Noemie Emery, Chris Christie, and wishful thinking

Yesterday I opened my copy of the Washington Examiner to see a column by Noemie Emery entitled “Why they still pine for Christie.” I will not post the entire column here, but you can read it by following the link. And her main thrust is that Chris Christie would be a better nominee for the GOP than any of the current contenders.

Well, I'm not going to say anything negative about Christie here. Those of you who have read my earlier posts know I like him, and would happily support him — even in preference to Mitt Romney — if he chose to run. But he does not want to run for the Presidency this year!

So it is simply wishful thinking for Emery to build up Christie as the best candidate. The day is long past when a candidate could be nominated without seeking the nomination and getting delegates pledged to him elected by the primary voters. This could be done in 1940 for Wendell Willkie. It cannot in 2012. So, writing about how great a nominee Christie would be is a waste of effort. Sorry, Noemie Emery!

The perils of purism

Yeaterday I ran a post about a column by Cal Thomas in that day's Washington Examiner which surprised me in that I often disagree with Thomas' columns, but found that particular column to be totally in accordance with my thinking. Today I'm also posting about a column in the Examiner, but while I am just as much in agreement with today's column as I was with yesterday's, this time it causes no great surprise, because the column is by Noemie Emery, whose posts I usually find make a lot of sense to me. As it happens, it says much the same thing as a remark in Thomas' column in yesterday's paper:

If the Republican “tent” isn't large enough for Chris Christie, then it will resemble a pup tent for some time to come.

Emery's column is entitled, “Conservative crisis management.” At the beginning of the column, she says:

When in a hole, keep right on digging. That's the attitude of a number of movement conservatives, who, in reaction to last year's shellacking, seem to want to make certain they never climb out.

And, addressing those conservatives, she makes the point (emphasis mine):

…don't complain about Republicans running the Bushes, John McCain, Bob Dole and Mitt Romney, when you run Alan Keyes, Pat Buchanan and Rick Santorum against them. If you want to win nominations, you might try running candidates. (And a better message might help matters, too.)

That's a powerful dig, but they deserve it. The fact is that most Americans are not far-right conservatives. If a conservative is to win their votes, he needs to be moderate enough to get the votes of people closer to the middle of the political spectrum, who would never support a Santorum. Which leads ino her next point:

check the urge to purge heretics, which died out long ago in most of the world. Movement conservatives now scourge their party's most popular governors. Yes, blue- and swing-state Republicans always enrage some conservatives; the problem is that conservatives need them if they want to become a national party. If they like to throw tantrums, they should keep on what they're doing. If not, they should throw them some slack.

Why? Andrew Cline explained this two years ago, just after Scott Brown, having thrilled conservatives by winning the seat of Ted Kennedy, enraged them with one of his first Senate votes. “Scott Brown does not represent the Republican National Committee in the United States Senate. He represents Massachusetts,” Cline said then, correctly. “If Scott Brown voted as though he were from Alabama, the voters of Massachusetts would send him there.”

The really important thing to note is what Emery says a little bit further along:

…Chris Christie, with his Ralph Kramden vibe, is the closest thing they are likely to get in New Jersey — and, though conservatives would prefer a Reagan conservative, in those states this is not in the cards. Christie and Bob McDonnell represent their blue and swing states, not Utah or Texas, and the alternatives to them are not stronger conservatives.

The alternative to Olympia Snowe isn't Ted Cruz, it's Angus King, who votes with the Democrats. The alternative to Scott Brown isn't Rand Paul, it's Elizabeth Warren. We have Obamacare now because of the Club for Growth and Pat Toomey, whose primary threat scared Arlen Specter back to the Democrats, where he became the 60th vote for Obamacare's passage.

In other words, the far right's insistence on purity has driven the center of American politics leftward, hardly a desirable goal from their point of view.

I wish Noemie Emery's words could be read by the people who keep insisting on ideological purity.

