Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts

May 25, 2011

“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding"

From the NYT:
Parties See Obama’s Israel Policy as Wedge for 2012 
By JACKIE CALMES and HELENE COOPER 
WASHINGTON — Few issues in American politics are as bipartisan as support for Israel. Yet the question of whether President Obama is supportive enough is behind some of the most partisan maneuvering since the Middle East ally was born six decades ago, and that angling has potential ramifications for the 2012 elections. 
The visit of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in the past week captured just how aggressively Republicans are stoking doubts about Mr. Obama. Republican Congressional leaders and presidential aspirants lavished praise on Mr. Netanyahu as quickly as they had condemned Mr. Obama for proposing that Israel’s 1967 borders, with mutually agreed land swaps, should be a basis for negotiating peace with the Palestinians. 
Republicans do not suggest that they can soon break the Democratic Party’s long hold on the loyalty of Jewish-American voters; Mr. Obama got nearly 8 of 10 such voters in 2008. But what Republicans do see is the potential in 2012 to diminish the millions of dollars, volunteer activism and ultimately the votes that Mr. Obama and his party typically get from American Jews — support that is disproportionate to their numbers.

And that's not counting unpaid media: of the traditional big 4 newspapers, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and LA Times, are all Jewish-owned. Jews make up about half of the Atlantic 50 list of most influential pundits.
While Jewish Americans are just 2 percent of the electorate nationally, they are “strategically concentrated,” as Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster, put it, in several swing states that are critical in presidential elections. Those states include Florida — which in 2000 illustrated the potentially decisive power of one state — Ohio and Nevada. 
A test of Mr. Obama’s support will come June 20, when he will hold a fund-raiser for about 80 Jewish donors at a private dinner. 
John R. Bolton, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations and a possible Republican presidential candidate, argues that because of administration proposals, Republicans will be able to make gains not only among American Jews but also among evangelicals who are supportive of Israel on biblical grounds, and other voters. 
Mr. Bolton said that he was on a cruise sponsored by the conservative magazine Weekly Standard last week in the Mediterranean, and that most of the people on the ship “reacted very strongly against” Mr. Obama’s speech outlining his Mideast vision. “As a Republican,” he said, “you can use this to show how radical the president’s policies are on a whole range of issues.” 
The depth of Democrats’ worries was evident from the competition to out-applaud Republicans on Tuesday during Mr. Netanyahu’s speech to a joint meeting of Congress

How many standing ovations did Netanyahu get from Congress? 20? 29? That reminds me of a story in Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago:
At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). ... For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the stormy applause, rising to an ovation, continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. ... 
However, who would dare to be the first to stop? … After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who would quit first! And in the obscure, small hall, unknown to the leader, the applause went on – six, seven, eight minutes! ... They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! ... 
The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers!  
Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! 
... That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him: 
“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding."

It has been widely noted that VP and President of the Senate Joe Biden merely rubbed his knuckles pensively after Netanyahu's statement that Jerusalem must be the united capital of Israel, while everyone else in the room cheered as if Beyonce had just finished singing "Single Ladies."
Yet it is the Republican Party’s close identification with evangelical Christians in recent years that is perhaps its biggest hurdle to winning over significant numbers of Jewish voters and donors. On issues that are crucial to the conservative Republican base — like opposition to abortion, gay rights, liberalized immigration and much government spending — most American Jews are on the other side, and strongly so. ...

 Indeed.
Mr. Netanyahu on Monday experienced first-hand the tension arising from that complaint among Democrats, and Republicans’ rejection of it, in a private meeting he held with representatives of the National Jewish Democratic Council and the Republican Jewish Coalition to underscore American Jews’ bipartisan consensus on Israel. 
A partisan argument ensued after Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, whom Mr. Obama recently named as chairman of the Democratic Party, suggested they agree not to make support for Israel an election issue. Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican group, objected, accusing her of proposing a “gag order.”

May 20, 2011

Reconquista founding father: Jeb, Arnold, or Mel?

Consider three family names that are somewhat tarnished at present: Bush, Schwarzenegger, and Gibson. Yet, they all have a chance to return to fame and power in the next generation due to the ongoing changes in the electorate. We live in an age in which surnames serve as brand names in politics, and that will likely only increase as the voters become less sophisticated due to demographic trends.

