As the election results were coming in last night for the New Jersey gubernatorial race, I was as surprised as Fausta Wertz that the following scenario didn’t occur:
Most of us who have lived in New Jersey for decades, however, expected the unions to turn out en masse to outmuscle and outnumber other voters in favor of Corzine. After all, the state is the largest employer in New Jersey, and that’s what unions do, sometimes not very subtly. Union leaders have been known to brag about it:
“We call it knock and drag,” said Jim Williams, general president and director of organizing of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, with about 3,500 members in New Jersey. “We knock on the door and drag ‘em out to vote.”
Corzine also greatly outspent (from his own pockets) his challengers; he outspent Christie 3:1 and Daggett by nearly 12:1.
The state Democrats had the full support of the Obama campaign staff, but it didn’t stop there. President Obama visited the state four times and was in New Jersey campaigning at five events last Sunday, telling voters to get their cousins out to vote for Corzine:
“You’re going to need to get Cousin Pookie off the couch and say ‘Pookie, it’s time to go vote,’” Mr. Obama said. “You’ve all got a Cousin Pookie. You know whom I’m talking about.”
I suppose — but it still seems rather unpresidential to use as silly a word as “Pookie.” Imagine the drubbing the President Bush would have gotten from such an anecdote.
“A story from my old stomping grounds of Chicago. Years ago, during the original Mayor Daley’s tenure, I heard of a precinct captain who, after the polls closed, realized that no one had voted for the Republican candidate for mayor. He came to the conclusion that no one would believe it. So, to avoid charges of voter fraud, he went in and pulled the lever for the Republican a dozen or so times.”
As Jay adds, “Don’t know if it’s true, but it sort of rings true.”
As long as social issues dominate the Republican Party, they will continue losing their north–I had a lot of relatives who at least considered voting for Obama. Ironically, I wonder if the tea parties won’t help bring the two wings of the Republican party together: guns and lower government spending are the two things all members can agree on. But if the south wants to keep its northern Republicans–and the congressional seats that come with them–it’s going to have to back off trying to make the northern party look like a miniature version of itself.
From the 1996 election up through and including 2008., affluent counties in the East, Midwest and West have trended Democratic, largely through distaste for the religious and cultural conservatives whom voters there have seen (not without reason) as dominant in the Republican party. Now, with the specter of higher tax rates and a vastly expanded public sector, they may be—possibly—headed in the other direction. An interesting trend to watch.
Christie certainly called himself a conservative in a historically very blue state, and won dramatically in the process.
The race has been called for Bob McDonnell. The extent of the win is not yet certain, but it will be a large margin. Very large. Republicans will hold all three statewide offices and will pick up seats in the House of Delegates. Republicans will immediately begin targeting three to four vulnerable House Democrats.
The spin game has begun. Democrats say it doesn’t reflect on anyone other than the hapless Creigh Deeds. Republicans will point to McDonnell’s laser-like focus on a number of Obama policies and his ability to retake, by a huge margin, a state which Obama took a year ago. All the chatter about Virginia being “Blue” will cease. This is the backyard of the White House, as Karl Rove, says on Fox. The White House will have many nervous Democrats to console.
New Jersey’s polls have closed. Now we will see if the Democrats can squeeze by in one of the Bluest states in the country.
So much for permanent majorities.
ABC News: “‘09 Exit Polls: Vast Economic Discontent Spells Trouble for Dems in 2010.”
Nothing but worthless Twitter chatter from NY-23, but watching the Obama partisans on MSNBC bemoan the GOP’s supposed surrender to the extreme “teabaggers,” those who ran a “moderate” Republican like Dede Scozzafava out of the race in a quest for ideological purity, the Stalinists of Frank Rich’s fever dreams, are in the very next breath denouncing Joe Lieberman as a Judas figure, a betrayer of progressivism for obstructing a really horrid health care bill. Lieberman is, of course, now an Independent and those who obsess over his supposed betrayal of liberal causes have every right to boo and hiss from the balcony. But the Scozzafava excommunication is, in most important ways, no different. Like Lieberman, she tows the party line on certain issues (gun control, for instance) but offends members of her party that believe, for instance, that support for bailouts and card check are anathema to conservative principles.
But because of Lieberman’s willingness to support Republican candidates in the next election cycle, talk show hosts like Rachel Maddow, who is leading the charge against the supposed purging of moderate Republicans by knuckle-dragging teapartiers, hyperventilated that the Senator from Connecticut supported—get this—the moderate Maine Republican Susan Collins! Bipartisanship (or is it post-partisanship?) is when the other guys come to our side, not the other way around.
And speaking of which, Allahpundit of Hot Airspots “Arianna Huffington lecturing [Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) on the dangers of … rigid ideological purity."
