Who is insisting on 100%?

There seem to be a lot of people assailing the Tea Party for refusing to compromise. President Obama is quoted as saying,

I cannot remember a time when one faction of one party promises economic chaos if it can't get 100 percent of what it wants. That's never happened before, and that's what happening right now.

But it's not the Republican Party, or even the Tea Party, that's insisting on “100 percent of what it wants.” It's Obama and the Senate Democrats. When the Republicans passed a bill that simply delayed for a year some of the more objectionable features of Obamacare — scarcely 100% of what the Republicans want, which is an outright repeal of the act — the Senate turned it down. The Republican House of Representatives has passed bills to fund particular parts of the Government and avert some of the negative effects of the Government shutdown, but the Senate refuses to go along. And President Obama has echoed the Senate, saying he'd veto this type of bill if it comes to his desk. Who is insisting on 100%?

Now what?

The “fiscal cliff” has now been averted, thanks to the professionalism of Vice President Joseph Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who are clearly the heroes of this drama. Now the question is, what next? Will Pres. Obama be even more emboldened, since he was able to fend off spending cuts with only a moderate upgrade from $250,000 to $400,000 in the threshold for the repeal of the Bush-era tax cuts? Or will the Tea Party be emboldened, since now they cannot be hung with the slander that they only want to help millionaires hold on to more of their money?

President Obama had said he would not negotiate on the debt ceiling raise. But he's accepted a compromise plan that does not raise the debt ceiling. He hardly has any cards left to play, now that the “fiscal cliff” compromise is passed and signed. He can bluster that he won't sign any bill that meets the needs Republican lawmakers have to reduce spending, but unlike the tax effects, he does not have the threat that he had built into the “fiscal cliff” issue — if the debt ceiling does not rise, there are provisions that such things as Social Security payments will continue to be made. What will happen? Who knows?

More on the "fiscal cliff" controversy

I recently had an exchange of e-mails with my brother, who is politically somewhat more conservative than myself, though we are closer to each other in our views than either of us is to those our parents held. Some interesting points were made, which I will make public here. First, after I referred him to my post:

Actually, I read similar ideas to yours recently, soak the really, really rich, but leave the really rich alone. Well said on neither side being willing to compromise, when you wrote it, but there is breaking news. Joe Biden, the Clown Prince of Buffoonery, was quoted yesterday as saying that it doesn't have to be exactly 37 percent for the top bracket, it could be less, it's just the principle that the rich have to pay more.

To which my response was:

I suspect that some compromise like this will be attained in the end. What we really don't know is what is going on behind closed doors in secret negotiations, where Boehner's lieutenants and Obama's can make deals that neither can endorse in public because of the socialistic elements in the Administration and the TEA Party contingent within the House GOP.

He continued:

The Republicans were willing to compromise by expanding revenue, 800 billion worth, but that wasn't enough for the Dems, and is too much for the TEA Party.

What we have here are two opposed sides ON PRINCIPLE. (Old Yiddish saying: "Corrupt officials can be bribed into doing the right thing, but men of principle are much more expensive.")

To the Socialists, the high-earners are anathema. They contradict the very foundation of Marxism: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. They get paid more than (the Marxists think that) they need.

To the Republicans, high-earners provide the life-blood and impetus of life's flows, without their spark of energy, the society would fail and wither. Everyone else (and that includes you and me) are hangers on, who should just shut up and follow, unless we want to become entrepreneurs and get some skin in the game. This is best represented by the works of Ayn Rand.

I had to agree with his comment that “[w]hat we have here are two opposed sides ON PRINCIPLE.” But my main point is that:

All that you say is true. BUT, sometimes it is necessary to make some concessions even from one's principles. The socialistic Democrats control the White House and (except for the filibuster rule) the Senate. The Republicans control the House. Nothing can be done at all unless all three can find agreement — the Madisonian principle enshrined in the Constitution. If neither one gives an inch, a result occurs that neither side wants to happen — it's like Prisoner's Dilemma: you have to make what seems to be the worse choice, or the net result is the worst possible alternative.

I'm willing to say as much publicly, and so this post.

"Occupy Wall Street" vs. the "Tea Party"

There is a man up in New Hampshire who does a blog called “Libertarian Leanings.” I don't always agree with him, but it usually makes good reading. And yesterday, he posted this comparison between the two movements called “Occupy Wall Street” and the “Tea Party.”

