Via Joe Bodell at MN “Progressive” Project, it seems that Rep Tim Walz’s  (DFL, MN 1st District) feet are cooling down in re the notion of passing the Senate Obamacare bill.

Bodell:

One of the remaining options for the health insurance reform effort is for the House of Representatives to pass the Senate version of the bill verbatim, thus avoiding having to send a modified bill back to the Senate for debate, where it would likely die thanks to 41 votes being stronger than 59.

Which, of course, the Dems could “fix” by invoking the “Nuclear Option” – changing the Senate rules to allow cloture, or the shutting down of filibusters, on a majority vote rather than needing the traditional 60 votes.  Which they are loathe to do, since it’ll come back to haunt them when the Senate changes hands again, and that change looks to be closer at hand than they’d figured a year ago.

So it’s back to parliamentary tactics 101:

Thus, [the Tics] need to figure out where House members stand — several have said various things about whether they would vote for the Senate bill, and TPM is making a list — and Minnesota’s Tim Walz looks like he falls into the “maybe” category.

I got the following statement from Walz’s spokesperson:

Congressman Walz has not taken an official stand on whether he would vote for the Senate health care reform bill verbatim if it were put before the House. However, the pay-for-value Medicare reimbursement provisions that currently exist in both bills are an extremely important consideration.

So the absence of a public option in the Senate bill doesn’t sound like a deal-breaker for Walz — but unless it looks like there could be 218 votes for the Senate bill, members are likely to be very skittish about making public pronouncements one way or the other.

“Skittish” is a good word for it.  Walz squeaked into office in 2006 by beating “Moderate” Republican Gil Gutknecht in one of the worst elections for Republicans in recent memory (until 2008).  He represents a largely red district in the rural southwest part of Minnesota, hundreds of thousands of acres of conservative farmers surrounding a tiny blue outpost in Mankato.  He’s right to be skittish; he must looking at Byron Dorgan and Earl Pomeroy’s contortions, and Collin Peterson’s deep ambivalence about throwing himself on a sword for Barack Obama in his very similar Seventh District, and calculating his odds.

CORRECTION:  Yeah, I know – Walz is the First, not Third, District.  I’m a Saint Paul guy.  Anything west of Lyndale is a purely academic concept to me.  As is the concept of “a responsive Congressperson…”

The headline is that Arlen Specter told Michele Bachmann to shut up and get back in the kitchen.

Not quite in the headlines?  Even if you leave out Specter’s little sexist jape, you hear Bachmann clobber Specter on all the points that are going to be big and key this fall; jobs; prosperity; everything but more and more and more regulation.

Earlier this week, I wrote about Dave Mindeman’s take (on his MnpACT blog) on the gubernatorial election. His basic assumption; without Norm Coleman in the race, the DFL will take the governor’s office.

I noted that that conclusion would indeed reflect the “conventional wisdom” in Minnesota, normally; that Minnesota likes center-left DFLers and “moderate” Republicans.

Of course, there are all sorts of larger reasons the “conventional wisdom” could come up lacking this year; Obama’s plunging popularity will sap votes in the DFL’s traditional powerhouses, the Twin Cities and their first-ring suburbs; the “tea party” movement and its populist offshoots are going to bring an energy back to the GOP’s powerhouses – the third tier of ‘burbs on out, the south east and southwest parts of the state, the Red River Valley – that they lacked during the dismal dismal years of Bush’s second term, when you could palpably feel the exhaustion on the part of an awful lot of the volunteers that are the backbone of the MNGOP.

But there’s one other thing that I think the DFL/media (as always, pardon the redundancy) miss in their assessments. 

Not to indulge in name-calling – that’s not my intent, here – but there’s an intellectual laziness behind the overuse of the term “extreme”.  It seems everybody to the right of Arne Carlson gets labeled “Extreme” by the left and their allies on the editorial boards.

It is, of course, a crude but effective way to frame the debate for the left; labelling everyone and every thought of the opposition as “extreme” at every possible mention.  If you’re a conservative, you’re not just pro-life, you’re a “pro-life extremist”; you’re not just for limited government, you’re an “extreme Tenther”; you don’t just favor constraining spending and cutting taxes, you’re an “extremist”; any Second Amendment activists…well, we’re used to being called that and much worse. 

Marty Seifert

A big part of me would like to think that this bit of framing is showing signs of backfiring – as with the term “teabagging”, which the left turned from a junior-high snark into a fairly universal slur to, through relentless overuse, a two-edged sword that says more about them than the actual protesters. 

“Extreme” is different.  While there’s a certain amount of self-caricature in the left’s overuse and devaluing of the term, I think the left has fallen into an even more pernicious trap; after calling everyone to the right of Arlen Lindner an “extremist” for a generation now, they’ve come to believe it.

The left has been working overtime to label Tom Emmer (and, comically, Marty Seifert) as “extreme” conservatives, smug in the belief that as long as they apply the label (and the media dutifully uses it at every opportunity), then it’ll stick with the people, while the “reasonable”‘, non-“extreme” left will mop up the votes, because (so say the left and media) that’s where Minnesota really is.

But they haven’t heard Tom Emmer speak to a mixed crowd.

Tom Emmer

Here’s the thing people like Mindeman miss about Seifert and – especially – Emmer; they state the conservative case to the middle and the undecided better than any recent conservative figures in Minnesota politics.  While some previous conservative leaders in Minnsota have been seen (rightly or, more usually, because of media connivance) as exclusionary dogmatists, the two GOP frontronners can actually get out in front of an undecided crowd and make an appealing, articulate, solid case for why those in the middle should be over with us on the right. 

And while it’s entirely possible that someone among the left’s pack of hamsters – Rukavina or Kelley spring to mind – can do the same, I’ve seen little to no evidence that they can preach to anyone that’s not fundamentally disposed to be in the choir.  And given how fast Obama, Pelosi, Reid and (let’s be honest) Kelliher have been piddling on independents this past year, I think it’s fair to say that Emmer and Seifert will have a more sympathetic audience than they might have a year or two ago.

So I’m a lot less convinced that having the left/media merely chanting “extreme!  extreme!” over and over again – as well as it’s served them in previous elections – is going to do the job for them this time.

Two months ago, an arrogant GOP district committee tries to hand-pick a very blue candidate for a very purple district. Very red backlash comes up barely short, finishing up barely behind the Democrat, and going 3:1 against the very blue “Republican”…

…and the media and the lefty talkingpointbots portrayed it as a referendum against conservatives – one of which Dede Scozzafava was not.

Today – uninspired Democrat committee picks a very blue candidate in a very blue district. A district that’s been in Democrat hands for two or three generations.  She is upset by a Republican.  One that came out of nowhere within the past month.

Nope.  No referendum there.

Brown wins:

In an epic upset in liberal Massachusetts, Republican Scott Brown rode a wave of voter anger to win the U.S. Senate seat held by the late Edward M. Kennedy for nearly half a century, leaving President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul in doubt and marring the end of his first year in office.

The loss by the once-favored Democrat Martha Coakley in the Democratic stronghold was a stunning embarrassment for the White House after Obama rushed to Boston on Sunday to try to save the foundering candidate. Her defeat signaled big political problems for the president’s party this fall when House, Senate and gubernatorial candidates are on the ballot nationwide.

But remember – no way, no how was it a referendum on Obama’s first year.  Uh-uh.  No sireebob.

Bring on November.

With the departure of Norm Coleman from the gubernatorial race, things are both wide-open and, paradoxically, more focused.  The GOP is down to three real contenders – Tom Emmer, Marty Seifert and Dave Hann.  The DFL is holding steady, so far, at about 12 candidates.  The Indpendence Party shows us the value of those little loopholes in “Major Party” laws.

Dave Mindeman at MnpACT  thinks he smells victory.

Now that Norm Coleman has made his decision and practically every person in the world has given us their opinion, let’s go for one more.

Here’s my opinion.

Minnesota will have a Democratic Governor elected in 2010.

And I, as we shall see, disagree. 

Onward.

Now, I realize that nowhere in that sentence do you see Norm Coleman’s name, but Norm’s decision is a pretty direct translation.

