The topic of the breakup of the United States bounces around every once in a while.  Often it’s a comic subject – as last year, when a Russian tycoon predicted we’d break up into six countries each aligned, conveniently, with a European or Asian power (or Latin-American “power”).

It’s been rattling about lately because of the newfound acceptance of what used to be Big-L Libertarian rhetoric, since the rise of Ron Paul.  To a big-L libetarian, naturally, liberty comes before government.

We’ll come back to that.

Erik Black at the MinnPost has been writing a series of posts on “understanding tentherism”, which has been a useful, challenging exercise (and which deserves a more-detailed set of answers, but I haven’t had the time what with having to keep Minnesota safe from Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota and all).  There was, naturally, no commensurate hand-wringing in 2004 over the wave of lefties who called for breaking the Blue states off to join Canada, but then apparently the left has a sense of humor about their own wackos that they don’t share with the right’s.

But I digress.  Black says:

The more I obsess on it, the more convinced I am that Tentherism is the key to the biggest ideological divide in American political culture. It takes the perpetual argument about how big the government should be and how much it should do, and attaches to the adoration of the founders and the framers and the belief in the Constitution as our secular/sacred text.

Which is an interesting assertion, and one I’ll address in a future post.

But long story short, I think Black has things backwards.  We’ll come back to that in a bit.

Black notes with the sort of shock that the left always shows when the subject comes up – feigned or real – that some conservatives are actually engaging in edgy rhetoric about the subject that must never be mentioned…:

Yes, secession.

If you think the civil war talk is crazy, did you notice that a sitting congressman, who is a candidate for governor of Tennessee, said last week that he hoped the next couple of election cycles would come out right “so that states are not forced to consider separation from this government?”

Hard to take that as anything less than an assertion that states have a right to secede and that if things keep going the way they are going, some states might exercise that right.

Monday that Tennessee guv candidate, U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp, said that if he is elected Tennessee will not secede from the union, although there was no takeback of the assertion that it could.

“Could” Tennessee, or any state, secede?  We fought a war at least in part over the question once upon a time – but that’s really neither an answer nor the subject that interests me.

Black says “tentherism” is the key to our current political divide.  I say it’s a byproduct of the real key.

And the real key to “the divide” in America today is one’s answer to these two questions.

First:  To what does an American truly pledge his/her allegiance?  To…:

A) America the physical entity with four million square miles of land, and its government with its capitol and it’s branches and bureaucracies and fifty sub-governments with their sub-branches and sub-bureaucracies?

B) Or is it to the one thing that created America – the idea of liberty, that we are all created equal, that we are a nation under a creator that endowed us with inalienable rights which no government has the legitimate power to take away?

How you answer that is “the key” to the divide. Is America the ideal of liberty?  Or is it a government?

That’s the easy question, of course; plenty of people – especially those who see themselves as principled liberals or Liberals – will answer “B” almost by reflex.

Of course, there are not a few people out there who are solid “A”s – Pete Stark’s “the Constitution is irrelevant, and the Fed can pretty much do what it wants” outburst is the A-list version, but he’s hardly the only “government uber alles” activist among America’s suit class.

Still, Stark and his ilk are basically cartoons.

But there’s a second question.

If our government decayed to the point where it could realistically be said to have rejected the ideals that this country is ostensibly built around, and there is no realistic electoral or legal remedy, is it a citizen’s duty to…:

A) Suck it up and go along with it, because it’s our government, dammit, or…

B) Find a place and/or a means to re-instate those ideals, even if it means starting a new country that actually does enshrine what America really means?

That’s where the question gets interesting.

I’m imagining certain peoples’ answers even as I write this.

So if the United States’ federal government ever abrogated the Constitution to an extent that was utterly, unmistakably a thumb in the eye of the notion of the “government of, by and for the people” – say, if presidents stopped handing over power peacefully, or if one branch of government shut down one of the others – would the states (forget the people for a moment) have a duty to stay in the country if they had a better idea?

(more…)

Washington tries to put more junk in the SBA’s trunk.

The pre-recession economy saw more than its fair share of credit alchemy as lenders ignored equity.  With bank loans to small firms dropping 5.6% to $670 billion from heights of $710 billion as recently as June of 2008, the Administration has become increasingly desperate to get credit into the hands of business.  The only problem?  The companies that need the credit can’t afford to accept it:

Bankers say the problem isn’t scarce credit, it’s lack of demand from creditworthy firms in a weak economy. The result may be more loans given to distressed firms and higher losses. While bank regulators don’t compile default rates, the biggest lenders have charge-offs of 4 percent to 14 percent tied to small businesses. Eliot Stark, managing director at Capital Insight Partners Inc., said their credit record resembles “junk.”

“The highest demand for loans is from the companies least qualified, the companies that have really struggled because of the economic downturn,” said Stark, a former Comerica Inc. executive whose Chicago-based investment bank helps community lenders raise capital. The way lawmakers see it, “everyone’s a good borrower, and that’s just not the case.”

Washington’s lending advice is currently as practical as a baseball coach telling his hitter he can swing away – but under no circumstances will he be allowed to get out. 

Worse is D.C.’s legislative panacea of having the Treasury Department make preferred stock investments in “small” banks (those with assets of $10 billion or less) in order to stimulate loans.  $30 billion in capital will be transferred to small banks in hopes that most of these lenders will leverage the funds to help create new small business loans – a figure that some in Washington estimate could be as high as $30 billion.  Despite assurances from Treasury that the program will earn $1.1 billion over 10 years for taxpayers, the legislation sounds like TARP for Hervé Villechaize-sized lenders.

Considering the bailout investment program targets largely community banks which account for most of the 240 banks that have failed since 2009, it becomes even harder not to see the effort as an attempt to inflate a TARP into yet another credit bubble.  Which may be precisely the point:

Small borrowers are higher risks because their size leaves less room for error, bankers say. Half fail within their first five years, according to the SBA, and the recession eroded the value of hard assets such as property and equipment to pledge as collateral, said Alfred Osborne, senior associate dean of the UCLA Anderson School of Management in Los Angeles.

“We can create lots of jobs making bad loans,” NFIB chief economist William Dunkelberg said. “We did that during the housing bubble.”

Norm Coleman starts the RNC’s game of musical chairs early. 

As 2009 begin, one of the two major political parties in the U.S. handed over its reins of control to an underqualified but charismatic African-American politican who subsequentially torpedoed the party in a series of public gaffes and highly publicized scandals.  Barack Obama was also inaugurated.

For a post that typically attracts little attention outside of the Beltway, Michael Steele’s RNC chairmanship has been disasterously high-profile.  In the last year-and-a-half of his two-year term, Steele has surfed one mistake after another into a building tsunami of political pressure to oust the chairman early.  From his public criticism of Rush Limbaugh, to his speaking fees, and sudden anti-Afghan War comments, Steele has taken the largely managerial role of RNC chair and tried to turn it into a psuedo-legislative office.

If Steele’s effect on the RNC were limited to his apparently incurable foot-in-mouth disease, talk of removing him or even talk of the next election for chair in 2011 would seem incredibly premature.  But the RNC’s mechanics appear to have suffered as well.  The party’s primary role as a fundraising vehicle has been easily usurped by the Republican Governors Association – headed by former RNC chair Haley Barbour.  While the RNC holds only $10 million in cash on hand, with more than $2 million in uncollected debts, the RGA is breaking fundraising records.  At $28 million in the bank, the RGA has already doubled it’s largest yearly take – ever.  And those numbers don’t even take into account charges that Steele is hiding more than $7 million in debt.

But is the solution to replace a politician as chair with another politician? 

Chatter about Norm Coleman assuming the RNC post isn’t exactly new.  While Politico threw some gas on long-dead embers of Coleman’s RNC ambitions, stories of the former St. Paul mayor leading the Grand Old Party first started floating only weeks after his recount battle began in 2008. 