For some time now Democrats have wanted their own version of the Tea Party, and now they think they have it with Occupy Wall Street. Good luck with that. As Karl Rove observes, there are differences between the two.

The tea party is a middle-class movement of people who want limited government, less spending, less debt, low taxes, and the repeal of ObamaCare. Occupy Wall Street isn't a movement. It's a series of events populated by a weird cast of disaffected characters, ranging from anarchists and anti-Semites to socialists and LaRouchies. What they have in common is an amorphous anger aimed at banks, investors, rich people and bourgeois values.

The tea party reveres the Constitution and wants to change laws to restore the country to prosperity. Occupy Wall Street started by occupying a New York City park and then blocked the Brooklyn Bridge, sparking the arrest of hundreds.

The tea party files for permits for its rallies and picks up its trash afterwards. Occupy Wall Street tolerates protesters who defecate on police cars, allows the open sale of drugs at protests, and features women walking around rallies topless.

Somehow differences like that haven't registered with progressives like Nancy Pelosi.

“God bless them,” Pelosi said, “for their spontaneity. It's independent ... it's young, it's spontaneous, and it's focused. And it's going to be effective.”

Effective? Yes, if the plan is to destroy any chance for Democrats to hold the White House and the Senate in 2012. Their embrace of the Occupy Wall Street movement will prove toxic to Democrats, especially in light of Barack Obama raking in near record setting amounts of Wall Street campaign money. Which raises one notable similarity between the Tea Party and OWS. Both will effectively drive Democrats from office in 2012. Go team, go!

This time, I think he's hit the nail on the head, so I quote his post in its entirety.

The hypocrisy of the Congressional Black Caucus

Allen West is an African-American member of the United States House of Representatives who happens to be a conservative Republican — more conservative than I am, in fact. Herman Cain is an African-American candidate for the Presidency of the United States, who recently won a straw poll for the Republican nomination in Florida. The Congressional Black Caucus claims to be representative of African-Americans trying to get a “piece of the pie.” So you'd think that Allen West and Herman Cain would be shining examples to the CBC. But clearly, they are not.

Obviously, the CBC's approval goes only to liberal Democrats. Even African-Americans, if they happen to be Tea Party conservatives, are considered examples of white racism.

Of course, the CBC isn't racist — yeah. Stephen Cohen, a white Congressman who tried to join the group in 2007 because he sympathized with their goals was refused membership. But this isn't racism. Yet the Tea Party, which supported Herman Cain, is racist. Please explain this to me.

Why Michele Bachmann should not be the nominee

This is probably not news to anyone, but it's clear that, on all the issues that she considers important, Michele Bachmann and I are on opposite sides.

In a campaign stop in Iowa, Bachmann said:

"I'm 100 percent pro-life, I'm 100 percent pro-marriage, pro-family, I'm 100 percent on the Second Amendment."

Assuming that "pro-marriage, pro-family" means in fact against allowing same-sex marriage (which would be consistent with her previous stands) her "100 percent" issues are all on the wrong side. Supposedly, Bachmann is the "Tea Party" candidate. The "Tea Party" is supposedly an anti-tax, anti-spending movement, which would meet with my approval, but when Michele Bachmann makes the three things listed here her signature issues, she's lost me.

Where is the political center?

There is a blog I read frequently, called "Rise of the Center," owned by Solomon Kleinsmith. He obviously considers himself a centrist, but sometimes I wonder.

Now, I do not claim to be at the dead center of the political spectrum, but I think I'm a relatively short distance to the right of center. Yet Kleinsmith sometimes impresses me as far to my left.

Case in point: the recent debt ceiling/deficit settlement. In comments to his posting on it, he took me to task for referring to the final solution as a "compromise," because in his eye, any refusal to impose a new tax burden on the American people is a "hard right" position. In fact, the Tea Party types gave up quite a lot in order to win a no-new-taxes solution, and many voted against the bill because they felt it did not cut spending enough. I'll admit that if you consider the most extreme positions of the left wing of the Democratic Party and the most extreme positions of the right wing of the Republican Party (approximately synonymous with the Tea Party), the final solution was closer to what the right wanted than to the left. But the right wanted to eliminate several executive departments (Yesterday's Washington Examiner had a column advocating the Energy, Education, and Housing & Urban Development departments; Sen. Rand Paul has proposed a bill to eliminate Commerce as well as those three), eliminate the Medicare drug benefit, and many other reductions in the Federal Government that were not even approached. (Frankly, the department I would eliminate is Agriculture. When it was formed, more than half of all Americans were farmers. Today it is about 3%. Do they really need a whole Cabinet department devoted to their interests?)

