Election Day: November 3, 2009

I wanted to post this earlier but I suffered a bout of “connectile dysfunction” this morning and this is the first chance I’ve had to post… Get out and Vote! Preferably for the conservative candidate of your choice, but I digress.

The bulk of our attention has been focused on races New York, New Jersey and Virginia but the race to watch may turn out to be the special election to replace Ellen Tauscher in California’s 10th Congressional district. I’ll confess I haven’t been paying close attention but I’ve been hearing rumblings that the race between Republican David Harmer and Democrat Lt Gov. John Garamendi may turn out to be  a lot closer than anyone expects.

California’s 10th Congressional district is just about as blue as blue can get… Pres, Obama defeated John McCain by a 64-33 margin there in 2008. Ellen Tauscher’s average margin of victory in the last four Congressional races there  has been 37 points. If David Harmer can get within even single digits of John Garamendi it’ll be shocker, if he wins it’ll be shot heard around the world moment.

Ed Morrissey and Moe Lane have more on the CA-10 race  here and here. Michelle Malkin has an Election Day primer and a little preemptive pushback against the soundbite media spin here and Erick Erickson has notes on what to watch for once the polls close in the NY-23 race.

Related

• Republicans Are Poised for Gains in Key Elections – Wall Street Journal
• Tuesday’s Races an Early Test of Obama’s Political Influence – CNSNews.com
• Uncivil War: Conservatives to challenge a dozen GOP candidates – Politico
• 45% for Obama, 49% Against – If Election Were Held Right Now – Rasmussen Reports

Weekend Briefing – Saturday, October 10, 2009

I’m going to be tied up with family all weekend but here’s a collection of must read links:

• CBO: Budget deficit hit record $1.4T in 2009 – Associated Press
• Proposals to create jobs add up to second stimulus – Associated Press
• A Nobel for Obama – New York Sun
• Barack Obama’s peace prize starts a fight – Times Online
• McCain Vs. Palin For The GOP’s Soul – Investors Business Daily
• What I Heard in Honduras – Rep. Jim DeMint, Wall Street Journal
• California Budget Is Already in the Red 10 Weeks After Passage – Bloomberg
• Report: Reining in lawsuits would cut deficit – Washington Times
• CBO’s Analysis of the Effects of Proposals to Limit Costs Related to Medical Malpractice (“Tort Reform”) – CBO Director’s Blog
• Save the Greenback, Mr. President – Larry Kudlow, CNBC
• Paying the Health Tax in Massachusetts – Wendy Williams, Wall Street Journal
• CBO Stands for Cooked Books Office – Rep. John Shadegg, Red State
• What happened to global warming? – BBC News
• As Republicans Predict a 2010 Surge, Democrats Dig In – New York Times
• Taliban growth weighs on Obama strategy review – Reuters

Feel free to add your links in comments.

John McCain: 9-11 Hijackers Entered U.S. From Canada

Oh jeez… First it was Janet Napolitano now it’s John McCain repeating a the highly dubious claim that the 9-11 hijackers entered the United Sates through Canada:

What’s up with Arizona politicians?

Arizona Sen. John McCain made the dubious claim Friday that Sept. 11 hijackers entered the United States through Canada — just days after Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona, said the same thing.

Napolitano retracted her claim on Thursday after Canadian officials chided her for the remark, calling it an unfortunate misconception. Napolitano admitted Thursday that she made a mistake — since the 9/11 Commission concluded that the hijackers entered the U.S. from overseas.

But when asked about the gaffe on FOX News Friday, McCain said: “Well, some of the 9/11 hijackers did come through Canada, as you know.”

This drew an instant retort from the Canadian embassy, which re-issued Canadian Ambassador Michael Wilson’s public comments from Tuesday, in which he said:

“Unfortunately, misconceptions arise on something as fundamental as where the 9/11 terrorists came from. As the 9/11 Commission reported in July 2004, all of the 9/11 terrorists arrived in the U.S. from outside North America. They flew to major U.S. airports. They entered the U.S. with documents issued to them by the U.S. government. No 9/11 terrorists came from Canada.”

Idiot, Senator you might want to review the 9-11 commission report… The 9/11 hijackers DID NOT enter this country through Canada. They entered the country directly from overseas with documents issued by the U.S. Government.

Got it? Good.

Minuteman Founder To Challange John McCain

Minuteman Civil Defense Corps founder Chris Simcox is expected to announce today that he will challenge Arizona Sen. John McCain in a Republican primary in 201o:

PHOENIX — The co-founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps in Arizona will challenge Sen. John McCain in the 2010 Republican primary.

