John Kasich for President

The results are in on yesterday's primaries. Marco Rubio, who was the man I expected to be the eventual nominee, did so poorly in his home state of Florida that he quit the race for the Presidency. But John Kasich won Ohio. He won it big. The most recent polls showed him narrowly defeating Donald Trump in Ohio, with the Real Clear Politics average of recent polls showing a 39% to 35% margin. The actual results were 47% to 36%.

I had been withholding an endorsenment, though ever since Chris Christie withdrew, those who read this blog knew that Kasich was my favorite, only because Rubio was still an acceptable choice, and if I thought he was more likely to beat Trump and Ted Cruz, and Kasich did not, I wanted a chance to endorse him. But now the race is down to three men:

1. Donald Trump, an inexperienced-at-politics man whose knowledge of the Constitution is flawed and whose manner is decidedly un-Presidential,
2. Ted Cruz, a religious fanatic whose accession to the Presidency would really hurt our First Amendment rights, and
3. John Kasich, who has been such an outstanding Governor of Ohio that his popularity there, where they know him best, is immense.

With the above characterizations, it is clear that Kasich warrants my support. If it ever comes down to Trump vs. Cruz, I'd take Trump (unlike my wife, who has such a visceral dislike of Trump that she would certainly vote for any Democrat — even socialist Bernard Sanders, though she does not approve of his socialistic politics — to defeat him). But as long as Kasich is in the running, I have to say he is the best choice.

Which should drop out? Kasich or Rubio?

I had lately been thinking that even though I preferred John Kasich to Marco Rubio as a candidate, the best thing for the Republican Party this year would be for Kasich to drop out and let the reasonable people in the Republican Party coalesce around Rubio to prevent Donald Trump, or even worse, Ted Cruz, from gaining the nomination. But I saw a post yesterday by Tom Bevan entitled “The Case for Kasich Staying In” which makes a case for the reverse, and I quote it in full:

Admittedly, 2016 is a year in which the electorate—especially the rebellious voters who have turned the GOP primary season upside down—aren’t putting a premium on political experience. But of the five Republican candidates left in the field, there's one person who has the traditional résumé indicative of a president of the United States.

That would be 63-year-old John Richard Kasich of Ohio. He’s a pro-life conservative who emphasizes the working poor. He’s a fiscal conservative who helped maneuver President Bill Clinton into balancing the federal books in the 1990s budget wars. He is also, not to put too fine a point on it, governor of a big Midwestern state with a significant distinction: No Republican has ever ascended to the White House without carrying Ohio.

And the Republican “establishment” is trying to force him out of the race.

I don’t have a horse in the GOP nomination fight, but it was hard to argue with Kasich, who said yesterday that anyone calling for him to leave the 2016 race needs to “chill out.” He has as much right to stay in this race as anyone else—and more than some. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

First, let’s talk about the panic that has gripped vast swaths of the Republican Party in the wake of Donald Trump’s smashing victory in Nevada on Tuesday. After months of denial about the strength of Trump’s appeal and wishful thinking about his imminent demise, the GOP establishment now fears that Trump is on the verge of running away with the nomination. Hence the frantic calls for some sort of “unity ticket,” or for Kasich and Ben Carson to get out—or even for Rick Perry, freshly cleared by the courts Wednesday of bogus and politically motivated charges, to get in as a third party alternative. Republicans are grasping for something, anything, to stop Trump before it’s too late.

The trajectory of this race reminds me of the plot of the classic 1983 anti-war movie “WarGames.” The film starts innocently enough, with a teenager trying to pirate the latest video games accidentally hacking into the U.S. defense network. The computer responds by asking the now iconic question in its halting, robotic voice: “SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?”

This is more or less how the Republican establishment viewed Trump’s entry into the 2016 race: a harmless diversion that would be over in a few weeks. Eight months later Donald Trump is at DEFCON 1, threatening to nuke the Republican establishment and win the nomination, and GOP elites are running around shrieking like Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy trying to break into NORAD and pull the plug on the whole thing.

Except it’s looking more and more like this movie ends with the computer winning. Trump heads into Super Tuesday on March 1 with the wind at his back. He’s leading in 10 of the 11 states up for grabs that day, with a combined 595 delegates in play.

The only state where Trump isn’t leading is Texas. Ted Cruz currently has a 5.2-point lead in the RealClearPolitics Average, though the most recent poll, by TEGNA/SurveyUSA, shows the two candidates tied.