Yet as a politican who only months ago declined a widely expected bid for governor, is Coleman making a similar mistake to Steele in eyeing the job as a national political soapbox?  So far, Coleman and his allies are hitting the right notes:

“He sees tremendous longing for donors who want to invest in an organization that will be critical to the 2012 cycle,” said the Coleman confidante. “And he has a proven track record of being able to raise money from the party’s traditional key constituencies and constituencies the party doesn’t always have.”…

“He understands it’s a fundraising job,” said one senior Republican, who has talked to Coleman about the RNC post.

If anything, Coleman appears to be trying to position himself – as Newsweek puts it – as the “anti-Michael Steele.”  Where Steele viewed his role as making public pronouncements about Republican policy, Coleman at least rhetorically understands that the role of RNC chair has little to do with grand strategy.  It’s a distinction even Newsweek has trouble understanding in suggesting that a Coleman selection might be an attempt to target swing states:

Coleman hails from Minnesota, which is a bluish-purple state, with populist and environmentalist streaks. So, would Coleman, who defeated high-profile Democrat Walter Mondale and came within a few hundred votes of doing the same to Al Franken in a Democratic wave election, unlock the secret to helping Republicans break out of their old/white/Southern cage? Probably not. Steele, after all, was chosen to attempt that, and the Democrats chose then–Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine to chair their party to do the inverse for them. Neither can be said to have accomplished that.

Party chairman are ideally much like the Victorian view of children – better seen then heard.  They aren’t policy wonks nor are they press secretaries.  As the last year has shown, average activists have far greater impact on the political process than party apparatchiks.   That’s how it should be.

Steele can be endured until his tenure ends and should not be re-elected.  And while Norm Coleman will undoubtably not make the sames mistakes as Steele, he remains a political – not managerial – figure.  The GOP needs a functional, competent manager, not another high-profile politician who will be granted greater attention due in part to his elected past.

Principles can be painful.

I, as an occasional independent consultant, would just love to land a gig leading the User Experience design effort for a big world-facing institutional application.  I’d love the opportunity to pitch my skills to one of these institutions, convince them that I’m the right guy for the job, and bask in the eventual glory of a job well designed.  To say nothing of the payoff of 12-24 months’ lucrative work.

But if the big instutional customer were a front for AFSCME, the SEIU and the Minnesota Federation of Teachers, and the job was a website to help “community organizers” track union members who violated “Card Check” rules for future retribution, and to link these objectors to other union “assets” (goons) to service the transaction (throw bricks through their windows and kill their dogs), principle would tell me I would need to bow out of the gig.  No matter how much it paid.

Principle has its price.

Would bowing out of the project be a huge mistake?  Business hari-kiri?  From a bottom-line sense, it might very well be.   If “Mitch Berg Design” were publicly-held, it might even violate my fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders.  But if it’s my call, given that I oppose Card Check to say nothing of union thuggery, it wouldn’t even be a serious question.

One of the better, more thought-provoking conservative blogs I’ve encountered lately is “Minnesota Conservatives”, a duoblog featuring Minneapolis conservative Barbara Malzacher and 4th CD blogger “Shabbosgoy” – who’s a fairly well-known goy/guy in Saint Paul GOP circles, but I don’t know if his real identity is something he’s put on the blog yet, so I’ll hold off on that for now (note to self; find out why they’re not in the MOB).

Last week, Shabbosgoy wrote a post,  “On Saving The Emmer Campaign From Itself”, that caused a bit of a stir among Emmer’s followers.

Shabbosgoy’s (I’m going to save my fingers and call him SG from here on) premise is that Emmer’s “Waiter’s Wage” kerfuffle was a huge hit to the campaign.

Not fatal, of course…:

Not being glass-half-empty liberals, however, MC believes the campaign can right itself and move forward to victory in November. But the change has to be immediate, if not sooner. And the person who came up with the town hall seppuku should be tasered.

Let’s walk through them one by one:

1. Cancel the seppuku. Sure Emmer will be mocked but such pales in comparison to being tagged as the guy who wants servers to make $2.13 an hour. Such tagging has been ongoing all this week.

Let’s define our terms.

“Seppuku” (the political version, not the Japanese ritual self-disembowelment) is saying “I have no idea what E85 is” while in the middle of Minnesota’s Corn belt; it’s betraying a crucial tone-deaf ignorance.

Favoring a return to the tip credit – the exact system Minnesota used for tipped workers until 1990, and that is used in 43 other states to allow for the fact that tipped waistaff don’t rely on hourly wages for the bulk of their income – is a stance for principle; in this case, the principle that mandated minimum wages kill jobs.

Is it going to cost Emmer votes – especially given the way the agenda-driven media has reproted the story?  Perhaps among food servers; I’m sure waitrons at places in outstate Minnesota where the locals still consider a buck a lavish tip for a $30 tab will be un-thrilled by the prospect.  And understanding how tip credits work is important (and most people don’t); it only counts for time when the worker can get tips; not for time spent folding napkins or cleaning out the ice machine in back (which is paid at at least the regular minimum wage, and which is time that most decent food service workers like to avoid, the better to be out working tables and raking in tips).

Among people who run businesses?  Especially among bars and restaurants, whose profit margins have always been razor-thin?  Who’ve seen their bottom lines squeezed by $5/hour for every single waitress or bartender they have out in the house for the past couple of decades?  Or among parents of teenagers (ahem) who have a harder time than ever finding entry-level minimum wage jobs as the minimum wage has risen?

I’m not so sure.

2. If the death wish can’t be scrubbed, then Emmer should come out for making tips and gratuities tax-free. Who cares what it does to revenue? Just get on the right side of this issue politically.

That in particular is a good, princpled, conservative approach to the issue.  It’s also a federal issue controlled by the IRS, and most likely not something a governor can carry off.

3. Stop running for the endorsement. Emmer won. He can’t win with the narrow base that propelled him to victory. He’s in a general election race now and any campaign staff that can’t grasp the obvious ought to be waiting tables. We jest! Don’t shoot!

But as I’ve seen it all along, Emmer’s campaign has been about running on conservative principles all along – and selling those principles to the middle to convince them to move to meet him on the right, rather than scuttling toward the center.

The principle in this case is “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs” – or, more directly, “Get government out of the way of business creating more jobs”.  The loss of the tip credit has effectively tripled the cost of every waiter on a restauranteur’s or barkeep’s floor, giving them the option of slashing either profits or the number of waitstaff.  Emmer is proposing rectifying this.  The DFL and Media’s predictable response is “look at the money waiters might lose!” (when it’s not “where are the $100,000 waitstaff jobs?”); Emmer’s response, and that of his supporters, should be “but look at the jobs, averaging $8-15 an hour with tips, we’ll be creating!”.

4. Run on winning themes and speak of nothing else: lower taxes for all, less nanny-state interference in our lives, reduced state spending and the legitimate fear of the intellectually lazy DFL in control of the executive and legislative branches.

But I think that was Emmer’s point, if phrased inartfully and exploited deceptively.

5. Don’t take the post August 10th bait from Mark “Renoir-Toulouse Lautrec” Dayton. He’ll run a class warfare campaign and the tip-credit snafu only plays directly into that. Like most Democrats, he hasn’t had a new idea in decades. Point out he’s to the left of our wholly incompetent affirmative action President.

And here, SG is absolutely correct.

Finally, one friend of MC suggested something brilliant: bring in New Jersery Governor Chris Christie and campaign for real reform and not just tinkering around the edges. New ideas scare Democrats; so scare them!

I agree; Governor Christie is like the long-lost child of my own political idol, former Jersey City mayor Brett Schundler, who did for his city half a generation ago what Governor Christie is trying to do for the whole state today.

But here’s a question;  when it comes to tip credits, and the media and DFL’s (ptr) class-baiting response to the “story”, What Would Christie Do?