WASHINGTON (AP) – Republicans wrested political control of Virginia from the Democrats on Tuesday as independent voters swung behind the GOP, a troubling sign for President Barack Obama and his party heading into an important midterm election year. New Jersey decided whether to stick with unpopular Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine.
Republican Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell’s victory in Virginia over Democrat R. Creigh Deeds was a triumph for a GOP looking to rebuild after being booted from power in national elections in 2006 and 2008. It also was a setback for the White House in a swing state that was a crucial part of Obama’s electoral landslide just a year ago. The president had personally campaigned for Deeds.
Independents—the crown jewel of elections because they often determine outcomes—were a critical part of the diverse coalition that carried the president to victory in Virginia and across the country. But, in the midst of a recession, still early in Obama’s term, they fled from Democrats in a state where the economy trumped all.
Early returns showed that by a 2-1 margin McDonnell was winning rapidly growing, far-flung Washington, D.C., suburbs—places like Loudoun and Prince William counties—that Republicans historically have won but that Obama prevailed in last fall by winning over swing voters.
More from the other states as they come in.
Update (5:35 PM Pacific): From the main Pajamas Portal: Decision ‘09: 2% Reporting in NJ: Christie 49%, Corzine 43%; GOP Sweep in VA."
The thing the Republican party needs to remember here, and especially in the NY-23 race, is that they can claim no credit for these victories. In fact, in the NY-23 race, Doug Hoffman will have won in spite of the GOP. It should be sending a pretty clear message to the Republicans like Meghan McCain who like to say that Americans want a “moderate”, Democrat-lite version of the GOP. Democrats haven’t won in NY-23 in over 110 years, and yet here they are, contenders to take the seat because the GOP decided to go for a Republican that would surely get the Meghan McCain stamp of approval. What does that tell you? Abandoning conservative principles to get liberals in the media to like you does not win you voters, and it’s a testament to Doug Hoffman, not the GOP, that he could walk away tonight victorious.
I’ll keep updating over the next 24 hours as the results come in. Stay tuned!
UPDATE:The AP confirms McDonnell’s win; says the NJ race is still too close to call. Notes that independents are heavily favoring Christie.
UPDATE: The AP is now reporting that Christie has gained an early lead, with Christie at 52%, Corzine at 41%, and Daggett at 6%.
Update: (6:30): ABC's Jake Tapper tweets, "NBC's 'The Biggest Loser' is at the White House tonight. This is not a joke."
Meanwhile, the Politico reports "Gibbs: Obama 'not watching returns.'" Why yes, that is reminiscent of this moment; when a president who's obsessed with domestic issues was surprisingly removed from them.
Mayor Mike Bloomberg (I) won re-election today, a little over a year after he signed a controversial bill that changed the city's term limits law and allowed him to seek a third term.
With just 6% of the precincts reporting, Bloomberg leads Comp. Bill Thompson (D), 53-44%. WNBC-TV is reporting that their parent network has called the race for Bloomberg.
Bloomberg shattered his own record for personal campaign spending for U.S. political office. Through 10/15, he had contributed more than $85M to his own campaign, and he was well on his way to breaking the $100M mark.
Thompson, meanwhile, had spent just $6.6M as of the latest filing deadline, pocketing a little over $3M in public matching funds.
FDR could not be reached for comment.
Update (7:09 PM PST): No link yet, but apparently AP has called NJ for Christie. But in NY-23, Ace of Spades tweets "eeesh... 20% of precincts in, Owens 51%, Hoffman 43%."
Update (7:13): "TRENTON, N.J. (AP) – Republican Chris Christie has defeated Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine in New Jersey."
Update (7:22):Greg Pollowitz on Twitter: "Does this mean Bruce Springsteen must leave NJ now?"
Update (7:27): Frank J. on Twitter: "Christie reminds me of the large guy from the Sopranos who was the nicer mobster. Nicer mobster is pretty good for NJ."
Wow: This is looking to be a very long night for the billionaire-incumbent-front-runner in New York.
With more than a third of the votes in, it's a 1-point race. NBC called it for Bloomberg — but just reversed that call. The New York Times continues to indicate that Bloomberg has won.
I still think Bloomberg will pull it out, but then, I didn't give Christie that big a chance, either.
Wow. That's just amazing. I don't see how the White House can spin it away. Remember their explanation for Deeds' loss was that Deeds didn't embrace Obama enough. Corzine hugged Obama and made the election about Obama in a state Obama carried by 15 points and where Dems outnumber Republicans by a wide margin. And he lost.
"Generalissimo" Duane Patterson adds, "could there be two more welcome words on this tuesday night than 'Corzine concedes?'"
Meanwhile, a Corner reader jokes, "Obama goes to Europe and comes back with no Olympics. Goes to NJ and his candidate looses. Same in Va. Maybe he should stay at home since he comes back empty handed each time."
Andrew Breitbart dubs the election, "A referendum against community organizing."
