The point of the caucus system is to give party activists a voice in how the party’s business and nominations are carried out.

Of course, it lowers the definition of “party activist” so far that virtually anyone can stand up and be counted.  In the GOP, it means you spend maybe ninety minutes (sixty in my precinct) taking care of the most trivial party business possible – electing precinct officers, voting on resolutions – and, finally, the endorsement straw polls.

In the DFL, of course, it means that you can show up, cast your ballot, and go out and get a latte before The Practice is on.

But the key point is that they – and the various types of primaries that other states use to determine their party nominees – are the parties’ mechanisms of publicly selecting nominees, courting public involvement, and carrying out their public business.

The other night, as people on both sides of the aisle noted, caucuses were flooded.  On the DFL side, they were flooded with vote ‘n dash voters.  On the GOP side, caucus sites had plenty of people show up who wanted to do the same; some left in a huff when they were told they actually had to stay and conduct Republican Party business; others – many, many others – stayed and participated, in the biggest turnout in recent memory.

It’s for the vote ‘n dash voter – the people with the short attention spans who want to make a simple, black ‘n white ideological statement and get out – that the Strib comes out today:

After more than a quarter-million Minnesota voters swamped Tuesday’s DFL and GOP precinct caucuses and encountered long lines, traffic jams, makeshift ballots and other logistical headaches, some wondered Wednesday if a presidential primary might be a better way to pick candidates.

Meanwhile, numerous caucus-goers, many of them first-timers who found the process daunting and frustrating, vented on blogs and complained to party officials. Some called for a switch to primaries.

On Wednesday, two DFL legislators introduced a bill that would establish a traditional primary…That kind of reaction prompted Sens. Ann Rest, DFL-New Hope, and Linda Scheid, DFL-Brooklyn Park, to announce their plan to decouple the presidential contest from the caucus system by the next presidential election cycle. Their bill would allow voters to participate in a primary similar to a general election without requiring them to be involved in the caucus process now run by political parties.

Rest said party caucuses would take place at a later date. “We are always looking for ways to make participating in public life easier and more accessible,” she said.

If a presidential primary becomes law, “they can put it on the calender if they want … but it will remain a beauty contest for us,” he said.

Let’s put a cork in this deeply-stupid idea.

Over at True North, the theme is amazement.

Reading the results from caucus after caucus, the point is clear; Republicans turned out in droves. In record numbers. Numbers like nobody’s ever seen. And it wasn’t just the hordes of Ronulans that some had predicted (although they were very much in evidence).

And while people turned out for the Tic caucuses as well, there’s a difference; at DFL caucuses, people can “vote ‘n dash”, causing one DFL stalwart to note on a Saint Paul discussion group:

> On another note, what I found in our precinct, when the dust settled is that [the lopsided Obama blowout] would be reversed when you looked at who stayed to actually caucus and agree to the heavy lifting through to November.
> Listen, if we want to switch to a primary state, then that is fine. But if we’re going to be a caucus state, we should caucus and the straw polls and binding ballots should be the last order of business, not the first.
I’m afraid a large number of our National delegation will have to plug their nose* to cast their binding ballots, since there won’t be any committed supporters of the candidate that are actually delegates.

In the meantime, every single GOP vote in that crushing onslaught of turnout was from someone who stayed the distance, voted on party business and resolutions and all the stuff that normally bores those with short enough attention spans to actually need to be Tics.

I’ve been monitoring a Saint Paul Politics discussion group.

It’d seem that turnout at DFL caucuses was incredibly heavy – and the Obama vote was staggering, with blowouts even worse than the one he notched statewide.

Anecdotally, most of these new voters seemed to be fairly clueless; many of them just dropped in, cast their ballots, and left (legal in the DFL, not in the GOP, although many tried).

Further evidence of my theory that Obama is the next Jesse Ventura; he’ll draw a slew of ignorant, clueless “voters” with his vaporous, vacuous “message” who would otherwise not have the faintest idea where the polls are. It’s interesting that the raw numbers of voters dropped in 2002. with Ventura out of the race.

Which, to some, is a good thing.  But I have to ask – are uninformed, clueless “voters” good for the country?
They’re good for the DFL and the Tics, obviously; a lot of Republicans, myself included, started as Democrats until they got a clue.

Well, we’ll see.

I gave a brief speech last night at the District 66 Caucus in Saint Paul.  The fun part?  I gave it to a room that was vastly more full than in previous years.  It could have been even more full, if only the large number of people who just wanted to vote and leave had stuck around.
I was also a precinct convener.  My precinct (Ward Four, Precinct 15) drew about double the people that it did four years ago, and six times as many as two years ago.  And – true to form – my district got done before anyone else!

We had a solid turnout across the board, but even more university kids.  We also had two observers, international Fulbright scholarship students from the Humphrey Institute, a fellow from Burma and another from Georgia (Tbilisi, not Atlanta), and no, he wasn’t there because he mistook “Caucuses” for “Caucasus”.

In the straw poll, Ron Paul won my precinct, with McCain a close second – but, I’m gratified to say, Romney did rather better statewide, crushing McCain by over 2-1:

While Romney racked up big numbers in the Twin Cities, the range of support for him in the state was broader. In central Minnesota, he was winning by more than a 2-1 margin over McCain in Sherburne County with two-thirds of the precincts reporting. He had a nearly 3-1 margin over McCain in Isanti County.

The Strib – which, like most of the media, thinks Mac is just peachy – sniffs:

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney owes much of his Minnesota victory to the peculiarities of the state’s caucus system, which rewards candidates who have a passionate, partisan following and punishes those who don’t.

And that is completely fitting; it’s a party caucus, not a general election.  It’s a distinction that seems lost on a lot of people.

Unsurprisingly to me, Obama did very well in the Minnesota Tic primary; I’d like to have been a fly on the wall of one of their caucuses.  I wonder if they start with group calisthenics?