Obviously, Texas is a must win for Cruz. If he loses his home state to Trump, his rationale for being the Trump-stopper is demolished. Similar tests awaits Rubio and Kasich on March 15, when both Florida and Ohio are up for grabs as winner-take-all states, for 99 and 66 delegates, respectively.

In Florida, polls taken in late January show Trump with massive leads and, equally as stunning, with support over 40 percent in a multi-candidate race. A new poll is expected later this morning from Quinnipiac University, which will take into account most of what has transpired in February and will give us a better understanding of where Marco Rubio stands in his home state.

In Ohio, there’s not much data to work with either. The most recent poll, also conducted by Quinnipiac last week, shows Kasich trailing Trump by five points, 31 to 26. Things could, and probably will, change by mid-March, but at the moment Kasich remains within striking distance.

Imagine we wake up on Wednesday morning, March 16, to find that Sen. Rubio has lost Florida to Trump, while Gov. Kasich has beaten Trump in Ohio. If that happens, how do Rubio’s supporters, which include much of the existing GOP officialdom, make the case that Kasich should defer to Rubio? Why wouldn’t the logical argument be the other way around?

Kasich bolsters his argument by pointing to the fact that he runs far better against Hillary Clinton in general election match-ups than either Cruz or Rubio. So why wouldn't establishment Republicans rally behind the most "electable" candidate who carries his home state in the primary?

As we’ve already seen, anything can happen in a race as crazy and unpredictable as this one. Which is why John Kasich has every right to stay in this contest through March 15 and let Republican voters in Florida and Ohio have their voices heard. Until then everyone should listen to Kasich and chill out.

An interesting point. And perhaps that is right. Let's see where things stand on March 15.

The South Carolina results

I'm not unhappy with the results of yesterday's South Carolina primary. Yes, the winner was Donald Trump, whose nomination would be a disaster. But I am glad to see that Marco Rubio beat Ted Cruz for second place, and this in a state where Cruz' extremist conservatism might be expected to do well. Since Jeb Bush (who has now withdrawn) and John Kasich got together over 16% of the vote, and Trump's plurality over Rubio was only 10%, if the supporters of so-called “establishment” candidates combine, Trump can be beaten.

And he will be. Trump, even in “winning,” got only a third of the vote. A lot of commentators seem to think this was a big win for Trump, but they don't seem to understand that he only “won” because there was a split in the opposition. As it consolidates, and it looks like Rubio will be the one it consolidates behind, Trump will lose the nomination.

Will Rubio be the candidate?

For a long time, I've been saying that while I preferred Chris Christie (now dropped out) or John Kasich as the candidate, I thought Marco Rubio was the actual probable winner. Then, along came New Hampshire, and Rubio stumbled badly, leaving me in doubt as to the likelihood of his win. Now at least one post that I've seen seems to imply that Rubio has once more emerged as the candidate to beat Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

Possibly. But we will have to see what happens in South Carolina tomorrow.

It's now down to six

It starfted with 17 candidates for the 2016 Republican nomination. Now there are only 6: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, and John Kasich. Of course, if you've read my earlier posts, you know I prefer Kasich among those six. But I could support anyone but Cruz if he were the nominee. I prefer that it not be Trump (who has a limited knowledge of what the Constitution says a President can do) or Carson (who, with Trump, has little relevant experience, though I think he'd make an excellent chair of a task force studying how to replace Obamacare). Jeb Bush is, as that CNN questionnaire I took showed, quite close to me on the issues; I'd think he'd make a good President, but I'm afraid that many whose opinion of his brother's Presidency is poor would not vote for him, so my only objection to Jeb Bush is electability. Rubio is somewhat more conservative than I'd prefer. However, he's still within the bounds of acceptability. And running against either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, of course Rubio would get my vote: both of those prospective Democratic nominees are far further to my left than Rubio is to my right.

That is my current take on this election.

It isn't an "either-or" choice!

This past Saturday, there was a debate in New Hampshire among the candidates for the Republican nomination for the Presidency. And the most talked-about exchange was between Chris Christie and Marco Rubio.

Now as I've said before, Christie is among my favorite candidates for the nomination, while Rubio is the one that looks like the actual winner. So I'm a bit uncomfortable with such a degree of hostilities between them; should Rubio actually get the nomination, I should hope that Christie could support him against the far worse candidate (probably Hillary Clinton) that the Democrats will nominate. But the gist of the exchange was that (according to Christie) Rubio's short experience in the Senate — comparable to Barack Obama's when he first ran eight years ago — is insufficient preparation for the Presidency. And Rubio's retort was that Obama's failure is not from inexperience, but that there is a “fiction that Barack Obama doesn't know what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing.”