According to the “conventional wisdom” in this state, that’s exactly true.  The CW has it that Minnesota is a purplish-blue state that needs a “moderate” for any statewide office.  Of course, the term “Moderate” – and for that matter, “conservative” – rarely are put into any meaningful context (and the keepers of conventional wisdom in this state, the DFL and media – pardon the redundancy – distinguish the concept of “liberal” no more than an Eskimo distinguishes the idea of “cold”).  And in many elections, that might be OK.

But not this one. 

We’ll return to that.

Without Norm Coleman in the race….

a) The GOP nominee will be either Marty Seifert or Tom Emmer. A contest between the two of them will be causing them to fall all over each other grabbing for the farthest right slot. Besides I can’t think of Seifert without remembering his dalliance with pirates. Arrrgh!

Remember that “no meaninful context” bit I mentioned above?  Here’s where it kinda matters.

Mindeman does what most media/DFL types in Minnesota do; assumes everyone to the right of Arne Carlson is an Attilla the Hun in a gray suit. We conservatives all look the same to Dave Mindeman (and pretty much everyone like him).

But they’re as different as can be; Seifert is a personable pragmatist in the Tim Pawlenty mold – which to a DFLer means “heartless conservative marauder”, and to a conservative means “acceptable, but needs constant scrutiny to keep them from swerving to the center”.   Emmer is the real deal, of course; after years of hearing the left crying wolf over the supposed conservatism of the MN GOP, Emmer is an actual hip-shooting podium-dominating Reagan Conservative.

And to someone like Mindeman, that’s all that one needs to know. 

We’ll come back to that.

b) So far, the Independence Party has not come up with a strong enough name to be a deciding factor. Most of the candidates in the past have had somewhat liberal leanings and siphoned off Democratic votes. Right now, the top prospect is Tom Horner, who will be a bigger drawing card for siphoning off moderate Republicans from the GOP.

In an ordinary year?  Perhaps.  But there are two wild cards in play here (as well as the fact that the Independence Party has become less of a “wild card” than a “soft three”).  Those cards are:

1. This is not a normal year for conservatives.
2. Tom Emmer, in person, resists Mindeman’s facile stereotype.

We’ll come back to both of those.

c) Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I don’t see the Democratic candidate moving (or perceived) as far to the left as is being surmised. With the probability of a primary challenge a virtual certainty, the Dems will have to make a broader appeal much earlier than the GOP candidate. This will give the Democratic candidate (and right now it doesn’t matter who it is), the advantage of broader statewide appeal.

That is a good point, as far as it goes.  The would-be Dem candidate is going to have to play less to the base than in a normal race, and more to real Minnesotans. 

And they’re going to have to, because the DFL Legislature has handed the MNGOP nominee, whomever he is, a priceless gift; their arrogant, self-entitled, spendthrift profligacy in the past two sessions stand a great chance of turning the southwest, northwest, and the third-tier suburbs – the GOP’s stronghold, which got a lot less strong in the past two elections – vibrantly red.  These areas are the hotbeds of the Tea Party movement; the conventional wisdom in the past few elections had it that the third tier ‘burbs were the swing districts, and if they were then, they are moreso now.

d) It is also doubtful that the Republicans will be able to substantially outraise the Democrats in money. Norm Coleman could have presented a challenge in that regard — the rest of the field will have a tougher time. Big donors will be more concerned with Congressional or Senate races. The GOP field wasn’t attracting the big money before Norm’s announcement — and even if they were holding back to see what he would do, that doesn’t necessarily mean there will be an enthusiastic outpouring now….it’s still the same field they were hesitant about.

It’s a possible problem – but it’s focused on “big money”, which is a very DFL-y perspective.  The MNGOP has always been about small donors.  Great case in point – in 2002, Paul Wellstone and Norm Coleman raised similar totals.  But Norm got his money from five times as many people; the donations were smaller, but they made up for it with volume.  And the GOP is turning the corner on winning back the Internet fundraising race; I suspect “big donors” will be a lot less important to the GOP nominee.

e) There will be no GOP primary battle. Republicans think this is a good thing, but even if Norm would have lost in a primary, the attention would have given Seifert or Emmer some serious name recognition. And they need it. The Democrats may have to fight it out, but the media attention will be focused on them and if the winner has the money to stay with it into the general election…. well, same result….. Democrat wins.

Enh.  Depends on the Democrat that gets through, and what the GOP nominee does.  Mindeman would be absolutely correct – if the GOP nominee were totally dependent on the metro media for exposure while the DFL was sorting things out.

That’s no longer entirely true.

And people out there are pissed.  That’s not normal.

It’s too late for someone else to get in. It’s Seifert or Emmer.

Democrat wins

That’d be the conventional wisdom.

It’s been a bad year for conventional wisdom, so far.

More on this tomorrow.

We in Minnesota have a perspective on Martha Coakley that most states don’t.

It’s been 25-odd years since an overzealous prosecutor in Jordan, MN tripped into a controversy over a pre-school, and pretty much invented the genre of the “entirely fantasy-based sex abuse case”; the conventional wisdom of the day was that children never, ever made up stories about abuse – so pre-schoolers, under questioning, pretty much let their little fantasy lives run amok, destroying not a few lives in the process and serving as the first of a wave of “satanic child abuse” cases that wracked the nation during the early eighties.

Including a similar, and at face value vastly more sickening, case in Massachusetts, involving a daycare run by the Amirault family.  Building on the same wave of suggested memories and childish fantasy that we saw in the Scott County case, the State of Massachusetts sent several of the Amiraults to jail – until it became clear that the procedures used to convict them were fatally flawed.  And so most of them were released.

Except for one of them:

In July 2001, the notoriously tough Massachusetts parole board voted unanimously to grant Gerald Amirault clemency. Although the parole board is not permitted to consider guilt or innocence, its recommendation said: “(I)t is clearly a matter of public knowledge that, at the minimum, real and substantial doubt exists concerning petitioner’s conviction.”

Immediately after the board’s recommendation, The Boston Globe reported that Gov. Jane Swift was leaning toward accepting the board’s recommendation and freeing Amirault.

So far, so good.

Enter Martha Coakley, Middlesex district attorney. Gerald Amirault had already spent 15 years in prison for crimes he no more committed than anyone reading this column did. But Coakley put on a full court press to keep Amirault in prison simply to further her political ambitions.

By then, every sentient person knew that Amirault was innocent. But instead of saying nothing, Coakley frantically lobbied Gov. Jane Swift to keep him in prison to show that she was a take-no-prisoners prosecutor, who stood up for “the children.” As a result of Coakley’s efforts — and her contagious ambition — Gov. Swift denied Amirault’s clemency.

Thanks to Martha Coakley, Gerald Amirault sat in prison for another three years.

There are few things in this world lower than fraudulently destroying another person’s life for your own gain.

Martha Coakley deserves defeat because she’s a tone-deaf political patrician who’s run the worst campaign in recent memory, anywhere.

She deserves ignominy and pointed scrutiny for what she did in the Amirault case.  An emphatic retiredment from public life seems a small price to pay.

For her, anyway.

Special election day in Massachusetts.  Most of the polls are showing Scott Brown with a commanding lead over Democrat Martha Coakley, who’s gone from (by some accounts) a 30 point lead in the fall to (by some others) a nine point deficit as of last night.

Has she run a tone-deaf race?  Absolutely.  Has she snatched defeat from the jaws of victory?  It’s still possible she wins today – but the very thought of a Republican, even a Massachusetts Republican in the Romney mode, getting within 20 points of any Democrat above room temperature for “Ted Kennedy’s seat” is a moral victory for the GOP.

Some say “he’s not a conservative Republican”.  For starters, it’s Massachusetts; “conservative” means different things in Massachusetts than it does in Wyoming – and I don’t think any rational person can say he’s running anywhere but to the right of, say, Susan Collins or Olympia Snowe, to say nothing of the hapless Dede Scozzafava.  And he’s already vowed to vote conservative enough on the issues that matter for purposes of this special election – especially on killing off the Democrat supermajority in the Senate.

Make no mistake; the Dems are going to call in the clans on this one.  The SEIU and ACORN have been flooding the state with workers.  You can expect voter intimidation, a la Philadelphia.  You can expect the usual crowd of media hamsters to try to shame people with the freshly-sainted memory of Ted Kennedy.

But so far, 2010 is looking like a very good year.

I’ll get back to you tonight.

Conventional wisdom  is wrong; Norm Coleman is not running for Governor of Minnesota:

“I love Minnesota and I love public service, but this is not the right time for me and my family to conduct a campaign for Governor.