Chris Simcox — who rose seven years ago from an obscure newspaper publisher in Tombstone to a national figure in the debate over how to control the U.S.-Mexican border — is scheduled to appear today at a press conference outside the state Capitol, where he will announce he is stepping down from his position with the Minutemen to challenge McCain.

I have a great deal of respect for Senator McCain and the sacrifices he made in the service of this country but he’s part of the problem in Washington and it’s time for him to go.

That said I’m not sure how much of challenge Simcox will be… If the Obama Administration and Democrats in the House and Senate push hard for amnesty this year and it becomes a galvanizing issue for the base, McCain’s in trouble. If not, Simcox will be stuck between a rock and political hard place. He won’t be able to tact to the right on immigration in primaries without alienating a sizable chuck of the electorate he’ll need to win in the general.

Related

• Simcox bid will rely on GOP grassroots, but support might be thin – Arizona Capitol Times
• McCain Gets a Primary Challenger in Arizona – CQ Politics
• Oh my: Minuteman founder to challenge McCain in Arizona primary – Hot Air
• Simcox for Senate
• Minuteman Civil Defense Corps

McCain Dodges the Palin Question

Josh Painter over at RedState points out this exchange between George Stephanopoulos and Sen. John McCain on last Sunday’s This Week:

Today on ABC’s This Week, when asked by host George Stephanopoulos whether he would support Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin if she runs for president, Sen. John McCain punted:

“Oh no. Listen I have the greatest appreciation for Gov. Palin and her family and it was a great joy to know them,” McCain said. “She invigorated our campaign and she was just down in Georgia and she invigorated their campaign.”

“But I can’t say something like that,” McCain said, “We’ve got some great other young governors… Pawlenty, Huntsman.”

Pressed by Stephanopoulos that McCain had considered Palin to be the best person to succeed him if he had been elected and something had happened to him, the former Republican presidential candidate replied:

“Well sure, but now we’re in a whole election cycle.”

My first reaction on seeing this was ho-hum… I thought it was kind of a non-story. I never expected Sen. McCain to endorse Sarah Palin, or anyone else for that matter, this soon after the election.

After reading some of the comments posted on George Stephanopoulos’  blog and elsewhere I decided to throw my two cents in though.

Republicans didn’t lose this election because of Sarah Palin or John McCain. They fighting an uphill battle against their own record over last eight years.

They lost this election because they abandoned traditional conservative principles in favor of some sort of squishy, centrist/populist republicanism that lead to out of controlled spending bad policy ideas like campaign finance reform, no child left behind, and amnesty for illegal aliens.

Sen. McCain’s choice of Gov. Palin as a running mate may not have helped him with independent voters but there’s no doubt she energized grass roots conservatives and helped get them to the polls on election day… Without her I can’t help but think that a lot of conservatives would have stayed home on election day.

I’m not sure how or when the Republican party lost its way, but It’s obvious that that there’s a civil war of sorts going on in the republican party… Grass conservatives who want the party to return to traditional conservatives principles are battling inside the beltway cocktail party republicans who think the party should move further towards the populist “center”.

Defining traditional conservative principles isn’t a simple task but in short they start with a fundamental unwavering belief that, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “… all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

If Republicans are going to have any chance in 2012, or in the 2010 midterms, they need to put principles before policy and start educating voters about the principles of fiscal responsibility, limited government, private property rights, and a strong national defense.

5 Myths About the 2008 Elections

Washington Post writer Chris Cillizza examines and attempts to debunk 5 myths about the 2008 elections… The entire article is worth reading but the two points that stand out in my opinion are these:

4. A Republican candidate could have won the presidency this year.

I doubt it. In the hastily penned postmortems of campaign ‘08, much of the blame for McCain’s loss seems to have fallen at the feet of the candidate and his advisers, who (so the narrative goes) made a series of lousy strategic decisions that wound up costing the Arizona senator the White House. There’s little question that some of the choices McCain and his team made — the most obvious being the impulsive decision to suspend his campaign and try to broker a deal on the financial rescue bill, only to see his efforts blow up in his face — did not help. But a look at this year’s political atmospherics suggests that the environment was so badly poisoned that no Republican — not Mitt Romney, not Mike Huckabee, not even the potential future GOP savior, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal — could have beaten Obama on Nov. 4.

Why not? Three words (and a middle initial): President George W. Bush.

