Chris Cillizza in the Washington Post:

The 2008 presidential election ended less than two weeks ago, but the mythmaking machine has already begun to churn. President-elect Barack Obama transformed the face of the electorate! The Republican Party will be a miserable minority in Congress for the next century! Cats and dogs are now living together! Below we explode the five biggest myths that have already sprung up around the election that was.

1. The Republican Party suffered a death blow.

There’s no question that losing six Senate seats and 24 House seats (not to mention the White House) wasn’t a step forward for the Grand Old Party. But there are two good reasons to believe that Republicans will be back on their feet sooner than many people expect.

First, much of the Republicans’ permanent political class has concluded that electing Sen. John McCain as president would have amounted to applying a Band-Aid to a gaping wound. Given the state of the party — bereft of a signature new idea and without many fresh faces — plenty of Republican operatives have come to subscribe to what I’d call the Ra’s al Ghul theory of rebuilding: Ghul, a villain in the movie “Batman Begins,” advocates destroying the city of Gotham to rebuild it from the ground up. “It is beyond saving and must be allowed to die,” he says — a sentiment echoed by many Republicans these days, who argue that hitting rock bottom was the only way to allow new faces and ideas to emerge.

Second, historical electoral patterns suggest that Republicans could pick up a passel of Senate and House seats in 2010 — the first midterm election under President Obama. Every president (save one) since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934 has lost seats in the House in his first midterm election. The exception? George W. Bush in 2002, when Republicans picked up six House seats and two Senate seats — a historic anomaly widely credited to the world-changing events of Sept. 11, 2001.

2. A wave of black voters and young people was the key to Obama’s victory.

Afraid not. Heading into Election Day, cable news, newspapers and blogs were dominated by excited chatter about record levels of enthusiasm for Obama among two critical groups: African Americans and young voters (aged 18-29). It made sense: Black voters were energized to cast a historic vote for the first African American nominee of either major party; young people — following a false start with former Vermont governor Howard Dean in 2004 — had bought into Obama in a major way during the primary season, and they finally seemed on the cusp of realizing their much-promised potential as a powerhouse voting bloc.

Or not. Exit polling suggests that there was no statistically significant increase in voting among either group. Black voters made up 11 percent of the electorate in 2004 and 13 percent in 2008, while young voters comprised 17 percent of all voters in 2004 and 18 percent four years later.

The surge in young and African American voters is not entirely the stuff of myth, however. Although their percentages as a portion of the electorate didn’t increase measurably, Obama did seven points better among black voters than Sen. John F. Kerry did in 2004 and scored a 13-point improvement over Kerry’s total among young voters.

The way candidates are photographed is not left to chance, at least not by savvy campaigns.

Needless to say, a lot of thought goes into lighting political events. The campaign staff wants to do all of the heavy lifting, so the media can swoop in and get stuff that looks good with a minimum of effort.In that sense, how you light your candidate is a point of significant control. Do it well, and he/she looks like a hero. That’s a strong visual statement. And it is somewhat subconscious, which makes it even stronger.

McCain is classic Michael Deaver. And by that, I mean, create a little looking-into-the-sunset lighting and line up the shooting pits to where they show your guy in front of a big American flag.

Deaver (Reagan’s Deputy Chief of Staff) was the first to exploit on a large scale the idea that, if you controlled the lighting/backdrop/shooting location, you could damn near put your candidate on a movie set. It helps if your candidate was a former actor, too.

Reagan, of course, was exactly that. And since the Reagan/Deaver (or maybe, Deaver/Reagan) one-two punch was so well executed, that strategy went a long way towards crafting a heroic visual image of Reagan in the media.

This is a bit arcane for non-photographers, but might be of interest.

The California secretary of state’s office has a great web site for checking out election results, with interactive maps that show county-by-county returns and so on.

Find it here.

Old joke
To choose between three women up for a promotion, the male boss does a test: he intentionally puts an additional $100 in their paychecks. The first woman immediately brings the overpayment to his attenion. The second spends the extra $100 right away. The third holds on to her paycheck, weighing what to do.

Who got the promotion? The one with the big tits.

New joke
Voters must choose between a neophyte politician who recently admitted that he was not yet qualified to be president, and a grizzled war-hardened dogged competitor. They go out for months selling themselves to voters.

Who gets the job? The smooth talker.

Victor Davis Hanson:

…Why do so many conservatives think that an Obama-elect might be prove a centrist, and so why do they use phrases like “I pray” or “I hope” that Obama might turn out, well, not to be Obama?

Jimmy Carter did exactly what he promised: raised taxes, grew the government, told the world he had no inordinate fear of communism, trashed our allies as retrograde right-wing authoritarians—and we got the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian hostage-taking (have we forgotten that the “Great Satan” originated as a slur against Nobel laureate Carter?), communism in Central America, the Cambodian Holocaust, and spikes of 12% inflation, 18% interest, and 7% unemployment.

For his first two years (until 1994 Gingrich’s ‘Contract with America’ revolution, and Dick Morris’s ‘triangulation’), Bill Clinton, as promised, raised taxes, raised spending, tried to ram through socialized medicine, and by fiat wanted to force the military to accept those openly gay.

So why would any conservative think that Obama—friend of Ayers, Khalidi, Meeks, Pfleger, and Wright, veteran of mysterious campaigns in which rivals in 1996 and 2004 simply dropped out or were forced out, erstwhile advocate of repealing NAFTA, controlling guns, stopping new drilling and nuclear plants, zealot for bringing all troops home by March 2008, advocate of a trillion dollars in new spending, and raising the tax burden on the 5% who now pay 60% of the aggregate income taxes, supporter of more oppression studies and racial reparations—would not likewise try to govern as he has lived the last 20 years?

