Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Ninety-Nine Seats



TIADaily.com




One count of the latest polls indicates that there are now 99 seats in the House that could credibly by taken over by the Republicans. The polls are going very badly for the Democrats, and Intrade prices are starting to predict the results some of us expected: at least a 55- to 60-seat gain in the House. The latest RealClearPolitics map shows a likely 222-vote Republican majority in the House, with another 33 seats in the "toss-up" category.

But as Jack Wakeland noted to me: "As this dramatic mid-term election campaign enters its final weeks—the weeks that matter the most—published polling data will not be able to track changes in voter sentiment. The vast majority of voters don't really pay close attention until these final weeks, and the polls cannot keep up with what is going on.

"The published polls do not measure the ideological power behind each individual campaign, and what matters now is that power to influence voters who have just decided to make up their minds. Published polling data will not keep up with the details of how this ideological wind is shifting in each race and nationwide. Only a review of the speeches and the actions of political candidates and their party leaders in response to events on the ground—and in response to their large-sample, proprietary, and tactically-oriented polls—will tell the story of how our side fares.

"This is when the political armies meet and in the dust of battle, all one can really make out are the blows one warrior strikes against another.

"In the past few months we've been counting the men (the candidates and their supporters), remarking on their weapons, and measuring their qualities as they step upon the field and take up positions in the opposing ranks. But now that they're in contact, we cannot see the whole field. We have to wait until the night of November 2 to see if the ranks of the statists and the New Left power-lusters have been broken.

"In the meantime, three stories carried by RealClearPolitics look like the kind of thing that you should be reporting on in TIA Daily: the specific arguments, and non-arguments, that each of the candidates is making for his election.

"If you want to motivate your readers to work as election volunteers or just to vote, this will do it: the words of some of the best candidates we've seen since 1924; the words of some of the worst candidates we've seen since 1972."

In that spirit, today's edition of TIA Daily will offer a review of the cut-and-thrust of the political battlefield. I considered composing it in blank verse in the style of Homer's Iliad ("Sing, goddess, the wrath of the Tea Party..."), but I thought that might be a bit cumbersome—much as it would match the epic scale of the contest.

No overview can be comprehensive, and with up to 99 seats in play, it would be a bad idea to try. But this overview is thorough enough, and long enough, that I decided to make it count for two editions of TIA Daily.

I'll start with Jack's recommendations.

In the Wall Street Journal Karl Rove sums up the performance of the top Democratic leadership:

At an April 2008 fund-raiser in San Francisco, Barack Obama let loose with his famous "they cling to guns or religion" line. Last Saturday [now a week ago Saturday] at a West Newton, Mass., fund-raiser, the president said, "facts and science and argument [do] not seem to be winning . . . because we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared."

Memo to White House: Calling voters stupid is not a winning strategy.

The economy and jobs are the No. 1 issue in every poll. Yet Mr. Obama of late has talked about immigration reform and weighed in (unprompted) on the Ground Zero mosque. He devoted Labor Day to an ineffective Mideast peace initiative. He demeans large blocs of voters and now is ending his midterm pitch with attacks on nonexistent foreign campaign contributions and weird assertions that "the Empire is striking back."

Meanwhile, Republicans have talked about little else than the economy—drawing attention to lackluster job growth, the failed stimulus, out-of-control spending, escalating deficits and the dangers of ObamaCare.

Rove concludes that the Democrats have "no theme"—that is, no coherent argument—to argue for their re-election.

At RealClearPolitics, David Paul Kuhn argues that insulting the voters is the Democrats' theme.

In effect, Democrats are insinuating: It's not me; it's you.

Americans are responding: No, it's you.

Politics is like courtship. A guy asks a girl out. She says no. The guy tells the girl she's irrational, not thinking clearly. What happens? She walks away, more certain in her thinking.

The public is sick of its suitor. They want to try the new guy. And Democrats will not win Americans back by demeaning why they walked away.

