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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (42304)	3/22/2010 3:25:51 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

I do think that some conservatives are overconfident about November, but I think this vote will still hurt the Democrats at the elections. The elections concern me less than the harm this vote will do to the country. But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. Romney's plan was a plan in one state, which is a major difference than a national plan. Also its probably the strongest cause of opposition to him within the Republican party. It doesn't represent anything close to traditional Republican ideas, certainly not conservative ideas, and its the opposite of libertarians. Not that "libertarian = conservative", but the conservatives where effective, when they could ally with libertarians, and the Republican party was strong when it received the support of each of those groups. If the Republicans are to dump the libertarians, the statists are likely to mostly remain with the Democratic party anyway. Big government is a losing strategy for Republicans, and that's even if the goal is only to win elections. If its to actually achieve implement conservative principles, big government becomes more than just a poor strategy its aiming at the wrong goal. A deal would have been bad for the Republicans election chances in the short and medium run, bad for conservative principles under any run, and bad for the country except to the extent that a slightly less worse bill might possibly have been passed (and even if that happened, it could always have been added to later on, so its only a moderate delay).

To: tejek who wrote (42304)	5/13/2010 8:23:35 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

How Badly Will the Democrats Do? A few trends to watch ahead of November. MAY 13, 2010. By KARL ROVE The 2010 midterm elections will be bad for Democrats. But the question is, will their losses be worse than the post-World War II average of 24 House and four Senate seats lost by the party that holds the White House? The answer isn't locked in yet—and will depend on the confluence of many elements. Here are several that matter. The most important metric is presidential job approval. President Obama is now at 51% in Gallup and 47% in Rasmussen. When Democrats lost 54 seats in 1994, Bill Clinton's job approval was at 46%. Every president has been lower by the midterm than at the start of that year. Mr. Obama was at 50% in early January. Add a persistently high jobless rate and it points to a worse-than-normal year for Congressional Democrats. A second factor is the generic ballot—which measures voters' preference for voting for a Republican or a Democrat. At the end of the 2008 election, Democrats led in the Gallup generic ballot by 12 points. Today, the parties are tied at 45%. At this point in 1994, the GOP was nearly five points behind. By Election Day, it was five points ahead. The GOP also enjoys a lead in the polls that now sample likely voters. In Rasmussen, the GOP is ahead 44% to 37%. Intensity matters as well. The latest Fox/Opinion Dynamics poll reports two-thirds of Republicans are "extremely" or "very" interested in the midterms, compared to only half of Democrats. Older voters are almost twice as likely as younger voters to be interested; and seniors now favor the GOP 50% to 41%. Look for the Obama White House to try raising Democratic intensity in the months ahead, especially among blacks, Latinos and liberals. The president's harsh attacks on the Arizona immigration law are part of this strategy. Another important metric for the fall is the turnout for primaries. Is it rising or falling compared to four years ago? The results so far are bad for Democrats. For example, in Ohio, Democratic participation was down 24% over the last midterm while GOP turnout was up 64%. Registration in the states that enroll by party have shown major-party and independent registration down from 2008 while third-party registrations—admittedly a small part of the total electorate—are up modestly, according to George Mason University Prof. Michael McDonald. It's early; watch what happens if both parties push registration. Congressional job approval is an anemic 28% in a recent Associated Press poll. Thirty-two percent of Americans told ABC/Washington Post pollsters in late April that they'd vote to re-elect their congressman, while 57% said they'd look for someone else—the highest number since 58% responded that way to an ABC/Washington Post poll in October 1994. Democrats can take heart from their party's cash position. At the end of March, the Democratic National Committee reported $15 million on hand, while the RNC had $11 million, down substantially from the $23 million it had when Mr. Obama took office. The Democratic Congressional campaign had $26 million to House Republicans' $10 million, while the Senate GOP was keeping things close, with $15 million to Senate Democrats' $17 million. Individual Republican candidates fare better in competitive Congressional races. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, GOP Senate candidates have collectively raised $176.3 million, outpacing Democrats' $133 million. GOP House candidates have raised $240 million to Democrats' $254 million. But spending isn't everything. In 2006, the six GOP Senate incumbents who lost outspent their opponents by a 1.65-to-1 ratio and the 22 defeated GOP House incumbents outspent their opponents 1.53 to 1. Democrats are also helped by fewer retirements. Seventeen House Democrats have retired so far, compared to 20 House Republicans. However, more Democratic retirements (11) are swing seats than are GOP departures (2). The White House has many tools to change the narrative to its advantage. But it's unlikely swing voters will abandon their concerns about ObamaCare, spending and deficits. The public, especially independents, increasingly believes Mr. Obama's policies threaten America's economic future. Though this midterm election will likely turn on national concerns, it will still come down to individual contests. While a lot will play out over the next six months, there's no question good Republican candidates running effective races will make this a memorable, perhaps even epic, election for the GOP. Obama Democrats should beware. Mr. Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, is the author of "Courage and Consequence" (Threshold Editions, 2010). online.wsj.com