Timing is everything. The timing on this race is both a bit too soon and a bit too late. It is too soon after my last race and too late to do a proper job of seeking the support of delegates who will decide in which direction our party should go. The commitments I have to my family and the work I am currently engaged in do not allow me to now go forward.

At the moment, I am tremendously energized by the work I am currently involved in to create a positive, center right agenda for this country. Anger on the left and anger on the right will get us nowhere. In Minnesota, we face a jobs deficit, a budget deficit and a bipartisanship deficit. We must all put aside the bitterness and sniping and remember that behind every job loss and every home foreclosure is a Minnesota family losing hope and confidence.

That changes the Gubernatorial race again.  Until this, it looked like the convention was going to be a movement-conservative rear-guard action to try to sway the primary against Coleman.  Now, with this news and the departure of Pat Anderson from the race to switch to Auditor, it looks like it’s going to be a battle to see which movement conservative – Emmer or Hann – can overcome Marty Seifert’s big lead with the GOP (not necessarily conservative) establishment at the convention.

It’s a whole new race.  And a big opportunity for conservatives – all of you, the Paulbots and Tea Partiers and Tax Protesters and pro-lifers and the whole works – to make a huge difference.

Remember back in the eighties, when some less-than-articulate conservative commentators lapsed into self-parody by referring to fairly run-of-the-mill fabian statists as “commies”?  The reversion to facile cliche did conservatism no favors, and probably helped you (this kills me) look like the level-headed ones?

I just though I’d thank Chuckles Schumer (P[inhead], NY) for paying the favor back with interest:

New York Sen. Charles Schumer, who famously hammered then-Sen. Alfonse D’Amato for calling him a “putz-head” in their hot 1998 campaign, was accused Thursday of stepping into the gutter himself after he sent out a fundraising e-mail in which he called Massachusetts Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown a “far-right tea-bagger.”

The two-term Democrat, in accusing Brown of being aligned with the conservative “tea party” movement, used a term that every tea party critic knows refers to a sexual act.

DISINGENUOUS LIBERAL: “But nooo! They themselves sent tea-bags to legislators! That’s what me (sknxx) mean!  Honest!”

“Chuck has a way of saying things that I don’t think he really understands or means, and it’s unfortunate,” Brown told Fox News Thursday when asked about the e-mail. “I’m not into name-calling. … so shame on Chuck.”

What was it Gandhi said?  “First they ignore you; then they mock  you; then the mocking turns into a self-parodying cliche that says more about the smugness of their own isolated, cossetted point of view and their tendency to listen to your own press; then your degrading cliche turns into a wry rallying cry for the very opposition you’re trying to mock; then they get angry realizing you’re turned their smug ignorance has been turned against them, and they either say something even dumber (see Martha Coakley vs. Curt Schilling) or they sic your SEIU goons on the opposition; then we win.”

Yeah.  I think that was what Gandhi said.

…weren’t we told that the November Republican turnaround victory in Virginia and the stunning upset in New Jersey weren’t referenda on Obama’s first year?

If that were true, then wouldn’t this story just, like, totally not exist?

Coming off stinging election losses in Virginia and New Jersey — not to mention Copenhagen, where he failed to win the 2018 Olympics for his hometown of Chicago — President Obama is staying away from what could become another painful loss.

Even though the campaign of Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has been making quiet entreaties, the president has no plans to visit her in the last week of the special election to fill the Senate seat once held by the late Edward M. Kennedy.

“It’s not on our schedule to go to next week,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said matter-of-factly.

Huh.

Damn tea partiers.

The GOP gubernatorial field has been an embarassment of riches so far, for a good conservative.  Tom Emmer, Dave Hann and Pat Anderson are all good orthodox conservatives; Marty Seifert is more of a pragmatist but certainly acceptable. 

But with the 800-pound gorilla rumors that Norm Coleman is pretty likely to enter the race, some of the air got sucked out of the room. 

And Pat Anderson, who served as State Auditor from 2002 to 2006 (and a very, very good one at that) has decided to run for her old office.

Good for her, I say.

Coleman – so says at least one thread of conventional wisdom – is going to get into the race, likely lose the endorsement but go to the primaries, and have an excellent chance of winning the governor’s office against the pack of gabbling hamsters the DFL will field. 

Coleman is not the perfect conservative, but if the choice is between an imperfect conservatve (who’s voted to the right of John McCain and Jim Ramstad, for crying out loud) and Steve Kelley, Mark Dayton or Margaret Anderson Kelliher (especially since the MNGOP is unlikely to flip the House and/or the Senate this fall, not that that’s not going to stop me from trying like hell), the choice should be obvious, if that’s what it comes down to; I am hoping that the presence of strong conservatives Emmer and Hann will drive him to the right, one way or the other.  That’s presuming we all believe the conventional wisdom.

But this is about Pat Anderson.  She’s young.  She articulates a conservative vision in a way that reaches out to people in the middle who might be sticker-shocked by the DFL’s coke-binge-like spending spree.  She’s very sharp.  She’s also been out of the public eye since the drearily unaccomplished Rebecca Otto upset her for Auditor during the 2006 election.  I think four years in the public eye will set Anderson up nicely for whatever comes next.

I first predicted in 2002 that Pat Anderson would be Minnesota’s first female governor or Senator. 

I’ll amend it; she’s got a great shot at being Minnesota’s first female governor or good female Senator.

It looks like it’ll be official: North Dakota governor John Hoeven is going to announce his candidacy to replace Byron Dorgan in about an hour.

Listen to the press conference at 6PM Central time here.

Ed and I interviewed Rob Port, who is the foremost political blogger in North Dakota, who correctly noted a nuance that escapes a lot of outside observers; while North Dakota is famously Republican, the state also has a mixed traditi0n in terms of spending; it has the nation’s only successful state bank and state mill; there’s a long prairie populist tradition, as well as some of the Scandinavian communitarian traditions that the state shares with Minnesota, that means the state government is a little more activist than many other Western states.  As such, Hoeven is a more “Moderate” Republican on spending than some of his GOP counterparts.  It’d be a mistake to call him a RINO; he’s probably slightly to the right of Norm Coleman and John McCain, and if elected he’ll be a big improvement over Dorgan, and vastly better than either of Minnesota’s senators.

Tune in!

This might be better than Ed Schultz running for Senate…:

This morning, The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder reported that retiring Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) may be offered a job in the Obama administration. “Privately, senior White House officials have communicated to Dodd their belief that his position was untenable. A sinecure or administration position is likely,”

It’d be like George W Bush putting the Department of Justice under Randy Cunningham.

The Republican attempt to soil Massachusetts’ tidy Senate election gets bleached.

In a state where only 24 of the 200 legislators who occupy the legislature are Republicans and which last reliably voted GOP at a national level during Dwight Eisenhower’s era, most pundits and pols could be forgiven for tuning out their interest in the race to succeed the late Ted Kennedy after the lopsided, low-turnout Democratic primary of earlier this month.  Between Massachusetts’ historically liberal leanings, State Attorney General Martha Coakley’s convincing primary victory and her sizable cash advantage, national Republican leaders and even conservative activists have largely written off St. Sen. Scott Brown’s erstwhile attempt to score even a moral victory in the Bay State.

While there’s no question that despite being an articulate communicator whose good looks allowed him to put his posterior in Cosompolitan magazine for posterity in 1982, Brown faces taller odds than Hervé Villechaize at a slam dunk competition.  Still, some are questioning the national GOP’s disinterest in the campaign.  NRO‘s Jim Geraghty gamely expresses the NRSC and GOP’s likely logic of throwing away good money after bad considering the simple political math that Massachusetts presents any right-of-center candidacy:

But to illustrate how tough the odds are for Brown, let’s pretend that every registered Republican in the state, as of 2008, shows up and votes for him. And let us pretend that the independents split evenly, and that only one third of the state’s Democrats show up and vote for Coakley.

Under that scenario, Coakley still wins by about 1,045 votes.

With Brown trailing Coakley in cash-on-hand alone by nearly $1.6 million, in addition to having been already outraised $4 million to $400,000, there’s little logic at hand for any national Republican organization to spend the kind of money necessary to deliver, in the words of one snubbed Bay State Republican, “a level playing field.”  Had the state’s beleagued GOP recruited any one of the higher-profile candidates mentioned months ago, including Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling or former White House chief of staff Andy Card, funds would likely be more forthcoming.   Such realities explain the lack of organizational support for Brown – but it doesn’t explain why conservative activists have wiped Brown from their radar.

