 2003.

One of them, Allen West, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army, prevailed in a tough fight in a South Florida district. The other, Tim Scott, is the first black Republican to be elected to the House of Representatives from South Carolina in over a century. They will be the first black Republicans in Congress since J. C. Watts of Oklahoma retired in 2003.

[...]

Mr. Scott, 45, was elected to the Charleston County Council in 1995 and the South Carolina House of Representatives in 2008. In the Congressional primary, this year he defeated both Carroll Campbell III, the son of a former South Carolina governor, and, in a runoff, Paul Thurmond, the son of former Senator Strom Thurmond, to take the seat in the First Congressional District, which hugs the South Carolina coast.

Mr. West, 49, has never held public office. Born and raised in a military family in Atlanta, he rose to battalion commander in Iraq. His 22-year military career came to an end during the war when he was relieved of his command after using a gun to coerce information from an Iraqi police officer during an interrogation. After retiring from the military in 2004, he moved to Florida, taught high school for a year and then went to Afghanistan as an adviser to the Afghan army.

John Thrasher, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party, said Mr. West won the battle to represent the 22nd Congressional District, which includes the coast of South Florida, because “he’s a great American patriot that resonated with people.”

“His opponent was Pelosi-Obama liberal,” Mr. Thrasher added, “and Allen gave them a different understanding of how government could be.”

Mr. West said he was more surprised that he won as a Republican in a district carried by the Democratic presidential nominee three elections in a row than as an African-American in a district with a white majority. But, he added, “I am honored to be first black Republican congressman from the state of Florida since Reconstruction. There is a historic aspect of it.”

Meanwhile back on the progressive plantation, Professor Hajnal takes another wild swing-and-a-miss at Republicans.

Republicans thus face a real dilemma. They may be able to gain over the short term by continuing their current strategy of ignoring or attacking minorities. But that is short-sighted.

Over the long term—as white voters become a smaller and smaller fraction of the electorate and Latinos and other racial and ethnic minorities become a larger and larger share of the electorate—any campaign that appeals primarily to whites will be doomed.

So here we go again with the same tiresome excuses for getting soundly thrashed in the midterms.  For the past two years Democrats have been calling the tea partiers racist, desperately and futily hoping that the charge would stick.  Sixty-plus house seats later we're seeing how that worked out.  The professor does not.

Professor Hajnal repeats the old incantations, conjuring up some nonexistent Republican plan for "attacking minorities" as a campaign strategy.  But he doesn't say it all that well, and he doesn't offer the slightest bit of support for what he says. 

Progressives remain steadfastly delusional, but there is a method to their madness.  In describing a Republican demographic doomsday scenario, the political science professor maps out a real strategy, but it's the progressive strategy.  Sadly enough, stoking the fires of racism, class warfare, and hatred is their only hope.  Progressives can't succeed without it.  Since they have absolutely no idea of what to do about the economy, what else can they do to get elected?

No Democrats

The choice is clear.  The national referendum on the Obama/Pelosi/Reid agenda is on for tomorrow, when voters will choose between the Democrat and whoever is the most likely of the other candidates to beat the Democrat.  Off hand, I can't think of any race where that's not the Republican.   But how did it come to this?

We arrived at this point because we have a Democratic president and Democratic congress a who are determined to transform America, and we have an electorate that is determined to prevent them from succeeding at it.  Never in my lifetime have Americans felt so threatened by Washington as they do on the eve of this election.  

Our leftist president and his congressional allies took advantage of a financial crisis to push through a partisan agenda, which when all is said and done, was a brazen power grab.  Health care reform's individual mandate sits at the very heart voter fears.  Since it requires a person to buy a product or face government imposed penalties, the indivual mandate represents an unprecedented assertion of federal government control over the individual.  Democrats are the authors of that authoritarian legislation.

The rationale behind health care reform, aside from the usual stuff about compassion, was that it was supposed to bring government spending under control.  President Obama claimed it would bend the health care cost curve down, and since health care takes such a big chunk of the federal budget it would reduce government outlays.  As you might imagine, there were some who were skeptical. 

In what might best be described as a tactical blunder, Democrats took to accusing anybody who asked how all this was supposed to work of being a racist or just plain stupid.  They seem, even now, to be surprised that a lot of people would find this offensive.  Then came their strategic blunder.

Health care reform was advertised a weapon in the fight to bring down the deficit.  That didn't play well in Peoria, since Democrats were busy tripling the deficit with stimulus bills and bailouts.  This took a big problem for the Democrats and made it bigger, because all of this was going on while the economy was in the toilet.  Voters wanted Washington to cut the big spending and focus on jobs and the economy, but instead Democrats rammed through health care reform.

