Stromata Blog

A New Road A-Building?

Why do we have to use storm metaphors for the Republican election victory? Storms are destructive. I prefer to think of the outcome as a construction project that came in ahead of time and under budget, like the highway rebuilding after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 (California’s last First World accomplishment). Of course, much still must be done. A government is a road that is never finished.

It’s not likely that I have any insights that improve on what’s readily available on the Internet, so the goal of this post is merely to put my own thoughts into order.

Around the dexterosphere, there seems to be universal agreement that the voters wanted to punish Democratic failures more than they wanted to reward the Republican Party. That is the biggest difference between 2010 and 1994. Newt Gingrich’s victory was the triumph of a positive vision. President Clinton had certainly blundered a number of times (Hillarycare, the proposed BTU tax, the income and Medicare tax increases, the “don’t ask, don’t tell” fiasco), but he was intensely unpopular among only a small slice of the public, the economy was in decent, if not superlative, shape, and all foreign policy annoyances seemed to have vanished with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In 2010, close to a majority of voters “strongly disapprove” of the Democratic President’s policies, the economy is making its slowest post-recession recovery ever, America’s position in the world is falling apart, and the Democrats’ signature achievement, health care reform, is widely unpopular. What opposition party couldn’t win under those circumstances?

The trouble with “had enough?” victories is that they don’t last. The most famous was in 1946, when the GOP picked up both the House and the Senate. Two years later, the Democrats won back both houses and kept the Presidency. Repealing wage-price controls, passing the Taft-Hartley Act and ignoring the “Fair Deal” were good for the country but not sufficient to ward off the fatal “Do Nothing Congress” label.

It’s a good thing that very few conservatives seem to harbor illusions about realignment, inevitable future victories and the like, and realize that it isn’t possible to row a boat forward with only one oar. Unfortunately, recognizing a problem isn’t the same as solving it.

The great post-election imponderable is how President Obama will react. Actually, there are two imponderables: What will he try to do, and how competently will he do it? I have no idea of the answer to either question, though I wonder whether a figure with such high self-esteem can be chastened by other people’s defeats. Don’t his party’s losses merely demonstrate how much inferior the rest of them are to The One?

One reason why the Right’s irrational exuberance is restrained is the Republicans’ relatively tepid Senate pickup: probably five seats when the consensus forecast was seven or more. True, the consensus a year ago was that the Democrats were likely to gain seats, having fewer to defend and generally more favorable terrain. Back then, it was realistic to foresee Republican losses in New Hampshire, North Carolina, Florida (all carried by Obama, two of them open seats, one with a not very popular incumbent) and Louisiana (incumbent hit by scandal), with no offsets except North Dakota and, more doubtfully, Arkansas. But that was then. The expectations game has turned yesterday’s stunning string of victories into today’s disappointment.

Some of the narrow defeats confirm some of my “don’t get cocky” concerns: In Colorado, the Democrats were unenthusiastic, but they dutifully came to the polls, spurred by one of the country’s best GOTV machines. Nevada and Washington are places where fraud is easy. (Nevada has plenty of corruption; Washington doesn’t have a secret ballot.) It’s noteworthy that, outside the epicenters of ballot finagling (Clark and King Counties), Republicans did well, gaining a House seat in each state (possibly two in Washington if Joe Koster’s 400 vote margin holds up in the 2nd District).

The major lesson of the Senate races, though, is a familiar one: the importance of recruiting top-flight candidates. This election cycle was challenging for Republican Senate recruiters, because prospects were so gloomy at the start. Only a few formidable candidates were willing to take the risk. Thus the GOP wound up playing its second string. Ken Buck is a great guy (and a better candidate than Jane Norton would have been), but state’s attorney in Greeley isn’t exactly a high profile position, nor are campaigns in the “good old boy” corner of Colorado the ideal preparation for a statewide race. In Nevada, Brian Sandoval could have demolished Harry Reid, but that wasn’t obvious when he decided to run for governor instead, leaving the Senate primary field to three fairly weak choices. In New York, Republicans couldn’t even find a serious candidate against blue-dog-turned-lapdog Kirsten Gillibrand.

