Capitol Weekly reports on an interesting recent political dialogue in California.

Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, famously told the governor to “kiss my gay ass” at a Democratic fundraiser last month. Two days later, the governor responded in the veto message of one of Ammiano’s bills.

Earlier in the month, the San Francisco Democrat was at a boisterous Democratic fund-raiser when Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger stopped by to say hello. The governor, a guest of former Mayor Willie Brown, said a few words of greeting and extolled the virtues of bipartisanship. But Democrats, unhappy with the governor in their midst, booed loudly.

“Kiss my gay ass!” Ammiano shouted out.

Schwarzenegger smiled and left. But he was plotting his move.

On Oct. 11, the governor vetoed Ammiano’s AB 1176, with a seemingly innocuous and vague veto message.

Innocent enough. But when read on the governor’s Web site, the first letter of the last two paragraphs line up to spell out a clear, if crude message.

Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear said the hidden message was a “strange coincidence.”

“When you veto so many bills, something like this is bound to happen,” he said with a straight face.

John Aravosis, of leftwing AMERICAblog, scored a real journalistic coup, catching the RNC mocking Barack Obama with an imaginary Obama card, which Aravosis discovered could be used to buy “Anti-semitic, anti-Latino, and overtly pornographic literature – with pictures to boot.”

The bounders!

Except, wait… why! it’s all in Aravosis’s own head, as Right Wing News explains.

The website has a profanity filter in place that blocks certain words. Otherwise, all it does is pull up a search of that particular word on Amazon.com, which no one considers to be a racist or anti-semitic website.

In other words, what you’re seeing is a placebo effect for liberal bloggers. ...

It’s like a Rorschach test for the liberal psyche. You see a butterfly, they see Ronald Reagan beating a homeless guy to death with a baby panda.

(T)his has been controversial enough to make it all the way to The Politico in an article entitled, “RNC pulls game selling offensive items. ...

(T)he (real) story is that a bunch of childlike liberals, most of whom curse like sailors, typed words into a search engine that referenced Amazon and pretended to be shocked and offended by what pulled up.

Aravosis demanded an explanation from the Republican National Committee “for including ‘bondage,’ ‘anal,’ and ‘clitoris’.” Hilariously enough, Right Wing News has demonstrated that the RNC included no such words. All the racist and sexually charged search words came directly from Aravosis’s own dirty little mind and their only connection to the RNC page came via his typing them in himself.

Wow, talk about a story backfiring. A sanctimonious liberal hack takes a go at proving that Republicans are dirty-minded racist bigots, and winds up demonstrating before a huge audience exactly how self-righteous, prejudiced, dirty-minded, and basically incompetent he really is himself. Ouch!

John Aravosis Wikipedia entry

Not only were we offended at the sheer effrontery of McCain’s pick: How dare the Republicans proffer this déclassée piece of Wasilla trailer trash whose only claim to fame was that she didn’t exercise her right to choose? Where were her degrees from Smith or Barnard, her internships at PETA, the Brookings Institution, or the Young Pioneers? We were also outraged that the Stupid Party had just nominated a completely unqualified candidate nobody had ever heard of, a first-term governor of Alaska whose previous experience consisted of a small-town mayoralty. As opposed to our guy, Barry Soetoro of Mombasa, Djakarta, and Honolulu, a first-term senator nobody had ever heard of, whose previous experience had been as a state senator (D., Daley Machine) in Illinois. After eight long, illegitimate, lawless years of &*^%BUSH$#@! tyranny, how dare you contest this election?

And so the word went out, from that time and place: Eviscerate Sarah Palin like one of her field-dressed moose. Turn her life upside down. Attack her politics, her background, her educational history. Attack her family. Make fun of her husband, her children. Unleash the noted gynecologist Andrew Sullivan to prove that Palin’s fifth child was really her grandchild. Hit her with everything we have: Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, taking a beer-run break from her quixotic search for Mr. Right to drip venom on Sister Sarah; post-funny comic David Letterman, to joke about her and her daughters on national television; Katie Couric, the anchor nobody watches, to give this Alaskan interloper a taste of life in the big leagues; former New York Times hack Todd “Mr. Dee Dee Myers” Purdum, to act as an instrument of Graydon Carter’s wrath at Vanity Fair. Heck, we even burned her church down. Even after the teleological triumph of The One, the assault had to continue, each blow delivered with our Lefty SneerTM (viz.: Donny Deutsch yesterday on Morning Joe), until Sarah was finished.

You know what? It worked! McCain finally succumbed to his long-standing case of Stockholm Syndrome (“My friends, you have nothing to fear from an Obama presidency”), Tina Fey turned Palin into a see-Russia-from-my-house joke, “conservative” useful idiots like Peggy Noonan and Kathleen Parker hatched her, and finally Sarah cried No más and walked away. If we could, we’d cut off her head and mount it on a wall at Tammany Hall, except there is no more Tammany Hall unless you count Obama’s Tony Rezko–financed home in Chicago. And it took only eight months — heck, Sarah couldn’t even have another kid in the time it took us to destroy her. That’s the Chicago way!

Read the whole thing.

I think Republicans today should be less interested in moving toward the center and more interested in running against the center. Here I mean a different “center”—not a midpoint on an opinion spectrum, but rather the centralized government institutions being created and strengthened every day. This is a center that is taking over functions fulfilled in a decentralized way by private individuals, firms and markets.

This center includes the Treasury, with its $700 billion of TARP funds voted last fall to purchase toxic assets from financial institutions and used instead to quasi-nationalize banks and preserve union benefits for employees and retirees of bankrupt auto companies. It includes the Federal Reserve, which has been vastly increasing the money supply. It includes a federal government whose $787 billion economic stimulus has so far failed to lower the unemployment rate from where the government projected it would be without the stimulus package.

To govern is to choose, as John F. Kennedy said, and those in charge of these new centralized institutions are making choices that inevitably favor some and hurt others. Unsurprisingly, the politically well connected tend to get the favors. Banks forced to take government money are now blocked from paying it back and in the meantime must direct funds where the government wants them to go.

Chrysler and General Motors bondholders have their property redistributed to the United Auto Worker retiree health-care fund (how the retirees help the companies make cars profitably is left unclear). Stimulus funds go to state governments with lavish contracts with public employee unions. And out of every dollar that goes to a union, a certain number of cents make their way to the Democratic Party.

Read the whole thing.

Jonah Goldberg reminds readers that the voters threw out the GOP majority in Congress in 2006 because of corruption scandals. But replacing them with democrats has not proven to be a very effective cure, has it?

Democrats took back Congress in 2006 and the presidency in 2008 in no small part because of their ability to bang their spoons on their high chairs about what they called the Republican “culture of corruption.” Their choreographed outrage was coordinated with the precision of a North Korean missile launch pageant. And, to be fair, they had a point. The GOP did have its legitimate embarrassments. California Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham and lobbyist Jack Abramoff were fair game, and so was Rep. Mark Foley, the twisted Florida congressman who allegedly wanted male congressional pages cleaned and perfumed and brought to his tent, as it were.

Of course, it wasn’t as if Democrats were without sin. Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson was indicted on fraud, bribery and corruption charges in 2007, after an investigation unearthed, among other things, $90,000 in his freezer. Then-New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was busted in a prostitution scandal.

But that’s all yesterday’s news. Let’s look at the here and now.

Read the whole thing.

Byron York published a nice tribute to Ronald Reagan recently in the Washington Examiner. The GOP would be well-advised to ignore people named Bush and to return to fidelity to the legacy of Ronald Reagan.

You drive up a steep, rough and winding road to reach Ronald Reagan’s ranch in the Santa Ynez mountains. For eight years, from 1981 to 1989, this place north of Santa Barbara was the Western White House; Reagan spent nearly a year of his time in office here. Now, what he called Rancho del Cielo is pretty much deserted.

But the ranch, tended by a lone caretaker, is still much like it was when Reagan was alive. It’s not open to the public; these days, the old adobe house and 688 surrounding acres are owned and carefully maintained by the conservative Young America’s Foundation. The group doesn’t have the staff or resources to conduct public tours, but they were kind enough to take me on a visit one afternoon last week.

The first thing that strikes you as you approach the house is how modest it is. The main part of the building was constructed in 1871. Even after Reagan added a couple of rooms when he bought it in 1975, the whole house only measured about 1,500 square feet. ...

The house is nestled on the edge of a mountainside meadow. It’s idyllic, but if you drive about five minutes away, you’ll find another spot on the property, at the top of a hill, where the president could have built a new home, perhaps an impressive monument to himself, with fabulous views of the Pacific to the west and the valley to the east. Instead, Reagan preferred the little house by the meadow.

Walking around the ranch, you can’t help thinking about the current Republican party and its relationship to Reagan.

The Obama Administration’s constant and ever-increasing attacks on Rush Limbaugh demonstrate perfectly clearly that, at this point in time, there is no more effective and articulate representative of Conservative political thought in America than the genial and talented radio talk show celebrity and that Rush is the single most effective source of opposition to the radical democrat agenda. Rush Limbaugh is the Republican leader that democrats most fear, and decidedly not Michael Steele.

Barack Obama has himself demonstrated in the most effective possible way the ability of the combination of eloquence and personal charm to substitute for a meaningful resume featuring either significant occupancy of, or achievement in, high office.

The conclusion is unmistakable. We should, at once, start grooming Rush Limbaugh as the next GOP presidential candidate. Limbaugh should run for a governorship or senate seat in 2010, and proceed, in precisely the way Barack Obama did, to let his newly acquired seat grow cobwebs, while he pursues higher office.