All politics is local, they say, and Tuesday’s off-off-year elections certainly had their local angles. Jon Corzine has been a terrible governor even by the undemanding standards of terribly governed New Jersey. Creigh Deeds, though he looked good to Democratic Party recruiters not long ago, turned out to be an undistinguished campaigner, more driven by the concerns of Washington Post editorialists than of Virginia voters. And NY-23 Republican nomineee Dede Scozzafava was a bizarre choice, bizarre enough to inspire a seemingly quixotic third-party run by Doug Hoffman.
* * *
The truth is, Obama wasn’t ready to be president when he ran in 2008. When he started, he probably thought he had no real chance — he himself admitted upon entering the Senate that he wasn’t qualified to be president — and that his first run would simply be a PR effort that would lift him to the top ranks of Senate Democrats.
When, to everyone’s surprise, resentment of the Clinton machine crystallized around him, he wound up beating Hillary for the nomination, and found himself riding an out-of-control express train. He rode it to victory, with some help from erratic McCain actions.
But he was right the first time about not being ready for the Oval Office. As president, he seems confused and a bit distant on the issues, leaving the details to congressional Democrats and an ever-growing number of “czars” while he golfs and launches attacks at Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.
With the economy tanking (unemployment is much worse after Obama’s deficit-swelling stimulus than Obama’s advisers predicted it would be with no stimulus at all), with the promised post-partisanship dissolving into witch-hunts against hostile media and the promised post-racial America devolving into the awkwardly staged “beer summit,” with the “necessary war” in Afghanistan the subject of endless dithering and the promised “smart diplomacy” materializing as a series of awkward missteps by Hillary Clinton, the froth has become a lot less frothy.
Republicans, who were prepared to give Obama the benefit of the doubt a year ago, now can’t stand him. Independents who voted for him are deserting in droves. And Democrats don’t seem that happy either.
Update (9:37): The cast of Day By Day channels their inner Braveheart:
Update (9:43 PM): Good news and bad news out of New York State for Republicans. First up, Roger Simon on the bad news — “The Strange Case of NY23:”
November 3, 2009 was a great day for the Republican Party with resounding wins in Virginia and, improbably, New Jersey where Bruce Springsteen blared as Chris Christie began his victory speech. (I wonder if Bruce will sue.) But in the midst of the welter of re-upped GOP glory only one year after ignominious defeat, there was one outlier – New York’s Twenty-Third Congressional District.
Now I realize that the surprise loser there, Doug Hoffman, ran as a Conservative, not a Republican. But I submit in this case that was a distinction without a significant difference because virtually all the Republican establishment had lined up behind Hoffman by the day of the election.
So why – in what was clearly a Republican year – did Hoffman lose? Well, there are several reasons and, yes, the Democratic victory was narrow, thinner than the five or so percent that went to withdrawn Republican nominee Scozzafava who herself endorsed the Democratic candidate. Still, the 23rd is a safely Republican, even conservative, district. In a year where the GOP racked up a 20% margin in Virginia and coasted easily in Jersey, a state in which Obama romped in ‘08 by 16%, what was the problem?
Well… I might as well say it… social conservatism. America is a fiscally conservative country – now perhaps more than ever, and with much justification – but not a socially conservative one. No, I don’t mean to say it’s socially liberal. It’s not. It’s socially laissez-faire (just as its mostly fiscally laissez-faire). Whether we’re pro-choice, pro-life or whatever we are, most of us want the government out of our bedrooms, just as we want it out of our wallets.
Hoffman’s capital-C Conservative campaign, however, tried to separate itself from the majority parties by making a big deal of the social issues. He was all upset that Scozzafava was pro-gay marriage, seemingly as upset as he was with her support for the stimulus plan. He projected the image of a bluenose in a world that increasingly doesn’t want to hear about these things. Hoffman’s is a selective vision of the nanny state – you can nanny about some things but not about others. I suspect America deeply dislikes nannying about anything.
There is, of course, a message in this for the Republican Party going forward. You can choose to emphasize the social issues or not. Today may show the former is a losing proposition.
The biggest defeat for RINOs in New York wasn’t the pre-election collapse of Dede Scozzafava in the 23rd CD. It was tonight’s stunning victory by conservative Republican Rob Astorino in the race for County Executive of Westchester County—the affluent and heavily taxed suburb just north of NYC, which has been solidly Democratic for more than a decade. Astorino’s victory is a stinging rebuke to the brand of New York Republicanism personified by Assemblywoman Scozzafava, former Gov. (and Westchester native son) George Pataki, and Westchester’s famously liberal former state Sen. Nicky Spano of Yonkers, who had endorsed incumbent Democratic County Executive Andy Spano (no relation) and engineered Andy Spano’s endorsement by the local Conservative party. Astorino, 42, a county legislator who used to co-host a satellite radio show with Cardinal Egan, happens to be pro-life — but going against the trend established by Pataki and other suburban Republicans in the 1990s, he didn’t waver from that position. He knew the pro-choice swing vote in Westchester would be motivated by primarily economic issues. He was right, and has a bright future in statewide politics if he does a good job. An even more stunning Republican showing came in the other big, affluent NYC suburb, Nassau County, where an underfunded Republican named Ed Mangano was — as of midnight — in a dead heat with the charismatic Democratic County Executive Tom Suozzi. Meanwhile, the GOP recaptured control of that county’s legislature. Nassau residents apparently were so fed up with the status quo that they may have returned control of county government to the same discredited GOP machine that nearly drove the county into bankruptcy just eight years ago. In a word, Wow.