Truth to be told, I’d hoped to be sitting here right now, waiting to head out to caucuses, writing about either Fred Thompson or Rudy Giuliani. They, by a razor-thin margin, topped my short list of candidates for the nomination this year. Fred brought the conservative message; Rudy brought the leadership and the executive experience and the passion and, for all of John McCain’s palaver, the real straight talk in this campaign.

But it was not to be. Fred ran a somnambulent campaign, and Rudy miscalculated and put all his eggs in the Florida basket.

And so the race – to all intents and purposes – is down to John McCain and Mitt Romney – two men who finished very close to the top of my short list for very different reasons, but neither of whom was my top choice.

I don’t “endorse” people, because “endorsement” is something that big, influential institutions do. Dennis Prager and the National Review and even Ed Morrissey can get away wtih “endorsing” candidates. Me – a little basement pajamablogger with 2,000 daily readers? No. But I can tell you what I’m going to do and why, and hope that I convince someone – even one of my readers – to some kind of action; to come out to the caucuses for the same reasons, or even at all; to stiffen the spine of one conservative in what might be a dismal year; to drag even one more person out on a winter Tuesday night to devote it to the cause of pushing conservatism (and, of course, to convince as many of you Democrats as possible to show up for your caucuses, which are being held at the Target Center at 7PM tonight).

I’m going to caucus for Mitt Romney. And in keeping with my election-eve “100 Reasons…” tradition (from the ‘04 and ‘06 General Elections), I’m going to make a big list. Maybe not 100 reasons long – that’s more a general election thing – but there are quite a few.

So let’s get started.

1. Because Romney has more executive experience – being the person with whom the buck stops, as opposed to the legislative role of being the person that passes the bucks around – than the entire Tic field, with McCain thrown in for good measure.  Senators are like nagging passive-aggressive relatives; Governors – the good ones – are the ones that actually makes things happen.
2. For all the left’s talk of “inclusion” and “Getting things done”, Mitt is the only presidential candidate who’s actually had to reach “across the aisle” and get things done.
3. Mitt has always adapted; he’s become what he’s had to become. I commented yesterday that Romney isn’t really the kind of candidate people can get passionate about. But I think he can make a game stab at it.
4. Yes, he’s changed his mind on some things.  Like me, he’s changed them in the right direction. 
5. He has more economic common sense in his left index finger than the entire Tic slate – Madame Putin and O’Kennedy and Silkypony to boot – have in their entire focus-grouped bodies.
6. Mitt has an approach to the war that’s straight out of Max Boot and Robert Kaplan and Patrick Nagl.  He’d reinforce success – metaphorically and literally (he’d increase the size of the military – a much-needed boost). 
7. He favors and supports school choice.  Putin and Obie are in the pocket of the teachers’ union; every charter school in the country will look like the Branch Davidian compound whey they’re done.

Mitt is far from perfect.  And maybe the media’s right; maybe Mac’s got it in the bag.

So I’ll be sending Mac and his people a message tonight; there are a lot of us out there – the ones he’s been badmouthing for most of the past eight years, who will get behind him if he gets the nomination.  But tonight, he’s gotta earn it – he’s gotta meet us halfway. 

If he picks TPaw as his running mate, maybe the Governor will tell him the story of the ’02 MNGOP convention.  It’ll be a good lesson to the Senator.

One of the frustrating things about Obama (and the thing that may well earn him the Tic nomination, if not the presidency) is the fact that he is so vaporous on the issues.  What does Obie believe, really, behind all of that rhetoric about “change”?  Well, you have to do some digging.

And Clayton Cramer has – and finds that behind Obie’s palaver, he’s lying about his approach to the Second Amendment:

It isn’t just that he supports bans on semiautomatics, and more possession and purchase restrictions. He claims that he wants more laws to keep guns out of the inner cities. Why? Does he think black people lack the sense that white people have?

The roots of gun control in America have always been racist; America’s first gun ban, in the late 1860’s in south Texas, was aimed at disarming blacks, many of whom were Union Army veterans who gave the early Klansmen a lot of nasty bloody noses.  The resurgence of gun control in the late sixties was a knee-jerk response to inner-city crime (and the RFK assassination) – and to the left and the media, “inner city” is always a PC synonym for “people of color”.

Obama may be able to triangulate on faith – but he’ll polish the turd of his anti-gun past into a perception of being gun-friendly over my dead body.  And I think I can name about four million NRA members who’ll go along with me.

One of the things that’s been blocking single-payer health-care in this country – aside from the fact that it’s hideously expensive and, cherry-picked stats aside, tends to leave nations with lowest-common-denominator healthcare – is the hideous cost.

Madame Putin Hillary has an approach to that: hold a gun to peoples’ heads and make them pay:

The New York senator has criticized presidential rival Barack Obama for pushing a health plan that would not require universal coverage. Clinton has not always specified the enforcement measures she would embrace, but when pressed on ABC’s “This Week,” she said: “I think there are a number of mechanisms” that are possible, including “going after people’s wages, automatic enrollment.”

This – along with her play during the era of Hillarycare! to turn the Tic party apparatus into a sort of home-grown Stasi to build dossiers on Hillarycare!’s opponents – should make all you Democrats who’ve been yammering about “choice” for the past thirty years (to say nothing of all you “Ashkkkroft Libertarians”) rise up in arms against your presumptive nominee.

Shouldn’t it?

I don’t believe in Karma – but I do believe what goes around comes around.

Maybe it’s my Scandinavian roots, but I’ve always tried to shy away from “overconfidence” – especially the great proto-American injunction against “counting your chickens before they’re hatched”.

So – while I’ve come to regard John McCain as a better option for the GOP nomination than, say, Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul (I’ll get behind him. anyway), I gotta confess; I heard Mac’s statement that he assumes he’ll get the nomination, and thought “this is the sort of thing that people unwittingly say that gets ’em into the history books”.

