Former democrat congressman (he lost in 2010) Alan Grayson is a loudmouth bolshevik, but he’s right on the results of the Florida GOP Primary.

[T]he GOP is leaving Florida worse than it arrived.

“I think there has been lasting damage,” he said. “I think that when Newt Gingrich parades around the country saying Mitt Romney is a liar and Mitt Romney parades around country saying Newt Gingrich is a liar, the conclusion most people draw is they’re both liars.”

I’d say though that it started in South Carolina, when the Gingrich campaign took the low road and started attacking Mitt Romney using the left’s anti-capitalist, class warfare arguments.

The massive counter-attack on Gingrich, featuring prominent Republicans, former Congressional colleagues, and conservative pundits, which stooped to utilizing bogus democrat party ethics charges fabricated in the late 1990s for purely partisan advantage was effective and appalling.

We came into this presidential campaign, essentially with an economy-based free “Elect One President” card which ought to have made this race a relative walk-over and a complete sure thing.

Our only problem has been the conspicuous absence, for many years, of a respected, confident and articulate, national figure conservative candidate. For some unaccountable reason, no one has come along to occupy the role once filled by Barry Goldwater and later by Ronald Reagan. Newt Gingrich, for instance, did not really enter the race with that credential. I tend to think that Sarah Palin may yet grow into the role, though she is not there yet. Her declining to run prematurely speaks well for her judgment, and Palin has since 2008 been doing the kind of thing no conservative since Reagan has done: she has functioned as a reliable and effective voice for the conservative movement, and has had regular impact on the national political debate from outside elective office.

We Republicans and conservatives ought to be filled with optimism and resolve at a point in history when it is clear that we are going to have an opportunity to change the country’s direction for the better, but instead we seem to have no leadership, no principles, no really satisfactory candidates, and no class. We clearly have too damn many slime mold professional campaign operators, too many spiteful and grudge-bearing has-beens, and too little genuine leadership.

The Republican Party, the Conservative Movement, and the country want the kind of leader who makes, not only our economy, but our politics better, the kind of man who leads and inspires.

If Gingrich and Romney persist in what they’ve been doing, they may yet re-elect Obama.

I caught most of yesterday evening’s debate, missing only the opening portion.

Personally, I found all the candidate’s positions generally agreeable and it was refreshing to hear, openly expressed, so many heresies from the consensus of the elect. All the GOP candidates acquited themselves well. I thought Romney has mastered playing the role of still-young-and-vigorous mature father figure to perfection. His voice and manner are remarkably pleasant and agreeable. One reflects that watching him spout generalities and persiflage at press conferences for four-to-eight years would probably be less painful than other alternatives.

Newt Gingrich, of course, is everyman’s bright, but bratty, younger brother grown old. Rick Santorum astutely identified Newt’s special instability and unpredictability, pointing out his lack of complete domestication as a drawback. Santorum was right, of course, that Newt Gingrich is a bit of a loose cannon, but I think myself that we are facing a crucial watershed moment in which what is vitally needed is a radical and far-reaching change of direction and fundamental revisions and reforms. I think that an unconventional person capable of original thought and willing to flout established opinion is precisely what the times require. Electing an enthusiastic nerd has genuine appeal as a proposition, I think.

Newt Gingrich is my favorite candidate, despite my having literally cursed his name and cast him out of my regard more than once, specifically because I think he has earned the front running position in the race. Newt Gingrich has, again and again, elevated the level of the conversation, clarified the issues, and moved the conversation beyond the media’s range of comfort. We should be supporting the candidate who makes the national conversation more intelligent.

Rick Santorum, despite my personal prejudices against traditionalists, deeply impressed me with his sincerity, intelligence, and combativeness. I did think he was a bit appalling in his position on illegal immigration, a regionally characteristic streak of Pennsylvania (Presbyterian-culture) fascism, came out in him on that one. I recognize exactly where this kind of morally delusive interest in following the rules for the sake of following the rules comes from. I grew up in the same state. People like Santorum are actually generally better than they sound. Beneath the (totally insane) insistence on always following all and every one of the laws and rules, they are generally quite good-hearted. Fill out the form they are insisting on being completed correctly, and they’ll give you the shirt off their back.

Even Ron Paul (who has frequently been the most self-righteous and obnoxious of the candidates) was pleasant to listen to. Ron Paul tends to remind me of a different back-home type, one’s clever, but slightly crazy, uncle, who has lots of theories and knows a whole lot about certain things, and who is very eager to tell you all about them. For a change, I thought Ron Paul added more pleasantness and good lines to the debate than extravagant accusations, and I was even beginning to lean to seeing him as a useful and creditable contributor.

Watching the debate conclude last night left this conservative Republican feeling happy and optimistic. I grew up in the same state as Rick Santorum, but I’ve come to appreciate the South. I’m decidedly comfortable with a key role, perhaps the decisive role, in selecting the Republican nominee being played by South Carolina.

When Republicans will opportunistically use left-wing, anti-capitalist agitprop to bash one another in a group race to the abyss of demagogy?

Jim Geraghty’s emailed Morning Jolt arrived first thing this morning and did a splendid job of beating up on the idiots and scoundrels.

If Mitt Romney’s opponents embrace the rhetoric of the Occupy Wall Street crowd any further, they’re going to start pooping on police cars.

So, here we are, on the day of the first primary, and the main objection to Mitt Romney from Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry is that he fired a bunch of people? They object to this more than to his liberal-softie-sounding rhetoric from 1994 and 2002? More than to his crusade to liberate us from the individual mandate of Obamacare in order to leave the states free to enact their own individual mandates? More than to the fact that he’s won exactly one general election in his life—in a year when the left-of-center vote was divided?

We’re hearing objections to private-sector layoffs from the party that wants to shrink government. How do we think all those employees of the federal bureaucracy will get off the payroll—mass alien abductions?

When you think about it, isn’t it possible that the layoffs implemented when Romney was at Bain constitute one of the boldest moves of his career? It was one of the times he was willing to do something unpopular because he thought it was right and in the long-term interest of the institution he was managing, instead of following the polls and telling people what they wanted to hear.

Much of the focus was on Romney’s comment that he likes being able to fire people who provide services to him if he’s not happy with the quality of the service. You know, the way you can’t with the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the way you can’t (or, at least, not without Herculean determination) with a crappy teacher at a public school. You can’t fire a tenured professor at a state university, whether or not he gives good value for his salary and benefits to students and the taxpayers. We can’t take our business to some other government without leaving the country.

(I thought it was almost impossible to fire any federal-government employee, but somehow Barack Obama is eliminating 80,000 U.S. Army jobs over the next ten years, from 570,000 to 490,000.)

“You like being able to fire people who provide subpar services? Well, don’t we all. In fact, there’s one guy in particular who I’m itching to fire in November,” quips Allahpundit at Hot Air.

In case you haven’t seen it elsewhere, here’s the outrageous outrage du jour, a Democratic attack so cheap and out-of-context that even lefty Greg Sargent felt obliged to defend Romney from it. The full, entirely unobjectionable quote: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. . . . You know, if someone doesn’t give me a good service, then I want to say, ‘I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.’” Surely, surely, only an especially desperate Democratic hack would stoop to twisting that.

Right?

Of course, Jon Huntsman jumped on it—as did Perry and Newt.

“Dying to know if second place in NH goes to the guy who disdains me or to the guy who latently disdains capitalism,” sighs VodkaPundit.

“They sound like a bunch of leftists. Listen to the rhetoric,” sighs Jedidiah Bila. She also quips, “McCain thinks SuperPACs are damaging the GOP field. I think most of the candidates are doing a good enough job of that themselves.”