Meanwhile, when Jack talks about the best words we've heard from politicians in a long time, he's thinking of George Will's introduction to the West Virginia Senate race, where a Republican looks like he might pull off an unexpected victory against a popular Democratic governor—by running against Barack Obama. Here is how Will introduces us to John Raese.

Raese, 60, is trim, tanned and gray-haired and radiates the confidence of a multifaceted businessman. He owns newspapers and radio stations; his barges ply the Ohio River carrying limestone; he manufactures Proctor Silex pots and pans, bumpers for Buicks and shiny metal stuff for Harley-Davidsons. He burns a lot of coal. And he takes what he considers Obama's anti-business agenda personally.

Channeling his inner John Galt (the Promethean entrepreneur in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged), Raese insists, "There is nothing wrong with making money." His audience finds nothing objectionable about that.

Lamenting that "we are in an industrial coma," he says of the Bush tax cuts, "We're not going to 'extend' them, we're going to permanentize them."

You read that right: "channeling his inner John Galt." Isn't this a great election season? And Will gives us this wonderful anecdote:

Warming up an audience that hardly needs that service—Republicans this autumn live at a roiling boil—a speaker at the rally was pleased that ABC's "World News" recently showed to its national audience a yard sign that says "Obama Says 'Vote Democrat'" and also says the sign is provided by West Virginia's Republican Party. The speaker says the state party's website crashed under the load of people asking for signs. This is just another straw in the wind—the gale, actually—that has filled Raese's sails and propelled him into a competitive race in what may be the nation's most thoroughly nationalized contest.

From a local news report, here is even more of what Raese is saying:

"If you want to make this country great, and if you really want to see this country move, let free the shackles on our vast supply of natural resources," Raese said, explaining that the United States is only country in the world that legislates keeping resources—such as coal, gas, timber, and limestone—in the ground.

"We have more natural resources in this country than any other region in the world, and we're grappling around worrying about foreign oil right now? I don't think so," Raese said. "Remember that the cornerstones of capitalism are energy and private property...."

"I believe that this country is the greatest country in the world," Raese said. "I believe in American Exceptionalism. Don't you?"...

"The reason that we are here tonight is because you parents and your grandparents and your great-grandparents were exceptional people.... They came to this country because they knew if they came to this country, it was an exceptional country. And they could come and make a family and make a life and make a living and make money, and there's nothing wrong with making money, believe me...," Raese said. "This is an exceptional country and we're going to take it back."

"How are we going to take it back? You are the people who are going to take it back..." Raese said. "You all represent what is really good about America. You're not interested in a political position. You're not interested in a career in politics. You don't have any vested interest except the constitution and your family. And a moral fiber that goes with both."

We need John Raese in the US Senate.

Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the spectrum, Massachusetts Democratic fixture Barney Frank is panicking. Frank is in trouble because for decades, he loudly championed the cause of "affordable housing" and pushed for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to lead the way in corrupting the nation's mortgage lending standards—with the results we now see all around us. Now he's trying to rewrite that history in an attempt to deny his role in the current economic disaster.

See a wonderful video skewering Frank for his history on this subject, on the campaign website of his sharp Republican challenger, Sean Bielat.

In response to this challenge, Frank has loaned $200,000 to his own campaign. It's a lot of money for Frank, and it's a sign of desperation for any candidate. But he has also continued the Democrats' theme—and it has long been a theme of Barney Frank's career in particular—of contempt for the governed. In a fund-raising letter, he tells would-be supporters that he's not going to put up with being "smeared" by the Tea Parties—whom he then smears as "bigoted."

Oh yes, and then he sent his boyfriend to heckle his opponent.

Bielat is polling in the mid-30s, but Frank is polling with less than 50% of the vote. This implies that Bielat's low numbers are due to his being relatively unknown—while the voters know Frank all too well. Which means that the remaining undecideds could overwhelmingly break for the challenger, and Beilat could win. A lot of races around the country are in exactly this position—the same is true for Stephen Bailey's race against a Democratic incumbent in Colorado—and these are contests in which a little bit of last-minute support, whether money or manpower, could make a big difference.

