“My Way or the Highway” absolutists aren’t new to politics in any party, much less the GOP.  In 2000, it was hard to get any traction in some caucuses I remember if candidates weren’t not only pro-life, but weren’t sufficiently, convincingly pro-life enough.  It was the litmus test for a lot of people.

I think it was Ronald Reagan who said “if someone is 80% your friend, it doesn’t make them 20% your enemy”.  And beyond that, William F. Buckley enjoined conservatives to “vote for the most conservative candidate who can win“.

There are a few such groups in the GOP today that just don’t buy that; some of the Ron Paul crowd, and some traditional conservatives, have morphed over to the “Anything less than 100% might as well be 0%” school of thought.

It’s easy to sigh and roll your eyes and chuckle “that’s naive” – and then catch yourself for doing it, since there’s almost nothing in the world (short of adults who hang around comic book stores) more annoying that people who roll their eyes and chuckle about other people’s politics. 

But chuckling and rolling is a bad idea, if only because it prevents the possibility of anyone learning anything.  And a little learning is simply desperately needed.

Here’s a great example; over the weekend, I interviewed Cam Winton, the moderate Republican candidate for Mayor of Minneapolis.  He’s a sharp guy, and he’s got a genuine chance to shock the world in Minneapolis next month, and if I were a dishonest guy I’d figure out a way to get to Minneapolis and vote for him a couple of times, just like the Democrats do.

Now, in the great Republican scheme of things Winton’s a moderate.  And I’m not.  On the show, since the topic came up, he specifically listed three areas where a base conservative – like the AM1280 audience – might disagree with him; he supported gay marriage, he supports background checks at gun shows (provided that it can be shown they can’t be turned into a registry for confiscation) and…er, something else that I can’t remember.

Against that?  Winton advocates bringing a whole lot of free market common sense to Minneapolis; cutting spending, prioritizing the spending that’s left better (cops and roads, in a city with the highest crime and worst roads in Minnesota), cutting the pork (streetcar lines, city power co-ops), slashing mindless regulation of small business and much more.  He favors giving Minneapolis’ taxpayer a bigger bang for fewer bucks – something Minneapolis desperately needs after two generations of DFL spendthrifts. 

And I had a couple of Minneapolis conservatives write me after the show.  One wrote and said he’d sit the election out until Minneapolis got “a real conservative” running for Mayor.  To which I replied “Tom Tancredo is never going to get 51% of any vote in Minneapolis.  Ever.  You’ll never even get Rhonda Sivarajah or Dave Thompson or Jeff Johnson over the top for mayor in Minneapolis.  Cam Winton is the closest to a conservative I’ve seen running for office in the 28 years I’ve been watching Minneapolis politics that’s had a credible chance of winning.  Perfect is the enemy of good enough, especially when you’re a Republican in a city full of Democrat workers and clients”.

Put another way; Minnesota conservatives complained about Norm Coleman’s conservatism.  But none of them have shown me how a more conservative candidate could have even gotten into position to stage a credible run for mayor of Saint Paul – and that was 20 years ago, when the Saint Paul DFL still had people like Norm, Jerry Blakey and Randy Kelley – all of whom have been purged.

Another critic, a Twin Cities Second Amendment activist, decried Winton’s stance on background checks.

To which I respond:  Minneapolis is run by people who invite Michael Bloomberg to town; people who support Michael Paymar; people who would schuss right past background checks to ban every gun you own, if they could.  So even if you leave out the fiscally-conservative stuff completely (and you must not!), how would electing a person who favors just about the weakest credible “gun control” there, is provided that it could be made non-threatening in terms of confiscation (an iffy compromise, but one we made, successfullly, on the NICS system 20-odd years ago) be any worse than the current, anti-Second-Amendment, gun-grabber-friendly Mayor, or all of the DFL front-runners for the office who are at least as bad as Rybak, and jointly and severally worse than anything Winton is proposing…

…all of which is completely irrelevant, since the Mayor of Minneapolis, or any city in Minnesota, can have absolutely no policy impact on gun control, or any impact beyond their “bully pulpit” at all (and ask Representatives Paymar and Martens how much that bully pulpit got them this last session) by state law?   That’s right – the state’s pre-emption statute bars cities from having gun laws more restrictive than the state law!

On the issue of victim disarmament, the Mayor of Minneapolis – whatever their party or their beliefs – is as relevant as a promise ring on Kim Kardashian.  If Minneapolis elected a mayor whose entire platform was “melt down every gun”, it would be the same as electing a mayor with no platform at all.  It’s the law.

More realistically – if Minneapolis elects Cam Winton (and I hope they do), it’ll be a huge benefit to Minneapolis citizens and property tax payers – and a net gain for Minneapolis gun owners from the bully pulpit (it’s just not a big issue to Winton), and an absolute “no change” in terms of policy – because the City of Minneapolis has as much control over gun control policy as it does over building nuclear submarines and setting the federal budget; it’s not a job the law gives them.

Principle is a great thing.  One of the most important principles, I think, is analyzing ones’ principles to see if they’re making you do dumb things.

