With 2% of the vote counted, Chris Christie is clobbering John Corzine in New Jersey by ten points.
Of course, I fully expect that the votes from Newark and Camden will put ACORN and Presiident Obama…er, I mean Governor Corzine, back in the thick of things.
I’ve seen no Saint Paul results so far. I’m off to the Eva Ng party. Fingers crossed.
Look – there’s no real suspense. I’m voting for Eva Ng for Mayor of Saint Paul tomorrow.
Why? Well, I have 100 reasons:
See you at the polls tomorrow. Bring a friend. Have your friend bring a friend, too.
Caught this piece from the Forum Group’s Saint Paul bureau; Al Franken is shilling for money for Byron Dorgan:
Franken today sent an e-mail message to his supporters asking them to donate to Sen. Byron Dorgan’s campaign who last year, he said, “made the long trek from North Dakota to Minnesota and we spent some time talking to folks about helping small businesses and getting our economy moving again. I can’t tell you how grateful I was for his insight and support.”
…
“Look, we need genuine champions of the middle class in the Senate, and Byron Dorgan is one of the best,” Franken wrote. “Can you donate $5 or more today to help Senator Dorgan gear up for 2010?”
Federal Elections Commission reports indicate Dorgan’s campaign has $4 million in the bank.
Of course, there’s more to it than a simple repayment of a campaign favor.
Dorgan – who was a heavyweight in North Dakota politics when I was starting out in radio news in NoDak 30 years ago – is the king of the purple-dog Democrats. He’s a Democrat, and a fiscally-liberal one at that, in a state that’s voted Republican for president almost every possible election since statehood; local politics in North Dakota tends to be also rigorously right-of-center.
But since the eighties, the state has sent Byron Dorgan, and then Kent Conrad, to the Senate. It’s about the money, of course; Dorgan and Conrad are champions of big farm bills; they have enough seniority between them to deflect light artillery fire. NoDak’s voters (like those in South Dakota, Montana and much of the rest of the Midwest, who send plenty of socially-conservative, fiscally-profligate people to Washington) know where the loot is.
But this election, there’s a real challenge. John Hoeven, North Dakota’s very popular and wildly successful Republican governor (who is, at the moment, the nation’s longest-serving state governor), is rumored to be interested in going to Washington. He won his last gubernatorial bid by almost fifty points…
…and the rumors are causing strange things to happen in North Dakota Republican politics. People are donating money, coming to meetings…
…and talking about doing to Dorgan what voters in South Dakota did to Tom Daschle not so long ago; “the unthinkable”.
And so Dorgan would seem to be calling in his markers, dipping into that bottomless pool of Twin Cities liberal money (which, dimes’ll getcha dollars, he’ll softpedal back home) to pad his war chest for what could be the biggest challenge of his long political career.
We’ll be talking with people from the NDGOP on the Northern Alliance in coming weeks. This could get interesting.
The Strib notes – wonder of wonders – that the GOP’s candidates are a conservative lot:
In the early GOP field for 2010, a common theme has emerged — government should be smaller. Some candidates want to dramatically cut back on mandates and local funding, some would merge departments, reduce state workers and slash one out of every $5 the state is slated to spend. What they want, at bottom, is a government that not only does more with less, but which simply does less.
The candidates are ambitious in their pledges to shrink government — “The sky’s the limit,” state Rep. Tom Emmer said at a recent forum — but haven’t yet worked out all the details.
And that’s the good news. The GOP of Arne Carlson is dead and unlamented.
“But wait!”, the likes of Lori Sturdevant and Nick Coleman will respond, “what about the GOP that sat down and worked with the DFL for a better Minnesota?”
For starters, your idea of a “better Minnesota”is a Minnesota that looks, taxes and spends like Massachussets and California.
Second – it was all baked wind and you know it. While the MNGOP – under its old guise, the “Independent Republican” Party – compromised to the point where it was indistinguishable from the DFL, the DFL never compromised on anything unless the votes forced them to.
Third – this is the campaign. This is the time when parties should present choices to voters. The MNGOP during Arne Carlson’s era was nothing but the DFL in better suits with less chanting. Compromise and “working with the opposition” are for after the election, when everyone is in office.
The plans, still in their infancy, could run into political trouble, practical and legal problems and have even prompted disagreement among the Republican field. A smaller, leaner government — long a mantra for Republicans — could hold appeal in cost-conscious times but could alienate those who believe government must step in during economic low-points.
That’s the point. People who believe that government’s role is to spend money like crack whores with stolen Platinum Cards probably should be in the DFL. It’ll make for a more honest conversation.
Back at my first usability/human factors gig about ten years ago, a very smart systems analyst (who is an occasional reader of this blog) gave me a piece of advice on how to analyze problems.
Any proposed solution exists, really, on two planes – Policy and Mechanism. Policy is “what you want”. Mechanism is “how you get what you want”. Policy is your goal, mechanism is the work it takes to achieve it. You need both, formally or informally; great work without a coherent goal, or “policy”, is like pushing hose up a hill; great policy that can’t be implemented by any attainable “mechanism” is just baked wind.
The advice was given to me in an engineering context, from someone who worked on the “mechanism” side, to someone who designed and validated “policy” by the ream.
But it applies in politcs as well. There are groups in politics who are neck-deep in policy, but who can’t implement anything; the Libertarian Party jumps to mind as a group with lots of policy, but no real ability to implement anything (since they never, ever get elected to anything; Ron Paul was the first Libertarian to actually start to implement some “mechanism” to Libertarian policy, by trying to co-opt the GOP).
Of course, for everyone involved in any place where the real world impacts theory – where “mechanism” and “policy” have to be made to match when they don’t want to, knows that that can be mighty difficult. In the world of technology, making “mechanism” deliver on “policy” is called “engineering”. Your policy is “I want to drive across the river”; the initial mechanism says “gravity and fluid dynamics make it literally impossible, and the river is too wide to just throw boards across it”; your job is to solve the problem.
And in “real world” politics, where ideals (“policy”) of necessity get corrupted by political reality (“mechanism”), there is a push and pull between What You Want – often expressed as “What You Believe” – and “What Is Realistic”, or “What Can Happen”, or most importantly “What We Can Either Ram Past The Opposition, Or Get Them To Agree To In Some Form”. It’s also called “politics”.
