Well that took long enough

Obama vs. McCain. Sure, we’re used to it now — but anyone who was predicting that a year ago deserves a medal for prognostication and/or damn good guesswork.

There’s already been a lot of hoohah written about the historical nature of this contest, deep symbolism, reflections of larger problems and issues, and so forth — I say hoohah not because these observations are invalid, merely that at a certain point this overwhelms the actual mechanics of what’s going down. And that’s going to be interesting on a variety of levels.

Couple of examples are these instances of paying attention to what’s behind the curtain — and the fact that these are public statements and reports means that I’d love to know more of what else is going on:

• Mark McKinnon’s departure from McCain’s team is to me far more interesting than the dust-up over lobbyists departing from said team. Politicians might work with lobbyists when it comes to constructing and maintaining their political networks? You don’t say! They’ll be working on crafting ad campaigns with professionals in the field next. Which of course was what McKinnon was doing, and is still doing — and presumably will be doing, really:
  

  Last summer McKinnon, who lives in Austin, announced he would leave the McCain effort if it was going up against Illinois Sen. Barack Obama….he’s sticking by his vow that if the Democratic candidate was Obama, he would step off the McCain ad team because Obama’s election “would send a great message to the country and the world.”

  The transition will occur over the next few weeks. He will, however, continue as an informal advisor. “I’m just getting off the front line making ads,” he said.

• Then there’s that whole money issue:
  

  In financial disclosure reports released Tuesday night, Obama reported raising $32 million for his primary in April and banked an aggregate of more than $9 million for the general election.

  In contrast, McCain reported raising just $18.5 million for his primary account in April and having no money set aside for the general election.

  The Arizona senator has decided to accept taxpayer financing for the general election phase of the campaign, which means he will be limited to spending $85 million between the September Republican convention and Election Day.

  If, as expected, Obama’s campaign can soon shift its focus entirely from the primary to the general election and his fundraising remains at its current pace — about $30 million to $40 million a month — he could easily match McCain’s total taxpayer-provided kitty before the Democratic convention in August.

  There’s already some pushback on this — then again, Ed Morrissey in cheerleader mode is a fairly hollow prospect at the best of times — but comments in response like “I was ready to send the RNCC some money but on the same day they voted for the bloated farm bill and so my checkbook went back into my purse” don’t exactly boost confidence, I’d figure.

• Meanwhile, the whole flap about talking to dictators/appeasement/whatever is about to take an amusing turn given the confirmation of this:
  

  Israel and Syria announced Wednesday that they were engaged in negotiations for a comprehensive peace treaty through Turkish mediators, the first time in eight years that such talks have taken place.

  Senior Israeli officials from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office and their Syrian counterparts were in Istanbul on Wednesday, where both groups had been staying separately, at undisclosed locations, since Monday. The mediators shuttled between the two.

  The elements of negotiation were not made public in short official statements from both capitals that spoke of conducting “these talks in good faith and with an open mind.” But there is no question that the Syrians want to regain the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war. Nor is there any doubt that Israel wants to end Syria’s close alliance with Iran, hoping to reduce the power of anti-Israel groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Both benefit from Syrian as well as Iranian patronage; both are considered terrorist groups by Israel and the United States.

  Talks are talks, of course, not things set in stone; anyone assuming otherwise would be nuts. But it’s nice to see that after a few days of posturing rubbish from morally outraged people about the very idea of not using weapons when dealing with people of whom they are not fond that two governments actually IN the Middle East are engaging in this thing called ‘realpolitik,’ which I heartily recommend to people like Andy McCarthy, say. (That said, it would have been even more bizarrely impressive if it was Israel and Iran talking, if only because that would have undercut whatever was left of the neocon dream belief completely, but I suspect that’s backchannel at best.)

