Handicapping the key 2006 politics races with RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman
Hugh Hewitt's talk show
HH: Ken, Happy New Year to you.
KM: Happy New Year to you, too. It's always great to talk to you.
HH: Thank you. I had your colleague from 2004, Matthew Dowd on the program earlier this week, talking about the elections of 2006. And he struck a chord that you made a lot of reference to repeatedly in 2004, which was values have to work to connect to people.
KM: Yup.
HH: And we've got different regions in this country, and I've been noodling on this. The battleground's really the upper Midwest...
KM: Yup.
HH: ...with an open seat in Minnesota, governorships in Iowa, Wisconsin and Michigan, and Minnesota at stake. How does a candidate connect on values in that region of the country?
KM: Well, I think there are a lot of different ways. One, you look at the history of the upper Midwest, it's an area where people have liked reform and experimentation government. For instance, Wisconsin is the home and the birthplace of welfare reform and of school choice. Michigan was a state where Governor Engler pioneered what was happening with respect to welfare reform. So I think that one of the things that voters look for in that region are people that understand that the job of government is to serve the people, not the other way around, and want to see leaders who will come in and change and reform government. I think Republicans all over the country are going to do well in 2006, and the reason we're going to do well is because we're going to have an agenda for change, and an agenda for reform. And that's critical.
HH: Taking that same message up to the region where we have the most difficult time, which is the Pacific Northwest and California...
KM: Yeah.
HH: Does that get traction in those areas, too, because Maria Cantwell's on the ballot for the Senate in Washington State. Arnold's got to win re-election. If you're advising them, how do you say that?
KM: Well, you know, one way to look at it is this. Ronald Reagan was successful because he practiced what I call the politics of and. If you think about it, before President Reagan, there were a whole bunch of people that said we need to be strong toward the Soviet Union. And other people said we need to make peace with the Soviet Union. And Ronald Reagan said we need peace through strength. That was the politics of and. One of the reasons that a lot of people move to the Northwest is because they want to live in a region of the country where there's an opportunity to use the outdoors, where the outdoors are beautiful, where there's a lot of different resources that are available. And too often, we as Republicans don't explain how our free market principles, and our commitment to private property, and our commitment to making sure that government is able to be accountable to the people, not only will make sure that we protect jobs in this country, but also protect the environment. That's the politics of and. And I think that's something we have to practice in explaining ourselves to voters in the Northwest. But look, you look at a guy like a Gordon Smith, he is an example of a Republican...look at Washington State. They elected a Republican governor. They just counted some votes that shouldn't have counted, that were not real votes at that time.
HH: You're right.
KM: And so I think there's a huge opportunity. Look into your own state, it's not the Northwest, but look at California. The reality is that Arnold Schwarzenegger got elected, and I'm confident he will be re-elected, because he came to the voters, and he said let them defend the swamp that is Sacramento. I'm going to reform and change things.
HH: Let's take a look at...I want to go all the way across the country, to the middle Atlantic, where there are three Senate seats in play: the New Jersey seat where Tom Keane, Jr. is challenging the newly-appointed Menendez, there is Rick Santorum's defense of his incumbency in Pennsylvania, and then there's West Virginia, Robert Byrd. They're all middle Atlantic, they're all very different. Is there a values set there that matters, that resonates?
KM: I think there is. First of all, I think that we are in a strong position in all three. They're all going to be competitive races. But look, certainly look at Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and there is a common denominator there. Both are states that have a very important number of resource voters, a large number of coal workers, obviously, in West Virginia, and also in Pennsylvania. Both have a significant rural population. That's going to be important. Pennsylvania, Philadelphia is 40% of the state. That's going to be a critical component of what happens in that race. You missed one, and that's Maryland.
HH: Oh, you're right. I did miss it.
KM: In Maryland, Michael Steele is ahead in the polls right now. You could have the first state-wide African-American elected official. He is in Maryland. He is a Republican. He is a proud conservative. He is a great American, named Michael Steele. I think New Jersey, we're very competitive. You mentioned Tom Keane, Jr., probably the best name in the history of the state was Tom Keane, Sr., a former governor, and a very well-regarded official. Someone who served well on the 9/11 Commission. His son, a state senator, is a smart guy, now running. I think we have a good opportunity there.
HH: If you look at the red map, Ken Mehlman, and you're examining where it's possible to grow that at the edges, is it primarily in the upper Midwest? Or do you think that the Republican Party can advance across its border?