An Examiner column I really liked

I've recently mentioned some columns and editorials in the Washington Examiner to which I found myself very much opposed. I should, in fairness, cite a column which appeared today, which I applaud unhesitatingly. It was done by Examiner columnist Noemie Emery. (I read it first in the paper; it is now available online as well.) She in turn was responding to a column by Michael Walsh in the National Review Online in which Walsh had said:

"After running one of the most disgraceful 'honorable' campaigns in American political history ... you'd think the least the least of the military McCains could do is to slink quietly off into the wild blue yonder with the thanks of a grateful nation trailing in his wake. But no, at age 74, he's still in the Senate ... where he can continue to reach across the aisle, poke his finger into the eyes of conservatives, hog the media spotlight, rail about Republican 'isolationists,' suck up to Fox News, and unleash his ankle-biting mini-me onto his enemies. Please, just go away."

Emery's response, after quoting this paragraph, began:

This was National Review Online contributor Michael Walsh's pique-bomb for John McCain, R-Ariz., whose behavior was clearly irking him.

But the appraisal is as short on understanding as it is long on rhetoric. McCain's "disgraceful" campaign did a remarkable job under the circumstances in staying close to Obama. He actually led him for two weeks before the financial implosion put paid to his chances.

McCain was also elected to the Senate five times, by fairly large margins. Having put away a movement conservative challenger by a two-to-one margin in the 2010 primary, he has the right and the power to do as he wants. He represents his state — not conservative pundits, to whom he owes nothing. He has the right to poke his finger in the eyes of anyone when he thinks they deserve it. He has the right to rail at "isolationists" when he thinks that they're wrong on the issues. And they, of course, have the right, and the duty, to rail back at him.

And then Emery went on to make it clear that the Republican Party has an identity separate from its conservative wing. And one of Emery's best remarks in that column is:

The Republican Party is conservative in the relative sense that it is the more conservative of the two major parties, and home to everyone in the country to the right of the center, by one degree or by one hundred: to Olympia Snowe and Michele Bachmann, to Jim DeMint and Jon Huntsman, to Rand Paul and Marco Rubio; to Scott Brown and Rick Perry.

There are no "Republicans in Name Only"; only different kinds of Republicans.

Bravo, Ms. Emery. I couldn't have said it better.

Truth: a casualty of liberal thinking?

As I have mentioned more than once, I get a lot of material for my posts from columns I read in the Washington Examiner. Many of the columns do not really share my opinions, and I've agreed with some and disagreed with others. (In some, I have not really cited the column, such as one by Gene Healy on Gary Johnson, though it was because of that column that I wrote my most recent post, which was about Johnson.) And yesterday I saw another column I'd like to cite; this one by the Examiner columnist I tend most to agree with: Noemie Emery. Her column, in yesterday's paper, was entitled “The year of losing touch with reality”: among some of the things she says is

Somewhere in the recent past (say, about the time “Dreams From My Father” was published), liberals decided reality wasn't really their thing. It was too dull. It didn't give closure. Sometimes the endings weren't right. So it turns out that Obama's main squeeze in his young days was a “composite,” digitally enhanced for your reading experience.

Then, it turned out that even the blond, blue-eyed, whey-faced Elizabeth Warren, running against Scott Brown in Massachusetts for his seat in the Senate, was hired by Harvard as an American Indian, though the proportion of Cherokee in her bloodline was just 1 in 32 parts. Just how pale-faced is Warren? A lot more than George Zimmerman, the brown-skinned son of a Peruvian mother who is accused of murdering Trayvon Martin. He was described by the New York Times as a “white Hispanic,” because if you're going to characterize a death as a lynching, the one who commits it had better be white.

I have to say that I enjoyed seeing those words in her column, and I felt I really needed to quote them. She also goes on to say, later in the same column,

What could be less real than that? Well, there is one thing — conjecture about what would have been in an alternative universe, in which much is asserted and nothing proved. These have become mainstays for President Obama, whose case for re-election is based not on what has happened, but what could, would or might have occurred under different conditions, which he is allowed to make up. One is his belief that his stimulus averted a second Depression. A second is to charge that a President Romney would not have made the call to take out Osama bin Laden and then to attack Romney for a “decision” he never had the opportunity to make. The supposed evidence for this claim came from a wide-ranging interview on general strategy that Romney had given five years earlier.

I recommend that you read the entire column, but these excerpts show how Noemie Emery tells it “like it is.” More power to her.