For all this and other things that can be said, the first point is the one that’s most interesting to me, for this reason, even if this does get into the hoohah I was just decrying a bit — McKinnon, either by clever calculation or by virtue of being the first, ended up dry testing a meme that’s been quietly running for some time at various spots on the right, namely that Obama winning the candidacy would be a very impressive thing for the country as a whole. Which it is — as a friend put it to me a couple of months back, up until this electoral cycle he figured that the Democratic Party would never actually nominate a black man to run for president, no matter what rhetoric had always been offered. But it’s when I started seeing parallells to McKinnon’s sentiment get more seriously advanced some months back on the likes of RedState that I wondered about how quickly it was being embraced there, and why.

What had happened at such right-leaning sites and blogs — in between all the usual ‘pass. the. popcorn.’ yawnsomeness regarding the extended primary battles that passes for deep thought at many — was this rather too glowing idea about ‘isn’t it great that we’ve reached a stage where a black man and a woman can be competing for the candidacy of a major political party’ without turning the gaze in on their own party too much, a odd bit of weird self-congratulation without substance. It can be argued — and it has been, tendentiously, by themselves — that the whole idea of the institutional right is that they are aiming at the truly color-blind society and the like, happily borrowing Martin Luther King’s noted phrase ‘the content of their character’ as needed. Cute misdirection from the bunch that came up with the ‘Southern strategy’ and all, it must be said.

But more telling is this story:

Just a few years after the Republican Party launched a highly publicized diversity effort, the GOP is heading into the 2008 election without a single minority candidate with a plausible chance of winning a campaign for the House, the Senate or governor.

….

“In 1994, when I first ran, we had 14 African-American Republicans running for Congress. … I was the only one that won that year, but we had 14, and we had some good candidates,” said former Oklahoma Rep. J.C. Watts, one of the party’s most recognized African-American voices. “I am grateful for what Ken Mehlman did when he was RNC chairman, but I knew that wouldn’t last — that was one person. I’ve never gotten the impression that it was institutionalized.”

So who’s to blame for this diversity deficit?

Jack Kemp, the former Republican congressman and vice presidential nominee, says the culprit is clear: a “pitiful” recruitment effort by his party. “I don’t see much of an outreach,” he said. “I don’t see much of a reason to run.”

….

Watts, for one, rejects the argument that Republicans can’t compete for minority votes or successfully recruit minority candidates. He argues that the party simply hasn’t tried hard enough.

“Unless you have an infrastructure to build off of, it’s all throwing mud at the wall and hoping that some of it sticks,” said Watts. “There’s an entire infrastructure that needs to be thought through, and it seems to me no one is interested in building that.”

Let us speak frankly — there is no point in claiming that the Democratic Party is magically the home of perfect and well-rounded reflections of society as a whole in terms of all its makeup, its groups of interest, its main players and money sources. Only the naive think that. Similarly, only the naive think that the Republican Party is home to nobody but crusty bigoted old white men being crusty etc. That ain’t life, that ain’t reality.

But intent means a lot. Some sense of recognizing the time is extremely important. And the 21st century time is one where the divisions and biases in society are familiar but the dynamics and possibilities are much, much greater than ever before. Watts, I think, nails something simple and obvious, which has been directed at the GOP the entire year — they can’t stay frozen in place and hope for success, they actually have to make a concerted effort to build, create, and maintain. What there is of the loyal base can kvetch and kvetch all it wants, but that base isn’t enough, and will decrease over time by natural attrition.

I’ve commented before on how William F. Buckley’s famous definition of being conservative — standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’, to summarize it — is by definition defeatist, because it implies history is going to run you over anyway. Talk isn’t enough, talk is cheap, and can mean nothing. (He says, while writing this blog entry!) Personally I’m not interested in helping the GOP or the cause of the right — its tethering to a reflexive social conservatism I do not agree with is its own burden to bear, and I am quite happy to see it suffer as a result. But as a matter of political observation and dynamics, it is perversely fascinating to watch a slow suicide in this fashion.