So Zogby shows Mitt up by eight in California, now. We can’t call it a “turnaround”, since a smallish fraction of the delegates have actually been allocated (that’s what tomorrow’s all about!).  And Mac may well be right, and it might not be the worst thing in the world.

But it reinforces the lesson; if you’re a Republican and you’re reading this, you need to show up at your caucus or primary tomorrow if you’re in one the the Super Di Duper Tuesay states (and Minnesota is one of them) and get your two cents into the works.

Find your precinct caucus, and hire a sitter, and be there.

True North has the best wrapup of Minnesota Caucus information anywhere, plus a caucus finder.   Read ’em, use ’em, be there.

I went to check out this piece, by ultra-left Chomsky acolyte George Lakoff, intending to bury him, not praise him.

And I still might do that.

But there’s a teaching moment in here, too. 

Lakoff, by way of attacking Hillary and her attempt to pillory Obama on “the issues”, discusses something I wrote about last week re the video of Obama talking about Ronald Reagan.

Because while conservatives’ admiration of Reagan is obvious (and in some extremes, dysfunctional), you can learn a lot from a diametric opponent’s reasoned analysis.

In Thinking Points, the handbook for progressives that the Rockridge Institute staff and I wrote last year, we began by analyzing Ronald Reagan’s strengths as a politician. According to his chief strategist, Richard Wirthlin, Reagan realized that most voters do not vote primarily on the basis of policies, but rather on (1) values, (2) connection, (3) authenticity, (4) trust, and (5) identity. That is, Reagan spoke about his values, and policies for him just exemplified values. He connected viscerally with people. He was perceived as authentic, as really believing what he said. As a result, people trusted him and identified with him. Even if they had different positions on issues, they knew where he stood. Even when his economic policies did not produce a “Morning in America,” [pfffffft, whatever – Ed.] voters still felt a connection to him because he spoke to what they wanted America to be. That was what allowed Reagan to gain the votes of so many independents and Democrats.

And that’s my big concern about this campaign.  Obama does, indeed, understand Reagan’s technique, although I do believe him to be genuine in his approach.  Unlike Reagan, though, Obama is an inch deep in the experience department, and his policies are (to this conservative) noxious, debilitating and dangerous.  I think – as I noted on the NARN show last Saturday – that Obama has the potential to be the next Jesse Ventura, or Jimmy Carter; a soothing and invigorating personality that draws lots of personality-driven voters to the polls. 

Worse, I think that the GOP nominees suffer by comparison. 

Romney shares values (#1 on Lakoff/Wirthlin’s list) – with most American voters; he’s definitely right on most issues.  But can you honestly say he connects with those undecided, non-political, “Reagan Democrat” voters?  That they look at his CEO hair and his perfect modulation and trust, identify and connect with him?  It’s a question, not a statement.

McCain has obvious crossover appeal – or so the media tells us – but that’s largely because he has crossed over, on so many issues.  He’s cranky, cantankerous – he’s America’s irascible grand-dad.  How does he stack up on  values, connection, authenticity, trust and identity?  I suppose it depends on who you ask. 

Lakoff inserts a bunch of baked wind about conservatism before getting back on point:

The Clintonian policy wonks don’t seem to understand any of this. They have trivialized Reagan’s political acumen as an illegitimate triumph of personality over policy. They confuse values with programs. They have underestimated authenticity and trust.

I wonder – again, asking rather than stating – if the GOP isn’t doing the same.

(Via Joel Rosenberg)

As I’ve noted in many places in several forums and media, I’m going to caucus for Romney, but if JMac wins the nomination, I’ll be right there.

I’ve linked to a fair amount of stuff supporting the more overtly-conservative Romney.

I should point out that Marty Andrade – who’s been an “out” McCain supporter all along – states some very articulate cases for Mac and against Mitt.

Start here, and then go read this.

And he also notes that, after four years of blogging, he’s up for at least another.  That’s a good thing.

Hang in there, Marty.

Jay Reding gives one of the most complete shreddings of Barack Obama out there.

While I’ve complimented Obama’s communication style, it is just that – style. Reding closes that circle:

Ultimately, what makes Obama so troubling is that he’s putting out the political equivalent of junk food. His silky-smooth and tasteful rhetoric is ultimately full of calories, but has no nutritional value. A President must make hard decisions. They must not only talk about “change” but about facing down the real issues that effect the lives of voters. The American public deserves something more than smooth talk—they deserve real and substantive answers. Will Barack Obama continue to govern along the same far-left liberal lines as he has voted in the Senate? How will Barack Obama deal with the threat of terrorism? How will he deal with the impending insolvency of Medicare and Social Security? Talking about “change” is not an answer. Saying “yes we can” is not an answer. The American people deserve real substance, and Senator Obama is feeding us empty calories.

America has an obesity problem – intellectually as well as physically. This nation loves empty calories. Jesse Ventura was an Almond Joy, if you catch my drift – and we all know how that turned out. Obama is like a Three Musketeers bar.

Let’s harness some of that election mania right about now.

For whom are you going to caucus?

Results are not binding on any of the major parties

Yet.

Polinaut reports that Obamapalooza is sold out:

A campaign spokesman says 15 thousand online tickets have been given out and the campaign is expected to give out a few thousand paper tickets. Update — All tix are gone. No tickets are available. I’m told there’s a waiting list of 2,000 people.

Obama is apparently going to throw a sweaty towel into the audience.

Well, that changes everything!

The Republican Convention is going to draw scads of protesters.  Bully for them.

It’s also going to draw scads of arrested (figuratively) adolescents who intend on creating mayhem.  Some of them have been saying in public that their intention is to “shut down Saint Paul” and “stop the convention” and harass delegates outside the convention and generally cause mayhem.  And while I’m willing to write 90% of it off to vainglorious adolescent posturing, rumor has it that it’d be naive to assume that it all is. Very, very naive.