Running an inexperienced outsider candidate is bound to be something of a long shot, and Rush has a few vulnerabilities, but just compare Limbaugh’s essentially trivial prescription drug scandal with Barack Obama’s raft load of unsavory associations. The press will not treat Rush as clemently as they did the Kenyan Caliban, but Rush Limbaugh has a real genius for counter-framing an issue. Rush can defend himself.

Rush’s sometimes slightly transgressive sense of humor and his entertainer’s style represent admittedly a greater handicap. Americans want their politicians to provide a primary note of dignity and gravitas. But there is time still for Rush to strike a different tone, to present a modified version of himself. Besides, the continuing economic crisis and the practically assured foreign humiliations and debacles that the current administration will inevitably produce are bound to provoke a passionate desire for change on the part of the electorate so strong that any credible and effective GOP candidate will be starting out with a strong hand.

The White House is trying to link the GOP to Rush. Let’s really link them.

Never Yet Melted endorses Rush Limbaugh for President in 2012.

In American politics, the distinction between populism and elitism is… subdivided into cultural and economic populism and elitism. And for at least the last forty years, the two parties have broken down distinctly along this double axis. The Republican party has been the party of cultural populism and economic elitism, and the Democrats have been the party of cultural elitism and economic populism. Republicans tend to identify with the traditional values, unabashedly patriotic, anti-cosmopolitan, non-nuanced Joe Sixpack, even as they pursue an economic policy that aims at elite investor-driven growth. Democrats identify with the mistreated, underpaid, overworked, crushed-by-the-corporation “people against the powerful,” but tend to look down on those people’s religion, education, and way of life. Republicans tend to believe the dynamism of the market is for the best but that cultural change can be dangerously disruptive; Democrats tend to believe dynamic social change stretches the boundaries of inclusion for the better but that economic dynamism is often ruinous and unjust.

Both economic and cultural populism are politically potent, but in America, unlike in Europe, cultural populism has always been much more powerful. Americans do not resent the success of others, but they do resent arrogance, and especially intellectual arrogance. Even the poor in our country tend to be moved more by cultural than by economic appeals. It was this sense, this feeling, that Sarah Palin channeled so effectively. Her appearance on the scene unleashed populist energies that McCain had not tapped, and she both fed them and fed off them. She spent the bulk of her time at Republican rallies assailing the cultural radicalism of Barack Obama and his latte-sipping followers, who, she occasionally suggested, were not part of the “the real America” she saw in the adoring throngs standing before her. Palin channeled these cultural energies more by what she was than by what she said or did, which contributed mightily to the odd disjunction between her professional resume and her campaign presence and impact. ...

Palin never actually boasted of ignorance or explicitly scorned learning or ideas. Rather, the implicit charge was that Palin’s failure to speak the language and to share the common points of reference of the educated upper tier of American society essentially rendered her unfit for high office.

This form of intellectual elitism is actually fairly new in America, though it has been a dominant feature of European society since World War II. It is not as exclusive or as anti-democratic as cultural elitism is in other countries, because entry to the American intellectual elite is, in principle, open to all who pursue it. And pursuing it is not as difficult as it once was, at least for the middle class. Indeed, most of this elite’s prominent members hail from middle-class origins and not from traditional bastions of American privilege and wealth. They can speak of growing up in Scranton, even as they raise their noses at dirty coal and hunting season.

Nor is membership in the intellectual upper class determined by diplomas hanging on the wall. Palin could have gained entrance easily, despite the fact that she holds a mere degree in journalism from the University of Idaho. Although the intellectual elite is deeply shaped by our leading institutions of higher learning, belonging to it is more the result of shared assumptions and attitudes. It is more cultural than academic, more NPR than PhD. In Washington, many politicians who have not risen through the best of universities work hard for years to master the language and the suppositions of this upper tier, and to live carefully within the bounds prescribed by its view of the world.

Applied to politics, the worldview of the intellectual elite begins from an unstated assumption that governing is fundamentally an exercise of the mind: an application of the proper mix of theory, expertise, and intellectual distance that calls for knowledge and verbal fluency more than for prudence born of life’s hard lessons.

Sarah Palin embodied a very different notion of politics, in which sound instincts and valuable life experiences are considered sources of knowledge at least the equal of book learning. She is the product of an America in which explicit displays of pride in intellect are considered unseemly, and where physical prowess and moral constancy are given a higher place than intellectual achievement. She was in the habit of stressing these faculties instead—a habit that struck many in Washington as brutishness.

This is why Palin was seen as anti-intellectual when, properly speaking, she was simply non-intellectual. What she lacked was not intelligence—she is, clearly, highly intelligent—but rather the particular set of assumptions, references, and attitudes inculcated by America’s top twenty universities and transmitted by the nation’s elite cultural organs.

Many of those (including especially those on the Right) who reacted badly to Palin on intellectual grounds understand themselves to be advancing the interests of lower-middle-class families similar to Palin’s own family and to many of those in attendance at her rallies who greeted her arrival on the scene as a kind of deliverance. But it is hard to escape the conclusion that while these members of the intellectual elite want the government to serve the interests of such people first and foremost, they do not want those people to hold the levers of power.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Bird Dog’s Best Essays of the Year.

An on-scene correspondent reports an amusing exchange via graffiti found at the Owl Shop:

“F*** Republicans”
and underneath in different script, of course:
“...because Democrats just lie there unresponsive.”
———————————————————
Hat tip to Angie Chamberland.

National Journal:

By one estimate …, some 131.2 million Americans cast ballots for president this time around, or 61.6 percent of eligible voters. That’s a high turnout, to be sure, and represents a 1.5-percentage-point increase over the 60.1 percent turnout rate of 2004, according to Michael McDonald, a professor of government at George Mason University who tracks voting.

But it’s still below the 62.5 percent rate from 1968, and falls far short of the 65.7 percent record set in 1908—a record that earlier this year, McDonald suggested Americans just might approach.

Some have seized on the absence of more dramatic increases as evidence that this year’s voter surge was just another overhyped media myth. A closer look at the data, however, suggests plenty of historic trends. Turnout increased most sharply for certain blocs—especially 18-to-29-year-olds, African-Americans and Latinos. Turnout also surged more in certain regions of the country, such as the South. And there’s evidence that some GOP voters simply stayed home—driving down overall turnout.

“It is going to put a ceiling on your turnout if you only get one side to vote,” said Peter Levine, director of Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, or CIRCLE.

Among other explanations, GOP nominee John McCain does not appear to have put together as formidable a ground operation as George W. Bush did in 2004. Whereas 24 percent of voters told exit pollsters they had been contacted by the Bush campaign four years ago, only 18 percent said the same of McCain this year, noted McDonald. By contrast, 26 percent of voters said they’d heard from President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign, the same percentage as reported contacts from Democratic nominee John Kerry’s team four years ago.

“It looks as though the McCain campaign did not do as good job of doing voter mobilization as the Bush campaign did in 2004,” McDonald said. “It might explain why Republican turnout seemed to be down in this election, particularly if we look at some of these battleground states.”

I agree with him. The threat to liberty these days is not coming from bible thumpers. It’s coming from bien pensant liberals.

Social conservatism is taking a beating lately. Not only did it lose in the recent elections, it is being blamed for the Republican losses. If only the religious right would get off the Republican party’s back, the GOP could win like it is supposed to again. I beg to differ.

I’m anything but a social conservative. In nine presidential elections, I voted Libertarian in six. I am a hard core “limited government” conservative/libertarian; I want government out of my pocket-book and out of my bedroom. Concerning my religion, it’s none of your business, but I’m somewhere in the lapsed-Catholic-deist-agnostic-atheist spectrum; let’s just call it agnostic.

Having said all that, I have no problem with “social conservatives” or the “religious right” and their supposed influence on the Republican party. I base this not on the Bible or historical authority, but on the love of liberty and the evidence of my own eyes.

Who are the true liberty killers?

The most obvious point to me is that it is the do-gooding liberals who are telling us all what we can and can’t do. The religious right usually just wants to be left alone, either to home school, pray in public or not get their children vaccinated with who-knows-what. Inasmuch as the “religious right” wants some things outlawed, they have failed miserably for at least the last 50 years. Abortion, sodomy, and pornography are now all Constitutional rights. However, praying in public school is outlawed, based on that same Constitution.

Just think for a moment about the things you are actually forced to do or are prevented from doing. Seat belts. Motorcycle helmets. Bicycle helmets. Smoking. Gun purchase and ownership restrictions. Mandatory vaccines for your children. Car emissions inspections. Campaign ad and contribution restrictions. Saying a prayer at a public school graduation or football game. Trash separation and recycling. Keeping the money you earned. Gas tax. Telephone tax. Income tax. FICA withholding. Fill in this form. Provide ID.

For the most part, the list just cited is post-1960. Neither Pat Robertson nor James Dobson ever forced any of that on us.

The picture is of a solid Democratic win, but not the tsunami some had expected. Obama won the popular vote by a solid, but not crushing, margin of slightly less than six percent (52.4-46.5). Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole by a significantly greater margin and even greater relative percentage (49.25-40.71), and George Bush by a slightly lower margin, but higher relative percentage (43.01-37.45). Bush, meanwhile, beat Dukakis by a larger margin, 53.4 to 45.6. The Democrats picked up about twenty House seats, on the low end of the expected range. And, as noted above, they seem likely to pick up five or six Senate seats,which would make the Senate races either 18-16 in favor of the Democrats, or tied at 17-17, again on the low end of the expected range.