(Besides say “tip credits work in New Jersey”; the state is one of the 43 that allows ’em).

Voters will reward you. Look at what he’s doing in his state and think about what could be applied here to good effect. If Christie can have such success in New Jersey, MC holds out hope for this state of government workers.

Hope is good.

And to achieve hope, you need to start with a princple, and then move to achieve it.

And DFL/media caterwauling aside, I don’t think this past week has been a bad step on the way.

And so we get to the peak of the peak; the top ten Minnesota Conservatives that Minnesota liberals and Democrats hate!  These, for the most part, are the people who drive Minnesota liberals into paroxysms of rage because…they disagree with them.

Drum roll please!

10. Ed Morrissey: Yeah, I’m surprised the mild-mannered Morrisey made the top ten, too.  Maybe it’s the effortlessness of it all that they hate so much; Ed, my radio colleague, mows through national lefties like a riding mower through a cabbage patch, and doesn’t break a sweat, and makes it back to the Morrissey Mansion in time for reruns of The Wire with the First Mate; he may have more influence on national opinion than Media Matters, and until recently he did it for the love of the game.  If you were George Soros, you’d hate that.

9. Norm Coleman: There is nothing the left hates worst than apostates; we’ve seen how they detest female conservatives throughout this poll; Democrats who flip parties are one circle of Lib Hell removed from them.  Norm flipped when he was mayor of Saint Paul, and went on to be the best Senator this state has had in years, and the best we’re likely to have until at least 2014.

8. Mitch Berg:  Huh?  Me?  A guy with a blog that gets a respectable but strictly-C-list 2,000 visits a day?  OK, I claim home field advantage; I got a lot of votes, but my passion index was the lowest on the Top Ten.  Still, it’s fun to see!  Thanks!

7. Jason Lewis:  Let’s not mince words; Lewis is to Minnesota conservatism what the Wright Brothers were to aviation; before them, conservatism and heavier-than-air flight were both theories; it took them to make it all happen.  Jason Lewis brought the Reagan Revolution at long last to Minnesota.  His impact on politics in this state is easy, and wrong, to understate. Before Jason Lewis, Arne Carlson was the face of the GOP in Minnesota.  Without Lewis, he still very well might be.  And that makes the DFL and media’s (pardon the redundancy) jobs harder.  And we know how liberals hate to work.

6. David Strom: If Jason Lewis brought the Reagan Revolution to Minnesota, David Strom taught that revolution how to invoke Hayek and spell Friedman and, by the way, how to make their representatives do it, too.  If the DFL sold dartboards, his picture would be on them.

5. Michael Brodkorb:  Michael – my former NARN co-host – cut his public-image teeth as the owner of Minnesota Democrats Exposed, and became the Matt Drudge of the Minnesota alt-media almost overnight.  He didn’t just eat the Dems’ lunches every day; he ran laps around them, and never broke a sweat, ever.  If anyone has ever let the air out of the Minnesota political media establishment’s tires, it was Brodkorb.  He’s earned the hate!

4. Katherine Kersten:  The Twin Cities’ leftymedia hated Kersten partly because she didn’t know the secret handshake; she didn’t get her late, lamented column after years of covering city council meetings and dog shows and one-car crashes; she actually had a productive career – but there are few things journos hate worse than people who get printed in newspapers without bothering to join the Order of Most High Priests of Information. And if journos hate her, then the DFL will hate her too (even without considering that she’s a female and a conservative, which puts her beyond the pale); and Democrats hate whomever their superiors tell them to hate.  So Kersten became a reviled figure, even though most of those doing the reviling, the Twin Cities leftyblogs and their followers, had put no more thought into it than dog puts into fetching a stick.   Although she’s #4, she had the second-highest “Passion Index” – average ranking – of anyone in the poll.

3. Rep. Tom Emmer: Of course, there’s almost nobody the Democratics hate more than any conservative who can beat them.  Emmer finished third; I suspect it’ll move up after the Dems have to figure out how to make Mark Dayton beat him this fall.   I suspect Tom’ll make a run for #2.  But not #1.  You’ll see why.

2. Governor Tim Pawlenty:  The DFL hates him for the same reason the Persians hated King Leonidas of Sparta; because he almost singlehandedly stymied them on pure personal and conservative principal for four years, fighting against two DFL-controlled chambers and a media that would have to develop a whole lot of integrity to be called merely “in the bag for the DFL”.   TPaw is only reason all income above the “living wage” hasn’t been confiscated from  you by the State of Minnesota and given to AFSCME.  In a just world, he’d be in the top three contenders for the White House.  He knows how to beat back the DFL like perhaps nobody in history; he’s more than earned the hatred.

And finally, the most-hated conservative in Minnsota…

[trumpet fanfare]

1.  Rep. Michele Bachmann:  It wasn’t even close.  She not only got more votes overall, but never finished lower than #2 in anyone’s rankings, and even then only two or three times.  Her “Passion Index” is just south of a perfect “10”, over two points higher than the next highest contender, Kersten.  Bachmann is everything the left hates rolled up into five feet three inches of explosive charisma; she’s a pro-lifer who’s spent a life putting her money where her mouth is (five biokids and a couple dozen foster kids), she’s been sounding the most articulate jeremiads about the federal spending orgy of anyone on Capitol Hill; she is one of the faces of the Tea Party (which, to the horror of the left, is led and largely peopled by women);  she endures the most scabrous assaults of anyone in Washington, slips them all and bobs back up smiling and shooting from the hip (with an AR15 – oh, yeah, she’s a perfect 100 on Second Amendment issues, too).  Bachmann is unabashedly Christian and Reaganite and Pro-shining-city-on-the-hill – all things that give Minnesota liberals seizures.  And not only is she a woman, but she’s among the leaders of this year’s conservative female revolution, which threatens to undercut the Democratics’ traditional monopoly on the female vote.

You can see steam shoot out of lefties’ ears when her name is mentioned – partly for what she stands for, and partly for how she does it; with the pure glee that comes from always kicking your opponents’ asses in every way.

Congrats, Rep. Bachmann!

So there we go for this year!  Maybe this will be an annual, or at least biennial, tradition…

GREETINGS, HOT AIR HEADLINES READERS:  Thanks for stopping by!  I’ll also direct you to the first two installments – for places 21-30, and 11-20.

GREETINGS MERCURY RISING “Reader”/”s”:  “Phoenix Woman”  (has anyone ever noticed that her and Ken “Avidor” Weiner have never been seen in the same place?) apparently thinks that any reference to Bradlee Dean is not only a) a wholehearted endorsement of every minute facet of his worldview, and b) since I am a Republican, proof that Bradlee Dean really really double-dog is is is is is an honest-to-Pete “GOP insider”.

And “her” “point” is that Dean and the “You Can Run…” crew aren’t really “obliquely involved in politics”.  Which I wrote because, in 2010, they were pretty, well, obliquely involved in politics.  Sure, they did a political talk show; but unless “Phoenix” can show us some evidence that Brad and Jake actually particpate and are involved in some sort of party activity on a regular basis, “she” is really talking out her ass – or as we conservative bloggers put it, “Phoenixing”.

Further proof that

a) if logic were gasoline, “Phoenix Woman” couldn’t drive around the inside of a cheerio, and

b) if you read Mercury Rising, you’ve either had  a stroke, or are trying to give yourself one.

On to the actual article

——–

With the backmarkers out of the way, it’s time to recognize the middle of the pack – the Minnesota conservatives that are the eleventh through twentieth most-hated by Minnesota liberals.

Just as explanation, I weighted all votes by their position on the voters’ lists.  Thus a first-place vote got ten points, second-place nine points, and so on down to tenth place, for a point.   I also calculated a “passion index”, which is just a fancy way of saying the average points the subject got per vote; the higher the “passion index”, the more high-point votes the subject got.  Rankings are in descending order of point totals.

So without further ado, here we go!