Well, in my estimation, it is not an either-or choice. Obama's inexperience has led to many problems in the past seven years or so, thus Christie is right in pointing to Obama's election and saying, “What we need to have in this country is not to make the same mistake we made eight years ago.” But Obama has chosen a direction for this country that is contrary to its best interests, as Rubio has implied.

So both Christie and Rubio have valid points to make. And we should recognize this.

Nothing much has changed, but...

More and more, it looks as though the Republican nominee will be Marco Rubio. That at least two former candidates who have dropped out, Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal, have specifically endorsed Rubio (though, from my point of view, Santorum's support is a negative!) shows that Rubio is collecting support in the way he needs to be nominated.

But this is really what I've been thinking for some time, and most recently stated in a post a few days ago. While I would prefer to see Chris Christie or John Kasich, I can certainly back Rubio if he is the nominee. And so nothing is really any different. There isn't much more to post about this election.

Sorry for my absence

I haven't been posting here for a few months, in part because of my own life's being complicated (including a surgery and more than a month in a rehabilitation facility), and in part because I do not know what to make of the large support being gathered, according to the polls, by Donald J. Trump in his candidacy for the Presidency. I see him as a very poor choice, though if he is nominated against Hillary Clinton he will get my vote in November, mostly because his direction for the country is closer than hers to what I would like to see. He has no political experience (which his supporters see as a positive! and seems not to understand the Constitution (based on some of his proposals), and thus I see him as really poorly qualified for the office of the Presidency. I certainly would prefer Chris Christie or John Kasich.

However, the Iowa caucus just completed inspired me to resume posting. I was, on the one hand, glad to see Trump receive a lot less support than the polls indicated, though, on the other hand, not very happy that the man who beat him was Ted Cruz, who I like even less than Trump. Yet Cruz' victory is not a big surprise. Iowa seems to be very hospitable to the religious Right; in the two most recent previous elections it gave its support to Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum.

I do not, however, expect Cruz to be the nominee, any more than were Huckabee and Santorum. For some time, I have been predicting that the eventual nominee would be Marco Rubio. And Rubio's near-tie with Trump for second place makes me even more convinced that this will be the outcome in the end. And while Rubio is not my first or second choice (or even my third or fourth!) I see him as certainly a nominee I can live with.

But New Hampshire may tell a different story next week. We will have to see.

Comments on Thursday's debate

First of all, I have to confess that I did not watch the debate. I do not, these days, like to stay up late, and I decided to spend my evening going early to bed. So these comments are based, not on observation of the debate itself but on others' comments on the debate.

The consensus was that three of the candidates helped their cause. Of the candidates considered “major,” the winner seems to have been Marco Rubio; however John Kasich seems to won a new-found attention (about which I am, of course, very happy, as can be evinced by my comments of a few days ago), and one candidate who was not even in the main event, Carly Fiorina, has impressed a lot of people. In addition, my actual favorite (though Kasich is becoming something of a “co-favorite”), Chris Christie, seems to have done well. And the beginning of Donald Trump's fall from the top seems to have occurred.

Since Christie and Kasich appear to have both improved their positions and Trump has hurt his own, I think the debate has helped in the struggle to winnow down the candidates. Such candidates I really dislike as Mike Huckabee do not seem to have changed anyone's opinion, which on balance is probably good. So all in all, I'm happy. But the biggest surprise is Carly Fiorina. As I've said, the biggest flaw I see in her is a lack of political experience, but after this debate, it seems she is being considered more seriously. To me, she and Ben Carson form a matched pair — brilliant exemplars of what they are good at, but simply not experienced in the specific needs of political leaders. But their performances were dead opposite in this debate. Fiorina has made people wish she had been in the main debate; Carson has prompted comments as to why he was on the debate stage at all.

Before the debate, I was of the opinion that Scott Walker was the eventual nominee, and I could certainly support him in November 2016 if he were the nominee, though Christie and/or Kasich ranked much higher in my preference list. Now I'm not so sure. I'm more optimistic about the chances of my two favorites, less certain that Walker will pull it out, but even less certain that if it's not Walker, it'll be Jeb Bush. Both Walker and Bush seem to have turned in disappointing performances. But what will happen next? Will Fiorina move into the top ten? Will Trump decide he's an independent and quit running for the Republican nomination? (This would scare me a bit, because it could take just enough votes from the actual Republican candidate to throw the election to Hillary Clinton.) I guess all I can do is wait and see.