It's widely assumed by the press that the onrushing tsunami of Latino voters that will slam home real soon now will lead to a Hispanic Obama, but that simplistic logic overlooks the widespread lack of charisma found among Mexican-Americans. Just as the first African-American President is of unusual background, so might be the first Mexican-American President.

Thus, there exists the odd but not implausible chance that a glamorous non-Hispanic will father a Latino political dynasty.

As I may have mentioned over the years, the Bush dynasty looks to Jeb Bush's handsome half-Mexican son George P. Bush as the most likely member of the next generation to return the Bush name to the White House in a demographically altered America.

As a commenter suggested, this week's confirmation that former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger really likes chicas suggests a potential competitor for the Bushes in a Hispanicized America. Arnold is rich enough and will soon be single enough to remarry and produce a brood of half-Latino legitimate heirs to someday battle the Bushes.

And then there's the dark horse: Mel Gibson, whose The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto are the most aesthetically impressive responses yet to the Hispanicization of America. Granted, his personal tastes seem to run toward Slavic adventuresses, but he is also rich enough and single enough to find a nice Mexican girl and have a half dozen kids who might challenge the Bush and Schwarzenegger Latino dynasties in a Mexicanized America.

You read it here first.

May 17, 2011

Tim Pawlenty

Back in 2009, I looked up the frontrunners for the 2012 GOP Presidential nomination on one of those betting sites. There was a three-way tie between Sarah Palin (whom I had heard of), Mitt Romney (whom I had heard of), and Tim Pawlenty (uh ...). Presumably, the smart money figured that nobody else could win, so through process of elimination, Pawlenty would be the last man standing. This theory remains popular today.

Since then, I've tried to read the long Wikipedia article on Pawlenty several times. Each time I get through the identity politics basics: he was governor of Minnesota, a nice, respectable Canadian-border state; he's half German and half Polish (which gets me musing on how that would be nice for Poles who seem like quiet people who don't make much of a fuss and it would be nice if they got part of a President to claim); so that sounds like he'd be Catholic but he's actually an evangelical Protestant, which should appeal to Southerners even though he's from the far North. 

So, I get the theory of Tim Pawlenty, but as soon as I start reading about the individual, my eyes glaze over. I've never come close to finishing anything about Pawlenty. In contrast, with potential candidate Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana, maybe just because I've had dinner with him a couple of times, but I can observe themes emerging from the biographical minutiae: like, what a huge role selling drugs has played throughout his life. That's interesting. But with Pawlenty, I can't force myself to pay attention long enough to notice patterns.

So, tell me something interesting about Tim Pawlenty.

April 26, 2011

Pew Hispanic Center: Latino Electoral Tidal Wave MIA Yet Again

From the Washington Post:
Latino and Asian voters mostly sat out 2010 election, report says
By Shankar Vedantam, Tuesday, April 26, 6:07 PM 
A record 14.7 million Latino voters sat out the 2010 midterm elections, according to a report by the Pew Hispanic Center that shows the nation’s fastest-growing minorities are largely failing to exercise their right to vote. 
Along with Asian voters, who appear similarly disengaged, the absence of so many Latino voters at the polls means the political influence of these minority groups will fall short of their demographic strength by years, if not decades. 
About 31 percent of eligible Latino and Asian voters cast ballots in the 2010 congressional elections, compared with 49 percent of eligible white voters and 44 percent of eligible blacks, according to the Pew report. ... 

So, way back in 1986, 39% of Hispanics eligible to vote bothered to show up and vote. By 2010, voting was down to 31%, and only 25% looking at the marginal change from 2006 to 2010: a crazy four million more additional eligible voters (thanks George W. Bush!), but only one million more actual voters.
The snapshot of minority voting comes on the heels of a poll showing that support for President Obama among Latinos is down by more than 25 percentage points compared with the start of his administration — cause for serious concern among Democrats. 
Obama needs Latinos to show up in force for him in 2012, as they did in 2008, political analysts say. But the administration has disappointed many Latinos by failing to win immigration reforms while increasing deportations among the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Because that's the only thing Latino voters care about: immigration. That's why the Arizona immigration law led to that widely predicted landslide of angry Hispanic voters in 2010 punishing the GOP for SB1070. I read dozens of interviews in 2010 with Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Earmuffs) saying that was going to happen, so it must have happened right?
Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.) ... blamed Obama’s immigration stance for lackluster turnout among Latinos. ...
Several Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (Calif.) were reelected last year with strong Latino support, but on the whole, GOP candidates fared better than expected among Latino voters. That was especially true of Latino GOP candidates. 
“During the November 2010 midterm elections, the Republican Party had historic levels of Hispanic support,” said Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “In fact, exit polls showed that 38 percent of Hispanic voters cast ballots for House Republican candidates. This is more than in 2008 and 2006. . . . All five Hispanics elected to Congress in 2010 were Republicans.” 
Smith said that calls for strong border protection and enforcement had played well in Florida, Mexico and Nevada, including with Latino voters.“This is a good trend for the GOP,” he said.