What Watts is talking about is only one factor of many, this isn’t a tipping point per se, and it’s not like the GOP is suddenly going to up and disappear in November. But to get back to McKinnon’s inadvertantly made point — the GOP can either be the party simply talking about how nice it is that their opponents are showing what a good thing the opportunity for a range of potential voices and backgrounds in their candidacy process is for America, or they can be the one putting something into place allowing for that in their OWN process as well. They want to keep shooting themselves in the foot, they’re more than welcome. At some point, though, they might discover that all those gunshots kinda hurt their ability to stand.

WordPress.com Political Blogger Alliance

Mississippi chuckling

The wonks are agreed — and I agree with them — that West Virginia had its place yesterday but the real story was down in Mississippi:

Democrats picked up a northern Mississippi House seat in one of the most conservative-minded districts in the country Tuesday night — an upset that will reverberate darkly through a House Republican caucus already reeling from losses in special elections in Illinois and Louisiana.

With all precincts reporting, the Democratic nominee, Prentiss County Chancery Clerk Travis Childers, defeated Republican Greg Davis, 54 to 46 percent. Childers was able to expand his three-point margin of victory from the race’s first round of balloting last month — even as he faced an onslaught of Republican attacks.

The victory marks the Democrats’ third straight special election pickup in three months. It will be a serious blow to the Republican Party’s already-flagging morale and will surely prompt a new round of finger-pointing among the already fractured GOP caucus.

“This loss is going to prompt serious introspection by our conference to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it,” said a GOP leadership aide. “We have time to do that, and we will if we learn our lessons leading into November. But the next couple of days are not going to be pretty.”

First things first — it’s important to note that the Democratic candidate is a fairly conservative guy himself — anti-abortion, pro-gun, for instance. (The first would always be a sticking point with me but the second has become less so over time — not out of any great love for guns or the NRA or any of that, but simply because I think it would be far more interesting to take up the ‘well-regulated militia’ part of the Second Amendment as a point of argument.) In any event, this has led the hapless Tom Cole to say things like “We haven’t lost as a party because of the ideological agenda on the other side,” when personally I think this about says it all:

The $1.27 million that the NRCC spent in the heavily Republican district amounted to nearly 20 percent of the committee’s entire cash-on-hand. The committee has now spent more than $3 million to defend three conservative House seats, losing all three of them, and it is ill-equipped financially to compete fully in an ever-widening playing field for November.

Given that another special election might be in the offing shortly, this could be, how you say, fun.

What’s been more interesting is doing something I hadn’t done in a while — trawling through the various right-leaning sites I’ve made a speciality of checking out over the last few years. In recent months it had been all pretty boring, and overly focused on the Democratic primaries, understandably enough, but the fact that various special elections had been going the Democratic way was starting to cause fear and loathing and etc.

What I hadn’t realized, though, is how…well, pathological is a strong word. But how self-loathing is clearly apparent among so many right-leaning sites (a generic term but one thing more up for grabs than ever is the term ‘GOP,’ which ever more people formerly identifying themselves as Republicans are rejecting for other terms entirely). As with all political discussion, mistaking the comments and immediate reactions of hardcore political junkies for a sense of a shift in the wind in the national mood is fraught with peril, but when results like the Mississippi election are registered — something concrete rather than so much malarkey — then that’s when it gets interesting.

For instance, it was long clear that McCain’s ascendancy was hardly looked upon with happiness by many on the right — little surprise why, there’s a clear sense from him that he feels the party should serve him rather than the other way around, which I perversely admire in a ‘hey, he’s more honest about it than most’ — but I hadn’t realized it had gotten to the point where in the last couple of weeks various posters at RedState had to put up essays going “We should be all be struggling against our common enemy!” The fact that McCain’s speech yesterday treated global warming as something other than a bugbear led to a variety of people identifying the common enemy as McCain once more, and off to the races again.