Yes, this was a compromise. Both sides gave up something, and members of the two houses of Congress from both ends of the political spectrum refused to vote for it. But yet, Solomon Kleinsmith insists this was "not a centrist solution." I guess to me the center isn't what Kleinsmith thinks it is. But then, nobody has the power to define the center, I guess.

Sore winners?

It is very strange that so many of the "Tea Party" types voted against the budget compromise bill. They may not have gotten all they wanted, but they got a lot.

Yesterday, I saw a post in the Washington Examiner by Susan Ferrechio:

The debt deal President Obama signed into law Tuesday was shaped largely by the Tea Party movement, which propelled dozens of fresh faces into Congress last year only after the candidates pledged to drastically slash federal spending.


While many Tea Party freshmen in the House and Senate ended up voting against the debt ceiling bill because they didn't think it cut deep enough, their fingerprints were all over the measure.

There were historically steep cuts, no tax increases and a commitment to even bigger spending reductions in the near future. In response to Tea Party pressure, the measure also requires the House and Senate to vote on a balanced budget amendment, something that hasn't happened in 15 years.

Yet it wasn't enough for some. In the face of a Democratic President and a Democratic Senate, did they really believe they could avoid all traces of compromise? If I'd been trying to get the Government to do something, and I got as much of what I was trying to get as the Tea Partiers did, I'd have been enthusiastic!

The debt ceiling vote -- as I expected

Yesterday — after 7 pm — the House of Representatives voted to extend the debt ceiling. A moment of drama was added by having Rep. Gabrielle Giffords return to the House for the first time since she was shot last January.

It will still need to pass the Senate, which is scheduled to vote on it today — the last possible day before a threatened default. I assume it will pass.

As I said in an earlier post, the politicians involved were playing "chicken" to win political points. President Obama got the one thing he desperately wanted — an extension past the 2012 election, so the election would not be fought while the debt ceiling debate went on. The Republicans got one thing they wanted — at least short-term, no new tax increases. The Tea Party got only some of the spending cuts they wanted — but this was a bit of a victory for them, since the Democrats wanted, at first, not to make any cuts, and to do it all by tax increases.

It's a compromise. Everyone got something and gave up something. But as a Republican I have to say that the Democrats, controlling the Senate and White House, had so much in their favor, and yet gave up so much in the end. I have to think that the Republican Congressional leaders worked beyond the call of duty to make this a bill with more Republican input than you might expect with the Democrats controlling so much of the machinery.

Kudos to Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and anyone else I forgot in the Republican Congressional leadership.

Another unreasonable Gregory Kane column

Gregory Kane, the columnist at the Washington Examiner, who has been the cause of some previous posts on this blog, did it again today. He wrote a column excoriating fellow conservative Ann Coulter because of some favorable remarks she wrote about the late Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, in her new book, "Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America." Now, it is fair game for conservative Kane to say, as he does, that current Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas is closer to his ideas of what a Justice should be. But Coulter makes some valid points in comparing Marshall to Martin Luther King.

My bone to pick with Kane is where he says:

Coulter's thesis is that mob action is inimical, even dangerous, to a republic and that throughout history it's primarily the Democratic Party that has supported, encouraged or even benefitted from what Coulter derisively calls "the mob."

In Coulter's eyes, the street demonstrations that Martin Luther King Jr. led to end segregation were mob actions. Marshall, a lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People during the civil rights era, was anti-mob. Here are some passages where Coulter talks about Marshall, King or both.

"[John] Locke was concerned with property rights. His idea was that the government should allow men to protect their property in courts of law — as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall realized — rather than have each man be his own judge.

"One man who didn't like mob action even on behalf of civil rights was Thurgood Marshall. A skilled lawyer, he was redeeming civil rights for blacks the American way — by bringing lawsuits, making arguments, and winning in court.

"Thurgood Marshall had always disdained King's methods, calling him an 'opportunist' and 'first-rate rabble-rouser.' Indeed, when asked about King's suggestion that street protests could help advance desegregation, Marshall replied that school desegregation was men's work and should not be entrusted to children. King, he said, was 'a boy on a man's errand.'

"Redeeming blacks' civil rights could have been accomplished without riots, marches, church burnings, police dogs, and murders. Except the problem was, Democrats were in the White House from January 1961 to January 1969 and only Republican presidents would aggressively enforce the law.