KM: I think we can advance across the country. The upper Midwest has a good area. You know, one of the things that happened in 2004 that's really important for your listeners to remember is this. If you read the Washington Post and the New York Times, you would think that we have to choose between motivating our conservative base and reaching out and bringing in new faces and new voices in the Republican Party. In 2004, we had the most Republican and conservative electorate that we've had in 80 years. Yet at the same time, we got 44% of the Latino vote, we doubled the African-American vote in Ohio, a critical state to victory. We got 53% of the Catholic vote. We reduced the gender gap. If you lived in a city of over 500,000 people, we got 13% more votes in 2004, than we had gotten in 2000. Why did that happen? It happened because if you are confident, and you put forward a compassionate conservative philosophy, and you explain it everywhere and anywhere, then you have the opportunity to simultaneously motivate the base, and reach out to swing voters, and reach out to new faces and new voices. A good example is education reform. The fact is it's conservative to believe that local control and parental choice and accountability is critical to our education system. It is compassionate and progressive to point out that it was children who too often were poor or African-American or Latino that were being left behind. After eight years of being told it takes a village to raise a child, eight years of Clinton/Gore, we ended up in a situation where one out of three white children, two out of three African-American, and six out of ten Latinos, could not read in the 4th grade at a 4th grade level in 2000. We fixed that through what can only be called compassionate, because it helped those kids in need, and conservative, because it stressed accountability and choice and parental control. That's got to be our model.
HH: Let's conclude by focusing on my home state of Ohio, because I had Barone and Barnes and Mark Steyn on at the end of last year, and they're almost writing off Ohio because of scandals in the party, because of an exhausted, long tenure in the governorship, a lack of sort of energy. But I believe its traditional focus on family and parish and community gives us an opening. How do you see Ohio?
KM: I agree with you entirely. It's going to be hard. We have a challenge. The key is, do we have candidates who can do what the Bush/Cheney campaign did in 2004, and that is A) bring out people in ways they hadn't before, and B) are our candidates reformers? Are we going to come in and say here is our vision for reforming government? Here's my theory about this. People don't elect Republicans to manage the existing bureaucracies. They elect us to reduce it, to change it, and to reform it. And if we have candidates that run for office in Ohio that do that, they're going to win. Let me give you two examples that are really interesting models. We haven't had a Democratic governor in the bluest of blue states, Massachusetts, since 1986.
HH: That's remarkable.
KM: That was the last time. You know why? Because in 1990, Bill Weld ran as a reformer, and got elected as a Republican. In '94, he ran a different kind of campaign. He said I've done some reforms. Here's my new model. Four years later, a guy named Paul Celucci came in and offered another vision. Then came in Mitt Romney. Everyone of those Republicans replaced an existing Republican, yet every one of them was seen as a reformer, not a status quo guy. Another example is Wisconsin. Why did Tommy Thompson get elected again and again and again? Because every four years, he took stock and didn't say we're going to stay the course. He got re-elected by saying you hired me to change things. Here's what I want to change now, based on the credibility of what I changed before.
HH: Great playbook for 2006. Look forward to talking to you again soon, Ken Mehlman, from the National Republican Party, it's chairman.
End of interview.
Posted at 5:00PM PST
Mark Steyn on the population decline of the West, and the further embarrassment of Pat Robertson
HH: Mark Steyn joins me, columnist to the world. Let me ask you, Mark Steyn. Yesterday, you wrote a piece in the Opinion Journal that the Wall Street Journal picked up. It's the Demography, Stupid. Have you ever had such amount of commentary that quickly on a piece?
MS: Well, it's interesting. It's basically a speech I gave in New York a few weeks ago, I think, late November. And it was a relatively small crowd. There was Daniel Pipes there, and Judge Bork, and a few other people for the New Criterion. And it pops up on the internet, and within a minute and a half, it's gone around the world, and you're getting reaction to it from Australia and Israel, and Italy and Denmark. It's an amazing thing. It's a completely different kind of media time we live in, where you make a passing reference to Denmark, as I did, and I had reaction from a couple of dozen Danes within an hour and a half. You wouldn't get that in a...
HH: Here's my theory. It's candid. It's brutally, bluntly candid about where the West is going, and that people have been hungry for, and are afraid of that at the same time. Your reaction to my analysis?
MS: Yes, I think you're right. You know, I tried, when I started writing about these issues, to be rather dispassionate about it. And in a sense, when you write in a dispassionate way about it, you become evermore detached about it. It's like you're watching something proceeding. It's like watching a sort of truck coming toward you, and it's seeming like a film, as if it's not going to hit you. But what dismays me is the way that...when people criticize that piece. On the left, you're just generally accused of being a racist, which is sort of a banal observation. If I was a gay or a feminist, I would think it would be foolish to assume that you can have a significant portion of your population become Muslim, which is what's happening in Europe, and for that not to have implications to you. I mean, you imagine...if you believe in gay marriage, say, do you think the Massachusetts Supreme Court would support gay marriage if three of five judges were Muslim? And that's really what they're looking at in certain European countries. So it ought to be the left's issue. And then on the right, people say well...people say these are doomsday projections like the environmental wackos make. But it's not. I mean, if you have one million, say, Italian babies born in 2006, there's only going to be one million Italian 20 year olds around in 2026.
HH: Right.
MS: It's not a projection. It's a fact. There's only going to be one million young Italian adults. So if you need two million to support your social welfare system, you're going to have to find them from elsewhere. And these days, there's no incentive for a talented Indian, or Singaporian, or Chilean, to contemplate moving to the European Union, or to Canada, and paying conficatory taxation to support a lot of deadbeat geriatric Europeans.