Good candidates aren’t everything, even in what turned out to be a generally good year. That brings us to the cycle’s most seriously awful result: California – yesteryear the engine of American economic growth and a cornerstone of Republican election strategy; today a Democratic bastion with, not coincidentally, a verging-on-Third-World economy. Political historians will get many a book out of accounting for this trajectory. My own tentative opinion is that the principal agents were Pete Wilson’s elevation of immigration to the status of a defining issue, a gambit that saved his RINO-ish administration at the cost of disaffecting the state’s fastest growing group of voters, and the legislative reapportionment after the 2000 census, which gerrymandered into office an unbreakable Democratic majority whose members had nothing to fear but primary opposition from left-wingers and creatures of the public employees’ unions. The latter condition may not continue, since the next redistricting will be in the hands of a (supposedly) nonpartisan panel. That’s a ray of hope. The trouble is, the state may go the way of Greece before a more competitive legislature can come into being, and Voice of Liberalism Past Jerry Brown will stand athwart reform shouting “Stop!”.

Let me end, though, by highlighting an unexpected bright spot: In Iowa, where the Republican “wave” was a mild sloshing, three Supreme Court justices who had discovered a “right” to same-sex marriage in the state constitution lost their retention elections by 55-to-45 margins. Whatever one thinks of homosexual unions as a policy matter, it’s heartening to see the voters reject judicial irresponsibility.

Five Reasons Not to Get Cocky

Around the dexterosphere, the question about the coming election seems to be whether it will be more like 1994 or 1894. Amidst the confident babble, Instapundit has made a trademark out of the whisper, “Don’t get cocky, kid.” It’s not just that cockiness enrages the gods and lacks social grace. This year, in particular, there are solid reasons to doubt that November 2nd will be nearly as happy a day as we hope:

1. It’s not enough to win; you have to win by more than the margin of fraud. That concern ought to be obvious in states like Illinois and Nevada, where a Republican has to run about five percentage points ahead to be sure that he’ll be declared the winner, but it also exists in places like Washington State. There almost all voting is by mail, which means that ballot secrecy is optional and verification of voters’ identity hit-and-miss.

As John Fund has documented in Stealing Elections, electoral crime has never been easier. Which party benefits? Look at which one denies that there’s a problem and relentlessly opposes even such minimal security measures as the presentation of identification at the polls.

2. An unenthusiastic vote counts just as much as an enthusiastic one. The “enthusiasm gap” matters only if the unenthusiastic Democrats don’t cast ballots. They may not, but shepherding them to the polls (or fraudulently subbing for them) is going to be a high and well-financed Democratic priority. It’s true that the “GOTV machine” didn’t work for Republicans in 2006 or 2008, but that’s because a high Republican voter turnout depends crucially on informal networks. When a large proportion of GOP activists stopped urging their friends and neighbors to vote, the “machine” faltered. The Democratic Party relies far more on paid efforts, which can go forward even if morale is low.

3. Money still talks, and Dem money talks louder and smarter. “Democratic Funding Fades” was an encouraging Wall Street Journal headline – and, alas, a misleading one. In the last paragraph, we learn, “The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics said the Democratic Party and candidates had raised a total of $1.25 billion so far for the election. The comparable GOP figure is $1.1 billion.” The Democrats are moaning that their funding margin isn’t as vast as in the last two elections, but a $150 million advantage ain’t peanuts.

What’s more, the Democrats’ money is likely to be more astutely deployed. Most of it comes from labor unions or rich socialists, or is funneled through umbrella organizations. It can be easily directed to the races where it is most needed. The more chaotic, small-donor-based Republican fund raising is inherently inefficient. Money tends to flow to candidates who catch the rank-and-file’s fancy. To take a couple of examples, Christine O’Donnell, whose chances of winning are near to nil, and Michele Bachman, a Minnesota congressman whose chances of losing aren’t much greater, have raised vast sums that could have been better used to, say, bolster Dino Rossi’s close race in Washington State or turn the Oregon Senate race into a contest. So far as I can tell, there are many underfunded Republican candidates in winnable districts this year, while no Democrat who has a chance is going to lose because of lack of cash.