"If Nixon had been elected in 1960, instead of Kennedy, we could have skipped the bloodshed of the civil rights marches and today we'd be celebrating Thurgood Marshall Day, rather than Martin Luther King Day."

My dear Ms. Coulter, I'd much rather celebrate Martin Luther King Day. Even if I agreed with your assessment of the relative worth of King and Marshall, the fact remains that, as Supreme Court justice, Marshall damaged the nation in ways King and his "mobs" never did.

It's as if Coulter never heard of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. Marshall was one of the seven justices who voted to overturn every state anti-abortion law in the nation. And he was one of the seven who presumed to tell a nation of then nearly 200 million people exactly when life does or does not begin.

It definitely does not begin in the first trimester of a woman's pregnancy, this less-than-magnificent seven concluded, kind of does in the second and definitely does in the third. I have grandkids that can cobble together a better definition of when life begins than that.

And Marshall was one of the justices who voted to overturn, temporarily, every death penalty statute in the land. One result of the noble intentions of Marshall and his cohorts was that a man named Kenneth McDuff, then on death row in Texas for multiple murders, was eventually paroled. McDuff went on yet another killing spree before he was convicted a second time and eventually executed.

A Thurgood Marshall Day? I'm sure the murderers of the country would love that one.

Of course, his first objection to Marshall is his support for Roe v. Wade which he, like many conservatives, thinks is a terrible decision; I think it a good one, because in "overturn[ing] every state anti-abortion law in the nation," he made it possible to save some real human lives. Kane, of course, agrees with the Roman Catholic Church in defining human life as beginning at conception; I've posted a few reasons why I think that is ridiculous.

But even someone who agrees with Kane on the Roe and McDuff decisions can hardly believe that King would have taken the opposite side. And we're not talking about comparing Marshall with Clarence Thomas here; we're talking about Marshall compared with Martin Luther King.

I think Ann Coulter is right on target in the comparison she makes. And let us remember King's near-treasonous stand on the War in Vietnam.

No, I've always considered Marshall a better representative of African Americans than King, and I applaud Coulter's comments which so appall Kane.

The shutdown that wasn't

Well, the shutdown that threatened to happen Friday didn't. And how you want to classify the result depends on whether you're a "glass half-full" or "glass half-empty" type.

The Republicans started off trying to cut over $60 billion. The Democrats responded with $33 billion, and they ended up with about $40 billion. Looks like the Republicans caved. But look at the other side. The Republicans had only the House of Representatives. The Dems had both the Senate and the White House. There was just no way the Republicans could have won a total victory against those odds. And it's pretty likely that the Dems would not have cut anything if they hadn't been prodded by Republican "tea party" types. So in a sense, the Republicans got about ²/₃ of what they wanted. That's not so bad.

From my point of view, there was another thing I liked. The "social conservative" wing of the GOP wanted to use this budget process to push their anti-abortion agenda. And that totally failed. Using the threat of shutting down the government to advance a "social conservative" agenda is, fortunately, a non-starter.

But this process has only pushed the thing forward another six months. So let us see what happens then. Stay tuned for the next episode of "The Perils of Pauline and the Federal Budget."

The (partial) reversal of the parties

When I was a child, the South was the most solidly Democratic part of the country. In fact, one State, Georgia, had never voted Republican in a Presidential election, and most of the Southern States were solidly in the Democratic column at least since the end of Reconstruction. The most solidly Republican part of the country was New England, and in fact Vermont had been solidly Republican as long as Georgia had been Democratic. Vermont was also one of the only two States that had voted Republican in the 1936 Roosevelt landslide (the other, Maine, was also in New England).

How different the electoral map looks today. New England is heavily Democratic, perhaps the most solidly Democratic part of the country, though it elects some Republicans (like Scott Brown, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins to the Senate, and a string of Republicans to the Massachusetts Governorship — though Massachusetts currently has a Democratic Governor, Deval Patrick.) And the South is the most reliably Republican part of the nation, except possibly for the Mountain West.

It would seem that the end of segregation is partly responsible for the South's transformation — without the racism that characterized Southern Democratic politics, the South, more conservative than the rest of the country, found its proper home in the GOP. And Barry Goldwater, though his vote against civil rights legislation was due to libertarian principles rather than racism, attracted some of the Southern racists — it is clear from the fact that, except for his home State of Arizona, Goldwater's only State victories in 1964 were in the South.