Why would anyone think that an Obama would not wish to enact the visions of those who first backed him—the Moveon.org crowd, ACORN, The Huffington Post, Sen. Reid, Rep. Pelosi, a Chris Dodd or Barney Frank—rather than the late pilers-on like Colin Powell or Scott McClellan? We should remember that, unlike the cases of Carter and Clinton, Obama would have both houses of Congress, and a (Republican) precedent of the federal government intervening into the free market, in the manner of 1932.

John Stossel broadcast his “Politically Incorrect Guide to Politics” last Friday. It’s worth watching, if only because it’s one of the few fresh views you’ll get.

It’s broken into segments. The last bit covers farm subsidies, which ought to get everyone mad.

Segment 1 here.

Segment 2 here.

Segment 3 here.

Segment 4 here.

Segment 5 here.

Why is Bill Ayers a respectable member of the upper middle class and Sarah Palin contemptible?

 Thomas Fitzgerald:

In 1936, George Gallup, a father of modern opinion polling, successfully predicted the re-election of President Roosevelt over Alf Landon, while his chief competition, the Literary Digest poll of voters, incorrectly predicted a Landon victory. Gallup accomplished his feat by directly phoning selected voters about their intentions, thereby avoiding the built-in bias of the Digest’s mailed “straw ballots.” His innovative method was welcomed by politicians and journalists as a superior and technologically advanced approach to gauging the views of the public.

But Gallup’s triumph provided only modest guidance to the burgeoning field. There was no consensus in the new polling industry on how opinions might be captured and assessed when the question at hand was not an either/or choice in a national election that everyone knew about and had presumably given some thought to. Would the new technique also serve to assess less distinct views about more poorly understood and complex issues and questions? What, exactly, was to be granted the status of current public opinion? Where was it located for collection? And how to measure it when found? These questions posed serious challenges and evoked a critical intellectual moment for the field. Responsible practice required a clear sense of that loosely bounded something waiting out there to be studied and described. It called for a psychology of public opinion.

As it turned out, these concerns would be overwhelmed by the sheer pull of Gallup’s technology. Questions of theory would be abandoned for a single conceptual orientation with rules for observation, recording, and interpretation that we now call the opinion research paradigm. It reduced the enormous diversity and linked issues awaiting pollsters’ study into a set of discrete and aggregated data lifted from narrowly defined frames of reference to constitute “public opinion.”

The concept of designed and directive interviews provided the basis for a convenient and efficient technology well suited to wide application and subsequent marketing promotion. It would produce straightforward numbers that would bear a resemblance to the kind of results produced by elections, and so would fit neatly into the structure of our politics.

Alternative approaches to learning about public opinion as a distinct reality, or about its sources and processes of formation, stability, or evolution, were set aside in favor of a basic posture of inquiry still with us: call people on the phone, ask them a few questions, then add up the coded answers, and call the results public opinion.

Acceptance of that now-standardized methodology followed from its fortuitous intersection with a rising academic movement: the doctrine of positivism that sought to unify social science. Historians and others who had been observing the rise and fall of nations, empires, and civilizations wanted to get beyond armchair ruminations and archeological records to reveal (or construct) historical and societal laws similar to invariant physical laws discovered by the eminently successful physical sciences. In sum, the human world would be studied in the same ways as the natural world.

Read it all.

A 10-question quiz.

HT: Susan Gertson

“The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” –Sigmund Freud                 

Victor Davis Hanson:

…The current debate about energy in the United States has devolved into doing the same old thing — consume, don’t produce and complain — while somehow expecting different results. Congress talks endlessly about the bright future of wind, solar and new fuels, while it stops us from getting through the messy present by utilizing abundant coal, shale and tar sands; nuclear power; and oil still untapped in Alaska and off our coasts.

For the past five years, we fretted over a “housing boom” that had priced an entire generation out of the market. In response, government and lending agencies got “creative” by relaxing standards to allow shaky “first-time” buyers into the red-hot market of high-priced homes. Home-improvement TV shows proliferated on how to “flip” houses and buy “no-down-payment” properties.

When the bubble inevitably burst, cries of outrage followed about how “they” (never “we”) caused a “depression” in housing. Our leaders shrieked about greedy lenders and incompetent regulators who foreclosed on us — never that the American people themselves caused much of the speculation problem, or that housing prices are finally becoming affordable again for new couples.

Over 70 percent of the American people, and a majority of Democratic senators, wanted to remove Saddam Hussein — overwhelming support for the administration’s war that rose even higher as a brilliant campaign finished off the Baathists in three weeks.

But when a messy insurgency erupted, suddenly we heard that our victory was ruined by “their stupid occupation.”

Yep.

There is a pattern in all these dilemmas. And it is not conservative-versus-liberal politics, but generational chaos. Those who came of age in the 1960s now hold the reins of power and influence — and we are starting to see why their values have worried almost everyone for nearly a half-century.

History has seen something like them before in the “blame them” years of Demosthenes’ Athens, the self-indulgence of Julio-Claudian Rome, the “after me, the deluge” generation of late 18th-century France, the Gilded Age, and the Roaring Twenties.

What are the baby boomers’ collective traits? Like all perpetual adolescents who suffer arrested development, we always want things both ways: Don’t drill or explore for more energy, but nevertheless demand ever more fuel from other suppliers.

There are never bad and worse choices, but only a Never Never Land of good and even-better alternatives. Housing not only has to stay affordable for buyers, but also must appreciate in value to give instant equity to those who have just become owners.

When things don’t go well, we always blame someone else. Why drill off Santa Barbara or Alaska when we can sue those terrible Saudis for not putting more oil platforms in their Persian Gulf?