And it wasn't as if voters hadn't dropped a hint or two along the way.  A house-from-a-helicopter sized hint came in the form of Scott Brown's defeat of Martha Coakley in the special election to replace Senator Health Care himself, Ted Kennedy.  It was priceless.  Brown won that seat by advertising himself as the 41st vote against health care reform.

But Democrats passed it anyway.  There were the bribes.  Special exemptions for Lousiana and Nebraska became known as the Louisiana Purchase and the Cornhusker Kickback respectively.  There were betrayals.  Pro-life Congressman Bart Stupak vowed to block the bill if it didn't include language to prevent federal dollars from supporting abortions.  Yet he voted for it over the objections of his constituents on a promise from Obama that there would be an Executive Order to make up for what the bill lacked. 

Finally there was the legislative trick.  Differing versions of the health care bill, one from the House and one the Senate, never went through conference committee to have their differences ironed out.  Had the bill gone to conference committee the revised legislation would have to go back to both the House and the Senate for final passage.  The Senate version had been passed before Scott Brown won his special election, which meant Democrats couldn't risk allowing a conference committee bill back to the Senate where Republicans with Scott Brown seated could block it.

So Democrats used a legislative process called reconciliation which is ordinarily reserved for budgetary issues, and the House passed the Senate version. Voters got the message, loud and clear.  Democrats were not interested in what the voters thought or wanted.  The Democrats wanted health care reform and they would have it. 

And that is what is at stake in the election tomorrow.  If tomorrow's vote leaves them in power, Democrats will take it as voter validation of all of the corruption, betrayal, and chicanery that went into the passage of health care reform.  In that event voters could expect even less respect from legislators, both Democrats and Republicans, than we get now. 

In order for the prevent that from happening, voters must defeat Democrats with their ballots.  If the latest opinion polls can be believed Americans are ready to do just that.  Tomorrow the most important vote is the vote against any Democrat.  The party must be punished. 

If we voters fail to punish the Democrats, and punish them severely, we can expect to be ignored from here on out.  And worse, we can expect to say goodbye to the America we know.  Democrats will transform it in a way that is intended to guarantee Democrat majorities.  We will become a European style social democracy with an entrenched ruling class.  The Democrats. 

So tomorrow when we vote remember this:  No Democrats.

Barney, Fannie, and Freddie

The Clinton Strategy - Revisited

Byron York wonders, is Bill Clinton really trying to help the Democrats?

The problem was, it wasn't entirely clear how much Clinton really wanted to help Democrats, and especially Obama, win next week's elections.

[...]

The event began like any other Clinton appearance: he was late, first a half-hour, then an hour, then 90 minutes. As a crowd of several hundred party activists, volunteers, and labor organizers milled around a ballroom at the posh Palmer House Hotel, a woman in the audience tried to breathe a little life into a group that had nothing to do but wait.

"Fired up!" she shouted.  "Ready to go!"

A few people scattered around the room joined in. "Fired up!  Ready to go!"  After several more turns, perhaps half the crowd was chanting.  But the enthusiasm never spread all around.

Dissatisfied, the woman tried again a few moments later.  "Yes we can!" she yelled.  "Yes we can!"

This time, maybe a half-dozen people joined in before it fizzled out altogether.  Nobody cared; they were too busy with other things.

Update:  I wondered about Clinton's real objectives myself, some time ago.  I thought he was driving the left into the ditch in order to bolster Hillary's chances for a pesidential run in 2016. 

Unhappiness with Obama and the other leading Democrats is so high that a national tea party movement has virtually brought the Republicans back from the electoral grave. The president’s job approval numbers have been in a year-long slide. In almost every election since he took office, Democrats have gotten trounced.

Yet he continues to push extraordinarily unpopular policies. Could it be the advice he’s been getting?

In the face of this disastrous performance by President Obama and the Democrats, the Clinton team has been actively advising that they keep doing what they’re doing. It’s as if Bill Clinton has just discovered that his beloved party is firmly in the clutches of the extreme left, and he’s decided to encourage their leaders to drive themselves into the proverbial ditch.

Today's Wall Street Journal editorial prefers the cliff metaphor.  In the WSJ version the 1960s liberals in congress are behind the wheel.