But again, that’s the presidential race. Post-Mississippi, this is the kind of thing that’s out there:

• Krikorian at the NRO: “If the GOP can’t hold on to a House seat in the Deep South that Bush won by 25 points, it’s going to be 1974 all over again.”
• Allahpundit at HotAir: “And so the only election that mattered tonight, the bellwether of this fall’s congressional races, goes the wrong way. I’m going to go find some glue to huff.”
• Instapundit: “The GOP Congressional delegation didn’t learn its lesson in 2006, and they’re paying the price now….the GOP keeps losing these races they shouldn’t lose.”

And these are the politer assessments. (Most amusingly melodramatic so far: Erick at RedState invoking Moses and wandering in the wilderness, which fits their not-so-crypto-religious martyrology complex — personally I’d say the bit about the ground giving way under Korah’s feet is more appropriate.) Blog comments in general seem to contain some of the worst of humanity (this absolutely exceptional blog and its audience clearly excepted, naturally), so if you want to trawl around for complaints about how McCain and Bush are teaming up with Mexico to sell oil resources in the Gulf to China, go right ahead, because they’re out there. Obama should have said bitter people cling to explanations like that more than anything else, and he would have been elected already.

What’s funniest among the vaguely more sane complaints — or at least more readily legible — is the idea that it’s all about ‘branding.’ Now, all sides in politics obsess over this to a ridiculous degree, it’s just that, as with all political tools to hand, some do it more smoothly than most. (Thus Obama once more.) If you end up reading a lot of comments today, though, you’ll notice a long-running theme that Cole’s already mentioned — namely, that the GOP can’t sell itself properly these days. Some examples:

• Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard, just before the Mississippi election (and may I just say it’s been refreshing to see this clod brought up sharp over the last few months): “House minority leader John Boehner talks about fixing the Republican “brand.” Davis’s assessment: “We haven’t done anything the last year and a half to re-do the brand.””
• Powerline: “But my takeaway is that the Republican brand is in such bad shape that the Dems can win virtually anywhere if they nominate a candidate whose position on key issues is, or can be made to seem, close to that of the Republican.”
• RedState: “There is no denying it anymore–if it could even be denied in the run-up to tonight; Republicans have serious problems with the brand identity.”

Reducing it all to marketing terms is its own form of amusement and head-shaking, if utterly unexpected in a culture that has over the past few decades reduced everything from Sun Tzu and Clausewitz to David Oglivy down to a philosophy of life in general. But the real kicker is a simple one — it’s all about the public message, somehow, all about how the ads don’t work, how the trademarks and the symbols aren’t as successful as they were. It’s a collective head-scratching that kinda overlooks a key conclusion that a large number of people are starting to make more forcefully:

The product sucks.

Each of the complaints you see above comes from the point of the view that the product doesn’t suck, of course. The whole point is that it can’t suck, it’s not supposed to suck, that it is the correct product for the job at hand. And confidence in one’s own product is certainly mighty handy in order to sell it, if one has to reduce down something minor as the fate of the nation and the society to questions of buying and selling.

But what if the product, in fact, sucks?

There’s a great Peanuts strip that illustrates this key point which I can’t find right now, but at a summer camp meeting which turns out to be a theological one, the kids are all being harangued by a speaker about something (Schulz, wisely, leaves things a bit unclear as to what). Linus raises his hand to ask a question, prefacing it with the words “I don’t want to offend or anything…” which prompts first Charlie Brown and then the others to leave before he completes the question. At the end of the strip, Linus is alone facing the unseen speaker, doggedly going forward with his question: “Have you ever considered that you might be wrong?”

It’s not surprising that ideologues don’t consider that they might be wrong, on the right or on the left, but the ones on the right are a bit more tiresome of late. Going into all the reasons would take a while, but you can see examples above here — if you’re obsessing over branding rather than the product, that means you’re obsessing over how it’s being sold rather than the product itself. There’s no consideration that they might be wrong.