And why accept that the conduct of all wars is flawed and victory goes usually to those who persevere in making the needed adjustments when we can just keep pointing fingers at the official who disbanded the Iraqi army or sent too few troops after the invasion?

The Diplomad: 

A few years ago, more than I care to mention, I headed a large office at the State Department. I got tasked with hiring a couple of Presidential Management Interns (PMIs). These PMIs come from the elite of the elite student body at the elite of the elite universities. They get hired on a temporary basis and then, usually, get offered prestigious jobs in the government. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that whatever else I did, I had to hire women.

So I began to pore over the resumes. My heart sank. I felt inadequate and so, so inferior to these kids. Their resumes, impeccably printed and organized, using dozens of words ending in “-ization,” and listing prowess with a dazzling array of complex software programs, described accomplishments beyond my wildest dreams — especially for when I was the applicants’ age!

I thought I should resign and give up my job to one of the “brilliant” child wonders. Ah, naive me. I obviously had spent too much time overseas. I saw resumes as truthful documents actually written by the applicants, applicants, in this case, full of accomplishments and possessed of massive brains throbbing with energy and ideas. As I, however, kept reading, even slow-witted me began to notice oddities. They all began to look the same: the font, the format, the wording, the list of classes and even — horrors! — the “accomplishments.” I noted this in passing to a cynical old friend (now, alas, departed) who worked in “human resources” (what a great phrase that). He laughed, “You dope! They get classes on how to write resumes! They have professors and computer programs that put these things together for them.” (Remember, folks, computers were new things back then.) He said, “Just randomly pick a couple of women students, they’re all the same, hire’em, and move on.”

I could not do that. I stole a friend’s idea and devised “The World War II Test.” I invited the applicants for interviews. These PMI wannabes came off as slick and somewhat rude. I noted something among my subjects, a sense of entitlement, they all, to varying degrees, emitted a message along the lines of “Why are you bothering me with this silly interview? I am obviously brilliant. I have a degree from Columbia. I am not going to spend my whole life as you have in this stupid bureaucracy. I just need this to add to my resume. I am in a hurry.” I hit them with the test, which consisted of about dozen questions about WWII and its aftermath. I recall a few,

Can you tell me how US troops got into Europe in the first place? When was WWII? (I would accept a variety of answers as long as the applicant could defend the dates as the true start and end of WWII.) What nations comprised the principal Allied and Axis powers? Who was Neville Chamberlain? What he did he do at Munich and with whom? Who was Mussolini? What did he do to Ethiopia? Who was Stalin? Who was Hirohito? What was D-Day? What President ordered the dropping of the atomic bombs and why? Can you name a result of the Conference at Yalta? What was the Berlin Airlift?

Of the 14 or 15 applicants I interviewed, only one got them all right — the only male in the crowd, by the way. None, zero, zip of the rest got even ONE right. Not a single one. A very irritated applicant asked me, “Do we really need to know this old stuff?” I noted that we worked with NATO and Europe, hence, it was important to know the background that led to the creation of NATO and the then just-concluded Cold War.

She stared at me and said, “What does World War II have to do with NATO, the Cold War and Europe?” I promptly offered the job to the male — oh, the cries from “Human Resources” — who turned it down for a more lucrative one in the private sector. In the best Foreign Service tradition, I stalled hiring anybody else, let my two-year assignment run out, and left my poor successor to get stuck with one of the clueless ones.

Yuval Levin:

A casual observer of American politics in recent years could be forgiven for imagining that the legitimacy of scientific inquiry and empirical knowledge are under assault by the right, and that the left has mounted a heroic defense. Science is constantly on the lips of Democratic politicians and liberal activists, and is generally treated by them as a vulnerable and precious inheritance being pillaged by Neanderthals.

“For six and a half years under President Bush,” Senator Hillary Clinton told an audience in October 2007, “it has been open season on open inquiry.” Senator Edward Kennedy, in an April 2007 speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, bemoaned the many ways in which “the truth is taking a beating” under conservative influence in Washington. One popular recent book on the subject is entitled The Republican War on Science; another, by former vice president and Nobel laureate Al Gore, is called The Assault on Reason.

But beneath these grave accusations, it turns out, are some remarkably flimsy grievances, most of which seem to amount to political disputes about policy questions in which science plays a role. Ethical disagreements over the destruction of embryos for research are described instead as a conflict between science and ignorant theology. Differing judgments about the proper role of government in sex education in schools are painted as a quarrel between objective public health and medieval prudishness. A dispute about the prudential wisdom of a variety of energy policy alternatives is depicted as a clash of simple scientific facts against willful ignorance and greed.

And the countless minor personnel and policy decisions that always shape the day-to-day operations of the federal executive branch are pored over in an effort to reveal a nefarious pattern of retrograde anti-rational obscurantism. The president’s science advisor, it seems, now has an office located a little further from the Oval Office than his predecessors had, and a member of a Food and Drug Administration advisory board once wrote a book about his religious conversion.

The American right has no desire to declare a war on science, and nothing it has done in recent years could reasonably suggest otherwise. The left’s quixotic defensive campaign against an imaginary enemy therefore has little to tell us about American conservatives—who, of course, do have a complex relationship with science, though it is not the one the left seeks to describe.

But if this notion of a “war on science” tells us little about the right, it does tell us something important about the American left and its self-understanding. That liberals take attacks against their own political preferences to be attacks against science helps us see the degree to which they identify themselves—their ideals, their means, their ends, their cause, and their culture—with the modern scientific enterprise.

New Mexico governor Bill Richardson seemed to speak for many when, in a speech in the course of his ill-fated campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, he called upon Democrats to make theirs “the party of science and technology.” This is a more positive (not to say less paranoid) way of expressing the deep connection between science—understood both as a way of knowing and a means to doing—and the agenda of liberalism and progressivism.