The point being, most human endeavor occurs out of the tension between what you want, and what you can actually get. It’s as true when building a bridge or a ship or a bipartisan compromise as it is when your kids bug you for money for their latest expensive obsession.
When it comes to politics, it hits all sides. If the world obeyed liberal “policy”, then Lyndon Johnson’s “War On Poverty” would have resulted in a surrender ceremony on the deck of the USS Missouri by 1970.
And we conservatives have the same battle to fight. Conservatives all follow, to one degree or another, certain first principles and core tenets of our belief system. Of course, some of us emphasize different parts of those principles – I’m more a growth and security guy than a social conservative – and others pay them lip service while they focus, to be polite, on the “mechanism” side of the equation (with Duke Cunningham being an extreme example).
The upshot? No pure ideal survives its first brush with reality unscathed.
Although Dave Mindeman of “mnpACT” m seems to think conservatism is not only immune from this, but so immune that conservatives should be held to the standard of absolute idealism.
Or at least, that Pat Anderson, GOP gubernatorial candidate and former State Auditor, should:
GOP Governor candidate Pat Anderson wrote an opinion piece in the Star Tribune a few days ago, which gives a pretty good summation of why she could never be elected Governor of Minnesota.Her problem is that she thinks the Free Market is actually “free” and that “limited government” approaches can succeed. The evidence says she is wrong on both counts.
Right – if by “evidence” you mean “the results we have after Republicans have to try to jam their beliefs – “policy” – through legislatures full of people who believe other things“.
Republicans constantly preach to us about the dangers of government expansion. How less government is good government. Yet, their free market and limited government approaches never adhere to any semblance of real principle and the approach they do use is blatantly biased toward corporate America. Free markets? Not here, not now.
Let’s take the so called free market. How is it that Republicans can elmininate government involvement in the societal areas where government really needs to be — such as the social safety net…..and yet can’t eliminate the corporate subsidies that drastically distort competitive forces?
There is actually a good question there, one that has much occupied the Minnesota and National GOPs. “Corporate Subsidies” are both anathema to real conservatives on a “policy” level, and have been one of those things that have been exacted from politicians (who have been by no means all conservative or even Republican, by the way) at a “Mechanism” level to garner support for differnet initiatives. Which, for better or (usually) worse is how politics actually works.
There’s also a great counter-question, too; turn Mindemann’s statement around. “How is it that Liberals can push government involvement into all areas of society regardless of “government need” (whatever that is), and …..and yet can’t eliminate the problems for which they tried to justify eliminating competitive forces?”
Dave, if you answer that, please feel free to phrase your answer in the terms of the same degree of ideological purity you demand of Pat Anderson.
And without the strawmen, please:
GAMC is cut completely in unallotment. But JOBZ and Tax Increment Financing and building stadiums are never eliminated in the “limited government” approach?
While Tax Increment Financing is a targeted tax cut, which is a core conservative principle (except for the “targeted” part), I don’t know that you’ll find a whole lot of actual conservatives who support JOBZ or stadium subsidies.
Why should large corporations get incentives to move to this state? How does that translate to “free” markets? Isn’t that unfair to smaller but local businesses?
They shouldn’t, it doesn’t, it totally is, and it’s an utterly non-partisan “tool”; the biggest corporate subsidy stories and boondoggles- Target’s Minneapolis development, Best Buy’s conquest of Richfield, the USBank Westside Flats developments, the entire hole that New Brighton dug itself – have been the province of the states’ biggest assemblies of liberal whackdoodles.
And in regards to “limited government”. This libertarian approach that is based on “Constitutional” grounds feels that government should only due what it was originally mandated to do.
So, I assume that means we eliminate Social Security and Medicare for starters. That is not a governmental role — security in retirement is an individual responsibility. If you do not acquire the means to support a retirement, it is too bad. Keep working or live with relatives.
And again with the distinction between “policy” and “mechanism”. If we were operating from a blank slate, or a slate that could be blanked, then it would be a tenet of purist, limited-government libertarian/conservative policy that huge interventions (and distortions) like Social Security and Medicare should be eschewed.
But the fact that both of those trains left the station 1-3 generations ago notwithstanding (creating the multi-generational dependency on government that they were arguably intended to in the first place), most conservatives recognize the need, as Winston Churchill put it, to “not level out the peaks to fill in the valleys, but to spread a safety net over the abyss”. So when you see Mindeman echoing stuff you’d more usually hear from an orthodox big-L Libertarian, like this…:
We must also get out of government welfare of any kind. The poor are on their own. Depend on charities or beg in the streets. Not our collective problem.
…it’s inflammatory, simplistic balderdash, of course; you will find very few conservatives who don’t recognize some imperative to keep people from starving, especially given forces that are sometimes beyond the individual’s control (and usually the “unintended” consequences of government actions anyway – like the Great Depression and our current troubles themselves!). That liberals confuse “cradle-to-grave entitlement” with “safety net” shouldn’t be held against conservative policy.
Buy why do we give subsidies to Exxon? Why are there farm subsidies to corporate farmers? Why do we prop up grain prices? or dairy prices? or why do we pay farmers to leave land idle?
Why? Because successive generations of politicians – mostly liberals – enacted programs to make farming “safer” and “more secure”; they created a national farm policy that has destabilized agriculture to the point that the majority of the farmers the program was intended to stabilize are now working in factories and shopkeepers and carpenters, and their children are programmers and teachers and everything-but-farmers. But where they failed in securing individual farms, they did succeed in making sure the big farmers that are left, and the political establishments they support, conservative and liberal, are utterly dependent on government subsidy. Again, it’s a bipartisan failure.
Which is why conservative “policy” would be to trash all these corporate subsidies as the debilitating interferences they are – and why reality has these subsidies so interwoven into the farm economy that it’d take a political effort far beyond the attention span and pain threshold of any American politician of any party, to fix.
Government is only limited when the constituency that gets downsized has no power or money to contribute to the political collective. That isn’t limited government — that is special interest government.
Well, no. It’s a manifestation of De Tocqueville’s classic dictum, “Democracy will only survive until people discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury”.