Fortunately, Grace Kelly rides to the rescue.  Kelly – a Saint Paul area 9/11 Truther and DFL spear-carrier – writes for MNBlue, a blog that lost last year’s “Unintentionally Funniest Leftyblog Contest” only because I didn’t allow myself to vote 200 times a day – submits a pledge for your approval:

I propose that everyone involved in the peace parades and peace protests at Republican National Convention (RNC) use the same pledge as the School of the Americas vigil in Georgia.

We will gather together in a manner that reflects the world we choose to create. We will promote an alternative to domination systems by acting with love, respect, mutuality, compassion and acceptance for the interdependence of all life.

We will struggle for a world free from violence, and we will use
actions, words and symbols consistent with this struggle.

We will not use or instigate violence against any person.

We will act with respect for the people and property of the local community.

We will promote the safety of ourselves and others through our
actions and interactions.

We commit to recognize and to work to dismantle all forms of
oppression in our personal relationships, local neighborhoods, globally and with Earth itself.

We will return to our communities with renewed energy to create the peace.(Retyped from a physical copy)

One minor change is in pledge to ensure relevance , the phrase “to close the SOA/WHINSEC” is changed to the more generic “to create peace”.

An alternative is the Pledge to Nonviolence. that all marchers in Birmingham had to sign, before participating in the marches:

Oh, have no fear; since the various Tic factions resemble the Peoples Front of Judea sketch, Kelly actually submits about forty different options for pledges, delving into the semiotics of each in a way that sjdaksd kl,ml;ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
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Oh, crap.  I’m sorry.  I nodded off.  Where was I?

Pledges.  While Kelly (have I mentioned she’s a 9/11 Truther?) does give a small pile of options for pledges to give out, she neglects to tell us how she’s going to get the Black Bloc, the “Youth Against War”, and the other groups that have reported dedicated themselves to mayhem and violence to take, and follow, them.

Note to all you lefties; we know most of you aren’t going to cause any problems, pledge or no.  It’s all those “people” who travel with you that we’re watching.

It’s a metaphor I’m going to beat to death in the coming week and a half. Politics is a tug of war.

And right now, the tug I’m following is within the GOP.

Although my choice for the caucuses was still up in the air as of yesterday, it was going to be between Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. Two good friends and colleagues of mine – Dennis Prager and Ed Morrissey – endorsed Rudy and Mitt, respectively, and for reasons I fully support.

Truth be told, I was planning on caucusing for Giuliani on Super Tuesday. Not “endorsing” Giuliani, because me and my political decisions are of no interest to anyone. But for whatever it’s worth, I was going to take it to the floor for Rudy. He has the combination of executive experience, fiscal conservatism and leadership that I think this nation needs. He’d have needed his feet held to the fire about nominating constructionist judges, of course, and the national media would have done to his personal life as the regional media did to Rod Grams (but, oddly, not Bill Clinton).

But there’s been a change of plan.

I’m a movement conservative first and a Republican second. My goal is to do what it takes to move the party to the right. My prototype for this idea was the 2002 Minnesota Gubernatorial nomination; during the convention, the insurgent candidacy of conservative Brian Sullivan drove pragmatist Tim Pawlenty to the right, enough that after over a dozen ballots he was able to win the nomination and, in November, the general election. I could have, and would have, gotten behind either one, because the alternative, Roger Moe, was too awful to think about.

And so it is this year; John McCain, whatever his sins against conservatism and conservatives, would be better than any of the Tic alternatives. He launched McCain-Feingold, but even the BCRA isn’t as bad as Hillary’s “Fairness Doctrine”; he’s wrong on immigration, but Madame Putin and Barack O’Kennedy would be worse; consulting with Carl Levin on judges is bad, but not as bad as having Levin controlling the president’s actions as he would with either of the Tic contenders. And McCain is right on so many issues; spending (although he needs to get religion on taxes), the war, the Second Amendment, and many more. Perfect is the enemy of good enough – and McCain would not just be the lesser of three evils when stacked up against Madame Putin and O’Kennedy – he’s lesser in the “evil” department by head, shoulders and ankles.

But the general election is nine months away; the convention, seven; Super Di Duper Tuesday, a week and a half. Today is not the time to settle for the lesser of evils; not yet.

So I’ll be caucusing for Romney on Tuesday. I’m going to do my bit to make sure that the media coronation of their pet Republican gets a steep, snarling speed bump, courtest of the right; I’m going to give the Straight Talk Express some straight talk of my own, right into the teeth of the gale, and make damn sure Mac knows that, while I’ll work and donate and vote for him should he come out with the nomination, there is a movement here that he’ll ignore, or antagonize, at his own peril.

You listening, John?

“Bogus” Doug over at True North says:

Seriously, despite the blather, John McCain is no liberal. Neither was (umm… I mean IS… he’s not technically dead. Just pining for the fjords.) Rudy. Neither is Mitt. They’re all merely imperfect in their execution of whatever conservative perfection is supposed to be these days…

…On to Super Tuesday and the Minnesota Caucus… where I shall be politely applauding the cause of the Man from Michigan Utah Massachusetts. But I’m not going to be all lathered up about it. Nor foaming at the mouth if the zeitgeist of my fellows ends up endorsing McCain. Any other result will get the expected mockery of course. But I’ll at least get some entertainment out of it, so even that wouldn’t be a total loss.

Thorley Winston stated a thought-provoking case for JMac last fall – one that coincided with my Road to Damascus Tempe moment at the December 8 debate, where I noticed that Mac does say a lot of the right things. (Thorley – get back to blogging, man!)

Jay Reding (I add emphasis):

Sen. John McCain is an American hero, a man of great personal integrity and someone who has always stood strongly on the side of his country. He often rubs conservatives the wrong way, and his “maverick” image causes much consternation—however, when it comes right down to it a man who agrees with us 80% of the time is better than a woman who represents the worst of American politics and a man whose great rhetoric is but a cover for a fundamental lack of real-world experience. We may have our issues with John McCain, but when it comes down to the basic principles of the party: fiscal conservatism, a strong national defense and strengthening the family, McCain has his heart in the right place.