Read on.

It’s galling.

If the words “swift” and “boat” must be combined and turned into a verb, then let us insist on its proper use. The word as a verb originates from the campaign undertaken in 2004 by the Swift Boat Veterans in response to the John Kerry presidential candidacy. The word means, or should mean, the exposure of a fraudulent autobiography of one seeking political office or public influence. It is the correction of a personal and professional record that has been selectively and dishonestly compiled, as the Swift Vets did so effectively to that of John Kerry. 

Although swiftboating may be a neologism, there are other recent examples of this phenomenon. Justus Reid Werner, in a seminal Commentary article, exposed the fraudulent life story created by Edward Said to advance his political agenda. Dan Rather’s macho claims to be an “ex-marine”, when he did not finish marine basic training, were also revealed to be fraudulent. This is swiftboating in its truest sense.

The Left is now redefining and, therefore, misusing the term swiftboating, and this misuse has become one of the many notable aspects of the 2008 presidential campaign. Democratic candidates and their partisans in the blogosphere use this word to mean smearing their candidates for public office with lies and innuendo. For some blog sites, the word is now synonymous with “screeds,” the “politics of smear and fear,” and “character assassination of proven effectiveness.” Recently, some candidates have angrily declared that they will not be swiftboated.

To understand better the origins of this term and the actual meaning of swiftboating, one can do no better than to read To Set the Record Straight, How Swift Boat Veterans, POWs, and the New Media Defeated John Kerry, by Scott Swett and Tim Ziegler.  In 2004 John Kerry chose to make his service in Vietnam as a supposed war hero the centerpiece of his presidential campaign.  In a scene now reminiscent of Groucho Marx’s addresses to Fredonians in Duck Soup, who can forget John Kerry’s infamous “reporting for duty” speech to the Democratic Convention in 2004?  This strategy adopted by Kerry actually made sense when one examines his time-serving and singularly undistinguished career in the Senate.  Here is a man who ran for President for no reason other than he could afford to.

My lib friends all think Kerry was slimed; they’re ignorant. They also don’t know that John O’Neill, one of the Swifboat Veterans for Truth, had been busting John Kerry for lies going back to the 1970s.

In the clip below, we can see the same dynamic that played out in the 2004 campaign at work three decades ago — Karl Rove is one devious plotter, no?

Notice how the introduction of the clip labels O’Neill a Nixon supporter and Kerry an “anti-war activist.

From Shrinkwrapped:

There was a wonderful science fiction story written many years ago by Murray Leinster called “First Contact”  which concerned the first contact between an alien race and human beings.  The contact occurred far off in space; our space ship contained diplomats and military men.  Both races took great pains to conceal the location of their home worlds and made contact with a fair amount of anxiety and paranoia about the intentions of the other.  The story ended with one of the characters, an enlisted man if my memory serves, expressing confidence that our two races would find a way to co-exist in peace.  His reasoning?  All the while the senior diplomats and military were parlaying, he had spent the time with a junior soldier of similar rank telling jokes to each other.  The idea that the aliens had the same sense of humor as the earthlings was enough for him.

In a similar vein, one of the places that computers routinely fail the Turing Test is to fail to “get” humor.  Try to joke with a computer program and you will find the “intelligence” you are involved with to be quite alien indeed.

Humor is one of our most effective and most sophisticated defenses.  It can defuse the ability of anxiety, depression, anger, and a myriad of other uncomfortable emotions to control us.  It is considered one of the most mature defenses.  As might be apparent, humor does not resolve dysphoric affects but robs them of much of their power and intensity just as it allows an attenuated expression of the affect.

Ideologues typically are humorless.  What humor does get expressed by them is usually bitter and angry and directed at their enemies.  This is one reason ridicule is an effective weapon against such people.  They take themselves and their ideologies extraordinarily seriously and cannot tolerate ridicule.  One recent example occurred when the outtakes of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ’s last videotape were placed on the web.  His ineptness with a rifle inspired laughter rather than fear; his death was assured at that point.

In today’s Huffington Post, Erica Jong, a writer who made her reputation writing humorous novels, shows the damage that ideology can do when it destroys one’s  sense of humor.  She is angry that male reporters routinely comment on Hillary Clinton’s appearance:

Read on.

If you think candidates already seem alike, brace yourself.

Million-dollar political campaigns have got some bargain-basement competition.

A mere $499 gets a candidate a snappy 30-second TV spot — complete with patriotic colors, a compelling message and a slick announcer. Exclusivity, however, is not part of the package. The shell of a spot is pre-produced with all the appropriate Hollywood touches — lots of heartfelt imagery and dramatic pauses.

The candidate’s name, photo, logo and district are simply dropped in as electronic graphics at the appropriate moment. The finished commercials are available in 24 to 48 hours.

It’s an effort to “democratize the election process by leveling the playing field,” said former Sen. Bill Bradley, New Jersey Democrat and adviser to Spot Runner, the upstart Los Angeles-based marketing company that began offering the service yesterday.

“It’s groundbreaking,” Mr. Bradley added.

Depressing, says I.

The company has created a library of 22 ready-made spots that showcase generic political messages, divided into such categories as “scathing political candidate ad” or “urgent political outreach for your law-and-order candidate.”

The selections — or “templates” — include commercials touting faith-based content or assorted takes on leadership, immigration, crime, health benefits and education. A spot titled “Strong Leader” features soft-focus photos of the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, emblazoned with the motto “your headshot here” and a blank spot for a local contact number.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer let his little head rule his big head and now he’s in a heap of trouble. For some this is a sweet moment, the comeuppance of a bully.