20. King Banaian: My long-time NARN cohost, conservative economist and candidate for the Minnesota House in district 15B, Banaian squeaked onto the Top 20 with three votes and the second-lowest passion index in the group, barely ahead of Erik Paulsen.  I suspect he’ll do much better in the election this fall.

19. AM1280 The Patriot: The station that broadcasts such controversial fare as Bill Bennett, Hugh Hewitt and Michael Medved – also the NARN – is hated by many for being a dissenter at all.

18. Taxpayers League of Minnesota: The group behind the “No New Taxes” pledge, the TPLoMN has been blamed for everything from the 35W bridge collapse to full wastebaskets in state offices. Tied for the highest passion index in the 11-20 group.

17. Bradlee Dean: Host of “Sons of Liberty”, minister at the controversial “You Can Run ButYou Can Not Hide” street ministry, and Andy Birkey’s constant stalkee, the regional leftymedia has turned Dean into a strawman representing all that is evil about Minnesota conservatism, notwithstanding the fact that he’s only tangentially involved in politics.

16. Scott Johnson: The Powerline blogger pummels lefty figures from Dan Rather all the way down to Nick Coleman without breaking a sweat.  Liberals hate that.

15. Rep. John Kline: He wins the Second District with the same kinds of margins Betty McCollum and Keith Ellison get in the Fourth and Fifth.  Unlike the dim McCollum and the always-frothing Ellison, Kline is a competent congressman.

14. Rep. Laura Brod: One voter commented “the left hates conservative women more than anything”, and Laura Brod has become one of the strongest figures in Minnesota conservatism – a “prairie Sarah Palin”, said one voter.  And that adds up to votes!  Youtube videos of her running verbal rings around DFLers in the house are a favorite among Minnesota conservatives.  Lefties hate fun.

13. John Hinderaker: My NARN cohost and Powerline contributor is widely, but mildly, detested; he got the most votes of anyone in the 11-20 group, but also drew the lowest passion index – lower than his blog partners Johnson and Mirengoff, lower even than Banaian or his NARN 1 co-host Brian Ward.  This is, however, a great base from which to improve for next year.

12. Phil Krinkie: Former “Doctor No” of the legislature and then head of the Taxpayers’ League, Krinkie has stood in the way of DFL spending, which is like getting in a Christian’s path to heaven, or a Packer fan’s access to beer – it’ll get people exercised.

11. Carol Molnau: Pawlenty’s lieutenant governor and former Transportation Commisioner, Molnau has been conservative and female – two words that act on liberals like holy water on vampires.

Tomorrow at noon – the Top Ten Minnesota Conservatives that Minnesota liberals hate!

Earlier this week, I took a poll – what Minnesota conservatives do Minnesota liberals hate the most? 

I collected responses via the comment section, my facebook page, and email – and got a pretty fair bunch of responses.  There were some surprises and at least a couple of foregone conclusions.

I’m going to publish 11-20 over the noon hour today, and 1 through 10 over noon tomorrow. 

But first, I’m going to give some recognitionto that mass of Minnesota conservatives that give Minnesota’s liberal establishment just a little to hate.  These are the people and institutions that got one vote each:

• The DFL – One wag apparently believes the left believes Minnesota’s dominant party is liberalism’s worst enemy.
• The Cans – No idea.
• All Minnesota Conservatives
• Mitch Pearlstein – Longtime head of the Center of the American Experiment
• Bill Cooper – Former MNGOP chair, CEO of TCF Bank, and pwner of Nick Coleman.
• Cosmo Insolocco – No idea.
• Mary Kiffmeyer – the former MN Secretary of State was a lightning rod for…ACORN.
• Freedom
• Pat Anderson – The former and future State Auditor
• Mac Hammond – The megaminister from Maple Grove
• Brian Sullivan – Tim Pawlenty’s convention opponent in 2002, and arguably the person we can thank for the conservatism of Pawlenty’s administration.
• Denny Hecker
• Conservative Bloggers – should be self-explanatory.
• Tony Sutton – The current chair of the Minnesota GOP
• Randy Kelly – Former Saint Paul DFL mayor who doomed his shot at a second term by endorsing George W. Bush in 2004.
• Regular Coffee
• Alan Quist – the first hardcore social conservative I can remember in Minnesota politics; endorsed for governor in 1990, he lost to Arne Carlson in the primary.
• Learned Foot – former Kool Aid Report blogger.
• Marty Seifert – Tom Emmer’s convention opponent and, now that he’s suddenly not running for office, a “reasonable, common-sense Republican” to all the DFLers that were calling him an extremist two months ago.
• Henry Ford
• Tom Pritchard – longtime chair of the Minnesota Family Council
• Kermit – blogger from Anti-Strib
• Rod Grams – former one-term Senator
• The Suburbs
• Captain America

Congratulations to everyone on the list that’s, er, human.

Now, the people with more than one vote, with their standings in the final poll:

30.  Katie Kieffer: The blogger, former college-press gadfly and up-and-coming pundit got two votes, including from one voter who added every conservative woman she could think of; “that’s who they really hate…”

29. Swiftee:  The of Bruce Springsteen of button-pushing, the Charlie Parker of chain-yanking, perhaps the most banned person among Twin Cities leftyblogs, the only surprise is that he didn’t come in in the top twenty.

28. Twila Brase:  Tireless healthcare crusader and my neighbor.

27. Entrepreneurs: Except when they can serve as ATMs for social spending, of course.

26. Joe Soucheray: Souch’s social curmudgeonism is often called “conservative”, and it was certainly something Minnesota liberals detested.

25. Tracy Eberly: Three years past the “Dirt-Worshipping Heathens” flap, Tracy still gets ’em frothing.

24. The Tea Partier: The “boogeyman” of the Minnesota left.

23. Paul Mirengoff: Not a Minnesotan, but when groupblogs got votes, I spread the votes among their contributors, and Powerline got two group votes.  Which is also why…

22.  Brian “Saint Paul” Ward got on the list as well.  My long-time NARN co-host scored two votes as  a member of the NARN.

21.  Rep. Erik Paulsen: With three votes, Paulsen is the only Republican in Minnestoa’s congressional delegation not to make the top twenty with a bullet.  As it were.

Top Twenty coming up at noon!

As AP at Hot Air notes, Pam Gorman – who’s running for Congress in Arizona CD3, but first faces six other conservative Republicans in the primary – has upped the ante on “memorable” ads.

AP takes a whack at summing it all up:

The real question isn’t so much “is this what political advertising is about today?”

No.  It’s “what will an opponent have to come up with that’ll make a bigger impression than a 1928 Thompson?”

Suggestions solicited.

…voting is going on through midnight tonight for the Most Hated Conservatives poll.

Vote for the Minnesota (!) conservatives that Minnesota liberals hate the most.  Vote for up to ten, in order; I’m weighting the votes by where they appear in order (a #1 vote counts for more than a #8 vote).

Leave your votes in the comment section, or email my yahoo dot com address found at “feedbackinthedark”.

Cutoff is midnight tonight.

As noted last week, my pal and radio colleague Ed Morrissey made it onto the list of the top 100 conservatives the left loves to hate. Morrissey earned his #49 spot, beating out Governor Pawlenty (#86) and Ted Nugent (who cares).  Glenn Beck was the winner, naturally, with the usual suspects – Limbaugh, Rove, Hannity, Malkin, Savage – up at the top of the list (and, oddly, the not-very-conservative, liberal-friendly David Frum at 99).

But it started me to thinking:  Who are the most hated conservatives in Minnesota?  Who does the leftysphere in Minnesota detest more than anything?

Thus, it’s time for a poll.  Everyone give me up to your top ten Minnesota conservatives that Minnesota liberals love to hate, in descending order – in other words, put your “Most Hated” at #1, the tenth most hated at #10.  I’ll use your rankings to weight the results.

