 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
 |
||||||||
For those interested in the fate of the West (interior West, that is), AFF has a podcast up of the panel it held in Denver last week.
My portion of the panel starts at around 42:00. The real heat came, though, in the Q&A, which follows immediately after my portion.
And, yes, I really do subscribe to the Focus on the Family email blast just to enrage myself on a daily basis. Those people sure do hate teh gays.
My column in the Post this morning gives my rundown of the GOP’s prospects in the interior West this cycle and recounts Wednesday’s panel:
DENVER — CHEERED as Republicans may be by the Clinton-Obama wars, the fact is that long-term trends still favor the Democrats this fall. To see the problem, consider the interior West - the eight states between the Midwest and the Pacific Coast: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
This week, I spoke at a panel put on here in Denver by the America’s Future Foundation, a youth-oriented libertarian-conservative group. The topic: “How the West Will Be Lost.”
In fact, having heard my fellow panelists’ takes on the situation in Colorado and the rest of the region, the use of the future tense looks optimistic: The GOP is already well on its way to losing the West.
The reasons were well summed up by the president of Colorado’s Independence Institute and a popular conservative radio talk-show host in the state, Jon Caldara: “We lost our values. We lost our way.”
There is one way the GOP can pull it out: The Democrats can nominate Hillary.
The Rocky Mountain News this morning runs an account of the America’s Future Foundation panel I spoke at last night in Denver (cheery panel title: “How the West Will Be Lost”):
A group of conservative writers and thinkers gathered for a panel discussion Wednesday night at the Oxford Hotel where the beer was free, the talk was fast and the mood - at least when it came to the 2008 presidential race - was a deep blue funk.
The title of the forum - presented by Face the State, America’s Future Foundation and the Independence Institute - summed up the general pessimism, “How the West Will Be Lost - Democrats’ Strategy to turn the Mountain West Blue and What Libertarians and Conservatives Can Do About It.”
The speakers generally agreed that the coalition Ronald Reagan assembled of social conservatives, libertarians, limited-government proponents and free-marketeers is fractured.
They differed, however, on the extent of the split or what can be done to put that coalition together again.
I’m quoted in the story as the voice of pessimism — which will hardly be earth-shattering news to friends and family. Hey, I’m a gloomy guy.
It was a great panel and a great audience in a part of the country usually relegated to fly-over status. While we did disagree on how bad things have gotten and what the chances are for repairing them out here in the interior West, the one thing we all agreed on was that Colorado is Ground Zero in the changes that are coming to the region politically. Both houses of the Legislature taken over by the Dems in 2004, the governorship taken over in 2006. A Senate seat gone. Another House seat gone. All that’s left is for the state to get colored blue in November.
I’ll have more on the panel and why that may or may not happen shortly. In the meantime, thanks to AFF and Face the State for having me and to everyone who came out.
The Supreme Court has decided not to take up the Citizens United case I wrote about Friday.
The Court basically said it doesn’t have jurisdiction to hear the case, so this wasn’t a refusal to hear the case on its merits.
The SpeechNow.org case is still making its way through the system.
In my post column today, I look at two upcoming, important free-speech cases:
Let’s face it: The 2008 election season is well under way, yet political speech remains decidedly un-free in America - held hostage to the vanity of John McCain and the cynicism of his accomplices in Congress and the media, who seek to silence their political opponents in the name of clean government.
…
Citizens United, an activist conservative group, wants relief from burdensome disclosure and disclaimers rules in ads for its documentary, “Hillary: The Movie.” While the film isn’t necessarily the most high-minded of cinematic projects (sample from the script: “She is steeped in controversy, steeped in sleaze.”), it is - as political speech - every bit as deserving of First Amendment protection as the newspapers of the early republic or the communist Daily Worker.
The other case relates to SpeechNow.org, which wants to run ads against politicians who support campaign-speech regulation. They’re aiming for irony, and will likely see their efforts to speak out against speech regulation shut down by … speech regulation.
If you happen to be in the Denver area next Wednesday evening (March 26), I’ll be on an America’s Future Foundation panel about the political fortunes of the GOP in the West (a topic, of course, close to my heart): “How the West Will Be Lost.”
Pessimistic, but I think correctly so (at least it’s pessimistic from a partisan, GOP perspective). Here’s the description from the Web site:
It’s no mistake that Democrats will be hosting their national convention in Denver. Liberal funders have invested heavily in Colorado as part of a multi-cycle strategy to turn traditionally red states in the mountain west blue. But have Republicans and the Religious Right put more libertarian-leaning mountain states up for grabs? Looking at the primaries, does Huckabee’s success indicate the growing or waning influence of evangelicals in the Republican Party? Does Ron Paul’s fundraising success indicate a growing influence of libertarians? And what to make of McCain? Join our panelists as we discuss the future of libertarians, conservatives, and evangelicals in the West.