So, Mexico is the 52nd state!
Clarissa Martinez, director of immigration and national campaigns at the National Council of La Raza, a pro-immigration group, said political candidates were not investing enough effort in reaching out to and mobilizing Latino voters.

I've got a great idea: they should reach out and invest more by hiring Clarissa Martinez! She probably has some relatives who would like jobs as ethnic consultants, too. Neither party should cease investing until all the Martinezes have nice Hispanic activist jobs. And Rep. Gutierrez probably has some nephews and nieces who are someday going to need jobs as well.

We must import more immigrants so all these Martinezes and Gutierrezes can be employed as their nominal leaders.

April 12, 2011

GOP takes dead aim on own foot

From the LA Times:
President Obama will call for shrinking the nation's long-term deficits by raising taxes on wealthier Americans and requiring them to pay more into Social Security, drawing a barbed contrast with a Republican plan to save money by deeply slashing Medicare, Medicaid and other domestic spending. ... 
Democrats hope to repeat the experience of 2005, in which President George W. Bush's proposal to privatize parts of Social Security proved to be a staggering miscalculation that cost his party heavily in the next year's election. They think voters will not accept a Republican proposal put forward by Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) that would replace guaranteed Medicare benefits with a limited voucher.

You know, Republican Congressmen, you are back in the majority in the House now in large part because a whole bunch of older white people got worried in 2009-10 that, having paid taxes for Medicare for decades, Medicare would now suddenly get whittled down by this black liberal guy to pay for health insurance for a whole bunch of younger and not so white people who aren't very related to them. 

You probably consider the motivations of your own 2010 voters to be, at minimum, zero summist -- Don't these old white bigots understand the Magic of the Market? -- and probably racist. So what if this implicit white coalition that came together to defend Medicare is your party's main chance for political survival? Old white people are creepy!

Hey, some of your 2010 voters abandoned the GOP in 2006 after Bush announced in 2005 that he wanted to take Social Security, which they had paid for for decades, and hand it over to the tender ministrations of Wall Street. (How'd that work out for you, anyway?) But you probably consider those voters who didn't trust Wall Street with their Social Security to be more or less raving anti-Semites, too, so who wants their votes?
And beginning in 2022, Ryan would privatize the Medicare program by giving seniors a subsidy to help them shop for commercial insurance.

Let's throw together tax subsidies, incredibly complicated health insurance products, customers who are going senile, and corporations staffed by bright MBAs with spreadsheets. What could possibly go wrong? 

I can't think of anything I'd rather spend my declining years doing than engaging in an ongoing battle of wits with MBAs with spreadsheets on their own turf over my health insurance. (And I am an MBA with a spreadsheet. I used to be a bright one, too, but I'm already too old to try to outsmart pros who devote their careers to outsmarting civilians like me.) 

April 6, 2011

$4 per gallon gasoline

Perhaps one reason for the Obama Administration starting the Libyan War was to avoid a situation like in Iraq from 1991-2003, where international sanctions reduced oil exports, presumably making gasoline prices higher in America. If Gaddafi had won his civil war, the great and the good would likely have voted sanctions on Libyan oil exports, thus tightening world oil markets, with unfortunate effects on unemployment and Obama's re-election chances.

Of course, gasoline prices were pretty low in absolute terms during much of the 1991-2003 period. And as the Iraq War showed, war isn't really conducive to oil production. The presence of oil in the ground can generate civil war over who will control its future stream of wealth, driving down production in the present due to violence and sabotage.