Massachusetts may be solidly blue but the Democratic establishment has rarely been less popular.  Gov. Deval Patrick, who successfully broke a 20-year streak of moderate Republican governors with his victory in 2006, has a 47% disapproval rating, which is actually a slight improvement.  The state’s health care system, once seen as the template for Congress’ national health care reform, has been seen as successful by only 26% while merely 10% believe the system has actually improved the quality of care.  Throw in your run-of-the-mill scandals that happen in states that lack much competition at the polls and at least a pyrrhic Democratic victory seems possible.

The same scenario played out three years ago as Republican Jim Ogonowski nearly upset Niki Tsongas in Massachusetts’ 5th Congressional district.  Despite being outspent 4-to-1 and residing in a district where only 18% of voters were registered Republicans, Ogonowski captured 46% of the vote.  And while the numbers once again sizably favor the Democrat, the intangibles love the underdog:

[T]he number of votes there are in the Democratic Primary is usually the high-water mark of what the Democrat will get. In 2001 special congressional election, Steven Lynch got more votes in the Democratic Primary than he received in the General Election.  Fewer people voted for Nikki Tsongas in 2007 in the general than voted in the Democratic Primary.
…Coakley has basically shut-down and set the cruise control. She thinks she’s already won. Her base is no longer motivated. Scott is Senator 41. Obama’s Agenda screeches to a halt if Scott is elected . . .

Despite Brown’s potential importance, few conservative activists and fewer conservative dollars have rushed to his aid.  But recriminations are likely to abound should Brown pull closer than expected come Election Day, leaving the RNC and NRSC in an impossible position – spend money only to see Brown lose in a modest landslide or save for 2010 while likely losing dollars from yet another blog-inspired embargo on committee contributions.

Much like the Doug Hoffman candidacy in nearby New York, if conservative activists want to see Scott Brown supported, they’re best advised to start by doing so themselves.

The big Minnesota story du jour is about Mark Dayton’s “coming out” last week about his long battle with depression.

Bob Collins at MPR addresses the issue:

Former Sen. Mark Dayton revealed in a Sunday column that he’s suffered from alcoholism and depression. It’s now an issue in his quest to become governor. In politics, there’s often a price to be paid for honesty.

On Sunday afternoon, a Star Tribune reporter asked Dayton for more details of his admission, but Dayton reportedly said such details are “private.”

Few affliction can kill a candidacy faster than mental illness.

And it’s perhaps a shame that that’s true.  Depression manifests itself in a lot of ways; it’s not infrequently linked with people who are highly intelligent, creative and capable.

In 2002, an advocacy group called the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance released a poll that showed that 24 percent of all Americans would not vote for a political candidate with a mood disorder, according to the Washington Post. An equal percentage said they “might not vote” for such a candidate.

And I’m not one of them.  It’s not the illness; it’s how one deals with it.  George W. Bush is a recovering alcoholic; while his presidency had its faults, they had nothing to do with his illness; the depraved reaches of the lefty fever swamp said more about themselves than about Bush when they claimed he was “obviously” drinking again.  

I’m less concerned about Dayton’s depression than I am about his history of alcohol abuse; he’s been treated at least once.  But again, it’s the results that count.

There are many reasons not to vote for Mark Dayton for governor;  he espouses the same tax-and-spend statist liberal philosophy that has gotten so many other states into deep trouble in this recession; he will tax Minnesota business even closer to the stone age than the current Legislature has; his record in elective office – as Senator and State Auditor – has been uniformly awful; even the liberal lapdogs at Time magazine called him one of “America’s Five Worst Senators“.   He’s an ineffective poltiicians with a dismal record at leadership.

That being said, I hope he stays in the race; his money and connections will drag the DFL’s decision process all the way to next September, if he wants them to.  This is good.

The Star Tribune’s following up on Dayton’s acknowledgment, however, now raises another question in the governor’s race. Should all current candidates now be asked if they’re being treated for any illness or have ever been diagnosed for it?

If people believe that it’s none of our business, then Dayton’s mistake — politically speaking — was in being honest.

Well, I’m suspecting his “mistake” was being a DFLer; the timing of the story tells me (and I say this with no information to back it up – just a hunch) that one of his DFL rivals for the nomination was about to move a big story on the subject; what better time to jump ahead of a hit piece than Christmas weekend? 

Again, that’s just conjecture.

What’s less speculative is the Twin Cities’ media’s disingenuity in covering the “story”.  This is a media market where every aspect of Michele Bachmann’s personal and legislative lives, from her speeches to her choice draperies to the supposed inner workings of her marriage and family are virtually a cottage industry among the local mainstream (to say nothing of lefty “alternative”) media.  It’s a place where the antics of Morgan Grams became front-page news at precisely the moment they had to be to affect his father Rod’s defense of his Senate seat against Dayton (even though Grams hadn’t had custody of the boy in many years).  Where misinformation about Norm Coleman’s apartment was unquestioningly accepted and reprinted during the past Senate race.   Business connections between GOP stalwart Tim Commers and Governor Pawlenty and then-State Auditor and current GOP gubernatorial candidate Pat Anderson got pored over by everthing the Twin Cities media had, looking for a scandal they just couldn’t quite find.

But Mark Dayton’s behavior, and the broad outlines of his medical condition, have been fairly well-known for years among the Twin Cities media.  Scott Johnson wrote about this almost six years ago – and we spent an hour on the Northern Alliance Radio Network back in 2004 talking about the subject, which Scott wrote about again this past weekend:

At a charity auction in 1994 or so I won the opportunity to have Dayton take me and a friend to lunch at the Minneapolis Club. The lunch occurred toward the end of Dayton’s tenure as the Minnesota state auditor. At lunch we argued politics and found nothing on which to agree. The lunch was extremely unpleasant because Dayton seemed to be unable to disagree agreeably. Dayton nevertheless put me on his Christmas card list for roughly the next five years.

Over those five years Dayton used his Christmas cards to discuss the dissolution of his two marriages, his entry into rehabilitation for alcoholism and related therapy issues. His psychiatric challenges were no secret to the many people on Dayton’s Christmas card list, including virtual strangers like me.

In its story today, the Star Tribune reports: “People who have worked closely with Dayton or within the [Minnesota Democratic Party] said they have long known the former senator struggled with mental health issues.” Later the story adds: “Opponents — and even some supporters — have long whispered of his possible struggle with mental illness.”

This was, indeed, the basic outline of the hour we – Scott, John Hinderaker, Brian Ward and I, if memory serves – spent talking about the subject – in 2004. 

Now, if Scott Johnson – a person who was at that time a person of no great media consequence, seven or eight years before Powerline made him a meta-celebrity – knew the whole story, and it’s been fairly general knowledge that everyone, but everyone close to him knew even more, then – given the Twin Cities’ media’s rigorous punctuality in investigating every wart, burp and exhalation from some other politicians, why is the “story” only now getting out?

So I have two questions:

1. What did the Twin Cities media, especially those who cover politics full-time, know?  And when did they know it?  And why was it never deemed newsworthy?
2. There was a time when the media informally swore off covering politicians’ private lives; it was a sort of unwritten agreement, which meant that President Kennedy could squire Marilyn Monroe around the White House with impunity, among many other things.  Fair enough; so why has that unwritten agreement survived so long with favored DFL politicians, when it was tossed under the bus over two decades ago for the GOP?

You know what’d be cool?  If we had a media that’d ask these questions…of the media!

A while ago, codified all of the various Berg’s Laws in one place.  These laws – an encyclopedic survey of several small but fairly universal truths – include perhaps one of my most trenchant observations, captured for posterity as Berg’s Seventh Law:

Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Projection – When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are projecting.

Critics have misguidedly assailed this law; “you’re basically saying you’re rubber and we’re glue”, which may sound satisfying on a superficial level, it ignores the fact that the Seventh Law is entirely true.

For example – liberals constantly tell conservatives they’ve “gotten too extreme” for the American people.  This is at a time when the American people are rejecting Obama’s far-left overreach in droves, even to the point of the once-unthinkable; conservatives organizing and going to demonstrations. 