Also on the panel will be Gene Healy of the Cato Institute, Jim Pfaff, president of the Colorado Family Institute, and Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute. It will be moderated by Brad Jones of FaceTheState.com.
Should be a fun time. Colorado really is ground zero in the West-turning-Blue story.
With David Paterson’s extra-curricular activities having taken over the news about his new administration in the past few days, I just wanted to highlight this video of Sun Albany correspondent, one-time M.O. guest-blogger, and all-around serial bigamist Jacob Gershman asking the incoming governor whether he had ever patronized a prostitute (while holding public office):
Nice timing on Paterson’s part with the quip (”Only the lobbyists.”). What a pause.
And balls of steel on Jacob’s part. That’s one to tell the grandkids. When they’re old enough.
First, there was terrifying, buzzing military robot dog:
Then, there was the literal robot master — a machine that will play fetch with your dog all day while you’re out:
The robot fetch machine actually looks a bit unsafe (floppy ears + rusty springs = bad combo). But I’d rather have the latter in the house than the former.
…it were the Democrats who’d been running up the national debt the last 10 years.
Then this ad would make sense.
Instead of annoying everyone around you on your cell phone, now just strap on a neck band and communicate from brain to vocal chords to phone to software to phone:
OK, so it’s pretty unwieldy right now. It looks even stupider than a Bluetooth headset. It’s first application will likely be patients with ALS. But in not too many years we’ll probably see a commercial version.
The New Scientist writes it up here.
On this, Eliot Spizer’s last day in office, I find myself thinking not so much of the fate of our great state — we’re screwed, get over it — as about the joy that is yearly pop-culture memes. One of the delights of the beginning of every year is the fact that we simply do not, cannot, know what phrases, images, etc. will be newly iconic in a year’s time.
At the start of 2007, who among us could have imagined that the phrase “wide stance” would take on such delightful connotations? Or that “Don’t Taze Me, Bro!” would not only be mixed, but re-mixed?
And so, I asked myself at the beginning of 2008: What’s next? As always, I was surprised.
So simple. So elegant.
And yet, I can’t help feel it’s a bit of a disappointment. While it’s fun to bat around (”You may know me as Client-9,” “David Paterson, aka, Client-10″), it’s not quite as malleable as “wide stance” or “don’t taze me.” It just doesn’t seem like it can be applied to as many situations, or mutated in as many ways.
I guess the cat’s out of the bag now, but I’d like to see more use made of: “I must now dedicate some time to regain the trust of my family.”
Such as:
It’s a little harder to remember, so it’s probably doomed. But I thought I’d throw it out there.
You can also try, as I have repeatedly now, telling your spouse upon his or her arrival home: “Today, I want to briefly address a private matter.” Somehow, it makes the follow up “I forgot to pick up the dry cleaning” go down a lot smoother.
What other memes await us in 2008? I can’t wait ’till the future gets here.
In today’s Post, I review Grover Norquist’s new book, Leave Us Alone:
[Norquist’s] book manages to diagnose and prescribe treatment for the ills of the modern-day Republican Party with hardly a mention of the tumor in its guts: Bush-Rove-style Big Government Conservatism.
Norquist breaks down modern political actors into two camps: the Leave Us Alone Coalition and the Takings Coalition. The Leave Us Alone Coalition, he says, consists of taxpayers (the ones who want lower taxes, anyway) businessmen, property owners, gun owners, homeschoolers and conservative religious types threatened by the secular mainstream - Catholics, evangelical Protestants, Orthodox Jews, Muslims and Mormons. The Takings Coalition consists of government workers, labor unions, trial lawyers, welfare recipients and much of academia - or, as Norquist puts it, folks who “raise your taxes to subsidize Piss Christ while explaining that your church cannot be used for child care until you cover up all those icky crucifixes.”
But has the Republican Party of the last 10 years really been under the sway of a Leave Me Alone Coalition? Far from it. That’s the sort of coalition libertarian Republicans wish they had, but it’s certainly not what’s existed in practice.
It would be nice if the GOP’s problems were as minor and self-correcting as Norquist argues — requiring, mainly, that Red Staters breed and New Deal liberals die (in the natural course of getting old, of course, nothing more drastic). They are, however, not.
David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’
A surprisingly sane view of politics, recognizing that the world is not a never-ending series of injustices crying out for revolution.
This is the best David Simon interview I’ve seen since the end of “The Wire” this Sunday.
Turns out Rawls really was gay — for those of us long puzzled by that throwaway reveal. But there was never any plan to do anything with that information.
Rudy Giuliani’s started running this attack ad against Barack Obama, making it clear that your sleeping children will be raped and beheaded by Muslims should the Illinois senator become president:
What? Oh, right. The ad actually comes from the Clinton campaign.