And from the Westchester Journal News:
Voters rejected the Democratic incumbent’s bid for a fourth term, opting instead for a candidate who pledged to downsize government and cut the highest county taxes in the nation.
“It’s far surpassing anything we expected,” Astorino said after taking Spano’s concession call at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. “But I think the message resonated. People wanted change and they are going to get it starting in January.”
Astorino’s victory came despite Democrats’ 2-1 margin over Republicans among Westchester’s 538,822 registered voters.
With 87 percent of the votes in, Astorino had 58 percent, Spano 42 percent, according to the unofficial results.
I just spoke to a smart one. He argues that the Virginia governor’s race offers more lessons for Republicans than either the New Jersey race (because there was an incumbent on whom it was a referendum) or the New York congressional race (because its circumstances were too odd). One of the lessons he draws is that Republican candidates have to “finish the sentence.” Instead of just saying that we have to keep taxes and spending low, and thus pleasing conservatives, he said, McDonnell explain how these policies would create jobs and “plug the hole in Richmond.” Too many Republican candidates, he says, forget to do that.
He pours cold water on the idea that the elections were a referendum on Obama. “Obama’s numbers in Virginia are not that bad. He’s not upside-down, that’s for sure.” (That is, more people rate him favorably than unfavorably.) “I guarantee you that McDonnell got a lot of votes from people who approve of [the job Obama is doing].” He takes the vote to be a rejection of many of Obama’s policies. But he adds, “I don’t think that Republicans should come away from this and think that all that we have to do in 2010 is run against Obama. McDonnell had a very vigorous policy agenda.”
“Finishing the sentence” and reminding constituents that all politics are indeed local — and ultimately fiscal — sounds like excellent advice.
Update (10:30 PM): Or actually, a flashback to last week, when Neil Cavuto said, “If, and it is certainly a big if, Republican challenger Chris Christie goes on to win the New Jersey gubernatorial election next week, I think I will know what turned the tide…”:
And on that note, barring any big late night breaking news, I think this post has run its course, and regular blogging will resume on the regular blog. Thanks for stopping by our special election night round-up!
OK, this one was pretty easy to call, but still, the Indispensable One (as Hugh Hewitt has dubbed him) writes:
With the polls in Virginia closing in one minute, the Campaign Spot Decision Desk gets a jump on the competition and declares the winners in the statewide races: Bob McDonnell wins the governor’s race, Bill Bolling wins the lieutenant governor’s race, and Ken Cuccinelli wins the attorney general’s race.
Early turnout indicates that Cuccinelli is the winner of the 2013 governor’s race as well.
This week marks the 45 anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s “A Time For Choosing” speech delivered on behalf of Barry Goldwater pyrrhic 1964 presidential campaign. Here’s an excerpt; Red State (naturally enough) has the full speech:
“Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.
And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man.
This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I’d like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There’s only an up or down—[up] man’s old—old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism…
“No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. So governments’ programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth…
“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.
We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
One of the reasons why President Obama may be hesitating to commit fully to a renewed Afghan front is that he is worried that political opportunists might seek to gain advantage by loud rhetoric that unfairly simplifies the bad and worse choices, that he, like all other presidents in time of war, are confronted with.
In other words, he fears someone very much like an on-the-rise Barack Obama himself—who in 2007 in loud fashion demanded that all combat brigades leave Iraq by March 2008 and then flat-out declared to the nation that “the surge is not working” (a mantra for months posted on his website until Trotskyized in summer 2008). Ditto all that with Guantanamo, elements of homeland security, and Iran—and one can see that Obama knows first-hand the opportunities for demagogic and unprincipled political ankle-biting that a decisive wartime President invites. After all, what President, after making a tough decision to surge into Afghanistan, wants a young charismatic rival barnstorming the nation, without evidence assuring the public that “the surge is not working!”
Mr. Obama may have similar fears on a domestic level. (Perhaps worse — he’s more in-tune to the fighting on the ground there). There’s an L.A. Times article titled, “Democratic Party encounters ‘Obama hangover’ in state, local elections.” At least based on the response of the tea parties, F. Scott Fitzgerald never had a hangover as bad as that! Orrin Judd responds that hopeandchange works in both directions: “The UR ran on a content free message of change. Now voters are changing the leadership of their states too. It’s not a reaction to Obama. It is Obamist.”
