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It appears our fearless leader has pulled the plug on that extremely ill-conceived O.J. book.
Says Rupert:
“I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project. We are sorry for any pain this has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.”
Riiiiight … Good call.
A new Pew poll shows Rudy and McCain neck-and-neck. I’m not going to stick cotton in my ears every time there’s good news for McCain. But I’ll just note that this poll is a pretty big aberration from most other polls of Republican voters. And it was taken November 9-12 — right when McCain announced but before news of Rudy’s toes-in-the-water committee hit.
While we’re on the topic of Rudy, however, I can’t believe I missed this a while ago … RudyBlogger highlights a poll from Cook / RT Strategies that shows Giuliani’s numbers remain strong even when respondents are prompted regarding his views on social issues. I continue to think the social-issues question won’t kill Giuliani in the primaries. His personal life and characters like Kerik … well, we’ll see.
This morning brought the sad news of Milton Friedman’s passing. Perhaps there’s not much to be said, especially between lovers of liberty — all of us have long appreciated the world-changing contributions Friedman made to the technical aspects of economics as well to the popularization of free-market ideas. He will be missed.
That said, here are a few places you can go to read up:
* The New York Times, of all places, has a wonderful column about the reaction at the University of Chicago.
* The Wall Street Journal weighs in here.
* The Cato Institute has put up this page.
* Instapundit has a good link roundup, as always.
And, lastly, I think people will enjoy this. Here’s Ahnold, back in 1990, introducing “Free to Choose”:
I love how he says, “Chase your own rainbow.” Friedman, suffice it to say, was no economic girly man.
How far along is the GOP in the stages of grief? That’s the question in my latest column at RealClearPolitics:
If they’re in denial about what happened last Tuesday, Republicans will stick with both of the men at the top of the team that just led them to a crushing defeat: Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri, the Republican whip. If they’ve made it to bargaining, they might keep one and ditch the other. But if they’ve worked all the way through their grief to anger, or even to acceptance, they’ll realize what they need to do to take their first steps out of hell.
They need to cleanse themselves of the sulfuric stench of the DeLay years, the K Street lobbying culture and the failure of President Bush’s big-government conservatism. And, to do so, they need to toss out both Boehner and Blunt in favor of the two men now running as Reaganite reformers: Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) for minority leader and Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) for whip.
If the GOP had held or lost the House by a narrow margin, there might be an argument for keeping the current team. They’re experienced. They know how to move legislation. They’re the Establishment.But as the president said, the GOP took a thumpin’. Experience matters less now. The party doesn’t get to move legislation. And the Republican Establishment is what the American people just tossed out on its ear.
It’s time for Republicans to let go of their majority mindset and start thinking like a minority.
The return of Trent Lott to the Senate Republican leadership tells me they’re not too far along in this process. But, actually, I’ll let my N.Y. Post colleague Robert George have the last word on that:
“There’s something painfully ironic about Trent Lott being named ‘minority whip.’“
The South has risen again.
I’m going on the road with my Destroy the GOP Road Show for the next two days (OK, just down to D.C. and back). So, I’ll be doing a limited amount of blogging.
Just wanted to weigh in quickly then on another troubling move by Bush/Rove: Mel Martinez for RNC.
That would be Mel “How Can We Make Political Hay of This Vegetative Woman” Martinez.
Bad choice. Terrible choice.
How do you say “Miers” in Spanish?
Rise up, my libertarian brethren, and help stop this. Call anyone whose number you know.
This isn’t the “Bush Party” anymore. Serious appointments can’t be made on the basis of who’s loyal to the president. Or, more likely, whose name the president has heard before.
Forget Martinez. Remember Michael Steele. And, while we’re at it, forget Boehner and Blunt and remember Mike Pence and John Shadegg.
A lot of choices are being made in a short period of time. Unfortunately, they all matter.
Hot Air has posted a clip of my appearance on “Heartland with John Kasich.” There seem to be some … mixed emotions regarding what I have to say.