My friend Owen sends on this video:
It’s of an amputee using a robotic arm being developed by the inventor of the Segway, Dean Kamen. (We saw a monkey working a similar device, in a more controlled setting, here.)
It’s pretty hard to wrap one’s head around, but it seems virtually inevitable at this point that humans will have Luke Skywalker quality prosthetics in most of our lifetimes. I mean, we may not be able to fight like a Jedi with them, but in a couple decades they could be indistinguishable from real limbs in everyday life — able to manipulate small objects, send sensory information to the brain, etc.
With the concept at this point proven — we can decode what the motor cortex is trying to tell the limb — it’s all a process of endless refinement. Those refinements, of course, will all represent major breakthroughs. But the direction things are heading is clear.
And, of course, we’re likely to reach the day when prosthetics will have advantages over normal limbs. Just ask this guy.
I’ve been making the argument for a little while now (btw: you can now read my old Atlantic piece on this for free, since they opened up their archives): the Democrats’ key to victory in 2008 is the interior West.
And, so, along comes some interesting polling data from Rasmussen out of Colorado. It should be clear to anyone watching the primary results that Obama is the strongest Democratic candidate in the interior West. But here are some numbers: He’d start out the race with a seven-point, 46-39 percent, advantage over John McCain. Hillary? She’d start down 14 points. 35-49 percent.
Just something for all those superdelegates to think about.
(via Sullivan)
A look at what’s wrong with superdelegates:
ABOUT half a million Democrats went to the polls on Saturday, in Louisiana, Nebraska and Washington state, handing decisive victories to Barack Obama. Some 14.6 million Democrats went to the polls Feb. 5 on Super Tuesday, including 1.7 million New Yorkers, and delivered a decision more evenly split between Obama and Hillary Clinton.
But maybe everyone should’ve just stayed home. In the end, the Democratic race may be decided not by the voters, but by 796 party powerbrokers: the superdelegates.
As a libertarian committed to the defeat of John McCain, I’ll be pissed if we’re left with Hillary Clinton as our last, best hope.
In my Post column today, I look at McCain’s continuing weakness with the base:
McCain’s strength, early on in the night, manifested itself most clearly in the northeast, where he racked up his first sound victories - that is, ones where he was able to break the 50-percent mark.
States like Connecticut, New Jersey, Illinois and New York gave the Arizona senator comfortable margins of victory over his nearest competitor in the region, Mitt Romney.
But these states don’t represent the heart of the Republican Party - they hardly ever end up painted red on election nights these days. They may represent delegates in the primary process, but they don’t tell us anything about the senator’s ability to rally the base.
In the southern states, which do make up the heart of the Republican Party, McCain found himself slogging it out with Evangelical candidate Mike Huckabee last night.
As of this writing, Arkansas had been called for Huckabee (the hometown boy, by a lot), as had Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee (by smaller margins).
The results down South once again showed McCain’s weakness with the base. In Georgia, for instance, exit polls found McCain losing conservatives (67 percent of the primary electorate) to Huckabee by 21 percent to 38 percent. In fact, McCain was third among conservatives, with Romney garnering 37 percent of their votes.
Frankly, I’m not sure this can be overcome. McCain had his chance to be conciliatory toward the right between Florida and February 5; instead, he chose to act his obnoxious, arrogant self, smirking his way through the Reagan Library debate and unveiling that appalling line about “patriotism, not profit.” McCain the underdog has its appeal (though, not to me). But McCain the frontrunner is just a disgusting spectacle.
For the first time in a long time, the GOP may actually nominate the less likable candidate this time around.
For Obama. Turnout in Brooklyn Heights? Light when I went (11-ish), but I heard it was rather heavy in the morning rush.
If you have ever tried to chew more quietly, you know it sounds exactly like not trying.
In my Post column this morning, I look at McCain’s win — a narrow one, once again without the conservative base, but enough:
THEY don’t like him. They re ally don’t like him. But he’s going to be their nominee.
John McCain has won yet another primary without carrying either self-identified conservatives or Republicans - at least according to the Florida exit polls, which show McCain losing self-identified Republicans by 31 percent to 33 percent for Mitt Romney. More, Romney scored a stunning 37 percent of self-described conservatives to McCain’s 27 percent.
But a win is a win - and there’s little that can stop the Straight Talk Express now.
McCain had been written off by the pundits (including me, many times, usually quite gleefully), but the media remains his base, his campaign treasure chest and his get-out-the-vote operation all wrapped up into one. His narrow victory will ring through the land as a landslide.
And, truth be told, while it’s underwhelming, it’s enough. It’s long been clear the winner of Florida would almost certainly go on to win the whole thing - and now McCain has, and he most likely will.