4. If lying didn’t work, nobody would do it. Dishonest Democratic ads have proliferated as the election draws near. The claim that Republican campaigns are being financed from abroad is only the most prominent. On the Right, we tend to see this trend as a sign of desperation, and our hopes rise correspondingly. Bear in mind, though, that most citizens have better things to do than follow politics closely and that ignorance makes them risk-averse. One reason why incumbents usually win is that the fact of incumbency lends them a patina of safety. At least, nothing disastrous has happened on their watch. If there is even a small chance that a challenger will be dramatically worse, e. g., is financially beholden to shadowy foreign benefactors, caution dictates voting against him.

5. The pollsters are skating on stilts. The key to accurate polling is gauging who will and won’t vote. Mid-term elections are notoriously harder to poll than Presidential years, and mistakes in turnout models are more likely this year than in most, because the electorate in 2008 was so atypical. Poll takers seem to be assuming that turnout among the last election’s first-time Obama voters will fall off sharply. That sounds plausible, but it may be that the decline will be almost entirely among those who are now disillusioned and might be inclined to vote Republican in remorse. Those who approve of the One’s performance, for whatever irrational reasons, could be more strongly motivated than the typical voter, old or new. In any event, if the polls are going to be badly wrong, this is the year for them to fail.

Finally, we must keep in mind that even a tremendous victory on November 2nd will not necessarily translate into better government over the next two years. The President has declared that he is looking ahead to “hand-to-hand combat”, the Vice President to “playing hell” (by which I presume he doesn’t mean the card game).

Barack Obama has said that he would not mind being a one-term President. If he is sincere (and no President with a dram of political sense would make such a statement, with its potential of turning him into a self-crippled lame duck, unless he meant it), that was an unmistakable signal that he won’t compromise or triangulate, that he is in fact willing to paralyze the government rather than surrender progressive principles. The President, so long as he doesn’t care about his political standing and retains the backing of one-third plus one of either House of Congress, holds a nuclear weapon: He can threaten to put the United States out of business. No President has ever yet escalated toward Defcon One, but perhaps the inevitable hour has found its man. I have my doubts about whether the rather unimaginative and timid Republican Congressional leadership can devise a deterrent.

Those Wicked Furrin’ Corporations – Who Is They Backin’?

The President has been warning ominously that foreign corporations are trying to “steal our democracy” by contributing to Republican candidates for Congress. The argument is in the pure birther mode: If pro-GOP organizations can’t prove to the satisfaction of the invincibly skeptical that they aren’t illegally funded, they are presumed to be conduits for sinister alien interests.

Interestingly, Open Secrets has compiled statistics on the political contributions made by political action committees of foreign-owned U.S. corporations (legal so long as only American citizens and green card holders donate to the PAC). The flow of funds is directed by corporate management. So far in this cycle, Democratic candidates have collected almost a million dollars more, and no foreign-controlled PAC has given more to the GOP than to the Party of The One.

Easy Come, Easy Go

In an ordinary election cycle, a Senate seat in Delaware would be well out of the Republican Party’s reach. In this extraordinary one, it seemed close to a sure thing. Last night, the party’s rank-and-file decided that they weren’t really interested.

It’s too late to argue about whether Mike Castle is “really a RINO”. A more interesting question is why so many Delaware Republicans turned against him, despite the sure knowledge that the most likely alternative was a Democratic victory. Christine O’Donnell isn’t an especially compelling candidate and didn’t run a brilliant campaign, nor did Rep. Castle suffer from Lisa Murkowski’s fatal overconfidence. The vote was, it appears, anti-Castle more than it was pro-O’Donnell. Not being a close observer of the First State’s politics, I don’t know what the long-serving Congressman did to alienate his party. It must have been a doozy. One can’t help wondering, too, whether he would have been the unbeatable general election candidate that everyone assumed.

Perhaps someone like Senator DeMint did perceive in advance that the Castle walls were made of paper. If so, his push for O’Donnell, which came rather late, may have been slick political calculation, not ideological extremism. He (and Sarah Palin, too) get the credit for an outcome for which they were only marginally responsible.

The conventional wisdom, backed by direly unpromising polls, is that the O’Donnell candidacy is doomed. That’s probably right. The small consolation is that the candidate’s weakness is her dodgy résumé. She doesn’t advocate crackpot positions – if she did, we’d have heard all about them by now – so she won’t do much harm. And, who knows? Just as the horse might learn to sing, so might Delaware voters come to prefer a semi-employable conservative over an ex-bearded Marxist.