And for all the preaching that candidates like Pat Anderson give to us regarding their “limited” government approach and their free market systems, they are never really adovcating either of them….and if elected, they never will.
Tell you what, Dave Mindemann; why don’t you lefties sit back and give actual conservatives a prohibitive supermajority that’d allow us to wipe the slate clean for ten years or so, and get back to us on that, OK?
Drudge, early this morning, reflected the first question of a fair chunk of whatever portion of the landed punditry follows these sorts of things, with a front-page photo of TPaw with the headline “CAN THIS MAN CONQUER OBAMA?”
The Strib noticed, and elaborates on the story:
Gov. Tim Pawlenty filed paperwork today with federal regulators to form the Freedom First PAC, a national fundraising committee he can use to aid GOP candidates in upcoming elections.
Simultaneously, he was featured — with a photo — at the top of the Drudge Report this morning with a headline asking, “CAN THIS MAN CONQUER OBAMA?”
The headline linked to a Politico.com story that reported Pawlenty “has been quietly assembling the blueprint of a presidential campaign even as he has stayed “under the radar of D.C.’s political community”
Now, Barack Obama is shaping up to be a pretty dismal president so far; many of us who on January 21 were resigned to eight years in the wilderness are making mental notes not to throw out the drape measurements, just in case.
But can TPaw do it?
Let’s go over the strengths and weaknesses of a Pawlenty bid for the White House:
Weakness: He’s from Minnesota. Minnesota’s salad days as an incubator of exciting politicians and interesting races are long behind it. Jesse Ventura, by the way, was more a “freak show” than “evidence of a vibrant culture”. Minnesota’s only real significance is its ten electoral votes; not chump change, not a kingmaker.
Strength: On the other hand, TPaw has been working diligently on raising that profile. If slow and steady wins the race, TPaw has got the first part down.
Weakness: His profile is very low among the conservative base. Pawlenty has a reputation, not so much as a “moderate” as as a “pragmatist”; he’s no movement conservative. His showing at the last CPAC – about 2% – showed that he’s not especially well-exposed to the conservative base. Some Minnesota conservatives call him (wrongly) a RINO.
Strength: But he’s right on the “conservative” issues that do matter to people outside the base – especially in a season where independents are getting serious buyer’s remorse over the neosocialist baggage that came with all the Hope and Change (TM). His Thermopylae-esque stand against a two-chamber press (the DFL, Minnesota’s Democrats, control the Senate and have a prohibitive supermajority in the House) on two successive state budgets, battling back against a spending-crazy DFL phalanx, should be getting conservatives’ attention nationwide. While TPaw does run to the center on the occasional issue – global warming, ethanol subsidies – these are “B” and “C” list issues, “nice to haves” compared to the bread-and-butter pocketbook issues.
A story, for those of you who don’t follow Minnesota GOP trivia: when Pawlenty sought the nomination to run for governor, he faced a very stern challenge from conservative businessman Brian Sullivan, who ran well to Pawlenty’s right. The state convention in 2002 came down to many, many ballots – and was finally clinched when Pawlenty broke down and took the Taxpayers’ League’s “No New Taxes” pledge. And for the past six years, come hell or high water, he has held to that pledge, at fearsome political risk, and against the kind of pressure that would have made a real RINO buckle and scamper for cover.
Weakness: I don’t know that the American conservative “base” knows the above. They should. Of course, the national media will follow the lead of the Twin Cities’ media to do their best to obscure this from the legions of moderates and independents who are bailing on the Democrats today.
Strength: Pawlenty is, in theory, the kind of “conservative” who should be able to reach out successfully to independents. For all the Minnesota left’s incessant whining, he’s not a dogmatic conservative. He’s focused less on conservative dogma, and more on results in his six years. His results, unless you’re employed by or addicted to the state bureaucracy, are excellent. If the American independent street knew the truth about Pawlenty – who’s branded his politics “Sam’s Club Republican” – they’d see there’s a lot to appreciate.
Weakness: Remember the last time we had a Republican that the media anointed as the “Republican who can reach out to Democrats?” Remember when Democrats would intone with straight faces that “McCain is the one Republican I’d ever consider voting for?” Of course, once McCain became a threat, that all changed; the knives came out; the media and left (pardon the redundancy) began finding a “radical conservative” John McCain (whose American Conservative Union lifetime rating is a point to the right of Jim Ramstad, and down there with Chuck Hagel) that had eluded even us on the center right for his entire career.
Strength: The media matters less than it used to. Not enough less, but we’re getting there.
Weakness: Of course, the main vehicle for the weakening and outflanking of the mainstream media – the conservative and center-right alternative media – is an area where Pawlenty has traditionally gone slower than a lot of other candidates. Along with the Minnesota GOP as a whole, Pawlenty’s been very much a traditionalist in dealing with both the major media (who will eventually turn on him) and the conservative alternative media, talk radio and the blogs.
Strength: The Minnesota GOP shows signs of being able to change that. We’ll see if they do, and if TPaw follows suit.
Weakness: He’s chasing some powerful frontrunners; Palin, Romney and Huckabee have big name recognition and established machines.
Strength: I’m not sure that a machine established in 2008 is all that much to brag about anymore. To be sure…
Weakness: …Pawlenty lacks the name recognition of a Sarah Palin or a Mitt Romney. But…
Strength: …he’s got some strengths, too. Since about 2001, I’ve called Pawlenty “the best stump speaker in Minnesota politics today” – and although Rep. Tom Emmer may have taken that title in-state, Pawlenty has formidable stage presence. He’s much more polished onstage than Sarah Palin – but can fairly be said to match her folksy bonhomie; he plays the “Son of a meat-packer” card with consistency but grace. As important, he exudes the same sense of gravitas and competency that Romney does – he has paid his dues with interest – without sounding like a CEO in the process.
I’m not saying Tim Pawlenty is the next “Great Communicator”. I am saying that enough raw material is there that you can’t rule it out out of hand.
It’s going to be a fun couple of years!
Last night, I went to the District 54 “Grill the Candidates” picnic, at Central Park in Roseville.
I didn’t get a count of the turnout, but it was packed, especially gven that it rained off and on for the first couple of hours. So yeah – great turnout!