Conservatives should make their voices heard, and they should continue to push Sen. McCain towards the mainstream of the party as they have on issues like immigration. However, if McCain gets the nomination—and it seems altogether likely that he will—conservatives cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good. John McCain will cut wasteful spending in Washington, defend our troops in Iraq and our war against radical Islamist terrorism and will continue to be a strong voice for respecting human life, born and unborn. He may not be perfect, but he can lead, and we need true leadership in Washington more than anything else.

GeeEmInEm will also be caucusing for Mitt. He promises a post soon; keep checking TvM, since whenever he writes it, it’ll be better than just about anyone else’s take on the subject.

Ed notes:

If Romney wants to build momentum and define the race in binary conservative vs moderate terms, he has to start tonight and get aggressively positive about his credentials. He has only a few days in which he can crowd McCain out of the messaging. If he can’t do that tonight and for the next five days, he will have little chance of prevailing, especially if McCain takes a big delegate lead next week.

What does McCain need to do? He needs to reach out to conservatives. He started last night with a gracious victory speech, but he needs to address the real and honest concerns on policy that conservatives still have with McCain. They need to see McCain promise to go after the Democrats with the same fervor that he went after Republicans over the years, and he has to convince them that he won’t go back on his word on border security and tax cuts. After this debate, he has to make a significant outreach effort, and CPAC would be the best place to do this.

Reynolds:

What I find particularly hard to swallow, though — and this is not Bill’s problem — are the people who say that if Romney doesn’t make it they’ll vote Democratic rather than support McCain because McCain’s not a true conservative. Maybe not, but neither is Romney, and it seems like a strange place to draw the line. Those who hold a special grudge against McCain over immigration or McCain-Feingold are a different case. But again, everybody gets to vote how they want. Just be prepared to live with the results.

More as we get closer to the cauci.

Yesterday, in a thread about the South Carolina primary, commenter “Peevish” wrote in the midst of a tangent about Barack Obama’s appeal to voters…:

Obama, like Reagan, has an extraordinary oratory presence

Interesting point there.

I give speaker points.  My father was a speech teacher; I’ve earned a living from speaking, and had it as a wonderfully-rewarding avocation for almost the past four years.  Winston Churchill is one of my personal idols, if only for his talents as an orator.  Like radio, oratory and communication are skills about which I am pretty remorselessly clinical; I’ll state my admiration for the politicians purely on their communications skills, leaving their actual policies and beliefs out of the mix (for the moment, anyway). 

Bill Clinton, while a poor big-crowd orator, was wonderful at the up-close and personal stuff, and a master at the use of television.  George W. Bush is famously bad at prepared oratory (although he’s had his moments), but is as good at off-the-cuff ad-libbing as anyone in the business.  Paul Wellstone was an odd case; he could be a riveting speaker, as long as he didn’t let his emotions run away with him – then, he’d become a sputtering caricature that reminded one of the bastard love child of Benito Mussolini and Daffy Duck.

Obama is an excellent speaker.  How excellent? 

“Like Reagan?”  Well, he’s good.  Good enough to cajole mainstream Republicans to vote Democrat? We don’t know.  So far, he’s spoken almost exclusively to friendly or benign audiences; campaign appearances, mostly.

Is he good enough to sell conservative values in a state that is, and has been for decades, fundamentally hostile to them?  We don’t know – Obama has never been an executive.

Is he good enough to rally a nation behind a vision that goes against a congressional majority?   We don’t know – he’s never been an executive.  His (short) legislative career has focused on voting on other peoples’ stuff, not making an intractable mass of enemies tractable.

Good enough to rouse several nations full of slaves to hope for freedom, against not only the nations’ own governments and his own legislative opponents but elements of his own administration?  We don’t know; Obama has never faced a situation anything like that. 

Could Obama do any of these things – things at which Reagan excelled?  Perhaps – but there’s nothing in the record to tell us one way or the other.  It’s said when Cicero spoke people said, “Wow, what a wonderful speaker Cicero is,” but when Demosthenes spoke they said, “let’s go pants Phillip of Macedonia.” (or words to that effect). 

Can Barack Obama get Democrats to come out and vote for him?  Sure.

Can he get Republicans to go pants Philip of Macedonia?

As good a communicator as he is, that remains to be seen.

Jay Reding, quoting Dick Morris, calls Obama’s South Carolina victory over the weekend “pyrrhic“.

Morris:

By challenging Obama for the black vote – by promising to go door to door in South Carolina in minority neighborhoods, for example – Bill is highlighting the question: Will Obama carry the black vote? Of course, he will. He leads, 4 to 1, among African-Americans now.

But by making that the central question, Obama’s South Carolina victory will be hailed as proof that he won the African-American vote. Such block voting will trigger the white backlash Sen. Clinton needs to win.

Reding:

This loss certainly doesn’t look good for Hillary Clinton—she got creamed by Obama—but ultimately time (and the byzantine Democratic primary process) is on her side. The Clintons are masters of political hardball, as well as divide-and-conquer politics. They know full well that all they need to do is split the vote along racial lines and they can win—and it’s not like black voters will cross over and vote Republican in the general election.Obama won a major victory tonight—but it could end up being a Pyrrhic one. Obama must broaden his appeal beyond racial and class lines, and so far he’s been unable to do it. The demographic tide going into Super Tuesday doesn’t favor him, and while he’s dinged Clinton’s armor twice now, he’s yet to slay the beast.

Which is, I think, a good thing.

As I said on the show on Saturday – Obama is my nightmare scenario. Not because he’s presidential material, by any means – he’s a state legislator with not even an entire term in the Senate.