In the meantime, some Democrats – the ones that have to live in the real world outside the Beltway – are starting to get nervous.

This might be the only time you ever see me call  Chicago mayor Richard Daley a moderate.  He’s got an op-ed in the WaPo:

The announcement by Alabama Rep. Parker Griffith that he is switching to the Republican Party is just the latest warning sign that the Democratic Party — my lifelong political home — has a critical decision to make: Either we plot a more moderate, centrist course or risk electoral disaster not just in the upcoming midterms but in many elections to come.

Rep. Griffith’s decision makes him the fifth centrist Democrat to either switch parties or announce plans to retire rather than stand for reelection in 2010. These announcements are a sharp reversal from the progress the Democratic Party made starting in 2006 and continuing in 2008, when it reestablished itself as the nation’s majority party for the first time in more than a decade.

That success happened for one major reason: Democrats made inroads in geographies and constituencies that had trended Republican since the 1960s. In these two elections, a majority of independents and a sizable number of moderate Republicans joined the traditional Democratic base to sweep Democrats to commanding majorities in Congress and to bring Barack Obama to the White House.

Daley is leaving out a few things, of course; Obama and the Dems made those “inroads” against the legacy of a deeply unpopular outgoing Administration, with the full complicity of a media that made a rigid agenda point of showing Obama as a moderate, to the point of actively stifling any discussion of his far-left past, associations or record.  I think the left accepts that as a given, by now.

But wait! (I’ve added some emphasis):

This call was answered not just by voters but by a surge of smart, talented candidates who came forward to run and win under the Democratic banner in districts dominated by Republicans for a generation. These centrists swelled the party’s ranks in Congress and contributed to Obama’s victories in states such as Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado and other Republican bastions.

But now they face a grim political fate. On the one hand, centrist Democrats are being vilified by left-wing bloggers, pundits and partisan news outlets for not being sufficiently liberal, “true” Democrats. On the other, Republicans are pounding them for their association with a party that seems to be advancing an agenda far to the left of most voters.

The political dangers of this situation could not be clearer.

Or more fun!

In particular, I love Daley’s probably-offhanded admission – that the left wing smear machine actually is as venal, smug and divisive as they’ve always alleged hosts like Limbaugh, Hannity and the Northern Alliance – whose messages are actually relatively closer to the center of American politics – to be.

Witness the losses in New Jersey and Virginia in this year’s off-year elections. In those gubernatorial contests, the margin of victory was provided to Republicans by independents — many of whom had voted for Obama. Just one year later, they had crossed back to the Republicans by 2-to-1 margins.

Witness the drumbeat of ominous poll results. Obama’s approval rating has fallen below 49 percent overall and is even lower — 41 percent — among independents. On the question of which party is best suited to manage the economy, there has been a 30-point swing toward Republicans since November 2008, according to Ipsos. Gallup’s generic congressional ballot shows Republicans leading Democrats. There is not a hint of silver lining in these numbers. They are the quantitative expression of the swing bloc of American politics slipping away.

The Mayor still knows his audience:

Despite this raft of bad news, Democrats are not doomed to return to the wilderness. The question is whether the party is prepared to listen carefully to what the American public is saying. Voters are not re-embracing conservative ideology, nor are they falling back in love with the Republican brand. If anything, the Democrats’ salvation may lie in the fact that Republicans seem even more hell-bent on allowing their radical wing to drag the party away from the center.

Of course, the biggest second-tier danger facing the Democrats is believing their own talking points about the GOP and conservatism; just because you relentlessly intone that everything to the right of Olympia Snowe is “extreme” doesn’t make it so. 

The real conservative case – limited government, individual and economic liberty, security, family – is the American mainstream.  And when Republicans act like conservatives rather than beltway lobbyists-in-training, it shows at the polls. 

Read Daley’s entire op-ed.

I’ve long felt that the MNGOP’s best shot at a pickup in 2010 will be in the First Congressional District (CD), where DFLer Tim Walz beat incumbent moderate Gil Gutknecht in 2006.  Walz was a middling-to-weak candidate, but a likeable enough guy who ran far enough to the center to eke out a win in the second-worst election for Republicans in recent memory.   Incumbency has its privileges, of course; Walz solidified his position last year against a very weak GOP candidate in the worst year for Republicans in recent memory.

Still, if there’s a vulnerable DFLer in the state, it’s Walz; he’s a mushy center-left Congressman of no real distinction, one who’s followed whomever’s ridden the biggest horse in his three exceedingly vanilla years in Washington.  A good conservative reflecting the overall realities of the district and, let us not forget, a better year for Republicans, could make 2010 the year Tim Walz goes back to whatever it was he did before he went to Washington.

The Cook Report is showing early signs of agreement, demoting the race in the First from “Solid” to “Likely” Democrat – and this long before the GOP has even begun winnowing its five contenders down to find a candidate.

I think it’s unlikely, but far from impossible, that the GOP will take the US House back in 2010; beyond the historical tradition of the president losing seats at midterm, I think that there’s a lot of generalized dissatisfaction with the Administration out there.  It’s easy and tempting to fall into Pauline Kael Syndrome – none of my friends voted for him! – but I think that at least among “independents”, Obama has a lot more in common with Jesse Ventura than Bill Clinton.  And while that may or may not mean a change in administration in 2012, it could very well mean that a lot of Representatives who got in on Obama’s coattails last year will wind up short of fabric next year.

And if that happens, what?

Center-left site “HillBuzz’ ” ponders what is, for local lefties, the unthinkable: Speaker of the House Michele Bachmann:

The Tea Parties could install Bachmann as Speaker, we believe, if the Tea Party Movement itself grows, buckles down, and becomes a larger force to be reckoned with going into 2010.

Palin herself could help deliver Bachmann unto the Speaker’s chair, if the candidate Palin campaigns for next year mostly win, and the next Congressional majority owes a lot to Palin.  It appears Palin and Bachmann are friendly, if not already allies.  Palin would be well-served with one of her own as Speaker.  That could help Palin’s groundgame in 2012 immensely.

Of course, that’d get an awful lot of local lefties to glaze over and start muttering incomprehensibly to themselves; Bachmann inspires among the local and regional left the most lumpen groupthink in American politics; like Sarah Palin, Laura Ingraham, Katherine Kersten and indeed pretty much every “out” female conservative, she is “teh crazee” to her detractors.  “Bachmann Derangement Syndrome”, as practiced by the Representative’s many online stalkers, creates a dissociative state where fact and ratonionality lose meaning; indeed, it’s ironic, given the hatred that so many of her stalkers feel for her fairly fundamenalist Christianity, the amount of garbage her detractors are willing to take on nothing more than faith.

While the writer correctly notes that the GOP base hates labels, there’s a case to be made for just a little bit…:

Whoever replaces Nancy Pelosi needs to be a firecracker.  We also think the GOP needs to put a woman in that Speaker’s chair.  Because of the misogyny the Democrats have wallowed in for the last two years, many women are open to voting Republican for the first time in their lives.  Republicans, thus, have the once-in-our-lifetime chance to be seen as “the party for women”.  Some of you might not like identity politics, but a great deal of independents sure do.

I’ll get back to ’em on that.

So is there something to the idea of a couple of female conservative firebrands with a shared history of sparking unreasoning derangementi in their foes, leading an insurgency?

Someone seems to think so.

I don’t go to the WaPo’s Chris Cilizza for keen-eyed observations on conservatives or Republicans. 

But his piece in “The Fix” on the Minnesota goober race provides some junk food for thought:

Norm Coleman (R) isn’t expected to make a decision on the 2010 governor’s race until next year but a new Rasmussen poll suggests the former senator has plenty of time to make his decision. Coleman led the Republican field with 50 percent while state Rep. Marty Seifert at 11 percent was the only other potential candidate to break double digits. Coleman’s lead is almost entirely attributable to name identification gained from his time as mayor of St. Paul and his six years in the Senate but it does suggest that if he decides to run, he will be a clear favorite. On the Democratic side, former Sen. Mark Dayton and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak each received 30 percent of the vote while none of the other candidates scored in double digits. Coleman would give Republicans a chance to hold this seat, which is being vacated by Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) after two terms. But, if Coleman takes a pass this race looks extremely difficult for any other GOP candidate given Minnesota’s Democratic tilt.