Michelle Malkin entitles a post, “The abysmal incompetence of the non-Romneys.”

So that’s sorta, kinda an endorsement of Mitt, right, Michelle? (Ducks.) She writes:

If you were unfortunate enough to watch Saturday night’s GOP debate in New Hampshire, you saw a pageant of feckless non-Romneys fail to step up to the plate and forcefully challenge Mitt Romney’s presumptive claim to the GOP presidential nomination. Newt Gingrich, who has spent the last week whining about the liberal media, hid behind the liberal media when asked about attacks of Romney’s private-sector record at Bain Capital. . . .

All of that will get lost as the Occupy rhetoric seeps into attack ads by Republicans that will send tingles down the legs of anti-capitalists everywhere from Gingrich’s new favorite newspaper, the New York Times, on down. Click on that link to read about the $5 million boost to a pro-Gingrich super PAC (yes, super PACs—those evil entities that Gingrich was whining about last week after his Iowa drubbing) that will saturate South Carolina with Occupy-style demagoguery. With Newt’s explicit approval and endorsement.

“Obama’s re-election campaign’s going to be easy. He won’t have to make attack ads against Romney. He can just rent Newt’s,” quips Mark Evanier.

I have no great inclination to support Mitt Romney, but a bit more of this kind of thing and Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry may yet talk me into it.
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Mitt Romney “Fire People:”

]]> http://neveryetmelted.com/2012/01/10/who-needs-democrats/feed/ 0 http://neveryetmelted.com/2011/12/31/2012/ http://neveryetmelted.com/2011/12/31/2012/#comments Sat, 31 Dec 2011 18:52:09 +0000 JDZ http://neveryetmelted.com/?p=15827

Hat tip to Mark Scott.

They saved your right to continue to use Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulbs if you so choose. We won’t all have to sit in our living rooms bathed in the Orwellian florescent glare of the over-priced alternative bulbs favored by devotees of the modern cult of Gaia.

The Politico reports.

The shutdown-averting budget bill will block federal light bulb efficiency standards, giving a win to House Republicans fighting the so-called ban on incandescent light bulbs.

GOP and Democratic sources tell POLITICO the final omnibus bill includes a rider defunding the Energy Department’s standards for traditional incandescent light bulbs to be 30 percent more energy efficient.

DOE’s light bulb rules — authorized under a 2007 energy law authored signed by President George W. Bush — would start going into effect Jan. 1. The rider will prevent DOE from implementing the rules through Sept. 30.

But Democrats said they could claim a “compromise” by adding language to the omnibus that requires DOE grant recipients greater than $1 million to certify they will upgrade the efficiency of their facilities by replacing any lighting to meet or exceed the 2007 energy law’s standards.

Fueled by conservative talk radio, Republicans made the last-ditch attempt to stop federal regulations from making their way into every Americans’ living room.

“There are just some issues that just grab the public’s attention. This is one of them,” said Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.). “It’s going to be dealt with in this legislation once and for all.”

Our self-appointed lords and masters on the left were not pleased.

White House… communications director Dan Pfeiffer [was] saying Wednesday that the House GOP plan would “undercut environmental protections.”

On Twitter, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) wrote: “I strongly oppose that language. I hope it’s deleted from any final bill that we pass.”

“This is just another poke in the eye,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.).

Conrad Black observes the liberal media redirecting its fire from Herman Cain in the direction of Newt Gingrich, and shrugs indifferently. It is already obvious to any intelligent observer (like Mr. Black) that Barack Obama (absent divine intervention) has no real hope of being re-elected and that the election of 2012 is destined to be a genuinely transformative election, sweeping all of the consequences of the election of 2008 onto the ash-pile of history.

For me to achieve a degree of optimism from this procession of accident-prone Republican candidates might seem aberrant or a worrisome sign of cabin fever, but it isn’t. The grace of revelation came in two mighty flashes of celestial light, a few seconds apart, thunder to follow closer to next November. Whatever obloquy may be rained down on the well-tended topknots of the Republican hopefuls, it will not excuse or reelect the administration described by one commentator a few weeks ago as “the worst since before the invention of electricity.”

This administration will have produced $5 trillion of deficits, which will have the economic consequences of a 500 percent increase in the money supply in four years, without any serious effort to suggest how it is going to close the spigot, much less repay any of the accumulated debt. Only someone more familiar than I with the most fantastic realms of fiction could find adequately recondite metaphors for this level of fiscal irresponsibility. There has not been a hint of entitlement reform; no interest in a reforming budget or in changing the actuarial assumptions or vesting conditions of Social Security; no comprehensive analysis of municipal, county, or state debt, as Harrisburg, Pa., and Jefferson County, Ala. ($3 billion) went down in the last two weeks like tenpins; nor an effort to tackle the $1 trillion student-loan debt bomb. The administration continues its glazed pall of official prevarication in a reassuring monotone.

There has been no serious effort even to make the 10 percent token reduction in the projected decade of deficits required by the outcome of the debt-ceiling fiasco. The president clings to his arithmetic of the 99 percent and cozies up to the infantilists of Occupy Wall Street (even as he continues his dalliance with the stragglers among his limousine-borne Wall Street groupies). And Treasury Secretary Geithner, having been struck dumb like Zechariah in the temple for the last two years, recovered his voice to exhort the impecunious Europeans to join America in the St. Vitus’s Dance of spending confected trillions of virtual electronic dollars/euros. ...

At least Herbert Hoover acknowledged that a depression was in progress, and Jimmy Carter spoke of a malaise (of which his presence in the White House was the principal symptom). The president and other administration spokesmen seem supremely confident that all they have to do to retain immersion rights in the public trough for another four years is hammer the piñata about the 99 percent and incant the name of the preceding president.

As long as there is an alternative that can speak and tie up its shoelaces in the morning, I do not believe that this administration can be reelected. It is so unrelievedly incompetent that its fecklessness is more a matter of sadness and embarrassment than of the rage that engulfed George W. Bush. This, I surmise, is why the liberal establishment, the Times editorial writers and columnists, the Hollywood groupies, the rich fundraisers, don’t detect that the ship is sinking, and still squeal with delight as the Republican challengers fail to generate more than tentative or reluctant enthusiasm. But they are reading the wrong dials; there will be a Republican nominee. The country will not reelect this mockery of an administration, and whoever the Republican is will be elected and inaugurated, even if he has operated an open-air dog kennel on the wings of an airborne aircraft while groping relays of stewardesses.

And the other illuminated revelation, which came swiftly after the first: The voters will not only be disposing of a failed administration; they will be approving the Republican platform, which will call for radical tax simplification and reduction, entitlement reform, serious health-care reform, real spending reductions, incentives to increased domestic oil production and natural-gas use, and an absolute commitment to preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear military power.

It will be a drastic reform program that will signal that the United States is awakening like Brünnhilde, however unlikely the Siegfried, finally resuming world leadership, acting on its budget and current-account deficits, and behaving like a Great Power and a textbook case in self-government for the first time since President Bush Senior. The effect of the change will be electrifying. ...

The new president may have an imperfect CV and too-perfect hair; Speaker Boehner may surpass Mr. Obama’s historic favorite, Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh, in his proclivity to burst publicly into tears; the White House may be as boring and banal as it was under George W. Bush (though that is unlikely, especially in syntactical matters); but America will lead in policy terms, if not in the personality of its leader. Problems will be addressed and the mere anarchy of abdication compounded by smug official sophistry will no longer be loosed upon the world. Mr. Churchill’s bust may come back to the Oval Office, and FDR’s address at D-Day, including the godly references that the Bureau of Land Management feels disrupt the spirit “of the elegant memorial,” may yet be displayed there. The night will end and glorious will be the dawn, in Washington. I have seen the future, and in it, people work.