Last December, the New Yorker profiled him. Some highlights:

Before his first year in office, Eliot Spitzer was a populist avenger, a media darling, a rising Democratic star, a progressive’s Rudy Giuliani, a panacea-in-waiting, a front-runner in the first-Jewish-President race. Somehow, he’s become an unpopular governor careering from mess to mess. Allegations that his office used the state police to smear Joseph Bruno for misusing state aircraft (an affair known as Troopergate), and a doomed proposal to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, have compromised the brand. His head shot has appeared repeatedly in the Post over the words “DIRTY TRICKS.”

**************

An Albanian who is in Spitzer’s party but no longer in his camp compared the Governor to an alcoholic who can’t be helped until he acknowledges that he has a problem. Another assessed what he felt were Spitzer’s shortcomings in graphic terms: “Spitzer lunges. He seems not to be a person of strategy. He slipped on a banana peel, or six, and once down has thrashed around.”

**************

Spitzer’s tenure as a state attorney general may be the most heavily chronicled of any in America’s history. He reimagined the office, inserting it into the void left by a general regulatory retreat by the federal government. He regarded his activism as a logical and just extension of a new states’-rights movement, which had been conceived as an attempt to roll back oversight and advance a conservative, laissez-faire agenda, but which Spitzer interpreted as an invitation to state-led intercession and prosecutorially mandated policy change. With great gusto, he went after big polluters, pharmaceutical companies, gun manufacturers, and, most notably, the financial industry, where various harmful and fraudulent practices had taken root—insincere equity research, shady market timing, bid rigging.

As many saw it, Spitzer’s modus operandi was to build a case against his targets, then push the most egregious allegations in the media, which put unbearable public pressure on the targets to settle. And settle they almost invariably did. Spitzer earned an impressive array of scalps, admirers, headlines, and plaudits for reform, as well as a coterie of powerful enemies, whose indignation toward his media manipulations, disproportionate tactics, and occasionally shallow understanding of their businesses tended to be drowned out by the widespread public disgust engendered by their greed.

 **************

Brooke Masters, in “Spoiling for a Fight,” her 2006 biography of Spitzer, meticulously recapitulates each prosecution—the regulatory turf battles, the legal dekes and dodges, the mutating rationales—creating a portrait of a righteous and far from infallible crusader employing every tactical advantage that his office makes available to him. He does not always come off well. (All the same, his parents have the book on the coffee table at their house in Rye.) His detractors tend to complain that the press created Eliot Spitzer—that the Sheriff of Wall Street, to use one moniker, was a fantasy of the liberal, wealth-resenting media. And so they take some satisfaction in the fact that the pendulum seems to have swung back on him, with so much force that you’d think it was spring-loaded.

Roger L. Simon nails it:

Ever since I “came out” after 9/11 as someone who “goes both ways” - pro-gay marriage and pro-War on Terror - I have been accused of being a conservative. As I have written elsewhere, that used to bother me a lot. But I got over it. I had been called a communist in other times and survived. As the old saying goes, call me anything you want, but just don’t call me late for lunch.

Nevertheless, I have the sense our society is increasingly trapped in old ideologies with withered definitions. Conservative, liberal, progressive, socialist, anarchist, libertarian, left, right—they seem to have lost much of their meaning and their punch, defined and redefined over decades, even centuries. This should be no surprise. The terms left and right themselves stem from seating arrangements from the French Assembly of 1791. Talk about ‘ye olde’.

Since we live in a world of media images, this has become even more confusing. In the current election, we have the spectacle of the leading Democratic candidates—who define themselves as “liberals” or sometimes as “progressives” to avoid the pejorative connotations of the former—competing with each other in their zeal to restrict a free trade agreement. Is this a “liberal” or “conservative” position?

Well, historically, it is liberal because it seems to side with labor, but in this case it really sides with labor bureaucrats (the high-paid leaders of local unions in endangered industries, an aristocratic elite of sorts), because the rank-and-file membership would more than likely suffer—at least in the long term—through the forced preservation of failing industries. Indeed, the larger working class beyond these local unions would suffer badly.

In another sense, then, Obama and Clinton are highly conservative, seeking to conserve at all costs a fading (labor) aristocracy that should long since have been consigned to the garbage heap of history. No wonder Obama’s economic advisor—in act worthy of the oldest of old politics—rushed to reassure the Canadian ambassador that the “candidate of change” was only joshing about reforming NAFTA. It was just another campaign fib for a gullible public. The image of ideology trumps the reality.

Meanwhile, “true conservatives” have lined up to vilify the putative presidential candidate of the Republican Party because he is not “conservative” enough, even though McCain’s voting record is well over eighty percent “conservative” (quotes deliberate because these definitions are ever fluid) according to most measurements. Again the image of ideology trumps the reality. McCain is seen by many as a closet liberal. Is he? Who knows? Maybe he’s a closet conservative masquerading as a progressive with libertarian and anarcho-syndicalist tendencies. Or maybe he’s just John McCain.

Victor Davis Hanson: 

One wonders how the United States has come to the brink of nominating and probably electing someone with almost no experience as either an executive or national legislator, replete with ratings and rankings that suggest he will be about the most liberal Presidential candidate since George McGovern.

1.Spending. The Republicans spent a fortune between 2001-5, at rates far above inflation to fund new federal programs at a time of war. No vetoes, no remorse. The ensuing deficits then discredited the wonderful effect of the tax cuts that brought in more revenue, but today are somehow blamed for the shortfall.