Mike Huckabee is unfit to be president. Here's why

Once more, Mike Huckabee is acting in a way that shows his unfitness for the Presidency. In a column entitled Huckabee Takes Aim at Court Activism on Gay Marriage dated May 28, 2015 by Andrew Desiderio on the Real Clear Politics site, we read:

With a Supreme Court decision expected next month on constitutional protections for same-sex marriage, one presidential candidate is not mincing words when criticizing what he sees as judicial overreach.

Specifically, the court is expected to rule on whether the 14^th Amendment requires states to authorize same-sex marriages, as well as recognize those already carried out in other states. For Mike Huckabee, this is a clear case of the justices acting beyond the authority granted to them.

“Many of our politicians have surrendered to the false god of judicial supremacy, which would allow black-robed and unelected justices the power to make law as well as enforce it,” the former Arkansas governor said during his May 5 campaign launch.

That was hardly his first comment on the issue. “I respect the courts, but the Supreme Court is only that – the supreme of the court,” he said at the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference in April, as the high court was holding oral arguments on the gay marriage case. “It is not the supreme being. It cannot overrule God.”

It is Huckabee's seeming willingness to make the United States a theocracy that I find appalling. The Supreme Court is not trying to “overrule God”; it is merely interpreting the Constitution. And God is irrelevant. What God believes is unknown to us — I as a Jew of course differ from Gov. Huckabee, an evangelical Protestant, in our beliefs as to what God's laws are; and others of different religious tendencies would have yet other ideas in this direction, but the Supreme Court is supposed to ignore this question. The Court is bound only by the Constitution. If it does violate God's will, God will punish the Justices. Gov. Huckabee has no more right to speak for God than do I or does any individual in the Supreme Court.

Desiderio continues:

Marbury v. Madison, an 1803 landmark case, created the process of judicial review, by which Supreme Court justices are given the power to determine the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress and signed by the president. It allows the judiciary branch to serve as a “check” on the legislative and executive branches. But many conservatives claim the courts have inched into the realm of judicial activism.

Huckabee, the 2008 winner of the Iowa caucuses, reiterated his criticisms during a “Fox News Sunday” interview last weekend. “The notion that the Supreme Court comes up with a ruling, and that automatically subjects the two other branches to following it, defies everything there is about the three equal branches of government,” he told host Chris Wallace.

The President and the Congress are sworn to uphold the Constitution. The role of the Court is to provide a definitive interpretation of the Constitution. Gov. Huckabee seems to imply that he would be free, if he were President, to interpret his oath to support the Constitution as one to write his own doctrine of what is constitutional. Since 1803, the nation has accepted Court decisions as the last word on constitutionality. Gov. Huckabee's ideas fly in the face of this agreement. This is hardly a conservative position.

Desiderio's column continues:

Wallace pressed his onetime Fox News colleague further, asking whether he would have approved of Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus’s 1957 defiance of the high court’s ruling on school desegregation.

Huckabee called that comparison a false equivalency, noting that both the legislative and executive branches agreed with the court on desegregation. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Huckabee said, was therefore right in sending the 101^st Airborne Division to enforce and carry out the law at Little Rock Central High School.

Huckabee then presented a hypothetical of his own in criticizing those who “bow down” to court rulings that are not backed by the legislature: “What if the Supreme Court ruled that they were going to make the decision as to who was going to be the next president, and save the taxpayers and the voters from all the expense and trouble of voting, and they’ll just pick a president?”

Of course, nobody really believes that the Supreme Court would do such a thing. Even the Gore enthusiasts who would say that the Court came close to such a ruling in the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision have to admit that the Court never eliminated the election, but merely terminated the recount process. So Huckabee's hypothetical is of a piece with “What if the President said the Constitution was henceforth null and void, and his decisions, on all issues, were to have the force of supreme law?”

Huckabee spokeswoman Alice Stewart declined a request to comment on whether a President Huckabee would take any type of executive action if the court deemed all state bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, saying there is “not more to add.”

Both declared GOP candidate Carly Fiorina and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is expected to enter the presidential race soon, have said they would not fight a SCOTUS ruling in favor of same-sex marriage, while Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker have signaled their support for a constitutional amendment that would prohibit courts from interfering with existing or future state bans on same-sex marriage. It is unclear whether Huckabee supports such a step.

The column then concludes with a summary of other opinions on Huckabee's position, including the two biggest organizations that are concerned with the issue:

But there’s plenty of opposition to this conservative stance. The Human Rights Campaign, a liberal organization that has been pushing for LGBT rights since 1980, says Huckabee’s comments prompt the question of whether Florida Sen. Marco Rubio or former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who are at the top of the RealClearPolitics polling average among Republicans, are on the same page as their rival.