I want everyone to vote – conservatives, liberals, don’t cares, Tea Partiers, Libertarians, the works.  Just leave me your top ten, either in the comments or at the email address “feedbackinthedark”, which is a Yahoo dot com email address.

You have until Thursday midnight to get your votes in.  This post will likely be bumped up or reprised during the week.

Back during the 2008 race, a local leftyblogger called the NARN in a state of high-dudgeon over my statemenat Erik Paulsen was running a conservative campaign for the Third Congressional District.

The caller bellowed “You’re a Liar!!!”, which is leftyblogger-speak for “I disagree with you, but I can’t coherently articulate why”.

My point at the time:  the “Conventional Wisdom” (a fancy term for “the current of thought among the DFL and their friends in academia and the media”) was saying that the Third was “purple”, and that any Republican hoping to win would have to “run to the center” and be a “moderate Republican” (which is again DFL/media/academic code for “willing stooge of the DFL”) a la the departing moderate Jim Ramstad to have any hope of riding out the rising Obama tide – and yet Paulsen was solidly center-right on all the issues that mattered.

So it’s kinda fun to look at the American Conservative Union ratings of our current House delegation.   Betty McCollum, Al Franken, Keith Ellison all get “0” on a 1-100 scale; Oberstar and Walz tie at a nearly-Trotskyite “4”.

On the other hand, Michele Bachmann has a lifetime “100”;  “Extremist” John Kline also dialed up a 100 this past year, better than his lifetime rating of a thoroughly respectible 88…

…which happens to be exactly the same as Paulsen’s rating this past year.

Which is twenty points better than Jim Ramstad’s rating of 67.

Further proof that the only real information comes from the right.

Arne looks to be Revered.

During the 1980s, the growth in state government exceeded the growth in people’s paychecks by 15 percent.  Since then we have frozen the number of state employees, held the growth of government to the growth in personal income, implemented a wage freeze, and cut welfare for able-bodied adults…

In the process, we quickly became the target of nearly every entrenched and powerful spending system in Minnesota.  And as we were being attacked by all the forces that resists change – it was then that I knew we were doing something right.  — Gov. Arne Carlson’s 1994 State of the State Address

As former Governor Arne Carlson begins his much media ballyhooed “Paul Revere Tour” doing largely what he’s done for the past eight years – needle the Pawlenty administration – it’s not hard to look back at his 1994 comments and wonder which “side” the Arne Carlson of the 90’s would view his 2010 doppleganger.

Whether Carlson’s tour caused him to be revered or tarred and feathered, the former governor is indirectly experiencing his largest political relevance since leaving office.  Between the candidaces of self-described “former Republican” Tom Horner and former Carlson finance director Jon Gunyou, Arne’s old “Independent-Republican” brand (which the party called itself from 1974-1995) will be a subject of hot political debate and historical revisionism.

But how much are Carlson and others engaging in euphoric recall?  For most of Carlson’s eight years, the relationship between the chief executive’s office and the legislature looked as cozy as an Israeli/PLO summit.  Despite Carlson’s recent shot that Pawlenty “lacks leadership” due to his vetoes and inability to compromise with the DFL legislature, it’s Carlson who maintains the lead in the veto count.  In fact, it’s not even close as Pawlenty’s 96 vetoes are dwarfed by Carlson’s record 179.

Until at least 1998, when Carlson’s State of the State address read like an heiress’ shopping list amid his bid to buy a legacy, Arne had a far different reputation that his current incarnation as putting the ‘I’ in ‘IR’.  The Beta version of Arne Carlson was known by his liberal opponents as a tax-cutter, a supporter of vouchers, and a proponent of reducing funding to cities and counties.  He publicly rebuked the federalism of HillaryCare, decrying the would-be mandates on the states.  Carlson even tepidly backed the idea of a TABOResque constitutional amendment that would require voter approval before raising taxes.  Combined with his penchent for spending, especially later in his term, Arne’s dig at Pawlenty that “what the governor wants to do is to say no to taxes, yes to spending” seems apt to describe Carlson’s tenure as well.

Arne Carlson and his current supporters can definitely argue that circumstances were different in the 1990s when he professed such conservative positions, although Minnesota (like most of the nation) saw largely languid growth and recession for most of Carlson’s first four or so years in office.  But what may truly gall Carlson is that his Republican predecessors actually believe the rhetoric Carlson and his IR-brand of Republicanism once spouted.

Despite the invective hurled at Carlson during most of his term by the very same political and media institutions that now champion his public criticisms, most of the fiscally conservative positions that Carlson took were politically expedient. Rhetoric towards smaller government, tighter welfare rules and tax cuts were not just en vogue for most of the 1990s, but politically necessary for a governor viewed as boardline illegitimate by activists in both major parties.

Democrats and conservative Republicans groused at Carlson’s last-minute entry into the 1990 governor’s race following Jon Grunseth’s attempt at a Hot Tub Time Machine that would get him under the swimsuits of three teenaged girls. From the-then Republican perspective, Carlson had already lost the endorsement and the primary to Grunseth and had been trying to undermine the party with a write-in candidacy in the general election. 

Democrats hated that Carlson had narrowly beaten incumbent Rudy Perpich despite only being in the campaign for days and tried to steamroll Carlson’s early days, forcing a number of vetoes. Thus for Carlson, while it could be argued whether or not he viewed fiscal conservatism as good policy, it was certainly good politics.

16 years after his political highwater mark, Carlson still knows how to practice good politics – at least for himself.  Gaining nothing by defending Pawlenty or the GOP, which would in essence be defending many of same fiscal practices and positions he said he held while governor, Carlson can hold some media limelight by embracing his former opposition.  Whether that involves doing political gymnastics worthy of Nadia Comaneci – from now backing nationalized health care, to his views on vetoes and budget shifts – perhaps matters little.

Carlson believed he was fighting the status quo in 1994 and still believes it today.  Considering the Minnesota budget has expanded since he left office from $10 billion to $34 billion, Arne might seriously wish to question if he’s fighting for or against the dominant attitudes in St. Paul.

Every once in a while an article comes along that makes the scales drop away and makes me go “ah hah! That’s how it is!”

I’m a conservative.  Have been for over 25 years.  And in all that time, there’ve been two things that have bothered me:

1. The media’s fixation for mixing up “republicans” and “conservatives”.  This is always a problem in Minnesota, with GOP’s history of having collaborated with the DFL’s spending orgies in the seventies and eighties, and having had Arne Carlson as governor for eight years, which seems to make every DFL pundit feel entitled to remind conservatives “but Tom Horner was a perfectly legitimate Republican!”  Since some of the people who say this are smart, savvy political observers I have to figure they’re being willfully obtuse, but in the cases of many non-conservatives, I can’t help but think it’s just ignorance.
2. “The Southern Strategy”.  Way back in the pleistocene epoch, Richard Nixon supposedly started spinning the GOP’s message to play to the fears of white southern racists.

Well, I’ve been a conservative since Reagan’s second term, and I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever met a geniunely racist conservative or Republican.  Not one.  (And I’m not going to superimpose the fact the the most gleefully racist person I’ve met in my entire life was a DFL organizer onto the rest of the party. You’re welcome).

And so for decades, I’ve wondered what form of conservatism people were talking about when they mentioned either of the above.

Jacob Weisberg summed it up well in, of all places, Slate; there are really three different kinds of conservatism:  Northeastern (“moderate”, outwardly secular, tends to work within in big government; think Mitt Romney) and Southern (conservative, evangelical, with a racial aspect), which were the two main faces of conservatism from the 1950’s through the 1990’s.   Weisberg notes:

The big drama of the GOP over the past several decades has been the Northeastern view giving way to the Southern one. To see this transformation in a single family, witness the shift from George H.W. Bush to George W. Bush.

