Category: 2012 Election

From the Inbox, this morning, Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt:

It does feel like there’s now a paint-by-numbers formula for giving a speech that garners media raves: My parents/grandparents/great-uncle Iggy came from humble beginnings. They struggled to give me a better life. Here is my focus-group-tested anecdote of my childhood. From this humorous event, my elderly, or preferably deceased relative/mentor figure, who will be played by Morgan Freeman in the movie, told me this valuable lesson: Only in America can you find opportunities like this. Only in America can you find opportunities like the ones I, and millions of other Americans, enjoyed! These opportunities are endangered by the policies of our opponent. But they are strengthened by the policies of our nominee! And I will not give up upon this majestic dream of a better future that is America! I will not give up and neither will you! We will do this together! Si se puede! Thank you! God bless America!

From what polls have been showing, the partisans are already lined up for this November, and that includes the people who call themselves independents, but generally lean one way or another. The rest is aimed at reaching the low-information voters who are still undecided. In fact, the election will hinge on how the people who barely pay attention fall.

And people wonder, and often lament, why our founding fathers had a healthy distrust of democracy, and did their level best to check it.

With GOP theater having concluded, Democratic theater is now in full swing. The first part of the convention, the part not widely aired, was a lot of shouting, and a lot of the politics of gender and race. Bitter was getting quite irritated with the gender politics, which she said weren’t even laid on as thick at the women’s college she went to. The first part was pure base rallying, focusing on Obamacare and, if you’re a woman, about how the evil Republicans want to control, or otherwise do bad things to your girly parts. They will defend your vagina!

The entire tone of the convention changed for the prime time speeches. I thought Michelle Obama was every bit Ann Romney’s equal, when it came to making the case for her husband as a person. Both Michelle and Ann are pretty good at delivering political speeches, which makes one surmise if they don’t have some political talent on their own. I suppose you have to in order to be First Lady these days. Speaking of politics, when you’re getting up and giving a speech during a prime time speaking slot at a Party national convention, you don’t get to say “I’m really not a political person.” It doesn’t pass the smell test.

From Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt:

Massachusetts Democratic-party Chairman John Walsh, discussing GOP Sen. Scott Brown at a breakfast meeting Monday: “He’s a regular guy. I mean, he spent a couple million dollars folding towels on TV to prove he’s an honorary girl. We appreciate that.” This was a reference to a television ad of Brown’s, in which he is seen folding laundry.

Finally, an actual example of the war on women!

Whether Scott Brown wins or loses, it’s been an absolute delight watching the Massachusetts Democratic Party become completely unhinged over having to win back a seat that they rightfully think belongs to them, and not being able to quite seal the deal with the people of Massachusetts.

Taking a break from landscaping a bit, and the drudgery of moving crushed stone around from places that don’t need it to places that do. I noticed some criticism from my last RNC post form Bill Quick, with a link in the comment section to a Reason article that I feel sums up the point I was trying to make nicely:

Mitt Romney may indeed be a deliberately empty vessel (for the definitive framing on his approach to politics, please read Peter Suderman’s excellent cover story from March, “Consultant in Chief“), but empty vessels have a habit of tacking to the wind. One striking, even unrecognizable difference between the 2012 RNC and the convention just four years ago is that there is a generation of legitimately interesting new Republican politicians–Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Texas senatorial candidate Ted Cruz, Puerto Rico Governor Luis Fortuño – who campaigned on tackling the real structural problems facing the country, and have largely (though not completely) kept up their end of the bargain.

These people weren’t afterthoughts during the convention, grudgingly given off-prime speaking slots; they were the featured speakers. They reflect (and were mostly brought into the office by) the populist, anti-big-government uprising that has rocked the country since the fall of 2008, and they are precipitating long-overdue conversations within the GOP about cutting spending, reforming entitlements, reducing public-sector compensation, and even reducing military expenditure. They are the ones who have the juice and the momentum within the Republican Party, even if they haven’t yet produced a presidential nominee.

Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan (read Peter Suderman’s great profile of him here) isn’t precisely of their generation, or radicalism, but he’s cut from the same philosophical cloth. As FreedomWorks’ Matt Kibbe told me, “Ryan is a real market guy–I know all of his flaws, I know all of his bad votes, but by choosing Ryan the party has conceded that it actually has to defend these ideas, including entitlement reform.” Ryan’s selection can be read as a sign that the S.S. Romney felt the wind blowing from the fiscal conservative grassroots.