Read the whole thing.

I reluctantly watched some of last night’s GOP debate.

How did the Republican Party get tricked into adopting a television entertainment-based pre-primaries system in which an astonishing superfluity of candidates, many with no realistic chance of winning the nomination, are invited to respond to questions selected by intensely partisan representatives of the liberal mainstream media, obviously chosen with the intention of inflicting the most damage to Republican candidates, individually and in general? Who is running the Republican Party that goes around agreeing to have our party’s debates hosted by MSNBC and CNN? Let’s fire that guy fast.

It’s obvious to lots of Republicans that this endless series of “Welcome to the Thunderdome” debates in which gleeful liberal commentators invite GOP candidates to enter the arena and beat up on one another is not the best thing in the world for us.

Last night, we saw again how these debates are conducted in an atmosphere of intimidation with the media’s version of GOP orthodoxy used as a weapon to bully candidates into knuckling under instead of arguing their own positions with anyone daring to speak independently (as Rick Perry did in an earlier debate) being Gotcha’d, awarded failing performance grades and described as having made a gaffe.

Republicans have been successfully mau-maued by liberals, and by our own dumbass law-and-order petite bourgeois wing, into making illegal immigration, really insane Anti-Hispanic immigration nativism, a bedrock, party identifying issue. Rick Perry, who excelled originally in having a more intelligent and honest perspective, was seriously damaged and finally bullied into mouthing typical politician’s platitudes on the same issue.

Perry attacking Romney for “hiring illegal aliens.” (Romney used a lawn service, instead of mowing his own lawn. His lawn service—like most lawn services throughout the country—employed low-skilled Hispanic workers, some of whom were not legal immigrants. The horror! You can, I think, divide Republicans on immigration politics between those accustomed to have enough money to employ a lawn service and those who mow their own lawns.) This was a depressing low point in the debate, particularly since it was combined with an unseemly competition to display manliness by trying to talk over one another. Romney actually kind of won by invoking civility.

Romney, I thought, was definitely the candidate one would prefer to hire to play the role of president in a movie. Herman Cain continues to surprise. He is far more articulate and capable of holding up his end of a policy debate than many professional pols. He also tends to be the best dressed guy on stage. His double-breasted blaser and bright yellow tie was a refreshing change from the classic candidate’s dark suit and red (maybe blue) power tie.

Ron Paul openly indulged in class warfare politics of envy, manifesting once again the appallingly common perfect congruence of what calls itself “libertarianism” and leftism. Why is this guy even there?

Santorum was surprisingly good, and he seems to be receiving too little attention and appreciation. He ringingly defended traditional American culture and values, and he came up with a clever argument (“I won running as an arch conservative in a swing state. If you can win in Pennsylvania, you can definitely beat Barack Obama.”) as to why he would be a superior candidate.

Bachmann looked and sounded good, but her hypermoralism didn’t really fit in, and I did not hear her very much.

Gingrich is definitely the wittiest and best debater of all the candidates. Unfortunately, like Bachmann, his presence and participation was really just that of an afterthought. If all these absurd debates really were deciding something, Gingrich ought to be winning.

Perry is significantly less smooth and practiced, less comfortable under the microscope, and less glib. He does not seem to know how to move fluidly off his prepared game plan, and he seems a bit abashed about his regional accent. Herman Cain has fun using ethnic dialect and accent when he wants to. Perry clearly feels at a bit embarrassed at having a heavy Texas drawl and is trying to minimize it.

Republicans need to start encouraging unserious candidates to quit wasting everybody’s time. Get Ron Paul, Huntsman, Bachmann, and Gingrich out of there as soon as possible.

Republicans ought to hold debates in friendly venues with friendly or completely neutral moderators.

Watching last night’s debate, I suppose I thought Romney and Herman Cain both demonstrated why they are doing well, Perry demonstrated what his problem has been, and beyond that, I thought I was not much the wiser. I am not persuaded that we ought to be nominating Mitt Romney. I see no point in the presence or participation of a lot of those candidates. I am not sure that these numerous debates may not be doing more harm than good.

Hat tip to Theo.

Stephen F. Hayes says Rick Perry won last night’s Republican presidential debate in Iowa without even showing up.

They’re happy tonight in Austin.

It’s one of the most predictable and tiresome of the many presidential debate clichés: The candidate who didn’t participate won because the others were so weak. And yet that was the case in the Republican presidential debate here Thursday night. A Republican presidential field often described as weak seemed to confirm that conventional wisdom in a debate that featured many tough questions and many more weak answers. Rick Perry, who will announce his bid for the presidency on Saturday.

Latest example: There are signs when you enter Texas warning the bears not to feed Rick Perry.

Pat Buchanan left mainstream Conservatism for the Paleocon fever swamps some years ago, and has rarely ever made much sense since, but today the old Pat Buchanan is back and in fine form. In fact, Buchanan identifies precisely the tactics of bluffing and intimidation that the mouthpieces of the establishment are using to try to frighten the Republican leadership (which holds all the cards) into surrendering on tax increases to the impotent, discredited-by-reality, and sinking-daily-in-the-polls democrats. Pat Buchanan is right: the level of shrillness of the MSM commentariat is directly proportionate to their desperation. They know they’re losing.

By refusing to accept tax increases in a deal to raise the debt ceiling, Republicans are behaving like “fanatics,” writes David Brooks of The New York Times.

Anti-tax Republicans “have no sense of moral decency,” he adds.

They are “willing to stain their nation’s honor” to “worship their idol.” If this “deal of the century” goes down, as he calls the Barack Obama offer, “Republican fanaticism” will be the cause.

“The GOP has become a cult” that has replaced reason with “feverish” and “cockamamie beliefs,” writes Richard Cohen of The Washington Post. The Republican “presidential field (is) a virtual political Jonestown,” the Guyana site where more than 900 followers of the Peoples Temple drank the Kool-Aid that Rev. Jim Jones mixed for them.

Does anyone think this an appropriate description of such mild-mannered men as Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman?

“The GOP’s Hezbollah Wing Is Now Fully in Control,” screams The New Republic over a recent lead editorial.

Other columnists charge the GOP with holding America “hostage” by refusing to accept tax hikes to avert a default on the debt.

What to make of this hysteria?

The Establishment is in a panic. It has been jolted awake to the realization that the GOP House, if it can summon the courage to use it, is holding a weapon that could enable it to bridle forever the federal monster that consumes 25 percent of gross domestic product.

To bully and blackmail the GOP into surrendering the weapon and betraying its principles and signing on to new taxes, that establishment has unleashed rhetoric more befitting a war on terror than a political dispute.

For how, exactly, are Republicans threatening the republic?

The House has not said it will not raise the debt ceiling. It must and will. It has not said it will not accept budget cuts. It has indicated a willingness to accept the budget cuts agreed to in the Biden negotiations.

Where the GOP has stood its ground is on tax increases. ...

The Republican Party has not said it will refuse to raise the debt ceiling. It has an obligation to do so, and will.

The House has simply said it will not accept new taxes on a nation whose fiscal crisis comes from overspending.

If the GOP keeps its word, raises the debt ceiling and accepts budget cuts agreed to in the Biden negotiations, the only people who can prevent the debt ceiling’s being raised are Senate Democrats or Obama, in which case, they, not the GOP, will have thrown the nation into default.

It is the establishment that is resorting to extortion, saying, in effect, to the House GOP: Give us the new taxes we demand, or Obama will veto the debt ceiling and we will all blame you for the default.

They’re bluffing.

The GOP should stand its ground—and fix bayonets.