It would have taken a miracle, or at least a match between a really unattractive democrat who made many mistakes and a dynamic Republican with Reagansque charisma, to produce a GOP win this year with the economy in a mess and poor, clueless George W. Bush hanging around the elephant’s neck like a dead albatross.

Considering all the factors destining this to be the democrat’s year, it could have been much worse.

I’ve just come back from a weekend in Vermont — and here’s how I understand it: Modestly off people — “real Vermonters,” as some people say — are voting for McCain and Palin. Comfortably off people, such as those who own ski chalets, are voting for Obama and Biden. And the following has been frequently noted about the city of my residence, New York: The rich are voting Democratic. And those who work for them — driving cars, cleaning rooms, and so on — are voting Republican.

Yet, when I was growing up, the Republican party was always called the party of the rich, and it still suffers from that label. Over and over, that which I was taught is contradicted by the evidence of my lived experience.

Even the Washington Post notices:

Now the good news for Republicans: You are happier than Democrats. You always have been, and you probably always will be.

Never mind that your presidential candidate is sinking in the polls while your president plumbs historic depths of popular scorn and your free market squeals for intervention while your investments evaporate on Wall Street. You are not just happier than the other guys, but more of you are very happy indeed, according to new survey results published yesterday by the Pew Research Center.

The pollsters were in the field asking about happiness this month, a period when economic news was gloomy for everybody and presidential campaign news seemed especially baleful for Republicans. Yet they found 37 percent of Republicans are “very happy,” compared with 25 percent of Democrats; 51 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats are “pretty happy”; and 9 percent of Republicans are “not too happy,” compared with 20 percent of Democrats.
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The partisan happiness gap—unbroken for nearly four decades—is impervious to electoral ups and downs. It has something to do with worldview. ...

Brooks says a lot hinges on the answer to this question: Do you believe that hard work and perseverance can overcome disadvantages? Conservatives are more likely to say yes.

Pew found that Democrats are more likely to say that success in life is mostly determined by outside forces. Republicans lean toward thinking that success is determined by one’s own efforts.

The hypothesis: Those who think they can control their destinies are happier.

Read the whole thing.

Ross Douthat argues that a more successful McCain campaign with better poll results would have stiffened the spines of those representatives of the center-right punditocracy currently finding all sorts of reasons (“first class temperament”) requiring them to desert the Republican cause and make peace with a Marxist democrat.

Suppose that you accept the most cynical account of, say, Peggy Noonan’s uncertainty about whom to vote for in this election, or Christopher Buckley’s Obama endorsement – that they’re just craven, self-interested bandwagon jumpers who want to keep getting invited to all those swanky cocktail parties I keep hearing about. Suppose that you regard every right-of-center writer – or single-issue fellow traveler with the Bush Republicans, in the case of Christopher Hitchens – who’s publicly hurled brickbats at the McCain campaign as a quisling and a coward, a stooge for liberalism and a rat fleeing a fast-sinking ship. In such circumstances, what’s the best course of action – denouncing the rats, or trying to figure out why the hell the ship is sinking? Even if Brooks and Noonan and Buckley and Dreher and Kathleen Parker and David Frum and Heather Mac Donald and Bruce Bartlett and George Will and on and on – note the ideological diversity in the ranks of conservatives who aren’t Helping The Team these days – are all just snobs and careerists who quit or cavil or cover their asses when the going gets tough and their “seat at the table” is threatened, an American conservative movement that consists entirely of those pundits with the rock-hard testicular fortitude required to never take sides against the family seems like a pretty small tent at this point. And if I were Hanson or Levin or Steyn I’d be devoting a little less time to ritual denunciations of heretics and RINOs, and at least a little more time to figuring out how to build the sort of ship that will make the rats of the DC/NY corridor want to scramble back on board, however much it makes you sick to have them back. Who knows? It might just be the sort of ship that swing-state voters will want to climb on board as well.

Douthat is right in observing that, when you’re winning, the wimps, opportunists, and trimmers have neither need nor incentive to take French leave, but, alas! no political party, no philosophical school of thought can always win. Sometimes fate and circumstances are against you. Sometimes victory in a particular contest, in a particular election year, is impossible. And it is at those unfortunate times that we get to discover that in the contemporary political wars not everyone is another Roland or another Leonidas.

Read the whole thing.

USATODAY:

In the new poll, taken Friday through Sunday, McCain leads Obama by 54%-44% among those seen as most likely to vote.

Before the convention, Republicans by 47%-39% were less enthusiastic than usual about voting. Now, they are more enthusiastic by 60%-24%, a sweeping change that narrows a key Democratic advantage. Democrats report being more enthusiastic by 67%-19%.

As predicted, Sarah Palin delivered a star performance at the GOP Convention last night. She, with some help from Rudolph Giuliani, succeeded in turning the tables on the democrat punditocracy and making Obama’s lack of achievements, inexperience, and empty rhetoric the main issue of the campaign right now.

Giuliani’s line about how the democrat candidate talks about fighting for you, but there’s only one man in this race who has really fought for you was particularly a killer, as was his elaborate act of astonishment as he pretended to scrutinize Obama’s resume, and did a double-take over “community organizer.” Americans know what a “community organizer” is. A
community organizer is some upper middle class kid from an elite college who shows up in town to make trouble on behalf of the bums, because he understands that they are really victims of society and he is nobler and more sensitive than the rest of us.

Sarah Palin’s speech, personality, and amusing background seem likely to prove irresistible to the press. It’s her turn to be flavor-of-the-month. Her selection by McCain was nothing short of political genius, striking directly at the Obama phenomenon with what amounts to the perfect anti-Obama, an equally extraordinary personality able to come from nowhere directly to the center of the national political stage, who is also very articulate and charismatic, but female, authentically blue-collar, and (as Mark Steyn aptly put it) not only American, but hyper-American. She is the perfect foil to Obama. As a woman, she is breaking the glass ceiling Obama kept intact over Hillary’s head. She represents precisely the working class Americans essential for there to be any hope of democrats winning a presidential election, and she is not a Punahoa-cum-Harvard missionary come to save them, she is one of them. She is strongly associated with a series of diametrically opposite positions from the democrat party’s and Obama’s, with powerful blue-collar appeal: Right-to-Life, Gun Ownership, Hunting, Drilling for Oil.

How was it Karl Rove described Joe Biden? “Blowhard doofus,” wasn’t it? Biden is a self-congratulatory imbecile, with a conspicuous mean streak, who has a serious habit of putting his foot in his mouth. Sarah Palin debating Joe Biden? I wouldn’t want to be the democrat campaign guru trying to prep Biden for that one. It’s likely to get very ugly for Biden.

Democrats, in the final analysis, have nobody to blame but themselves. The US is a Center-Right country, featuring (let me whisper it to you, liberals) a predominantly average population which pays taxes and works for a living. You guys keep nominating the most liberal guy you can find, an elitist representing your own base of birkenstock-wearing socialists, tree-huggers, and Hollywood do-gooders. You think America vitally needs to be made a great deal more like France. You think we need to punish those hicks, rubes, and bitter gun-owners for their lack of fashion sense, and we need to make this a kinder, better world by taking money from the ignorant yahoos who worked for it and giving it to the needy at home and abroad. All of this seems as obvious to you as your own moral and cultural superiority to the uncouth primitives with whom an unkind Providence has condemned you to share the country. After all, they stole America from the Indians and they are guilty of the crime of Slavery, the central issue of human history, which invalidates their institutions, their way of life, and everything they stand for. Only through your leadership, by a series of essential sacrifices to the appropriate causes, can this wardrobe-and-cuisine-challenged, morally-disastrous nation possibly be saved.

All in all, for some mysterious reason, this particular viewpoint is less than attractive to ordinary Americans, and you keep losing elections.

This year, we have a war hero and beauty queen governor (who hunts) and you have a community organizer novice Senator with a record of two autobiographies and a speech running with the vainest and most arrogant airhead in the same body by his side. Your Crow Indian scouts are already painting their faces and singing their death songs, General Custer.

Congressional Republicans actually find a winning issue, so what happens next?

Why, naturally, the Third Senator from New York, Lindsey Graham arrives with four other weak-kneed RINOs accompanied by a matching set of five democrats to propose a bipartisan sell-out which would protect the democrats from Republican attacks. Sheer genius! Isn’t it obvious just whom John McCain ought to be picking as his running-mate?

Speaking for real Republicans, Kimberly Strassel had a few choice words about all this.

It’s taken time, but Sen. McCain and his party have finally found—in energy—an issue that’s working for them. Riding voter discontent over high gas prices, the GOP has made antidrilling Democrats this summer’s headlines.

Their enthusiasm has given conservative candidates a boost in tough races. And Mr. McCain has pressured Barack Obama into an energy debate, where the Democrat has struggled to explain shifting and confused policy proposals.

Still, it was probably too much to assume every Republican would work out that their side was winning this issue. And so, last Friday, in stumbled Sens. Lindsey Graham, John Thune, Saxby Chambliss, Bob Corker and Johnny Isakson—alongside five Senate Democrats. This “Gang of 10” announced a “sweeping” and “bipartisan” energy plan to break Washington’s energy “stalemate.” What they did was throw every vulnerable Democrat, and Mr. Obama, a life preserver.

That’s because the plan is a Democratic giveaway. New production on offshore federal lands is left to state legislatures, and then in only four coastal states. The regulatory hurdles are huge. And the bill bars drilling within 50 miles of the coast—putting off limits some of the most productive areas. Alaska’s oil-rich Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is still a no-go.