Read the Whole Thing, as they say. I am under no delusion that Romney is now suddenly an ideal candidate. Having lived in and worked in politics in Massachusetts for a number of years, Bitter is well familiar with his quirks and flaws. He will stick his finger into the air and see which way the winds blowing, he can follow bad advice, and yes, when Governor of the most Democratic, liberal state in the nation, he’ll pass the model for Obamacare if he doesn’t think he can afford not to. But my observation is that he seems to have committed his campaign to the idea that the wind is blowing in the direction of shrinking the size and scope of government. As long as we keep the wind blowing in that direction, Mitt will go along. He’s that kind of politician. Obama doesn’t care which direction the wind blows. In his mind he is a transformative being, out to remake America, and that’s all that matters to him.

With the close of the RNC Convention, we only have to endure one more party convention, and then the silly season is officially in full force. The silly season is where I try to pretend that Mitt wasn’t my second choice in 2008, when the other choice was McCain, who was not exactly my first choice when the field was still open. But I have to say, I’m at least starting to think that McCain was really the inferior candidate in the 2008 primary.

Perhaps because I did not start out with high expectations for Mitt Romney, he has managed to surprise me. He’s run his campaign well, whereas McCain’s campaign was a disaster . I’m not worried that Romney is going to go crazy before the election like Col. Tigh did when the financial crisis hit. I can still remember watching that sorry display and telling Bitter “Well, that’s it I think. He just lost the election.” While Sarah Palin is was a breath of fresh air compared to the top of the ticket in 2008, she does not have Paul Ryan’s depth on issues. The Romney Campaign has also hit Obama a lot harder even in this early stage of the campaign, than McCain’s people ever did. I believe that the debates this time will not be as painful to watch, and to be honest, I’d be worried if I were Obama heading into those debates. Good thing he stacked the deck with moderators.

And as for Mitt’s speech, I have to agree with Jim Geraghty on this one. From his Morning Jolt:

At times, he was scary good.

No, really, where has that Mitt Romney been all year? All campaign? Since 2007?

Every time he’s given a nice speech after a primary victory, I would usually joke on Twitter, “ah, looks like those new personality software upgrades are working out, he sounds much more natural now,” or something like that. (It’s a perennial; as Erick Erickson said last night, “Romney v.6.5 is pretty awesome.”)

But the Mitt Romney we saw tonight . . . it’s as if he had been saving up every bit of his inner emotional life, his soft, sentimental side, and let it all out. This was a speech that requires us to reexamine what we think we know about Romney.

Bitter and I are political junkies, who tend to follow this stuff like sports, only a sport where you kind of hate all the teams and most of the players. We listen to a lot of speeches, and most political speeches will bowl you over with a feather, assuming you aren’t sleeping through it. But even I have to admit, Romney’s speech last night was one of the best political speeches I’ve seen in a long time from the GOP.

After watching most of the convention, though sometimes not paying attention when the speech’s were boring or bad (which is honestly most of them), Mitt seems committed to running the party on a message of economic and fiscal conservatism, in other words, the things conservatives and libertarians tend to agree on. There have been about as many bones tossed to the Huckabee wing of the party as there have been to gun owners, which is to say, not many. I think Romney has made a conscious decision to downplay social issues, and if that continues during the campaign, it’ll certainly help me feel better about things, but it ups the stakes considerably. A loss on that message will be a signal to the GOP it needs to go back to the Rove strategy of ginning up the social conservative base, and talking about compassionate conservatism (i.e. big government conservatism) to the soft middle who are happy to let the government do things that make them feel good while it spends itself into bankruptcy. The fiscal problems of this country are not easy, and it’ll be difficult no matter who’s in the White House, but Romney is signaling he’s up to the job. Is he? The only thing I know for sure there is Obama definitely isn’t.

I’m a cable cutter, so it’s hard for me, but I found Fox had the best HD feed over the Internet. The conventions are pure political theater, and they are meant to be, but political theater can have its place as long as you’re putting on a good show. I only saw part of Ann Romney’s speech, which was pretty good. She’s pretty polished as a public speaker, and the speech was well written. Chris Christie is better off the cuff, I think, than he is scripted. For a while I was concerned they put him up there to give a fluff speech with no meat in it. There was some meat, but more fluff than I think was suitable for his personality.