The problem in Libya with this line of thought is that the lightly populated war zone contested between Gaddafi's westerners and the Benghazi rebel easterners is where most of Libya's oil comes from. This Washington Post graphic  of east/central Libya shows the four major oil shipping ports. At present, the westernmost is controlled by Gaddafi, the easternmost by the rebels and the two in the middle are being fought over.

Now, things can change fast in Libya, as the back-and-forth war of 1940-1943 showed. The Obama Administration seems to be focusing on bribing Tripoli insiders to do something with Gaddafi so Obama can declare victory. The Benghazi rebels, however, as they realize how awful they are at mechanical warfare, are making noises about accepting a partition of Libya with them in control of some of the oil.

In Libya, you have a fundamentally tribal culture growing out of nomadism. If you wander around in the desert your whole life, the most effective way to organize your loyalties is into "segmentary lineages" defined by male ancestry. But the oil doesn't wander around in the desert, it just stays in one place. To paraphrase Winston Churchill on the Pashtuns, the life of the Libyan is thus full of interest.

Bill Gates Sr. and Jr.

Jonathan Last points to Michael Kinsley's new oped in the LA Times, in which Kinsley explains that his old boss at Slate, Bill Gates, was a Jefferson Smith-type innocent who didn't understand that the city slickers of Washington D.C. would fleece him unless he hired lots of lawyers and lobbyists. Kinsley asserts:
For many years before the [Clinton Administration's antitrust] lawsuit, Microsoft had virtually no Washington "presence." It had a large office in the suburbs, mainly concerned with selling software to the government. Bill Gates resisted the notion that a software company needed to hire a lot of lobbyists and lawyers. He didn't want anything special from the government, except the freedom to build and sell software. If the government would leave him alone, he would leave the government alone. 
At first this was regarded (at least in Washington) as naive. Grown-up companies hire lobbyists. What's this guy's problem? Then it was regarded as foolish. This was not a game. There were big issues at stake. Next it came to be seen as arrogant: Who the hell does Microsoft think it is? Does it think it's too good to do what every other company of its size in the world is doing? 
Ultimately, there even was a feeling that, in refusing to play the Washington game, Microsoft was being downright unpatriotic. Look, buddy, there is an American way of doing things, and that American way includes hiring lobbyists, paying lawyers vast sums by the hour, throwing lavish parties for politicians, aides, journalists, and so on. So get with the program. 
So that's what Microsoft did. It moved its government affairs office out of distant Chevy Chase, Md., and into the downtown K Street corridor. It bulked up on lawyers and hired the best-connected lobbyists. Soon Microsoft was coming under criticism for being heavy-handed in its attempts to buy influence. But the sad thing is that it seems to have worked. Microsoft is no longer Public Enemy No. 1. 

Okay, I've heard that before, so maybe it's true. But here's what I don't get. In the movie Casino Jack (now out on video, here's my review), Kevin Spacey plays out-of-control lobbyist Jack Abramoff. In the first half of the movie, Abramoff works in DC for a big law and lobbying firm called Preston Gates & Ellis. 

Wikipedia explains:
Preston Gates & Ellis, LLP, also known as Preston Gates, was a law firm with offices in the United States, China and Taiwan. ... Preston Gates was ranked among the top 100 law firms in the United States by both The American Lawyer magazine and the National Law Journal, and was traditionally considered, along with Perkins Coie, one of the two leading Seattle-based law and lobbying firms. 
The "Gates" in the firm's name is William H. Gates, Sr., father of Microsoft founder Bill Gates.[1] Gates retired from the firm in 1998. ...  

The Gates are Democrats, by the way, just like the Clintons.
The firm's Washington, DC office is known as Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds LLP. When it was opened in 1973, partners included Emanuel Rouvelas, former counsel to the Senate Commerce Committee, and former Congressman Lloyd Meeds (D-WA).[3] Among its major clients is Microsoft, which paid PGE over $1,380,000 for lobbying various federal government institutions. During that time the chairman of the firm was William Neukom, who was employed by Microsoft as head of its legal department. ... 
From 1994 to 2001, Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds LLP employed Jack Abramoff, a Republican lobbyist later convicted for his illegal activities. [2] Abramoff was hired by partner Emanuel Rouvelas following the Republican takeover of Congress: according to the Seattle Times (1995), although the firm's representatives were half Democratic and half Republican, they "didn't have a conservative, Christian Coalition Republican with strong ties to the new Republican leadership."