You vote for the most conservative (or libertarian-conservative, if you’re me) candidate who can win.  At the moment, in Minneapolis, that candidate is Cam Winton – who I am proud to support, “imperfections” and all.  He is the most conservative candidate who can win; not just because Minneapolis is a solid blue city, but because he is the most conservative candidate to have posted a single lawn sign, appeared at a single debate, knocked on a single door, gotten a single media appearance – much less running a pretty masterful campaign to boot. 

Yes, conservatives; there could come a time in the future when government by “moderate” Republicans as a sensible and solitary sane alternative to Democrat hegemony starts to convince the unconvinced that “Republican” and “conservative” aren’t the untrammeled evils that their establishment and media (pardon the redundancy) have been programming them to think.  Hint:  You’re not going to get there with 20 more years of R.T. Rybaks and Chris Colemans in power.  It’s happened before, in a place you may have heard of; the state of Minnesota.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

“Obama and Boehner both came to the same conclusion—that they would allow the shutdown to persist for two weeks, until it became politically possible to reopen government and address the threat of default at the same time.”   From this article in the Strib.

If that’s an accurate statement, then Boehner must be removed as Speaker today.

Joe Doakes

I think the only people that disagree are the people who think “the system” basically works…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Boehner: “Tell you what, Barry, I’ve got a little popularity problem with my own party so here’s what we do:  we let the right-wing crazy people shut down the government for couple of weeks, you punish the public by closing the parks and have your buddies in the media savage the Tea Party.  Send some of your bureaucrats out to tell everybody the sky is going to fall.  Meanwhile, the other senior leadership and I will fumble around not doing much until we can declare that the public pressure is too great and sensible people must step in to restore order and save the day.  Then we’ll give you a blank check to kick the can down the road for a few more months and we can all go back to the cocktail parties but without those pesky Tea Party types, who won’t have any clout so they won’t be invited. How’s that sound?”

Obama: “Yeah, okay.  Now kiss my ring and bow as you leave my presence.”

Joe Doakes

By outward appearances, that’s not too far off.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Senate Republicans caved.  House leadership caved.  Rationale seems to be that if they don’t cave, people will say bad things about them.  And if Republicans don’t work with Democrats to pass laws Democrats want, then Democrats won’t work with Republicans to get laws Republicans want passed in the future.  We have to go along now to get along later.

In other words, okay, here, take my lunch money but don’t hit me.

No, you morons, Democrat will never go along with any Republican law, now or in the future.  And the media is going to say bad things about you no matter what you do.

You can’t buy your way into friendship with bullies, you have to kick their asses to generate some respect so you can begin to negotiate as equals.

Joe Doakes

It was a frustrating week indeed.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Tom Cotton is one of the 87 Republicans who voted to cave.  He did it because he thought Obama would voluntarily default on the national debt which would plunge the world into economic chaos, and the main-steam media would blame it on Republicans.

In other words: Cotton believed Obama would shoot the hostage so Cotton paid the ransom But Let Obama Keep The Hostage!

The continuing resolution only kicks the can down the road for a few months.  Republicans can try to negotiate something in January.  I get that.

But here’s the thing about setting a precedent, Tommy Boy . . . .

That precedent was set decades ago. Even Reagan made some unconscionable compromises for reasons that seem dumb in retrospect (and to conservatives seemed dumb in 1987).

The challenge is in trying, at long last, to break it.

All of you “The GOP Let Us Down, Why Should We Ever Support Them Again?” types:   To quote LTCDR Montgomery Scott, “you can’t change the laws of physics”.  Or the Constitution, in this case.  The Republicans – RINOs, Tea Partiers, Cruzes and Boehners alike – control one chamber of the Congress.  The Dems have the other one, and the Presidency.  No law is going to be changed while we are the minority.  The best we can hope for is to stall some of the Dems’ plans until, hopefully, somehow, someday, we get majorities in both chambers and the Presidency.  Someday.

All of you “What has Ted Cruz gotten us?” folks:  Hopefully, a sense from the base that there are some people on Capitol Hill who aren’t cowed by the system, and among independents that someone is publicly bucking against the insurance plan that’s jacking their rates up through the ceiling.

Remember the 2012 election?  When the GOP base and not a whole lot else came out to vote, tepidly, for Mitt Romney and the guy who should have been the candidate?  That’s what going along and being polite and playing the Beltway’s game the beltway’s way gets us.

To Both Of You:  Not a single concession?  After all that?  Are you kidding me?

More Monday.

Chris Christie:  h more popular than Springsteen.  In Jersey:

A Conservative Intel poll of 778 likely voters shows 56 percent of New Jerseyans have a favorable impression of their Republican governor, while just 34 percent have an unfavorable view of him. Ten percent said they were not sure how they feel.

Christie bests Bruce Springsteen, a New Jersey icon, by eight points. “The Boss” registers a 48 percent favorability rating in the poll. In contrast to Christie, however, only 22 percent say they have a distinctly unfavorable impression of the “Born to Run” singer. A whopping 29 percent said they were unsure of how they feel about Springsteen.

Apropos not much.

Real America fought like hell last year against a full-on onslaught from the Sorosbots and the media to wrench control of the House away from the walkers.

And this is what we got for the effort.  Bupkes.