Katie Thompson, blogging at Cornell Law Prof Bill Jacobson’s site, makes the case for Rick Perry.

I think myself that Perry seems to be acceptably conservative, and he strikes me as a potentially stronger candidate than Romney, Pawlenty, and the others currently in the race. Perry has available as a powerful argument the fact of Texas enjoying spectacular growth in jobs, at a time when the only other place in the country that is in the same situation is Washington, D.C.

My first choice for GOP nominee would be Paul Ryan. Ryan has done more to address the key economic issues which are going to be the focus of the 2012 race than anyone else. But Ryan (so far) isn’t running. The governor of the state excelling the rest of the country, by a wide margin, in economic growth is a very plausible second choice.

Katie Thompson makes also the telling point: Rick Perry is everything Barack Obama is not. And that’s exactly what voters want.

And that’s a good argument.

Read the whole thing.
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Ruger .380 Coyote Special

On the symbolic front, Thompson points out that Governor Perry stands out among GOP possible contenders in having a handgun named in his honor.

Apparently, while jogging in February of 2010, Perry drew a .380 Ruger he carries and dropped with one shot a coyote that was menacing the labrador retriever that accompanied him on his run.

Sturm, Ruger & Co. gleefully responded with a special commemorative edition:

On the box it comes in it says “For Sale to Texans Only.” It says “Coyote Special” on one side of the barrel and “A True Texan” on the other side of the barrel. The top of the barrel has a Texas star and a Coyote howling to a full moon.

Not bad at all. I like Perry better and better.

There are all those other Republican candidates, whose names are vaguely familiar, but about whom one knows next to nothing. Looking over the news this morning, I noticed omens and portents pertaining to the candidacy of Jon Huntsman, so let’s start with him.

Mark Halperin, for instance, blogging at the New York Times, says that prominent movement conservative C. Boyden Gray has signed on board the Huntsman campaign in an influential role. Halperin draws from Gray’s affiliation the reasonable conclusion that GOP conservatives may be preparing to back Huntsman as the more conservative alternative to “moderate” front-runner Milt Romney.

Less positive from my own perspective, is a basically typical New York Times magazine puff piece by Matt Bai, treating Huntsman surprisingly sympathetically.

So, I turned to Google and spun up the Wikipedia article on Huntsman. Aha! Governor of Utah, that’s who he is.

He’s a Mormon, just like Mitt Romney. (Basically good. Mormons are crazy, of course, for subscribing to a 19th century Sci Fi religion but, hey! Mormons are also rock-ribbed tribal Republicans, gun-owning, capitalism-defending, fiscal conservatives, respectable and hard-working people, typically a lot more clean living than I am.)

He’s from Palo Alto, California. (We can look on the bright side, and recognize that he must therefore be well acquainted with how nice it is to have lots of money, the economic significance of technology, and the left coast dystopian future American needs to make every effort to avoid.)

He speaks Mandarin and became ambassador to China for Barack Obama, whom he (perhaps, in consequence) makes some effort to avoid attacking.

He supports same sex civil unions, but not Gay Marriage.

He has a good record of governing as a fiscal conservative, and he apparently does not demagogue on immigration.

He does, however, believe in Global Warming, and he signed one of those bogus initiatives to curb “greenhouse gases.” (So much for being such a great technocrat. In my view, Global Warming is a litmus test demonstrating both scientific literacy and real conservative principles, or the lack of both. I would not be happy voting for any Republican with a record of support for AGW superstition. This one is a big deal in my book.)

If you believe the Times’ story, he is under the influence of one of John McCain’s less-reliably-Republican advisors, a guy named John Weaver, a political pro and rival to Karl Rove, who has a hankering to move beyond all the tedium of political principles and ideology and on to mass market appeal via “bigness.”

By bigness, Mr. Weaver evidently means something resembling Ronald Reagan’s ability to attract the support of moderates and to occupy an effective leadership position that could get the country as a whole behind him. In my view, Reagan’s success was achieved by explaining what he meant to do, and why, and winning the argument. The alternative view, which the Times likes, means simply dropping all the theory and the principles off the sled and running as a pragmatic technocrat who solves problems. Amazing, isn’t it, the way the establishment intelligentsia always goes running to the shelter of good old-fashioned American anti-intellectualism and pragmatism, when it finds that it is losing the theoretical argument?
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So, on looking closely at Jon Huntsman, I see that some good people whom I seriously respect are in the process of joining his team. He looks like a decent guy in most respects, but his record features strong support for the leading pseudo-scientific stupidity of our time, indicating that he is either a fool or an opportunist. (On which same basis, we know what Newt Gingrich is, for instance.)

He has hired a political strategist who is the personal embodiment of all the worst features of McCain-ism, a guy so bad that McCain evidently got rid of him during the 2008 campaign.

The stories are contradictory. Mark Halperin suggests that back-room forces of movement conservatism are planning to support Huntsman to prevent the too-moderate Romney becoming the nominee. Yet, we also have evidence that he is planning to run explicitly as the non-conservative in the race for the GOP nomination.

There is a bit more reason, judging by the volume of mainstream media sympathetic coverage, to suspect that the latter theory is the more likely. The strategy of running as a non-conservative will make the New York Times respect him, but I rather doubt myself that it will succeed in delivering the GOP nomination.

Mitch Daniels’ announcement that he’s not running for president means Republicans may turn up the pressure on dream candidates like Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan and Chris Christie.

“It would be unfair to call the current field a vacuum,” said William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, in a blog post. “But it doesn’t exactly represent an overflowing of political talent.”

He predicted that “the odds are better than 50-50 that both Rick Perry and Paul Ryan run,” referencing the Republican governor of Texas and Wisconsin congressman, respectively.

Kristol also speculated that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton “may not feel they have to decide until after Labor Day—or maybe even until October or even November.”

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Michael Barone sums up where we at at present:

In, in alphabetical order: Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Gary Johnson, Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum.

Probably in: Michele Bachmann, Jon Huntsman.

Probably not in: John Bolton, Sarah Palin.

Out: Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, Mike Huckabee, Mike Pence, John Thune.

Declared out but still being wooed: Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Paul Ryan.

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Hugh Hewitt is taking the bizarre position that everything is hunkydory. By his lights, the GOP has a strong field of candidates, and besides “the top two contenders—Romney and Pawlenty—have essentially locked up the campaign talent and the money commitments necessary to mount a traditional campaign.”
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Barack Obama clearly doesn’t agree with Hewitt about the GOP field. As the New York Post reports:

President Obama’s re-election campaign is trying to dig up dirt in the Garden State.

Despite New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s repeated pronouncements that he will not seek the GOP presidential nomination, Obama operatives are compiling a dossier of what they call “opposition research”—material that could be used to damage Christie if he changes his mind, The Post has learned.

The Obama campaign is trying to keep its efforts from public view, concerned they would only elevate Christie’s already impressive standing within the Republican Party, sources said.

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I think Bill Kristol is dead on and Hugh Hewitt is dead wrong.

No member of a field consisting of Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Gary Johnson, Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, and Jon Huntsman obviously represents a serious challenge to a polished and articulate incumbent democrat.

Of the actually known candidates in that list, Newt Gingrich is demonstrably unreliable on policy and in performance, Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum are too socially conservative, Ron Paul is a pacifist isolationist, Mitt Romney is a liberal from Massachusetts, and Tim Pawlenty (from liberal Minnesota) has a very mixed record as well.

To win in 2012, the Republican nominee is going to have to offer a serious alternative to Obamanomics. We can hardly defeat Obamacare with the record of a governor who created a similar system in his own state. Americans want prosperity restored. They do not, in general, desire to elect a president primarily devoted to a counterrevolution in public morals.