So, I’m a little skeptical about the notion that Bill Gates Jr. was just a poor rube from the sticks who didn’t know about the importance of lobbying in Washington when his dad was a name partner of the firm that unleashed Jack Abramoff on the world. Moreover, one of the specialties of Preston Gates & Ellis was antitrust defenses of corporations accused of monopoly.

I don't really understand the full story here: it doesn't make sense that Gates Jr. wouldn't understand lobbying. Maybe what happened is that Gates Sr. reassured Gates Jr. that he had D.C. covered for him -- Trust me, son, I'm a pro at this -- but he let his kid down.

Or maybe Gates Jr. held Gates Sr.'s career in contempt? But they seem like they have respectful and pleasant relations. 

That's all just speculation, but it seems like there must be a a human interest story here that I've never heard spelled out.

P.S. Yes, I will pre-emptively admit to commenters that, indeed, it is petty and makes me look bad that I try to find out more about people like Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Muamar Gaddafi, and so forth. I realize that these gentlemen go to great expense to employ PR agents who will tell us all we need to know about them.

April 4, 2011

Barone: "GOP Shouldn't Panic If Whites Become a Minority"

Michael Barone writes about the Census results:
Finally there is an assumption -- which is particularly strong among those who expect a majority "people of color" electorate to put Democrats in power permanently -- that racial consciousness never changes. But sometimes it does. 
American blacks do have common roots in slavery and segregation. But African immigrants don't share that heritage, and Hispanics come from many different countries and cultures (there are big regional differences just within Mexico). The Asian category includes anyone from Japan to Lebanon and in between. 
Under the definitions in use in the America of a century ago, when Southern and Eastern European immigrants were not regarded as white, the United States became a majority non-white nation sometime in the 1950s.

That's just the kind of myth that springs up as people forget what really happened. Jim Crow never applied to Italians or Poles. Anti-miscegenation laws didn't apply to southern and eastern Europeans. Black people should get upset about all this "How the Irish Became White" mythmaking.
By today's definitions, we'll become majority non-white a few decades hence. 
But that may not make for the vast cultural and political change some predict. Not if we assimilate newcomers, and if our two political parties adapt, as we and they have done in the past.

Barone is vaguely picking up here on some of my arguments over the last few years that the GOP could take a number of steps to redefine the government's race/ethnicity categories to their advantage. All over the world, people (especially women) want to be described as fairer than they actually are. But in America, the government rewards ambiguous people for declaring themselves nonwhite. And you get more of what you pay for. I've argued, in short: concede that the descendants of American slaves and American Indians will always be legally privileged, but nobody else should be. So, either get rid of the category of ethnicity, which is currently reserved for Hispanics, or open it up to everybody. Don't let South Asians be a protected group. Etc.

But the first thing you've got to do is pay attention to how the race rules work. For example, Barone writes, "The Asian category includes anyone from Japan to Lebanon and in between." No, the Asian category currently ends at the Khyber Pass. It used to end in the hill country of Burma. That Barone, who has a tremendous memory for detail, can't remember stuff like that shows how outgunned Republicans are intellectually in this area because they never pay attention to it. You can't begin to win at this game if you don't know the rules.

February 24, 2011

Chris Christie in 2012?

On paper, NJ governor Chris Christie sounds like a pretty good nominee for the Republicans in 2012. The GOP these days is rooted in the South, so a northeasterner gives a good balance. 

But, how fat does the guy look? I've never met him and I don't watch much television, but is he just too fat to go up against a half-Luo skinny incumbent President?

February 9, 2011

Defying stereotypes

What's this world coming to? Strange phenomena are afoot as Republican politicians continue their mystifying recent trend (e.g., Sen. Ensign, Gov. Sanford) toward getting into sex scandals with women:
Rep. Chris Lee (R-N.Y.) has resigned from the House effective immediately, an announcement that came just hours after a Web site alleged flirtatious behavior by the congressman online. ...

Lee's decision to vacate his Upstate New York seat came after Gawker, a gossip Web site, posted a shirtless picture of Lee that it said was part of a correspondence between the congressman and a woman who was not his wife.