The conservatives' problem

The Washington Examiner, a paper that I read regularly, is a rather conservative newspaper; one in fact that makes me, by comparison, seem a liberal. And a lot of the columnists in the Examiner are, similarly, a lot too far right for me, and my criticisms of these columnists in this blog have been numerous. But I've noticed one of the Examiner's columnists with whom I usually agree: Noemie Emery — and readers of this blog will find my references to her columns pretty much uniformly favorable. And today's column is not an exception to this. I quote her column here:

Pity the conservatives — they certainly do pity themselves — in their perennial election-year plaint. Since time immemorial — 1988 — they have presented large fields in primary contests, and each time they have been forced to take squishes and Bushes, mavericks, Doles and McCains. They suspect plots, but the reasons are simple: The candidates they have backed have been pretty appalling. And the market for a genuine movement conservative may not be as big as they think.

Putting second things first, they fool themselves with statistics, noting that the number of self-described conservatives (something over 40 percent) is twice as large as that of self-described liberals. They assume they have a built-in and reliable base. But the word “self-described” is the problem. Mitt Romney would call himself a conservative, as would Rudy Giuliani, as would John McCain. People conservative on only some issues describe themselves as conservative. If the question were phrased to fit movement conservatives, the number might be cut in half.

Even among the Republican primary electorate, the largest plurality is “somewhat conservative,” and they are the ones who elect the McCains. In recent primaries, Rick Santorum won among evangelicals who self-described as “very conservative.” Evangelicals who weren't “very conservative” and the very conservative who weren't evangelicals voted for Romney. Very conservative strong evangelicals do not define the Republican Party. These leaders don't know their own base.

As to part A, let's go to Jim Geraghty's words: “I would argue that a conservative presidential candidate who aspires to be the actual president, not just the metaphorical president of the conservative movement or the president of a faction of the movement, has to clear a bar of credibility,” such as actual record at governing, the ability to form and maintain coalitions, and the ability to establish a level of trust. The sad fact is that while the establishment picks have been Senate leaders (Dole and McCain), effective state governors (Romney and Bush 43), and a vice president, CIA head and ambassador (Bush 41), the right-wing insurgents have largely been vanity candidates, activists somewhat far out on the fringes, and people who never held office at all.

In 1988, it was Dole and Bush 41 against Jack Kemp, Pete du Pont and Pat Robertson. In 1992 it was Bush 41 against Pat Buchanan. In 1996, it was Dole against Buchanan, Phil Gramm and Steve Forbes. And in 2000 it was Forbes, Orrin Hatch, Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes against Bush 43 and McCain.

(The outlier was 2008, when all the major candidates were the size of a president, and all were strong Reaganites on at least one set of issues — McCain and Giuliani had War on Terror credentials; Romney had business credentials; and Mike Huckabee had social conservatives' backing. All were suspected of moderate leanings elsewhere.)

The 2012 contest upped the ante on vanity candidates, with six or more cranks, losers and retreads against the lone figure of Mitt. In the last 24 years, of all the insurgents who have run to the right of eventual winner, only four — Hatch, Gramm, Rick Perry, and Kemp — had the right resumes to be running for president. The first three were nonstarters. Kemp's attempt to run as the true heir to Reagan was derailed by the claims of Reagan's loyal vice president, the elder George Bush.

Why was Reagan the last “real conservative” to win the nomination and the election that followed? He was the last and only with the experience and the political talent to reach beyond his own base. If conservatives want to win, they should try running a good politician. Who knows? It could work again.

As usual, Ms. Emery makes a lot of sense. Though, if the truth be told, I think that it's probably a good thing that “the right-wing insurgents have largely been vanity candidates, activists somewhat far out on the fringes, and people who never held office at all.” Because I certainly do not want an extreme right-winger. Some of the people she has mentioned as “establishment candidates” — people like Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Bob Dole — have been the kind of person I really wanted to see in the Presidency.

My take on some recent columns

Regular readers of this blog know that many of my posts are prompted by columns I read in the Washington Examiner, which is, for me, a local paper. The Examiner is a conservative paper, and its columnists all hew to that line to one or another degree (although not always agreeing with everything that each other says). In this way the Examiner differs from the Washington Post, which often prints columns by Charles Krauthammer, probably the columnist in all the papers I see with whom I most agree. But getting back to the Examiner: two columns that appeared earlier this week particularly caught my eye.