In re the impending cave-in, Allahpundit put it pretty well:

The most pitiful part of what’s happening right now isn’t the cave itself, which was predictable since day one of the quixotic “defund” effort, but the fact that they’re going to drag it out another day or two to the bitter end purely for theatrical purposes. There’s a 99 percent chance that Reid will reject whatever emerges tonight from the House, leaving Boehner to float a clean debt-ceiling hike tomorrow and let Pelosi and the Democrats bail him out, but in order to marginally reduce the upset among grassroots conservatives, he’s going to push this to the last possible moment. That means passing — hopefully — one more House bill to show that he really did try to get something in return for raising the debt limit, even though what he and House Republicans are now asking for barely qualifies as “something.”

That Boehner didn’t even try to repeal the medical device tax, and get something useful out of this, adds injury to insult.

We need a new speaker of the house.

And while I’ve never been one of those “primary ’em” kinds of conservatives, and the people who say “better to have 30 solid conservatives than a workable coalition of 51 conservatives and moderates” are idiots, we definitely need a GOP leadership that hasn’t gone native inside the Beltway.

Not sure what that’ll take – a Tea Party majority in the caucus?  Moving the party HQ someplace away from DC?

I don’t know.  But not since this have I been so tempted to break my “no gratuitous profanity” rule.

As this is written, Ted Cruz is still filibustering. 

A couple of observations. 

On the one hand, a friend of mine – a disaffected Republican and Ron Paul supporter – snarked something like “Hey, Ted Cruz is filibustering Obamacare!  Western Civilization will be saved!  Oh, wait – no, we’re still screwed”. 

So let me get this straight; when some people launch quixotic grandstanding windmill-tilts against big government, taxation, spending and creeping statism, it’s a statement of rock-solid principle, but when others do it for the same reasons, it’s snark-fodder? 

I’ll have to chew on that one for a while.

Grandstanding:  As Michael Medved pointed out yesterday, the filibuster is, tactically, pointless.  The Senate – and its majority of Democrats – will support the President.  Period. 

Politically?  Medved among others also had a point:  Obama wants the government to shut down.  He benefits when he (and a compliant media) can pin pain on smaller government.  And while the sequester was a complete squib for him, a shutdown would provide an endless parade of calumny for the media, his Praetorian Guard, to force-feed the “for the children” voter segment. 

And that’s not the only reason a shutdown benefits Obama.

The Great Diversion:  Think about it.  Obama’s been in office almost five years.  What does he have to show for it?

• An economy that is creating nothing but part-time jobs (unlike all previous recoveries – a sort of economic,ex post facto”Berg’s Seventh Law”).
• Thousands of American guns sent across the border to the narcotraficantes, resulting in the deaths of American cops and Mexican children.
• Four Americans dead in a terrorist attack, who had the misfortune to be attacked in a place that apprently was serving as a hand-off point for a black-bag weapons-smuggling operation sending arms to a movement that is rapidly being taken over by Al Quaeda – leading to a year worth of stonewalling that looks more and more like a coverup.
• The Middle East is in worse shape than it’s been since the 80s, and our stature in the world has shrunk since Dubya left office.
• And a bold trip to where even Nixon never went; the Obama Administration appears to have used the IRS to stifle conservative political dissent.

And even if you get all of those out of the way, what is Obama left with?  Obamacare – a law with some popular provisions that needed to happen via one mechanism or another (portability, dealing with pre-existing conditions) but is, as a package, about as popular as mandatory ice-water enemas. 

What would better serve Obama’s purposes than to divert attention away from everything he and his Administration have done?

A government shutdown, I suspect, strikes this blog’s audience (as it does me) at first blush as a great idea.  But it plays right into Obama’s hands.

So Cruz should stop filibustering and take a nap – right?

But Not So Fast:  As we  noted earlier this morning, Americans are fundamentally conservative.  They don’t identify with the GOP at the moment – at least in part because the mainstream GOP, the Beltway GOP of the consultants, doesn’t reflect the conservative principals that Americans support. 

And they didn’t last year – which was why conservatives stayed home on election day, handing another term to Obama.

The Tea Party wave of 2010 went back underground. 

But it’s still out there.  The Gallup and Rasmussen polls show it. 

And while Ted Cruz’ filibuster isn’t going to defund Obamacare, and it’d probably be a very bad idea to let it shut down the government, it could be – if the GOP is smart enough, and I have doubts about that – a key step toward doing something that all of the GOP consultants in the Beltway can’t do and don’t really want to; mobilize the vast unwashed base of Tea Party conservatives, people who don’t like to identify as Republicans  but see perfectly well that Obama and our idiot Congress have us on the road to Palookaville.

We noted this from a Gallup Poll last winter; voters prefer Republican ideas – until they hear they’re Republican.

A new Rasmussen Poll confirms this; voters trust GOP positions on most issues:

The only issues where Democrats prevail – Environment, Education, Social Security – are the ones most dominated by memes tailored to low-information voters.

John Hinderaker at Power Line – one of my longtime NARN co-hosts – writes:

There are some interesting findings. The Democrats (and some Republican pundits and politicians) are trying to stampede Republicans into a radical change on immigration policy, but Rasmussen finds that voters prefer the GOP on the issue, by seven points. Then there is gun control: after the better part of a year of Democrat and media hysteria on the subject, voters trust Republicans over Democrats by 46%-39%.