Now, the assumption behind much of the discussion seems to be that I am “attacking” Evangelicals. This is a common misperception about my book, so I suppose I accept a good portion of the blame that the message has gotten garbled. But as I try to explain in my exchange with Kasich (note, it’s Kasich saying I have a problem with Evangelicals and trying to goad me into attacking them … I say no such thing), it’s not that I want to kick Evangelicals out of the party — nor is it anything even approaching that.
What I argue in the book — again, for those of you who’ve heard this too many times — is that conservatism used to be based on an idea called fusionism. Libertarians and social conservative agreed, for the most part, that small government was the goal. This wasn’t social conservatives “sitting down and shutting up.” This was a recognition on the part of social conservatives that an expanding federal government was the biggest threat to the Republic’s morals. In recent years, some, but by no means all, on the Religious Right have lost their appreciation of just how dangerous government is. So long as Republicans are in charge, they’ve assumed, they can ride the beast, so to speak.
I’m not the one causing a split between libertarians and Evangelicals (would that I had such sway). I’m not the one who campaigned on the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004 and then abandoned it in 2005. I’m not the one who campaigned on an expansion of the charitable-giving tax credit in 2000 and then threw it overboard to make room for a repeal of the estate tax. And I’m not the one doing all this while throwing away the GOP’s reputation for fiscal responsibility for a generation.
The GOP’s cynical and dysfunctional relationship with Christian conservatives well predates me — and it may outlive us all. As for big-government conservatism — well, that’s the real beast I set out to attack in the first place.
So, in closing, I haven’t spent four years — or one second — of my life “trying to purge the GOP of all Christians and everyone else who doesn’t agree with [my] pretty narrow libertarianism.” I’m a big-tent guy. I just happen to think the GOP should represent more than the South (I direct everyone to the continuing erosion of the GOP in the West this election cycle if you still doubt we have a problem out there).
I’m sorry some people see any criticism of where the GOP is going as an attempt to sabotage or divide the party. But the GOP just suffered a pretty big setback, and more may be on the way if we don’t change direction. Maybe it’s worth — I don’t know — thinking about why we are where we are.
Rudy Giuliani is forming an exploratory committee.
Immediately sending libertarians into fits.
And giving pause to some chronic Rudy doubters.
Great news for anyone who cares about the future of the GOP.
I finally figured out how to post pictures on this new blog set up. (Word Press is fantastic, but not necessarily intuitive — at least to me.)
So, anyway, to celebrate the return of pictures, I’ve added a picture of Stan Jones (Libertarian Blue Man) below.
And, here, for no particular reason, is a picture of Tina Fey that I tried to post a long time ago to accompany a post about “30 Rock”:
It’s a really good show. Funny, as opposed to, say, “Studio 60.”
Outside of changing course in Iraq, I think it’s fairly obvious that there really isn’t one — especially when it comes to domestic policy.
And here’s a pretty good reason to be skeptical about any claims made on the basis of the Democrats’ popular-vote margin in the Senate: Almost all of it came from safe seats in California, New York and Massachusetts.
UPDATE: Over at Reason, David Weigel makes the head-slappingly obvious point that if you do the same math to discount the Republican margins in safe Republican seats, you get totally different results. I haven’t done the math myself, but David comes up with 4.5 million more Democratic votes in competitive races — a lot more votes than Bush won by in 2004.
I hold to my original contention, however, that there’s precious little here in the way of a Democratic mandate. The Democrats won by not having a program, not by presenting a more attractive program. That matters as to how they might best govern over the next two years.
I forgot to post this earlier, but I’m scheduled to be on “The Heartland with John Kasich” at 8 p.m. tonight.
I’ve got a real fan down in Alabama:
Yes, Ryan Sager, I mean you. When I need lectures about the “true meaning” of conservatism and the history (or the future) of the Republican Party, I’ll damn sure not be listening to a 27-year-old smart-ass who thinks he’s God’s gift to punditry.
Young Mr. Sager has made himself into a latter-day Larry Sabato, a quote-whore consulted whenever someone wishes to oversimply politics: San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Christian Science Monitor, The Myrtle Beach Sun News (!?) …
Damn, son, I wish when I was 27 I could have found a job where all I had to do was answer calls from reporters desperate for my keen insight into What It All Means. You have made an auspicious start toward being one of the all-time great windbags of American political punditry, a worthy peer of Kevin Phillips and Andrew Sullivan in the pantheon of overrated blowhards.
