A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

Obama’s first crack at Election 2012

Well done, people on YouTube!

Looking Ahead To 2012

I know it may be the last thing some of you want to think about, but the presidential election of 2012 will soon become front-page news again.  For some thoughtful commentary on the challenges President Obama may indeed face between now and November 2012, check out the latest column from John Podhoretz at Commentary Magazine.

Podhoretz's basic point is that when one looks at the history of presidential bids for a second term in the last 50 years, one finds pertinent examples of challengers who cost the sitting president his office.

The scale of the Democratic Party’s defeat this year and the parlous condition of the country’s finances inevitably raise the specter of a challenge to a first-term president from within his own party. Such challenges have been part of the political landscape for the past half-century. Eight presidents since 1960 have run for re-election. Four of them have had to fight off a significant primary opponent whose key message was that the president had betrayed his party’s core principles. In each case, the challenge preceded the president’s eventual ouster in the general election.

He then goes on to give some concrete examples of what he's referring to.

In 1968, Eugene McCarthy came at Lyndon Johnson from the anti-war left and, in losing in the New Hampshire primary by a mere seven points, convinced the man who had won the biggest landslide in American history three years earlier that he could not secure a second full term. Ronald Reagan went at Gerald Ford in 1976 in part on the grounds that Ford was capitulating to the Soviet Union; Reagan went on to win several major states, galvanized the Republican Convention far more than its actual nominee, and left Ford to close a 30-point gap in the polls with Jimmy Carter (which Ford almost did).

With stagflation at home and chaos abroad, Edward Kennedy confronted Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election. Kennedy went on to win 10 primaries, upstage Carter at the Democratic Convention just as Reagan had upstaged Ford, and in general, presage Carter’s doom. Twelve years later, George H. W. Bush began his re-election campaign in the economic doldrums and came under unexpected pressure in New Hampshire from the paleoconservative Pat Buchanan, who got a stunning 38 percent. Ross Perot saw this and designed an independent bid against Bush on the single issue of the budget deficit, which Bush had actually taken aggressive measures to confront; Perot’s bid got Bill Clinton elected.¹

There is great ideological irony here. McCarthy and Kennedy ran to their presidents’ left at the beginning of an election cycle that concluded with the victory of a hated conservative—Nixon in 1968, Reagan in 1980. Reagan ran to Ford’s right in an election that went to Carter. And by running to Bush’s right, Buchanan helped establish the conditions under which Clinton would achieve victory in 1992. Both Carter and Clinton ran as Southern moderates but began governing as aggressive liberals. Feingold, or any other Democrat who considers a challenge to Barack Obama, will have to contend with the knowledge that the better he does, the more likely it will be that a conservative Republican will occupy the White House come 2013.

Given this history, what conceivable justification can there be for a primary challenge to Obama for an ideologically driven politician who would not wish his worst enemies to achieve power? The only principled justification is, precisely, principle: you do so because you think the president of your party has acted in ways that are especially injurious to the things you believe in most deeply by suborning those beliefs to his political ambitions. Pat Buchanan’s quixotic effort against George H. W. Bush was driven by this; he opposed the Gulf War, had become a Bryanesque economic populist, and wanted to fight for his (repugnant) vision of what the Republican Party ought to be.

In the case of McCarthy and Reagan and Kennedy, something rather more layered was at play. Kennedy’s 1980 bid was clearly opportunistic, so much so that he himself found it literally inexplicable when CBS’s Roger Mudd asked him why he wanted to be president. The plain fact is that he and his pseudo– royal court had seen an opening for him a decade after Chappaquiddick, but they couldn’t close the deal, and in the process did significant damage to the incumbent.²

Reagan certainly did believe that the policy of détente undertaken by Richard Nixon and continued by Ford was a moral and geopolitical abomination. But he also knew that Ford had not been elected to anything other than the Michigan House seat from which Ford had been elevated to the vice presidency only 10 months before Nixon slunk from office. For Ford to skate into the 1976 Republican nomination without having ever received a single vote as part of a presidential ticket seemed anti-democratic; the logic of the American political system dictated a challenge by someone.

It was the logic of the 1960s that dictated a challenge to Lyndon Johnson in 1968 from within his own party—notwithstanding the fact that he had received 61 percent and 486 electoral votes in November 1964 and had ushered in a new era of activist government with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the initiation of Medicare in 1966.