Given those numbers, you would think that Republicans will sweep in 2014–increase their hold on the House, and take the Senate. But that isn’t what voters have in mind. Rasmussen also finds that currently, Democrats lead Republicans in the generic Congressional preference poll by 40%-37%. It’s a paradox: voters prefer Republicans on the issues, but still lean toward voting for Democrats.

And like Hinderaker, I think there’s one guess why that’s true…

 I think it is obvious that the press’s ceaseless attacks on Republicans are part of the explanation. That is a longstanding problem, but the numbers suggest that Republicans will do best if they keep pounding away on the issues, especially the ones where voters are predisposed to favor them.

The other note for Republicans:  the issues where conservative Republicans win (according to this poll and the previous Gallup one) are the ones where the Tea Party took the lead four years ago.

 Some of you know my political backstory – I’ve written about it a time or two.  In 1994, disgusted by the GOP’s capitulation to Clinton on the 1994 Crime Bill along with George HW Bush’s reversal on taxes, I left the Republican Party and joined the Libertarians. 

Over the course of four years, I did what most libertarians do; thought big thoughts about liberty.  I also ran for office under the Big “L” banner – and did better than I thought I would.

But it was mostly thinking big thoughts.  Libertarians were big on debating principles, and even bigger on deriding those who, by their calculus, didn’t – or at least those whose principles weren’t drawn in as big, stark letters as their own seemed to be, to them and each other. 

I left the Big “L” after about four years.  I had – and have – principles. 

• One of them is “don’t screw up the country, and try to prevent other people from screwing it up too bad”. 
• Another?  A slight modification of Buckley’s Eleventh Commandment:  “Vote for the most acceptable candidate, from a fiscal, security and liberty perspective, that can win. 
• One last one?  “Perfect is the enemy of good enough”.  If I eschew imperfect candidates – say, candidate who champion my principles 51%-85% of the time – then I’m doing my little bit to make sure someone who agrees with me even less, as in “0-15% of the time” (that’s the current, extremist version of the DFL’s track record) is actually running things.  Raising taxes.  Vacuuming my personal info into “MNCare”.  The whole nine yards.

 And I figured there was a better chance of doing my part toward that end, and actually having some effect in the great scheme of things, by working within an actual party that had a chance of doing something useful than via endless navel-gazing in the Libertarian echo chamber. 

And so I left the Libertarian Party – partly because the party line on foreign policy and national security is (I’ll be charitable) simplistic, but mostly because the Big “L” Party is never, ever, going to have anything to do with passing actual policy into law; the most it can ever hope for is to serve as a spoiler, taking liberty voters’ votes away from the other parties, mostly the GOP.

And in 15 years of varying involvement – from observer to amateur pundit to even-more-amateur activist – the party has come a long way.  In 1998, Arne Carlson’s legacy loomed large in the party; today, it’s virtually gone, and good riddance.  It’s been largely squeezed out (everywhere but in the media’s consciousness) by an uneasy, sometimes fractious assembly of business conservatives (who may or may not care about social issues or liberty), Tea Partiers (who focus on the “limited government” aspects of “liberty”) and, over the past couple years, “Liberty Republicans”. 

These last came to the party in 2012 as an organizational juggernaut that acted about as “libertarian” as a North Korean synchronized dance team – at least in terms of taking control of party functions and sending people to Tampa.  The best of them – the ones in CD4 were among ’em – brought with them the pragmatism that led to a couple of really promising campaigns.  The worst of them – I’m not naming names – left us a display of nihilistic principles-over-pragmatism that bordered on onanistic. 

None quite as dismal, thankfully, as the recent resignation by a group of libertarian Maine Republicans, who resigned in protest over…

…convention rules?

Walter Hudson has an excellent piece over at Fightin’ Words on this whole deeply dumb incident.  And I think there are lessons for both of the “sides” of the debate in the GOP – especially the “Liberty” clicque’s penchant for walking away from it all when the “establishment” doesn’t carry them up to the front of the room on their shoulders:

The critical failure which informs this move manifests from activists’ perception of the party as a servant which ought to work on their behalf, rather than a vehicle which must be actively steered in a desired direction. If I had a nickel for every time I heard an activist whine about the party not treating them well, as if that were its purpose, I’d be set for life…This common sentiment from libertarian activists completely absolves them of any responsibility for changing the party. Instead, they proceed from the rather absurd notion that Republicans ought to advocate views they do not agree with in order to earn libertarian support. That’s not how politics works.

Or, in many cases, endless prate and gabble about how stupid – racist, homophobic, war-mongering – Republicans are for not folding like a Wal-Mart end table. 

And then there’s this line’s first cousin – the “Under Thirty” crowd.  The GOP, we’re told, must embrace the Ron Paul Agenda in whole because so many under-thirty conservatives and Republicans are so very libertarian.   More on this next week.    

Libertarian Republicans need to dispense with the notion that their “individual integrity” is defined by the party’s compliance to a libertarian agenda. Holding the reigns of power in a party office does not mean you “support” every little thing anyone in the party says or does. If resignation remains the default response to any deficiency within the party, it only enhances the victory of those who remain.

Yep. 