Maybe it was the hot dogs. Then again, maybe it was the candidates; all the gubernatorial candidates, I believe; there are a total of nine, although I caught the speeches by Andersoon, Emmer, Kolls and Seifert, not to mention Laura Brod, whom rumor says is thinking of re-entering the race. Of course, there was a who’s who of other GOP celebs there; Tony Sutton, Michael Brodkorb, Barb Davis-White, Ed Matthews, Sue Jeffers, Enge and a slew of others.
The best part? Listening to the candidates, it sounds like they get it; “bipartisanship” is a trap; the GOP’s way forward it to provide an alternative to the DFL’s spendthrift ways.
And people are feeling energized in a way they were not for the past two years. I observed many times during the ’08 campaign; the GOP runs on volunteers, and after “must-win” full-court pushes in ’98, ’00, ’02, ’04 and’06, the habitual volunteers were completely exhausted. Between that and the nomination of the fairly politically uninspiring John McCain, the mojo was gone.
If the rest of the party is feeling the way people sounded last night, the vacation is over.
This is going to be a fun year.
Over the past week, congresspeople have been running into grass-roots anger over Obamacare.
And yesterday, it spread to Cash For Clunkers:
Rep. Russ Carnahan was clobbered by tea party protesters at his Cash for Clunkers rally today in St. Louis.
The protesters who disagreed with Carnahan were forced outside of the dealership.
KSDK has video from his event today at McMahon Ford in St. Louis City.
Make sure the White House hears about it. Wonder how many of these protesters are on Janet Napolitano’s list?
But The One can’t be happy about these numbers:
Trust in President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies to identify the right solutions to problems facing the country has dropped off significantly since March, according to a new Public Strategies Inc./POLITICO poll.Just as Obama intensifies his efforts to fulfill a campaign promise and reach an agreement with Congress on health care reform, the number of Americans who say they trust the president has fallen from 66 percent to 54 percent. At the same time, the percentage of those who say they do not trust the president has jumped from 31 to 42.
And the Party of Pelosi?
The president’s party has taken a similar hit since the last Public Trust Monitor poll, with only 42 percent of respondents saying that they trust the Democratic Party, compared with 52 percent who do not. The party’s numbers are nearly the inverse of March’s survey, in which 52 percent said they trusted Democrats and 42 percent did not.
Obama’s overreach on healthcare and his squandering of the nation’s economic future are orders of magnitude worse than the Clinton overreach that led to the Gingrich revolution.
The only real question: is there are GOP that can pick up this fumble?
That’s the worry.
Back in 2002, a couple of unnamed conservatives walked into the State Green Party Convention on a lark, got themselves seated (because “credentials” were, at the time, an authoritarian paternalistic relic of fascism, apparently), and nominated former Marine fighter pilot Ed McGaa – a firebreathing property rights conservative and absolute anti-Green – for governor. Hilarity ensued; McGaa, who was not present at the convention, won the nomination. Afterwards, he got in on the joke, running an extremely tongue-in-cheek campaign while the Greens gradually realized they’d been had, went through a cataclysmic soul-searching, and finally tossed him and ran perennial pest Ken Pentel. McGaa, tongue in cheek or not, might have done better.
It was a joke that got out of hand.
It looks like the joke got paid back this weekend.
While I’m deliriously happy about Eva Ng – a genuine conservative and person with the kind of vision my city needs – running for Mayor of Saint Paul, it’s not all roses.
The Minneapolis GOP has endorsed “Papa” John Kolstad. Kolstad, a DFLer who left the party because “centrism” frustrated him, next ran for the Attorney General slot as a Greenie (note to pretty much anyone; the presence of “Papa” in a political stage name is always always always a bad sign).
And now – since the Greens have lost major-party status – he’s “running as a Republican”.
Kolstad has run for a DFL state senate seat and Atty. General (Green Party endorsed). His reasons for running for Atty General in 2006: http://dailyjam.blogspot.com/2006/06/minnesota-green-party-slate-of-2006.html
First, Becky Lourey has said she would bring the National Guard troops home from Iraq. Kolstad would use the attorney general’s office to assist her in that cause.
Second, as a strong supporter of Single Payer Health Insurance, Kolstad would continue the work Hatch has done in holding insurance company executives’ feet to the fire. He would also fight any legal challenges to Single Payer waged by the insurance companies.
Third, he would use the attorney general’s office to fight on behalf of the environment. If you are creating greenhouse gases by driving a gas guzzler, you should pay for it. He suspects collusion between coal companies and electric companies, and he’d like to investigate that. How can electric companies charge rate-payers to pay farmers not to use wind turbines to generate safe, renewable energy? He’d like to look into that.
Look, the GOP is a big tent, but this is lunacy.
And while I’ve led the Twin Cities’ punditry in trying to welcome the Ron Paul supporters to the party, we have to draw the line at nominating a crypto-maoist like Kolstad. Word has it that it was the Ronulans on the Minneapolis City Committee that pushed the decidedly non-conservative, non-Republican Kolstad through the process.
Rules is rules. Elections go to those who show up. Duly noted.
But it is time for actual Republicans to take their party back in Minneapolis. Somehow we in Saint Paul managed to incorporate the energy and vitality of the Paulbots, without losing our conservative souls. Minneapolis needs to do the same.
Minneapolis Republicans; you need to rise up and condem this theft of your party by – words fail me – enemies of what you believe in.
…give a thought toward stopping over in Saint Paul as Eva Ng formally files her run for Mayor of Saint Paul!
TUESDAY, JULY 21st
Time: 1:00 pm
(Please arrive about 12:30)
Ramsey County Elections Building,
90 West Plato Blvd., St. Paul
Might just be worth a trip. She could use the support – and Saint Paul could use her in charge at City Hall.
This one popped up in the comment section yesterday – but I figured it was worth asking here (although I know nobody will answer it).
For years, John McCain was the one Republican who could reach across the aisle. From Democrats across the spectrum – from relative moderates, like my Dad (who once said he could have brought himself to vote for Mac) to moderately-sane liberals – said that McCain was someone they could get behind. His American Conservative Union lifetime rating of just below seventy confirmed this: Mac’s correct stances on the budget and defense notwithstanding, he was no doctrinaire conservative.