With Mike Huckabee staying in the race to split the conservative (and especially the southern Evangelical) vote, it’s hard to see where Romney could put together any significant number of primary victories on Feb. 5.
I also give a brief assessment of how he fares versus the two possible Dems. Short version: well against Hillary, poorly against Barack.
I’m happy enough to take my lumps on Giuliani. Forced to guess, I would have guessed he’d be the nominee, up until roughly December (after that, I wouldn’t have guessed, and still won’t).
However, the idea that I somehow thought he was inevitable is just ridiculous. While I thought it possible, perhaps even likely, that Giuliani could overcome being a pro-choice former mayor of New York City, it was never even close to inevitable or safe. There was always at least one other very plausible way for this election to go other than toward a Rudy victory: Romney could have knocked down Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina right off the bat, game over. Now, that didn’t happen, either, ultimately. But it was certainly a very easy way Rudy could have lost, and that was apparent to anyone following the campaign all through 2007. The hope for Rudy was a divided outcome in the early states. It turns out that even with that he couldn’t do it.
Again, willing to take my lumps. But c’mon.
Also, the GOP isn’t on a tear against immigrants? I seem to remember something about a giant wall. And, then, why exactly did the GOP lose roughly 15 points with Hispanic voters between 2004 and 2006? Must have been all that welcoming rhetoric toward Latinos. As for the word “bigot,” which I’ve used repeatedly to describe one side of the immigration debate, I know it’s not particularly soothing, but I’m not a politician and I don’t give a damn about protecting people’s feelings. I’ve spent enough time around the Republican base to feel quite comfortable with my word choice.
I expected the idea to be brought up that I’m just disappointed with Giuliani because he’s losing. I’d only note that, despite the perception that I’m some big Giuliani booster (I’ve never endorsed. I’m not sure that’s something I have any interest in doing.), I’ve been highly critical of the Giuliani campaign since at least last spring when he flip-flopped on civil unions. I’ve also been critical of his immigration pandering and his ugly War on Terror mongering. I was a believer in the late-state strategy; maybe that seems foolish now, but as I argued in today’s column, it was, at the very least, the best strategy available.
As to the usual charge that any argument for a socially moderate, fiscally conservative GOP (or GOP candidate) is just asking for a candidate who pleases me — well, yes, that is what most people in politics are after. The specific argument as re Rudy, however, is that he wasn’t going to win the Pat Buchanan / Mike Huckabee / Mitt Romney (version 2.0) part of the GOP base. He had to be the moderate-acceptable-to-die-hards. That is, he had to be McCain, but better (I’d argue much better, given my antipathy for McCain).
How that boils down to “He alienated Ryan Sager,” in Ramesh’s words, is beyond me. McCain’s alienated me, too, but he might actually win. Maybe Rudy could never have knocked off McCain in New Hampshire — they just love the old coot too much up there in the Granite State. But he certainly did himself no favors by failing to even fight for the ground that ought to have been his.
In today’s New York Post, I look at why Rudy Giuliani ran a campaign that deserves to lose:
TOMORROW in Florida, Rudy Giuliani will make what is expected to be his last stand of the ‘08 race. What went wrong?
As an early (2006) believer in his capacity to become this race’s frontrunner, I’d have to say that he’s run a campaign that deserves to lose.
While he focused strategically on Florida and the Feb. 5 states, he undermined this by pitching his campaign thematically to Iowa and other parts of the GOP least likely to vote for him.
My conclusion: The best thing Giuliani can do now is to bow out gracefully should he come up with anything less than a win tomorrow. He had his chance and wasted it: The least he can do now is stop wasting our time.
I’m no Clinton hater. For all his faults, Bill Clinton was a better conservative president than George W. Bush (though, yes, that has a lot to do with the Republican Congress).
But what a disgusting campaign Bill and Hillary are running against Barack Obama, with Bill today comparing Obama’s win in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson winning the Palmetto State twice. From now on, I guess, it will be “black candidate, black candidate, black candidate.”
Depressing because it will probably be effective.
My Post column today looks at the emerging one-on-one race between John McCain and Mitt Romney:
BARRING a longshot comeback by Rudy Giuliani in Florida on Jan. 29, GOP voters now face a choice between the guy they’re not sure they like, vs. the guy they’re sure they dislike - that is, a choice between conservative chameleon Mitt Romney and professional maverick John McCain.
There’s already no love lost between Romney and McCain. Their hate for each other is so pure it could wash away sin. But things are only likely to get uglier and more heated from here on in.
[W]hat utterly opposite candidacies the two men represent. The man who will say anything to please, versus the man who says anything he pleases.
It also takes a skeptical look at McCain’s supposed big win in South Carolina.
A Cornerite notices what I’ve been noticing: Immigration, despite the hype, has been essentially a non-issue in this GOP campaign once votes are cast.
Recent Comments