The highlight is instead $84 billion in tax credits, subsidies and federal handouts for alternative fuels and renewables. The Gang of 10 intends to pay for all this in part by raising taxes on . . . oil companies! The Sierra Club couldn’t have penned it better. And so the Republican Five has potentially given antidrilling Democrats the political cover they need to neutralize energy through November.

I was talking to a friend of mine’s little girl the other day. I asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up and she replied, “I want to be President!” Both of her parents are liberal democrats and were standing there. So then I asked her, “If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?”

She replied, “I’d give houses to all the homeless people.”

“Wow – what a worthy goal.” I told her, “You don’t have to wait until you’re President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow, pull weeds, and sweep my porch, and I’ll pay you $50. Then I’ll take you over to the grocery store where this homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward a new house.”

Since she is only 6, she thought that over for a few seconds. While her Mom glared at me, she looked me straight in the eye and asked, “Why doesn’t the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?”

And I said, “Welcome to the Republican Party.”

Her folks still aren’t talking to me.

Gasoline is $4+ a gallon. It takes over $70 to fill-up my car, and around $10 more to put some gas in the plastic jerrican for the lawnmower.

Congressional Republicans want to pass a bill to do something about this by freeing up more domestic production. They have the votes, but democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refuses to allow a vote, has adjourned the House of Representatives for a five-week vacation, and turned the lights off in the Capitol in an effort to evict Republicans who have stayed on the floor in protest.

As Patrick Ruffin notes, a watershed has occurred in which Republicans are succeeding in mobilizing a grassroots protest effort using the Internet.

The prime tool for organizing currently is Twitter free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates, known as “tweets,” text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Sign the petition.

1:38 Call Congress Back video

The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52%) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category.

t’s just a shame that there is no Republican leadership whatsoever out there to offer a meaningful alternative.

Women’s Wear Daily profiles the Republican Party’s female Celtic bard, noting that she has recently developed a certain cross-over appeal.

Ordinarily, Noonan loves giving interviews. She particularly loves boys with political roundtables, and boys with political roundtables love her back. George Stephanopoulos, Chris Matthews and the late Tim Russert have all invited Noonan on air repeatedly, partly because she is a good counterpoint to people on the left and partly because she is reliably theatrical and can be counted on to flatter her host. Nearly any time a question is directed at her, she will turn her head slightly, look off into the distance and do what might be described as a long-studied blink, followed by the signature Noonan double-nod of agreement. It’s a dramatic gesture that says that her host is so unbelievably smart he’s caused Noonan to consider, for the first time ever, something that is, in fact, her job to consider all day long. Then comes her response, which more often than not begins with a sigh and is then followed by a Dale Carnegie-esque incantation of the host’s name. Such as, “Here’s the thing, Chris” or “I’ll tell you the truth, George.” As if Noonan and he are best, best friends and she is going to tell him (and the whole audience) a big secret. “It’s full-body communicating,” says Stephanopoulos. ...

in 2005, Noonan broke with President George W. Bush’s administration over the Iraq war, among other things, and it gave her an air of cross-partisan credibility going into the current presidential season. Then, as Clinton stumbled in the Democratic primaries, Noonan found herself being embraced by an unlikely coalition of Obama supporters and disaffected Republicans to whom she was no longer a boilerplate conservative, but an iconoclast who’d turned on President Bush and been vindicated by anti-Clinton sentiment that was growing among Democrats. What’s more, being a woman gave Noonan a freedom to write critically about Clinton with little risk of being labeled sexist by the senator’s supporters.

“With Peggy Noonan, not only did I share many of her views about the election, I felt she was coming at it in a fair-minded way,” says New York Magazine columnist and Obama supporter Kurt Andersen. “It wasn’t like Bill Kristol, who you know what he’s going to say before he says it.”

“This moment was made for her,” Stephanopoulos says by phone. “She has a special feel for Hillary, though I’m sure it’s not one Clinton supporters always appreciate. And she’s had tremendous insight into what has been a troubled period for the Republican party. It gave her an opportunity to show some independence.”“This moment was made for her.­­”— George StephanopoulosOr, as William Greider of the left-wing staple The Nation puts it: “She’s come face-to-face with what happened to the Republican party and acknowledged it rather than pretending it’s not so or blaming the Democrats. I think she’s terrific.”

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that a sizeable chunk of the left eventually fell in love with (or at least got a crush on) Noonan

And, perhaps predictably, some of Noonan’s critics already are predicting the end of her comeback. Last week, the political blog Wonkette ran a post about her first post-primary election column, saying: “Our girlfriend Peggy Noonan has been more enjoyable than usual this year, as a tragically drawn-out Democratic primary battle provided her with endless opportunities to touch herself while Barack Obama spoke pretty things….Now, that tortured eloquence has vanished.”

Not so fast.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Arnold Jones (posed as American Gothic farmer, in tone of belligerent stupidity): “Because all other countries are inferior to us.”

Trudy Jones (American Gothic female): “We should start as many wars as it takes to keep it that way.”

3:28 video

The GOP can’t take “safe” seats for granted when Democrats run conservatives who distance themselves from their national party leaders. The string of defeats should cure Republicans of the habit of simply shouting “liberal! liberal! liberal!” in hopes of winning an election. They need to press a reform agenda full of sharp contrasts with the Democrats.

Why is it tough sledding for Republicans? Public revulsion at GOP scandals was a large factor in the party’s 2006 congressional defeat. Some brand damage remains, as does the downward pull of the president’s approval ratings. But the principal elements are the Iraq war and a struggling economy. ...

What is clear is that John McCain and Republicans will prevail only if they convince voters that there are profound consequences at stake in Iraq, and that more and better jobs will follow from the GOP’s approach of lowering taxes, opening trade, and ending earmarks and other pro-growth policies.

Republicans also face challenges with the young (whose opposition to the war and attraction to Mr. Obama have made them Democrats) and Hispanics (the fastest-growing part of the electorate). A recent survey offers some encouraging news. Mr. McCain is polling as high as 41% with Hispanics – close to President Bush’s 44% in 2004.

Democrats shouldn’t be complacent after Tuesday. Their problems start with Mr. Obama’s 41-point loss to Hillary Clinton in West Virginia. Mr. Obama lost the primary because the rejection of him by blue-collar voters is hardening. The last Democrat to win the presidency without carrying the Mountain State was Woodrow Wilson in 1916.

Barely half of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters in Indiana, North Carolina and West Virginia say they’re ready to support Mr. Obama against Mr. McCain today. Without solid support from these voters, Mr. Obama will be in trouble in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, West Virginia, Wisconsin and other battlegrounds.

So far, Mr. Obama owes his success to elites captivated by his personality. But in the general election, most folks will care more about a candidate’s philosophy and stand on the issues. And what’s considered mainstream values in a general election is different than in a primary.

Rove’s conclusion is that GOP can win, but it will require persuading voters that difference in philosophy between our candidates and theirs matters. John McCain is not exactly the ideal Republican spokesman for principled Conservatism.

Having used his bully pulpit on AM Radio to persuade Republicans to cross over and vote for Hillary in several of the democrat primaries, a strategic political move which he has dubbed “Operation Chaos,” Rush Limbaugh, during his radio program yesterday, paused from mocking the Mainstream media, to hint that he may continue his Operation Chaos strategy in the general election, advising Republicans to crossover again to vote for John McCain.

Noemie Emery, in the Weekly Standard, relishes the ironies of this year’s democrat party nomination battle.

‘Strange new respect’ is the term coined by Tom Bethell, an unhappy conservative, to describe the press adulation given those who drift leftward, those who grow “mature,” “wise,” and “thoughtful” as they cause apoplexy in right-wingers, and leave their old allies behind. But no new respect has been quite so peculiar as that given by some on the right to Hillary Clinton—since 1992 their ultimate nightmare—whose possible triumph in this year’s election has been the source of their most intense fear. Lately, however, a strange thing has happened: A tactical hope to see her campaign flourish—to keep the brawl going and knock dents in Obama—has changed to, at least in some cases, a grudging respect for the lady herself. ...

..she began to rouse outrage in parts of what once was her base. It is a truism that liberals think people are formed by exterior forces around them and are helpless before them, while conservatives think individuals make their own destiny. Liberals love victims and want them to stay helpless, so they can help them, with government programs; while conservatives love those who refuse to be victims, and get up off the canvas and fight. Hillary may still be a nanny-state type in some of her policies, but in her own life she seems more and more of a Social Darwinian, refusing to lose, and insisting on shaping her destiny. If the fittest survive, she intends to be one of them. This takes her part of the way towards a private conversion. She is acting like one of our own.

If this weren’t enough to make right-wing hearts flutter, Hillary has another brand-new advantage: She is hated on all the right fronts. The snots and the snark-mongers now all despise her, along with the trendies, the glitzies; the food, drama, and lifestyle critics, the beautiful people (and those who would join them), the Style sections of all the big papers; the slick magazines; the above-it-all pundits, who have looked down for years on the Republicans and on the poor fools who elect them, and now sneer even harder at her. The New York Times is having hysterics about her. At the New Republic, Jonathan Chait (who inspired the word “Chaitred” for his pioneer work on Bush hatred) has transferred his loathing of the 43rd president intact and still shining to her. “She should now go gentle into the political night,” he advised in January. “Go Already!” he repeated in March, when she had failed to act on his suggestion. “No Really, You Should Go,” he said in April after she won Pennsylvania, which made her even less likely to take his advice. “Now that loathing seems a lot less irrational,” he wrote of the right wing’s prior distaste for both the Clintons. “We just really wish they’d go away.”