Host Stephen Green interviews Eric Olsen, the founder of Blogcritics.org, on how new FTC regulations will impact bloggers. Recorded at the annual Blog World Expo convention this past weekend in Las Vegas. (Watch for video on Monday at PJTV!)
Here’s more footage I shot at Western CPAC this past weekend — this time with a decent camera and tripod to boot! It’s highlights from Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota’s keynote speech on Friday, October 16th.
Pawlenty’s speech was about nearly an hour long; the above are just five minutes of highlights. Unfortunately, I was shooting reaction shots of the crowd when Pawlenty had one of his best moments. But Ed Morrissey (who resides in Pawlenty’s state) had his camera fortuitously aimed in the right direction at the right time. Scroll to about 1:25 into Capt. Ed’s video for a nifty riff that dovetails quite well with the title of my clip:
Jonah Goldberg flashes back to the bad old days of 1992 (which look remarkably good in comparison to today), when that year’s “Worst Economy In 50 Years” and the first President Bush’s appearance of aloofness gave birth to the Little General himself, H. Ross Perot and the populist wave he rode:
In part because Perot voters and sympathizers were disproportionately white and male, and because they expressed their dismay with Clinton by voting for the GOP, the Democrats and the media ginned up the “angry white male” theory of American politics. The same voters who were part of a “vital center” when attacking a Republican president were increasingly recast as dangerous minions of Rush Limbaugh and the forces of hate when they aligned with Republicans.
Fast-forward to today. The tea-party protesters are in large part the heirs of Perotism, and they are being subjected to the same insults. Liberal commentators are deaf to the tea partiers’ disdain for both political parties, preferring to cast the protesters as a deranged band of birthers and racists or hired guns of a Republican “AstroTurf” campaign.
Meanwhile, as National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru has argued, the Democrats have convinced themselves that the moral of Clinton’s failed health-care push is not that he was wrong to try, but that he was wrong not to cram it through against popular opposition.
President Obama promised a “new era of fiscal responsibility,” but he’s governing as if exploding the size of government is what Americans want, polls be damned. The Democrats’ budget games and giveaways amount to poking the angry Perotista beast with a stick.
If the GOP can convincingly align with and exploit the growing Perotista discontent, it very well might ride to victory on a tsunami the Democrats can’t even see.
Most of you are now up to speed on all the nonsense at what could have been a focused effort to promote conservative activism at Western CPAC. If you aren’t, I would encourage everyone to take a trip through the posts written by the people who helped make the weekend worthwhile for me. Ed Morrissey, Melissa Clouthier, Jim Hoft (Gateway Pundit), Ed Driscoll, John Schulenberg (Infidels Are Cool), as well as John Sexton and Morgen Richmond (Verum Serum) have excellent wrap-ups of the various outbursts of dementia and other highlights. Caleb Heimlich, Elizabeth Crum, Jon Fleischman and Rachel Alexander rounded out the under 90 crowd that spent most of the weekend dodging the expanding prostates that tend to dominate old-school conservative gatherings.
It is this group of people and others like them who make me stick around and fight the fight. Honestly, if I thought that conservatism had to remain in the hands of the guy I wrote about earlier and/or some of the zombie extras from an old George Romero movie I saw wandering around WCPAC, I’d have moved to Costa Rica this afternoon.
The single most energizing thing about the election of Barack Obama is that it’s made online conservative activists redouble our efforts to find new ways to get the job done. Blogging stalwarts have kept the pressure on while people like me have gone nuts on Twitter and Facebook. I won’t for a moment pretend that I did any of this by design, it’s all been a happy accident on my part but the gift horse’s mouth is wide open and I ain’t taking a peek.
The confusion on the right stems from the fact that conservative principles are enduring. This leads to a misbegotten belief among some that everything else about conservatism is supposed remain unchanging. In fact, everything but the principles should be in flux, especially in the modern political era.
So we now have friction between the “Well, we’ve always done it this way!” crowd and those of us who moved into the 21st Century as soon as it was available for occupancy. It would be nice to have everyone come along for the ride but some people just can’t seem to leave 1984.
As I said yesterday: fine, we don’t need them.
The exchange of information and ideas between the new media people this past weekend was invigorating and inspiring. We talked about local politics, national politics, entertainment (Andrew Breitbart had a great line about conservatives ponying up the money to make movies they like rather than whining all the time) and a variety of other subjects. We were always in a good mood, hopeful and solutions-oriented. That’s why we get so irritated with the birther/impeachment crowd that some would have everyone believe constitutes a significant part of the base.