Principles – or at least saying you have them, as opposed to having to defend them against a lifetime of real-world experience – are easy.  Convincing other people about them is not.

No one has ever “learned their lesson” from an activist resigning in protest. The concept ignores political reality and smacks of a narcissistic valuation of one’s political worth. “Oh, you resigned?! Well then, let me completely realign my entire worldview in order to get you back,” said no party officer or elected official ever.

And the corollary of that truth, as I’ve been saying for years; political parties don’t “learn lessons”.  They respond to the will of those who show up. 

Which is why I, and my impure mutt’s-breakfast of conservative and libertarian and pragmatic beliefs keep showing up.

Read Walter’s entire article, if you would please.

I grew up in pretty boring times.  If you’re reading this and you’re under the age of 86, so did you, really. 

And let’s be clear; when it comes to the march of human history, boring is good.  “May you live in interesting times” is often attributed as an ancient Chinese curse; it appears to be as “Chinese” as Leann Chin, but the sentiment is dead-on.  For most of human history (and the entire time before it), life was fascinating, brutish and short.

In contrast to most of human history, with its wars and plagues and cataclysms, human history as known to people alive today has been blessedly, wonderfully boring. 

Some react to the boredom by turning the idea of the collapse of civilization into entertainment, from campy “zombie” fiction (The Walking Dead) to breathlessly pompous asteroid fantasies (Armageddon) to moralistic sermons about being our own undoing (The Day After Tomorrow) to conjuring genocidal invaders from the world of fiction (from the sublime Battlestar Galactica  (the 2004 version, not the loathsome seventies one) to the ridiculous Independence Day). I find “end of the world” p0rn unseemly; I didn’t spend this much time and energy raising kids to laugh about the whole world collapsing.  (And may I add “stop being an idiot”).

Others react by hedging their bets against what, throughout human history, seems to be an inevitable. sooner or later; stocking up on food, land, ammo and other supplies to ride out a bad spell the best they can. 

What goes up must come down.  Things tend to move from a state of order to disorder. 

S**t Happens.

And it’s happening all around us. 

And not only is it inevitable – sometimes it can be a very good thing.

———-

A couple of weeks back I had the pleasure of interviewing Kevin Williamson of National Review Online.  We talked in re his new book, The End Is Near (And It’s Going To Be Awesome).   Like all of Williamson’s writing, it’s as breezy and readable as it is intellectually beefy.  He’s like a modern-day Paul Johson – and that’s a huge spiff.

I recommend you read it.  Like, go get a copy.  You’ll thank me later. 

I’ll oversimplify; the book has a few major premises:

• Politics is the worst possible way to allocate scarce resources.  Not because people are evil or democracy is wrong – but because while every other aspect of life has evolved, politics remains essentially unchanged over the centuries.  Politics is a perfectly valid way of dealing with many of the human condition’s issues – contracts, justice, dropping bombs on people who try to kill you, issuing restraining orders and the like.  But for purposes of driving the allocation of our society’s resources, it just doesn’t work.
• No, really.  It’s a disaster.  Our national debt is hanging around a years’ worth of our national GDP.  But the unfunded mandates that nobody wants to talk about currently equal, roughly, the GDP of the entire planet.  As in every single bit of economic output from every man, woman and child on the planet for a full year.  Every Big Mac sold, every Android Phone built, every bag of rice hauled in from a paddy in Bangladesh, every Justin Bieber download sold, everything – just to pay our nation’s mandates.  And most of the world’s other “advanced” economies are the same, and maybe worse – they have no senses of dynamism, little familiarity with the notion of “Creative Destruction”, and even nastier senses of societal entitlement than Americans have developed.  Go ahead – tell a Greek that she can’t have nine weeks’ vacation. 
• It literally can not go on.  It’s like trying to run a family when your significant other is running off to Ho Chunk with the credit and debit cards six days a week.  It is not sustainable.  No matter how vigorously the world’s political bodies affirm their interest in building roadmaps and finding solutions, bla di blah di blah, it is virtually inevitable that the system is going to misallocate its way straight out of business.   Only instead of a divorce or a painful stretch of credit counseling, it’s going to involve some degree or another of the government running out of money, presuming it stops short of taxing every Big Mac sold, every Android Phone built, every bag of rice hauled in from a paddy in Bangladesh, every Justin Bieber download sold, everything. 

So eventually, and pretty much inevitably, government is going to grind to a halt. 

And to Williamson, that’s the good news.  Again, read the book.  You’ll thank me.   Because once you get government out of the way, things actually look pretty good.  We’ll come back to that later.

And you can thank the good folks in New Orleans, Detroit and – soon, I suspect – Camden New Jersey for giving us a previous of how it’s going to work.  Or not work.

And if you think about it, there is some good news in there. 

More tomorrow.

We broke down the GOP race for US Senate here.  We now take a similar look at the Governor’s contest.

—–

To listen to the polling establishment that gave us Govs. Mike Hatch, Skip Humphrey and the ’02 version of Sen. Walter Mondale, Republicans should just give up any notion that Mark Dayton could be defeated in 2014.  Dayton posts a 57% approval rating, up from 43% just this past February.  Of course, Tim Pawlenty was sporting a 54% approval rating around this time in his first-term, in what turned out to a nail-bitter of an election decided by Mike Hatch’s failure to attend his anger management class.  And Dayton’s polling numbers, like most politicians, seem to go up when the legislature is out of session and thus his name is off the front pages.