And what caused this display of intense irritation? She’s running a right-wing campaign. She’s running the classic Republican race against her opponent, running on toughness and use-of-force issues, the campaign that the elder George Bush ran against Michael Dukakis, that the younger George Bush waged in 2000 and then again against John Kerry, and that Ronald Reagan—”The Bear in the Forest”—ran against Jimmy Carter and Walter F. Mondale. And she’s doing it with much the same symbols.

“Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11,” the New York Times has been whining. “A Clinton television ad, torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook, evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war, and 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden . . . declaring in an interview with ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president,” she would wipe the aggressor off the face of the earth. “Clinton is saying almost exactly the same things about Obama that McCain is,” Chait lamented: “He’s inexperienced, lacking in substance,” unprepared to stand up to the world. She has said her opponent is ill-prepared to answer the phone, should it ring in the White House at three in the morning. Her ads are like the ones McCain would be running in her place, and they’ll doubtless show up in McCain’s ads should Obama defeat her. She has said that while she and McCain are both prepared to be president, Obama is not. They act, he makes speeches. They take heat, while he tends to wilt or to faint in the kitchen. He may even throw like a girl.

And better—or worse—she is becoming a social conservative, a feminist form of George Bush. Against an opponent who shops for arugula, hangs out with ex-Weathermen, and says rural residents cling to guns and to God in unenlightened despair at their circumstances, she has rushed to the defense of religion and firearms, while knocking back shots of Crown Royal and beer. Her harsh, football-playing Republican father (the villain of the piece, against whom she rebelled in earlier takes on her story) has become a role model, a working class hero, whose name she evokes with great reverence. Any day now, she’ll start talking Texan, and cutting the brush out in Chappaqua or at her posh mansion on Embassy Row.

In the right-wing conspiracy, this adaptation has not gone unobserved. “Hillary has shown a Nixonian resilience and she’s morphing into Scoop Jackson,” runs one post on National Review’s blog, The Corner:

She’s entering the culture war as a general. All of this has made her a far more formidable general election candidate. She’s fighting the left and she’s capturing the center. She’s denounced MoveOn.org. She’s become the Lieberman of the Democratic Party. The left hates her and treats her like Lieberman. . . . Obama is distancing himself from Wright and Hillary is getting in touch with O’Reilly. The culture war has come to the Democratic Party.

She might run to the right of McCain, if she makes it to the general election, and get the votes of rebellious conservatives. Or she, Lieberman, and McCain could form a pro-war coalition, with all of them running to pick up the phone when it rings in the small hours. The New York Times and the rest of the left would go crazy. Respect can’t get stranger than that.

And she’s right.

From a conservative perspective, it is definitely possible to argue that Hillary winning would be the best thing.

The responsibility for a new spate of liberal programs and entitlements (and their untoward consequences) would belong to the democrats, as would adult responsibility for American foreign policy. If we need to bomb Iran, the radical left and the media will be tearing away at their own Party.

Hillary additionally could very possibly be capable of assembling a more competent and responsible cabinet team than John McCain. Bill’s appointment of Richard Rubin as Treasury Secretary, and continuation of Greenspan’s tenure at the Federal Reserve, demonstrated a pragmatic commitment to a good economy.

If McCain wins, liberal Rockefeller-style Republicanism will be back in business, and any real conservative presidential candidate will face the kind of entrenched internal Party opposition that Barry Goldwater did. On the whole, the prospect of trying a come-back with a better Republican candidate four years down the road has some real advantages.

0:40 video

And, would you believe this?

John McCain and (the now McCain-ite) Republican National Committee have called upon those tarheels to withdraw the ad, calling it “offensive,” “inappropriate,” and not “respectful.”

2:28 video

Back in 2001, John McCain denied having any reasons for, or intentions of, leaving the Republican Party.” Last year, his spokesman told Power Line that there was no truth in stories that John McCain had considered leaving the GOP.

But former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, currently out promoting a new book, has just leaked his own recollections of private democrat party negotiations with McCain.

According to Sidney Blumenthal, a senior adviser for former President Bill Clinton and current adviser to Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Clinton, at one point McCain was going to leave the Republican Party and caucus with Senate Democrats.

“And although he doesn’t want to talk to reporters about it now, there was a time and I was privy to some of those who were involved, did conduct negotiations through third parties about whether or not he would leave the Republican Party and become an independent more or less aligned in the Senate with the Democrats,” said Blumenthal on April 1. Blumenthal did not say when those negotiations took place.

Of course, this revelation is not completely new

A story dated 3/28/07 from the Hill features a similar account.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was close to leaving the Republican Party in 2001, weeks before then-Sen. Jim Jeffords (Vt.) famously announced his decision to become an Independent, according to former Democratic lawmakers who say they were involved in the discussions.

In interviews with The Hill this month, former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and ex-Rep. Tom Downey (D-N.Y.) said there were nearly two months of talks with the maverick lawmaker following an approach by John Weaver, McCain’s chief political strategist.

Democrats had contacted Jeffords and then-Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.) in the early months of 2001 about switching parties, but in McCain’s case, they said, it was McCain’s top strategist who came to them.

Going into the 2008 elections, Cole faces a daunting list of challenges. To date, 29 of his party’s representatives in Congress have retired, an unusually large number, leaving open politically marginal seats that incumbents might have held but which will be more difficult for challengers to defend — Deborah Pryce’s seat in Columbus, Ohio; Mike Ferguson’s in central New Jersey; Heather Wilson’s around Albuquerque; Thomas M. Reynolds’s in Buffalo. Reynolds, Cole’s predecessor at the N.R.C.C., just narrowly held his seat in 2006. Rick Renzi, a Republican congressman from Arizona, was indicted last month on federal corruption charges, putting what was another safe Republican seat in play. These vacancies mean that in a year when, by historical standards, his party would be expected to win back seats, Cole will have to defend many more seats than he will be able to attack (only six Democratic incumbents have announced they are leaving office). His committee has approximately $5 million on hand, roughly one-eighth the amount of cash on hand as its Democratic counterpart, which at latest count had $38 million. ...

Many within the Democratic Party believe that the gains of the 2006 election weren’t merely the result of good strategy. They believe that the map was undergoing a fundamental shift. Perhaps the most-studied Democratic detailer of the map’s evolution is a consultant named Mark Gersh, whose analysis of the 2006 election results has become the Democratic Party’s official version. “Most people think of politics as changing from the grass roots up,” Gersh says. “It doesn’t. It changes from the top, from presidential races on down.”

For Gersh, the modern political map has sustained two basic changes in the past 30 years. The first, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 but only culminating with the 1994 election of Newt Gingrich’s insurgents, was the slow, top-down conversion of socially conservative blue-collar voters, in the South and elsewhere, from Democratic partisans to Republican ones. In 2006, Gersh saw the culmination of the second big shift. “The biggest thing that happened in 2006 was the final movement of upper-income, well-educated, largely suburban voters to the Democrats, which started in 1992,” he says. The largest concentrations of districts that flipped were in the suburbs and the Northeast. This, Gersh says, was the equal and opposite reaction to the earlier movement toward the Republicans and to some degree a product of the social conservatism demanded by the Republican majority. When I spoke to Emanuel earlier this month, he told me: “I believe there’s a suburban populism now. The Republican Party has abandoned any economic, cultural or social connection to those districts.” ...

Many Republican operatives now worry that crucial segments of the electorate are slipping away from them. Republicans had traditionally won the votes of independents; in 2006, they lost them by 18 percent. Hispanic voters, who gave the Democrats less than 60 percent of their votes in 2004, cast more than 70 percent of their votes for Democrats in 2006. Suburban voters, long a Republican constituency, favored Democrats in 2006 for the first time since 1992. And Democrats won their largest share of voters under 30 in the modern era, a number particularly troubling for some Republicans, since it seems to indicate the preferences of an entire generation.

“What is concerning is that we lost ground in every one of the highest-growth demographics,” said Mehlman, the former R.N.C. chairman and Bush political adviser, who is now a lawyer at the lobbying firm Akin Gump.

Tom Cole, however, thinks the situation is not hopeless.

Cole’s basic challenge is to try to flip the popular perception of the capital so that more voters identify Washington with the Democrats than with the Republicans. He says he wants to use his party’s resources to define Nancy Pelosi as a national character, the face of a Democratic Congress that is once again too liberal for the country. (“Those three little words — ‘San Francisco liberal’ — are just magic for fund-raising,” one of Cole’s staff members told me.) He has tried, when possible, to choose candidates whose biographies can reinforce the anti-Washington theme, even if they have no real political experience. And he is counting on McCain’s emergence to permit the party to distance its image from that of Bush. Cole might have come up with a grand and unifying policy vision for his insurgents to run on. But Cole is not an ideologue. And with Rove and the party’s other grand strategists having abandoned the field — five of the six members of the Republican Congressional leadership in 2006 have now retired — Cole is now turning to practical answers, to process, and deferring to the politically moderate geography of the battleground areas. “I still think most Americans want their government to be smaller, not bigger, and their taxes to be lower, not higher,” Cole says. “And I still think most Democrats in office think that America is not a force for good in the world, and I think most voters have a different perspective.”

But Wallace-Wells believes the GOP coalition and platform are in serious trouble.