Doubt, reflection, reconsideration — these are key. Questioning your positions and conclusions constantly throughout life — these are key. These are not solutions in and of themselves — this approach can be taken to strange extremes, such as the questioning of the scientific method as opposed to what people have done with the results of that method (but that’s a post for another time). In the realm of politics, as in the realm of life, there is something to be said for putting your thoughts and beliefs under an internal microscope, if not an external one — there are arguments for both ways, among other approaches — and being rigorous in your conclusions. This may be an ideal, and I do not claim to have fulfilled it as much as I could, but I would rather have that as an ideal instead of essentially saying, “Gee, I know I’m right — I’ll blame everything else instead, then.”

There’s much more I could say but I’ve gone on long enough for today — perhaps later in the week. For now, though, pardon my schadenfreude on the one hand if you’ll allow for the sober reflection on the other. Still some months to go — still so much to see.

WordPress.com Political Blogger Alliance

Mike Huckabee has scored the best photo yet for this year

To be broadcast on February 29.

TYRA BANKS: Are you pumped about being here?

GOVERNOR HUCKABEE: I am. You know, I actually said, the next time I’m in New York, find out if I can get on Tyra’s show.

TYRA BANKS: Oh, are you serious?

GOVERNOR HUCKABEE: My staff has been trying for a long time, and I think when Mitt heard that I was on, he’s said I’m out and here I am, on the way to the White House from here.

As a master of PR, Huckabee is a frickin’ goldmine. I don’t say that with irony or annoyance, he is a master of PR, in that his heavy-handed touches exude earnestness rather than calculation while his lighter moments — no less calculating — exude a joy for the moment. A sign of a smart politician, and a careful one. He and Obama are well matched, or would be if the race came down to that.

[EDIT: over at ILX, friend Dan came up with another of his spot-on comments:

Huckabee is totally the successful version of Bush in that he does actually convince me that he’s a likeable, fun guy. I know many likeable, fun guy who would make horrible, horrible presidents.

Couldn’t be more OTM if he tried, especially on just how horribly Bush did at this.]

Right now there’s an incipient counter-narrative happening that wants to cast Huckabee as eventual spoiler of the McCain party, forced as it already is. I really can’t see it lasting…but. There are enough weird surprises already this year, enough well laid plans already down the crapper. Right now even Ron Paul has taken a powder from this whole thing, and as sole active non-McCain primary candidate Huckabee couldn’t be better placed to put himself front and center in the news/talk cycle for a while yet (Romney in contrast is already coming across as even more of yesterday’s news than I’d guessed — keep in mind it was only a week ago that many were screeching he had to be voted for otherwise McCain would cause the republic to collapse).

The most interesting story of the day might be his alleged big bounce for the Virginia vote tomorrow — not enough to win but maybe enough to pull damn close. Following his victories this weekend — not to mention a spectacular Washington caucus disaster that has made the party there look either like a willing accomplice to arm-twisting or just plain incompetent. If you look over at HotAir, you get comments towards the Virginia poll like these:

“Getting nervous”?

That qualifies as understatement of the year.

Dear God, please, not Huck.

Splashman on February 11, 2008 at 1:34 PM

—

How sad is it when Huckabee has me rooting for…McCain.

amerpundit on February 11, 2008 at 1:37 PM

—

I really, really, really, really don’t want Huckabee to get Texas. I don’t think I could ever live down the embarrassment.

aero on February 11, 2008 at 1:39 PM

And these are some of the calmer ones.

Mind you, if you believe people like Frank Rich or Paul Krugman, the Democrats are already going to hell in a handbasket for a variety of reasons, and some are taking hope in the fact. But I suspect projection, as ever, plays a lot into this — one wants to hope one’s opponents are on the verge of collapse and recriminations, makes things easier for one’s own bunch.

Once again — months upon months to go. To be repeated daily if necessary, but it’s not to be ignored.

