Category Archives: Politics

This would be a high point in political geekery

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Jennifer Rubin reports,

Here at CPAC a well placed source with knowledge of the Republican Senate Committee plans tells me that Larry Kudlow is “considering” a Senate run against embattled Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd. Dodd’s approval ratings have been plummeting in light of the Friend of Angelo scandal and the ongoing effort to stonewall local and national media. Kudlow would bring instant name recognition and plenty of funding, but more importantly a wealth of economic knowledge. A debate between the two over the management of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae would be a thing to behold. Kudlow has been approached and is considering the possibilities.

I hope he does it; that race would be a blast to follow.  Rubin says it would be “the most entertaining and most educational senate race in a long time,” and if anything I think that undersells it; running against Sen. Dodd would give Kudlow the chance to put on a veritable clinic on the economy and the roots of our current problems (one of those roots being Sen. Dodd himself), and given his personality, I think it would be absolutely fascinating to watch him do it.  It would also give the GOP a real chance to steal the seat, since Kudlow would be nearly the ideal person to take full advantage of Sen. Dodd’s vulnerability (and would seem to have no qualms about doing so, not being one to pull his punches).Given the way Kudlow’s interviews with Sarah Palin raised her national profile and gave her the ability to show her stuff, do you think we’d see the governor return the favor by campaigning for him in CT?  That could be a lot of fun, too.Update:  Looks like Kudlow’s serious about this—he had dinner with Sen. John Cornyn, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, to talk about it.

The problem for Barack Obama

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This from Mark McKinnon:

Obama can never live up to his stratospheric expectations. He set the bar himself. But now he is realizing how hard it is to clear. He’s extraordinarily gifted. As gifted, perhaps, as anyone who has ever held the office. But in today’s world, gifted only gets you in the zoo. Then you have to tame the animals.

Sarah Palin vs. David Brooks for the soul of the GOP

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OK, so that’s both oversimplified and overstated, but I think that captures the essence of the problem R. S. McCain’s talking about in his latest post.

Friday, I had lunch with Tim Mooney of Save Our Secret Ballot and, in the course of discussing everyone’s favorite CPAC ’09 topic—what’s wrong with the GOP?—discussed the problem of the polluted information stream.Among the ill effects of liberal bias in the media is that much political “news” amounts to thinly disguised DNC talking-points. The conservative must learn to think critically about news and politics, to filter out that which is misleading, or else he will internalize the funhouse-mirror distortions of reality that define the liberal weltanschauung.This, I said to Mr. Mooney, is one of the major problems of the Republican Party, that so many of its supporters have unwittingly accepted liberal beliefs as political truths. Therefore, when those who present themselves as conservatives parrot the liberal line, the damage they do is far worse than if the same statements were made by Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi. Why? Because this “conservative” echo tends to act as a hardening catalyst for the conventional wisdom.I have never forgiven David Brooks for “National Greatness.” Brooks’s argument, that “anti-government” conservatism is both wrong as policy and doomed as politics, had a demoralizing effect on the Republican Party. The elegance of Brooks’s writing—whatever your opinion of the man, the elegance of his prose style is beyond dispute—was the spoonful of sugar to make that poisonous medicine go down. That was 12 years ago, and if the GOP now appears disastrously ill, Brooks and his erstwhile publishers at the Weekly Standard are heavily implicated in this perhaps fatal disease.

This is, I believe, both a major reason why the David Brooks segment of the GOP is opposed to Gov. Palin and the major reason why the party needs Gov. Palin to play a major role, not just in Alaska but nationally.  She’s a Reagan conservative (and hands-down the most Reaganesque conservative we have, to boot) and an outsider to the “chattering class,” and both these things are essential characteristics for the next leader of the GOP, if the party is to have any hope of recovering from its political exile any time soon.  She won’t make the party elites happy—but then, neither did Reagan, at least until he was safely out of office and one of their own (George H. W. Bush) was safely in control.  (Of course, the elder Bush promptly lost the next election, the one he had to run on his own merits, but the GOP establishment didn’t get the point . . .)  What she can do, and I believe will do, is lead the party back to the point where it actually stands for something besides merely gaining and using political power—and that’s what matters most.Update:  Here’s a fine example of what I’m talking about, courtesy of the ever-diminishing David Frum, who looks increasingly like a RINO in sheep’s clothing.  Allahpundit linked to it as “the quote of the day,” which makes me think he was hoping to use it against Gov. Palin, but it looks like the commenters on his post have been too smart for that; one of them, DFCtomm, summed it up particularly nicely:

Frum is willing to say or do anything to win. I imagine there is no principle too big to be abandoned, and he justifies this by saying that once we’re in total power then we can steer the country to the right. It just doesn’t seem like a workable strategy to me.