And then, the moment he got nominated, he became “a radical conservative”.
Now, I understand that during the campaign the Tics will say whatever it takes; if the GOP had nominated Mother Teresa or Dennis Kucinich, they’d have called either of them “radical conservatives”, too.
But now that the campaign is over, you still see some of the left’s talkingpointbots repeating “McCain ran to the right! He became too conservative!” in an endless loop, like a piece of computer code with no exception handling.
So Democrats – how, exactly, did McCain “become to conservative”? And I’m talking policy statements, here – none of this “he picked Sarah Palin” BS, because he picked Palin to bolster his conservative support. Because he was lagging. Because he had not run to the right.
So anyway. ‘spain away.
This I gotta hear.
Well, the Gubernatorial poll yesterday was interesting: Tom Emmer ran away with it. Laura Brod – who dropped out of the race – came in second, with Marty Seifert rounding out the top three.
OK – time for the Presidential race.
Vote!
I was enjoying a rare day off when I flipped on the Hannity show and heard Ann Coulter talking about Sarah Palin’s resignation from the Alaska governor gig.
Her spokesman wouldn’t say why Palin decided to step down, but the announcement stirred speculation that she would focus on a bid for the 2012 Republican nomination for president.
Spokesman Dave Murrow says Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell will be inaugurated at the governor’s picnic in Fairbanks at the end of the month.
Speculation is running amok, of course; some say she’s just taking political life and shoving it (but there are less auspicious weekends for that than the Fourth of July. Who could blame her?
Others, of course, say she’s clearing the decks for a run in 2012.
As for me? I don’t think that a run will hurt her one bit – but I’m going to cross my fingers and hope she runs for the Alaska Senate seat open next year. As we saw this past election, having two years in the Senate no longer disqualifies one for a Presidential run (even with someone with as mediocre a resume as Obama); two to six years learning the Washington ropes would be good additions to her political rap sheet.
Coulter brought up a great point – she noted that Margaret Thatcher grew up as the daughter of a grocer, and had the accent to show for it. She didn’t talk in the Eton/Harrow/Cambridge accents that the UK’s ruling class learned or affected. She had to learn to talk that way; it didn’t come naturally. Likewise, in America while we might be governed by someone with a Texas accent, or one of those Harvard/Boston brogues (described by PJ O’Rourke as sounding like the speaker put the PoliGrip on the wrong side of the dentures), it’s a stretch to see us governed by someone who sounds like Frances McDormand in Fargo.
Palin has a better resume than Obama had this time a year ago; a hitch in the Senate would make her darn near a fantastic candidate. She just needs to stop droppin’ her “G’s” and try to sound as white and middle-class as Obama does.
“…the President said in an interview not that long ago ‘We are out of money’ with all due respect Mr. President, if we’re out of money, quit spending it!”
…also, at about nine minutes in, Pawlenty shares what he thinks of the President’s performance six months in and calls out the “Stimulus” Bill and the Federal Government’s encroachment into private industry.
One of the biggest challenges ahead for the GOP is to reclaim the Fiscal Conservative ribbon from…well actually nobody has it now…which is probably why we are enjoying a hiatus from the trappings of low unemployment, prosperity and economic growth right now.
“Paying for what you spend is basic common sense. Perhaps that’s why, here in Washington, it’s been so elusive”
True.
Who said that? Wait for it…of course…Barack Obama; filling the vacuum left by Republicans with more wholesome teleprompter goodness. The most liberal former Senator in recent history defines audacity once again.
Republicans marvel at his skill in stealing their clothes. Democrats retort that, under George Bush, Republicans left their clothes unguarded while they cavorted in a hot tub of borrowed cash. Sure, they talked about fiscal responsibility. But instead of choosing between tax cuts, wars and social spending, they chose all three—and left the bill for future generations.
True (although picturing Dick Cheney in a hot tub is a wee bit unsettling).
Whenever Republicans accuse Mr Obama of fiscal profligacy, Democrats have three easy answers. The first is to accuse them of hypocrisy—why did they not speak up when Mr Bush was splurging red ink?
True (although a few of us did speak up).
Americans stopped trusting Republicans with their money in part because some were caught trousering bribes or peddling influence.
and True…although Republicans have no monopoly here. Sadly, the public’s attention has been drawn from Republicans…because there are so few of them in power right now.
Republicans think they see an opening. Although Mr Obama is still very popular, Americans have doubts about his fiscal stewardship. In a recent Gallup poll, 51% disapproved of his handling of federal spending. Since this is the only area where most people disapprove of Mr Obama, Republicans are enthusiastically prodding it.
But will middle America believe them this time?
Tony Sutton won the State GOP Chair slot in one ballot, bright and early this morning.
Michael Brodkorb took a couple of ballots to get the Deputy Chair slot.
David Sturrock rounded out the executive slots, winning the Secretary Treasurer job that Sutton will be vacating.
Good job, guys.
Now, let’s win some elections.
In my post last week about the MNGOP leadership battle, I noted three things:
Ironically, I’ve gotten more flak about the Deputy chair race; I’m told that I (among a few others) was removed from the running to MC a candidate debate because of my alleged allegiance to one candidate or another in the Deputy Chair debate. To be perfectly honest, I barely knew what a Deputy Chair was before this go-around, and wasn’t entirely sure why it mattered until fairly recently.
Which isn’t to say I don’t have a dog in the fight. Michael Brodkorb’s a friend and former Northern Alliance colleague. I have a generalized sense he’ll do a good job, if only because he’s a butt-kicking “make-things-happen” one man political wrecking crew, and if for some reason the MNGOP administration were called upon to, say, build a bridge across the Minnesota River, Mike’d have the cars rolling early and under budget.
But I have no grounds to “endorse” anyone in the Deputy Chair race since, duh, I haven’t really formed a coherent opninion.
But Pat Shortridge has:
I didn’t intend to become involved in the MN GOP leadership races. I helped Brandon Sawalich frame his ideas about reforming and modernizing the state party when he was considering a run for Chairman. But, until now, that has been the extent of my involvement.
But, having read and heard many of the, what I consider to be, unfair criticisms of Michael Brodkorb, I decided to share some of my thoughts. The conservative blogosphere has been particular disappointing in its treatment of the Deputy Chair race. I find the analysis, from people I generally respect, lacking.