Indeed, one might say that Eugene McCarthy’s entry into the 1968 presidential primaries against Johnson was less a matter of his own choosing than it was a willed manifestation of the anti-war movement, which had turned out hundreds of thousands of demonstrators across the country in 1967. Members of the movement over 21 (then the voting age) were natural Democratic voters, but the policies they were protesting were being enacted by a Democratic administration. Their negative electoral energy had to go somewhere, and it was channeled into McCarthy in New Hampshire. But it did not belong to him; after McCarthy knocked off Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy entered the fray to steal McCarthy’s voters away. After Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, secured his party’s nomination— which was, to many on the left, no different from having nominated Johnson again. The Democratic Convention in Chicago at the end of August became the epicenter of a guerrilla war launched by leftists against traditional FDR Democrats (in the persons of Humphrey and Chicago mayor Richard Daley), with rioters setting upon Chicago cops, getting savagely beaten in response, and being placed under arrest by the thousands.

The carnage in the streets of Chicago figured prominently in the explanations for the electoral triumph of Richard Nixon in the 1968 general election. And the enduring memory of the way in which a policy disagreement within the Democratic Party had resulted in blood and panic in Grant Park may have contributed inchoately to Nixon’s own 20-point win in 1972.

It is tempting to look at this brief history and say that primary challenges are purely destructive. But that may overrate them. They may not have altered the political atmosphere against incumbents so much as they reflected a change that had already taken place within the body politic. For there is another reason these primary challenges arise, other than a principle or opportunism—a reason that is inchoate, hard to capture, and hard to define. They happen because the president has begun to look like a loser.

Very interesting stuff!  You can read the rest of the column here, and don't be surprised if we see a further-Left challenger to Barack Obama in the next two years.

Delusional

Nancy Pelosi, the outgoing Speaker of the House, is convinced that she and her legislative agenda had nothing to do with the 60+ seat turnaround in the mid-term elections two weeks ago.

“We didn’t lose the election because of me,” Ms. Pelosi told National Public Radio in an interview that aired Friday morning. “Our members do not accept that.”

Instead, the California Democrat attributes the loss of at least 60 seats to high unemployment and “$100 million of outside, unidentified funding.”

“Any party that cannot turn (9.5% unemployment) into political gains should hang up the gloves,” she said.

Good girl.  Keep it up till 2012.

The Morning After The Night Before

By: R.J. Moeller

The mid-term elections of 2010 have come and gone, and in their wake are the political careers of dozens of liberal Democrats who, along with their Community-Organizer-in-Chief, voted for wildly unpopular pieces of legislation and increased the national debt and deficits to unprecedented heights.  The "Party of No" did a stellar job of convincing millions of voters that, in fact, they were actually the "Party of Know" (as in, "we all know the president's agenda is a train-wreck").

I fully appreciate that there are much better sources of hard-data analysis you can turn to the day after the election, so I will just offer up some quick reflections on what I saw, what I think, and where we might go from here.

1.  California is in trouble - If being more than $25 billion in the hole doesn't wake a state up, what will?  If a pervasive and costly problem with illegal aliens in your state will not compel voters to make a drastic change in leadership, what are the rest of us to think?  If the unions, both private and public, show themselves to be buying politicians who then in turn spend money the state doesn't have to keep themselves in power, what would it take to keep the citizens of California from voting for such politicians?

California is in trouble.  In the midst of the worst economic crisis the state has ever seen, caused in large part by decades of financial irresponsibility and fiscal recklessness, a big-spending liberal Democrat (Jerry Brown) was elected to a third term as governor.  He defeated a woman who had been the CEO of one of the nation's most profitable companies (E-Bay).  Brown (and the complicit state media) attacked Meg Whitman relentlessly for unknowingly employing a woman who had lied about her status as a legal U.S. citizen.

But that ridiculous "scandal" wasn't the only reason Brown won.  For all the talk about the economy and the need to put social issues aside in favor of fiscal ones, enough Californians showed their true colors.  So many people in CA (as well as other states, like my own, Illinois) are dependent on the government for their livelihood that they are essentially paid voting agents of the Democrat Party.  If the economy is tanking because of the crumbling system upon which their livelihood rests, they will go down with the ship before becoming willing to help plug the gaping holes in it (for the benefit of their children and grandchildren).

2. Values Voters Matter! - Then there are the people who knew that the economy was bad, but are unwilling to vote for pro-life, pro-family values, pro-military Republicans.  Conservatives are frequently told by the media (and even some Republicans) that they have to drop the whole "values voters" shtick, but liberals and progressives never hear such things from the press or their own party.  The "social issues" are the only things that give Republicans a chance at making in-roads into minority communities.  Latinos especially share many of the same traditional values with the whitest evangelical conservative from the suburbs you can find.  (Here I am!)  The Republicans cannot buy into the false choice of having to choose between social and fiscal issues.  We need an all-of-the-above, not either-or mindset going forward.