Should We Stay Obama’s Course?

In 1980, America elected a charismatic President who embarked on economic policies at least 135 degrees, if not a full 180, opposite those of his predecessor. To cure the stagflation of the 1970’s, Ronald Reagan proposed to combine an anti-inflationary monetary policy with large tax rate reductions. Thanks to a cooperative Federal Reserve Board and a Congress willing to swallow any medicine after the chilblains of the Nixon-Ford-Carter years, he was able to move forward with most of his program.

As the 1982 mid-term elections neared, the economy was still not doing well, and liberals cried that “Reaganomics” was to blame. The President responded with one of his less inspired slogans, “Stay the course.” A witty Democrat countered, “Stay the curse”, and the voters largely agreed. The Democrats expanded their already substantial House majority by 27 seats, to 269 (versus 166 Republicans), a bigger margin that they hold today.

Then history moved on, and it turned out that the Reagan course was the right one. In the very month of the election, the economy began to expand. It continued upward, with two brief and shallow interruptions, for the next 25 years.

Why, then, aren’t the Democrats now arguing, “The country was right to stay the course for President Reagan; we ought to give President Obama the same chance”?

The chief difference between 1982 and 2010 is that parts of Reaganomics were palpably working. The Fed’s restraint had brought inflation down to less than half the 1980 level and heading lower. The economy was not yet growing, but there was a clear reason: Tight money was hindering business expansion, while the Reagan tax cuts weren’t slated to go into effect until 1983 (an unfortunate concession to the Baker-Dole school of “tax collectors for the welfare state”). One could say confidently that the ship was moving in the right direction, even though port was not yet in sight.

In 2010, a trillion dollars in “stimulus” spending and a gargantuan two trillion dollar increase in the monetary base – the Obama Administration’s remedies – have left us with a shaky, stalling recovery. “Unexpected” is now the norm for economic news: an unexpected decline in productivity yesterday, an unexpected increase in the trade deficit this morning. We can expect the unexpected again tomorrow.

When we turn the corner into next year, we also have the expected to fear: a huge tax increase awaits as the tax cuts enacted in 2001 expire. The best that anyone hopes for at this point is to avoid a double dip recession, prolonged deflation and a Japan-like “lost decade”. Japan, it should be noted, tried many Obama-like palliatives after the collapse of its asset bubble: “stimulus” spending, near-zero interest rates, higher taxes. None of them worked very well.

At this point, the Administration’s friends don’t claim that staying on their course will bring us to a happy haven. Their case is reduced to the assertion – a counterfactual that can be neither proved nor refuted – that different policies would have made conditions worse. The only reason to believe that, so far as I can discern, is on the basis of blind, unwavering faith.

The physicians at the court of Louis XIV of France routinely prescribed bleeding and purging for their patients, with deleterious effects on the life expectancy of the higher nobility. Perhaps, in place of the spirit of Dr. Fagon, it is time to give the American body economic an interval free of rising taxes and rising spending, in which to heal itself.

Further reading: Peter Wehner, “In Bush v. Obama, Bush Wins in a Rout”
Matt Welch, “The Endless Bummer”
N. Gregory Mankiw, “Crisis Economics”
J. D. Foster, “Another Recession, Really?”
Michael Barone, “Obama’s State Capitalism: A Failure of Modesty”
Washington Examiner, “Time to Admit Obamanomics Has Failed”

Defeat Isn’t Really an Orphan

What happens is that everybody tries to foist paternity on somebody else. David Frum has earned a high degree of conservative odium (more than he deserves for a mere misjudgment of the political tides) by arguing that the enactment of Obamacare was a “Republican Waterloo”, for which the benighted GOP leadership’s obstinate refusal to bargain with the Obami is to blame. I must say that an alternative history in which the two parties compromise on a not-too-bad health care plan strikes me as rather less likely than one where Bonnie Prince Charlie conquers a Jacobite kingdom in Virginia. At the obvious moment for conciliatory gestures, in the wake of Scott Brown’s Senate victory, the President eschewed any attempt to deal with moderate Republicans and instead pressed ahead with a purely partisan bill. That fact doesn’t suggest that opponents of a government takeover of health care had any option but stubborn resistance.