January 17, 2011

Ronald Brownstein's "White Flight" article in National Journal

From the VDARE.com column I wrote before the press whipped itself into a frenzy nine days ago:
Veteran centrist reporter Ronald Brownstein’s "White Flight" article in National Journal, a trade magazine for political professionals, had begun to get a lot of attention, until the political class went berserk over that psycho shooting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona. ...

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Brownstein’s article was left more implied than explicit:
“The Hispanic vote for Democrats in House races slipped to 60 percent, compared with about two-thirds for Obama in 2008 … Meanwhile, Republicans, with their 60 percent showing, notched the party’s best congressional result among white voters in the history of modern polling.”

Let me spell this out more clearly than Brownstein does. In 2010, whites voted slightly more as a bloc for Republican House candidates (60-37) than Hispanics did for Democrats (60-38).

...Still, it’s fascinating that after endless pronouncements in the MSM about how Republicans were dooming themselves in November by supporting the Arizona immigration law, it turns out that the GOP did fair to middling among Hispanic voters.

The unspoken reality: immigration is not that important an issue to Hispanic voters—certainly not anything like as important as it is to would-be Hispanic leaders.

Read the whole thing there.

January 7, 2011

"Business Background Defines Chief of Staff"

The New York Times explains the "background" of Obama's new chief of staff, William M. Daley:
He is a top executive at JPMorgan Chase, where he is paid as much as $5 million a year and supervises the Washington lobbying efforts of the nation’s second-largest bank. He also serves on the board of directors at Boeing, the giant military contractor, and Abbott Laboratories, the global drug company, which has billions of dollars at stake in the overhaul of the health care system. 

Funny, I always thought Bill Daley was a big shot (e.g., he's head of JP Morgan Chase's "Office of Corporate Social Responsibility") because his father had been mayor of Chicago for 20 years and his brother for 22.

Obama's chief of staff picks (first, Rahm Emanuel, now a Daley) suggest he still doesn't seem to know many people outside of Chicago. It's not like he knew Emanuel or Daley well in Chicago, it's just that he knows them less less well than non-Chicagoans. Who will be Obama's next chief of staff? Mike Ditka? Oprah's friend Gayle? Stedman Graham?

January 3, 2011

Gerrymandering

In VDARE this week, I compare two examples of how the press has treated two Members of the House of Representatives who have been major beneficiaries of racial gerrymandering: the media has portrayed Howard Berman's gerrymandering with appropriate cynicism but Luis Gutierrez is repeatedly profiled with near-complete credulity.

December 9, 2010

The DREAM amnesty

Mickey Kaus has been covering in Newsweek the maneuvering to pass the DREAM amnesty by the lame duck Senate (after it was passed by a lame duck House this week).  First, DREAM is potentially a huge amnesty:
because there are no penalties to lying on a DREAM application, and because once you file the application you get a work permit good for 10 years (while you comply with the Act's requirements), DREAM is basically a 10 year free pass to any illegal in a broad under-35ish age range who either qualifies or is willing to say he qualifies even if he doesn't.

Second, that Harry Reid postponed a vote today shows he's not just going-through-the-motions to prove his good intentions to Hispanic activists. Instead, he's trying to keep it alive in case it can become part of the tax cut extension compromise:
Delay offers the hope that something will break in his favor, that the ongoing big negotiations on taxes and spending will offer a moment of leverage to pry a recalcitrant Republican (or, more likely, Democrat) or two over to the DREAM side. At the very least, it offers the prospect that, once the big tax-cut-extension deal is done, Republican senators will consider themselves released from their "Wall of No" pledge not to give any other legislation priority.

iSteve Finnish Content

Election expert Michael Barone writes about the midterms:
The Finnish vote. Around 100 years ago, Finnish immigrants flocked to the mines and woods of the country around Lake Superior, where the topography and weather must have seemed familiar. They've been a mostly Democratic, sometimes even radical, voting bloc ever since. No more, it seems. Going into the election, the three most Finnish districts, Michigan 1, Wisconsin 7 and Minnesota 8, all fronting on Lake Superior, were represented by two Democratic committee chairmen and the chairman of an Energy and Commerce subcommittee, with a total of 95 years of seniority.

