Republicans

It’s been awhile since I read a Cal Thomas column. Partly that’s because his views when I did read him annoyed me…and partly it’s because I don’t do print media any more.

However, I think he has a few good points in a post at Real Clear Politics Tuesday:

Contemporary conservatism has mostly been about saying “no” to the liberal agenda. Suppose conservatives instead begin to circumvent liberals by applying better ideas to achieve ends liberals and conservatives claim to seek?[...]

Frum proposes an agenda that uses conservative principles to actually solve, rather than just talk about, serious problems. He wants universally available health insurance, but offered through the private sector; lower taxes to encourage savings and investment, but higher taxes on energy and pollution to promote conservation; a conservative environmentalism that promotes nuclear power to reduce our need for oil and coal (this would satisfy the Left’s misguided belief in “global warming,” while simultaneously pleasing the Right by freeing us from dependence on foreign oil); federal policies to encourage larger families; major reductions in unskilled immigration; a campaign for prison reform and a campaign against obesity; higher ethical standards inside the conservative movement and Republican Party; and a renewed commitment to expand and rebuild the armed forces in order to crush terrorism and prepare for the coming challenge from China.

I’m not so sure about the “federal policies to encourage larger families” and “major reductions in unskilled immigration”, but otherwise, I think he might have a point.

Did a few folks not get the memo that the GOP is supposed to come-together around McCain?

• Kansas caucuses: Huckabee 60%, McCain 24%, Paul 11%, Romney 3%
• Louisiana primary: Huckabee 43%, McCain 42%, Romney 6%, Paul 5%, Giuliani 1%
• Washington caucuses McCain 26%, Huckabee 24%, Paul 21%, Romney 17%

Even in the one state where McCain “won”, he still received fewer votes than did candidates who have already dropped out.

The Kansas and Washington results have me wondering if it might be easier now for some small-ell libertarian types to vote for Ron Paul, given that the nominee is all-but-decided  (or is it a function of lower turnout and/or the caucus effect).   However, I also find the disconnect between the Louisiana caucus and the Louisiana primary results interesting.

Seen at Politico:

Top House Republicans were told in recent days that a former employee of their campaign committee may have forged an official audit during the contentious 2006 election cycle and that they should brace for the possibility that an unfolding investigation could uncover financial improprieties stretching back several years, according to GOP sources briefed on the members-only discussions.[...]

The precise details of the suspected accounting irregularities and their possible fallout are not entirely clear. NRCC officials and top GOP leaders are being tight-lipped in large part because the FBI is investigating the matter. An outside lawyer advising members and staff has warned everyone at the committee to keep quiet.

There’s nothing like a little scandal to spice up an election…or to bolster concerns about the pervasive, corrupting influence of money during a ridiculously expensive campaign cycle.

Via The Hill, I found a statement from the Romney camp over their loss of today’s West Virginia caucuses:

“Unfortunately, this is what Senator McCain’s inside Washington ways look like: he cut a backroom deal with the tax-and-spend candidate he thought could best stop Governor Romney’s campaign of conservative change,” Beth Myers, Romney’s campaign manager, said in a statement.

In the first round of balloting, results were:

• Romney — 464 votes
• Huckabee — 375 votes
• McCain — 176 votes
• Ron Paul — 118 votes (eliminated)

Second ballot, because no candidate received a majority of the vote:

• Huckabee — 567 votes
• Romney — 521 votes
• McCain — 12 votes

It seems that a number of McCain supporters switched over to Huckabee, to block Romney from getting the win.

Thus, the sore loser statement above.

It’s been a while since I caught any of the Rush Limbaugh show. I was aware that he and his dittoheads were Thompson supporters, but I haven’t had the opportunity to see what their reaction is to Thompson’s withdrawal, and McCain’s seeming ascendancy.

So, it was with some amusement that I encountered the following comment in Colin McEnroe’s blog at the Courant:

Still it is worth pausing to note the way the Republican party seems poised to shrug off the advice—nay, the orders—of Limbaugh and his imitators. They keep sending McCain back to the kitchen, and the wait staff keeps bringing him back out, spruced up with fresh parsley. He’s not their idea of a real conservative. Unfortunately, conservatives don’t seem to agree with conservative talk shows anymore about what a real conservative is.

Here’s hoping that the days of Limbaugh-inspired angry social conservatives dominating the GOP might be fading, and fiscal conservatism and realism return to the mainstream.

I still think that he’s not viable, and he did suffer from a little bit of conspiracy-theory-ness leaking out…but Ron Paul’s response at the end of the debate was wonderful.  When asked about whether he’d leave the Republican Party, he took the party to task for having left its principles, audibly wishing that the GOP would be big tent enough to accept lovers of individual liberty.

It’s a shame that in the past few weeks, that message has been lost in questions about Ron Paul’s newsletter.

It’s also a shame that that message doesn’t have a more capable messenger.

I’m listening to the GOP debate on MSNBC, currently in the candidates-ask-each-other-questions phase, and unsurprisingly Giuliani posed a question on the concept of a national cat pool to to Romney (with McCain jumping in as his name was taken in vain).  Giuliani  posed his question to Romney,

A few thoughts:

• We just had more discussion on the concept than most MSNBC viewers have likely ever have been exposed to previously.
    