It is harder to see why New England has moved the other way. But in the mid-20^th century, New England Republicans were more libertarian than conservative, and the influx of Southerners into the Republican party, and the persistence of Westerners there (both being very conservative socially), has made the Republican party less attractive to New Englanders whose Republicanism meant something less conservative. (I would say that the Democratic Party was not really a great fit for them, but in an electoral system in which only two parties can compete, perhaps that did it.)

A great example of what has happened is in the State of Virginia. In the mid-1960s, I was in that State for educational reasons, and I saw a Governorship election in which the two candidates were Democrat Mills Godwin and Republican A. Linwood Holton. Godwin won, but four years later Holton became the first Republican Governor since Reconstruction. A number of years later, Godwin had become a Republican, and won the Governorship again for that party. (He is the only person in U. S. history to win Governorships under both the Democratic and Republican label!) In another election, I was working for the election of Richard Nixon against Hubert Humphrey, and calling people for the Republican Party; most of the people who answered were happy to support Nixon but we could not get them to abandon the local Democratic Congressman, John O. Marsh. Like Godwin, Marsh also became a Republican, serving in a sub-cabinet position in the Noxon administration.

I do not know of many New England Republicans who have become Democrats in the same way — they have generally become Independents supporting Democratic candidates instead (examples are James Jeffords, Lowell Weicker, and Lincoln Chafee).

But the parties have not totally reversed. Organized labor is still heavily Democratic, and (despite such Democratic supporters as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates) businessmen are mostly Republican. That is part of what keeps me in the GOP — I am still repelled by the influence of organized labor in the Democratic Party, as I stated in an earlier post. But I have to admit, I'm not very happy with what the GOP is now; I felt a lot more comfortable in the party of Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller then I do now in the party of Mike Huckabbee and Rick Santorum.

A response to a comment

Normally, when a comment is made to a post of mine, I reply to the comment directly. But this comment, posted by Solomon Kleinsmith to my post on centrism and term limits deserves more attention than just a comment-on-a-comment:

Term Limits don't have anything to do with ideology. There is no conservative, liberal or centrist position on term limits...

And there is a actually quite a bit of cohesion on the issues among centrists. The defining characteristics of centrists is NOT that they take from both sides, its that they stand between the two sides. People can be liberal on some issues, and conservative on others... that doesn't make them a centrist. For example libertarians are more conservative than most conservatives on government spending, and are more liberal than most liberals on keeping government out of our personal lives... and they are in no way shape or form at all centrist.

First, on the first paragraph, while I agree that "[t]here is no conservative, liberal or centrist position on term limits," there does seem to be more support for term limits among "Tea Party" type conservatives than anyone else. That being said, of course Kleinsmith himself is one big exception.

Now to the second. Certainly, I do not maintain that everyone who takes ideas from both the left and right is a centrist — the implication of Kleinsmith's example of the libertarians. But he is refuting the converse of my claim. Not everyone who takes ideas from both the left and right is a centrist, but everyone who is a centrist, of necessity, takes ideas from both the left and right. That is not the same thing. And my point in my original post is that there are people who call themselves "centrists" who still differ greatly on which ideas of the left and which ideas of the right they favor. I do not think that Kleinsmith can make a good case that I'm wrong.

Open primaries? No thanks! (But there is a good alternative!)

Solomon Kleinsmith is the owner of a centrist blog: this means, of course, a little bit to the left of my politics, but not so far that I don't agree with a lot of his positions. But one thing he favors that I cannot is open primaries.

You might think that allowing Democrats and Republicans to vote in each other's primaries might moderate their choices, but look what this could cause: Consider next year, when Barack Obama is certain to be the Democrats' nominee. Since a Democrat has no likelihood of affecting the primary process in his own party, he might decide to cross over and vote in the Republican primary, and vote for the Republican that Obama has the best chance to defeat. As a result, the Republicans would have someone like a Sarah Palin nominated, just to make it easier for Obama. (Think of Christine O'Donnell in Delaware last year. She wasn't nominated in an open primary, but open primaries might cause a lot more of this type of nomination.)

Of course, one might argue that this sort of thing hasn't much happened in those States that do have open primaries. Well, let's see what has happened in those States. Virginia is an open-primary state; it has to be, because Virginia law does not allow voters to register in a paty, the way Maryland and New York (to mention the two States where I've been registered to vote in my lifetime) do. Wisconsin is very similar to Virginia in this respect. Now can anyone argue that Virginia candidates have been more moderate, more centrist than, say Maryland candidates? I don't think they have been. And certainly the recent impasse in Wisconsin has shown that in that State, exteremism has not been driven out of local politics.