The third branch of conservatism:  Western.  It’s small-l libertarian, Tenth-Amendment-friendly, small-government, and on the rise:

You see this in the figures who have dominated the GOP since Barack Obama’s election 19 months ago: Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Rand Paul. You see it in the right’s overarching theme: opposition to any expanded role for government, whether in promoting economic recovery, extending health care coverage, or regulating financial markets. You see it most strongly in the Tea Party movement that in recent months has captured the party’s imagination and driven its agenda.

And no, it’s not like the three “factions” have uniforms and sub-conventions:

On many issues, such as guns, taxes, and immigration, Southern and Western conservatives come out in the same place. They get there, however, by different means. The fundamental distinction is between a politics based on social and cultural issues and one based on economics. Southern conservatives care about government’s moral stance but don’t mind when it spends freely on behalf of their constituents. Western conservatives, by contrast, are soft-libertarians who want government out of people’s way on principle.

Which is a fine answer to one of the left’s latest chanting points; “I wonder if conservatives would be such budget hawks if they knew they’d lose social security?”

Southern Republicans are guided by the Bible. Western Republicans read the Constitution. Seen in historical terms, it’s the difference between a movement descended from George Wallace and one that harks back to Barry Goldwater.

Weisberg:

The GOP’s Western tone of recent months summons the ghosts of Goldwater’s disastrous but transformational presidential campaign of 1964. Goldwater didn’t care about religion—he was a Jewish Episcopalian who once said that Jerry Falwell deserved a kick in the nuts. He wasn’t focused on racial politics—there aren’t many black people in Arizona. What mattered to him was limiting government and preserving liberty. To Goldwater, political freedom was inseparable from economic freedom, a view distilled in his most famous phrase, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” To call this politics Western is a matter of its Bonanza style as well as its anti-statist substance. Goldwater boasted a Navajo tattoo and liked flying planes, shooting guns, and playing the tables in Las Vegas. Western conservatism succeeded on a national scale when Ronald Reagan kept the cowboy look while easing up on Goldwater’s honorable, self-defeating consistency.

It’s not a bad description – although liberals like Weisberg always, always, always omit the second half of Goldwater’s famous dictum (“extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the defense of justice is no virtue“; the whole statement kinda sets the left’s false context on its ear.

Tea Party darling Rand Paul’s objection the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is clearly Goldwater’s, not Wallace’s. Wallace and his followers resisted civil rights because they wanted to maintain segregation. Goldwater favored integration but thought the civil rights bill infringed upon private property rights and free association.

Read the rest of the article; Weisberg doesn’t believe Western Conservatism has intellectual legs.

I disagree, naturally; more in coming weeks.

As the United States becomes more socialistic, the grandaddy of socialist nations, Sweden, owes its ongoing success to a gradual rejection of socialism:

In The Capitalist Welfare State, Lund University economist Andreas Bergh explains how Sweden has managed to increase economic productivity despite its large public sector.

Bergh says that despite popular mythology, Sweden is not a socialist success story but instead owes its economic growth to the lowered tax rates and deregulation of the early 1990s, which allowed innovation and investment to flourish. Bergh also discusses how Sweden’s national voucher program revitalized the country’s educational system and warns that Americans who are hoping to emulate Swedish success by growing the public sector are learning the wrong lessons from Sweden.

It’s not a capitalist haven, yet, but there’s a reason Sweden didn’t fail before Greece.

Katie Kieffer on Obama’s feminist face in bringing Wall Street to heel:

There are three women on Wall Street who have literally gone wild. No, they didn’t strip off their matronly suits on a GGW spring break tour bus. Rather, they are on a mission to strip Congress, small businesses and individual Americans of proper authority, rights and freedoms and replace these with their own rules and regulations for how to play the financial game on both Wall Street and Main Street.

These three women, who graced the May 24 cover of TIME Magazine and were touted as the “Sheriffs of Wall Street,” are an embarrassment to my sex. Rather than advancing equality between the sexes, their self-centered political agendas do the following:

1. Send the message that women do not understand finance or business, and this makes them insecure. So, they use their authority to control and regulate finance and business.
2. Reinforce the notion that the only way men will take women seriously is if they exert “control” over men.
3. Teach young women to prioritize power over finding solutions.
4. Dismiss equality entirely and send the message that women should referee men and dole out red cards – not play the soccer game with them.

Let me introduce you to these women, one by one. You can decide if they are on a mission to “protect consumers” or if they are on a quest to disprove an imagined bureaucracy of male chauvinists on Wall Street. If the latter is their goal, then the bigger question is whether cracking down on business and the financial industry is a good way to achieve this goal.

Read the whole thing.

Rob Port notices that have a hard time answering the question “what is the Tea Party?”

Back when the tea parties were first rising to national prominence as a political movement the unifying talking point from Democrats was that they were really nothing than GOP astroturf. They were being organized by “Republican operatives” and conservative “special interests” according to any liberal you cared to ask. Tea party activists actually had to work long and hard to make it clear that they weren’t just some quasi-official Republican splinter group.

But now that the tea parties have showed some staying power, and have proven that they’re going to have an impact on the 2010 midterm elections, Democrats have decided that a better talking point is to cast the tea parties as being anti-Republican. Thus driving a wedge between Republican candidates and the thriving political movement that’s going to push a lot of them to victory.

It’s a fact, and always has been; the Tea Party is independent of the GOP.  And may Teepers take pains to point out they’re not Republicans, they’re fiscal conservatives.  I’m fairly sure that’s behind a good chunk of the “defection” from Tom Emmer that the MPR/Hubert Humphrey Institute poll purported to show; they’re keeping their options open until they’re convinced which candidate is the best for taxes and spending.

Does anyone actually think Tom Horner or Mark Dayton is going to be that candidate?

The Minnesota state budget is a good 50% higher than it was when Jesse Ventura took office – when things were not half bad in Minnesota.  Yet if you believe the DFL and the Media (pardon the redundancy) things are falling apart from lack of money.  And, they say, if Tom Emmer is elected (via the “tomemmersminnesota” website) things’ll get much much worse with a governor who actually wants to hold government accountable for its spending.

Speed Gibson To asks the question that nobody in the Twin Cities media can ask:

We obviously just aren’t making the necessary investments in transportation, education, and health care. But that begs a rather obvious question in a state with an unquestionably above average tax burden: where then IS all that money going?

That’s what we’re going to find out in Tom Emmer’s Minnesota. I, for one, can’t wait.

Me either.

The mystery, wrapped in an enigma, smothered in secret sauce that has been Elena Kagan might be granted a little more clarifying light with the release of her Princeton and Oxford theses:

I’ve got two teenagers.  Both are looking for work, more or less; Bun washes dishes at a restaurant one day a week, so she’s got sometihng, but it’s very, very hard to find anything much better.  Zam isn’t even having that much luck.

In other words, it’s as bad as when I was 17 and 18.

The problem is, by the time I was 21jobs were everywhere, and the economy was on puree. I had more jobs that I knew what to do with by my junior year of college.

That’s just not going to happen with this recession.  White Castle’s CEO reports that just one provision in Obamacare is going to utterly gut low-income hiring:

Jamie Richardson, a White Castle executive, says, “We’ve been working on this internally from a number of different perspectives. One [provision] that has [us] the most concerned is the $3,000 penalty that kicks in when an employee’s portion of a premium exceeds 9.5% of Household Income.” Richardson elaborates, “In present form, this provision alone would lead to approximate increased costs equal to over 55% of what we earn annually in net income (based on [our] past 4-year average). Effectively cutting our net income in half would have [a] devastating impact on the business — cutting future expansion and more job creation at least in half. Sadly, it makes it difficult to justify growing where jobs are needed most — in lower income areas.” And that’s all from just a single provision in a 2,700-page act.

I love this next quote:

The Obama administration’s economic policy seems to involve dividing businesses into two categories: too big to fail, and too little to matter.

Alternately:  “too big to fail” and “future employees or wards of government”.