Paul Ryan is the best possible choice, it seems to me. The Ryan budget proposal represents the only serious alternative that anyone has proposed to the current out-of-control entitlement system. The choice between balancing the federal budget and national bankruptcy and decline is what the election needs to be about, and Paul Ryan is the best qualified Republican to argue our case to the American people.

Donald Trump is manifestly not all that bright. Educationally, he makes Sarah Palin look like Erasmus, and he has truly execrable taste: running to the Mafioso Miami school of interior design and that signature combover hairdo. But he has lately been doing great in Republican polls, while amusing a lot of the country by taking potshots at the mystery of Barack Obama’s unwillingness to release his long-form birth certificate.

David Brooks describes why Donald Trump strikes a deep cultural chord.

[T]here has always been a fan base for the abrasive rich man. There has always been a market for books by people like George Steinbrenner, Ross Perot, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Bobby Knight, Howard Stern and George Soros. There has always been a large clump of voters who believe that America could reverse its decline if only a straight-talking, obnoxious blowhard would take control. ...

He is riding something else: The strongest and most subversive ideology in America today. Donald Trump is the living, walking personification of the Gospel of Success.

It is obligatory these days in a polite society to have a complicated attitude toward success. If you attend a prestigious college or professional school, you are supposed to struggle tirelessly for success while denying that you have much interest in it. If you do achieve it, you are expected to shroud your wealth in locally grown produce, understated luxury cars and nubby fabrics.

Trump, on the other hand, is utterly oblivious to such conventions. When it comes to success, as in so many other things, he is the perpetual boy. He is the enthusiastic adventurer thrilled to have acquired a gleaming new bike, and doubly thrilled to be showing it off.

He labors under the belief — unacceptable in polite society — that two is better than one and that four is better than two. If he can afford a car, a flashy one is better than a boring one. In private jets, lavish is better than dull. In skyscrapers, brass is better than brick, and gold is better than brass.

This boyish enthusiasm for glory has propelled him to enormous accomplishment. He has literally changed the landscape of New York City, Chicago, Las Vegas and many places in between. He has survived a ruinous crash and come back stronger than ever.

Moreover, he shares this unambivalent attitude toward success with millions around the country. Though he cannot possibly need the money, he spends his days proselytizing the Gospel of Success through Trump University, his motivational speeches, his TV shows and relentlessly flowing books.

A child of wealth, he is more at home with the immigrants and the lower-middle-class strivers, who share his straightforward belief in the Gospel of Success, than he is among members of the haute bourgeoisie, who are above it. Like many swashbuckler capitalists, he is essentially anti-elitist.

Now, I don’t mean to say that Donald Trump is going to be president or get close. There is, for example, his hyper-hyperbolism and opportunism standing in the way. ...

But I do insist that Trump is no joke. He emerges from deep currents in our culture, and he is tapping into powerful sections of the national fantasy life.

In my own hyper-elitist way, I am every bit as anti-elitist (when our so-called elite is in question) as Donald Trump, and I have been enjoying the spectacle of Trump giving Obama a hard time.

I’d be delighted to have the GOP National Committee agree to give Donald Trump a special bit of air time late on election evening of November in 2012 to point his index finger, and on behalf of America, say “Barack Obama, you’re fired!”

But Donald Trump falls decidedly into Glenn Reynolds’ syphylitic camel category of candidates. We just have to hope hope that The Donald is sufficiently patriotic to get out of the way of a more serious Republican contender and does not decide to play the role of a Perot.

Pete Robinson reflects gloomily about Republican prospects, noting that the Republican base is bound to dwindle as the national illegitimacy rate skyrockets. (AEI article:)

Forty years after the Moynihan report, the tragic saga of the modern black family is common knowledge. But the tale of family breakdown in modern America is no longer a story delimited to a single ethnic minority. Today the family is also in crisis for this country’s ethnic majority: the so-called white American population….

Consider trends in out-of-wedlock births. By 2002, 28.5 percent of babies of white mothers were born outside marriage in this country. Over the past generation, the white illegitimacy rate has exploded, quadrupling since 1975, when the level was 7.1 percent. The overall illegitimacy rate for whites is higher than it was for black mothers (23.6 percent) when the Moynihan report sounded its alarm….

Today no state in the Union has an Anglo illegitimacy ratio as low as 10 percent. Even in predominantly Mormon Utah, every eighth non-Hispanic white infant is born out of wedlock.

Pete discusses these demographics over dinner in Hanover, New Hampshire with Mark Steyn, who points out that the dramatic changes to the American national character can be readily observed even in rural Northern New England.

For miles in every direction, Mark noted, lay country that until just a few decades ago represented the heartland, so to speak, of the flinty, resourceful, independent Yankee spirit. Now? “You’ll see lovely girls in the local high schools,” Mark said. “When you come across them again five years later, they’ll each have three children by three different fathers.” Then Mark told a story.

In colonial times, it was against crown law to cut down any pine that exceeded a certain girth—twenty-some inches, as I recall—because all such trees were reserved for the use of the Royal Navy, which required a ready supply of masts. Every time you see a colonial house with floorboards more than two feet wide, you’re witnessing an artifact of the American spirit—an act of rebellion. Mark pointed to the floorboards in the restaurant, some of which were certainly more than two feet wide. “Two centuries ago,” he said, “the families in these parts were felling trees in defiance of the crown. Today they’re raising their children on welfare checks.”

Woe to us all.

It probably is worth noting that both of the last two presidents elected by the democrat party may not have been born in wedlock. William Jefferson Clinton, given the name William Jefferson Blythe III at birth, is widely rumored not to have really been the offspring of the traveling salesman William Blythe II who perished in an automobile crash three months before Bill Clinton’s birth. Barack Hussein Obama is certainly of illegitimate birth, as his parents’ marriage was bigamous and invalid.

Barack Obama, Sr. had married Kezia Aoko aka “Grace” in 1954 and had already had two children, prior to his attending the University of Hawaii and marrying Stanley Ann Dunham in 1961. No divorce from Kezia ever occurred, and Barack Sr.’s first wife Kezia is still alive today.

Now

The budget plan introduced by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan actually represents a serious effort to fix the entitlements crisis and close the enormous gap between government income and expenditures. I do not believe that I have ever seen, in my lifetime, so courageous a piece of legislation. Wall Street Journal

One can see the dramatic impact of this one hundred degree shift in politics in the fact that it immediately forced the New York Time’s substitute-for-a-conservative David Brooks right off the fence, and transformed him into a full-throated supporter.

Over the past few weeks, a number of groups, including the ex-chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers and 64 prominent budget experts, have issued letters arguing that the debt situation is so dire that doing nothing is not a survivable option. What they lacked was courageous political leadership — a powerful elected official willing to issue a proposal, willing to take a stand, willing to face the political perils.

The country lacked that leadership until today. Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is scheduled to release the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes. Ryan is expected to leap into the vacuum left by the president’s passivity. The Ryan budget will not be enacted this year, but it will immediately reframe the domestic policy debate.

His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion. It will become the 2012 Republican platform, no matter who is the nominee. Any candidate hoping to win that nomination will have to be able to talk about government programs with this degree of specificity, so it will improve the G.O.P. primary race.

The Ryan proposal will help settle the fight over the government shutdown and the 2011 budget because it will remind everybody that the real argument is not about cutting a few billion here or there. It is about the underlying architecture of domestic programs in 2012 and beyond.

The Ryan budget will put all future arguments in the proper context: The current welfare state is simply unsustainable and anybody who is serious, on left or right, has to have a new vision of the social contract.