To: tejek who wrote (42304)	9/3/2010 8:40:30 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

David Frum and conservative purges By: Timothy P. Carney Senior Examiner Columnist 09/02/10 7:15 PM EDT David Frum’s blog post connects his dismissal from AEI with Brink Lindsey’s and Will Wilkinson’s departures from Cato. In the post, Frum makes some important and well-articulated points about the GOP’s lack of direction and what a Republican majority could yield: We are likely soon to have a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, maybe the U.S. Senate too. And what will that majority do? The answer seems to be: They have not a clue. Unlike the Republican House and Senate majorities of 1994, unlike the Republican Senate majority of 1980, these new majorities will arrive with only slogans for a policy agenda. After staging a for-the-record vote against Obamacare, and after re-enacting the Bush tax cuts, it will be policy mission accomplished. There’s little other policy inventory, because the think tanks have not done their proper work. Without a think tank agenda, the new majority will rapidly decline into a brokerage service for K Street. After the GOP lost its majority in 2006, a leading think tanker said to me: “Somehow I always thought we’d get more done before we became completely corrupt.” How much will we get done next time given the poverty of our think tank work over the past half decade? This is one of my concerns, and the GOP’s recent courting of Wall Street and hedge funds leaves me plenty worried. But I must say, Frum’s concerns about purges are a bit rich. Frum writes: But in the Lindsey-Wilkinson case, we confront the problem of the closing of the conservative mind in its purest form…. The waters are surging in the conservative world, and conservative institutions must either ride the wave or be swamped. But if wave-riding is all that these very expensive institutions are doing, who needs them?… The right-of-center world is poorer for the dessication of the institutions that used to act as the right’s brains. Perhaps Frum has learned a lesson in the past seven and a half years, when he was the one doing the dessicating; he was the one trying to spur the wave and tell everyone on the Right to get on board with the party line or be damned; he was the one who saw an open mind as a sign of treason. David Frum was the one who wrote this about those conservatives who dared oppose the invasion of Iraq: There is, however, a fringe attached to the conservative world that cannot overcome its despair and alienation. The resentments are too intense, the bitterness too unappeasable. Only the boldest of them as yet explicitly acknowledge their wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror. But they are thinking about defeat, and wishing for it, and they will take pleasure in it if it should happen. They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country. War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen — and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them. I was one of those conservatives who supposedly turned my back my country by opposing a war based on bad intelligence and bad foreign policy. More to the point, my boss at the time, Bob Novak, was branded in Frum’s purge article as a “defeatist,” a “terror-denialist” (because he suggested al Qaeda was a greater threat to Americans than Hamas was), and “unpatriotic.” Frum is very correct that the GOP and the conservative movement is in danger of taking control of the car with no idea how to steer. I just hope David Frum’s current worries about rigid dogma reflects a lesson learned rather than a rank lack of self-awareness. washingtonexaminer.com