2.The Half-measure. Conservatives did not articulate what we sought in Iraq. They did not give the public some historical perspectives about the cost versus the benefits of a stable constitutional Iraq. The looting, the pullback from Fallujah, the escape of Sadr, etc. were half-measures when double measures were needed, while no counter-narratives to “Bush Lied, Thousands Died” were offered. So now we are in the situation where a supposedly “failed” and “worst” something will be looked back within ten years as a heroic feat of arms in fostering a constitutional government in the heart of the ancient caliphate, after removing Saddam and defeating al Qaeda, and at a cumulative cost that in past wars might have been exceeded by single campaigns.

…

The Obama Message

I’ve now listened to almost every Democratic debate, watched at least three long Obama speeches on C-Span, and read his website. There are two messages I distill from all that.

One, he is an extremely good speaker, quick and humorous, perhaps the best natural orator and politician we’ve seen since Ronald Reagan and JFK—far better than Bill Clinton, inasmuch he rarely loses his temper or pouts on camera. So far, in Clinton fashion, he has not started shaking his finger.

I note in passing he almost never receives hostile questions. His debates have been limited to those with like-thinking liberal Democrats,. His political races were against other liberals or a weak conservative. And in general the press has bent over backwards to be considerate. Bottom line: we have no idea how he will react when crossed, although Hillary’s dig about his plagiarism in the Texas debate made him squeamish and moan.

Two is the message. Early last year, Obama started out as the post-racial candidate, a sort of liberal version of Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell. His handlers even worried whether he would solidify his African-American base (“not black enough?”) given Hillary’s liberal credentials, apparently sure-thing candidacy, and Bill’s honorific title as the first “black” President.

But sometime by December, the Obama candidacy had transmogrified, as his wife and Oprah, in style and substance, vouched for his African-American fides—and suddenly 90% of the black vote was unexpectedly won in many primaries. If his worry in the cauldron of Chicago politics was that he was too “white”, suddenly those fears were assuaged in the current election.

Second, at about the same time the hope and change message began to morph as well into a prophetic, near messianic sermon along the self-righteous lines of something like, “You, America, have a final chance to show that you are still good, after all, by voting for a brilliant African-American charismatic leader. If you don’t, then you are captive to race, and we were right all along about your America.”

Patterico:

The Democrat party is the party of hope.

The Republican party is the party of fear.

Democrats say: “I hope the terrorists don’t attack us!”

Republicans say: “To hell with that. I want them to fear us.”

Ari Kaufman:

Presidents Day has taken a deep back seat these days on our holiday calendar to the point that not only do schools go on as scheduled, but so do many state and government offices. This is not surprising in 2008, and many revel in it. Presidents Day now celebrates all presidents, not just our greatest. That being the case, let’s “celebrate,” or at least recall, the three worst presidents in our country’s otherwise proud history.

All 43 had their faults, and though mainstream media sources may not agree with my choices, many who understand history will, as a recurring theme continues. During each of these men’s short times in office, they were responsible for deterring progress and negatively affecting the future for America. Thankfully, two of them were followed by two of the greatest commanders in chief of all time.

Read on to see if you agree with his list.

Bob Myer:

…behind the calls for change is a genuine fear of change. The economy, for instance, cannot be allowed ebb and flow; it must remain constant. Or better yet, it must grow at a quicker and quicker pace. Home values can’t change, if change means a decrease in value. Again, constancy dictates ever rising home values. Anything less than constant positive movement in these areas is a world-stopping crisis, and we’re to believe that something must be done to stop the change.

The grand daddy of all fear of change issues is global warming, a.k.a. “climate change”. Some folks fear the well-established fact that global climate actually changes. They simply can’t accept that the earth gets warmer and colder because of forces much greater than humans and our CO2 emissions. Some folks believe this so much that they’re willing to do whatever it takes to “save the world”, even if staving off what may or may not be CO2-induced wrecks lives, economies and countries. Those changes are excusable only because they would be committed in the pursuit of “saving the world”. Climate change’s messianic vision trumps human suffering in the abstract.

So we’re asked to believe in change, to vote for change, to know that change is needed. But what we’re more than likely going to get is less change on important issues, issues that can really influence our future for the better. Universal health care, extended unemployment benefits and other nanny state initiatives are only good so long as the money flows through them. Both Senators Clinton and Obama seem to have rallied around the idea America should trust them to institute change, just trust them. In doing so, they have given the GOP candidate (whoever that may be) a chance to substantively differentiate himself from his Democrat counterpart in the general election.

by Burt Prelutsky 

With so many Hollywood celebrities jumping on the various presidential bandwagons, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell where politics leaves off and show business begins. This being the movie awards season, one sort of expects the politicians to return the favor by announcing their support of, say, George Clooney or Johnny Depp for the Oscar.

When I read recently that Robin Wright was divorcing Sean Penn after 11 years of marriage, I was hoping she would attribute the split not to the usual irreconcilable differences, but to irreconcilable differences of opinion. I mean, if I were the judge and Mrs. Penn testified that she’d finally had her fill of Sean’s going on like a besotted teenager about how cool Hugo Chavez is, I’d be happy to give her custody of the kids and 100% of the community property, including the Oscar he should never have won for his hammy over-the-top performance in “Mystic River.”

Speaking of Oscars, there’s a great deal wrong with them, even aside from the fact that the Academy voters actually handed one over to the bozos who wrote the song, “It’s Hard Out There for a Pimp.” For starters, there’s the fact that they are hardly ever awarded to comedies or to those who write or star in them. On rare occasions, someone such as Kevin Kline or Marisa Tomei picks one up in a supporting role. But, as a rule, if you want to win an Oscar, your best bet is to appear in an overlong, overwrought drama as a mute, a cripple or a prostitute.