Here’s the reality kids: the base is traditionally the part of a political movement that mobilizes and gives it the extra juice it needs to get through close elections with some success. The drooling checkbook hordes who keep hoping for some kind of magic birth certificate fairy to show up in lieu of cultivating articulate candidates who can speak about real conservative issues are stinking up the place and they need to go.
We are the Base. Resistance is futile.
Be sure to follow the links in the above passage for much more on the conference.
On the New Media panel we shared with the people Steven mentioned above (and the now infamous Captain Blastfax), Kruiser summed up Twitter in a single, perfect, sentence:
“It’s typing, people, OK?”
Hopefully the audience who attended that panel will leave Western CPAC with an understanding of how easy it is to get started with citizen journalism on some form, whether it’s blogging of Tweeting, and if they stick with it and get their chops together, where it can take them. It’s a far cry from as recently as 1996, as this passage from David Gelernter that I read during my appearance on the new media panel on Saturday highlights:
Today’s elite loathes the public. Nothing personal, just a fundamental difference in world view, but the hatred is unmistakable. Occasionally it escapes in scorching geysers. Michael Lewis reports in the New Republic on the ‘96 Dole presidential campaign: ‘The crowd flips the finger at the busloads of journalists and chant rude things at them as they enter each arena. The journalists, for their part, wear buttons that say ‘yeah, i’m the Media. Screw You.’ The crowd hates the reporters, the reporters hate the crowd– an even matchup, except that the reporters wield power and the crowed (in effect) wields none.
Within a couple of years of that event, the Drudge Report would launch, followed by the Blogosphere, Twitter, YouTube, and the like. Old media still hates the general public, but for very different reasons than the decades in which they took them for granted.
As far as some of the zanier stuff that went on at Western CPAC, I’m of two minds. As someone who identifies as fitting in somewhere on the center-righthand side of the aisle, it’s frustrating to observe. As a journalist/blogger/new media guy looking for stories, it’s wonderful to observe:
And it also serves a purpose, as well. In 2007, Jeff Jacoby explored “The Fights on the Right” in the Boston Globe:
On one important issue after another, the right churns with serious disputes over policy and principle, while the left marches mostly in lockstep. Liberals sometimes disagree over tactics and details, but anyone taking a heterodox position on a major issue can find himself out in the cold. Just ask Senator Joseph Lieberman.
In the liberal imagination, conservatives are blind dogmatists, spouters of a party line fed to them by (take your pick) big business, their church, or President Bush. Yet almost anywhere you look on the right these days, what stands out is the lack of ideological conformity.
In numerous articles and posts at National Review, Jonah Goldberg has stressed the importance of fighting out ideas on the right — and in that regard, the folks who attended Western CPAC may have gotten more than they bargained for.
It may have been messy — at times even a little ugly — but it was rarely boring. Nobody faxed it in this past weekend.
Update: John Fleischman, who chaired our New Media panel, has a lengthy “Review of the Event”, rounding up a variety of posts on Western CPAC, along with photos, at his Flash Report Website.
In her Examiner.com column, Kathy Shaidle writes, “The ‘Tea Party’ is just beginning”:
Many “tea partiers” and 9-12 protesters were angered by the way the mainstream media misreported their big protest In Washington, DC held on September 12.
In response to this and other examples of liberal media bias, Operation: Can You Hear Us Now? was born.
This coming October 17, activists will be rallying outside their local elite newspaper and tv news outlets to protest media bias against conservative ideas.
Step 1: Contact all your freedom-loving, American-loving, free-speech loving friends and get together to plan. Draw from your local Tea Party group or 9/12 group or other friends. Protest all things you did in D.C. – plus the complicit media!
Step 2: Identify local left-wing media outlets (most likely TV, since no one reads newspapers anymore).
Step 3: Plan a rally for October 17th, 2009. If you have enough folks, visit multiple sites concurrently, otherwise pick your least favorite, liberally biased outlet as ground zero. Time it for max participation for the working (i.e. tax-paying) class. Before the AM news or at the evening 6 o’clock hour might be good (local time).
Step 4: Use your 1st Amendment Right to Free Speech right outside their offices or broadcast locations.
At The Next Right, Patrick Ruffini sees a “Rising Rightroots and Declining Netroots Now at Parity (or Better)”:
Lost in the hubbub about the tea parties, the health care town hall protests, Joe Wilson, and the ACORN sting is the outcome of a long-simmering meta debate about the vibrancy of the grassroots right and its capacity to organize online. Along with a slew of other bad political indicators, the perception that the GOP might be stuck in a permanent Luddite rut reached its peak with the election of Obama and the role the Internet played in his victory.
Nearly a year later, not only have things turned around, but they’ve done so faster than anyone could have dreamed or imagined in those post-election doldrums.
First, hundreds of thousands of people showed up, flash mob-like, at Tea Parties not even three months after Obama Nation reached its apogee with the inauguration. The left was caught flat-footed and stammered that it must have been the creation of Fox News, although Fox News existed in the latter Bush years and during the McCain interlude and was unable to conjure up a similar display of enthusiasm in that period.