• Romney expressed “familiarity” with the problem via Massachusetts snowbirds.  I’m sure that folks living on Cape Cod and the Islands are feelin’ the love.  (Of course, considering what they think of the relative lack of capacity in that corner of Massachusetts…maybe he doesn’t want to associate with them.)
   
• I’m a little disappointed that the discussion didn’t acknowledge the magnitude of the expense involved (although McCain, in his rebuttal, at least raised the concern about lack of funding of current proposals).
   
• At least Romney did make a key point (looking beyond the Florida primaries) — that he didn’t want folks in Iowa to subsidize Florida risk.
   
• Interesting transition to the question of global warming at the tail of the insurance question (using threat to beach property as a segue).  Probably not a question that Republicans like to hear…but a big hat-tip to McCain for his observation on his cap-and-trade plan — “if global warming isn’t real, we leave the world cleaner for our children” (paraphrase).

I didn’t see much MSM media coverage of it, but Louisiana Republicans held their caucus Tuesday night. I suspect the lack of coverage is due to the complexity of Louisiana’s arcane procedure, but the caucus was to select delegates to conventions which will ultimately pick 21 delegates.

(If any candidate receives a majority of the vote for the 9 February primary, they pick up 20 delegates in addition to any of the 21 coming from the caucus procedure. Otherwise 20 delegates go to the national convention “uncommitted”.)

Anyway, one might ask, “who won?” The answer appears to be just as complicated as the delegate selection process:

Of those 105 delegates chosen Tuesday, McCain received roughly 30, more than any other named candidate. But “uncommitted pro-life” received twice that, about 70 delegates. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) each received a few delegates as well, but state officials are still calculating the exact number each candidate received because so many provisional ballots were cast. Caucusgoers had to register as Republicans by Nov. 30 in order to participate in the process but a number of voters—many of whom were Paul supporters—showed up and cast provisional ballots since questions remained over whether they had met this requirement.

You would have thought that a major hurricane would have been enough to wash away such silliness. However, Gallic bureaucracy apparently has the resilience one would only expect to find among cockroaches.

Meanwhile, McCain, Fred-heads, Ron Paulistas, and folks looking for the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan are all claiming victory.

In case you’ve been under a rock in the past few hours, Romney won the Michigan primary (Romney 39, McCain 30, Huck 17), thereby causing punditry in the mainstream media and online to shift into spin mode…or ignore their pre-primary predictions…to dance around predictions of a close race / possible McCain victory.

The folks over at Daily Kos are ecstatic over the Romney win and continuing pachydermic chaos, even if exit polling suggests that Kos’ call for Dems to cross party lines to support Romney may have had little effect. (Only a tiny portion of GOP primary participants reported to be Dems, although I imagine the Kossack army would be more inclined to misrepresent their affiliation in any such poll.)

I did, by the way, catch bits and pieces of the Dems’ debate, being held in Las Vegas as Michigan votes were being tallied. Unfortunately, since I had been up since 4am due to an early morning flight, much of the content was lost on me, because I kept drifting off. However, cutting the invite list down to three did help immensely with making the whole affair seem less rushed.

(Sorry Kucinich…but you aren’t a viable candidate. At this point in the campaign, that much is clear, and MSNBC was probably right in withholding its invitation.)

A few thoughts:

• Conventional wisdom is that Thompson won the debate.  I’m not sure that I’d go quite that far, and I’d have to wonder how much of that assessment is Fox-generated hype.  Notwithstanding my reservations, however, he did come across as a straight-talking, good ol’ boy who should be doing far better than his recent polling would indicate.
   
• If Romney weren’t well-financed and if he didn’t have extensive ground operations in place, I’d say, “put a fork in him, he’s done”.  He’s coming across as either a candidate in search of a message, or a politician who’s trying to be all things to all people.  He seems to be having problems carving a viable niche in the spectrum of messages, with the more popular messages having been claimed by other candidates.
   
  If Romney could credibly communicate the idea that he’d be effective at cleaning up waste and advancing a reasonably conservative message in the face of a hostile Congress, allowing him to build upon his resume of Massachusetts governor and Salt Lake City Olympic reformer, he might have a shot.  However, that shot is waning as Giuliani solidifies on the “I’m most likely to shift the purple states red” message.
   
• I can’t decide whether Ron Paul was just his usual nutty self, or if Fox carefully worked to make him seem extra-nutty.   I’m leaning towards the latter, given how the questions he faced were more in the “one of these things is not like another / one of these things is not the same” vein, from which he struggled to shift to answering policy questions handed to others, and given how giddy the commentators were over Paul’s low reaction numbers from their viewer’s panel…but Paul comes across as  a nut on his own, even without Fox’s assistance.
   
  If Fox News were as fair and balanced as it claims, they’d have a reasonable sounding Paul supporter on to explain why Paul’s message is appealing to his supporters (sometimes in spite of Paul’s quirks).
   
  Sadly, the notion that a nontrivial portion of the American electorate craves a small-government, pro-individual-liberties candidate so much that they’d tolerate quirks in their candidate, seems to finally be getting lost in Paul’s nuttiness.
   
• I have to give props to Huckabee for deflecting criticism and the spotlighting of the unconservativeness / un-neoconness of his positions while still coming across as a nice, likeable guy.
   
• If anyone won the debate, I’d have to name McCain.  He might not have won the battle of the soundbites (a title that Thompson did earn), but he seems to be solidifying his framing as a Republican partisans might not like, but who is viewed as most electable by partisans.