Unlike with the Senate race, GOP interest in the gubernatorial nomination is high and has attracted among the best Republican office-holders still standing after 2012.  The highest profile Republicans may have passed on running (Pawlenty, Coleman, Kline, Paulsen), but if the current crop of candidates represents the GOP “B Team,” they’re certainly stronger than the 2010 field.  And unlike 2010, they probably are more aware of what advertising deluge awaits the winner from the Alliance for a Better More Expensive Minnesota.

(more…)

Back in March, we broke down the various Republican contenders and pretenders looking to make a statewide bid in 2014.  Since then, there’s been a bevy of candidates and plenty of armchair analysis that’s been backlogged.

We start by breaking down the emerging GOP race for US Senate.  We take a similar look at the Governor’s race here.

—–

On the surface, Minnesota Republicans should have 312 reasons to want a strong challenger to Sen. Al Franken.

But with a party mired in debt and warring factions, and following a nearly one million vote margin of defeat against Sen. Amy Klobuchar, there have been ample reasons why Franken has been off the GOP radar as a potential target.  Running for Senate is an extremely expensive proposition, with a price-tag likely around $10-15 million minimum (Franken raised $22.5 million in 2008) – a tall order for anyone, especially candidates with limited name ID.

Still, Franken remains the candidate who won in a bitterly contested race and whom even Democrats had doubts about, hence the last-minute primary candidacy of Priscilla Lord Faris in 2008.  Franken leads potential rivals right now by margins around 15-16%, a testament in part to the incumbent’s name ID.  Keep in mind, Norm Coleman lead Franken by 15% as late as July of 2008 (an admitted outlier of a poll, to be sure), reminding activists of all stripes of the “tempest in a tea pot” nature of all polling data.

(more…)

If every Republican candidate stated as good a case for conservative Republican politics as Louisiana state legislator Elbert Guillory, the GOP would have 3:1 majorities in Congress and all legislatures – maybe 3:2 in New York and California. 

Republicans – take note.

Remember:  the goal is to find someone who agrees with you 100% on principle. Not 99%; if they fall to 99, you throw them under the bus. Electability is not only irrelevant, it’s a sign that they *could* compromise! Impure!

And if they’ve ever held office, and have ever compromised with the other side (or anyone!) on any issue for whatever reason (which every elected official in history has had to do, either publicly or privately – because that is the roots of the term “politics”), that’s prima facie evidence of impurity. Shun!

And if you lose the primary to someone you only agree with 80% (which is a zero, really), or the general to a candidate you agree with 0% – well, it’s irrelevant, because 99=0, anyway, and you can spend the next 2-6 years telling all the other rubes how what bovine sheeple (?) they are, and how screwed we all are for not listening to you.

Which is the real goal.

Clear on this?

There are times when “Republican” just isn’t good enough.  We need conservative Republicans.

I thought I’d drop in this Erick Erickson piece from RedState below the jump as a mental apertif.

The conclusion?  It’s a Ben Domenech quote:

The Republican Party needs to understand that shrinking its policy aims to more modest solutions is not going to be rewarded by the electorate. Yes, they need to tailor their message better and find policy wedges which peel off chunks of the Democratic base (winning political strategy is built on an understanding that every drama needs a hero, a martyr, and a villain). But what’s truly essential is that the party leadership rid themselves of the notion that politeness, great hair, and reform for efficiency’s sake is a ballot box winner, and understand instead that politicians who can connect with the people and deliver on their limited government promises – not ones who back away from them under pressure – represent the path forward.

Especially worth remembering as the media tries its damnedest to pound the GOP back into the “great hair/nice suit/benign reformer” box…

…they jammed us into from 1976-2002.

Read the rest of it below the fold.
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After eight years in office, Michele Bachmann is retiring from Congress:

A few questions for the audience:

Who Is Emanuelle Goldstein?: Extremists like the MNDFL has become need enemies.  The Minnesota Left will need to invent a new bete noir, someone on which to focus all their  insecurity and hatred, to keep them motivated.  Bachmann has served this role for over a decade and a half, between her Congressional, State Senate and educational organizing careers.  Bachmann bedeviled the local left by seeming to thrive on their hatred, turning it back on them with a wink and a smile and a dismissive quip.  So who does the MNDFL’s depraved, insane fringe pick as their new Demon?

Next?:  The Sixth is one of the few districts in the state with a deep bench of solid, polished GOP contenders.  Who should run to replace Michele?

Dead Air?:  With Michele Bachmann out of public life, what will Jack Tomczak talk about?

(I’m a kidder.  I kid.  I love Jack and Ben’s show.  But still…)

Tarry Not:   Does Tarryl Clark already have her U-Haul loaded up, or what?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I posted this to an earlier thread but it deserves more thought:

Have you thought through the implications of your defense, [regular commenter Emery, whom some of the Mitchketeers think is long-banned former comment-section regular “Doug”; I don’t think it’s him, unless he’s been on some serious meds]?