Before we get to Cilizza’s actual piece, let’s take a moment to remember how well the “cult of the inevitable” serves the Democrats.  While it’s entirely possible that the second coming of Ronald Reagan would have had trouble in the 2008 election, it’s also a fact that the “inevitability” of John McCain – cultivated through many careful years by the media, who spent the better part of a decade building up John McCain as the “Good Republican”, so they could spend six months tearing him right back down – didn’t serve the GOP especially well in the past election.  McCain was built up to serve as a beacon for “Moderate” Republicans, and “moderates” discredited themselves utterly and completely between 2002 and 2008.   Don’t believe for a moment that Big Media doesn’t desperately want to do the same again; look for a wave of approving stories about what an “acceptable”, work-across-the-aisle kinda guy Republican Mike Huckabee is, sooner than later.

But for the moment, let’s do two things; leave media perfidy out of it (or just accept it as a given and move on), and accept Rasmussen’s numbers at face value, and assume that Norm Coleman’s name ID gives him a prohibitive advantage in the GOP field (and, at first glance – again, let’s accept the numbers at face value – an edge over the Rybak and the ludicrous Mark Dayton), what does it mean?

I’ve disagreed strenuouosly with plenty of my conservative friends on Coleman, based on one key principle – a principle that guides so very much in life.

Perfect is the enemy of good enough.

Coleman, like Tim Pawlenty, is no conservative’s icon.  But like Pawlenty, he is conservative enough, at least on the issues that matter.

Coleman, like Pawlenty, has angered conservatives with a number of his stances over the past 16 years.  But, like Pawlenty, he has been a thoroughgoing conservative on the things should matter; taxes, spending, growth and security.

As Mayor of Saint Paul, he presided over eight years (and keynoted four more) of holding the line on taxes, on living within the city’s means, and on job and business growth – things that are nearly forgotten four years after Coleman’s successor Randy Kelly left office.  Like Pawlenty, his conservatism may fray a bit around the edges, but at its core it’s just fine.

So who do I support for Governor?

I think the race boils down to one thing, if you’re a Republican; not moving the party to the center, but communicating what the right really stands for to give “the center” a reason to move right.

Do I think a thoroughgoing conservative like Tom Emmer, Dave Hann or Pat Anderson has what it takes to communicate the benefits of a real conservative vision to a middle that’s shell-shocked by Obama’s incompetence and excess?  Yes, I do  – and so does the Twin Cities’ media, which is why you never see Tom Emmer or Pat Anderson’s name in print without some variation on “extreme” or “hardline” conservative in front of their names.    I’ve seen Emmer, Hann and Anderson talk with mixed crowds; I’ve even heard Emmer on a liberal-leaning internet talk show – he did a spectacular job of articulating the conservative vision to a non-conservative audience, and I have no doubt Anderson and Hann can do the same  (which is why the Strib and the rest of the Twin Cities media will make sure that they don’t give any of them the opportunity to do it to a larger audience).

But at the moment, I support one thing; fighting like hell – as I put it a few years ago, grabbing one side of the rope or another in our inter-party tug of war and pulling like mad.  Getting out the caucuses early next year and fighting like there’s no tomorrow for your candidate.  Because for Minnesota conservatives, it’s a win-win situation.  Either we get a genuine movement conservative, an Emmer or Anderson or Hann or Seifert, someone who can genuinely articulate conservatism to the undecideds, running for (and winning) the race…

…or we get Norm Coleman, after having to survive a tough, spirited nomination battle against three superb candidates to his right.  Which will make him tack right, while still remaining Norm.  Norm is no slouch at articulating the key tenets of conservatism to a crowd either; and as a “worst case” that isn’t all that bad, having to overcome Emmer, Anderson and Hann will force him to walk the conservative walk in a way he has not had to before.

Which is not a bad thing.

Perfect is the enemy of good enough.  Would I prefer that Emmer, Anderson, Seifert or Hann won with a forty p0int margin?  Absolutely – and I plan on pulling like hell for one of the three of them.

And whomever gets through the convention – Tom, Pat, Dave, Marty or Norm?  I’ll pull like hell even harder for any of them.

Because any of them will make a better governor in these times than Rybak or Dayton.

The latest Rasmussen poll shows that Republicans are beating Dems by four points in the very early polling for 2010.

But here’s the part that really shocked me (emphasis added by me):

As was the case in last Tuesday’s gubernatorial elections, independents are helping the Republicans’ cause. In the latest poll, independent registered voters favor the Republican candidate by 52% to 30%. Both parties maintain similar loyalty from their bases, with 91% of Democratic registered voters preferring the Democratic candidate and 93% of Republican voters preferring the Republican.

Question:  Are all those independents, who were “agents of hope and change” last year, suddenly “teabaggers?”

I joke, constantly, with liberal commenters and critics – the few that are worth engaging, anyway – “If a princpled conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and no liberal is there to hear it, is he/she still crazy?”

It’s a joke that covers a very serious reality; for a big chunk of the left, individually and as an institution, “insanity” is the only possible reason for dissent.  You encounter is from lefties small (“Suddenly John McCain got crazy!”) to big (the Soviets considered dissent a psychiatric condition, and filled psychiatric prisons to prove it).  To altogether too much of the American left, not being part of the American left is (to paraphrase Michael Savage) a mental disorder.

I saw that Dave Mindeman had written a piece entitled Bachmann has close to “Unsinkable” status” and thought briefly that perhaps Mindeman – who is one of the more estimable regional leftybloggers – was going to try something we’d not seen before; a sober, responsible, dispassionate look from the left at the success of one of the most drearily, rotely, predictably maligned figures in Minnesota politics.

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, or know anything about Minnesota politics, you already know not to take any action on that bet.

Any post that starts with a Paul Krugman quote is off to a bad start, of course:

The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.– Paul Krugman (NY Times)

So sit down with someone like  Paul Krugman, a Lori Sturdevant or, I’ll take a wild flyer here, a Dave Mindemann and ask them “what would the “rational right” look like?”.  If they get past the stumbling and the phumphering (I give you about one-to-four odds), they’ll describe something that looks, talks and votes indistinguishably from a Democrat.

Because, to these people, everything to the right of Dave Durenberger or Chuck Hagel is not just putatively wrong; it’s “crazy”.

Mindemann:

Outside of Bill Prendergast at MN Progressive Project (as well as some of the local 6th District bloggers like Hal Kimball and Political Muse), a lot of left leaning writers and activists (including myself) have considered Michele Bachmann to be a kook or extremist. [Really?  The hell you say. I’d put it more like “every regional leftyblogger has “Bachmann is teh crazee” on a hotkey – Ed.] Someone to make a caricature of, but not somebody to accept as a spokesperson for the right on the scale that she has nurtured.

That has to change, because Michele Bachmann is beginning to remind me of someone else….someone much more sinister….

Who might that be?

Margaret Thatcher, who presaged Ronald Reagan by fighting against not only a blinkered, ossified liberal leadership with immense success, but countered countless scabrous insults about her state of mine – because the British left was no less prone to see dissent as a mental illess as our own left?

Sarah Palin, whose own struggle with media/left (pardon the redundancy) orthodoxy has so completely paralleled that of Bachman (and Thatcher!)?

Who, pray tell?

Joe McCarthy.

{{facepalm}}

Wow.  Never heard that one before.

McCarthy rose to prominence because of fear. Fear of communism, the red menace. He turned those fears into an irrational paranoia. It ruined lives and paralyzed the US government. For a time, everyone had to tread carefully around the potential accusations that came out of McCarthy’s committee.

Bachmann is becoming the icon that the paranoid right is turning to now. She equates their fears into a “fight for freedom” or a “war against tyranny”. This new paranoia is not about real fears but about a loss of power that eight years of President Bush and 6 years of a Republican Congress kept in check.

Wow.  Speaking of paranoia.

Mindemann’s piece is marinaded in a crock-put full of the modern left’s most durable, and durably predictable, memes:

• To a liberal, a conservative never, ever fights the culture war because they have concerns and they wanna take their shot at correcting what they see as a problem in society.  It’s always about “fear”.
• No matter how carefully, even punctiliously, a cultural or social (or, these days, even a fiscal or security) conservative spells out a case, they are without exception “paranoid”.
• It is impossible for a conservative to speak on any issue, in any rhetorical terms, without it being considered “hate” on one level or another.
• Any conservative thought is assumed to immediately link to the most ludicrously extreme possible end results – and the most ludicrious fringe is inevitably concatenated with the most mainstream conservative thought.  This is not just intellectual laziness (although in the case of most lefty pundits, it certainly is the path of least resistance); this is part of a concerted pattern on the part of the left to frame all disagreement as one form of depravity or amother.