One thing is for sure, with the convention going on, there’s not going to be as much happening on the gun news front, but we’ll try to cover. Especially if the Republican manage to say something about guns at their convention. For once, all I really want from the GOP is a good Supreme Court justice to make the votes 6-3, so we can afford to lose a justice and still win.

I’ve generally found their are two types of social conservatives. There are ones who are mostly dedicated to the ideas of smaller government, and restoring fiscal and regulatory sanity, but are also personally religious and are generally on board with many of the socially conservative planks in the GOP platform, such as opposing abortion and gay marriage. But mostly their public activism is motivated around reducing the size and reach of government. The other type are the people who have come to politics purely through their social conservative values. They might offer lip service to smaller government, but their ultimate objective is to advance socially conservative ideas though the use of government. Their patron saint is Mike Huckabee. I believe the distinction between these two groups is perhaps the start of a rift within the Republican coalition, and that rift has never shown itself more strongly than with the recent Todd Akin affair.

The former group, the personal SoCos, joining with many non-SoCos (which I’ll call the National Review types), have pretty roundly condemned Akin, and joined the chorus demanding he step down from the race. The latter group, the political SoCos, now represented by their patron saint, have largely stood by Akin. See, Akin apologized, and Christian forgiveness being what it is, they have decided it is time to move on. But politics isn’t about Christian forgiveness, and no amount of that is going to overcome the fact that Akin is now down in the race he was once ahead in, and it’s looking like his dumbassery is even hurting Romney in Missouri, a state that has generally been getting more red as of late.

I bring this up because I think it’s possible for the Republican coalition to survive and thrive with the former type of social conservatives in it. We mostly all want the same thing, and while they’d probably have difficulty joining a coalition in a party that supported abortion rights and gay marriage, that’s largely not what drives them toward political activism. The latter type I think is hazardous to the coalition, because it’s their social conservative values that are driving their political activism, and they are less concerned about jeopardizing the goal of reducing the size of government. Indeed, they may even be fine with big government provided that it is controlled by social conservatives to serve socially conservative ends. I think in the long term, the big tent that the GOP would like to represent is going to have to have a moment of reckoning with the Huckabee branch of the Party, and the Akin controversy may provide the vehicle for that to happen.

Ordinarily, what I’ve called the National Review types, have always been uncomfortable with the inclusion of the Huckabee branch of the party, and Falwell’s “Moral Majority,” before that. The problem encountered is that the National Review types can’t win on their own. They can bring money to the table, but they don’t bring enough activists, organizations or votes, so they choose to coalition with the people who are personally socially conservative, the former group in my example above. These folks bring everything to the table the National Review types don’t. The problem is that the former personal SoCos are not all that uncomfortable with the Huckabees being part of the coalition, and thus would unlikely join any movement within the coalition to marginalize them. If Missouri costs the GOP control of the Senate, or McCaskill ends up being a key vote to prevent Obamacare from being repealed, I am hoping, perhaps against hope, that many personal SoCos will see that the cause of small government is being sacrificed on the altar of the Huckabee wing of the party. My hope is that they will see that candidates need to have better qualifications than just mirroring their own religious beliefs, and having the right views on a handful of social issues.

The coalition needs people who can carry small government values, which should be, after all, the best way to promote family values. I could care less if someone has the right religion, and the fact that Huckabee was once a preacher means about as much to me as the fact that Joe Wurzelbacher was once a Plumber. While I’m personally pro-choice and favor civil marriage for gays, I don’t think any of that is going to matter much if the country bankrupts itself, and the rest of us with it. The primary issue is that the government has run out of other people’s money, and facing that, has just decided to switch the printing presses into overdrive. Picking a candidate because he has the right religion, or the right views on abortion or gay marriage, is roughly analogous to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, and it seems many of the Huckabee folks in the Republican Party are as energetic in this rearrangement endeavor as the Democrats.

Jim Geraghty takes a look at the Senate Races, now that the stupid party has just handed McCaskill’s seat back to her on a silver platter. There’s two things I’m looking for in the Senate. One is to avoid confirmation fights, so that we can increase the number of votes for the Second Amendment. Two is to have enough margin to repeal Obamacare. The former is easier than the latter, though some Democratic senators might be able to have their arms twisted to vote for cloture in the latter case if they lose big again in 2012.