TO ALL REPUBLICANS: It is imperative that you shun the counsels of Ryan Sager. His sudden emergence as an opinion-monger this year should have been seen for what it was — and what I immediately recognized it to be — an ill omen, a portent of the impending doom that befell the GOP on 11/7.
There is no “Battle to Control the Republican Party” in the sense that Sager claims, for the simple reason that what he is describing is just the incessant bitching of one side of that alleged “battle,” namely certain urban sophisticates who don’t like being considered gauche because they vote Republican.
Sager is pimping for the Giuliani/McCain wing of the party — those who, 10 years ago, were what you might call the “Arianna Huffington Republicans” — which simply doesn’t have the votes to nominate, much less elect, a Republican president.
The McCainiacs have been pouting ever since McCain lost the South Carolina primary in 2000. Giuliani’s supporters are New Yorkers nostalgic for the mid-1990s, when Rudy was cracking down on urban blight and the Long Island Republican machine, in combination with old Jack Kemp Upstate Republicans, could elect a D’Amato and a Pataki.
These are the same people — some at National Review, others at The Weekly Standard — have been trying to handicap the 2008 GOP presidential field since the day after Election Day 2004. It is imperative to the Northern urban-sophisticate type of Republican that the guy (or gal) who gets the GOP nomination in 2008 be their kind of candidate, i.e., someone who can make the Republican “name brand” a more marketable commodity in places like Long Island, so the sophisticates can feel good about themselves again.
I don’t blame them. But they have completely misconstrued the nature of the problem, just as they’ve misconstrued the GOP’s problems in post-Reagan California. The problem really isn’t about policy or ideology, it’s about culture. The refusal of the urban-sophisticate Republicans to take seriously the culture war is at the root of these problems, and has been ever Pat Buchanan and Dan Quayle tried to warn them back in the early 1990s.
In the short term, those who wish to see the Republican Party recover from the 11/7 disaster must cease attempting to project their inner worries onto the GOP by casting the 2006 election in ideological terms. We can fight these battles after the GOP gets its mojo working again. Right now, we’ve got a busted mojo, and intra-party bickering ain’t gonna fix it.
Sager’s arguments — except so far as they reflect the general Republican consensus on such matters as corruption and out-of-control spending — are divisive and harmful to the GOP. There is nothing to be gained for the Republican Party by listening to Sager’s attacks on evangelical Christians, social conservatives and Southerners. Get new leaders, recruit new candidates, and watch like hawks for opportunities to capitalize on the predictable blunders of liberal Democrats.
Fix that mojo. Everything else is just noise.
There’s not much I can do about being 27 (I’ll be 28 next year, Bubba). As for the rest of the argument, I’ll just note that my book is not an attack on Evangelicals or the Religious Right. It’s a call to return to an earlier understanding of the libertarian-traditionalist alliance, one focused on small-government instead of the mixing of government with religion. I do think the GOP has too much of a southern flavor, to its detriment in the rest of the country. And I think that’s clear to anyone who can read the results of the last election (massive losses in the Northeast, big losses in the Midwest, and the West turning into a real swing region).
You can’t win the presidency or the Congress back with just the South. Dixie’s loss of political clout may be difficult for some to take, but it’s the direction things are headed. And it is, I submit, a good thing for the GOP and for America.
Here are two analyses particularly worth looking at after the Republican wipeout:
1) Over at TAPPED, Tom Schaller (author of Whistling Past Dixie, which reaches similar conclusions to that of my book when it comes to the South and the West) looks at the Democrats’ gains by region. The South is by far the most solidly Republican region and saw almost no change in partisan makeup. The Northeast had a huge realignment toward the Dems and the Midwest a smaller one. The “West” had a slightly smaller one — but that presumably includes California, Oregon and Washington as well. I’d be interested to see a breakdown of just the interior West (when I have a few minutes, maybe I’ll do the math). Either way, the West is on its way toward becoming a swing region — or, really, I think it’s already become one.