There isn’t much point in arguing about counterfactuals. More interesting is the question of what kind of defeat we have suffered. It definitely isn’t a Waterloo. After that battle, Napoleon abdicated and the Allies marched unopposed into Paris. President Obama, by contrast, has embarked on another political speaking tour, trying to sell the public on what they’ve already been forced to buy. As the The Weekly Standard observe,

Leaving aside the injustice to Napoleon of comparing Obama to him, the better analogy is Borodino.

Napoleon invaded Russia in June of 1812. On September 7 of that year, the Grande Armée under Napoleon’s command attacked the Russian army near the village of Borodino. Napoleon won the battle, the greatest of the Russian campaign, but at a terrible cost – about a third of his soldiers were killed or wounded. The Russian army was not destroyed, and while Napoleon occupied an abandoned Moscow a week later, the French army was never the same. It soon had to begin its disastrous winter retreat from Russia, and Napoleon finally did meet his Waterloo almost three years later.

Last night’s victory was the culmination of Obama’s health care effort, which has been his version of Napoleon’s Russia campaign. He won a short-term victory, but one that will turn out to mark an inflection point on the road to defeat, and the beginning of the end of the Democratic party’s dominance over American politics. Last night was Obama’s Borodino. Obama’s Waterloo will be November 6, 2012.

In the course of losing the battle, the opponents of Obamacare won the fight for public opinion, forged a bipartisan coalition, and left a large part of the Democratic “army” in positions where they face defeat in detail in this year’s elections. Just how little the President won can be seen by looking at the fathers of this famous victory.

The first and most crucial father was the Democrats’ willingness to disregard public opinion and procedural niceties. The first step, one that has received less attention than it deserves, was the decision to ignore the Constitution and Senate precedents by allowing Paul Kirk, whose term ended the moment the polls closed in Massachusetts, to continue voting in the Senate. That breach of the rule of law may not be justiciable, but it was flagrant. Without that faux vote, Obamacare would have died in the upper chamber.

The second father was Bart Stupak, who preferred to be an unemployed progressive rather than a pro-life Congressman. It’s obvious in retrospect that Rep. Stupak and his band of ostensibly anti-abortion Democrats was always ready to be summoned when Nancy Pelosi needed them. The feebleness of their excuse for abandoning their soi disant principles – a meaningless executive order – is all the proof one needs. What’s significant is that the Speaker’s position was so shaky that she had to call on this reserve. From the strategic point of view, the “pro-lifers” were a useful Democratic asset, making it possible to contend that the party wasn’t wholly dedicated to the aims of NARAL. That asset had to be sacrificed in order to get the deciding votes.

The third, ironic father was the President’s own weakness. In the days before the House vote, he pleaded with progressive Congressmen to save his Presidency by going along with what most of them regarded as a milk-and-water brand of socialism. They dutifully propped him up. This is no Bonaparte, but a roi faineant, paraded at the head of an army he has no capacity to lead.

Repeal!

The Coming Torricelli Maneuver in Illinois

Let me be the first to predict it: Just before the deadline for putting the ballot into final form, Alexi Giannoulias will withdraw from the Illinois Senate race, and the Democratic bosses will name Dan Hynes, who came within a fraction of a percent of winning the gubernatorial primary, as their replacement candidate.

Obvious when you think about it, no?

Update (3/4/10): Jennifer Rubin agrees with me.

A Whimper It Is

No one, I imagine, was shocked to learn that the White House’s “compromise” health reform plan is a compromise, as Grace-Marie Turner says, “between two bad bills that are hugely unpopular with the American people”. The new proposal – not formulated in enough detail for its costs to be evaluated by the Congressional Budget Office – borrows from both bills, adds nothing suggested by Republicans except for a few safeguards against Medicare fraud, and offers as its one new idea price controls for health insurance.

The price control proposal is the key evidence that the President has decided that Obamacare will go out with a whimper rather than a bang. No one can seriously argue that establishing a new federal regulatory agency is within the scope of the budget reconciliation process. Since non-germane amendments require 60 Senate votes, which the Democrats don’t have, price controls are won’t survive. As a legislative strategy, bringing them forward is pointless, which is a strong indicator that the President doesn’t expect a vote to take place.