Now Kleinsmith does agree with me on another proposed election rule change: he strongly opposes "top two primaries." These were adopted statewide in Louisiana and subsequently in a couple of other states; the same system is used in my county for the nonpartisan Board of Education elections. In a "top two primary," all candidates (in a partisan election, all the candidates of all parties) run against each other, and two (who might be both from the same party!) are chosen to run in the final election. In Louisiana, this has led to the bizarre "lizard/wizard" election of 1991. It is clear that it causes all sorts of problems, and a whole chapter was written in William Poundstone's book, "Gaming the Vote" about the 1991 Louisiana Gubernatorial election. Suffice it to say that that's not the answer either.

Is there a solution that will help moderate candidates get elected? Possibly. Poundstone's book suggests that another system would be better: score voting, also known as range voting. In this system, the voter rates all the candidates instead of picking just one. And a moderate candidate might, by getting high, but not maximal, ratings from both left-of-center and right-of-center voters, actually win in a score voting election. Check out the Center for Range Voting site, or Poundstone's book. You might be impressed.

On the shooting in Arizona

A Congresswoman has been shot and her life is in serious danger (and even if she survives, she will sustain severe brain injury). A judge is dead, as well as a number of innocent bystanders. And all because of a crazy man with a gun.

No, it's not the "Tea Party Culture" that deserves the blame, as some have said. But it's also not just because of one deranged man. If he hadn't been able to get a gun so easily, none of these deaths and injuries could have been inflicted.

What will it take to convince the Second Amendment fanatics that we need to make guns harder to obtain? Nobody outside the police and military has a legitimate need for a gun. But there seems no way to repeal the Second Amendment, so it's necessary to provide a reasonable interpretation of the amendment, that will protect the people from such shootings. And while I think the more conservative Supreme Court Justices appointed by Republican Presidents are, in general, good for our people's rights, in this area, they are wrong.

And for another good discussion of the issue, see this blog post.

Scott Brown and the Tea Party

I recently saw a posting on another blog (The FrumForum, a very nice blog which often has posts with which I agree) entitled: "Scott Brown Frustrates Tea Party." (This post apparenmtly comes from another source, "The Boston Globe" blog.) And it points out that Senator Brown, in his moderation, is frustrating Tea Party extremists, who may put up a primary opponent in two years when he has to run for a full six-year term. Apparently the Tea Partiers haven't learned their lesson. Harry Reid and Chris Coons are going to be sitting in the Senate at next month's swearing-in because Tea Partiers defeated Sue Lowden and Mike Castle with Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell in the primaries. If only they would understand that "Half a loaf is better than none."

Presidential popularity ratings

It is apparent, in the way President Obama had Bill Clinton carry the burden of his pressing for the passage of his tax compromise, that he's relying on Clinton's current popularity. And in a recent poll rating the most recent presidents, Clinton ranked very high — after only JFK and Reagan. Which set me to thinking: Why do bad Presidents get good popularity ratings, and good ones get bad ratings?

The most popular President of all was John F. Kennedy, and what did he do to get such a high rating except be shot and killed by an assassin? He was responsible for the disaster of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and could not push a single bill he considered important through a Congress controlled by his own party. (After the assassination, Lyndon Johnson adopted Kennedy's program as his own, and succeeded in pushing much of it through. But this was a success for LBJ, not JFK.)

Second on the list was Ronald Reagan, who probably does qualify as a successful President. I had feared that his Presidency would be too right-wing, and had favored others for the nomination, but perhaps I should have noted that both in the year he failed to gain the nomination (when he picked Sen. Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania), and four years later, when he did win the nimination and selected George H. W. Bush, he was willing to give moderates a role and showed a tendency to be a lot more inclusive than many "Tea Party" Republicans are in 2010. His Presidency was generally constructive.

The number 3 slot in the poll went to Clinton. I can't find words to describe the negative feelings I have about Bill Clinton, who I consider the worst President to serve in my lifetime. (Full disclosure: I had a job that was funded out of the Strategic Defense Initiative "Star Wars" program, which Clinton said in his campaign he would kill, and he kept that promise. I ended up unemployed for four years, and never again had a really good job. So I was personally affected negatively by Clinton, which makes me hate him in a more visceral way than most Presidents. But on an objective basis: What other President was called before a grand jury and lied to it? Not to mention all the other acts of misconduct which were found by Kenneth Starr.) Only politics in the U. S. Senate saved him from removal by impeachment.