Most of the time, it seems Gregory Kane's columns prompt my disapproval. This time was a rare exception. He wrote the column Sunday, and it appeared in Monday's paper under the title: “Rush Fluke apology came too late” I will not quote the whole column in detail, but only the first paragraph; I do recommend that you read it all on the Examiner's site:

If indeed, as some media reports have indicated, Republicans are now “on the defensive” in the contraception controversy, they have one Rush Limbaugh to thank for putting them there.

The main point was that, by using such offensive language, Limbaugh (if anything) attracted support to the woman he criticized. There was a good case to be made — based on religious freedom and the First Amendment — to oppose President Obama's contraception mandate. But Limbaugh's way — to insult the woman who spoke in favor of the mandate — poisoned the air. Mr. Kane, this time you and I agree.

The second column I want to write about came from a columnist with whom I more usually find myself in agreement: Noemie Emery. And while my agreement with Gregory Kane is out of the usual, the fact that Ms. Emery's column agrees with my thought is more typical. Her column appeared in Wednesday's paper under the title “Back to the what, Mr. Will?” and in it, she takes George Will to task. Again, I will not quote the whole column but advise you to read it all on the Examiner's site. But the one thing she said that particularly caught my eye was this piece:

Romney is poised exactly at the midpoint of the Republican Party, strong with those to the right or the left of this center, very strong with the "somewhat conservative," while being conservative enough not to enrage or discourage the base.

This is the best reason why Mitt Romney should be the 2012 GOP nominee, and I like the way she put it.

Another take on the Missouri Senate election

In the past, I've rather liked a lot of the posts by Washington Examiner columnist Noemie Emery. Friday's paper had an interesting column regarding the Senate election in Missouri, for whom the Republican primary winner, Todd Akin, has gone so off-the wall that the likes of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh think he should give up:

In 2006, unexpectedly bounced from his own party's ballot, Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman decided to run as an independent on a third-party line. The moment he did, he became the de facto Republican candidate, as the GOP decided to ignore its own nominee, neither funding nor mentioning him. Everyone understood what was happening, and Republicans voted for Lieberman. The state was (and is) Democratic, and Lieberman won.

In 2012, the Republicans' best way out of the mess in Missouri, now that they are left with a loon as a candidate, may be to do the same thing: Run a third-party line with the “real” candidate. But this time, actively fund and back him, with rollouts, endorsements and cash. This is because the installed nominee is not merely a blank, as he was in Connecticut, but a full-blown flake and media flame-out who needs to be wholly disowned.

Distance must be put between Todd Akin and the rest of the party and ticket, and this is best done by running against him. Link him to the Democrats and to Claire McCaskill, whose creature he does seem to be. During the primary, Democrats spent at least $1.5 million on television promoting him to Republican voters as the most conservative candidate. They also urged Democrats to go out and vote for him. By defining him now as a Trojan horse figure set to blow up and embarrass his party, Republicans could make the campaign against him appear more legitimate. They could also undermine liberals' efforts to link him to Romney, Ryan and other conservatives. If these are actively running against him, how tied together can they possibly be?

It's an open question who the third candidate should be, but it is one easily solved. Jennifer Rubin has brought up the name of John Danforth. Sarah Palin suggests Sarah Steelman (whom she endorsed), but she ran a few points behind Akin in the primary, and Missouri's “sore loser” law prevents runners-up from running in write-in campaigns. As the National Review's Jim Geraghty notes, a successful write-in candidate needs a simple name that is hard to misspell and a proven appeal to large blocs of voters, traits that he finds in one possible entrant: “If only some figure, well known to Missouri voters… would step forward and declare, “The name's Bond … Kit Bond.”

Other ex-senators are thick on the ground, and if Steelman can't run, she could campaign with and for them, driving a stake through the fake ‘war on women’ that the left wing is trying to wage. Campaigns such as these would give Missouri's voters a choice other than the other two ghastly options, and sever the links the liberals are trying to forge between Akin and saner Republicans. Who knows? They might even win.