But if Obie wins the nomination, America may well go through the nightmare Minnesota suffered from 1998 to 2002, when thousands of the politically-apathetic turned out to vote in another fantasy based on “change”, Jesse Ventura. Obie is trying – in some ways successfully – to capture the JFK vibe, all “change” and youth and upsetting the establishment which he is, conveniently, a part and product of. Like Minnesota during its four year nightmare, we’d get an executive with no executive experience (actually, even less than Ventura, who was at least a one-term mayor of sleepy bedroom suburb), peddling phony “change” to an audience that only has to buy the con once for the damage to be done.

If the Tics nominate Hillary, the fantasy element is gone, and we can have a race based on the issues, the facts, and of course Hillary’s whopping negatives.

My emerging hypothesis; that Hillary is the Tic Bob Dole. She’s someone whose main impetus to run is that she wants the job.

Yesterday – among many other times – I wrote about the need for conservatives to stand up for their beliefs (and, more importantly, stick with them; work for them; get involved, even tangentially, in the political process).  This, I firmly believe; now – caucus time – is the time to get out to your precinct cauci and speak up for conservatism.  Spit fire.  Exude brimstone.  Get real conservative candidates, planks and ideals endorsed.  If you’re elected as a delegate or alternate, go to the convention and do more of the same.  And so on and so forth, up the party food chain, to the State convention.

Everyone with me so far?

Still, that’s kinda the easy part; although conservatives and Republicans tend not to be “go hang out and do political things” people the way Tics are (we tend to have jobs and families and stuff),  a lot of us came to conservatism for deeply idealistic reasons.

And let’s be honest; it’s a hard time to be an idealistic conservative.  MOBster and True North contrib Kevin Ecker – so conservative he actually laughs at the “Daisy Ad” – writes:

Starting in 2003, many conservatives were becoming extremely disgusted with the Republican party. We had the Presidency and we had Congress, yet none of the conservative agenda was being accomplished. Instead we had the same inept leadership and massive spending. While conservatives did bite their tongue in 2004, they decided to express their disgust in 2006. Many didn’t show up, others made protest votes, the result being horrible losses across the spectrum for the GOP.

That’s a tough one for me.

Back in 1994, in the wake of the ’94 Crime Bill and the GOP’s cave-in, I “expressed my disgust” for the GOP by leaving the party.  I sat out the “contract for America”, and joined the big-L Libertarians.   Standing for absolute principle was important to me, then.

As it is now, actually.

I left the Libertarians in 1998 because relentless purism never won an election – not even for Ronald Reagan – and never changed anyone’s history (at least not in a good way).  I figured the best way to enact the liberarian-conservatism I believed in was to engage in the long, patient slog within the GOP.  And in the long term, I still believe that.

So I have two questions for conservatives who – like me – are underwhelmed with the remaining choices in this race.

Question 1: Remember 2002?  I, like many conservatives, was underwhelmed with Tim Pawlenty’s record in the legislature.  Not as a legislator, of course – he was a consummate legislative technician.  But Pawlenty was nothing if not pragmatic; he was no idealistic conservative.  It took the challenge from conservative Brian Sullivan to drive Pawlenty to the right to win the ’02 nomination.  Although he’s bowed to some pressure in the current term, to the chagrin of many Minnesota conservatives, the fact is that he answered the pressure from the right during the nominating process – the process that starts again a week from next Tuesday – and governed as the most conservative governor Minnesota’s had in a long, long time.   So – what if all of the conservatives who were disgusted with Pawlenty had stayed home in 2002?  Or 2006?  What would Minnesota look like today with Governor Roger Moe?  Governor Mike Hatch?

Question #2:  Have you checked the EKGs in the Supreme Court lately?:  In the next four years, between one and three seats on the Supreme Court will open up.  Now – Ronald Reagan said that if you agree with someone on 80% of the issues, you oughtta forgive ’em the other 20%.  It’s safe to stay that Rudy, JMac and the Huck are stretching to get anywhere close to 80% for me (and while Mitt is probably a safe 80% on the Berg scale, I just don’t see him winning.  Not at all).  But when it comes to filling three seats on the SCOTUS – in terms that will decide key interpretations of abortion law and the Second Amendment, to say nothing of the scads of issues the new justices will decide during their lifetime careers – I have to ask you:  is 70% better than 20%?

Is  50% better than 20%?  (Are Hillary and Obama even 20%?)

There is a time and place to stand on rigid principle to save the Republican Party.  That time and place is now, and extends through the national convention.  It’s a time when we – real conservatives – need to get out and fight like hell to save this party from the go-along, get-along crowd; the crowd that wants a moderate in the Third District; the crowd that concedes Minneapolis and Saint Paul to the Tics without a real fight; the crowd that gave us Kennedy-level spending and Strib-approved candidates.

But remember – the caucuses, the BPOU conventions and District and State and National conventions are where we act for the good of the party; where we save the GOP, and make it a real conservative party.  When the national convention ends next September 4 in Saint Paul, there’s another priority, and it’s much bigger.

We have a nation to save.

Eight years ago, I supported Steve Forbes.  I supported him for reasons that, in retrospect, were absolutely right;  I fought hard against the George W Bush machine at my caucuses and in my conventions, because I believed that Forbes would be a hard-core spending hawk.  In those pre-war days, that was the most important issue – and I was right.  Forbes would have been a better economic president than Bush.  My opinion of Bush didn’t change until 9/11 – and when it comes to spending, has yet to change.

But come election time, disappointed as I was, I reasoned; who’s going to be better for this nation?  A deeply-imperfect, barely-conservative Republican?  Or a gabbling, lisping, flip-flopping, ingratiating, holier-than-thou wonk like Algore?  George W. Bush was maybe a 60% candidate for me; Algore, perhaps 10%.

So however the convention turns out – and we still have a chance to save things – ask yourself this third, final question.

It is November.  It’s election time.  And in one hand, a Jihadi holds the Constitution, waving it menacingly over a bunsen burner.  In the other hand, he holds an AK47 aimed at your child’s head.  Who do you think is going to do the right thing – not for your party (the party stuff is over, now), but for the United States of America and its future?  For your child and the Constitution?