Part of the problem, for a Republican Party that wants to get back to basics, is that George Bush and Karl Rove’s party was not theirs alone but a pretty precise articulation of decades of post-’60s Republican strategy. “You go back to the Reagan years, and even before that, and we always had a three-legged stool: anti-Communism, anti-abortion and tax and spend,” Dan Mattoon, the Republican lobbyist and former deputy chairman of Cole’s committee, told me. “The first leg dropped off when the Berlin Wall fell, and after 9/11 we’ve tried to do the same thing with terrorism, but it’s not as strong. The second leg, tax and spend, was pretty strong until George Bush. Then we had just one leg of the stool, which was social issues, and I think that you look at the makeup of the younger generation and there’s more of a libertarian view on social issues.” Cole says that the party’s rhetoric on issues like gay marriage has cast Republicans as too reactionary for many suburban districts. “My problem on social issues is the tone — sometimes we have been too shrill, and that has alienated voters who might otherwise have joined us.

In other words, he is repeating the conventional viewpoint that the Reagan coalition of anti-communist neocons, religious and social conservatives, and economic conservatives has fallen apart.

I think it’s more the case that the Republican coalition, under George W. Bush, has fallen into disarray for lack of articulate and firmly principled leadership.

Bush is so inarticulate that it isn’t easy at all to identify a coherent Bush philosophy, but it seems clear that he has always been a moderate on Government, and is in many ways a liberal (resembling Woodrow Wilson) in foreign policy. Bush’s so-called conservatism has generally consisted of a manifest rejection of the consensus of the elect as articulated in the elite media outlets, which is widely recognized as an expression of a visceral animosity on Bush’s part to his own native elite culture.

Therein really consists his unforgivable sin from the point of view of the Establishment left. And Bush’s folly has proven to be his willingness to provoke their ultimate degree of wrath in the absence of an effective ability to fight them in public debate or within government.

Amusingly, Bush got away with his fundamentally happy-go-lucky approach right up until 2005 Hurricane Katrina. He seemed to be made of teflon. Media attacks simply bounced off him, and the American public in general indifferently shrugged off his malapropisms with a smile until along came New Orleans. The MSM was able to flood televisions screens with images of disaster while blaming them on Bush Administration incompetence and callousness. Blame for Katrina finally stuck.

Simultaneously, the disinformation operation conducted by disaffected elements of the Intelligence Community proceeded without White House interference or effective opposition. The passage of a couple of years proved adequate for the media echo chamber to persuade large portions of the public that “Bush lied.” There were no Iraqi WMD, and Bush knew it all along. He started the war “for the oil,” or to avenge Saddam Hussein’s attempt to assassinate his father.

The collapse of Bush Administration political activity coincided with a series of Republican Congressional scandals, and together produced the public perception of a failed and discredited GOP and the subsequent loss of both houses of Congress.

Bush’s failures seem to be amplified by the failures of the Conservative Movement. The Conservative Movement chose the time of Republican disarray to try mobilizing the base with a red meat issue. And what did they chose? Anti-illegal immigration. Anti-illegal immigration politics worked beautifully in transforming California into a firmly democrat stronghold. Why not take the same strategy, certain to alienate Hispanic voters, nationally?

Both George W. Bush and the current organized Conservative Movement demonstrably arrived at the 2008 primary campaign season without a defined candidate, a coherent strategy, or a clue.

The consequence was John McCain’s victory, produced by a combination of media bias and cross-over democrat voting in open primaries. Essentially, we are running the moderate democrat candidate this year as the Republican nominee.

If the Conservative Movement and the GOP does not return to the kind of politics practiced by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, to a politics based on a coherent and principled philosophy, to clearly articulated ideas, to a policy of winning elections by winning the long-term national debate, they are going to find the GOP stool has no leg to stand on at all.

Peggy Noonan thinks the two parties these days are like two very different houses:

It’s a tale of two houses. One is dilapidated, old. Everyone in the neighborhood is used to it, and they turn away when they pass. A series of people lived in it and failed to take care of it. It’s run down, needs paint. The roof sags, squirrels run through the eaves. A haunted house! No, more boring. Just a house someone . . . let go.

But over here, a new house on a new plot. It’s rising from the mud before your eyes. It has interesting lines, a promising façade, and when people walk by they stop and look. So much bustle! Builders running in and out, the contractors fighting with each other—”You wouldn’t even have this job if it weren’t for the minority set-aside!” And everyone hates the architect, who put a port-o-potty on the lawn.

But: You can’t take your eyes off it. “Something being born, and not something dying.” Maybe it will improve the neighborhood. Maybe the owners will be nice.

Personally, I think the cops will soon be arriving in large numbers to suppress the donnybrook going on in that nice new house, and to take a significant portion of the tenants away in paddy wagons.

We Republicans?

The base is tired. Republicans feel their own kind of unease at Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton. Talk about wanting to stand athwart history yelling stop. They’re not in a mood to give money. Remember the phrase “broken glass Republicans?” The number of Republicans so offended, so wounded, actually, as citizens, by the Clinton years, that they’d crawl across broken glass to elect George Bush? They existed in 2004, too. Now a lot of them wouldn’t crawl across a plush weave carpet to vote for a Republican.

Not if he’s John McCain, we wouldn’t.

But Peggy has one crumb of good news about McCain. He likes Hemingway. A lot.

Who has he read besides Hemingway? (And he’s read him—he loves him to an almost scary degree.)

Maybe he’s not all bad, after all.

Having heard this, I think it seems somewhat obvious in retrospect, but I met a smart conservative thinker last night who explained to me the conservative base’s fear about John McCain in understandable terms for the first time. Basically, McCain or no McCain this still looks like a bad year for the GOP. If he wins, it’s likely to be a personal win based on his persona and tarnishing Obama’s persona, in which the Democrats still pick up some House and Senate seats. Next up, it’s governing time. McCain’s not someone who enjoys a strong personal or professional relationship with John Boehner or Mitch McConnell, and he doesn’t owe any great debt to the GOP activist base. Under the circumstances, it’s plausible to imagine him striking a bunch of compromises with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi on domestic issue in order to get a freer hand with which to conduct foreign policy.

That does seem plausible to me.

After Goldwater and Reagan, even liberal Republicans describe themselves “Proud Conservative Republicans,” but sometimes liberals slip up and reveal the truth: They are Proud Conservative Liberal Republicans.

1:21 video

Hat tip to Scott Drum.

Liberal Michael Kinsley, in Time Magazine, makes fun of the Republican Party’s current situation.

Republicans have pulled some dirty tricks before: Swift Boats, Watergate, you name it. But this time they have gone too far. In its desperate hunger for victory at any cost, the Republican Party is on the verge of choosing a presidential candidate, John McCain, who is widely regarded (everywhere except inside the Republican Party itself) as honest, courageous, likable and intelligent.

Have they no shame?

More important: Have they no principles? In a properly functioning two-party democracy, each party is supposed to nominate a person whom members of the other party will detest. Ordinarily this is not a problem. In recent years, the basic principles of each party have been anathema to the other. If a candidate in addition has a personality that gives the opposition fits, or a few character flaws it deplores, that is gravy. Indeed, since Ronald Reagan (who last ran for office a quarter-century ago), the parties haven’t even liked their own candidates all that much. The dilemma of liking the opposition candidate just hasn’t arisen.

There is a word for it when a political party chooses a presidential candidate with more appeal in the opposition party than in his own. That word is cheating. For heaven’s sake, if the Republicans want to keep the White House that badly, why don’t they just nominate Hillary Clinton and be done with it?

Read the whole thing.

Kinsley, of course, is wrong to blame Republicans.

The ascendancy of John McCain came about as the result of an open primary system which allowed democrats to play too prominent a role in selecting the GOP nominee, and McCain’s unbeatable momentum was largely the product of partisan flackery on the part of the MSM. Kinsley can blame us for allowing our own primary process to be hijacked this year, but he can’t blame us for John McCain.

Tony Blankley explains how we got into such a fine mess.

Assuming John McCain gets the GOP nomination, it will show how whimsical history can be. It would be the first time in living memory that a Republican presidential nomination went to a candidate who was not merely opposed by a majority of the party but was actively despised by about half its rank-and-file voters across the country—and by many, if not most, of its congressional officeholders. After all, the McCain electoral surge was barely able to deliver a plurality of one-third of the Republican vote in a three-, four- or five-way split field. He has won fair and square, but he has driven the nomination process askew.

This result reminds me of a nursery rhyme: “For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.”

In the current instance, the lost nail was a viable conservative candidate. And despite the crabby, orthodoxy-sniffing, slightly over-the-hill condition of the conservative Republican majority, it still could easily nominate its candidate. In fact, we had two strong conservative candidates, either of whom almost surely would have unified the party early, as George W. did in 2000. But through accidents of history, neither ran.

Consider the recently very popular, tall, attractive, smart, eloquent, conservative, successful two-term Republican governor of one of our most populous swing states—married to a beautiful Hispanic woman, no less. In fact, he is the son of a former president. Unfortunately for him and the party, he is also the brother of the current president. If Jeb Bush’s name were Jeb Smith, the former Florida governor easily could have kept the conservative two-thirds of the Republican vote united and won the nomination. But fate made him a Bush in the only election in the past 20 years when no Bush need apply.

Or consider the cheerful, handsome, solidly conservative Virginia senator expected to run as the son of Reagan. Unfortunately, he uttered three little syllables: Ma-ca-ca. He lost his re-election, and so adieu, Sen. George Allen.