Speaking of hecklers, Florida Governor Charlie Crist's bid to run for the Senate as an unprincipled independent has failed spectacularly, and Republican candidate Marco Rubio may have just put the final nail in the coffin at a recent debate.

Rubio was responding to Governor Crist's politically expedient "flip-flops" on the issues, when Governor Crist lost it and began a rant that was aimed to talk over Rubio, simply to try to muzzle Rubio from laying a smackdown on him by detailing the reasons for the Governor's change in party affiliation and the notorious, well documented changes in his positions on the issues.

Rubio delivered the line of the campaign when he said that he had been heckled before from the audience, but never by one of his opponents on stage.

A lot of the campaign news, by the way, is of this kind: Republicans benefiting from the unforced errors of their opponents, including a lot of well-ensconced Democratic incumbents who are not accustomed to hard campaigning.

How else to explain Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid complaining that he is not getting credit for saving the world from another depression—while his state has an unemployment rate of 14%.

Or how about Lisa Murkowski, another establishment Republican who lost the party's nomination and is now running as an independent and campaigning on her support for pork-barrel spending, while denouncing the "Jim DeMint mentality" of small-government Republicans.

But perhaps the most embarrassing example of desperation is a series of ads produced by Rand Paul's opponent in Kentucky, who has elevated, as the central issue of his campaign, an old college prank in which Paul jokingly talked about worshipping "Aqua Buddha." His opponent actually made an ad using this story to portray Paul as an enemy of Christianity—talk about abusing the role of religion in politics!—and now has cut a new ad portraying Paul as a misogynist.

But no one goes as low as Florida congressman Alan Grayson, whom George Will describes as "America's Worst Politician" in a brilliant and blistering column for Newsweek.

Public life would be improved by scrubbing Rep. Alan Grayson from it. This act of civic hygiene probably will be performed Nov. 2 by voters of Florida's Eighth Congressional District....

Grayson's preferred name for [opponent Daniel] Webster—he used it in an ad—is "Taliban Dan." Grayson's idea that whatever rhymes is witty is sophomoric. His innuendo is worse. Consider:...

A devout Christian who home-schooled his six children, in 2009 [Webster] addressed a religious conference of men in Nashville on the subject of how to be a good husband. Concerning relations with their wives, he urged the men not to focus on biblical verses that enjoin wives to be submissive: "Don't pick the ones that say, 'She should submit to me.' That's in the Bible, but pick the ones that you're supposed to do. So instead, 'Love your wife, even as Christ loved the church he gave himself for it' as opposed to, 'Wives, submit yourself to your own husband.'"

Grayson sliced and spliced a videotape of Webster's words to depict Webster as saying, "She should submit to me. That's in the Bible." When asked about his lie-by-editing, Grayson blithely said, "These were his words."...

Grayson's rhetorical style is schoolyard crude. He has said, "If you get sick, America, the Republican health-care plan is this: Die quickly." He has compared Republicans to "knuckle-dragging Neanderthals" and Nazis burning the Reichstag. He has said, "I have trouble listening to what [Dick Cheney] says sometimes because of the blood that drips from his teeth while he's talking." He has referred to a high-ranking woman official at the Federal Reserve as a "K Street whore."

In a measure of how bad this year is for Democrats, it looks like Dennis Kucinich is in trouble in his district in Ohio. This kind of race has a nice symbolic resonance, in the same way as a defeat for Harry Reid or Barney Frank. Reid and Frank would be significant because they are leaders of their party. Kucinich would be significant because he has been a standard-bearer for the far left of his party.