In 1598, William Shakespeare wrote of English politics in his otherwise unremarkable play “King John”:

O inglorious league!
Shall we, upon the footing of our land,
Send fair-play orders and make compremise,
Insinuation, parley, and base truce
To arms invasive?

412 years later David Cameron enters stage left, arms as invasive as ever before in Britain’s Conservative Party.  Will he be equally as unremarkable as “King John”?

In the last year, the youthful, moderate, almost too-charismatic leader of the Tories has yo-yoed from political genius/cross-Atlantic conservative inspiration to cautionary tale and nearly (within the last 24 hours) the head of the loyal opposition instead of Prime Minister.  Instead Cameron sent “fair-play orders” (which in Shakespeare’s era was tantamount to surrender) and made compromise with the exceedingly left-wing Liberal Democratic Party to form the oddest fusion since the Second Coalition of the Napoleonic Wars.  Or maybe Elton John and Eminem at the Grammys.

The tendency in Anglo-American political relations has long been to see parallels across the pond.  Churchill and Roosevelt, Reagan and Thatcher, Blair and Clinton.  Indeed, from the moment Barack Obama positioned himself at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, conservatives both of the big ‘C’ and litle ‘c’ variety, began to argue that Cameron was positioning himself as a fellow change agent en route to occupying 10 Downing Street.

Perhaps the most accurate link between between Obama and Cameron was their first and foremost notion of what such “change” meant – having the other party out of power.  Most certainly for Cameron, at least on the campaign trail, having Gordon Brown out of power was the only real change he promised to offer the United Kingdom:

I peeled this bit out of my liveblog, since I think it’s worth a discussion on its own.

One of the tempests in the teapot last night; a group of “liberty” members of the party were tweeting merrily away that Norm Coleman and that noted moderate Vin Weber were making phone calls on behalf of Tom Emmer.  Now, among the purist/libertarian wing of the party, Norm (and Pawlenty, for that matter) are anathema, because they’re just not pure enough.

Of course, absolute purism and fifty cents will get you a cup of coffee; politics means compromise.  Did Norm and Governor Pawlenty always make the right compromises?  Perhaps not – but you have to be in office to be have an imperfect record.

But here’s a question I’d like to ask (if only rhetorically) to the “Emmer’s a RINO because Norm’s calling for him crowd”; which of Norm’s objectionable policies do you believe Emmer subscribes to, merley because Norm is making calls on his behalf?

Or is this just the most ofay attempt at guilt by association – policy by association, really – that I’ve ever seen?

Feel free to leave an answer in the comments.

The GOP’s rockstar diva puts her support behind the “hockey dad.”  Will her last minute endorsement score or just put Tom Emmer in the penalty box?

On the eve of the Minnesota GOP’s two-man dialogue for governor being pared down to a monologue, 2008 Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin has injected herself into the contest with the political equivalent of a powerplay goal for her self-described “hockey dad” candidate of choice, Tom Emmer:

A family man who wants to leave his kids a better future, a “hockey dad” who once played for the University of Alaska-Fairbanks Nanooks, a patriotic commonsense conservative who wishes to serve for the right reasons – that’s Tom Emmer, and I ask you to join me in supporting him for governor of Minnesota.

John “Policy Guy” La Plante asks the 60% question of the evening – is Palin’s endorsement worth having?:

So Sarah Palin has endorsed Tom Emmer. Is this good news for Team Emmer? I’m not convinced.

Why? Because, I suspect, most Palin fans are likely sympathetic to Tom Emmer anyway. But a Republican candidate must appeal to more than Republican voters to win in the general election.

For a good chunk of independents and Democrats open to voting for a Republican candidate, an endorsement by Sarah Palin is the kiss of death. They’re the mirror image of Republicans who disdain a candidate who

gets endorsed by the Star-Tribune .

Much like Emmer’s somewhat questionable choice of Annette Meeks as his runningmate earlier this week, the backing of Sarah Palin makes terrific sense in the context of a political universe that’s set to expire in an endorsement supernova sometime Friday afternoon or evening.  As the adage goes that there’s no bad press as long as they spell your name right, so goes the same logic for the choices that have defined Tom Emmer’s final week before the gubernatorial endorsement.  While picking a highly partisan activist to share the ticket and garnering the endorsement of a polarizing but beloved conservative politician are potential risks come November, they’ve ensured that for better or worse, everyone is talking about Tom Emmer less than 24 hours from what could be the pinacle or nadir of his political career.

But La Plante’s analysis is also spot-on.  Palin remains as much of a potential liability in the general as she is an asset in the endorsement.  And Emmer’s camp must be prepared, should he raise his arms in victory on Friday, to find his win credited to Palin’s involvement by the media in a pre-emptive strike to paint the Delano rep into the far-right corner of the electorate.  Such an outcome likely sounds fine to many on Team Emmer given that the alternative is a long fall and summer on the political bench.

Florida’s political version of Hernán Cortés burns his last ship back to the GOP as he tries to chart an independent path to Washington.

It was barely more than 12 months ago that Florida Governor Charlie Crist found himself basking the media limelight.  The politically-saavy governor of a swing state, Crist quickly positioned himself not only as the prohibitive frontrunner for Florida’s open U.S. Senate seat but as a presidential dark horse.  That one year later Crist is bolting the GOP while the party’s Senate leadership that had once backed him are now suing to drain his campaign coffers speaks volumes of how fickle political fortunes can be.

Much has been already written of Crist’s numerous campaign missteps and penchent to spend his dwindling political capital faster than a crack addict with a gold card.  Whether it was Crist’s ill-advised embrace of Obama and the stimulus (both literally and figuratively), his veto of a Republican-backed education reform bill or his Roger Muddesque inability to state why he was running for Senate, Crist’s once-famous campaign aptitude seemed to disappear into a Brigadoon-like political mist.  As NRO‘s Jim Geraghty notes:

You don’t get to be governor of Florida without a halfway decent sense of political judgment, and in fact that’s supposed to be one of Crist’s best qualities: He may not be the boldest or most principled politician, but he’s always been popular and displayed a knack for staying on the right side of Florida voters…

Yet during this election cycle, Crist’s keen judgment disappeared and was replaced with the bumbling instincts of some of our most legendary modern political blunderers…Almost every key decision made by Crist and his campaign since entering the Senate race has backfired.

Less has been written about Crist’s path forward.  While a few polls have shown Crist leading within the margin of error in an electoral ménage à trois with Marco Rubio and Kendrick Meeks, the political math remains at a calculus level of difficultly.  Crist would need a bare majority of independents plus nearly 1/3rd of all Republicans and Democrats to secure a plurality.  Just a political combination isn’t impossible but nevertheless rare among candidates not prone to wearing spandex and feather boas.  Nor is Crist aided when 52% of independents claim to be unwilling to vote for him under any circumstances, despite a 60% approval rating among the unaffiliated.

Undoubtably, an independent bid was Charlie Crist’s best chance of being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010.  Unwilling or believing himself to be unable to seek the Republican nomination in 2012 against Sen. Bill Nelson, Crist has bet his once rising star on an all-or-noting Cortés-like strategy.  But left unanswered in his decision is how Crist believes he’ll be welcomed in Washington should he win. 

Should Republicans win the Senate seats they lead in current polling, the GOP would pick up 8 seats this November.  With California and Washington creeping into contention as well, one seat could easily tip the balance of power come January 2011.  Such narrow margins will bring tremendous political advantage to any independent Senate candidate.  Indeed, should the GOP come up one seat short, expect massive political pressure to be applied to Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) to switch caucus allegiances.  Unable to afford a credible candidate to his right in what will likely be an incredibly bitter general election against a well-funded Democratic opponent, Lieberman might be tempted to caucus with the GOP even if his party affiliation remains unchanged.