Having nothing to say, Democrats are avid to run on distractions, from Seamus the dog to Rafalca the horse to Harvey, the invisible friend of Harry Reid, who keeps feeding him tidbits about Romney's taxes. They will continue to feed such distractions to the public till November, to drown out all talk of real issues like downturns and downgrades and “jobs,” the three-letter word that Joe Biden immortalized. This will never blow over, until it is made to. Unless Akin bows out, there's just one way to do it.

Ms. Emery has an interesting idea. The problem is that it will only work if one alternative candidate comes out. Otherwise, the vote will be split, and Claire McCaskill will still win. So who will do it?

The "settled law" argument

Liberals like to say that “Obamacare is a law passed by Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court.” The arguments by “Sundance” on “The Last Refuge” blog should dispose of that. But in any case, any law Congress can pass, Congress can repeal. In 1798, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. There was no Supreme Court test of these, because prior to 1803, the Supreme court had not declared an act of Congress unconstitutional, but these laws were certainly as much settled law as Obamacare is now. Yet people as high as the Vice-President of the United States at the time, Thomas Jefferson, were so strongly opposed that Jefferson helped author state legislative resolutions against their enforcement. (Jefferson was the author, not publicly acknowledged at the time, of the Kentucky resolution, while another future President, who is acknowledged as well as the author of much of the Constitution, James Madison, had a similar rôle regarding the Virginia resolution.)

No law is ever totally settled. And anyone who thinks a law is a bad one certainly has the right to work for its repeal. If Thomas Jefferson and James Madison could take the actions they did on the Alien and Sedition Acts, no Republican should be considered unreasonable for opposing, by all means possible, Obamacare. (Even a Constitutional amendment is not beyond repeal. Look at the history of the Eighteenth Amendment, and the Twenty-first.)

You are also invited to read posts by Nick Gillespie on the Reason.com blog, and by Noemie Emery on the Washington Examiner's site.

An on-point evaluation of President Obama

There used to be a newspaper published in Washington, D. C., The Washington Examiner, which I enjoyed reading. Some time ago, the paper ceased publication, except for an online presence that still continues. Recently I saw a column by Noemie Emery on the Examiner's site, which I found quite interesting. Her columns in the Examiner when it was in print often reflected my own thought, and I think this column also shows a great insight, so I would like to reprint it.

President Obama, wrote the Washington Post's Greg Jaffe in a recent story about the president's view of his country, articulates “his vision of a nation that can acknowledge and, learn from, its mistakes.” Would that this vision applied to himself.

Now comes the main point, one that I think characterizes this President above all things that have been written about him:

Not only does Obama never learn from mistakes, he doesn't think that he makes them, and he denies that they even exist. Any regrets for the way he passed healthcare? Not that you'd notice. Any regrets about leaving Iraq? Nope — he still thinks he “ended two wars,” which the other side keeps on fighting.

The conventional view of what has gone wrong — that Obama lacked experience, and that first-term senators should be viewed with suspicion — is undercut by the fact that he has had six years of experience, and failed to learn from it. At home and abroad, Obama makes mistakes over and over, with the same result, and takes nothing from them. He disses his friends, placates aggressors and seems surprised that aggressors advance and whole regions catch fire.

He refuses to bargain with Congress, insults opponents, imposes unpopular policies by fiat and seems surprised when his measures result in court challenges, when polarization increases, opposition solidifies, divisions harden and gridlock prevails. Deal-making is the essence of politics, but Obama finds it demeaning, so he resorts to brute force when he has the means to (as in the still-festering matter of healthcare). Alternatively, as with immigration, Obama resorts to executive actions that stir angry resistance and are frequently halted by courts.

This has gone on since 2009, but Dana Milbank noticed only when Obama began slighting Democrats, whereupon he began taking offense. “Rather than accept that they have a legitimate beef, he shows public contempt for them,” the Washington Post columnist complains, writing that Obama dissed fellow Democrats to friendly reporters as being short-sighted and dense. (Of course, he's done that for years to Republicans, but they seem not to matter.) If Franklin Roosevelt was described as having a commonplace intellect but a brilliantly tempered political character, Obama seems to be his ultimate opposite: A man with an intellect that delights the elite but a temperament that is counterproductive in matters of government. This combination seems to work much less well.

A comparison with his predecessors is instructive.