Another Democratic fixture who is in trouble is Minnesota Democrat Jim Oberstar, whose recent fund-raising report revealed that in the last quarter, he had only one donor from inside his district. It turns out that Oberstar doesn't represent his Iron Range district so much as he represents his inside-the-beltway campaign donors, who give generously because they are eager to influence the chairman of the House Transportation Committee. More recently, Oberstar was caught talking about how cap-and-trade would create a carbon "regime"—a phrase with ominously totalitarian overtones.

The overall mood of the voters can be summed up in a story from my local race, in Virginia's fifth congressional district, where the biggest advantage for Republican challenger Robert Hurt seems to be his yard signs, which read "Hurt US Congress"—something many voters seem inclined to do. Senator Hurt himself, with more élan than I gave him credit for, quips: "A lot of the folks we talk to don't know that there's a candidate involved in the sign; they just think it's a good idea."

There are a lot of races that will test how far this sentiment goes. I was very impressed with the Tea Party-backed New Jersey candidate Anna Little, who pulled off a startling upset in the primaries against an establishment-backed Republican who outspent her 20-to-1. Maybe she can do the same thing against Frank Pallone, which would be another symbolic victory since Pallone loudly boasts of his role in shaping ObamaCare. NRO has a good profile which points out the long odds. Little is running with Tea Party backing in a district where "51 percent have an unfavorable view of the Tea Party." And yet, independents and blue-collar Democrats could break heavily for the Republican in this year.

The 22-year Democratic incumbent is still favored to keep his seat, but Republicans have all the enthusiasm and momentum heading into the last full week before Election Day. In a survey of likely voters conducted for the Little campaign earlier this month, GOP pollster Adam Geller found Pallone up by just one point, 44 percent to 43 percent, with Little holding a 15-point edge (49 percent to 34 percent) among independents. Geller realizes that Pallone backers will dismiss his internal poll as biased and meaningless, but he insists that, in the current political environment, Little "has a legitimate chance" to win.

Every Saturday, her supporters have been launching coordinated "ground assaults" that involve old-fashioned door-to-door campaigning. Their goal is to knock on more than 100,000 doors by November 2.

Anna Little is a firecracker of a personality, and an ideological firebrand.

Many candidates move to the center after winning a primary. Not Little. Even though she is competing in a heavily Democratic district, the small-town mayor has campaigned as a robust, unapologetic Tea Party conservative, while picking up endorsements from Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney. In the near term, she wants to defund Obamacare (a "monstrosity") and implement "across the board" tax cuts. Ultimately, she would prefer to see the health-care law repealed entirely and the FairTax adopted. The short-statured redhead also advocates shuttering the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency.

It sure would be interesting to have her in Congress. On the other hand, she is a good bit more religious than I would like. And for this same reason, I'm not too upset that Christine O'Donnell looks unlikely to win in Delaware. I was glad to see her win the primary, because I thought it was good for the Tea Parties to serve notice to the Republican establishment. But when I hear O'Donnell talk about how she wants to be "God's voice" in Congress, I won't be too distraught if she loses. We already have enough senators who think they're God.

Speaking of unexpectedly competitive races, a Republican challenger is doing well in yet another "Kennedy seat"—the Rhode Island district of retiring Congressman Patrick Kennedy. Republican John Loughlin is gaining on Providence Mayor David Cicilline, in part because of another big theme of this election: corruption and mismanagement of state and local governments, particularly when it comes to the lavish pensions promised to government employees.

In a recent debate, Cicilline said the city's pensions have been fully funded during his term in office and that the city is in great fiscal shape. Days later, the city auditor released a memo stating flatly that this was a lie. Cicilline's administration had been stonewalling the auditor, hoping to slow-walk him through the election, so the auditor filed public information requests under state law this summer until he finally got to look at the city's books. His memo to the City Council states that last year's pension payments weren't made, and this year's cannot be made because the city's cash reserves have been spent down to $4.6 million, a mere fraction of what is owed.

This is very left-leaning district, so the Washington Examiner concludes: "Big picture: If this one is really competitive, then Katy bar the door."