WordPress.com Political Blogger Alliance

That was the electoral week that was

So, these last few days, and these last two days in particular. Much like my reactions to Super Tuesday, I’ve only scattered thoughts at this point, because there’s been so much to trawl through — and in many cases, laugh at.

• Requiem for a lighter weight — I’m sorry, but this was patently obvious to anyone looking at this with a clear head: Mitt Romney was always a pipe dream. He was a useful running dog for a long time for people who wanted their movement conservative, thus one Mr. F. Thompson, in that people could point to Romney, say “Flip-flopper!” and embrace Thompson all the more. Then Thompson dropped out. Giuliani misfired. McCain pissed people off by existing, Huckabee pissed them off by not only existing but being affable about it. Romney became the great white hope — and boy, was he ever white — and the professional blowhard patrol decided maybe Hewitt had the right idea and fell into line. Then Romney collapsed and the following day Hewitt was the first to say ‘Never mind!’ Then McCain delivered some dull platitudes at CPAC while being well aware that the people who attend such things are a tiny minority of actual voters, a bunch of imported supporters clapped and a variety of observers, caught between realpolitik and their slavering over buzzwords, pretended that they’d always been at war with Eurasia. And now I hear the laughter.
• But nobody was more laughable than Dobson — this is pure footnote material but Dobson’s endorsement of Huckabee couldn’t have been more of a closing the barn door move if he had tried. Dead-enders and conspiracy theorists are already wondering whether a combination of Romney’s ‘suspended’ campaign and Huckabee’s expressed willingness to carry on and presumably score more delegates here and there could yet result in the upset of upsets at the convention. You know, I wouldn’t mind that, in fact if anything it would be the only possible conclusion to the nomination process that could be more screwy on the GOP side — that is unless everyone defects to Ron Paul. But I find both of these prospects a bit questionable at present. Anyway, if Dobson has inadvertantly killed off hopes that there’s going to be any sort of successor to Jerry Falwell as self-perceived Cardinal Richelieu, I’m all for it, but I suspect there will still be complaints.
• But what of the DEMOCRATS? — yes yes, things are tight, will go the distance, and so forth. Already the possibilities are multiplying — Puerto Rico will decide the nomination, the superdelegates will decide it, how Michigan and Florida are dealt with will decide it, Howard Dean will decide it. (Oh dear.) Again, though, I’m pretty sanguine about how things will shake down at present, and sanguine about other things right now, for now. Still almost nine months to go. I will note this, though — as this story suggests, had Michigan not moved its date, it would now be in a position to deliver a potentially very important decision on the nomination tomorrow. Instead that’s fallen to Washington, and this gives you an idea of what’s up when you see the crowd of people who were turned away from the Obama rally outside Key Arena — and this during a weekday:

  

  A friend who lives in Michigan has been clear about her annoyance and contempt for the Democratic power players in the state and how they’ve potentially screwed a lot of things up. Right now they’re probably thinking that themselves, several times over…though perhaps they too relish the role of kingmakers. So many people do, I’ve noticed.

• And ending with Romney again, the most ridiculous ‘wait, WHAT?’ comment of the week courtesy of David Frum, the man who brought you the concept of the axis of evil:
  

  Mr. Romney was made of very different stuff. He could enthrall a roomful of CEOs and economists with his mastery of economic details. Watching him absorb information was like watching an ultra-powerful wet vac deal with a garage spill. SHLOOOOOP –in it goes!

And in conclusion…I have a headache. But some aspirin will help.

WordPress.com Political Blogger Alliance

That was an interesting day yesterday

Very interesting. The fallout today even more so. No point in making this a unified piece, so some scattered ruminations:

• First and foremost, my own voting — which, as I’d mentioned, was just for the California propositions. As it stands, all results (aside from 91, which literally nobody supported) ended up being the opposite of what I voted for. Ah well, but such is a democracy, and honestly aside from 92 I wasn’t deeply invested in a win or loss, and even in 92’s case I’m disappointed but not heartbroken. I actually like the fact that while so many people were understandably going into feverish overdrive with their local and state campaigns for me it was just registering my formal thoughts on some measures I looked at with a calmly reflective eye, then walking about a hundred yards or so back to my complex. Hurrah for simplicities.
• And the current Democratic front runner is…uh…:
  

  In a surprise twist after a chaotic Super Tuesday, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) passed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) in network tallies of the number of delegates the candidates racked up last night.