In the national exit poll, more than seven in 10 voters said that they disapproved of the job Bush was doing; not surprisingly, Obama resoundingly won that group, 67 percent to 31 percent. But here’s an even more stunning fact: While 7 percent of the exit-poll sample strongly approved of the job Bush was doing, a whopping 51 percent strongly disapproved. Obama won those strong disapprovers 82 percent to 16 percent. And Bush’s approval numbers looked grim for the GOP even before the September financial meltdown.

Just one in five voters in the national exit polls said that the country was “generally going in the right direction.” McCain won that group 71 percent to Obama’s 27 percent. But among the 75 percent of voters who said that the country was “seriously off on the wrong track,” Obama had a thumping 26-point edge.

Those numbers speak to the damage that eight years of the Bush administration have done to the Republican brand. It’s a burden that any candidate running for president with an “R” after his — or her — name would have had to drag around the country.

5. McCain made a huge mistake in picking Sarah Palin.

No subject is more likely to break up a dinner party early than the Alaska governor McCain chose as his running mate. Everyone not only has an opinion about her qualifications (or lack thereof) but also feels it necessary to share those opinions with anyone within shouting range.

Love her or loathe her, the data appear somewhere close to conclusive that Palin did little to help — and, in fact, did some to hurt — McCain’s attempts to reach out to independents and Democrats. But just because Palin doesn’t appear to have helped McCain move to the middle doesn’t mean that picking her was the wrong move.

Remember where McCain found himself this past summer. He had won the Republican nomination, but the GOP base clearly felt little buy-in into his campaign. A slew of national polls reflected that energy gap, with Democrats revved up about the election and their candidate and Republicans somewhere between tepid and glum.

Enter Palin, who was embraced with a bear hug by the party’s conservative base. All of a sudden, cultural conservatives were thrilled at the chance to put “one of their own” in the White House. In fact, of the 60 percent of voters who told exit pollsters that McCain’s choice of Palin was a “factor” in their final decision, the Arizona senator won 56 percent to 43 percent.

For skittish conservatives looking for more evidence that McCain understood their needs and concerns, Palin did the trick. It’s hard to imagine conservatives rallying to McCain — even to the relatively limited extent that they did — without Palin on the ticket. And without the base, McCain’s loss could have been far worse.

I agree with Cillizza on both points.

1) Republicans had no chance in this election… Over the last decade they’ve abandoned traditional conservative principles in favor of some sort of squishy, centrist/populist quasi conservative “Republicanism” that lead to out of controlled spending and bad policy ideas like campaign finance reform, no child left behind, and amnesty for illegal aliens.

If Republicans expect to have any chance in the 2010 mid-terms or in 2012 Presidential election they need rediscover traditional conservative principles. Defining those principles isn’t a simple task but for me they start with a fundamental unwavering belief that, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “… all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

It used to be that Republicans embodied those principles by fighting for fiscal responsibility, limited government, private property rights, and a strong national defense. I’m not sure how or when the Republican party lost its way what I do know is they’ve lost lost two straight elections because they’ve alienated both their conservative base and independent voters.

2) Sarah Palin may not have helped McCain with independent voters she did energize the conservative base of the Republican party… Without her on ticket I think it’s a safe bet that Barack Obama’s margin of victory would have been larger.

Personally, I think some of Palin’s problems with independent voters sterm from the McCain campaigns management of her. They would have been better served by having her do a handful of interviews on talk radio and with local media outlets in swing states to tell her story directly to voters before having her do national media interviews with Charlie Gibson and Kattie Couric.

The Blame Game

Over the last couple of days a lot has been said and written about why Republicans lost… Conservatives want to blame John McCain. Moderates and some McCain staffers are trying to pin the blame on Sarah Palin.

Enough!

All this finger pointing ignores one simple truth: Republicans had ZERO chance of winning this election. They have spent much of the past decade destroying their “brand”, they abandoned solid conservative principles in favor of quasi conservative/centrist/populist ideas that lead to out of control spending and bad policy ideas like campaign finance reform and amnesty for illegal aliens that alienated their conservative base.

That plus the Bush Administration’s mismanagement of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, coupled with their ham-fisted response to hurricane Katrina and failure to engage their opponents in a meaningful policy debate not only deepened the divide with the party’s conservative base it helped alienate independent voters.

The basic problem for Republicans is that they’ve forgotten Conservatism is not policy idea it is a fundamental unwavering belief that, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “… all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

If Republicans expect to have any chance of winning in the 2010 mid-term elections, much less the 2012 Presidential election, they have to rediscover those fundamental principles and return to being the party that embodies them through policies that promote fiscal responsibility and a smaller less intrusive government.