Runaway spending and looting by the public employees' unions is turning out to be the big issue in state-level races, where New Jersey governor Chris Christie is setting the tone. Christie has cut New Jersey's budget and challenged the unions over lavish and unaffordable pension plans for government employees. Now he is recruiting Michelle Rhee, an education reformer who got kicked out of DC for ruffling too many leftist feathers, to take over New Jersey's failing public schools.

This record is inspiring a lot of imitators, including in "blue states" like California, Illinois, and New York, where such reforms are most desperately needed.

Out on the trail, a crop of GOP gubernatorial candidates see in Mr. Christie a winning theme: root-and-branch government reform.

Democrats were appalled when he impounded $2.2 billion in spending; taxpayers cheered. The liberal class gasped when he vetoed a "millionaire's tax"; business owners hurrahed. He's demanding government unions help close $46 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. He's tough-talking but common-sense, and his approval rating keeps going up.

The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger tells us to keep an eye on the down-ballot race of New York State's comptroller, where solvency and pension reforms are the main issues.

There is one other important aspect we need to look at as the election closes into to its final stages: money. With the Republican National Committee fading as a conduit for funding—which is a good thing, because it diminishes the power of the statist GOP establishment—money is pouring into independent conservative groups, which are gearing up to outspend Democratic groups.

That's why President Obama has been cooking up conspiracy theories about anonymous donors to the Chamber of Commerce—a line of attack that has been taken up by the reliable Democratic hacks at the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, we're getting a few reminders of the old method that the Democrats like to use to sway close elections: vote fraud. There is the story of investigators demanding DNA samples from city council members in Troy, New York, to determine who licked the envelopes for forged absentee ballots. And then there is the bigger story of Democrats failing to comply with rules for the distribution of absentee ballots to military servicemen.

Despite months of warnings, Justice [Department] attorneys sat on their hands as 16 states and territories were caught in noncompliance with the [Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment] Act.... In President Obama's home state of Illinois, at least 35 counties were noncompliant. Finally yesterday, 32 days after the original deadline for mailing ballots and 13 days after the first reports of massive failure, Justice entered a consent decree. It "calls for a one day extension on the deadline for...soldiers overseas to postmark their ballots," according to Fox News. "But this decree seems to ignore the fact that some ballots were printed and mailed over two weeks late."

The same Illinois election officials are rushing ballots—unrequested by inmates—to the Cook County jail. This consummates the Justice Department's vow—previously highlighted on its website—to help felons in each state reacquire voting privileges....

Under the leadership of Mr. Obama and Mr. Holder, felons vote while soldiers don't,

In Houston, Tea Party members uncovered significant evidence of votes being cast by ineligible voters, inspiring the founding of the Tea Party Paranormal Society. That's "paranormal," as in: they see dead people—voting. The organization encourages Tea Partiers to purge the local voter rolls of the deceased and otherwise ineligible.

A friend of mine just joined the Tea Party Paranormal Society and will serve as a Republican election judge in Chicago—where he will have plenty of opportunity to see dead people.

There is a lot happening on the campaign trail, but here is what I think is the overall big picture. Thanks to the Tea Parties, political principles have been introduced back into American politics in a big way—and especially America's founding principles of individual rights and limited government. A number of radical, Tea-Party-backed candidates are taking up these principles and using them in their campaigns—and this has left unprincipled establishment Republicans (like Murkowski and Crist) and complacent leftists (like President Obama, Barney Frank, and pretty much the whole Democratic rank-and-file) floundering, desperate, and lost. They are in a new environment they have never had to face before, and they don't know what to do.

This is the big ideological factor that I hope is not fully accounted for in the polls we're seeing so far. Those polls already show Republicans re-gaining the House, though probably not the Senate. But I am hoping that the result will be even stronger and amount to a historic repudiation of statism. Let's do everything we can in the closing week of the campaign to make sure that this is the unmistakable message of the election.—RWT

TIADaily.com


Subscribe now!

Posted by at

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)