On the other side of the coin was Richard Nixon, the most underrated President we have had. Because he was too loyal to underlings who violated the law to help re-elect him, he has been stigmatized. In opening the way to contact with China, producing the basis of a settlement of Vietnam, and such, he did an amazingly good job (which was sabotaged in both cases by Jimmy Carter's ineptness, of course). He deserves to be rated much higher than he has been.

Postmortems - Part 3 (Pennsylvania/Maine/Rhode Island)

Of all the States, the one about which my feelings are the most complicated is Pennsylvania. I had followed the career of Arlen Specter for many years, beginning in the 1960s when I had a job in Philadelphia and Specter was a young DA uncovering corruption in that city. Over the years Specter developed into the Senator I had my greatest agreement with. So the ideal result for me would have been for Specter to stay a Republican and serve six more years in the Senate. But six years ago Specter was challenged for the nomination by Pat Toomey, a "Tea Party" type before they ever called it that. Given the rightward drift of the GOP, Specter apparently figured he could not beat Toomey in a primary this year, so he went over to the Democrats, which saddened me, though I could understand why he did it. This didn't work, because as far as the GOP primary voters were to his right, so were the Democratic primary voters to his left, and Specter lost that primary to Joe Sestak, so Specter was out of the pictue completely. If Specter had won the Democratic primary, and I had been a Pennsylvanian, I would have been faced with a terrible decision: Support someone who agreed with me on most issues, but whose first vote would be for Harry Reid to lead the Senate? or someone far ro my right, but who at least would help keep the Senate Republican? Sestak's winning the primary made the choice pretty straightforward. And so I wanted to see Toomey win, and was glad to see it happen, even though this was one of the closest races in the 2010 election. Pennsylvania, unlike both of its neighbors New York State and Maryland, was good territory for the GOP this year. Not only was Toomey elected, but a Republican Governor and State Legislature. All I can say is I wish Maryland had done so well.

Both Maine and Rhode Island had independent candidates running for Governor. Maine has in the past actually elected an independent to the office, so there was really a chance, but the Republican, Paul LePage, pulled it out. Maine seems to be the one State in New England which the GOP still can win frequently — it has two very competent Republican women as its Senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, who, with Specter gone, are probably the best representatives of the kind of Republicanism I prefer. LePage is considered a Tea Partier, so we'll have to see what sort of job he does as Governor of Maine. But I congratulate him and wish him well.

It was Rhode Island, however, that actually elected an independent this year. And Lincoln Chafee, Rhode Island's next Governor, is an enigma. He used to be a Republican, but supported Barack Obama's candidacy for the Presidency in 2008. And Obama recognized this and refused to endorse Chafee's Democratic opponent, Frank Caprio. (This led Caprio to say Obama could "take his endorsement and shove it," certainly one of the most impolite things a politician has said about a President of his own party!) Obviously, Chafee got elected mainly by Democratic votes, so it will be interesting to see whether he governs as a Democrat or a Republican. He looks like another Lowell Weicker to me, becoming a Democrat in all but name as Weicker did in neighboring Connecticut.

Postmortems - Part 2 (Maryland/California/New York)

A local weekly newspaper in this area printed a headline, following the election, saying "GOP Wave misses Maryland." Yes, it certainly did. As I said in yesterday's post, the most important observation to take from Tuesday's election is that every State is different. Maryland is sandwiched between Pennsylvania and Virginia, both of which were great states for the GOP this year. (Virginia was already so red that there was not much to go redder, but the GOP took 3, or possibly 4, House seats away from the Democrats there. I'll say more about Pennsylvania in a subsequent post.) But in Maryland, as I said in my October 12, 2010 post, the GOP made hardly a dent in the blueness of the State. One House seat, which should have been Republican anyway, but which went to Democrat Frank Kratovil in 2008 because of an internecine split in the local GOP, came back home. A few more seats in the lower house of the State's legislature went red, but in the upper house, a couple went the other way. And a good former Governor, Bob Ehrlich, certainly not a bizarre "Tea Party" type, lost by 10 percentage points to the sitting Governor, Martin O'Malley. In the Senate, one of the most liberal members of the chamber, Barbara Mikulski, had no trouble winning by a much larger margin, over a pretty uninspiring Eric Wargotz, who was pretty much unknown outside his home county. As I said in that post on Oct. 12, it seemed strange to see the GOP winning all over the place, while seeing nothing but blue here at home. It may be because so many Marylanders are Federal Government employees, and thus unsympathetic to a "smaller Government" GOP, and rather sympathetic to a President Barack Obama who the rest of the country was rejecting. As I said earlier, O'Malley even invited Obama into the State to campaign for him, something most Democrats were certainly not doing. Pretty dispiriting, though I'm happy for the rest of the country.