These truths should be self-evident; unfortunately they aren’t, they have to be articulated constantly, lest people forget what they are.

Election Postmortem

Let the finger pointing begin… Beltway Republicans will undoubtedly blame John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate as the reason for his loss. Palin may not have been the most qualified candidate available and her disastrous interview with Katie Couric certainly didn’t help her or John McCain.

It’s easy to lay the blame at Palin’s feet but doing so misses the larger picture; Republicans had no chance of winning this election for a number of reasons:

1. Fatigue – Simply put Pres. Bush and Republicans in the House and Senate abandoned Conservative principles and alienated Republican an independent voters with out of control spending, bad policy ideas like amnesty for illegal immigrants, and campaign finance reform and by grossly overreaching on some social issues. That coupled with the Bush Administration’s failure to engage the opposition in a meaningful policy debate left grass roots conservatives demoralized… We fought for them but for the most part they didn’t fight for us.
2. Lack of vision – For all intents and purposes the Republican Party ran an agendaless campaign. Yes, they had ideas but they never communicated them in an effective manner and allowed Democrats to color the ideas they did have as just more of the same.
3. The Economy – For 8 years democrats and media have called the Bush economy the worst in 50 years, something that’s simply not true… But because of the Bush Administrations failure to engage it’s resonated with voters. September’s economic collapse helped to validate that belief.

That said John McCain and Sarah Plain did about as well as a Republicans could do in this environment.

Where do go from here?

To be honest I’m not sure. Unless things change dramatically Republican prospects don’t look good for the 2010 mid-terms or in 2012.

We need new leadership at the RNC and in the House and Senate… Personally I’d love to see someone like Newt Gingrich as the next RNC chairman. Yes, Newt’s a lightening rod, but he’s also the one of the most effective advocates for conservatism we have.

Ed Morrissey has additional thoughts at Hot Air,  Michelle Malkin says “Enough with the “re-branding” crap” and Congressman Thaddeus McCotter has must read column in the American Spectator:

Now, Seize Freedom!

By Thaddeus G. McCotter on 11.5.08 @ 6:07AM

Welcome to “Republican Rock Bottom.”

Possessed of no vision, no principle, no purpose, and no appeal, we deserved our fate.

Now, seize freedom!

Finally, we are divorced from self-deceits. Dead is the self-indulgent imbecility of “re-branding” — as if the Republican Party was a corporate product to be repackaged, not a transformational political movement to be led. Despite what the media will tell you, and what so-called “conservative leaders” will discuss ad nauseam during “secret” meetings, this situation is not a crisis. It is an opportunity. Today, we are as the Great Emancipator proclaimed during another time of national trial: unbound by the tired dogmas of the past; and free to think and act anew.

First, we must not mindlessly mimic the momentarily triumphant Left. Sleek, detached, media savvy non-entities posing as existentially anguished leaders are neither in our nature nor our future. We are not teeny-bopper, pop-star politicians or the ideological dinosaurs of wealth redistribution.

At heart, we Republicans are flesh and blood and backbone, the proud servants of people. If we re-orient our vision, renew our purpose, and reaffirm our principles, the times will demand us — not as we were, but as we must be! Read the rest…

Poll Question: Who Are You Voting For?

It’s a slow news day, and like Allahpundit I’m a blogger strapped for content so here comes a poll question:

Wall Street Journal: Almost Everyone Would Do Better Under the McCain Health Plan

Robert Carroll has a must read Op Ed on John McCain’s health care plan in today’s Wall Street Journal. Carroll does and excellent job of explaining what may be the single most misunderstood and misrepresented proposal of this election… The bottom line is most of us would do better under McCain’s health insurance tax credit.

Almost Everyone Would Do Better Under the McCain Health Plan

His tax credit is larger than the current tax subsidy for insurance.

By Robert Carroll, Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2008

Still, some 45 million Americans are uninsured; and the growth in health-care spending continues to outpace the growth in incomes and the economy, which portends further increases in the number of uninsured. The employer-based system itself is eroding. Voters should be wondering whether there is a better approach than this subsidy.

What many may not realize is that the federal government already “spends” roughly $300 billion to $400 billion through the tax code to encourage people to pay for their health care through employer-sponsored health insurance. This subsidy takes the form of the exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance from both income and payroll taxes.

There has been a lot of rhetoric and misstatements, but what exactly does Sen. McCain have in mind? He would replace the current income tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance with a refundable tax credit — $5,000 for those who purchase family coverage and $2,500 for individual coverage. Mr. McCain would also reform insurance markets to stem the growth in health insurance premiums. Read the rest…

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