Wisconsin's David Obey and Michigan's Bart Stupak both chose to retire, and were replaced by Republicans who had started running before their announcements. Minnesota's James Oberstar was upset by retired Northwest Airlines pilot and stay-at-home dad Chip Cravaack.

So here's a new rule for the political scientists: As go the Finns, so goes America.

Gus Hall (1910-2000), who was the perennial Communist Party USA candidate for President when I was a kid, was born Arvo Kustaa Halberg in the iron-mining belt of Minnesota and grew up speaking Finnish in his family of twelve. A lot of the Finnish Communists who subsequently lost the Finnish civil war of 1918 to von Mannerheim fled to America, so the CPUSA always had a sizable Finnish contingent. 

So, Obama managed to lose the hereditarily Communist vote.


December 1, 2010

GOP sellout in offing?

In Newsweek, Mickey Kaus blogs:
When I worried that the Obama White House might have a plan to enact the so-called DREAM Act in "some sort of insidiuous tax-cuts-for-amnesty grand bargain," I figured it was just paranoid speculation. That's what bloggers are for, right? Unfortunately, the possibility of a lame-duck grand bargain that would include a big immigration amnesty has become more realistic since then.

Two things have happened: (1) The White House, Hill Republicans, and Hill Democrats have appointed a special negotiating group to hash out lame-duck issues, especially what to do about the expiring Bush tax cuts, and (2) 42 Senate Republicans have signed a letter pledging to vote against cloture "on any legislative item [including, presumably, the DREAM Act] until the Senate has agreed" on a plan to extend the tax cuts and also to fund the government.

That second development might seem to preclude consideration of the DREAM Act, but it doesn't. DREAM would just have to follow a broader tax deal—or maybe be part of it.

What, GOP politicians might sell out on immigration in return for tax cuts for the rich? I'm shocked, shocked to learn this.

November 22, 2010

More unsolicited advice for President Obama

In VDARE this week, I offer the President another policy suggestion that he won't hear from anybody else that would be politically feasible and good for himself, good for the Democrats, and good for the country.

You're welcome, Mr. President.

November 14, 2010

How could Obama earn re-election?

My new VDARE.com column:  "How Obama Could Earn Re-Election"
In an alternative universe in which John McCain had had the guts to take Obama to the mat over Rev. Wright, the Arizonan likely would have made a pretty miserable President. Yet one constructive thing McCain would have been politically well-positioned to do—if he so chose—would have been to use his reputation for bloodthirstiness to instead declare victory in the expensive war in Afghanistan and bring the troops home.

In contrast, Obama, hamstrung by his lack of military credibility, is now hinting that he’ll keep troops in Afghanistan past his announced withdrawal date of 2011, all the way to 2014.

So in what field does Obama have the personal credibility to declare victory and bring the troops home?

Where does he possess the personal authority to end a wasteful war, thus simultaneously improving the economy and getting himself re-elected by reassuring white voters? 

To find out the answer, read the whole thing here.

November 4, 2010

My Election Overview

From my new column in VDARE:
Let’s recap what happened:

Governors: As of my writing this, some 36 hours after all the polls had closed, Republicans had won 23 gubernatorial races, Democrats nine, independents one, and four were still up in the air.

State legislatures: Numbers are hazy at present, but Republicans supposedly took 500 legislative seats from Democrats. That will be important in the upcoming redistricting based on 2010 Census numbers, and in furnishing bench strength for future races.

Senators: Republicans won 23, Democrats 12, with Alaska still not called.

House: Republicans have won 239 races, Democrats 186, with ten yet to be decided.

"House Democrats lost more than half of the land mass they once held."
 
In other words, the historic Republican House advances of 2010 occurred largely in the less densely populated parts of the country. This was as predicted by my theory of Affordable Family Formation. Back in the 1750s, Benjamin Franklin pointed out that the less crowded the country, the lower the land prices and the higher the wages. That means that more people can afford, and at younger ages, to get married and have children. The 21st Century partisan corollary to Franklin’s insight: "The party of family values" thrives most where and when family formation is most affordable. The political implication: urbanizing more and more of the country through mass immigration is bad for Republicans. But Republican politicians have been remarkably slow to grasp that concept.