The democrat-controlled Senate will probably decline to endorse moving to a sustainable federal government, but Congressman Ryan has framed the 2012 Electoral Debate. This is a budget that Republicans can campaign on.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Some of our leading commentators have already begun to register their preferences, and, so far, the camel is in the lead.

Glenn Reynolds, January 20, 2011:

GEORGE WILL IS not so hot on Huckabee, Gingrich. I would vote for a syphilitic camel over Barack Obama in 2012, so therefore I would even vote for Huckabee or Gingrich. But I might try to talk the camel into running one more time.

I voted for John McCain, whom I despise slightly more than Huckabee and Gingrich, in 2008 myself, but that syphilitic camel had better take care to choose a good running mate. Without Palin on the ticket, I might very well have written in Donald Duck.

Fortunately for the camel, the ideal Republican VP choice is very obvious: Marco Rubio.

The Gallup Poll finds “the devil you don’t know” running, at this point, perfectly even with Obama.

U.S. registered voters are evenly split about whether they would back President Barack Obama for re-election in 2012 (45%) or “the Republican Party’s candidate” (45%). ...

Results from a parallel question Gallup asked during the presidencies of George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush show both of those presidents performing better on this re-elect measure at comparable points in their third years in office than Obama does today. ..

[T]he poll suggests Obama is relatively more vulnerable than former President George W. Bush at this point in his presidency.

When Gallup polled voters in 2003 to test Bush’s reelection prospects, the Texas Republican led a generic Democrat 47-39 percent.

These kind of polling results suggest that any credible Republican capable of uniting opponents of the current president, not destroyed by scandal or a major gaffe, would be able to defeat Obama.

I sincerely wish that we had a demigod like Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan to run, but I expect most of us will be happy to settle for anyone reliably committed to the kind of economic principles required to fix the American economy who seems to possess sufficient determination to do the job.

Perhaps you’re having a tiny last minute qualm about voting Republican. Take heart. And take the House and the Senate. Yes, there are a few flakes of dander in the fair tresses of the GOP’s crowning glory—an isolated isolationist or two, a hint of gold buggery, and Christine O’Donnell announcing that she’s not a witch. (I ask you, has Hillary Clinton ever cleared this up?) Fret not over Republican peccadilloes such as the Tea Party finding the single, solitary person in Nevada who couldn’t poll ten to one against Harry Reid. Better to have a few cockeyed mutts running the dog pound than Michael Vick.

I take it back. Using the metaphor of Michael Vick for the Democratic party leadership implies they are people with a capacity for moral redemption who want to call good plays on the legislative gridiron. They aren’t. They don’t. The reason is simple. They hate our guts.

They don’t just hate our Republican, conservative, libertarian, strict constructionist, family values guts. They hate everybody’s guts. And they hate everybody who has any.

The inimitable Frank Fleming explains why the democrats are inevitably going to get massacred in the upcoming election.

During the second term of the Bush presidency people just got fed up with Republicans. They were idiots, they were no good at the whole fiscal conservatism thing (which is sort of the whole point of them), we had these wars that seemed to be going nowhere, and the economy was beginning to fail. They sucked, and people were sick and tired of them.

Thus people turned to the Democrats. And Obama.

Let’s just say they also sucked.

AMERICANS: “So, the economy is pretty bad and there’s high employment. You think you can do something about that?”

DEMOCRATS AND OBAMA: “We can spend a trillion dollars we don’t have on pork and stuff.”

AMERICANS: “No … that’s not what we want. We’d really like you not to do that.”

DEMOCRATS: “You’re stupid. We’re doing it anyway.”

AMERICANS: “That’s not going to help us get jobs!”

DEMOCRATS: “Sure it will; millions of them … though they may be invisible. You’ll have to trust us they exist. And guess what else we’ll do: We’ll create a giant new government program to take over health care.”

AMERICANS: “That has nothing to do with jobs!”

DEMOCRATS: “We don’t care about that anymore. We really want a giant new health care program. We’re sure you’ll love it.”

AMERICANS: “Don’t pass that bill. You hear me? Absolutely do not pass that bill.”

DEMOCRATS: “Believe me; you’ll love it. It has … well, I don’t know what exactly is in the bill, but we’re sure it’s great.”

AMERICANS: “Listen to me: DO. NOT. PASS. THAT. BILL.”

DEMOCRATS: “You’re not the boss of me! We’re doing it anyway!”

AMERICANS: “Look what you did! Now the economy is way worse, we’re even deeper in debt, and we have a bunch of new laws we don’t want!”

DEMOCRATS: “You’re racist.”

AMERICANS: “Wha … How is that racist?”

DEMOCRATS: “Now you’re getting violent! Stop being violent and racist, you ignorant hillbillies! And remember to vote Democrat in November.”

So the Democrats sucked. But not just plain old, usual politician sucked, but epic levels of suck where it’s hard to find an analogue in human history that conveys the same level of suckitude. It was sheer incompetence plus arrogance — and those things do not complement each other well. We’re talking sucking that distorts time and space like a black hole.

It’s Godzilla-smashing-through-a-city level of suck — but a really patronizing Godzilla who says you’re just too stupid and hateful to see all the buildings he’s saved or created as he smashes everything apart. Or, to use Obama’s favorite analogy, you have a car stuck in ditch, so you call the mechanic, but the only tool he brings with him is a sledgehammer. And then he smashes your car to pieces and charges you $100,000 for his service. Finally, he calls you racist for complaining. Obama and the Democrats have been so awful, it’s hard for the human brain to even comprehend.

But the Democrats will counter that the Republicans also suck. And while this is true, it’s not really going to help them. As I pointed out before, both a dog incessantly barking and a zombie apocalypse are things that everyone would agree suck. Yet no one during a zombie apocalypse, while hiding out in a boarded up mall, would turn to the other survivors and say, “We don’t want to kill all the zombies; then we’d have to go back to being woken up at night by that annoying dog next door.” But this is the best argument the Democrats can come up with.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

CBS summary:

Jobs:

Cutting Spending:

Reforming Congress:

Defense:

Full text pdf (as I write this, I’m waiting for 17 minutes of download to finish)
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A lot of people, including most prominently Don Surber, Erik Erikson, think it is too damned long, too platitudinous, and not what it should be.

Doug Ross offered a superior, and far more concise, alternative version:

We pledge that every action we take will be gauged by the answer to a single question: Does it show fidelity to the Constitution, our highest law?

With that as our guide, we solemnly pledge the following as our first actions:

• We will repeal the Democrat health care bill and, if vetoed by the President, will de-fund every aspect of that bill until such time as the American people have input into a sensible health care reform process.
• We will slash the size of the federal government bureaucracies (Commerce, Education, Energy, the EPA, Labor, etc.) by 20% in 2011 with a goal of reducing each by 50% over the next three years, thereby saving hundreds of billions of dollars.
• We will secure the border with physical fencing suitable to repel drug smugglers, human smugglers, and terrorists, while encouraging legal immigration and enforcement of the law.
• We will confront the entitlement crisis—Social Security and Medicare—by preserving benefits for those who depend upon them and moving to privatized options for younger workers. Anything less condemns future generations to mountains of debt and economic catastrophe.
• We will strengthen our armed forces, space and missile defense programs to retain our unparalleled superpower status.
• We will begin the process of paying down our debts, spending within our means every year.
• We will ban public sector unions, which exist solely to wage war against the taxpayers who fund their operations.

Put simply: we intend to adhere to a strict interpretation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Faith, Family, and the Founding. That is our creed.

And for your support and with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

I must say that I find it difficult to believe that the guys who produced this bloviating document, loaded down with pretentious, trite, and irrelevant photographs (the Statue of Liberty! Mount Rushmore! even a cowboy) and padded with quotations from people like Ronald Reagan and Bob McDonnell who actually had something to say, are really going to reduce the size of anything.