But to use my own criteria, I’m going to talk about what I’m for than what I’m against.
He makes the case for Brodkorb.
The Central Committee votes tomorrow. I’m hoping we can get the results as close to real-time as possible on the NARN.
Manfred Von Richtoven – better known to history as the Red Baron, the highest-scoring fighter pilot of World War I – was once asked for his “mission statement”, as they’re called in business today.
Paraphrasing closely, he said “My mission is to patrol my sector, and shoot down the enemy. All else is bulls**t”.
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As I noted yesterday, Tim Pawlenty has done a great job as governor – in great part because he followed through on his promises. (And lest anyone think I’m disparaging Governor Pawlenty in any way in saying this, let me add right now that I echo what King says in every single particular. Thanks, Governor!)
And, as we noted yesterday, the promises that have mattered the most – indeed, the ones that have defined his administration – were the ones he made to get nominated; the No New Taxes pledge foremost among them. To his immense credit, Governor Pawlenty has largely kept that promise, especially with the big things; I’m willing to sacrifice a pawn to take a queen; I’m likewise wiling (if not thrilled) to trade “health fees” one year for unallotment this year; it’s not purist conservative gospel, and it’s pragmatic, but that’s politics for you.
Which means that much of the success of the Pawlenty Administration came from his reaction to a powerful, motivated insurgency within the party – the conservative candidacy of Brian Sullivan. Sullivan was a self-funded maverick (not a McCain kind, the real kind) who ran on a platform that’d have done Ronald Reagan proud. It scared the crap out of the party establishment – so much so that “their” candidate, Pawlenty, had to adopt one of their key tenets to get the nomination.
The rest, as they say, is history. The good kind.
Of course, motivated insurgencies are always a headache to the establishment of any organization, at any level. In 2006, many long-time Sixth District activists were turned off by Michele Bachmann’s organization; she flooded the precinct caucuses with supporters, which gave her a crushing majority of delegates at every level of the endorsement process. She went on, of course, to win twice, including last fall, when the Conventional Wisdom said she would lose; she’s the most conservative voice in Minnesota elective politics; thank goodness the establishment didn’t get their way.
Another insurgency, we’re still digesting; last year, Ron Paul supporters flooded precincts caucuses throughout the state. They brought boundless motivation, energy and (after one filtered out a few hundred thousand resolutions about the Trans-American Freeway and 9/11 being an inside job) some good, solid, libertarian-conservative politics. It scared the establishment, who in some cases had to resort to parliamentary maneuvering that baffled the newcomers; in other cases, they just plain had to organize their opposition.
None of those three insurgencies change the party, fundamentally. But all of them had their effects; the compromises that the parties had to make through the process made the party stronger, in each case.
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There’s another insurgency this year. It’s not of quite the same import as the 2002 Sullivan assault. It’s not going to send anyone to Washington. It’s not going to shake the party down to its precincts. But it’s important; just different.
For one thing, the battle for State Party Chair doesn’t have the same constituents as a convention, much less a general election; it’s the party Central Committee that’ll be doing the voting. And nobody vaults into the Central Committee from nowhere. It’s something that comes from years of service to the party. Which means that, no matter what one believes, one has developed the network of connections and allegiances that are the building blocks of any “establishment”.
State Chairman elections, thus, are not unpredictable free-for-alls. The network, the connections, the establishment has a very, very strong voice in the process. As, perhaps, is entirely fitting.
Tony Sutton is a good candidate; I believe he will make a good State Chairman. I also believe that, since he is the establishment’s candidate, his connections with that establishment – the Central Committee – are strong enough that the election is his. That’s not a bad thing because – this is important – his job is not to define the party’s philosophy. That’s the job of the individual candidates, and the people who recruit them and, to some extent the districts they come from. The chairman’s job is to run the administrative wing of the party, and make sure the party supports the candidates, and above all to raise tons and tons of money to make sure that support is there when it’s needed.
I don’t believe there’s any real question that Tony Sutton is going to win. And I think he will do a good job (and if he doesn’t, I’ll be joining a hell of a lot of Republicans in pointing it out). While I don’t like “Next In Line” politics, I think Sutton’s experience in the party machinery makes him qualified to run the party machinery.
I fully expect to be congratulating Tony Sutton next Saturday (June 13) after the Central Committee elections, and sincerely offering him my support (for whatever that’s worth) in helping the GOP kick ass in 2010.
But the party does need a swift kick in the pants, too. The party machinery is decayed and complacent in some areas; the party has ceded the Fourth and Fifth Districts to the Dems for far too long; candidate recruitment and development is lagging badly in places like the First District, and is virtually nonexistent in the Cities. The party still acts like it’s the 1970’s in terms of decentralizing authority; ask anyone who’s sat at a Congressional District convention and fumed as debate was slashed to ramrod District Committee initiatives through the processes. The party machinery needs to make a contest of the entire state, not just the South, the Red River Valley, and the second-through-sixth-tier suburbs.
So while Tony Sutton will, I believe, be the next MNGOP Party Chairman, the party needs to put these goals – the need to not just embrace change, but conquer it; the need to adapt to a world where authority is decentralizing – out front.
They need not so much to fight the DFL, but to present the GOP in a light that wins people over to what the party represents, and to make sure the candidates that do that are supported.
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I don’t “endorse” people on this blog. I’m just a workadaddy, hugamommy schnook from Saint Paul, with a couple of kids and a mortgage and a day job. And I am not on the Central Committee, so my opinion really matters only inasmuch as I have a readership and a modestly popular talk show – i.e. not all that much. To call my opinion an “endorsement” only makes sense as humor. So I don’t endorse.
But I support Dave Thompson for State Party Chair.
Part of it is that I like Dave, and I support his positions. Dave’s politics largely agree with mine. And I believe that if he were the state chairman, it’d send a message about the kind of candidate this party should be recruiting, and the kind of races we should be running; center-right, unapologetic, as tightly-focused on a solid, winning message as an hour of Dave’s talk show always was. I believe that Dave has a good command of what politics is turning into in this state – which isn’t so important for an administrator, but is vital for a leader.