Crist has little such luxury.  While if victorious he’ll be courted by both left and right given 2010’s likely outcome, neither is likely to embrace him come 2016.  And should control of the Senate shift sharply away from a narrow divide, Crist almost certainly would be discarded, his political leverage gone.  Thus it would appear that Charlie Crist has gambled his entire political career on trying to acheive a single – and perhaps very lonely – term as Florida’s senator.

There are two types of people in the world; the kind that relentlessly sort people into neat taxonomies, and those who don’t.

Likewise, pundits (amateur and pro) fall into two camps; the ones that focus on the jerseys running around on the field, and the ones that look up in the stands to see what the crowd is doing.

Dave Mindeman at MnpACT looks at Tom Emmer’s choice of Annette Meeks as running mate and counts jerseys.

Well, first of all it tells us a little about what DOESN’T concern Mr. Emmer.

1) No help for geographic balance. Meeks is not a legislator. She does not have any natural constituency. She provides no special geographic advantage.

File this under “counting the jerseys on the field”. 

Which isn’t to say that there’s not some value in the conventional wisdom that tickets in Minnesota need to balance the Metro and outstate. 

But there are two flaws to the conventional wisdom:

1. For purposes of getting votes from people who will actually vote Republican – party sympathizers and anyone who can be convinced to be a sympathizer before November – Emmer is balanced, in and of himself.  He’s from the third-ring suburbs, which to0 the conventional wisdom are neither here nor there, but to conservative thought are pretty much the state’s center of gravity.   And, perhaps more importantly…
2. …while regional provincialism is usually very important in Minnesota campaigning, Emmer is banking, for this election, on there being a bigger dynamic at work; revulsion with excessive spending and ruinous taxation.  It’s not a real long shot.

Mindeman continues (and I”ll add emphasis):

2) No offset for ideologic balance. Meeks is a consummate party insider. She will have little name recognition outside of the political junkie subset. And she specializes in conservative public policy. Emmer seems to be telling us that Minnesota wants a right of center governing policy. Independents and Democrats don’t matter.

Again with the jersey-counting.  Look up in the stands.

Conventional wisdom among the jersey counters is that to attract someone who doesn’t agree with you right out of the gate, you need to give them something – a running mate, in this case – who does, as a sort of shiny object to distract them.   In other words, the conventional wisdom is that the GOP needs to “move to the center” to attract voters.

Emmer is taking a different tack; he’s going to spend the next six months giving voters in the “middle” a reason to move “right”.  Except it’s not a matter of left and right; it’s a matter of irresponsible versus prudent; sanity versus madness.  The future of this state and its prosperity is not  a partisan issue!

And Democrats and Independents “matter” not as passive populations to be appeased with potemkin place-holders, but in the way that actually complements their intelligence and dignity as humans; as people to be convinced.

And while it’s arguably risky, Emmer’s got two things going for him:

1. People across the board are very open to the message of fiscal prudence.  Even Democrats are getting scared of Obama’s, and Kelliher’s, lust for taxing and spending.
2. Tom Emmer does a great job of presenting his case to the unconvinced.  I’ve heard him on, of all things, Marty Owings’ “Radio Free Nation”, a left-leaning internet talk show, absolutely kill at explaining why fiscal conservatism works to a hostile but polite audience.   (And while I”ve never heard Marty Seifert face that kind of crowd, I’m told he excels as well).

Convincing the middle to move “right” is what put Ronald Reagan in office.  Emmer, being the single strongest stump speaker in Minnesota politics today, is easily equipped to do the same.

Secondly, the Meeks choice tells us some things that do matter to Emmer…..

1) Special Interests have a say.

Ah.  But those stalwart independents Kelliher, Dayton and Entenza will show us the way on that count, right?

Some of the speculation centered around an early preference for Linda Runbeck, but MCCL intervened….

MCCL staffers did express concern to Emmer’s people about Runbeck, said executive director Scott Fischbach. In 1994, Runbeck was among several Republican lawmakers who changed their votes and tabled legislation that would have required women to wait 24 hours before having an abortion.

Obviously, Emmer fears pressure from MCCL.

Well, the MCCL is certainly a powerful group.  But there are a few other points against the “speculated” (by whom?  when?  in what context?  Mindeman apparently doesn’t feel that’s important enough to tell us) rumored Runbeck candidacy is that she’s been out of public life for a long time, and her last appearance was a tough loss to Betty McCollum. 

That just might have played a role.

He talks the talk about standing up to lobbyists, yet walks the line for the first interest group that weighs in on his first decision making process. How strong are those individual principles?

For my part, I’ll await word the MCCL was “the first” group, or that Mindeman’s unsourced quote had anything to do with the decision.

But I won’t hold my breath.  While Emmer is pro-life, he’s no puppet of the single-issue social conservatives.  One of my most memorable interviews in the history of the NARN was at the State Fair last summer.  Ed and I were talking with Emmer.  Someone in the audience asked him what he thought about gay marriage.

“I don’t care”. 

It is, realistically, not an issue the Governor of Minnesota will ever deal with; it’s of no import.   But wouldn’t a puppet of the socialcons, speaking to the Patriot audience (the very embodiment of the conservative base) have toed the line?

Take Mindeman’s claim with a big block of salt.

2) Feels the Need for Stronger Public Policy Credentials. Emmer seems to be responding here to some criticism of his depth of knowledge in public policy.

Meeks likely will help blunt criticism that Emmer has weak knowledge of public policy and the issues facing the state.

His answer to that criticism is to embrace an academic. Meeks has no actual legislative credentials. She fosters and works inside think tanks. She is a member of the Met Council, but Emmer has openly talked about abolishing that entity. And Meeks herself, has published a paper which made the case for abolishing the office of Lt. Governor.

Right.  She’s no toady.  She’s got a mind of her own (unlike, for example, the DFL’s nominee).

Articulating public policy is far different from implementing it. Meeks can explain the logic of what she thinks should be done, but to put it into practice with real people and real budgets, well, that is quite a different story.

True.

If only there were someone on the ticket with years of experience in the Legislature. 

Emmer has indirectly told us a lot about his decision making process by this first real personnell decision. If Emmer wins the endorsement, and it seems likely at this point, then he will have locked the party into a conservative right ideology. Making a broader, more centrist case to the general public will be difficult.

Which may be a gamble.

And then again, this year, with the Tea Party at his back and the DFL noodling around with four more months of deciding between Same Old and Same Old, it might not be.

And it would seem that Emmer would be comfortable with that. The Emmer/Meeks ticket seems to be designed for another 45 to 47% maximum electoral vote strategy. With Tom Horner as the likely IP candidate, that isn’t going to work.

Only if everything breaks down by conventional wisdom – by counting jerseys.  Which is Mindeman’s game, and that’s just fine.  But…

Emmer has kept himself within the GOP/Tea Party bubble. He doesn’t look like a candidate who will reach out and broaden his base of support. He believes his current base is enough.

…the idea, this year, is to bring that huge, discontented middle over to the good guys.

It was a gamble 30 years ago when Ronald Reagan did exactly the same thing.

Is the time right?

Whether Emmer or Seifert wins the nomination, I’m pretty happy with the prospects.

The US economy has been “exporting” (i.e. losing the price war to retain) manufacturing, programming and customer service jobs for years now.

Now, we’re “exporting” management.

Vegas developer Steve Wynn is thinking about moving his offices to Macau

“The governmental policies in the United States of America are a damper, a wet blanket,” Wynn said. “They retard investment; they retard job formation; they retard the creation of a better life for the citizens in spite of the rhetoric of the president.”

…Wynn said Wednesday he was concentrating his efforts on Macau and would skip potential opportunities in Las Vegas.”I don’t think the Las Vegas market at the moment beckons a large investment,” Wynn told Bloomberg “The economic outlook in the United States, the policies of this administration, which do not favor job formation, do not encourage investment at all.”

Think the Chinese aren’t going to raid the US for companies that are mobile enough to take advantage of tax havens like Macau?