This is the lens through which the left – not even the extreme left, mind you, but the mainstream left that got Barack Obama elected – sees all dissent, and into which they want to frame all dissent for everyone else.  Too much of the media accepts it as the baseline; much of the American left can’t be bothered to question it.

That’s gone, and now their paranoia has a face and its quite different from the faces they have been used to.

Michele Bachmann has become the rallying point for this new paranoia. She listens to them…she understands them….she IS one of them. When she calls them to Washington to stand against health care, they come. Never mind that a lot of that crowd was paid for by astroturf front groups. The fact that deep pocket astroturf groups are willing to bankroll a Bachmann rally makes her all the more dangerous.

Mindemann is shocked, shocked, that right-leaning groups spend money to get across right-leaning messages and support right-leaning causes.  Because goodness knows the entire left-wing slander machine is funded through bake sales.

She has an entire news channel (Fox News) at her disposal.

Because goodness knows the left gets short shrift on ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, the NYTimes, WaPo, LATimes, the AP, Reuters…

Her message can reach the people it needs to anytime she chooses. She is also recognized as an “official” opposition voice by other media as well. And she loves the attention, doesn’t care about “facts”, and makes it all personal.

Tangent alert:  I was at a town hall meeting in Saint Paul before the ’08 election featuring Elwyn “E-Tink” Tinklenberg and Bachmann.  E-Tink spoke in vague blandishments, and seemed about as sincere and connected to the moment as the moaning in a porn video.   Bachmann, on the other hand, did something I’ve never seen a pol do; she grabbed a whiteboard and a marker, and she started putting up the numbers; the amount of Porkulus; the morgage bailout; the upcoming, inevitable bailouts of other industries; the amount this’d add to our per-capita deficit figure, and what that meant not only to our paychecks, but to our children’s futures…

…in short, the facts. She not only waded through the numbers, but she made them – the facts – accessible to everyone in the room.  It was the most affecting explanation of the gravity of our current fiscal situation that I had seen to date, and just about the most effective I’ve ever seen, period. From anyone, in or out of politics.  Ever.

As to anyone on the left – the party of Saul Alinski – carping about a politician “making it personal?”  I’ll hold my tongue, so that my contempt doesn’t overtake me.

And dare I say it, she has a certain charisma that convinces her supporters she can do no wrong.

No.  She has a charisma that convinces her supporters – and even a few intellectually honest detractors – that she’s right.

The Democrats chance to defeat her was in 2008. They had the right candidate [um, no – E-Tink was a disaster – Ed.] and the right opportunity [True – Ed.] — it just all came together too late.

(Also incorrect, if  you’ll indulge the tangent; “it”, in the form of a Keith Olbermann interview about not much that got its context carefully doctored and blown up into a much-ado-about-not-much-ado  event by an uncritical all-too-compliant media – “came together” too early; Bachmann was able to get The Real Michele back in front of the voters in enough time to stanch the bleeding.  Thank God.

Tarryl Clark is an excellent candidate [Hah! – Ed.]. So is Maureen Reed. Clark could be a consistent winner for the DFL…..just not in the 6th District. I doubt Reed or Clark is prepared for the type of war they are about to embark on. The DFL candidate, whomever it is, is taking on an incumbant that now has an unlimited national war chest of funding…An incumbant who can call on high profile names to support her campaign.

Which is apparently only a bad thing when the  “high profile names” don’t come from Hollywood and the  “unlimited war chest” isn’t from George Soros.

An incumbant who will be protected by a national party that has become dependent on her followers.

Which is a pejorative way of saying “found its conservative voice and unifying principles” – the only voice and principles since the Great Depression that has led the party to any sustained success and impact on politics, in 1980 and 1994.

Which, frankly, terrifies the crap out of the Democrat establishment.  This is why the left and media (pardon the redundancy) push the meme of the “responsble” (inevitably “moderate”) Republican – in their world, Dede Scozzafava and Arne Carlson are the voice of the GOP! – to divide and then to conquer the party, to marginalize conservatism and conservatives.

Because we not only win, but we win against all odds and conventional wisdom.

Mindemann comes oh-so-close to an answer…

Is the state DFL prepared to meet that kind of challenge? I have my doubts. They can treat MB as a buffoon, but it will only enhance her appeal. Their candidates have shown an ability to raise some money but nowhere near the amounts needed to compete with Bachmann.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope that the 6th District has enough discerning voters that she can be defeated.

…but swerves away.

The worst thing you can do in any form of public life is to “believe your own press”.  Likewise with memes about ones opponents.  When conservatives start to write their opponents off as a bunch of gutless entitlement symps and lumpen government employees – and all too many conservatives fall into that trap, too – then it takes ones’ edge off.  You should never underestimate your opponent.

But the only real arrow in the left’s quiver in the Sixth District is underestimation to the point of collective slander, not only of Representative Bachmann.  The left’s entire point of view about Rep. Bachmann is framed by a years-long propaganda campaign waged by some of her most, let’s just say, “focused” destractors, people who find her social conservatism anathema to the point they lose their faculties of reasoning.  This has framed the entire 6th CD DFL’s thought on Rep. Bachmann – a myopia that can only have helped send Rep. Bachmann to Washington twice now.

Dave Mindemann – do you honestly think that Rep. Bachmman’s successive victories, in two of the most anti-Republican elections in 35 years, was the result of “undiscerning voters”?

Voters of the Sixth – to Dave Mindemann (oh, I’ll be fair – to the Institutional Left), you are nothing but half-trained lab animals in a pavlovian experiment designed by that most devious mind-warper, Karl Rove.

Not people who arrive at intelligent conclusions for reasons of your own.

Hold that thought for another year.

But at this moment, that seems nearly impossible.

And one is torn between hoping Mindemann, and the rest of the state and 6CD DFL, do and/or do not figure why.

One of the Democrats’ most irritating memes is the idea that there’s some “Moderate Republican” out there that, if the GOP would just send ’em to office, would unite with Democrats and, well, fix everything! 

There’s a complementary meme, of course; that conservatism – government that favors the utterly Jeffersonian ideals of lower taxes and free markets and security – is “Extremist”. 

Of course, this is never accompanied by the equal-but-opposite idea – that nationalizing a sixth of the economy, taxing achievement and subsidizing failure is equally “extreme”,  as opposed to being just what people (wrongly, in this case) believe and how they differ from you. 

In so doing, Democrats pine for the days before 1980 (2002, in Minnesota) when the GOP did nothing more than try to bring a little restraint to the statist fantasies of the far left that has been the mainstream of the Democratic Party, with a six-year break from 1994 to 2000, ever since 1972.

And after last night, as The Obama Dream staggers off to Wisconsin with a black eye, expect Dems to start pining for those days again – the days when Republicans had Stockholm Syndrome.

Jeff “Don’t Call Me Joel” Rosenberg of MNPublius  gives the meme voice:

Once upon a time in American politics, there was a character known as a Moderate Republican. The defining characteristic of the Moderate Republican was his or her tendency to occasionally Compromise on Things. Very young political observers may not understand what I’m talking about, but there was a time when the occasional Republican would actually vote for a bill sponsored by a Democrat.

They’d have to be very young “political observers” indeed. John McCain was one of them. 

So, for that matter, was George W. Bush; except for foreign policy and that whole “God” thing, he wasn’t far to the right of Jim Ramstad.  He presided over a domestic policy that only a moderate-to-lefty could love; prescription drug subsidies, co-sponsoring an  Education bill with Ted Kennedy, racking up a spending record to the left of Bill Clinton.

The problem is, once a “Moderate” Republican is in a position to threaten Democrat power, he/she is instantly labelled an “extremist”; see John McCain, whose lifetime ACU voting record of two points to the right of Jim Ramstad and “Maverick” label and history notwithstanding got branded by the Dems attack-PR machine and the media that basically spent the last two years working as their adjuncts as “an extreme conservative”.