2) Over at the Washington Monthly blog, Kevin Drum looks at which voters actually seem to have switched this election. I think he underplays the Evangelical factor, but here’s his list (based on exit polls): Latinos, no high school, people rating the economy “good,” Jews, no religion, income $200K-plus, independents. I’m utterly unsurprised to find that the GOP’s gains among Hispanics are mythical (I go into this in chapter 7 of my book) — especially after the year of Tom Tancredo. It’s also interesting to see Jews moving back toward the Democrats at a higher-than-average rate, given that the Democrats are pretty much the official anti-Israel party these days. But I wonder if between the numbers for Jews and “no religion” we have some solid proof of a backlash against the GOP’s anti-secularism and pandering to the Religious Right. I think, in fact, that it’s pretty clear that we do.
God damn it. One of my favorite bands, Rainer Maria, has called it quits.
That actually makes two of my favorite bands in one year.
At this rate, I rather expect to see local favorite Palomar call it quits before Christmas.
Here, in memoriam, is a video from R|M’s latest album, Catastrophe Keeps Us Together:
R|M will have two final shows:
12/15 - Philadelphia, PA - First Unitarian Church
12/16 - New York, NY - Bowery Ballroom
Don’t buy my damn tickets.
Over at The American Spectator, Philip Klein makes the excellent point that one strike against John Boehner for minority leader is his role in passing the No Child Left Behind Act:
No two laws better represent the modern brand of big government Republicanism than the Medicare prescription drug law and the No Child Left Behind Act. Any congressman who voted for either legislation should not be taken seriously as a proponent of limited government, and yet Boehner voted for both of them.
Not only did Boehner vote for the largest federal expansion into education since the Carter administration, but he sponsored the legislation. Shortly after President Bush signed the bill with Boehner standing over one shoulder and Sen. Ted Kennedy standing over the other (see photo), Boehner said its passage was “one of the proudest accomplishments of my tenure in Congress.”
No Child Left Behind is up for reauthorization next year and in his post-election press conference President Bush cited it as an issue he wanted to work together with Democrats on. If they are going to be negotiating education policy with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Republicans can ill afford to be led by Boehner, a man who is personally invested in the legislation and who proved willing to compromise conservative principles in order to get a “bipartisan” bill passed.
The original No Child Left Behind bill included provisions for school vouchers, but Boehner was willing to abandon those provisions in desperate pursuit of Democratic votes. Boehner also ditched a push by House conservatives to allow some states to decide how to spend federal education dollars.
Boehner is better than some of the others in the DeLay-Hastert crew. But he’s still part of the problem. It’s time for fresh blood.
Along those lines, Rep. Mike Pence has released a vision statement for the new GOP minority. From the first page:
Let me be very clear. I do not believe we need to figure out what our vision should be. I do not think we need to go back to the drawing board and mix and mash into place a set of principles to guide us. We already know what those first principles are – the same ones articulated by Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and the authors of the Contract with America. We just need to remember them and why we came here.
We came here to promote freedom and opportunity. We came here to allow American families to keep more of their hard-earned money and spend it on their own priorities rather than Washington’s, a reality that only can be accomplished through less government, lower taxes, less federal spending, and economic prosperity. We came here to rekindle the fires of men, material, and morale that warm the warriors who stand on freedom’s ramparts in far-off lands. And we came here to assert again the constitutional rule of law, an unalienable right to life, and the traditional values shared by millions of Americans.
That is our vision. It does not need to be constructed out of papier-mache or run through a focus group. Instead, it must be remembered, embraced in our hearts, and endlessly articulated, even in the midst of adverse political winds.
The whole thing is here (in PDF form).
The San Francisco Chronicle looks at the election aftermath here.
(The article features the least eloquent quote I’ve probably ever given a newspaper.)
Here’s Dick Armey in the WSJ today on the future of the GOP:
Moving forward, my advice to Republicans is simple: Don’t go back and check on a dead skunk. The question Republicans now need to answer is: How do we once again convince the public that we are in fact the party many Democrats successfully pretended to be in this election? To do so, Republicans will need to shed their dominant insecurities that the public just won’t understand a positive, national vision that is defined by economic opportunity, limited government and individual responsibility.