In August, the rightroots gained further velocity with the health care protests. This was significant in that it was the first head to head match with OFA and the unions, and it was no contest.
The third key moment came when Joe Wilson was able to raise as much (if not more) money than his Democratic opponent after the “You lie!” outburst. The left’s immediate rallying around Rob Miller was a textbook netroots play, aided by ready-made infrastructure (an ActBlue page ready to accept contributions without crashing and display real-time feedback). For a Republican — especially one deemed to be on the “wrong” side of a PR war — to have been competitive in money raised with a netroots Democrat is something that simply would not have happened in the Bush years. This is especially striking given that Markos, Stoller, Bowers et al. made money raised for candidates the sine qua non of the netroots, an outgrowth of the left’s 1970s era obsession with countering “big money” in politics.
Finally, the O’Keefe/Giles video bust of ACORN — the right’s biggest media coup since Rathergate — showed the right to be getting its sea legs in investigative journalism, a space virtually patented by the left in recent years.
What we seem to be witnessing is the Feiler Faster Thesis in action, with a robust grassroots opposition to Obama, aided by the Internet, taking shape far more quickly than anyone could have predicted, and comparatively speaking, in a far more timely fashion than it took the left to gets its act together against Bush.
Buckley said that the neocons’ greatest contribution to conservatism was “sociology.” The early National Review conservatism was more Aristotelian, Buckley observed, while the neos brought the language of social science to the debate. National Review might first ask whether a government initiative was warranted under the Constitution, or whether it violated some immutable moral law. The neocons were less abstract. “The legitimate question to ask about any program,” according to Kristol, “is, ‘Will it work?’”
Starting at the height of LBJ’s Great Society, Kristol unleashed a cadre of America’s finest social scientists — James Q. Wilson, Seymour Martin Lipset, Charles Murray, Thomas Sowell, Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, to name a few — to ask that question, and the answers usually confirmed that the Aristotelians were right all along. (No wonder the “law of unintended consequences” became the neocons’ motto.)
Kristol argued that there were two basic orientations on the Right: those who are anti-Left and those who are anti-state. An anti-statist would say the government shouldn’t be running the schools. The Kristolian would say public schools are fine; it’s what they teach that’s the problem. If anything, today’s conservatism is an imperfect fusion of these perspectives. Kristol himself became far more of a traditionalist, noting toward the end of his public life that the work of neoconservatism was largely done. The staffers at The Public Interest — not to mention his own son, Bill — were simply “conservatives” now.
It is often said that capitalism—that is, a market economy—is morally obnoxious because its “trickle-down economics” inevitably creates inequality of income and wealth. Now it is certainly true that “trickle-down economics” has that effect. It is also true, however, that if you want economic growth and greater affluence for all, there is simply no alternative to “trickle-down economics,” which is just another name for growth economics.
The world has yet to see a successful version of “trickle-up economics,” an egalitarian society in which the state ensures that the fruits of economic growth are universally and equally shared. The trouble with this idea—it is, of course, the socialist ideal—is that it does not produce those fruits in the first place. Economic growth is promoted by entrepreneurs and innovators, whose ambitions, when realized, create inequality. No one with any knowledge of human nature can expect such people not to want to be relatively rich, and if they are too long frustrated they will cease to be productive. Nor can the state substitute for them, because the state simply cannot engage in the “creative destruction” that is an essential aspect of innovation. The state cannot and should not be a risk-taking institution, since it is politically impossible for any state to cope with the inevitable bankruptcies associated with economic risk taking.
– “Income Inequality Without Class Conflict”, Dec. 18, 1997, by Irving Kristol.
As spotted by Tom Blumer, who also compares and contrasts AP’s obits for Kristol and Teddy Kennedy.
Meanwhile, in a new article here at Pajamas HQ, Charlie Martin confirms that the above photo was indeed taken on 9/12 (as opposed to the Promise Keepers photo which made the rounds on Saturday, a photo of a conservative event from the mid-’90s that similarly received anemic legacy press coverage). He then adds the new photo to the data used for his previous crowd estimates and concludes, “Yeah, It Was Big.”