New York didn't look much better. As a native of that State, I tried to follow it; the GOP didn't help their cause very much by nominating a lame excuse for a gubernatorial candidate, Carl Paladino. They elected a Democratic Governor and two Democratic Senators; most of the time you don't see two Senate seats filled in the same election in a State, but here there was one term expiring and the other seat vacant because Hillary Clinton had left to become Secretary of State, with Kirsten Gillebrand only appointed to an interim position. Both Gillebrand and Chuck Schumer easily won re-election, and Andrew Cuomo, son of a previous Governor, won the gubernatorial office.

While New York State elected the son of a governor from the 1980s and 1990s, California was restoring a governor who had served even earlier, in the 1970s and 1980s, Jerry Brown. Like New York and Maryland, California seemed to be bypassed by the GOP wave. And this one was even stranger, because in California, the GOP had some excellent candidates. Meg Whitman, running for Governor, and Carly Fiorina, running for the Senate, were well qualified, very desirable candidates, and both put millions of dollars of their own money into their campaigns. But Jerry Brown beat Whitman, and Barbara Boxer gained reelection to the Senate over Fiorina. I guess California voters just couldn't see what was best for them, but that's how democracy works sometimes.

Postmortems - Part 1 (Florida/Alaska/Delaware/Nevada)

Last Tuesday's elections showed a lot of different things. But the most important is that every State is different.

In Florida, the "Tea Party" candidate, Marco Rubio, succeeded in gaining the support of the entire Republican electorate. While I might have liked to see a better showing by Charlie Crist, he made a serious mistake. He let himself be painted "blue" (i. e. a secret Democrat). First, when some people were saying he might join the Democratic caucus if he were elected to the Senate, he refused to come out and say he was a Republican who would never support the Democratic leadership (i. e. Harry Reid et al), which lost him voters who wanted to express their hatred for the Obama/Reid/Pelosi agenda. Second, when such as Bill Clinton worked to get Kendrick Meek to withdraw so that the Democrats could unite to defeat Rubio, Crist accepted this role without saying anything that might have inspired Republicans to stay with him. This made Crist seem to be a Democrat while Rubio managed to unite all the Republicans, even those who had originally supported Crist. So Crist and Meek split the Democratic vote, instead of Crist taking both the moderates among the Republicans and those among the Democrats, which would have been the way to win. Too bad. But at least the winner in this scenario was a Republican, though further to the right than I'd like. Better this result than what happened in Delaware and Nevada, about which I will say more later in this post.

Alaska was a bit like Florida, but here the "Tea Party" candidate, Joe Miller, did not reach out to mainstream Republicans, who rallied behind Lisa Murkowski. So even though Alaskans had a harder job — Murkowski's name had to be written in — they seem to have done so. The write-in votes have to be examined to see how many of them are for Murkowski, but most people think she will become the second person in United States history to win a Senate seat on a write-in vote. If she does so, I congratulate her. It was a hard job, but it looks as though she did it!

The other two States I'm discussing in this post had much more unfortunate results. In both Delaware and Nevada, the "Tea Party" candidates were relatively unqualified people who made outrageous statements that drove even anti-Obama voters into the camps of their Democratic opponents. As disliked as Harry Reid was in Nevada, people voted for him over Sharron Angle, and in Delaware, Christine O'Donnell was so ridiculous in some of her statements that even Chris Coons' admission of having been a "bearded Marxist" did not prevent his beating O'Donnell. (And more to the point, Mike Castle, who was the loser in the GOP primary to O'Donnell, probably could have beaten Coons, according to all polls.) Obviously, if a "Tea Party" candidate like Marco Rubio (or Pat Toomey, to be discussed in another post) could run a sufficiently mainstream campaign to win, it is pretty clear that one cannot paint all the "Tea Party" candidates the same color. Some were plausible candidates, but others, like Angle and O'Donnell, were not. Too bad. Imagine if Sue Lowden had won in Nevada and Mike Castle in Delaware. The GOP would have been closer to tying the Senate. I just wish...