The larger lesson is that we are learning for the fourth time in 45 years that America can't be governed from the left. Democrats exploited the recession and the accident of 60 Senate seats to push the agenda of their dreams, and the American public has recoiled at the effrontery and the results. Repairing the damage of the 111th Congress will take years, and perhaps decades, but the first step is ousting the liberals who once again drove their party off a cliff.

Ditch?  Cliff?  Who cares!  Hand me my Slurpee, I'm enjoying this!

Update II:  Confirmation of my "ditch theory" comes from Hillbuzz!  Some Hillary Clinton Democrats are waging war on the Democratic party.  

We will not forget those Obamacare votes.  We will not forgive being called a racist because we don’t support this terrible man and his awful agenda.  We will not be silenced.

We will not give up.

It’s going to be years, if ever, before the lamestream media ever catches up to any of this, and realizes that a large swath of people who used to be Democrat loyalists are now doing everything they can to destroy the party.  Some of them are out and open, like me and my friends here at HillBuzz, but many are doing their part quietly.  They just stop writing checks.  Or maybe now they write checks to Democrat opponents.  They might continue to attend events and fundraisers, but now they call up Republican sites and give them all the dirt on what they heard in those meetings.  The Democrat Party alienated so many people who are now working to bring it down that I could go on for pages and pages more on this topic.

It’s very Sidney Bristow, Rush.  And if you watched that show Alias, you’d know she not only won in the end, but looked damn good kicking ass while doing it.

THAT, El Rushbo, is what your “Hillary babes” are up to.

That little excertp is from an open letter to Rush Limbaugh -- a long open letter. 

Update III:  Toby Harndon of The Telegraph (UK) says Bill Clinton is on a 'retribution tour' against Barack Obama. 

My hunch is that the Clintons smell Obama’s blood in the water right now and, political predators that they are, they are positioning themselves to take advantage (and, frankly, who could blame them for doing so?). We know from 2008 what they really think of Obama. Despite Hillary’s loyal service as Secretary of State, her scathing critique of Obama during their bruising primary still stands – and now looks prescient.

Just 8 Percent Say Members Deserve Re-election

A new CBS News Poll finds an extraordinarily high anti-incumbent disposition among likely voters. Four out of five want new blood in congress.

As can be expected the numbers are less stark when respondents are asked about their own representatives as opposed to congress in general. But not by much. Only 34 percent of the voters asked favor re-election of their own representative. Here's more evidence that it is a dire year to be an incumbent running for re-election: A new CBS News/New York Times poll taken shortly before the midterm elections finds that 80 percent of likely voters say that most members of Congress should be replaced with someone new. Just 8 percent say most members deserve re-election. By all indications it's going to be a very bad year for Democrats, and deservedly so.  Their policies have been ruinous and the worst of the health care reform provisions haven't even taken effect.

Barbara Boxer has been attacking Carly Fiorina on the issue of outsourcing.  She claims Ms. Fiorina laid off 30,000 workers and shipped their jobs to China when she was CEO of Hewlett-Packard.  According to the Wall Street Journal Cisco Systems has outdone H-P on the outsourcing score, but that doesn't seem to bother Senator Ma'am.

Yesterday, the networking equipment giant Cisco nonetheless hosted the three-term Democrat for a townhall meeting with employees at its office in San Jose. Cisco CEO John Chambers, a former adviser to John McCain's Presidential campaign, is one of Ms. Boxer's most prominent Silicon Valley supporters. Cisco employees and its political action committee have donated $41,350 to her re-election campaign and rank as her sixth largest contributor, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

This wouldn't count as notable, except for the fact that roughly half of Cisco's 70,700 work force and half of the jobs the company has added in recent years are located overseas. A Cisco spokesman rejects the notion that any of these jobs were "outsourced," though we'd enjoy hearing Andy Stern and other union leaders parse that distinction.

From scouring news clips, we were able to learn that in 2006 the company announced plans to invest more than $1 billion in India, triple its Indian work force and launch expansions in other South Asian countries. 

The Enthusiasm Gap

With a little more than a week to go until the 2010 midterm elections, Bill Clinton made a campaign stop in Detroit where he implored adoring Democrats to make a strong showing at the polls.  It was a study in wishful thinking, as the former president was unable to fill the high school gym where he spoke. 

Clinton, who campaigned in the battleground state of Florida earlier this week, is popular in Detroit and trying to fire up the party base in Michigan today with stops today in Detroit, Ann Arbor and Battle Creek.

But he began his speech just before 3 p.m. in a high school gym that was less than half full.

Bill Whittle On The Problem Of Elitism

Bill Whittle Explains The Concept Of Wealth Creation