Late last week, I interviewed James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute for my newest Silicon Graffiti video blog. (With a little help from the crew at PJTV, who made the transcontinental Internet HD video connection possible.) Piereson has an article in the latest edition of the New Criterion that’s a rebuttal to Sam Tanenhaus’ new book, The Death of Conservatism. As James wrote in his essay:
Sam Tanenhaus has now reprised the old arguments about conservatism and tried to bring them up to date in his newly published jeremiad, The Death of Conservatism. Tanenhaus, the editor of the New York Times Book Review and author of a justly acclaimed biography of Whittaker Chambers, argues that the conservative movement collapsed under the presidency of George W. Bush, and that Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 marked the beginning of a new liberal era in American politics. Tanenhaus is not altogether certain as to the causes of this collapse, at times suggesting that conservatives undid themselves because they were corrupt and unprincipled in their pursuit of power and at others suggesting that they lost the support of the American people because of their devotion to right-wing “orthodoxy.” The one thing about which he is certain is that he dislikes conservatives—intensely and unremittingly so, judging by the rhetoric deployed in this book. Tanenhaus says at various points that conservatives are out to destroy the country, that they are driven by revenge and resentment, that they dislike America, and that they behave more like extremists and revolutionaries (“Jacobins”) than as genuine conservatives. In this sense, he has resurrected the liberal literature about Sen. McCarthy and “the radical right,” and sought to apply it to contemporary conservatism as if nothing of importance had happened in the meantime. All of this is nonsense, of course, and given some of the author’s previous writings, particularly his biography of Chambers, one had reason to hope that he would have produced something more elevated than the partisan assault against conservatives that he has packaged in this book.
And during our interview, I asked James about this quote from the book, discovered by a staffer at the Weekly Standard and linked to by Brent Baker of Newsbusters:
Catching up with a great catch in last week’s Weekly Standard “Scrapbook” section, the September 7 issue highlighted an example of how it takes a worldview that sees liberals like Barack Obama as “consensus”-oriented/“explicitly nonideological” centrists — and Republicans as “ideologically committed” conservatives — to work at the New York Times. Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the newspaper’s Book Review and Week in Review sections, in his new book, The Death of Conservatism, proposes on page 23:
The primary dynamic of American politics, normally described as a continual friction between the two major parties, is equally in our time a competition between the liberal idea of consensus and the conservative idea of orthodoxy. We see it in the Democratic Party’s recent history of choosing centrist, explicitly nonideological presidential candidates (Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama), as contrasted with the Republicans’ preference for ideologically committed ones (Goldwater, Reagan, George W. Bush).
The unnamed Weekly Standard writer scoffed: “The sophistry here is breathtaking. Tanenhaus not only conflates his own political preferences with the American ‘center.’ In order to prove that only the Democratic party nominates ‘centrist, explicitly nonideological’ men for the presidency, Tanenhaus (1) puts Obama – Barack Obama! – in the ‘centrist’ camp, and (2) totally ignores Democrats Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and Al Gore, as well as Republicans Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, and John McCain.”
President Obama is centrist and “explicitly nonideological”? That would be news to those who participated in the 9/12 Tea Parties in DC and elsewhere. Speaking of which, as Rick Moran wrote, “What makes Saturday’s massive turnout around the country so significant is that it is the first truly conservative mass movement in American history.” This could have significant impact in 2010. But in the meantime, for a look at how a journalist with the New York Times can spectacularly misread an ideology, tune in to the video below:
And to catch up with previous editions of Silicon Graffiti you might have missed, click here and keep scrolling.
As of now, I’d say Dan Riehl has the definitive take on the number of attendees in DC yesterday, placing them into perspective with the number at President Obama’s inauguration in January:
Bottom line? It looks to me as if about as many people who showed up to welcome Obama into the WH a mere 8 or so months ago showed up yesterday in a mood to throw him out.
Or two million. Or 500,000. In any case, as Rick Moran writes, “Debate Over Tea Party Protest Numbers Masks the Real History Made”:
What makes Saturday’s massive turnout around the country so significant is that it is the first truly conservative mass movement in American history. The amorphousness of conservatism until the 1950s probably had something to do with that. Conservatism prior to then was rather clubby and its “leaders” had very little interest in developing a mass movement like labor, socialists, or communists were attempting to do. Even the candidacies of Goldwater and Reagan were more party-oriented than ideological in nature, although there is little doubt that conservative activists learned how to organize an effective movement by being involved in both those races.
I think it unfair for the media or the left to characterize this movement as “Republican.” The fact that GOP politicians are seeking to hijack the movement for their own purposes should tell you that they themselves feel the separation and are drooling over the prospect of tapping the enthusiasm, the anger, and the commitment of the protestors for electoral gain.
It is definitely an opposition movement, however. Certainly there is mass unhappiness with President Obama and his policies. And there is opposition to the Democrats in Congress. But does this really translate into electoral strength for Republicans? I am going to go out on a limb and say no. The anger here is a reaction (reactionary?) against a growing government, higher taxes, and the sense that the country that they grew up in is slipping away right before their eyes.
It seems a little unfair to call the protesters “reactionary”, when they’re responding to a president whose governing mindset is trapped somewhere between FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, both mid-20th century programs rendered anathama by today’s free-wheeling culture and the myriad of choices made possible by technology and (for the moment at least) free markets. On the other hand, I’m glad to see the Tea Parties gaining acceptance. Some on the right were more than a little skeptical of them at first.