  The Obama camp projects topping Clinton by nine delegates, 845 to 836.

  NBC News, which is projecting delegates based on the Democratic Party’s complex formula, figures Obama will wind up with 840 to 849 delegates, versus 829 to 838 for Clinton.

  Point being, Obama fans shouldn’t be crushed and Clinton fans shouldn’t rest on their laurels. Combine that with the upcoming caucuses and primaries — not to mention the wonderful bizarreness of the superdelegates — and I’m all for the sheer Byzantine skullduggery over the next few months.

• As for the GOP race, where to begin. Here’s the thing: anyone worried about a GOP victory somehow being a sure thing — even if Clinton proves to be the nominee, about which more in a bit — hasn’t spent time trawling through the sites where the right wing kvetches. And they’re doing more than kvetching now. Check out these three posts, ranging from the high-profile to the individual, and more specifically the comments attached to them as well:

  Hot Air: “As long as he’s got still got bank, Huck goes forward and Mitt probably goes nowhere.
  So let’s say he does drop out, leaving us with the race we’ve all dreamed of.”

  Polipundit: “If this is a McCain – Huckabee Republican Party, I want nothing to do with it. I’m re-registering as an independent tomorrow, and I’ll vote for Hillary or Obama over either one of those guys.”

  BabaluBlog: “You became buddies with Russ Feingold, Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman. You, sir, are not a conservative. You, sir, do not know the meaning of the word.”

  The exchanges in the comments in particular are telling — very telling. Civil war and a fracturing of the party, no, but discontent and impotent anger, plenty. The amount of despairing ‘it doesn’t matter, we’re going to lose no matter what’ comments are reflective of the wider trends that lead me to think that November, while hardly a foregone conclusion, is looking promising. When even Fred Barnes mentions, as he’s apparently done on TV this morning, that the country is turning towards a more liberal stance, the jig is likely up.

• This doesn’t mean that plenty of right-leaning commentators aren’t even now trying to mend fences and strategize as they can — some are, rapidly. Mark Levin’s an ungracious blowhard at the best of times, but he’s already posted this morning advancing a sensible argument in the circumstances: work on protecting GOP seats in the House rather than not voting at all. Levin also thinks McCain is toast in November no matter what. In contrast, Hugh Hewitt has again demonstrated his true colors — cut losses, suck up to the potential victor and pretend he hadn’t said anything prior to his current post. Some of the comments in response, noting his rather intemperate thoughts on one Senator McCain up until now, are highly entertaining. Still, Hewitt’s identified a key point — he or she who controls the White House controls the Supreme Court appointments, and those stakes ARE high. But right now I’m willing to bet on the upside. Which leads me to my almost-final point, an echo of previous ones:
• Right NOW I’m willing to bet on it. Now is not November. November is nine months away. A bunch of people just got pregnant last night — for all we know they were celebrating results a bit too enthusiastically — and their kids are all going to be born when the general election happens. Nine months previous to this Clinton was pretty much the guaranteed Democratic nominee, Giuliani left everyone in the dust, McCain was almost broke and Huckabee was this unknown-outside-of-Arkansas guy who played rock and roll when not preaching.

  Patently obvious points all. But consider this — the three presumptive front-runners, one GOP, two Democratic, are all currently serving United States Senators. Big votes are coming down the pike on a variety of points, while all sorts of unexpected jolts are possible. A Supreme Court justice dies or retires this year. Iraq suddenly erupts again. The economy takes a massive hit. A new Katrina?