It’s important to remember: this fairly strong Republican performance in the 2010 mid-term elections wasn’t supposed to be demographically possible anymore. After 2008, the whole country was supposed to have become like California—where, indeed, Republicans were mostly thrashed on Tuesday. (One commenter has suggested Republicans could now label Democrats "the Party of California.")

The question was repeatedly asked after 2008: How could the GOP ever win again when the population becomes less white each year?

Well, the answer is obvious, but only semi-mentionable in polite society: the GOP needs to do two things—get white people to turn out; and get them to vote Republican. This is the “Sailer Strategy”.

That’s how Republicans have long won in the South, where the white share of the population is already lower than California. (Outside of Florida, GOP candidates won all but a handful of Southern Congressional districts that weren’t specifically gerrymandered to be majority minority.)

You’d prefer not to live in a country where whites vote like a minority bloc? Me too! But maybe we should have thought about that before putting whites on the long path to minority status through mass immigration.

In the GOP’s 2002 and 2004 victories, whites turned out in large numbers and voted Republican by sizable margins—basically as a patriotic response to 9/11 and the subsequent Bush wars.

With the war going sour in 2006, however, the Republicans failed to hold their share of whites: Republican House candidates only won the white vote 51-47 and thus lost the House.

In 2008, McCain beat Obama by a mediocre 55-43 among whites. That’s not awful, but McCain also didn’t inspire whites to turn out to vote in large numbers, while Obama excited minorities and the callow. (In 2008, 11 percent of voters said it was their first time ever in a polling booth, compared to only three percent in 2010.)

As David Paul Kuhn, author of The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Party, pointed out in RealClearPolitics, the MainStream Media rewrote the history of 2008 in line with their worship of Obama. The forgotten truth: after picking Saran Palin as his veep, McCain led Obama in the Gallup Poll for the nine days preceding the epochal bankruptcy of Lehman Bros. on September 15, 2008, after which Obama regained the lead. But the Crash of 2008 didn’t so much convert whites into Obama voters as depress them.

In 2010, in contrast, GOP House candidates crushed Democratic House candidates 60-37 among white voters. And minorities had a hard time getting interested in a non-Presidential contest lacking in personalities and Will.I.Am videos.

The GOP picked up 91 percent of its votes among whites—in contrast to the Democrats’ 65 percent.

The two biggest governor’s races—California and Texas—illustrate how it works. In California, Hispanics and blacks together accounted for 31 percent of the voters—compared to 30 percent in Texas. In California, Democrat Jerry Brown won Latinos 64-30. Democrat Bill White carried them 61-38 in Texas.

(Interesting side note: as Hispanics become more dominant in California’s Democratic Party, blacks have been trending slightly more Republican. Among blacks, Meg Whitman lost only 77-21, while Rick Perry lost 88-11. As I’ve argued, immigration will cause problems for the Democrats too)

Adding blacks and Hispanics together, Rick Perry did slightly worse with the Non-Asian Minority vote in Texas, losing it 73-26, than Meg Whitman did in California, where she lost 68-27.

Why, then, did Perry cruise to a 55-42 victory in Texas, while Whitman failed 41-54 in California?

Answer: because Perry won the Texas white vote 69-28. In contrast, Whitman only edged out Brown 50-46 among California whites.

Moral: If a Republican candidate can’t win a majority of whites, he or she can’t win the election.

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it below.
 

October 11, 2010

Ask Them

From my new VDARE.com column:
It’s time for Republican candidates to address Hispanic voters directly over illegal immigration.

As a general rule, human beings respond more constructively to being challenged than to being pandered to. Hence, GOP candidates should forthrightly ask for the support of Hispanic voters in opposing illegal immigration.
“My Democrat opponent expects you to vote for him because he assumes that on the issue of illegal immigration, you vote as Mexicans, as Salvadorans, as Colombians, or so forth. In contrast, I expect you to vote as patriotic American citizens because more illegal immigration is bad for American citizens. As President Kennedy said: ‘And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.’”

Would this work? Would appealing to Hispanic voters as patriotic Americans rather than as entitled ethnics convert some to voting Republican?

Maybe—maybe not.

But how could it be worse than the Rove rout?

More importantly, a straightforward appeal to Hispanic patriotism would subvert the MSM’s dominant trope that being against illegal immigration is somehow shameful. 

Read the whole thing there.