The lesson all Republicans (and smart Democrats) should learn is that, when the chips are down, “the Moderate Republican” does not exist.

Today, however, Republicans fit into a much narrower band of ideologies. In fact, Newt Gingrich, a onetime leader of the conservative wing of the party, is now on the moderate side of his party.

{{facepalm}}

Now, Jeff is not by a long stretch a dumb guy.  Indeed, in a Twin Cities leftyblogosphere dominated by the stupid and the depraved, he’s near the top of the curve.  But this is just absurd.

Gingrich, in his capacity as both an intellectual and party leader, threw some institutional love to the party apparatus in a generally-insignificant, backwater upstate district.  That apparatus hand-picked Dede Scozzafava, who is a textbook example of a RINO – a woman who ran to the left of the Democrats’ endorsed candidate.  The endorsement is a sign that Gingrich didn’t think the race through, and that Palin and Pawlenty saw an opportunity and ran with it.  Not that Newt turned into a hamster on us.

Anyone to the left of Gingrich is considered an America-hating communist 

Oh, good lord, Jeff.  Give it a rest.

It’s all well and good that conservative activists want to elect politicians who reflect their beliefs. What they’ve created, though, is a monster — a Republican party that votes en masse against any bill sponsored by a Democrat,

I’m sure Rosenberg is aware that the GOP controls neither house of Congress. 

 that’s more interested in fire-breathing political gamesmanship than participating in the legislative process.

Jeff:  If you and I play a game of chess, and I actually move my pieces to try to put your king in check, it doesn’t mean I”m “not particpating in the chess process”.  It means I’m doing what I set out to do at the beginning of the chess game; enact my agenda (by beating you).

The left’s meme (for Republicans) would have it that agreement is the end.  It is not – or rather, it is not the end that any given elected official should seek as of election night.  It is a means to the end.

And the truly amazing thing is, it’s going to get worse.

Where “worse” equals “present the left all of that scary cognitive dissonance that comes from having to defend your agenda, rather than get it for the asking”. 

Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate who upended the race in New York’s 23rd District, is just the tip of the iceberg. Right-wing extremists have big plans for replacing Republican to the left of Glenn Beck with “real” conservatives.

Notwithstanding Rosenberg’s invocation of boogeyman-du-jour Beck, as well as the absence of any commensurate move by the Dems to replace anyone to the left of Byron Dorgan with moderate Joe Lieberman clones to show the sincerity of their commitment to “compromise”, why would he care?  I mean, if conservatism is truly “extreme”, and truly doesn’t reflect the electorate, then wouldn’t a good Democrat want the opposition to immolate itself?

Because, I suggest, Rosenberg (or the K-street spinmeisters he’s echoing, knowingly or not) knows it’s a bunch of baked wind.

When the Tea Parties can turn out millions of people in the shadow of the Obama Honeymoon, and when the best the left can do is call them naughty names in response, the left knows the “swing to the right” isn’t just a passing fad.

When the left has to demonize entertainers like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, rather than just let them do the voodoo they do (which, you’d think, would only help the left, if any of them were so “extreme” that they really did marginalize themselves and their followers, you know they’re scared of something.

When the left has to try to impart a patina of illegitimacy, depravity and even criminality on simple cognitive dissonance – everything from Janet Napolitano’s “enemies list” to the recurring slurs about the Town Hall meeting dissenters to Barbara Boxer’s “Nazi” references – you know it’s not because they think dissent isn’t self-abnegating.

On the bright side, this internal battle is going to make a mess of the 2010 election cycle for Republicans, who could have had a pretty good year in 2010. On the not-so-bright side, it’s going to mean even less cooperation from Republicans in Congress over the next year, if that’s even possible.

Um, Jeff?  If the GOP has a bad year in 2010, building on our almost-negligible position today, then why is our cooperation even an issue? 

Republicans will remember what happened to Scozzafava, and toe the conservative line lest someone challenge them, too.

That is the idea. 

I’m sure that will strike hardline conservatives as major progress. The funny thing, though, is that in the long run this scorched-earth strategy is likely to do major damage to the Republican party. That’s what Gingrich warned conservatives about after Scozzafava withdrew from the race:

If we get into a cycle where every time one side loses, they run a third-party candidate, we’ll make Pelosi speaker for life and guarantee Obama’s re-election

 And it’s there that Rosenberg gets close to a point, although he might not know it. 

Gingrich was warning about the dangers of excessive purism, and of the Pat Buchanan approach of taking ones toys and leaving the sandbox.   It’s a legitimate concern – ask Algore! – but should not be confused with what’s been his real message for 15 years now; selling conservatism to the middle, rather than running to the middle (the loathsome Scozzafava notwithstanding) like a $2 streetwalker to get some cheap votes.

And those are wise words indeed; which is why the left is working hard to try to portray all conservatism as “extremism”.

You know when I knew we were headed for a big night?

It was probably 6:30 last night.  I was waiting for V to come on.  And on Drudge, I saw that the MSM was claiming, mirabile dictu, that they had all sorts of polling to show that this election was not repeat not repeat not about Obama.

That’s when I knew we were going to run away in Virginia, and probably win Jersey.

Ecker on the Christie win:

It is easy to overstate the importance of this election, as it is after all a local race which centers around local issues and personalities just as much as it does higher issues. But voter attitudes towards their government in general can influence how voters approach those issues. In this case, Christie ran on the issue of property taxes and other economic issues, where voter opinions are certainly strongly influenced by the Democratically controlled Washington DC.

It’s also worth mentioning that Obama invested heavily in both races, stumping for both candidates a number of times, including in the final days before the election. It is a sign that his majestic holiness is no longer enough to sway voters with flowery speeches and hollow hyperbole.

Virginia – a traditionally Republican state – was a “must make a good showing” state for The One.

But Jersey?  Not only have they not elected a Republican in sixteen years, but that “Republican” was Christine Todd Whitman, a woman who sent Rockefeller Republicans scampering for their Hayek.

Think that if Obama Deeds had won, or even kept it really really close, and/or if Corzine had won by the usual huge margin, we wouldn’t be hearing Katie Couric chiming that The Dream Is Still Alive this morning?

The most immediate effect of this will be in the outcome of ObamaCare/PelosiCare/etc. Already Blue Dog Democrats were feeling the heat of public opinion regarding the absolutely horrendous bill that is before Congress. Both Pelosi and Reid were already having problems convincing Democrats from swing districts to vote for the bill. This election is likely to reinforce that hesitation. If even an incumbent Democrats in a core blue state can lose, a Democrat in a swing or even a conservative district is officially on notice. Voters are not in a forgiving mood.

You listening, Tim Walz?

What a great night!

In Virginia, the GOP didn’t just beat the Tics; we didn’t just beat them down; we didn’t just humilate them; we made them say “we’re not just your beeyotch, we are your bee-friggin-YATCH”.  The Obama Revolution in Virginia had a half-life shorter than Milli Vanilli’s chart career.  The Virginia election – in a state the Dems owned barely a year ago – made an eight-on-one prison shower-room beatdown look like a Japanese tea ceremony.

And in New Jersey?  NEW JERSEY?  I knew we were onto something when a third of the polls were in, Corzine trailed by seven, and Minnesota Public Radio’s utterly Republican-free “panel” spent a couple of minutes obsessing over “exit polls”.  Which was at least better than CNN, which was running the “exit polls show New Jersey neck and neck” slide up until, I kid you not, the moment they called it for Christie.

Governor Christie.

Note to Dems; when even fat jokes fail you, you know you’re screwed.

Note to Hugh Hewitt:  You were oh, so close to right on this one; if it’s not close, they can’t cheat (enough).

NY23 – well, there’s a lesson for the GOP:  “Moderates” are death.  Running to the middle to win moderates is the road to palookaville; Liberals want us to run moderates.  Making the middle want to move to you is the way forward.  The GOP flipped the Nassau County Commission, and the conservatives taught a lesson to the 23rd District’s GOP “elite”.  While we lost the special election (cue Ms. Scozzafavva; ride into the sunset by any means necessary), we’re well-placed to beat Owens next year; the party might be over before they know what hit them.

Remember last year, when the left was tittering like a bunch of latte-addled grad students about the GOP and conservatism being dead?

Hah.  We’re here, we’re conservative, and we’re not going away (Janet Napolitano’s enemy’s lists notwithstanding).

Bring on next year.