This ploy is a transparent continuation of the Administration’s effort to shift attention from the Democrats’ unpopular health care schemes to that favorite populist target, greedy insurance companies. We’ll hear nonstop excoriations of the industry, inspired by the hope that the next election can be turned into a referendum on AIG, Anthem and Blue Cross rather than the pitiful ineptitude and radicalism of the Democratic Party.

Well, it’s a plan – and it delays the destruction of American medicine by at least another year.

A Bang or a Whimper?

After Massachusetts elected a new Senator whose main campaign plank was a promise to be the decisive vote against Obamacare, the scheme seemed destined to end with a whimper. The President would “pivot” to “jobs, jobs, jobs”, and a government takeover of health care would be put off until after some future election.

Now the whisper goes that the Obami want to end with a bang. Next Thursday comes a “health care summit” that, judging by present indicators, will be designed to showcase a new bill negotiated in secret by Congressional Democrats and the White House. After Republicans refuse to go along, the Dems will proceed to try to push the measure through via “reconciliation”.

If that is really the Democrats’ strategy, it shows all the acumen of the Charge of the Light Brigade. First, at a time when, as John Fund puts it, “Democratic incumbents are running scared and the fear factor is only intensifying”, the chances of again rallying a House majority behind highly unpopular legislation aren’t very promising.

Second, passing the bill and signing it into law won’t automatically make it popular. Turning public opinion around wouldn’t be impossible, but the bill’s proponents start about 12 runs behind in the ninth inning.

The reconciliation gambit, if played, would be a desperate move by a President who has no reason to be desperate. No matter how often the White House repeats “health care crisis”, there is only a health care problem, one that has arisen over a period of decades, will be only slightly worse tomorrow than it is today, and does not necessitate emergency measures. One might contrast Iraq in late 2006, when it appeared that the American public’s patience with the war was on the verge of collapse. President Bush had to either act boldly and rapidly or acquiesce in an American defeat. President Obama can leave health care for his second term without dire consequences.

Since the “bang” is so patently foolish, my guess is that we will see a “whimper”. That will leave unexplained why the President’s men have been talking up reconciliation. Do they have a cunning plan, possibly involving provoking a split with the Angry Left and a post-Obamacare flurry of triangulation? Or, yet more cunning, does the President hope to lose control of Congress and be free to campaign against Republican “obstructionists” for the two years leading up to his reelection bid? Or are the Obami just delusional? We shall see.

Hebdomas Mirabilis

Any political analyst who had known a week ago that the Massachusetts Senate election would draw 75 percent of the ballot total of the 2008 Presidential election would also have known that Martha Coakley was going to win by at least ten points. On the other hand, one who had heard from an angel that Republican Scott Brown would get half the union vote – well, he would have converted to atheism.

Winning an election in Massachusetts would have delighted folks like me even if Boston had been shut down by blizzards, turnout had been the lowest in history, the entire Republican vote had come from suburban businessmen, and candidate Brown had campaigned as a RINO. What actually happened is beyond delightful.

What’s more, the surprising voters of Massachusetts threw the Democratic Party’s plans for the nationalization of health care into a tailspin. It wasn’t just that Harry Reid lost his sixtieth vote for cloture. All of a sudden, quite a few of his Senate and House colleagues noticed that Obamacare isn’t a popular cause. They now wish that it would go away. Yet the President has bound himself to this stake and cannot flee. Thus his party finds itself in a dilemma: Pressing ahead risks driving moderates into their opponents’ arms; giving up risks demoralizing liberals and miring themselves in impotence.

Then, the day after the “Massachusetts miracle”, the Supreme Court held that a movie denouncing Hillary Clinton has as much First Amendment protection as Debbie Does Dallas. A few liberals agreed; the ACLU had filed an amicus brief supporting the film makers. Most were appalled. The President issued a statement that sounded not unlike a Southern governor in 1954 calling for massive resistance to Brown v. Board of Education.

Whatever happened to maximalist interpretations of Constitutional rights? Where are the liberals who have instructed us that the Bill of Rights is more important than public safety, even if terrorists must go free and Americans’ lives be placed in jeopardy? One might almost suspect that their devotion to liberty stops the instant that liberty interferes with the forward march of progressivism.