Reducing this Pledge to specifics and essentials would have been a better start.

Big Apple quotes the Buckley Rule:

Conservative author and commentator William F. Buckley (1925-2008) was asked, in 1967, whom he would support in 1968 for U.S. president. Buckley responded with what would late be called the ‘Buckley Rule” for primary voting: “The wisest choice would be the one who would win. No sense running Mona Lisa in a beauty contest. I’d be for the most right, viable candidate who could win. If you could convince me that Barry Goldwater could win, I’d vote for him.”

Yesterday, in reference to the Delaware GOP Senate primary in which Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell supported by Sarah Palin defeated moderate Republican Mike Castle supported by Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh proposed replacing the Buckley Rule with a new rule of his own.

So we have professional Washingtonians now telling us that Mike Castle’s the only option we’ve got. Well, it’s time, ladies and gentlemen, for the Limbaugh Rule to supplant and replace the Buckley Rule, because the Buckley Rule requires clairvoyance. The Buckley Rule requires people who can’t possibly know the outcome of anything in the middle of September to support or not support somebody based on what they think’s going to happen in early November. Christine O’Donnell can’t win, she’s 25 points down. Can’t win? If a constitutional conservative can’t win in this climate coming down from 25 points, we need to find that out, find out where we are. Why not go for it? The stakes dictate it, do they not? Here’s the Limbaugh Rule: In an election year when voters are fed up with liberalism and socialism, when voters are clearly frightened of where the hell the country is headed, vote for the most conservative Republican in the primary, period.

Rush was perfectly right.

In general, it is better to back the conservative candidate and go down to defeat in the general election in an unfavorable year than to try calculation and support a RINO Republican, like John McCain, Arlen Specter, Lincoln Chaffee, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and the like, in hope of support on the organization of the Senate and the occasional vote.

In every serious contest during the Bush Administration, confirmation of judges, making tax cuts permanent, Social Security reform, reforming Fannie Mae, RINO Republicans sided with the democrats and foiled GOP policy. If we had not had so many RINOs, George W. Bush might have successfully privatized Social Security and prevented the Housing Bubble from collapsing. There might have been no Panic of 2008 and no democrat control of Congress, no Barack Obama.

We have to win the battle of idea and achieve victory in the national debate. There is no shortcut to conservative success achievable by compromising and taking a certain number of liberal RINO Republicans along for the ride. They will always undermine and betray any possibility of actually accomplishing something with a Republican majority. We need to elect a majority of real Republicans, and if we can’t put a principled and conservative Republican into a legislative seat, we should just need to go back and try again, and do a better job of opposing the incumbent democrat in the next election.

2:56 video

Among the registered voters in the [latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll], Republicans led by 2 points on the generic congressional ballot test, 45 percent to 43 percent. This may not sound like a lot, given that Democrats now hold 59 percent of House seats. When this same poll was taken in June 2008, however, Democrats led by 19 points, 52 percent to 33 percent.

That drop-off should be enough to sober Democrats up, but the next set of data was even more chilling. First, keep in mind that all registered voters don’t vote even in presidential years, and that in midterm elections the turnout is about one-third less. In an attempt to ascertain who really is most likely to vote, pollsters asked registered voters, on a scale of 1 to 10, how interested they were in the November elections. Those who said either 9 or 10 added up to just over half of the registered voters, coming in at 51 percent.

Hart and McInturff then looked at the change among the most-interested voters from the same survey in 2008. Although 2010 is a “down-shifting” election, from a high-turnout presidential year to a lower-turnout midterm year, one group was more interested in November than it was in 2008: those who had voted for Republican John McCain for president. And the groups that showed the largest decline in interest? Those who voted for Barack Obama—liberals, African-Americans, self-described Democrats, moderates, those living in either the Northeast or West, and younger voters 18 to 34 years of age. These are the “Holy Mackerel” numbers.

Among all voters, there has been a significant swing since 2008 when Democrats took their new majority won in 2006 to an even higher level. But when you home in on those people in this survey who are most likely to vote, the numbers are devastating. The NBC/WSJ survey, when combined with a previously released NPR study of likely voters in 70 competitive House districts by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg and Republican Glen Bolger, point to an outcome for Democrats that is as serious as a heart attack. Make no mistake about it: There is a wave out there, and for Democrats, the House is, at best, teetering on the edge.

To be sure, things could change in the four months between now and November 2. The GOP’s failure to get Republicans to vote in the May 18 special election in Pennsylvania’s 12th District underscores that the party can’t just sit back and await spontaneous combustion in terms of turnout. Still, the potential is here for a result that is proportional to some of the bigger postwar midterm wave elections. These kinds of waves are often ragged; almost always some candidates who looked dead somehow survive and others who were deemed safe get sucked down in the undertow. That’s the nature of these beasts. But the recent numbers confirm that trends first spotted late last summer have fully developed into at least a Category 3 or 4 hurricane.

Given how many House seats were newly won by Democrats in 2008 in GOP districts, and given that this election is leading into an all-important redistricting year, this reversal of fortune couldn’t have happened at a worse time for Democrats.

Deborah B. Sloan, at American Thinker, describes the failure of the Republican congressional leadership to rise to the challenge of educating the public and confronting the left, and their choice of cowardice and conformity to the politics of the left instead.

“I’m ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday,” Congressman Barton said. “I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown—in this case, a $20 billion shakedown. ... I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong is subject to some sort of political pressure that is—again, in my words, amounts to a shakedown.”

Amen, Congressman Barton. It is horrifying to witness the constant statist attack on property rights and the rule of law while being essentially powerless to stop it. What a relief it was to hear someone who does have a modicum of power speak out against this assault on our nation.

Of course, the usual suspects on the left—most notably Joe Biden—leaped onto their soap boxes and screamed bloody murder in reaction to Congressman Barton’s statements; they regurgitated worn-out clichés about Republicans being “in the pockets of Big Oil.”

This sort of tantrum always erupts when someone takes a principled stand against the left. It was an opportunity for the Republican leadership’s response to second Mr. Barton’s concern for the enormously important principles involved, to advocate reimbursement via the constitutionally supported mechanism of due process for people who were harmed by the oil leak, and to firmly tell the Obama regime that they will not be receiving any apologies—that it is they who owe apologies to the American people for the fraud, corruption, theft, and full-blown terror they have subjected us to since January 2009.

Instead, the House Republican leadership denounced the stand taken by Mr. Barton and demanded that he apologize. This type of spinelessness on the part of the Republicans has contributed significantly to the erosion of freedom in America over the past century. Ayn Rand observed that

[t]he uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other—until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology.

With the exception of the fight against ObamaCare, the current Republican leadership have demonstrated that they are unwilling to stand up to the left. The solution to this is not a third party. Instead, the Republican establishment must be phased out and replaced with a new school of leaders who will proudly fight for freedom and capitalism with the same endurance and unapologetic fervor that the left has exhibited for collectivism and tyrannical big government.

Michael Gerson discusses how Republicans are committing political suicide, attempting to apply the precise same strategy that cost the GOP its political competitiveness in California nationally.

According to a 2008 study by the Pew Hispanic Center, 49 percent of Hispanics said that Democrats had more concern for people of their background; 7 percent believed this was true of Republicans. Since the Arizona controversy, this gap can only have grown. In a matter of months, Hispanic voters in Arizona have gone from being among the most pro-GOP in the nation to being among the most hostile.