But as bad as the Academy Awards are, the biggest scam of all are the Golden Globes. At least most of the members of the Motion Picture Academy either work in the movie industry or used to work in the industry. But the folks who hand out the Golden Globes are 80-odd stringers, part-time foreign journalists. In the old days, when I was working for a production company, the joke was that if you cared about getting a nomination, you invited these underpaid wretches to a party and fed them pigs-in-a-blanket. If you actually cared about winning, you’d go whole hog and feed them jumbo shrimp in cocktail sauce.

Many Americans have complained that the only message to be found in Hollywood product these days is that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are dictators, that the CIA is a combination of the Gestapo and the KGB, and that those who serve in the U.S. military do so only because it enables them to rape, pillage and murder, to their hearts’ content. But I wonder if the subliminal message that comes through when audiences around the world watch this swill isn’t the opposite of what the Hollywood crowd intended. I believe if I were watching one of these stinkers in most foreign nations, I would be thinking, “What a great and free country America must be that these ungrateful louts are allowed to make movies so critical of the government. Over here, they wouldn’t be paid millions of dollars and treated like royalty. Over here, they’d be jailed or lined up against a wall and shot.”

Something else I’ve been musing about lately is Bill and Hillary Clinton repeatedly telling us that Hillary served as co-president from 1992-2000 and is therefore far more experienced when it comes to running the country than either Obama or Edwards. Until now, I thought the 22nd Amendment precluded anyone serving more than two terms as president!

Charles Krauthammer:

There’s losing. There’s losing honorably. And then there’s John Edwards.

Mike Huckabee is not going to be president. The loss in South Carolina, one of the most highly evangelical states in the union, made that plain. With a ceiling of 14 percent among nonevangelical Republicans, Huckabee’s base is simply too narrow. But his was not a rise and then a fall. He came from nowhere to establish himself as the voice of an important national constituency. Huckabee will continue to matter, and he might even carry enough remaining Southern states to wield considerable influence at a fractured Republican convention.

Fred Thompson will also not be president. His campaign failed, but quite honorably. He never tacked. He never dissimulated. He refused to reinvent himself. He presented himself plainly and honestly. Too plainly. What he lacked was the ferocious, near-deranged ambition (a.k.a., fire in the belly) required to navigate the bizarre ordeal that is today’s nominating process. Political decency is not a common commodity. Thompson had it. He’d make a fine attorney general, and not just on TV.

Then there is John Edwards. He’s not going to be president, either. He stays in the race because, with the Democrats’ proportional representation system, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton might end up in a very close delegate race — perhaps allowing an also-ran with, say, 10 percent of the delegates to act as kingmaker at the convention.

It’s a prize of sorts; it might even be tradeable for a Cabinet position. But at considerable cost. His campaign has been a spectacle.

Edwards has made much of his renunciation of his Iraq war vote. But he has not stopped there. His entire campaign has been an orgy of regret and renunciation:

• As senator, he voted in 2001 for a bankruptcy bill that he now denounces.
• As senator, he voted for storing nuclear waste in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. Twice. He is now fiercely opposed.
• As senator, he voted for the Bush-Kennedy No Child Left Behind education reform. He now campaigns against it, promising to have it “radically overhauled.”
• As senator, he voted for the Patriot Act, calling it “a good bill . . . and I am pleased to support it.” He now attacks it.
• As senator, he voted to give China normalized trade relations. Need I say? He now campaigns against liberalized trade with China as a sellout of the middle class to the great multinational agents of greed, etc.

Don Surber: 

Mitt: “The idea of Bill Clinton back in the White House with nothing to do is something I can’t imagine.”

A good debate in Boca Raton showed the problem Republicans face: Mitt, Rudy and McCain are each presidential.

MSNBC’s final debate before the Florid primary may have been the best so far. Brian Williams finally seems to get it that the debate is about the candidates.

Republicans are picking a president. Democrats are trying to decide whether to have the first woman candidate or the first black candidate. There’s a tortoise-hare thing going on this year.

The Republicans focused not on one another, but on the issues. Any attacks were reserved for Hillary.

Mitt even went after Bill, saying the American people do not look forward to having a Bill Clinton hanging around the White House with nothing to do.

Talk Left noticed that, blogging:“They are all attacking Hillary and I heard no mention of Obama. What does that signify? Also, they are being so polite to each other. Was that pre-arranged to show the difference between them and the Dems?”

There was nothing to pre-arrange. Republicans consider Obama to be the girl Democrats will date and Hillary the one they will marry.

by J.C. Phillips 

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama recently found himself in some hot water when he was heard to compliment former President Ronald Reagan. During an interview, the Illinois senator said, “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.” He was immediately attacked by his opponents and other new liberals that view as heresy the mention of Reagan’s name with anything but disdain.

Later, while addressing an enthusiastic audience, Obama clarified his remarks for those that obviously missed the point the first time. “Reagan,” he said, “was able to tap into the discontent of the American people and he was able to get Democrats to vote Republican – they were called Reagan Democrats.” He continued, “We, as Democrats right now, should tap into the discontent of Republicans. I want some Obama Republicans!” Or Obamacans!

Obama’s point may have been a bit too academic for a primary campaign. He was, however, correct. Reagan was an optimist and was able to bridge the partisan divide by articulating a vision of American strength. It was a vision of smaller, less intrusive government and lower taxes. It was a vision that swept him into office with two landslide victories. It was, alas, also a vision at odds with Obama’s message of higher taxes, bigger government and international mollification. If he is looking for Republican defections, he will have to offer more than soaring rhetoric. Like Reagan, he will need a message grounded in the same sense of American exceptionalism that Reagan preached in 1980. 

Obama, however, has something else to offer that, for some, might just outweigh his policy shortcomings. That something is the allure of history.

Hillary Clinton is running with a similar promise of history. However, a White woman riding into the White House on the coattails of her husband is not only a feminist’s nightmare, but it also fails to capture the imagination in the same way as that of a Black man being sworn into our nation’s highest office. 