Rudy (65%)?  Mitt (a soft 80%)?  JMac (70%)?  The Hucker (Maybe 60%, and it’s the wrong 60%)?

Or Hillary (10%), Obie (5%) or Silkypony (2%, divided between “two Americas”)?

Come out on Tuesday.  Fight for perfect.

But remember that perfect isn’t just the enemy of good enough.  This year, it might just be the enemy of “survivable”.

Fred Thompson is out.

Cap’n Ed:

Thompson had a great voice for conservatives in the race, but he had the weakest track record. He only had eight years in the Senate, no executive experience, and a mixed voting record. As a presidential nominee facing either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, the inexperience factor would have been negated — perhaps the GOP’s greatest potential strength — and his reluctance to campaign as necessary in today’s political market would have put the Republicans at even more of a disadvantage. In those senses, Romney, Giuliani, and McCain have better credentials and more upside for November.

Rated purely on the issues, Fred was my favorite Republican (ergo, candidate) in the race, and the closest to a solid conservative.

With two weeks until Super-Di-Duper Tuesday, my short list is looking like this:

1. Mitt and Rudy in a dead heat.  I may need to re-score the grading (stay tuned), but at this point it’s a tossup for me.
2. JMac is in a distant third, but if he gets the nomination, he’s still vastly better than any alternative from the left (even Bill Richardson, should he jump back into the race and somehow win the Tic nomination). 
3. The Hucker?  Again – better than Madame Putin, Silkypony or Obie, but it’s not gonna be an issue.  No way he comes out of Super-Di-Super Tuesday on his feet.

Thompson was a long-shot all along, and those of us who wanted a “real” conservative should have known it – if not up-front, then as his campaign started slow and stayed somnambulent.

Blah.

So it becomes a choices of who’s “good enough”-enough; Rudy the hawk and fiscal conservative, Mitt the fiscal whiz and foreign-policy naif, or JMac the conservative with the asterisk.

More later.

I don’t quote Glen Reynolds much – everyone reads him anyway – but on reading and hearing from all the Republicans who want to “teach the party a lesson” if the nominate the wrong guy, this bit struck home:

Some people think it’s time to teach the party a lesson. Fine, but I thought 2006 was supposed to do that. Did they learn anything? Seems to me that things are about what they were when I put up my pre-mortem post that had Limbaugh exercised. (For that matter, did losing in 2000 and 2004 improve the Democrats? What, exactly, have they learned that led to the Hillary/Edwards/Obama offering? Are political parties capable of really learning?)

A couple of points here:

1. Parties don’t learn “lessons”.  Minnesota’s GOP should be a great lesson for all of you who think that abstaining from voting is going to do you, the party or the country any good at all; the reverses in ’04 and ’06 caused the MNGOP to panic and revert (in many quarters) to the “moderate”, Sturdevant-approved  party of the bad old days.  Remember – parties have long memories, as long as those of the people who show up and do all the work.  And conservatism is still, in many ways, an insurgency in the GOP, especially in Minnesota.  Staying home from the election because, say, Mark Kennedy voted for ethanol subsidies, or because Mitt Romney flip-flopped (even in the right direction!) on abortion, teaches one lesson; conservatives are flighty and unreliable when it comes to election time.
2. And don’t get started about third parties.  I say this as someone who left the GOP in 1994, outraged at the party’s sellout on the ’94 Crime Bill.  I joined the big-L Libertarians for four years.  It was great.  I got to hang out with a lot of people who believed all the right things!  Of course, they – we – had the luxury of ideological purity precisely because we never had to govern anything; we never had to put our ideas into the scrum of actually having to run anything or represent a district that had elected us via a plurality.  Just a convention that had endorsed us unanimously.  You think starting a third party “sends a message?”  Remember Pat Buchanan?  Remember the effect he had in 2000?  Me either.

So is the lesson “fall in line behind the party?”  Hell no.  Get pissed.  Get angry as hell.  Do something radical, and show up at the Caucuses, two weeks from tonight.  Find your precinct – here or here – and stand up for your guy or gal.  I’ll be there, and I’ll fighting like hell to do a bunch of things:

• get my guy endorsed.  (I’m close to deciding, but I ain’t saying yet).
• try to do my little bit to get some sort of grass-roots GOP movement going in the city
• try to show certain parties at various levels in the GOP that some of us in the city aren’t satisfied with the way things are.

The catch, of course, is that you have to show up at caucuses.  And, if it works that way, your BPOU, District and State conventions.  And try to find the time to help out in between, phone-banking and lit-dropping and getting the vote out.  Because changing anything is way, way more than just writing a resolution and making a speech.  It takes work, and tons of it.

One of the most instructive lessons of my political life was watching (and, in an infinitesimal way, participating in) the movement to reform Minnesota’s concealed carry laws.  When all was said and done, Concealed Carry Reform Now of Minnesota spent nine years and thousands of hours…:

• building a mailing list
• getting people to show up at gun shows to pass out literature and make people aware of the issues
• buttonholing legislators, one at a time, to state the case
• doing the same for voters, until eventually – by 2000 and 2002 – outstate voters were removing DFLers (and a few recalcitrant Republicans) who opposed carry reform from office.  That got the legislature’s attention; after 2002, the DFL legislators, motivated by political self-preservation, allied themselves with the good guys.

It took good people getting involved.  Some of them got very involved; a few of CCRN’s majordomos made it nearly a full-time job, on top of their real jobs and families and lives – but the real triumph was that they got tens of thousands of Minnesotans to care about reforming a sexist, racist, paternalistic law – one voter at a time.  And eventually one lawmaker at a time.  And finally one state at a time.

That’s how you change parties.  A voter at a time.  A precinct at a time.  A ward, a legislative district, a congressional district, a state at a time.

Notice that “staying home and teaching the bastards a lesson” doesn’t pop up in there at all?