We need to remember Ronald Reagan’s legacy and again stand for positive, big ideas that get power and money out of politics and government bureaucracy and back into the hands of individuals. We also need again to demonstrate an ability to be good stewards of the taxpayers’ hard-earned money. If Republicans do these things, they will also restore the public’s faith in our standards of personal conduct. Personal responsibility in public life follows naturally if your goal is good public policy.
Besides the obvious impact on the House and Senate, Tuesday’s elections will no doubt redefine the Republican field going into early presidential primary states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. It will be up to grassroots activists in those battlegrounds to establish a constituency of expectations that anyone aspiring to be the next president of the United States must satisfy. To voters I say: Demand substance and you will get it. To Republican candidates for office I say: Offer good policy and you will create a winning constituency for lower taxes, less government and more freedom.
I like that phrase, “a constituency of expectations.” The biggest mistake the Republicans made on the way to their ultimate demise was the nomination of George W. Bush in 2000 — the ultimate “soft bigotry of low expectations.” That’s the elephant in the room people have been unwilling to talk about until now: that Bush has been a disaster for conservatism.
But, in 2008, we get the chance to make amends.
Here’s my column on the election from today’s N.Y. Post:
A COUPLE of big things expired Tuesday night: the usefulness of the trite Red/Blue dichotomy in American politics, and the George W. Bush/Karl Rove dream of the Republican Party holding a “permanent majority.”
But one big new thing was born: the interior West (the eight states off the West Coast: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) as America’s new political swing region.
Conservatives may not realize it yet, but all this will benefit the Republican Party in years to come.
And, of course, I give a roundup of the Republican losses (and close calls) in the West.
Office Space as a thriller:
(via The Corner)
Having poked some fun (and not-so-fun) at our good friend K. Lo over her bad Santorum-comeback predictions, let’s dredge up my (day-)old predictions from Election Eve and see how I did:
SENATE
Maryland: Steele (R) beats Cardin (it’s everyone’s pick for “upset of the night,” making it the new CW)
Missouri: McCaskill (D) beats Talent
Montana: Tester (D) beats Burns (my least confident prediction — Burns could ride an infusion of money and anti-tax ads to an undeserved reelection victory)
New Jersey: Menendez (D) beats Kean (corruption be damned — this is Jersey)
Ohio: Brown (D) beats DeWine (no Blackwell coattails, I’m afraid — or, at least, they’re going the wrong way)
Pennsylvania: Casey (D) beats Santorum (good riddance)
Rhode Island: Whitehouse (D) beats Chafee (OK riddance)
Tennessee: Corker (R) beats Ford (southerners come home)
Virginia: Webb (D) beats Allen (Virginians come home … but black Virginians find a severed deer head in their mailbox)
Dems net +5. Cheney rules the roost.
HOUSE
This is where I just make up a number and pretend I know more than anyone else. 38.
Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) becomes minority leader.
GOVERNORS
Colorado: Ritter (D) beats Beauprez (this hardly counts as a prediction)
Nevada: Titus (D) upsets Gibbons (based on the scandal surrounding Gibbons — I promise not to take credit for this as part of my interior West thesis)
Idaho: Brady (D) stuns Otter (couldn’t tell you why, but this seems to be how the polls are moving)
Dems hold seven of eight interior West governorships … up from four in 2004 and zero in 2000.
HOUSE SURPRISES OF THE NIGHT
House enters court-mandated rehab for prescription-drug addiction. (GOP House enters rehab for Medicare-prescription-drug addiction.)
Also…
Idaho 1: Grant (D) upsets wacko Sali (niiice)
Wyoming at large: Nutty Rep. Barbara Cubin (R) loses (very niiice)
The GOP’s losses out West pile up.
SENATE NON-SURPRISE OF THE NIGHT
Connecticut: Lieberman (Independent Democrat) crushes Ned Lamont like a bug
Will he cross the aisle of a 50-50 Senate?
Tune in next week …
(P.S.: AZ will be closer than the polls have shown. Kyl still wins.)