Sarah Palin and Whittaker Chambers: politics by pedigree

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If the always-astute Thomas Sowell is right—and I believe he is—then that’s really what the irrational negative reaction to Sarah Palin in some quarters last fall came down to.  It explains the fact that many liberals thought her wonderful (even though they would never vote for her because they agree with her on almost nothing), while a number of prominent conservatives came down with the reaction even though they agree with her on almost everything.  It also, I think (though Dr. Sowell doesn’t go this direction), explains why many of those same conservatives came out for Barack Obama over against John McCain:  because if Gov. Palin is “not one of us,” as Eleanor Roosevelt said of “slouching, overweight and disheveled” Whittaker Chambers, while the “trim, erect and impeccably dressed” Ivy League New Dealer Alger Hiss was, it’s also true that Sen. McCain isn’t “one of them” either, while Barack Obama most certainly is, on almost all the same scores.  (Sen. McCain actually fares worse in that respect than Gov. Palin does; neither of them is overweight, but posture and fashion are only problems for him.)  Never mind that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy, or that Barack Obama had no discernible record of accomplishment in actual governance:  to the intelligentsia, each man qualified as “one of us,” and at a visceral level, that’s the qualification that they really believe matters.We are not as far removed from the class system of our British forebears as we like to think; we’ve just changed the terms, is all.HT:  Conservatives4Palin

Good pick for Obama

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Unlike his successor as King County Executive, Ron Sims (whom the Obama administration tapped as deputy secretary at HUD), former Washington governor Gary Locke, whom the president has apparently chosen as his (third) nominee for Commerce, was someone I always respected.  He’s not as clean as reports would have you believe, as the folks at Sound Politics point out, but his fundraising misfeasance appears to have been relatively minor as these things go; he was an effective governor, a good administrator and to all appearances a man of good character, and generally pro-business and pro-free trade, which is important in a Commerce Secretary.  Since he’s also a loyal Democrat and an ethnic minority, here’s hoping his appointment quashes the administration’s unconstitutional attempt to take over the U. S. Census.Update:  from the AP article, it sounds like the administration will indeed leave the Census in the Commerce Department:

If confirmed by the Senate, Locke would assume control of a large agency with a broad portfolio that includes overseeing many aspects of international trade, oceans policy and the 2010 census. . . .”Who oversees the census won’t change,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said, adding that the director of it always reports to the commerce secretary. “I think members of Congress and the White House both have an interest in a fair and accurate census count.”

My hope, given that, is that Secretary Locke won’t bow to pressure to politicize the census, but will allow it to operate in as apolitical a fashion as possible.

The hypocrisy of professional liberals keeps growing

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By that I mean the left wing of our political class and their hangers-on in the media (a group which constitutes most of the MSM, which is why the Left is now preparing to try to destroy all other forms of media).  As the Anchoress sums it up,

Seems increasingly like all the “Fascist Bush” caterwauling was the usual fake, dishonest theater meant as a means to an end—the end being to destroy the hated “election stealer” and his legacy, and not much more.But you know, for someone who “did everything wrong,” his policies suddenly seem wise and right to some surprising people. . . .So, the FISA stays, Gitmo (despite all the righteous-sounding rhetoric) is not so bad, after all. Terrorist-suspected detainees do not enjoy constitutional rights, after all. Patriot Act, stays. Whether succeeding presidents will abuse the powers Bush put in place to protect us is rather less a question than a surety. Not an “if” but a “when.” And that is troubling, oh yes.