The last time we saw Hillary! Clinton talking like this…:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said that if she became president, the federal government would take a more active role in the economy to address what she called the excesses of the market and of the Bush administration.

… it led us directly to the Gingrich Revolt of ’94.

Mrs. Clinton laid out a view of economic policy that differed in some ways from that of her husband, Bill Clinton. Mr. Clinton campaigned on his centrist views, and as president, he championed deficit reduction and trade agreements.

Reflecting what her aides said were very different conditions today, Mrs. Clinton put her emphasis on issues like inequality and the role of institutions like government, rather than market forces, in addressing them.

File under “Silver Linings” should Hillary!’s pact with the Dark Lord pay off with a presidency.

Paul Mirengoff comments on Huckabee’s “I’d rather be in second place with honor than in first place with dishonor” quote – which’d seem to be a swat at current leader John McCain:

You can’t be in second place with honor once you take a shot like that at an honorable man.

I’ll chalk it up to the Hucker trying to coin a cute turn of phrase, and milling out a squib.

But it’s a dumb squib.

GeeEmInEm at TvM forecasts:

In a reprise of the 1992 campaign, get ready to hear about the worst economy since the Great Depression.

Also, expect to see the return of the Fairness Doctrine titled “the Freedom Act of 2009” -or perhaps the subject of a book, “It Takes A Village To Decide What Each Villager Can and Can Not Say”.

One of the biggest, nastiest indictments against Richard Nixon’s legacy is that he used the apparatus of the Federal government – including the FBI – to gather information about his political opponents (although to be fair, so had LBJ and JFK, to one extent or another).  It was supposed to have been a thing of the past.

It’s a very dangerous thing.  It’s the sort of thing that President Bush’s critics carp about endlessly (although those critics seem to have trouble distinguishing between “internal political” enemies and “foreign terrorists arrested overseas”, but Bush Derangement isnt’ about distinctions).

So I’d like to make sure the whole world – or at least the part of it that reads this blog – knows that Hillary wants to do the same thing.  If you haven’t read the linked piece, from my radio colleague Ed Morrissey, then do:

In other words, the White House would basically run their sales pitch through the offices of the Democratic National Committee. The federal government, rather than making its case through the normal legislative process, would instead deputize the DNC to run its publicity campaign, further politicizing the entire process. They would also use the DNC to “help keep the Democratic base groups pumped up and excited”, which gives readers an insight into the purpose of the entire program.

All of that falls into the category of “politicizing” the White House, and much more than having Karl Rove as deputy chief of staff.

But it gets worse:

But this goes beyond mere politicization. The HCTF foresaw using the DNC to “gather intelligence” on political opposition — a way to gain information to intimidate or extort their critics. It’s bad enough when electoral campaigns do this, but having the White House use the DNC for these purposes doesn’t border on abuse of power but invades it with a vengeance.

It gets into Communist and Fascist turf; using the Party as a de facto arm of government, as a web of informants gathering information not just to further the party’s legitimate election efforts, but as an adjunct to furthering government policy. It’d turn the Tic party into a domestic political surveillance operation reporting directly to the President.

I’d love to know what actual Democrats think about this.

In the previous post, I decried the intellectual provincialism of the (usually) female voters who claim their vote will be based on gender first and foremost.

I have never, ever, met a guy who claimed he’d vote “men first”.  I suppose such a guy exists out there; an angry fathers’ rights advocate, a militant gay, someone – but if I met such a guy, it’d be a first.

In the meantime, I’ve known quite a few women (and a few men) who claimed – as I noted in my previous post – that a pair of Y chromosomes was basically all they needed to earn their vote (although presumably they’d make exceptions for Michele Bachmann and Mary Kiffmeyer).

And I knew, in the pit of my gut, that I’d find more on the subject by reading the Twin Cities’ media’s most reliable Tic flak, Lori Sturdevant.

And it goes without saying that the key to the story will be a “Republican who is disaffected by the current state of the party”:

The story was that one longtime Republican backer of womenwinning (which at the time was called the Minnesota Women’s Campaign Fund) phoned another to announce that she was organizing a Republicans for Choice rally at next September’s GOP national convention in St. Paul. It was the sort of thing the two of them used to love to do 25 or 30 years ago — back when there was something called the GOP Feminist Caucus and when Minnesota’s Republican leadership had not yet alienated or exiled almost all of its backers of legal abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment.

“Can I count on your support?” Sally Pillsbury asked Marilyn Bryant.

“I’m sorry,” replied Bryant, “but I’m supporting Hillary.”

So is womenwinning. The still officially multipartisan state organization sends money only to candidates who are female, prochoice and viable, and this year found itself able to endorse a candidate for president for the first time.

Bryant, a womenwinning founder, explained her choice last week: “I’ve seen women move into the professions — business, law, medicine — with great success. But in politics, it’s been a terribly slow process. I’d love to have the opportunity to vote for a woman for president, especially a woman who’s as articulate, smart and qualified as Hillary Clinton is.”

That longing among female voters — some of them former Republicans like Bryant — is getting much credit for Clinton’s resurgent victory Tuesday.

To keep women’s votes coming the way they did in New Hampshire, Clinton has to make sure they see her the way Bryant does: articulate, smart, qualified, and a woman to boot — and not the way her opponents cast her in Iowa: too calculating, cautious, controlling and connected to a certain previous administration.

Clinton emerged from New Hampshire as both the establishment and the feminist candidate. That’s a complex and somewhat contradictory dual identity that no previous major presidential contender has borne. She’s traversing uncharted territory.

A lot of politically ambitious women are watching her for a lesson in how to do it…Minnesota House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher, state Senate Assistant Majority Leader Tarryl Clark and Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner — would have to decide how early and how often to play the gender card if they run for statewide office in 2010 or beyond.

In the wake of Clinton’s New Hampshire experience, all three played it boldly Wednesday.