Also this week, the UN’s Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, the Nobel Prize winning outfit that lobbies relentlessly for the economic strangulation of the Western world, confessed that one of the alarming predictions in its latest report – that the Himalayas are warming so fast that their glaciers will be melted within 25 years – was nothing but junk science. True, it was just one error, but falsus in uno, falsus in multis. Why shouldn’t we wonder whether the IPCC’s “science” is similarly slipshod elsewhere?

Just coincidentally, the United Nations waived the first “deadline” set by the Copenhagen climate change conference, the one that President Obama dropped in on so that he could enjoy a second great triumph in that fine city. In the words of the pertinent UNocrat, “You could describe it as a soft deadline.” Sort of like the ones that the Administration periodically issues to Iran.

Which reminds me that today, January 22, 2010, is another “soft deadline”. By no later than today, the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison was supposed to be shuttered. Happily, keeping that commitment proved beyond a former community organizer’s executive abilities.

One final bit of good news for the Right cheers me less: Air America has run out of money and fallen silent. I’ll hold my applause for two reasons. First, its financial backers may now channel their money in ways that will do more harm. (Washington Post, “Since last summer, Air America has been heard in the Washington area on WZAA (1050 AM). Its audience has been so small that Arbitron, which compiles radio ratings, was unable to detect any listeners for WZAA during several weeks in December.”)

Second, “Freedom of speech makes it much easier to spot the idiots”, and Air America was a water cooler around which the idiots gathered. Life will now be harder for snarky conservatives in search of left-wing imbecilities to lampoon.

Yet, despite that, it was a pretty good week.

Lessons from Massachusett(e)s

It’s been a while. First, I was busy with “real life”. Then I felt overwhelmed by the quantity of news that had piled up while I wasn’t paying attention. Then I had the horrible presentiment that if I wrote a single word about the Massachusetts special election, Scott Brown would be fatally jinxed.

The first two are still considerations, but the last is no longer a big worry, as by my rough calculation Marcia Murtha Monica Martha Coakley needs 115 percent of the remaining ballots in order to take the lead. Here, then, are the lessons that I gather from this more than astounding result:

Mrs. Coakley ran a pretty inept campaign, and the Official Progressive Line is already that her flaws are to blame for the outcome – nothing to do with Obamacare, the limp reaction to the undiebomber, cap-and-tax, the prospect of a KSM trial in New York et al. But that convenient spin leaves one big question unanswered: Why did Marcitha turn into a bumbler? She looked like a pretty smooth operator when she swept the Democratic primary. Did a GOP agent then slip stupidity pills into her white wine?

No, what undermined the Coakley campaign was the need to stand up as the proponent of an Administration that has sharply diverged from what it promised a year ago. As soon as voters – even Massachusetts voters who have been sending Kennedys to the Senate for over half a century – thought about the nationalization of health care and the treatment of enemy combatants as criminals entitled to Miranda warnings, what was there for a party line Democrat to do but flail? A different candidate would have flailed in different directions (presumably not picking quarrels with Curt Schilling or misspelling the commonwealth’s name), but it simply wasn’t possible to run a competent-looking race under such circumstances. Creigh Deeds, another hopeful who sailed through the primary, had the same insurmountable challenge.

The form that the flailing took was striking – and a bit disturbing. There were two elements: first, the personal invective (most shockingly evident in a flyer accusing Mr. Brown of wanting hospitals to turn away rape victims); second, the sharp left turn. In the final weekend, the Democrats, most notably the President himself, didn’t so much as try to present a case for their health care scheme. All their rhetoric was aimed at fat cat bankers and their evil bonuses. No effort to win over the center; just non-stop agitprop.

If that is how the President and his party intend to fight the next election, we’re in for a very long, exasperating year. The only consolation will be the size of the Republican majorities in the 112th Congress.

Tidbits: As of 10:27 p.m. EST, according to the Associated Press, the vote tally was complete throughout the state, except for Paxton’s one precinct and 32 of Cambridge’s 33. I guess those Harvard fellas have trouble counting.

Scott Brown carried 62 percent of the vote in Braintree. John Adams is standing up and cheering in his grave.

Election Spin

Almost everything that can be said about last Tuesday’s elections has already been published somewhere, so my reflections are unlikely to win a prize for originality. Still, for what they’re worth:

The most obvious cautionary note is that the world won’t remain static between today and November 2, 2010, much less November 6, 2012. While an optimist will recall that in 1993 and 2005 New Jersey and Virginia foreshadowed triumphs by the out-of-power party, one must not forget the counter-example of 2001, when Democratic wins in both states foreshadowed nothing at all.