3. Big cities tend to dominate elections - A quick glance over the electoral map from last night shows that the big cities in each state tend to be more liberal.  This isn't breaking news for most of us, but it's worth taking a moment to ponder this reality.  The cities are where more of the people in this country live.  They are where more of the nation's minorities, government employees, and single women live.  Conversely, the rural and outlying areas of states are typically more religious, more conservative, and serve at much higher rates in our military than city-folk.  The only spots in more-rural areas where the map turns blue are in towns where big universities are located.  Shocking!

Conservatives and Republicans absolutely must begin to develop pro-free market, pro-small business, pro-family values outposts in the big cities of this country.  Our goal on the Right should not simply be to win a few elections here and there.  It should be to facilitate a culture shift, resulting in an America where John McCain is the Left and Ron Paul the Right.

4. We cannot let up! - I am excited that the House changed hands.  I am pleased to see at least 6 seats in the Senate switch over to the good guys (and gals).  But, to be perfectly, honest, Republican victories at the ballot box are not what get me excited.  Changing the culture is what gets me excited.  Seeing more Americans understand how a free market economy works gets me excited.  The thought of abortion clinics shutting down, not necessarily because of legislation or judicial decree, but because so few people even want them anymore, is what gets me excited.  Forcing progressive liberals out of office gets me excited.  Living in a country where school choice is a reality gets me excited.

All of this, and more, is possible...but only if the spirit of patriotism and personal responsibility that spawned the Tea Parties and town-hall rallies continues to surge through the millions of Americans' veins it currently does.

------

Take a deep breath.  Enjoy the victories.  Get ready to pick the fight back up tomorrow.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the elections, so leave us a comment below.

Steyn on CA Results

I wanted to post something about the pathetic results in the state of California tonight, but then I stumbled upon Mark Steyn's blurb on that very topic.

In California, Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown have beaten Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman, two Republican candidates tailored for the Golden State, professional, centrist, and without any of that establishment-disturbing Tea Party craziness like certain lady candidates in Delaware and Nevada. And they both lost. I think we're seeing in California the limits of the democratic process in a Big Government state. The statist workforce and the dependency class can outvote the productive class. And, given the number of Californian small businesses who'll be ordering the U-Haul in the morning, that electoral gap will only widen in 2012 and beyond. California is Greece: The arithmetic does not allow for meaningful correction. The question is whether Texas and other non-insane states will volunteer to play Germany to Sacramento's ouzo-swiggers.

A liberal Republican governor, and a far-Left state legislature have run the state of California into the proverbial ground...and the people reward liberal Democrats by allowing them to retain a strangle-hold on the senate seats, and by handing the governorship over to Gerry Brown.

What the Left thinks of conservative voters

The video speaks for itself.

Go Vote!

And if you live in Chicago, vote early and vote often.

Krauthammer on the Election

In about 48 hours we will know (most of) the 2010 mid-term election results.  As we draw near this historic election, I thought it prudent to hear some final words of wisdom on the entire process from Charles "The German-hammer" Krauthammer.  His latest column is a doozy.

An excerpt:

The beauty of this year’s campaign, and the coming one in 2012, is that they actually have a point. Despite the noise, the nonsense, the distractions, the amusements — who will not miss New York’s seven-person gubernatorial circus act? — this is a deeply serious campaign about a profoundly serious political question.

Obama, to his credit, did not get elected to do midnight basketball or school uniforms. No Bill Clinton, he. Obama thinks large. He wants to be a consequential president on the order of Ronald Reagan. His forthright attempt to undo the Reagan revolution with a new burst of expansive liberal governance is the theme animating this entire election.

Democratic apologists would prefer to pretend otherwise — that it’s all about the economy and the electorate’s anger over its parlous condition. Nice try. The most recent CBS/New York Times poll shows that only one in twelve Americans blames the economy on Obama, and seven in ten think the downturn is temporary. And yet, the Democratic party is falling apart. Democrats are four points behind among women, a constituency Democrats had owned for decades; a staggering 20 points behind among independents (a 28-point swing since 2008); and 20 points behind among college graduates, giving lie to the ubiquitous liberal conceit that the Republican surge is the revenge of lumpen know-nothings.

On November 2, a punishing there will surely be. But not quite the kind Obama is encouraging.

My prediction: The Dems lose 60 House seats, eight in the Senate. Rangers in seven.

Republicans Are Stealing Democracy? Really?

I know the Democrats are desperate, but this attack ad is laughable:

How many of you even know who Ed Gillespie is?  And Karl Rove hasn't been in the same room with political power since 2007 when he left the White House a year early.  This is the best Democrats have to offer?  This is their strategy to stem the rising tide of GOP support for the election in November?

And as far as the charge that Republicans are taking foreign money to fund their campaigns, here is Barack Obama's "Karl Rove" (David Axelrod) giving his "evidence" for levying such an outlandish, irresponsible claim:

What a joke. Even the uber-liberal Bob Schieffer can smell what the DNC is cooking.