You suggest IRS agents misused the power of their office for partisan political purposes, not because Obama ordered it, but because he was incompetent to stop them.

That implies government agents are predisposed to abuse their powers but are restrained only by competent managers, i.e. Republicans.

The sensible conclusion is to give over as little of our lives to government agents as possible, and in those areas, put Republicans in charge.

I completely agree with the conclusion that flows from your analysis; I’m surprised you do.

See also: Fast and Furious, Secret Service hookers, government conventions in Vegas, AP wiretaps . . . the logic could apply to almost every scandal and for the exact same reason: we shouldn’t have given them that power in the first place. The Framers were smarter than we know.

Joe Doakes

To this I’d add that this blog has noted that the government and its handmaidens in the media and the lefty “alternative” media have spent the past six years demonizing every form of conservative thought, from fever-swamp leftybloggers chanting “Conservatives are Racist” to Janet Napolitano putting every form of conservative thought on a terror watchlist.

If you build a government around the notion of demonizing your opponents, your government will demonize your opponents.

Joe Doakes notes the MNGOP’s big problem.  I’ll add emphasis:

The DFL Governor and DFL Legislators have cut a deal to give more money to children and unions and have it all done by Tuesday. If only those pesky Republicans would agree.

Which they won’t of course, since this is the same pie-in-the-sky nonsense the DFL has been spouting all along, when not devoting the session to social issues such as gun control, gay marriage and bullying in schools.

And when Republicans don’t blindly sign on to the DFL program, why then the shut-down and special session and laying-off-of-cops will all be Republicans fault. Because Democrats had it all worked out, you see, and the Republicans ruined it.

We need better PR people, so WE can get ahead of the news cycle, for once.

Joe Doakes

I wonder if the MNGOP and the caucuses will ever figure that out.  The way they’re doing it just isn’t working.

To: GOP Senators Thst voted for the DFL’s Cash Grab
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re: Your vote

Take a Mulligan.

ASAP. Plead diminished capacity if you need to.

That is all.

Yesterday, we looked at the changes in voting in the 4th Congressional District after redestricting, and tried to give some context to what were, at face value, disappointing election results.  As I noted yesterday, the Tony Hernandez for Congress campaign had some big handicaps – fundraising was as terrible for him as it was for every other Republican, and a redistricting that was pretty benign for Betty McCollum – and a huge one, an epochal DFL turnout against the Marriage Amendment.

Most of those issues were writ larger across the river in the 5th Congressional District, covering Minneapolis and most of Hennepin County.  By all accounts, Keith Ellison was the biggest beneficiary from redistricting; the 5th CD became, on paper, even more strongly DFL than it was before.  And if anything, the 5th CD’s Republican party was even less functional last year than the 4th’s was.

But Chris Fields, the GOP-endorsed candidate in the 5th, brought the kind of game the GOP hasn’t seen in Minneapolis in way longer than I can remember.  Fields was a great candidate; he was elected Secretary of the State GOP last weekend, so hopefully he’ll be in a position to be one again soon.  He worked the district hard, had a small but highly-motivated staff, and raised a lot more money than Republicans normally do in the dismal 5th.

And so what happened?

Here are the vote totals and percentages going back to 2000:

But what does this mean in a larger historical context?

As yesterday:  the top two rows show how many more voters each party turned out in 2012 than in the year shown below.  The additional turnout for the DFL – and Ellison – in 2012 was staggering; 33,000 more than in 2008 (a great DFL year by itself), 43,000 more than in 2004 (a decent GOP year), 85,000 more than in 2000 (an excellent GOP year, outside the 5th anyway).

And as yesterday, the bottom two rows show a “rematch”; the DFL’s numbers in the listed year against Fields’ 2012 numbers.  Fields turned out over 30,000 more Republican votes than in most presidential off-years (2002 was a great year for the MNGOP), and 30,000 more than even in 2000, which was a very good GOP year throughout the US.

So what do these numbers mean?

Simply this:  the 5th remains a difficult district for Republicans.  But the combination of a strong GOP candidate, a motivated campaign that knows how to message the district (as Fields most certainly did, although the Minneapolis media was an even more bald-faced Praetorian Guard for Ellison than it was for McCollum) and raise money makes it possible for the district, as badly as it was gerrymandered, to edge closer to being a 60-40 district than a 75-25 one.  And as dismal as that seems, that’s at least within striking distance; Chip Cravaack overcame a 60-40 district in 2010.  It’s difficult – but not impossible.

And that is the mission for the GOP in both the 4th and 5th CDs; take their turf from “Impossible” to “Herculean”, and thence maybe to “Difficult”.

More candidates like Fields, like Tony Hernandez and Teresa Collett, will certainly help.

Better-organized District committees will also go a long way, as will a functional state party capable of raising money and – this is important – not undercutting the messaging of the 4th and 5th CD candidates.

And this last year, top-line percentages aside, was a decent start.

As Jack Tomczak wrote on Facebook on Saturday:

Racist and sexist Republican party of Minnesota elects woman and black guy into leadership.

It’s true.  The MNGOP State Central Committee elected Keith Downey as chair, re-elected Kelly Fenton as Deputy, and Chris Fields as secretary.