Immigration issues are emotional and complex. But this must be recognized for what it is: political suicide. Consider that Hispanics make up 40 percent of the K-12 students in Arizona, 44 percent in Texas, 47 percent in California, 54 percent in New Mexico. Whatever temporary gains Republicans might make feeding resentment of this demographic shift, the party identified with that resentment will eventually be voted into singularity. In a matter of decades, the Republican Party could cease to be a national party.

Even describing this reality invites scorn from those who regard immigration as a matter of principle instead of politics. But this represents a deep misunderstanding of politics itself. In America, political ideals are carried by parties. Republicans who are pro-business and pro-life, support a strong national defense and oppose deficit spending depend on one another to achieve influence. Each of these convictions alienates someone—pro-choice voters, economic liberals, pacifists. But Republican activists who alienate not an issue-group but an influential, growing ethnic group are a threat to every other constituency. The vocal faction of anti-immigrant Republicans is not merely part of a coalition; it will eventually make it impossible for anyone else in that coalition to succeed at the national level.

The good news for Republicans is that Hispanics tend to be entrepreneurial and socially conservative. While the general image Hispanics hold of the GOP is poor, individual Republican candidates can make significant inroads. In presidential elections, Hispanic support can swing widely. In 1996, Bill Clinton got 72 percent of the Hispanic vote. In 2004, John Kerry’s support was in the 50s. And Republicans do not need to win a majority of the Latino vote to compete nationally, just a competitive minority of that vote.

But even this modest goal is impossible if Hispanic voters feel targeted rather than courted.

The history of the left in this country is a history of division. Whatever conflict was current—labor vs. management, class vs. class, race vs. race—there you’d find the left, stirring things up in order to derive as much political benefit as possible. A workable democratic system demands a willingness to seek consensus and engage in compromise. The left prefers Balkanization and permanent conflict.

For some years now, it has appeared that the Leftist formula had reached the end of its string. The corrupt and crime-ridden unions were on their last legs, hemorrhaging members even as they drove jobs overseas. Blacks were steadily moving into the middle class and becoming less susceptible to separatist rhetoric. An attempt to transform the university student body into a permanent revolutionary phalanx on the Peronist model had only partial success—students were willing to play while actually on campus, but after graduation they went on to more interesting pursuits.

So how to keep the pot boiling? The answer was to go find a new millet—or rather, to take advantage of the one next door, of the desperate people fleeing a serial kleptocracy, an uneducated, ignorant, and frightened mass open to all forms of manipulation.

This explains why illegal immigration is so important to the left. It explains why efforts to halt illegal border-crossings, a problem that wouldn’t challenge a six-year-old, are executed so half-heartedly and so often left unfinished (see the recent “virtual fence”). It explains the irrational response to Arizona’s effort to tighten up existing immigration law (not create new law—Arizona’s statute is no more than a reinforcement of existing federal law). It explains the insistence that any solution to the immigration problem provide for amnesty and citizenship for the millions of illegals already living within our borders. It has nothing to do with compassion, nothing to do with fairness, or practicality, or any of the other reasons offered by “reform” advocates. As is almost always the case where the American left is involved, what it has to do with is power.

The left wishes to use the illegals as a battering ram against the American polity, the same as they used labor, and blacks, and every other group they ever encountered. Illegals will become a new protected class, with privileges and entitlements denied the rest of the populace (including, ironically, current members of previous such classes). They will be discouraged from learning English, as occurs today under the doctrine of “bilingualism”, to assure that they remain a separate presence. A vast bureaucracy will arise to “assist” the new citizenry, funded with billions—oh hell, make that trillions, this is the Obama era—and staffed with sociologists, ethnographers, psychologists, and other disciplines unimagined today. All will be of the same political persuasion. A permanent crisis atmosphere will be generated around the new class. The “Amnestee” question will lead to endless problems and ramifications and act as a permanent indictment of the country and its policies. The native population (not to mention legal immigrants) will grow increasingly embittered and angered. The former illegals will be rendered even more miserable than they are today.

The solution is obvious. There must be no amnesty. Such an action would simply drop a permanent inassimilable presence in the midst of American society. Current law must be executed to the fullest, and where necessary (as in all the border states) reinforced with new state laws. Illegals now in the country must be encouraged to regularize themselves according to recognized procedure. They must not be allowed, for their sakes and ours, to become clients of the left-wing establishment. The immigrant problem must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, according to individual circumstances. The notion that there is an acceptable mass solution is pure fantasy.

While this may involve some hardship—and will certainly give rise to cries of “unfairness”—it is in the long run the best solution for all concerned. Even the illegals will be better off. Becoming a member of a left-wing client class may not be the worst possible fate, but it’s not far from the bottom either, as generations of welfare families can attest. American leftists did nothing for this country’s workers once the union vote-getting machines were established. The same can be said of blacks in the inner cities once the political machines were in action there. The goal of power is simply to perpetuate itself. Actually solving problems might interfere with that process.

Imagine yourself inside Democratic National Committee headquarters, in the department of long-term planning. Huddling in the no longer smoke-filled room, stocked no doubt with eco-friendly coffee cups and whole-wheat snacks, the savants are pleased with themselves. In the great game of buying constituencies for more government, they believe that the gargantuan health care law is the greatest coup in history. Not only did it create millions more mendicants, but with the new legislation weighing in at 2,000 pages, endless new work for two other favored groups – lawyers and bureaucrats. Brilliant!

Pushed to the back of their minds are disquieting facts such as these: The health reform law remains deeply unpopular, with 55 percent (Rasmussen) saying they would like to see it repealed. The Congress that pushed it to passage has approval ratings of 23 percent (Gallup). President Obama’s approval ratings (Bill Clinton’s confident pre-vote predictions to the contrary notwithstanding) have not rebounded since passage.

Never mind, the Democrats reason, by hanging Wall Street around Republicans’ necks and by reviving the immigration controversy (with a great deal of help from the state of Arizona), Democrats will win out. Maybe not in 2010, as off-year electorates tend to skew older and whiter, but certainly by 2012, when President Obama stands for re-election.

The financial reform bill has yet to fully play out. But by stoking controversy over immigration, the Democrats are making a shrewd move. If Hispanics vote in 2010 as they did in 2008, it would be virtually impossible for a Republican to win.

John McCain won 55 percent of the white vote in 2008. Bravo for him. Even with 95 percent of African-Americans voting for Obama, McCain would have taken the oath of office had it not been for the lop-sided Hispanic vote that went for Obama by 67 percent. While it is true that estimates of the total Hispanic vote percentage have often been overblown (the total Hispanic vote in 2008 was 8 percent, not the 15 percent widely cited), the vote can be crucial in some key states. In California, Hispanics comprised 16 percent of the vote in 2008. In Florida, it was 14 percent, and in Colorado 13 percent.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, 74 percent of California Hispanics voted for Obama, along with 61 percent of Hispanic Coloradans, and 57 percent of Hispanic Floridians. ...

Hispanics are not ideologically committed. Not yet. George W. Bush received a respectable 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004. As Clint Bolick outlined in the Hoover Digest, a 2006 survey by Latino Coalition found that 34.2 percent of Hispanic voters considered themselves conservative, while only 25.8 called themselves liberals. More than 53 percent agreed that it was more important for Hispanics to become integrated into American society than to preserve their native cultures. Offered a choice between higher taxes and more government spending or lower taxes and less government spending, 61.2 percent favored the latter. Moreover, like other Americans, Hispanics tend to vote more Republican as they age.

Hispanic voters do feel very differently from many conservatives about immigration. Pew found that 53 percent of Hispanics worried about deportation in 2007, including 32 percent of the native born, and also that 55 percent opposed verification of citizenship before obtaining driver’s licenses.

Hat tip to Kenneth Grubbs.