Senate: I expected a near Democratic sweep, winning all of the pick-ups they needed, but losing the MD seat that they needed to keep — which would have meant a 50-50 Senate. Well, they ended up getting all those pick-ups, and holding MD. They had a hell of a night in the Senate. Take a bow Sen. Schumer. How I did: I called the Steele race wrong. My excuse: Blame Robert George.
House: Not to disclaim my prediction, but I did just make that number up. How I did: Still, I wasn’t too far off. My excuse: I expected a few more of the seats that came down to the wire in the West to tip (long-shots like Idaho-1 and Wyoming at-large). [also: House didn’t enter court-mandated rehab, but that slimy cop’s got his ball’s in a vice on writing forged prescriptions … thank you Mr. DVR]
Governors: My predictions here were a lark, and only dealt with the West. How I did: One for three. My excuse: Nevada’s Republican nominee had some weird scandals dogging him. I thought it would catch up with him. And I admitted up front that this race was too quirky to fit into my Western thesis one way or another. In Idaho, it was still closer than it should have been in Idaho.
AZ Senate: I bought the hype that this race was going to be tighter than expected. In the end, it tracked the polls almost precisely. How I did: I was wrong. My excuse: I’m an idiot.
Red vs. Blue is over. The dream of a Republican “permanent majority” is over. Both deaths are good news for conservatism.
I think people who read me by this point know I don’t spin, and I certainly don’t carry water for the GOP. So believe me when I say: I consider Tuesday’s results a genuine victory for conservatism.
I don’t support a single thing the Democrats want to do with their new-found power, but I voted a straight Democratic ticket (outside of some local races … I couldn’t vote for Andrew Cuomo for AG in New York … but anyway). I cheered on election night for the Democrats.
But now, starting on Day One, my focus is on how to rebuild. How to win the presidency in 2008. How to take back Congress eventually. How to begin building a Republican Party with a focus on limiting the power and size of the federal government but also with a proper understanding of the role of government in the social sphere. Obviously this isn’t an easy task. And after so many years of Bush/Rove, big-government conservatism and the God-and-government coalition it’s hard to even imagine. But there is a legacy we can look back to: Goldwater, Reagan, and even some aspects of Gingrich.
For an in-depth description, well, the fullest picture I can paint is in my book. (Sheesh… I sound like Sullivan.)
But the basics are described by the term “fusionism.” Libertarians and social conservatives should both be able to agree that small-government is the goal. An expanding state is a threat not just to the wallet but to the family. You can’t force morality and virtue on people. You can only leave them free to live their lives. And to the extent that we must deal with divisive social issues in a political context — such as, say, gay marriage — local control is the best way to avoid vitriolic national culture wars. Cultural federalism is an idea I flesh out a bit in the conclusion of my book, and I think it’s a concept with which Republicans, in particular, should become acquainted.
So, onto the rebuilding. National Review’s cover story this week can help get the ball rolling. House leadership elections will also be a crucial opportunity. I think the goal should be 100% turnover in the House leadership. Boehner may be a fine man, but we need to wash the stench of the Hastert years off of this party. Rep. Mike Pence is the kind of principled conservative who could bring some real credibility to the fight to take back the majority. Sure, he’s definitely more of a social conservative than I might like, but he understands the Reagan legacy — and he’s been out there taking on the president and the congressional leadership from way back before it was popular.
More thoughts, of course, in coming days. And, I’ll have a column in tomorrow’s N.Y. Post on the strategic picture and how the election stacked up against the thesis of my book.
But, those are some first thoughts.
More on the failure of the immigration issue to do anything at all to help the Republicans.
Don Devine at the American Conservative Union argues for finding victory in defeat, in the new Conservative Battleline:
If you were a political party that had used earmarks and special interest government spending to a degree unprecedented in recent history to shore up weak incumbents in a tough year under an unpopular president and you won the election anyway, what would you conclude? Elections can be bought with government spending? The New Deal slogan “spend, spend, elect, elect” would become the official anthem of the Grand Old Party, no?
A lot of conservatives obviously felt this way before Tuesday, so it’s not just spin.