HH: The Opinion Journal piece's title, It's the Demography, Stupid, it's linked at Hughhewitt.com. I'm sure Radioblogger will link it again tonight, in case you haven't seen it, America. But let me give the four-part summary as I see it, Mark Steyn. The West isn't serious about serious things. The West isn't reproducing. The Islamic world is the beneficiary of both its lack of seriousness, and its lack of reproduction. And along with the general spread of Islam into the void of demographic reproduction comes radical Islam as an opportunistic infection along with general Islam. Fair summary?
MS: Yes, I think that's right. I think...my concern about Islam, when people talk about oh, well, we need a Muslim reformation, is that in a sense, we've had one. If you talk to people who grew up in a relatively relaxed Muslim culture, thirty, forty years ago, and they say now those Muslim cultures, in South Asia, for example, and Indonesia, in Singapore, in Malaysia, the Muslims there are much more, are much closer to Saudi Wahabism than they were thirty or forty years ago. So Islam itself has undergone a transformation. And the most radicalized Muslims of all, in some ways, are the ones in Europe. I make an exception for a lot of this in America, and some people think I shouldn't be making an exception, but I really think Americans still have a tremendous advantage. They do a much better job...the United States does a much better job of assimilating immigrants than most other Western countries, there in part because they've been doing it a lot longer. You know, Sweden and Denmark and Norway and the Netherlands, these are countries that really didn't have significant immigrants until twenty five, thirty years ago. So America still does some things better than other countries.
HH: Let me jump to the end, to the real stinger, and I hope people will read through to the end to get to the quote, permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought the Russian, Austrian, German and Turkish empires would be gone within a half a decade. And I blame Francis Fukiyama for this, for this general idea that the West will wake up and get off of the mat. It's not necessarily so, is it, Mark Steyn?
MS: No, and I think, actually, where he goes wrong in his theory is in fact, usually you have incredibly swift and dramatic change. That's what happened in the second decade of the 20th Century, where these huge endearing European empires, one by one, were all suddenly gone. Russian empire, Austrian empire, German empire, Turkish empire, boom. All off the map. Similarly, in the late 1980's, you're watching TV one day, and they're talking about some demonstrations in...where is it? Czechoslovakia, or Hungary...it's kind of hard to follow. And within a few weeks, they're chipping away at the Berlin Wall, all these guys are gone. Havel's being sworn in as president. These...I think it's more likely we're going to have big, convulsive changes happening in that kind of sudden way, within the next fifteen or twenty years at the most.
HH: Well, it's a crucial piece. I hope everyone reads it. I want to get a couple of other subjects in with you, Mark Steyn, today. There's an epic figure on a respirator. John Podhoretz on this program yesterday referred to Ariel Sharon as, other than David Ben Gurion, the most significant figure in modern Israeli history. Do you agree with that assessment? And do we have a real grip on sort of the significance of this man's life?
MS: Yes, and I think he is the most consequential figure of our time in Israeli politics. And particularly so, because obviously, he abandoned his party, Likud, to form this new party. In a sense, the party's identity is very much wrapped up in him. They have a kind of modified Westminster system in Israel. So people...his supporters in that parliament are basically sitting for a party that they were never elected on. The acting prime minister is a man who is not formally the leader of that party. These are all kind of potentially problematic things. The new party itself may find it very hard to maintain any kind of identity without Sharon actually in there pitching. And basically, even what's happening in Gaza, where you're now seeing the full exposure of the Palestinian death cult, as they crash through the Egyptian border and kill Egyptian soldiers. These guys...more Palestinians have been killed by Palestinians these days than by Israelis. I mean, he is someone who has very much changed the whole focus of this issue in the Israel/Palestine thing.
HH: Now the last part deals with two religious leaders. Pat Robertson, who today decided it was the will of God that Ariel Sharon have a cerebral hemorrhage, and embarrasses Evangelicals again. And Father Joseph Fessio will be on in the last hour today to talk about Benedict. Has Benedict got an eye on the same problem you were writing about, Mark Steyn, in terms of the central challenge in Europe, do you think?
MS: I think so. I think he has a choice before him. He's going to be the first Pope to preside over a Church whose focus increasingly will be non-European. In other words, the growth area for the Catholic Church is outside Europe. And he's got a tougher job than John Paul had, which John Paul had to point out the defects of Communism. Ratzinger has to point out the defects of very relatively prosperous and superficially attractive Western European secularism, which is much more difficult. As for Pat Robertson, he sounds as nutty as these Imams, who say it's the will of God. I don't subscribe to this equivalence between, you know, Wahabi Imams and Christian fundamentalists. But I'm prepared to make an exception for Pat Robertson.
HH: (laughing)
MS: I think the media only keep him on TV because he basically embarrasses Evangelical Christianity in this country, and that happens to suit them. There's no reason to have him on.
HH: And he owns the station, too. That kind of helps to keep yourself going, despite the ratings. Mark Steyn, always a pleasure, my friend. We'll look forward to talking to you again next week. Steynonline.com, America.
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