  Playing the long game is the only one to play. And as a voter I can’t play it and neither can the entirety of my state anymore, because:

• We’re out:
  

  …it is at best questionable whether California will be a contested state in the general election.

  Democrats, easy winners of the last four presidential elections here, laugh off the suggestion that the state will be seriously contested come fall.

  “If the Democratic nominee has to spend a dime in California, we’re going to lose the election,” said Ben Austin, a Democratic strategist backing Barack Obama.

  Even Republicans say that for California to be, in November, the focus it has been in February would require a confluence of events: John McCain as the nominee, character as the defining issue and a decision that the cost of running a campaign here is worth the exceptional expense it would take.

  “To an objective observer, the trend is not the GOP’s friend in California,” said Don Sipple, a Republican veteran of national and statewide campaigns.

  Said confluence of events, meanwhile, rules out a lot of other factors, some of which I suggested above. I highly doubt they will all break the GOP’s way.

  And so in practical terms it’s done. Said it before — no gubernatorial election. No Senate elections. My local representative to Congress is a popular GOP lock. So to return to my initial point, for both the June and November elections I’ll be thinking about state and local measures, local races and candidates, things I literally have to live with day to day. So should you — that’s the whole point of being a participatory voter in this system, imperfect as it is.

WordPress.com Political Blogger Alliance

Amid all the Iowa caucus fallout, one thing

Obama winning is pretty interesting, Huckabee winning doesn’t surprise me at all. (And seeing the amounts of griping over that latter fact at the usual locations — NRO, Hewitt, RedState among others — is less surprising. Entertaining, though. Very entertaining. And I admit I have to wonder what a certain Mr. Limbaugh will say tomorrow…)

No, the one thing is the use of a particular phrase among certain conservative commentators — ‘identity politics’ — as applied to the GOP, negatively. Two samples:

Mark Steyn in NROville: “I’d also disagree with Ramesh’s idea that this was a good night for Christians reaching across the aisle. It would be truer to say that for a proportion of Huck’s followers there is no aisle: he’s their kind of Christian, and all the rest – foreign policy, health care, mass transit, whatever – is details. This is identity politics of a type you don’t often see on the Republican side.”

Bryan at Hot Air: “Depressing thought of the night. There’s little room to argue that Huckabee’s win wasn’t built on identity politics — he won decisively among voters who “share his values,” and Iowa’s GOPers are 60% evangelicals. On the other side, Obama beat Clinton across the board and among women, who ought to be her core. If she gets half the women’s vote, she wins. But she didn’t.

“So identity politics played a decisive role on the GOP side, and much less of a role on the Democrat side. That’s a reversal in the way the two parties tend to think and choose their respective leaders.”

There are other samples.

So why take note of it? Easy — the sheer…blindness at play. Utter, willful blindness, willful ignorance. These are the complaints either of fools or of practitioners of self-denial.

As long as I’ve been aware of the Presidential elections — dimly in 1980, clearly in 1984 and afterwards — ‘identity politics’ associating evangelicals with the GOP has been at work. Down the line. The equation of an activist, right-wing interpretation of American Protestant Christianity with support of the GOP wasn’t something that had evolved over time for me, it was a given. I could see it everywhere I looked, every time elections drew near. I knew who Jerry Falwell was before I was ten years old, and you can believe he wasn’t pulling for the Democrats. I knew who Pat Robertson was when he ran for President and he wasn’t a Democratic Party member. I knew who Karl Rove was targeting for getting out the vote for the current president. This wasn’t unknown or subtle stuff at all.

And now there’s this…this contemptible attempt at shock and surprise from Steyn, Hot Air, others over this result. It is an insult to the collective intelligence of American citizenry for them to pretend otherwise.

This is a bed that was long made. For the moment, at least, they’re lying in it, and they can’t pretend they didn’t notice where they were before this.

WordPress.com Political Blogger Alliance