One interesting way to view the election results is as a continuation of trends that were interrupted by the Republican collapses in 2006 and 2008. If we “gray out” those years, we see Virginia moving steadily into the GOP camp, New Jersey as a place where Republicans can be competitive under favorable circumstances, New York as increasingly hopeless, California as frozen by Congressional gerrymandering. Maybe all that is happening is that our political universe is regressing to its pre-2006 mean.

And why shouldn’t it? Undisturbed by recent perturbations is the fact that 40 percent of the adult population (and presumably a larger percentage of likely voters) are self-identified conservatives, outnumbering soi disant liberals by almost two-to-one. So long as that remains the case – and there’s no sign that the current liberal ascendancy is altering it – the right-of-center party has immense resilience, no matter how badly it goes off the tracks now and then. With hardly any special effort on the GOP’s part, suburban voters seem to be returning to it, while Barack Obama’s ability to spur voters to the polls has waned. It may be that all the theorizing about how to revive the Republican Party is beside the point; revival may take care of itself, and the real question will be how to prolong it.

Leaving that thought aside for the moment, let’s look at a couple of the prescriptions for revival. One is ostentatious moderation. Its advocates attribute the New Jersey and Virginia outcomes to Chris Christie’s and Bob McDonnell’s embrace of the center (so what if McDonnell was denounced during the campaign as a troglodyte who yearned to repeal the 20th Century?), the loss in NY-23 to Doug Hoffman’s refusal to let Dede Scozzafava do the same.

There is, however, no need to speculate about how well the “me too” strategy would work. Since the mid-1990’s, New York has furnished a natural experiment. George Pataki tried to govern as a conservative reformer; the state Republican hierarchy stultified his efforts; GOP fortunes have steadily declined, sinking both when the national party was successful and when it wasn’t. Failure in New York seems to me a poor recommendation for the “moderate” direction.

On the other end of the spectrum are the more enthusiastic tea partiers, who imagine that an upstart libertarian-populist movement can engender a viable third party. One may hope that NY-23 has sobered them up a bit. I rooted for Doug Hoffman, gave money to his campaign and am disappointed that he lost. His defeat shows, alas, how hard it is for a right-of-center minor party candidate to prevail in a three-way race. Even the long-established Conservative Party couldn’t provide a major party’s “ground game” and financial resources. As the Republican nominee, Hoffman would probably have won comfortably. As an out-of-party insurgent, he only came close. A “Tea Party” starting from an organizational zero would be an asterisk.

Finally, there are those who think that the only way to “save” the Republican Party is by trotting out shiny new gimmicks to entice the middle class back to our side. For their benefit, I note that Messrs. McDonnell and Christie didn’t beguile the electorate with innovative ideas. They didn’t affirmatively reject creative thinking; it just wasn’t essential to victory. The trouble with believing that one has to come up with something new and brilliant is that the former is a lot easier than the latter.

A Note to Alaska Political Fundraisers

Anybody who runs against Lisa Murkowski can count on a contribution from me. The candidate can be Republican, Democrat, Green, Independence, Libertarian, Communist or Fascist. Just not being Lisa is sufficient.

I make this ecumenical offer, because no one with Senatrix Murkowski’s lack of grace deserves to hold public office. Her comment on Sarah Palin’s decision to resign as governor was as classless as they come, to wit, “I am deeply disappointed that the Governor has decided to abandon the State and her constituents before her term has concluded.”

Sure, she was “disappointed”. And, sure, stepping down from office is akin to “abandoning” the State.

I don’t imagine that Governor Palin has much of a political career ahead of her. She’ll be popular, at least for a while, on the right-of-center speaking circuit, but it’s not likely that she’ll escape the “quitter” label, and in time other conservatives will edge into the spotlight. The Republican Presidential nominee in 2012 will be either Mitt Romney or somebody who isn’t yet on anyone’s list (and will, I fearlessly predict, carry forty or more states). At best, Sarah Palin will be Secretary of Energy in his administration.

By then, I hope, Lisa Murkowski will be a private citizen in Anchorage. I’ll do what I can to help her get there.