These two quirks of history have nothing to do with the fundamentals of the conservative hold on the GOP. But what was left after the two strongest candidates couldn’t run was one venerable candidate (McCain), one suspiciously newly minted conservative (Romney), one not-quite-plausible factional figure (Huckabee), one social liberal (Giuliani), a quixotic anti-war candidate (Paul) and an older Southern gent with a smashing younger wife for whom he seemed to be saving most of the energy he should have used in what was risibly called his “run” for president (Thompson).

So, the mischievous gremlins and elves inside the wheel of history have served up John McCain to lead Ronald Reagan’s party into November battle.

Read the whole thing.

If John McCain wins today’s primaries, he will probably be unstoppably headed for the GOP nomination, but that will not matter very much, because he isn’t going to win. Senator McCain has no chance of winning, because real conservatives, movement conservatives, people like Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, and me are not going to support him.

There has been a spate of realist editorials recently (Bill Kristol, Steve Calabresi and John McGinnis, Roger Kimball), arguing that McCain is more conservative than Hillary, Supreme Court seats will be at stake, and this is the most important election in history, and that we’ve got to win at any price.

Wrong.

We have a two-party system, and a two party system actually presupposes that the other side wins some of the time. They win when our side has done a bad job, and when our leaders, policies, and party have become unpopular. They win when we lack enthusiasm, unity, and a decent candidate.

Unfortunately, that’s the way things are this year. How did we get here? We got here by too much success. As Republicans became winners, we attracted, and elected to Congress, a bunch of opportunists and time-servers, who might just as well have been in the other party. They accomplished nothing but losing control of the legislature and ruining the Republican reputation for honesty and principle. We are losing also, because we elected a semi-, demi-, trying-to-have-it-both-ways nice guy, who in the final analysis didn’t pack the gear to lead successfully.

We owe George W. Bush a debt of gratitude for keeping a buffoon like Al Gore and a scoundrel like John Kerry out of the White House, but as a leader he resembles George Armstrong Custer. The opposition has good opportunity and strong momentum, and he gave it to them.

This, of course, is how things are supposed to work. When the people are persuaded that representatives of one party have screwed up, they get to give the other team a chance.

And that is precisely why you don’t want to go around desperately trying to throw Hail Mary electoral passes. Supporting the less-than-intellectually-gifted candidate, supporting the unprincipled candidate, supporting the really-a-liberal candidate is a recipe for disaster.

We do not want to elect Richard Nixon and destroy the Republican Party’s record, image, and reputation, assuring a major democrat party landslide down the road. It is actually better to take our medicine, and let them elect another Jimmy Carter.

And electing Jimmy Carter may well be exactly what they are preparing to do. Both leading democrats really have their roots in the leftwing base of the other party, and both are committed to policies leading inevitably to problems at home and abroad. Besides, can there really be another four years of a Clinton Administration without a conviction?

Let us accept four years of exile in the wilderness with as good a grace as possible. Let the Republican base become re-energized in opposition. And let the democrats preside over their usual mess. When it’s our turn again, it will be for another generation of the ascendancy of Conservatism and the Republican Party.

Time to drop back ten yards, and punt.

Republicans:

On the Republican side an embrace, but an awkward and unfinished one. It’s like the man-hug the pol at the podium now feels he must give to the man he’s just introduced. They used to just shake and say, “Thanks, Bob,” and go to the podium. Now they embrace, with an always apparent self-consciousness. Can you imagine JFK doing this? Or Reagan?

It is this kind of embrace many in the Republican party are giving John McCain. He has real supporters. He keeps winning. But he’s not getting even close to half the vote, as the presumptive nominee should. And he has been at odds with his party on so many things. ...

Mr. McCain seems to me to have two immediate problems, both of which he might address. One is that he doesn’t seem to much like conservatives, and never has. They can’t help admire him, but they’ve disagreed with him on so many issues, and when they bring this up his demeanor tends to morph into the second problem: He radiates, he telegraphs, a certain indignation at being questioned by people who’ve never had to vote in Congress and make a deal. He’s like Moe Greene in “The Godfather,” when Michael Corleone tells him he’s going to buy him out. “Do you know who I am? I’m Moe Greene. I made my bones when you were going out with cheerleaders.” I’ve been on the firing line, punk. I am the voice of surviving conservatism.

This doesn’t always go over so well. Mr. Giuliani seems to know Mr. McCain is Moe Greene. Mr. Huckabee probably thought “The Godfather” was kinda violent. Mr. Romney may be thinking to himself, But Michael Corleone won in the end, and had better suits.

Democrats:

All parties, all movements, need men and women who will come forward every decade or so to name tendencies within that are abusive or destructive, to throw off the low and grubby. Teddy’s speech in this regard was a barnburner. He went straight against the negative and bullying, hard for the need to find inspiration again.

He is an old lion of his party, a hero of the base. But people do what they know how to do, and objects at rest tend of stay at rest, and Teddy has long led a comfortable life as a party panjandrum who knew to sit back and watch as the dog barked and the caravan moved on. In a way he seemed to rebel against his own tendencies. He put himself on the line.

“I love this country,” he said, “I believe in the bright light of hope and possibility. I always have.”

As a conservative I would say Ted Kennedy has spent much of his career being not just wrong about the issues but so deeply wrong, so consistently and reliably wrong that it had a kind of grandeur to it. So wrong that I cannot actually think of a single serious policy question on which I agreed with him. But I remember the night President Reagan spoke of Sen. Kennedy’s brother at a fund-raiser for the JFK Library, and I remember the letter Reagan got from Teddy. “Your presence itself was such a magnificent tribute to my brother. . . . The country is well served by your eloquent graceful leadership, Mr. President.” He ended it, “With my prayers and thanks for you as you as you lead us through these difficult times.”

Liberals are rarely interested in pointing out, and conservatives by and large may not know, but everyone who knows Teddy Kennedy knows that he holds a deep love for his country, that he feels a reverence for the presidency and a desire that America be represented with grace abroad and stature at home. He has seen administrations come and go. And maybe much of what he’s learned came forward, came together, this week.

His principled and uncompromising rebellion seemed to me a patriotic act, and adds to the rising tide of Geffenism. When David Geffen broke with Mrs. Clinton last summer, and couched his disapproval along ethical lines, he was almost alone among important Democrats. It took some guts. Now others are joining his side. Good.

Michael Graham is despairing at The Corner:

Assuming there is no shocking revelation or health issue, the GOP nomination is over. Conservatives need to start practicing the phrase “Nominee presumptive John McCa…..”

I’m not quite so pessimistic. I think Rush and the rest of Conservative Talk Radio will yet marshal the base and put up a fight.

And, of course, we can’t really count on Romney or McCain with assurance to defeat either Lady Macbeth or the Magical Minority Man.

But, if John McCain were to capture the GOP nomination, and, you never know, something (like a successful act of terrorism) happened to turn public opinion away from its current course, and he was elected, think about it: the man is going to be 72 in August.

William Henry Harrison, the oldest man elected president who was not Ronald Reagan, was 68, and he caught cold during his inauguration and promptly died. Needless to say, John McCain is no Ronald Reagan.

In the event that McCain is nominated, we should probably be focusing very carefully on whom the GOP nominates for the vice presidency.

(Reagan) was a conservative first and a politician second, a National Review and Human Events reader first and an elected official second.

This is exceedingly unusual. The normal American president is a politician, with semicoherent ideological views, who sometimes becomes a vehicle for an ideological movement. ...

This year’s GOP field is, in this sense, normal.

Sigh.

Kristol is witty, but I think his neocon perspective is wrong. Republicans electing non-ideological-conservatives, Nixons and Bushes, only results in more liberal policies, a larger federal government, and, finally, a Republican electoral debacle.

He is right in observing that, in this presidential election, and in recent American politics generally, no obvious unquestionably conservative leader has emerged in the nation and the Republican Party. We need to ask ourselves why. And we need to start producing them again, not settling for substitutes.

The Hill:

Karl Rove told a group of state Republican officials Wednesday that while the GOP primaries “are far from over,” each of the candidates can beat the top two Democrats — and the former White House aide then outlined a strategy how. ...

In an address to a group of state GOP executive directors at the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) winter meeting, Rove outlined talking points for ways to defeat leading Democratic candidates Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.). The former adviser to the president did not mention former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.).

On Clinton, Rove said the senator talks about fiscal responsibility but has introduced “$800 billion in new spending and the campaign is less than half over.”

Rove said that “the woman” wants to repeal all of Bush’s tax cuts, and that she can be targeted for voting against “troop funding” in the form of her votes against the Iraq war supplementals.

Specifically, Rove hit Clinton for what could have been her worst campaign moment last year, when she had trouble answering a question about driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants at the Democratic debate in Philadelphia.

“You know, Sen. Clinton [has] got a problem with giving straight answers in this campaign,” Rove said. “I thought that was an incredible moment. In the course of 15 minutes, I counted her giving about four different answers.”

The Bush confidant also trotted out one of the lines of attack the RNC has already been working feverishly against Clinton, questioning why she and former President Bill Clinton will not release records from their time in the White House. This, according to Rove, “raises legitimate questions about what she’s hiding.”

Rove made it clear that most Republican attacks on Obama would focus on his “accomplishments and experience.”

“He got elected three years ago, and he [has] spent almost the entire time running for president,” Rove said.

Rove added that Obama has only passed one piece of legislation during his time in the U.S. Senate, and during his time in Illinois state Senate, Obama had “an unusual habit” of voting “present” instead of yes or no.

Rove also said that nonpartisan ratings show that Obama is more liberal than Clinton, which he said is “pretty hard to do.”

Time and again, however, Rove returned to the trump card he used in his successfully executed 2002 and 2004 elections, saying that neither Obama nor Clinton is prepared to protect the country from terrorists.