Read the whole thing; as usual, she has a lot of links to some very interesting things.  The interesting thing to me about all this is that the hypocrisy she decries is, as I said in the title, that of professional liberals—by which I do not mean liberals who are professionals, but rather people who earn their money by being liberal and representing liberal positions in some way.  What we’re seeing here on the part of those folks is the betrayal of a lot of liberal positions and a lot of liberal beliefs—not all, by any means, but a fair number of them—and all the strongly-worded unequivocal promises Barack Obama offered to go with them.Now, from my point of view, there are real benefits to that.  One, as a foreign-policy realist, I believe that our country will be the safer for it; the chances of a nightmare scenario are much lower than they would be had President Obama actually kept the promises made by Candidate Obama.  Two, this will help (and indeed, seems to be already helping) rehabilitate President Bush, because it is in effect an admission by many of his loudest critics that they were wrong; not just for history but even in this era, folks are unlikely to be able to argue with any credibility that President Bush was bad for doing things that President Obama was good for doing.The interesting question to me in all this is, will the vast majority of American liberals sell out on this the way that the vast majority of American conservatives sold out on other issues during the last eight years?  Doug Hagler has argued repeatedly in comments on this blog that there effectively is no conservative party in our economic policy; he’s been absolutely right about that because the conservative core of the GOP essentially sold out those issues (and others) in order to support the president on the GWOT and judicial nominees.  The result, ultimately, was electoral catastrophe for the party.  Some folks are now arguing that conservative Republicans should have gone into opposition years ago in order to preserve their own integrity and avoid being lumped in with the GOP Establishment types who were setting so much of the government’s policy (and doing so quite poorly).It is, of course, too early to argue that liberals in this country should do the same with respect to the Obama administration; I’m not even sure there’s a good case that conservatives should have done so, though I agree that at the very least, there should have been some strong conservative challenges to some of the Bush administration’s policies.  It’s too early to predict whether blind adherence by the Left to the Obama administration will end as badly as the Right’s blind adherence to the Bush administration did.  But it isn’t too early to predict that if the liberal movement makes the same mistake in the coming years as the conservative movement did in the years just past, they will likely come to the end of this administration feeling the same way the conservative movement has been feeling:  like they’ve lost their soul.Remember, put not your trust in princes.  No matter how often you kiss them, they’re all still frogs at heart.

Usual order: read bill, then vote on it

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The Democratic Party thought it could get away with reversing that order when it came to the so-called “stimulus” bill (all 1000+ pages of it)—but there really is a reason for the usual order, as Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) found out:

Sen. Schumer has pledged to undo a provision included in the stimulus package that will make it nearly impossible for New York’s banks to hire foreign workers through the H-1B visa program.The amendment to the stimulus bill, proposed by Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Chuck Grassley, D-Iowa, originally would have banned the visas for any company that received money from the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP. A compromise lifted the ban, but companies will still be required to hire from the growing pool of laid-off American workers first. Advocates say that the mandate is so onerous that it will virtually stop banks from bringing foreign workers into the country.According to a report released last year by the Partnership for New York City, roughly 13,000 workers in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are here on H-1B visas. The top visa sponsors in the area are the very same banks that have received TARP money. Those banks also have significant overseas operations, says Kathy Wylde, and this provision will hurt most when the economy turns around and the banks look to hire talent to tap new markets.“When they require someone with a language or other skill who they feel is the best person for the job, if they can’t bring them to New York, they will move the function,” says Wylde. “That’s what’s happened in the past when we’ve had a shortage of the H-1B visas.”Since the bill was signed with the provision included, Schumer will need to undo it in another bill, which could be tough sledding.“This is a counterproductive amendment that could hurt New York’s economy, and we are going to work hard to change it,” Schumer says.

As Moe Lane notes, the problem here for Sen. Schumer is

the banks in his state that would be affected by this are international . . . so if they can’t bring the workers into the country, they can take the work out of the country. Which is important because they’ll also end up sending other people’s work out of the country. Work done by people who are registered to vote in the State of New York, which is why Schumer’s now going full guns to get this rule reversed in future legislation.You know what would have stopped your little problem cold, Chuck? Reading the . . . bill in the first place. Which is your job, and the only one that an indulgent nation has ever required you to have. So lose the swarmy attitude next time and, you know, actually do some work for a change.

Act in haste, repent at leisure . . .

Is “anti-bipartisanship” a word?

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If not, someone needs to coin it; there’s no other way I can think of to label the behavior the Democratic leadership of Congress is engaging in these days:

Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Harry Reid (D-NV) met at length last night to put together the House/Senate conference report on the “stimulus” package. Only Democratic conference committee members were informed of the meeting and permitted to attend.The purpose behind the meeting was apparently to produce a conference report on the over $800 billion borrow-and-spend bill that was entirely free of Republican input, and that could be presented no later than this afternoon in preparation for House and Senate floor action tomorrow.

(Bold in the original, italics mine.)  Not only is there no deliberate effort to involve the GOP in crafting the final version of this spendathon, there’s a deliberate effort to prevent the GOP from having anything at all to do with the bill as it’s finally passed.Oh, and as for that “compromise” the Senate produced to get the RINO votes they needed for cloture?  The Democrats apparently intend to renege on the deal.  Nice.