It’s not a shot at Tony Sutton or his supporters. As I said, I believe Tony will win in the end, and I will work to support the party if and when he does.
But it is a warning shot across the bow of the state party; “I support you, but not without question. I expect results from you and your administration. The stakes are too high to be complacent“, not that I don’t believe Sutton knows that. “Come back with your shield, or on it“.
Whoever wins, the real challenges start June 14: recruit canddiates. Build a bench. Raise money. Get a message out there.
Further conservatism; limit government; promote growth, security, and limited government.
Win races, and make those victories matter.
As to everything else? Ask the Red Baron.
I was originally going to call this piece “What The Hell Is Wrong With the MNGOP, Part X”; there’s plenty more to talk about in that series.
But in the aftermath of the last legislative session, and especially Governor Pawlenty’s epic, lone stand against the DFL’s tax-and-spend orgy, I’m inclined to answer my question “not as much as there was eight years ago”. Or last year, for that matter.
Nobody’s ever mistaken Tim Pawlenty for a movement conservative – and some of my Buchananite friends sputter angrily when I even mention “conservative” in the same paragraph as Pawlenty, who is certainly a pragmatist, front and center – but he’s delivered on the one big honka-lunka mega-issue that every conservative should agree on; curbing spending and the size and reach of government.
And while the GOP Senate caucus is too small to sustain any gubernatorial vetoes, the House caucus did itself proud this year, doing something many of us had nearly given up on seeing; doing what they were sent to Saint Paul to do; acting like a party; presenting Minnesota an alternative to the DFL, rather than acquiescing with the majority like a herd of hamsters.
It’d be much better to be in control – but the party showed big signs of hope.
And I think it all traces back to something that happened eight years ago at the State GOP Convention.
If you’re a Minnesota Republican, you remember the story; Brian Sullivan, a movement conservative, took Pawlenty, then the House Minority leader, to 3,000 ballots over forty days and forty nights of voting. Pawlenty had to move sharply to the right of his normally pragmatic, legislative-negotiation-honed positions to win the nomination, finally taking the Taxpayers League’s “No New Taxes” pledge to secure the nomination.
Sullivan didn’t win the nomination – but had he not been in the race, Pawlenty would never have moved right; conservatism would have lost.
So what we have in Minnesota today – gubernatorial unallotment standing in the way of a state-bankrupting spending orgy – we owe to Sullivan (as well as a governor who has had the integrity to stick to his promises all these years against Thermopylean odds).
And this is what the party needs to recover from the last two drubbings: a coherent message, and the willingness to live and fight for that message when the heat’s on.
So on Saturday, June 13, the Central Committee of the Minnesota GOP is going to elect a new chair. There are a couple of great choices on the ballot.
What are we going to do?
More tomorrow.
Governor Pawlenty’s discipline is tutelage for Republicans everywhere.
Congressional Republicans — the ones who got tossed because of their embrace of spending and earmarks — might start looking for a message up north. Fiscal responsibility? “It is the fundamental tenet of our party, and the conservative coalition more broadly,” says Mr. Pawlenty, nicely. “If we don’t have that, we are nothing.”
If Republicans are looking to get back their conservative groove, they could do worse than study Minnesota’s budget brawl. Mr. Pawlenty deftly (and amusingly) outmaneuvered his Democratic opposition, not only saving his state from huge tax increases but clearing the way to cut government spending. Call it a refreshing break from the financial-crisis norm.
While liberal TV ads equate fairness with sticking it to the “rich”…
…Mr. Pawlenty kept voicing three simple principles. “Number one, we must have [because of the constitution] and should have a balanced budget,” he told me. “Number two, the state government needs to live within its means, just like everybody else. Number three, we shouldn’t raise taxes in the worst recession in 60 years.” Minnesota already has one of the highest tax burdens in the nation.
While in Washington, Comrade Obama increases the Federal Government and National Debt at unprecedented speed…
this will be one of the first times in modern Minnesota history that the state will reduce the size of government in real terms, not just slow its rate of growth. “The correlation in recent history has been between job growth and states that have reasonable government cost structures,” he says. These cuts, he says, will position Minnesota to take advantage of the recovery when it comes.
A Crisis Not Wasted™ indeed, Governor.
On August 31, 1939, Adolph Hitler, in a speech to the Reichsreingebotsamt in Münich, said:
Peace is still attainable! All the Poles, Norwegians, French, Danes, Dutch, Belgians, French and British need to do is start goose-stepping, killing Jews and working with us on the whole Lebensraum thing!
Lavrencz Szdurdzevanski, writing for the Sztrela-Trzybuna Warszawy (Warsaw Star/Tribune), wrote in a column later that day:
Where is the spirit of bipartisanship that animated our anscestors? Like when former Governor Elmzar Anderczszon worked with the Russians during the hundreds of years they controlled us? No; our partisan government will no doubt do its best to not cooperate with our neighbors!
And we all know how that turned out, right? [1]
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In a similar vein, the Democrats Dthink, mirabile dictu, that their lives would be easier if Republicans put “partisanship” aside and did their work for them:
Congressional Democratic leaders said Wednesday that Sen. Arlen Specter’s party switch is a sign that Republicans should become more like, well, Democrats.
“I say to Republicans in America, take back your party,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters. “The party of protecting the environment, the party of individual rights, the party of fairness.”
Pelosi, like much of the Minnesota political establishment, wants a return to the good ol’ days of the sixties and seventies – when Republicans basically acted like Democrats with better suits. It’s explained very well in the Wall Street Journal’s obit for Jack Kemp is the most cogent explanation of what Lori Sturdevant, the Minnesota Establishment and the Mainstream Media believe Republicans should be that I’ve ever seen (emphasis added):
A celebrated pro quarterback, Kemp was an unlikely intellectual. Yet amid the economic troubles of the 1970s, he immersed himself in the details of fiscal and monetary policy. Along with a handful of others, many of whom wrote for this newspaper, Kemp became a champion for the classical economic ideas that challenged the Keynesian orthodoxy of that time. He also had to mount an insurgency inside the Republican Party, which for decades had been dominated by budget-balancers who saw their fate mainly as moderating and paying for liberal excess.
That’s what they want. And I’m concerned that we’re seeing signs of the same thing from Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney on their “Listening Tour”.