Meanwhile, in the same issue, Paul Weyrich (interviewed at length in the book) makes the case for a revitalized conservatism:
Every political movement that succeeds pays a price for its success. In its early stages, as an outsider, it can be true to its agenda. But once it takes power, it inevitably comes to find much of its agenda politically inconvenient. It gets in the way of making deals, gaining more power and collecting money. In time, it ceases to be a real movement and becomes an Establishment.
Regrettably, I have to say this has happened to most of the existing conservative movement, with the exception of the Religious Right. It has gotten in bed with the Republican Party, which provides access, influence and resources to those who will play along. The price has been a “conservatism” that in many respects bears little resemblance to what many of us thought we were fighting for. Most conservative institutions support or are at least silent about a Republican Party government that will not control spending, has driven deficits up to dangerous levels, exports America’s industrial base through “free trade,” promotes ever-larger and more intrusive Federal government and follows a Wilsonian foreign policy. In the face of this abandonment of our old agenda, it is not surprising that it is hard to speak of a conservative “movement” anymore, again excepting the Religious Right. Most of the troops have gone home in disgust.
The old conservative movement is now so compromised that it has little grass-roots credibility. This is the first reason the next conservatism needs a new movement. The existing movement just isn’t real anymore.
Obviously I disagree with the idea that only the Religious Right is pure in all of this. But the overall sentiment is right.
The Economist looks at the (big-L) Libertarian spoilers.
It does appear that Libertarians cost the GOP Montana’s Senate seat.
…well, me:
What should worry Republicans most, however, is erosion of its strength in the West and in two states in particular: Colorado and Arizona. Fours years ago, Colorado was solidly Republican. Since then, Democrats have won a Senate seat, two House seats, the governorship, and both houses of the state legislature. At the state level, that’s realignment.
In Arizona, Republicans dropped two House seats and Republican Senator John Kyl got a mild scare. Kyl, by the way, may be finest and most able senator in Washington. He’s certainly in the top five. Meanwhile, Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano cruised to victory.
The bottom line is this: Colorado and Arizona may not be there for Republicans in the 2008 presidential race. Of course, everything depends on the actual candidates, but these two states start out as presidential swing states. This is a new development.
Call it least one argument for nominating John McCain. (erkkksdkdskkkmnuuuuu … [sound of me gagging])
The West is where it’s at. And libertarians matter in the West.
What an odd development (as in: this could have helped last week).
One thought: Is this so Bush can nominate a Democratic senator in a state with a Republican governor as the new Sec Def?
A name: Lieberman.
UPDATE: Nope. It’s the only way they could have held the Senate, though.
Right now, how much do the Lamont folks — the netroots supporters who waged Jihad against Sen. Joe Lieberman — wish they had focused instead on Sen. George Allen.
You know, the Republican. The guy from the other party. The guy who could cost them a majority in the Senate.
Some people, like Jim Geraghty at NRO, have speculated that more-than-a-long-shot Randy Graf could pull out a surprise victory in AZ-08, based on the tremendous untapped appeal of a truly virulent anti-illegal-immigration message.
I’d just like to note for the record: THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN. NOT EVEN CLOSE.
I don’t say any of this to play gotcha with people’s predictions (and Geraghty didn’t predict a Graf win, as best I know, he mused about one), but because it’s important to remember over the next year or so that the immigration issue is an utter political loser. I don’t see any major race (or any minor one, for that matter) where immigration saved an otherwise doomed Republican. Santorum banged that drum hard and lost. Graf banged that drum and only that drum and couldn’t get any traction with it — even in a border state.
I happen to support a Wall Street Journal style policy of open borders. But as a political matter it’s also clear: Restrictionism is bad politics. Republicans need to keep winning the West, and the West is increasingly Hispanic. We can’t turn the whole region into California.
The one positive outcome of a Democratic House, policy-wise, may be comprehensive immigration reform, including a generous guest-worker program.
UPDATE: In AZ-05, anti-illegal-immigration firebrand J.D. Hayworth also lost. The seat’s been considered a toss-up, but it’s still a bit of a surprise given the polling in the race.
From my hometown congressional district, the GOP has now lost Medicare prescription-drug bill co-author Rep. Nancy Johnson (R-CT).
Satisfying.
Death to big-government conservatism!
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