Though I am a member of the opposition party, I must admit to feeling a genuine excitement when Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses and to an equally fantastic sense of deflation when he later lost the New Hampshire primary and split the state of Nevada. (As of this writing, the results from the primary in South Carolina are not in.) In this way, I don’t think I am too very different from thousands of other Black folk across this country that hold viewing parties on primary nights and root for Obama, holding their breath with each update. They sense something real and historical happening in this country; they believe that like Reagan, Obama will not only change the political conversation in this country but our socio/cultural conversations as well. This is more than just a flashback to 1984 when I stood in a union hall in New York City chanting “run, Jesse, run!” Even in the naiveté of my youth, I never really believed Jesse could win. Obama, however, is something different. The country is different.

For Black people of my parent’s generation, a Black man becoming president was a sign that somehow we as a people would have arrived wherever it was we had been headed. What would my parents say today? How much does America change the morning after Obama is sworn in as president? Will the ghosts of our nation’s past finally be exorcised? Will this nation finally be absolved from its original sin? Will we finally take the last step in realizing the remarkable ideals articulated by this nation’s founders? What is it worth to find out? 

There are millions of voters across the country that couldn’t disagree more with Obama’s new liberal vision for America. There are some, however — voters both black and white — that feel the tug of history more than they do the pull of ideology. Obamacans will be those that step into the quiet anonymity of the polling booth and wonder if perhaps this is the moment that America changes for good. 

There were two Republican primaries on Saturday.

In Nevada, Romney demolished the competition, garnering 52% of the total, with the next closest candidate getting 14%. In South Carolina, McCain got 33%, a mere 3% more than second place finisher Huckabee.

Guess who the media has annointed as front runner? McCain.

Why? Does he have more delegates? No, Romney, the Nevada winner has 59 to McCain’s 32.

Dennis Prager asked radio guest Bill Sammon who he thought the Democrats most feared running against. Answer: Romney.

Selwyn Duke:

…Then there’s populism, now a euphemism for statism.  Mike Huckabee thrives on populist rhetoric, delivered with a mouth greased with snake oil.  No doubt, he turns phrases as well as he turns out Christian votes, but we’re choosing a president, not a wordsmith. 

 But Huck has his strong points.  He believes in charitable giving — at least with tax money — which makes some think he wears his cross more than he carries it.  He also opposes anti-marriage, although this minister has presided over some strange unions.  Why, he created an unequally-yoked marriage between Christianity and statism, which basically means he’ll rob Peter to pay Paul in the name of religion while praying for votes. 

We’re Peter, by the way.

It goes down easy, though, with his chicken-fried charm and nimble tongue.  Just remember the masterful verbal salvo aimed at Mitt Romney:

“You know, people are looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them more of the guy they work with rather than the guy that laid them off. . . .”

I hated the guy I worked with.

But it’s correct to associate Romney with money.  We’re told that even if Romney keeps losing and losing and losing . . . and losing, he’s not out of it and can keep campaigning for the duration, through November 2012. 

This speaks volumes.  People don’t research and vote for the best; instead, they’re bought by the fellow who can afford the most face time. 

And what a face. Romney’s has one great asset and one great liability.  And they’re the same thing.

If a filmmaker cast a man to play the president of the United States, it would be Romney; he has the looks, bearing, voice, temperment, and, oh, yes, the hair.  Yet if you cast someone to play a phoney politician, it would also be Romney.  It’s so superficially perfect, it doesn’t seem quite real. 

Speaking of phoniness and style over substance, there’s Barack Obama.  Have you ever seen those multi-racial, computer-generated pictures politically-correct marketers sometimes place on packaging?  I mean the ones that don’t look like anyone you might actually meet; that is, unless, through marvels of genetic engineering, you somehow amalgamated the genes of every single racial and ethnic group on the planet into the Democratic National Committee’s conception of an über-politician.  Obama is as close as you’ll come.

So the young flock to him because, weaned on political correctness, he fits their profile.  Not only is he multi-racial, he has a cool, exotic foreign name, a resonant voice and rock-star persona.  He isn’t just a plain vanilla white dude.  It doesn’t really matter what he says.

Good thing for him, too, because he makes Romney seem like a font of ideological fortitude and depth.  I honestly cannot address the substance of what he says because I’ve yet to detect any.  But he’s practiced in the platitude, speaking of change; being a uniter, not a divider; yada, yada, yada.  His is a Seinfeld campaign: It’s about nothing.  But it sure is entertaining.

As for Obama’s nonsense, there’s no greater insult to intelligence than the “uniter, not a divider” schtick.  To believe it is to confuse cause with effect.  Who thinks President Bush — who we’re told is a divider, not a uniter — asked 50 percent of us to vote against him in 2000?

Our division is a product of a deep, abiding philosophical rift.  That’s why it’s called the “culture war,” not the political one.  How much fellowship will there be between two groups on opposite sides of abortion, anti-marriage, guns, Iraq, the nanny state, taxes, public displays of faith, and probably the chasm between Heaven and Hell?  To think we’re divided because of a politician gives voters no credit for having principle; it says that, if the right demagogue comes along, they will unite around him.  It is to believe all voters are lemmings, as opposed to just those who vote for tears.

From  the Associated Press:

The Republican presidential race is so unsettled that some party officials are openly talking of a scenario that seemed almost unthinkable until now: the first contested GOP convention in 60 years.

Imagine that: two weeks into January and the GOP nominee has not yet been crowned!

Political conventions used to be interesting because that was where the nominee was determined. Of late, they’ve been boring infomercials.

Reminder: to date there have been primaries and caucuses comprising states with a total population of 15 million.

We have 303,253,036 people living here in the USA.