Look – there’s a time for compromise and some degree of cooperation. That time is not when you’re defining what your party stands for.
And not to Nancy Pelosi (and everyone who thinks as she does): partisanship is necessary for democracy.
Jay Reding doesn’t write nearly enough, but when he does, it’s always good.
And he does in one post what I did in about ten with my “What the hell is wrong with the MNGOP series” in this piece, “Winning on Principles”:
Everyone looks at the GOP’s problems through the lens of “conservatives” versus “moderates.” That is the wrong way to look at the issue: what this battle really is about is “principles” versus “politics.” The moderates want the GOP to play towards what they see as the political “center”—or the left. The principle-minded factions wants the GOP to stand on a bedrock of principle.
The dichotomy in Minnesota is best shown by watching “Sturdevant-approved” Republicans railing against “extremism” in the party on the one hand, and conservatives calling Tim Pawlenty a “RINO” on the other.
The moderates have a point. If you want to win as a party, you go where the votes are. It’s classic Anthony Downs, the voters fall along a bell curve and the party that can capture the most votes in the middle will win the election.
But the problem is that if the choice is between the Democrats and the Democrats-Lite, why not vote for the real thing? If Republicans start advocating for more government control, they lose the conservative and libertarian wings of the party and end up losing anyway.
Also the country; so many Democrat policies are irreversible; the nation’s addiction to other peoples’ money booms every time the Dems have unfettered power, and short of an epochal catastrophe will never go back to where it was.
There has to be room for both. The GOP cannot win by turning its back on its principles, but it has to be able to advocate for those principles. Being the best conservative in the world does absolutely nothing unless the GOP cannot get others to understand the importance of that stand.
That is the problem with the GOP today. They have no ability to connect with the average voter. They’ve lost the popular imagination, they’ve lost their political “brand” and there is no message coming from the GOP today. Even when they do have a point, they are so ham-handed in making it that they end up hurting each other.
I’ve written it before; conservatism is difficult. When you get beyond single-issue advocacy on abortion, guns and taxes, conservatism takes some serious thought to wrap your arms around. P.J. O’Rourke framed it well in Parliament of Whores; Liberalism is Santa Claus – happy, indulgent, with only hypothetical consequences (did anyone actually get a lump of coal? C’mon) and, in the end, nonexistant; Conservatism is like God – there are immutable rules and consequences, and judgments get made! It can be difficult selling “abstemiousness, principle, consequences and eternal truths” when the alternative is “Barack Obama is going to pay my mortgage and my heating bill”.
It should go without saying that it’s harder when the media actively sabotages that message – and worse still when the likes of Duke Cunningham sabotage it even more. Still, that’s what we’re here for.
Reding notes something I’ve been trying to discuss with my Dem friends:
All is not lost. Obama is a mule—a rare character that comes out of nowhere, establishes power, but leaves no lasting coattails. Obama is a rare individual, which makes him dangerous to the GOP, but the more the Democratic Party becomes a cult of personality, the worse off they are. Obama becomes largely irrelevant no later than 2016, and by then the sheen will be off.
This is a good point. If people thought we had Bush fatigue – for an administration that, leaving the war aside and ignoring for a moment his spending (which was un-conservative but seems almost quaint looking at Obama’s budget) didn’t really do all that much – then Obama is going to leave a toxic hangover, even if he does win re-election.
Now is the time that the GOP needs to regroup and experiment.
That is what the GOP ultimately needs to do. They can’t be afraid of failure. They’ve already failed, now is the time to be bold. Yes, the GOP needs to stand on its principles, but what they really need to do is win on those principles. That means trying everything they can to advocate for their values and seeing what sticks. As badly as Michael Steele’s first weeks on the job has been, at least someone is trying new tactics.
This is a good point. In my job – designing user interfaces – sometimes you need to show the customer a design that isn’t quite right. It gets them thinking about what they do want things to work like – which is the goal in the first place.
Moving in a direction will help people figure out how to move in the direction.
Politics is cyclical, and the Democrats are already sowing the seeds of their own downfall. They will grow complacent and arrogant (and have already), and the GOP will get their opening. Exploiting that weakness will take time and trial. But the Republican Party must learn to stand for something and be able to make that stand one that others will join. That is a tall order, but it is the way politics work in America. Politics is cyclical, and any claim of permanent Democratic majority status is as premature now as claims of a permanent Republican majority in 2002 were then.
Heh. Anyone remember that discussion?
Anyway – go read the whole thing.
Meet meet the real Arlen Specter, thanks to the NRSC.
You’re welcome, Tics. You can have him.
Gary Gross notes that the polls are starting to relent a little for the GOP nationally. He quotes a Rasmussen Poll:
For just the second time in more than five years of daily or weekly tracking, Republicans now lead Democrats in the latest edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 41% would vote for their district’s Republican candidate while 38% would choose the Democrat. Thirty-one percent (31%) of conservative Democrats said they would vote for their district’s Republican candidate.
Gross:
I don’t doubt that that last sentence is giving Democratic strategists gray hair. Though there’s no doubt that we’ll see fluctuations between now and Election Day 2010, there’s also no doubt that the Democrats have misread the electorate. The Democrats’ misreading the election results has helped put the GOP in better shape than we’ve been in a long time.
Yes, but there’s an asterisk there. We’ll come back to that.
I credit the change in the generic ballot to three things: President Obama’s radical agenda, President Obama’s arrogance and the House Republicans’ principled stand against Obama’s radical agenda. Obama’s radical agenda has given conservatives something to fight against while the House Republicans’ principled stance against that agenda is giving conservatives something to fight for.
Obama’s agenda is a factor. Congress adds the arrogance and the agenda, one that I think is going to turn out to be a drag on Obama. And the House GOP’s battle has been a blessing.
But so far all that gives us is something to campaign against. Until the GOP has something to campaign for – a positive message – the good news cup is only half full.
On the positive side – it can’t be that hard to craft a positive message when the executive branch is so amateurish and naive (Obama’s tongue-kiss of Hugo Chavez did not play well in middle America) and Congress is so gigantistic and arrogant.
On the negative side: I don’t know that we have anything close to a standard-bearer for that message yet.
Only seventeen months ’til the next elections!
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