Some of the races were, themselves, vastly more interesting than normal.  Fenton beat Ron-Paul-camp activist Corey Sax.  I’ve locked horns with Sax not a few times, but the guy had some useful ideas for “marketing” the MNGOP that the party could do much worse than look into.  I hope Sax takes his cue from the many “builder” Liberty supporters who’ve stayed involved in the MNGOP, and have improved it – if frustratingly incrementally – over this past year.

The Secretary race was difficult, pitting as it did two fantastic candidates.  Ryan Love is one of the GOP’s sharper tacks, one its most incisive Tweeps, and one of the more notably excellent activists.  He ran up against former CD5 candidate Chris Fields, who ran a spectacular campaign against Keith Ellison last year, and has only stepped up his game since then.  Fields ran straight into the teeth of the DFL’s GOTV tsunami, but…well, more on that later this week.   The only pity is that they both didn’t win.

Of course, the new leadership – and the entire party – faces a stern challenge.  After a year of grueling work, sparse donations and activist fatigue, the party is still over a million-and-a-half in debt.  The task at hand – decrease the out-go, increase the income, and start making the party a contender on the state level – is herculean.

More about that in the coming week.

Anyway – congratulations Keith, Kelly and Chris.  And good luck.

Cam Winton is running for Mayor of Minneapolis.

Winton – a former DFL activist who told of seeing the economic light after going into business – is running as a fiscal conservative and social moderate, and not as an endorsed Republican, per se.  I attended his kickoff rally a few weeks back in Minneapolis, and had a pretty singular experience for a GOP activists, standing in the same room and cheering along with people who’d opposed the marriage amendment (which Winton also opposed) and listening to Ashwin Madia, a couple of lesbian marriage activists, and Winton’s business partner extolling the candidate’s virtues.

And it was in that crowd, I thought, that one might see a successful challenge to DFL hegemony in Minneapolis; a candidacy that attacks the DFL’s weak spot in Minneapolis – its incompetence at running a city – while ignoring the GOP’s big weaknessses in places like Minneapolis.

Now, some – including my friend John Gilmore – have asked “is Winton Republican or conservative enough?”   He, and they, point to the fact that Winton is a former Democrat, and was in fact a prominent enough activist through 2008.

As a former Democrat myself, I’m pretty forgiving of Road to Damascus conversions.  And if you want to grill a candidate to assess the sincerity, or at least integrity, of their beliefs, then a debate could be a fine place to do it.

And there’s the problem.

———-

The Minneapolis mayor’s race is an expressly non-partisan one.  Party identification doesn’t appear with candidates on the ballot.

The Humphrey Center – the U of M’s Poli-Sci think tank and, if you ask conservatives, DFL hatchery and retirement home – is hosting a debate of these candidates this coming Wednesday.

The DFL ones.

Let’s rephrase that for impact; the Humphrey Institute – a public institution whose mission is at least ostensibly not “furthering the DFL’s interests and hindering their opposition” – is hosting a debate for a non-partisan office in the city in which the Institute resides.  And they’re only inviting DFL candidates to it.

According to the Winton campaign, he has been invited to a second debate.  At this second debate – which will have virtually no media coverage – Winton will appear on a panel with Bob Carney and Leslie Davis, a couple of perennial candidate who are shunted into a side-debate to isolate the comic relief from the “Real” race…

…which, the Humphrey Institute has decided in its infinite institutional wisdom, is among the DFL candidates, who will get the “real” debate.

This brings up a couple of questions:

Is the Humphrey Institute serving as a DFL campaigning tool?: Why the seemingly arbitrary cutoff at “DFL”, in a race where every candidate goes to the final ballot (Minneapolis uses “ranked choice” balloting, resulting in slow, unreliable elections with no need for party endorsements or primaries.   Having a fully-partisan “debate” is not only against the Humphrey Institute’s stated mission – it’s supposed to be irrelevant to the contest at hand.

Is this a debate or a DFL campaign rally?:  The Humphrey Institute’s planned event will include five DFL candidates who differ on policy only in the most tangential incidentals. That’s not a “debate”, it’s a support group meeting.

“Debate” implies “difference of opinion”:  But this “debate” – the one the U of M will actually publicize, the one the media will attend – studiously ignores a sharp, articulate candidate who sharply differs from the DFL on some issues where the DFL itself knows it’s vulnerable – spending, taxes, regulation, public safety, infrastructure.

I asked the Humphrey Institute’s Dr. Larry Jacobs about this last week.

I’ll have that part of the conversation tomorrow.

Because it’s never too early to start the campaign season.

Former Sen. Norm Coleman’s announcement last week that he would forgo a challenge to incumbent Gov. Mark Dayton may be remembered in hindsight as the starting gun for the 2014 election cycle in Minnesota.  With Democrats holding all the offices of note, the only real interest among political junkies is which Republicans will make bids for statewide office.  Having only won two cycles in the past decade (2002 & 2010), the GOP cupboard is sparse, with many of the party’s once rising stars now out of office.

So who’s left to run for governor in 2014?  In the spirit of the upcoming NCAA Tournament, we’ve made our brackets (sort of) and started the ball rolling towards months of endless chatter on who should or could lead the MN GOP out of the statewide office wilderness: (more…)