Presidents can sometimes repair their mistakes, but only after they realize they've made them, which is something Obama can't do. George W. Bush stayed with his failed Iraq strategy until a bloody year followed by a political bloodbath in the 2006 midterms forced him to change course dramatically. John Kennedy failed in the Bay of Pigs and then in his first face-to-face meeting with Nikita S. Khrushchev, when he compounded his first bad impression by seeming irresolute.

Sensing at once that he had made a grave error — “He savaged me,” Kennedy said later of the Russian leader — he doubled the draft, increased defense spending and took Dwight Eisenhower's advice to have his councilors argue their cases before him and each other (instead of one at a time and in isolation), which led to the peaceful solution of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

But admitting mistakes — and taking advice — are not the skill set of the current incumbent, who finds them demeaning. The learning curve of the 35^th president between l961-63 had been exponential, while, as Josef Joffe recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “the 44^th president's learning curve has been flat for six years.”

It's not lack of experience that hampers Obama; it's his refusal to learn a thing from it. That's the trait we can't have in the 45^th president — and the one we must strive to avoid.

A valuable observation, and one with which I heartily concur.

Don't give Pres. Obama a victory by default

I've remarked before about Noemie Emery, a columnist for the Washington Examiner, whose columns I usually find very close to my own thinking, and in yesterday's paper she had another very good column. It's too long to quote in its entirety — please follow the link to read the whole column — but the main point is that, by fragmenting, the Republican Party is making it easier for President Barack Obama to foist his far-left agenda on the American people. She points out, for example:

In 2008, during the fiscal implosion, they took two weeks off from the campaign against him to engage in a tong war over the much-loathed Troubled Asset Relief Program that turned a difficult race into one already lost. Between 2010 and 2012, they threw away four seats in the Senate -- two to primaries, one to Todd Akin, and one when they drove Olympia Snowe out of politics. This gave us Obamacare, when a primary election threat drove Arlen Specter back to his old party, where he morphed from a critic to an ardent supporter of that much-despised and badly formed legislation.

In particular, one section of her column is particularly apropos:

…last week, Republicans turned the lame duck into a TARP rerun, capped by a half-baked attempt to dismember the speaker, which embarrassed both him and themselves. This is what happens when people decide that some on their side are really The Enemy and get distracted from those with whom they have much larger differences. So before they move even more down this dream-scene-for-Democrats road map, there are three facts they might think of and four things they should do.

Fact No. 1 is to realize a political party isn't a church nor a cult but a mechanism to get diverse people who share some things in common to work toward a common position of power that none could achieve on their own. Fact No. 2 is that unless you can convert your principles into actual policies, standing upon them does no one a favor. If you believe in your principles but can't convert others, you are not an asset. If you antagonize them, you and your principles are a real liability, and perhaps you should shut the hell up.

Fact No. 2 [she means 3] is that because no coalition big enough to win power can ever be pure or completely united, and no pure wing or segment can be big enough to win or rule on its own, it is in everyone's interest to cherish the mavericks. Each party needs members who vote with them sometimes. Conservatives dreamed of the day they could rid themselves of the Snowes, Lugars and Castles; that day has come, and they and their party are weaker than ever. Many conservatives would kill now to have those seats back.

Sometime soon, before the debt ceiling crisis writes a thrilling new chapter, Republicans should sit down together and try to agree on four things: to name the shared goals that they want to move forward; to decide what to do to in a practical manner (in the real world, not an imagined alternative); to find their best spokesmen, and have him (or her) speak for them all; and to remember exactly who their real enemies are — who, in the real world, are not themselves.

The Tea Party loves the Gadsden flag symbol, with its poised-to-strike rattler and "Don't Tread on Me" message, but there is another illustration of that era that it ought to note: Benjamin Franklin's cartoon of a snake, chopped into 13 small pieces, unable to make any threatening noises. Beneath it was Franklin's exhortation for unity among the 13 Colonies: "Join, or Die."

She is right on the nose there. There is another blog I like, which has been relatively inactive lately, called “Big Tent Revue.” The name, I presume, comes from the remark that the GOP should be a “big tent” under which people of differing opinions, but with some in common, can all find shelter. This is a good image. If the Republican Party tries to purify itself to become a single-dogma party, the Democrats will win by default on every issue. Let us try to prevent this.