Rove served notice that Obama and Clinton would be targeted over how they vote on any Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act legislation that comes before the Senate this year.

“Do they or do they not want our intelligence officials to be listening in on terrorists’ conversations in the Middle East who may … be plotting to hurt America?” Rove said.

He told the state officials that it would be their responsibility to find “creative and sustaining ways” to “talk about these contrasts.”

Rove also offered advice to whichever Republican candidate wins the GOP nomination.

He said the candidates had to first “create a sustaining narrative about themselves.” Then he said the candidate should “immediately engage” on the “kitchen table issues,” like healthcare, education, jobs and the economy.

Third, Rove said the GOP nominee has to show that he is serious about campaigning “aggressively in places where Republicans don’t usually campaign.” Rove said that includes among black, Latino, Asian and union voters.

“We’re going for everybody,” Rove said.

Lastly, Rove argued that the Republican candidate must show the electorate “that they understand the surge is working.” Rove said the candidate should get firmly behind the war effort, painting the Democratic nominee as “defeatist.”

Democratic control of Congress, at least, has evidently upgraded the cafeteria service California-style, with an emphasis on locally-grown, fresh ingredients, eclectic cuisine, and… fresh sushi!

But at least one Republican is trying to make a little political hay over the change in cuisine.

NBC:

The presidential race is not the only place where change is an issue.

Members of Congress returning to the Capitol this week are being confronted by transformational happenings that have shaken the building to its foundations: Democrats have hired a new company to run cafeteria services. Naturally, this has caused an outbreak of partisan skirmishing.

“I like real food,” proclaimed Republican leader John Boehner when asked about the new menu by a producer for another cable news outfit. “Food that I can pronounce the name of.”

Boehner is now forced to wrap his lips around such phrases as “broccoli rabe and shaved persimmon,” “balsamic glazed butternut squash,” and “calico pinto beans”...all on this afternoon’s menu, along with the downright patriotic “American Regional Yankee Pot Roast,” which, even Boehner would have to admit, kind of rolls right off the tongue. On Fridays, there is a real sushi bar tended by a bona fide Japanese sushi chef. Gone are such grade-school cafeteria specialties as Salisbury steak and fried chicken, slathered in gravy and served with a side of chips. Debate rages among regulars about the merits of the new offerings. One consensus downside: the prices have gone upscale right along with the fare.

The company that Nancy Pelosi and her people have hired has a mandate to “Go Green,” complete with a mission statement posted outside the cafeteria on an eco-friendly LCD screen and a requirement to buy carbon offsets. Boehner doesn’t think much of that either.

“It reminds me of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, when we had indulgences,” says Boehner of the offsets.

Confronted by Preacher Huckabee standing astride the Iowa caucuses, smirking, “Are you feelin’ Hucky, punk?”, many of my conservative pals are inclined to respond, “Shoot me now.”

But, if that seems a little dramatic, let’s try and rustle up an alternative.

In response to the evangelical tide from the west, New Hampshire primary voters have figured, “Any old crusty, cranky, craggy coot in a storm,” and re-embraced John McCain. After all, Granite State conservatism is not known for its religious fervor: it prefers small government, low taxes, minimal regulation, the freedom to be left alone by the state. So they’re voting for a guy who opposed the Bush tax cuts, and imposed on the nation the most explicit restriction in political speech in years. Better yet, after a freezing first week of January and the snowiest December in a century, New Hampshire conservatives are goo-goo for a fellow who also believes the scariest of global-warming scenarios and all the big-government solutions necessary to avert them.

Well, OK, maybe we can rustle up an alternative to the alternative.

Rudy Giuliani’s team is betting that, after a Huck/McCain seesaw through the early states, Florida voters by Jan. 29 will be ready to unite their party behind a less-divisive figure, if by “less divisive figure” you mean a pro-abortion gun-grabbing cross-dresser. ...

Where I part company with Huck’s supporters is in believing he’s any kind of solution. He’s friendlier to the teachers’ unions than any other so-called “cultural conservative” – which is why in New Hampshire he’s the first Republican to be endorsed by the NEA. His health care pitch is Attack Of The Fifty Foot Nanny, beginning with his nationwide smoking ban. This is, as Jonah Goldberg put it, compassionate conservatism on steroids – big paternalistic government that can only enervate even further “our culture.”

So, Iowa chose to reward, on the Democrat side, a proponent of the conventional secular left, and, on the Republican side, a proponent of a new Christian left. If that’s the choice, this is going to be a long election year.

As truly horrific as it would be for the liberal and unethical Mike Huckabee to win the Republican presidential nomination, many Republicans still believe it would be almost as difficult to stomach the nomination of John McCain.

Huckabee, of course, would utterly destroy the old Reagan coalition, as even his campaign chief Ed Rollins has acknowledged. Huckabee’s bizarre propensity for letting criminals return early to freedom, combined with his utter cluelessness about foreign policy, also means that he would get absolutely crushed by the Democrats in a general election contest.

But McCain’s problems are almost as great, which is why reports of a comeback by the Arizona senator have so many conservatives scratching their heads.

McCain is, and looks, more than two years older than Ronald Reagan was when Reagan was elected president, and a poll last year showed that 42 percent of respondents said they would not vote for somebody who is 72 years old. That is a far higher percentage than that of people who would not vote for a Mormon (24 percent), a woman (11 percent), or a black person (5 percent).

McCain is not a tax cutter in a party that has made tax cuts one of its most basic tenets for nearly 30 years. Not only did he vote against President George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003—cuts that clearly are responsible for the booming economy of the past four-plus years—but just last week he told National Review’s Rich Lowry that he was correct not to vote for those tax cuts.

CNN describes a revealing campaign moment, in which Mike Huckbee chose to deflect press criticism of his own tardy awareness of a breaking story by echoing democrat-style criticism of Bush Administration foreign policy.

Huckabee’s comments came in an interview with Iowa’s Quad City Times, in which a reporter asked him why, last month, he was at first unaware of a National Intelligence Estimate detailing the threat posed by Iran, despite the fact the report had been made public for several hours.

“That was released at 10 o’clock in the morning,” Huckabee said. “At 5:30 in the afternoon, somebody says, ‘Have you read the report?’ Maybe I should’ve said, ‘Have you read the report?’ President Bush didn’t read it for four years; I don’t know why I should read it in four hours.”

Romney said Tuesday the comments were in ‘bad taste,” and lifted from the “Democratic playbook.”

William Murchison has identified the candidate Republicans should be supporting in ‘08, and always.

I’ve just now figured it out — the right conservative candidate for these confused and disturbing times. I’m voting for Barry Goldwater, and nothing can stop me. Save — I admit — the inconvenience of Barry’s residence in a venue other than the land of the living.

Still, I want to suggest to perplexed conservatives sorting through the credentials of Romney-Huckabee-Giuliani-Thompson-Paul-McCain that no one matches in substance and appeal the man who, in our hearts, we knew to be right: Barry himself. I want to suggest this not by way of whomping up some sentimental pilgrimage back to ye olden tyme. I suggest Barry as a model for the principled conservatism so many seem to seek vainly and despondently. Those Republicans, for instance, who can’t figure out what the Republican message is or should be.

“The Republican Party,” asserts Rich Lowry of National Review, “has run out of intellectual steam and good ideas.” That’s a preposterous state of affairs. Good ideas, as opposed to useful legislative enactments, never decline in potency.

Our guy Barry knew as much. Our guy — whom Lyndon Johnson imagined he had disposed of in ‘64, only to find Barry’s ideas taking up more and more space in politics — knew clearly enough what he was about. Freedom was what he was about — “the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order.”

Read the whole thing.

How did Mike Huckabee, a little known governor of Arkansas, find himself running neck and neck for the Republican nomination with Rudy Giuliani? How did the penniless Mr. Huckabee soar past the free spending Mitt Romney, estimated worth more than $200 million, in the early voting state of Iowa?

It is usually only paranoid conspiracy theorists who blame the press for causing the events they report, but in the case of the presidential race the insatiable need to find a new angle on an old story certainly helps the underdog. ...

Quietly, while the big beasts of the Republican jungle were roaring and clawing at each other, the mild and modest Mr. Huckabee, like James Stewart as Jefferson Smith in Frank Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” was making steady progress. As a Southern Baptist, he had spotted what may turn out to be Mr. Romney’s fatal weakness: his Mormonism. By playing up his own role as a “Christian leader,” and invoking at every turn Jesus as his mentor, Mr. Huckabee silently slipped a stiletto into Mr. Romney’s ribs.

Although the Massachusetts governor’s appeal last week in College Station, Texas, for religious tolerance and more religion in public life showed that he could look and talk like a president, by addressing the issue of his faith he has only drawn attention to it, causing more voters to consider whether or not they really would be happy with a Mormon in the White House.

The most recent Iowa poll, for Newsweek, puts the Arkansas governor at 39%, ahead of Mr. Romney’s 17%. And in the latest national poll, for CNN, Mr. Huckabee is just two statistically insignificant points behind the leader, Mr. Giuliani.

Fortunately for the GOP, Iowa is far from decisive.

Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats or independents to rate their mental health as excellent, according to data from the last four November Gallup Health and Healthcare polls. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans report having excellent mental health, compared to 43% of independents and 38% of Democrats. This relationship between party identification and reports of excellent mental health persists even within categories of income, age, gender, church attendance, and education.

Complete story.

Stands to reason, doesn’t it?

Hat tip to Michael Lawler.