“Another day, another attempt from Mike Huckabee to test-drive a desperate and absurd rationale for denying marriage equality to everyone at a time when more than six in 10 voters support marriage equality and nearly half the country knows an LGBT couple that has gotten married or is in a committed relationship,” JoDee Winterhof, HRC’s vice president for policy and political affairs, told RealClearPolitics.

(Rubio and Bush aides declined to comment on whether either would employ a strategy of denouncing activist courts, but Rubio has said in the past that he does not want the judiciary to “impose” gay marriage on certain states. Bush does not believe the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage.)

Meanwhile, the Family Research Council, a prominent social conservative group, did not return a request to comment on whether it would embrace a strategy of running against the courts in an effort to enshrine traditional marriage. The group’s president, Tony Perkins, said during oral arguments before the court that it should not “impose” same-sex marriage on states where bans have been upheld.

One can scarcely think that either the HRC or the FRC would take a position any different from what it has, of course. And the final piece of Desiderio's column continues:

Huckabee has insisted that his appeal is not exclusive to evangelical voters, who are more likely to share his views, and has said he is also vying for the support of working-class Americans.

But will the Republican nominee – whoever that turns out to be – feel pushed to run against the courts in the general election? And prior to that, will any of the primary contenders make this issue a cornerstone of his or her campaign? Those will be tough choices to make, as recent polls show the tide is turning on social ideology nationally, with increasing support for same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization.

While social conservatives remain a powerful part of the Republican Party electorate in most early primary and caucus states, the GOP establishment has signaled it does not want to alienate younger voters, who overwhelmingly support gay marriage, by embracing unpopular positions during a general election.

The big problem is that any Republican who makes “social conservatism” the cornerstone of his campaign is going to make the Republican Party a laughingstock and throw away the votes of millions of people who usually vote Republican because it is the party of freedom, by making it instead the party of bigotry.

Marco Rubio?

I hadn't given a lot of thought to Marco Rubio as a 2016 candidate. But perhaps I should. There is an article entitled “A Hillary Clinton Match-Up With Marco Rubio Is a Scary Thought for Democrats” by Jeremy W. Peters on The New York Times' site which implies that Rubio is very good at capturing his audience's sympathy. And of course, his history of doing so well against the former Governor, Charlie Crist, among Republicans that Crist left the party and still lost when he tried to run an independent campaign certainly points to Rubio's electability, which is an important factor. He may be somewhat more conservative than I'd like, but he may well be a good choice. After all, anyone who scares Democrats interested in putting Hillary Clinton in the White House as much as is implied by that article is worth looking at.

Let's pull together

When this blog was started in 2007, I was favoring a potential candidate for the 2008 Republican nomination, Rudolph W. Giuliani. I still think he would have been an excellent candidate, and an excellent President. But forces within the Republican Party decided he was not conservative enough for them. The candidate who was nominated, John McCain, was certainly good enough to get my support in the 2008 election, and I am sure he would have been a much better President than the man who actually won the office that year. But McCain was probably just too nice. He was not able to fight the Obama juggernaut. Would Giuliani have been able to win against Obama? Nobody really knows.

But the Republican Party needs to nominate a winner. Rudy Giuliani was able to win in strongly Democratic New York City, and McCain, for all his admirable qualities, had never been tested in such circumstances. By losing, the GOP found itself meekly standing by while the “stumulus that didn't stimulate” and the disaster known as Obamacare were unleashed on the American public.

Now we are looking forward to another chance, though it is three years away. The GOP has a chance to pull together behind someone who can win the Presidency. And we have a chance to pick another chief executive who has been shown able to win in a strongly Democratic jurisdiction. Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey is, like Giuliani, being dismissed by some as insufficiently conservative. My question to all those who want a Marco Rubio or a Rand Paul or the like is, do you want to cede the presidency to Hillary Clinton in 2016? The first task is to win. Even a Christie Administration is going to be better, even if you'd prefer Paul or Rubio, than one run by Hillary Clinton. Let's all get behind someone who can win — and nobody has shown this ability better than Chris Christie.

Kicking the can down the road

The Senate has put forth a bill to avert the crisis for now, by the overwhelming majority of 81-18. And the House has accepted the Senate bill, by a substantial, nearly ²/₃ margin, 285-144. President Obama has signed the bill. Nothing much has happened, except that the Government reopens, and the debt limit is raised. Under the terms of the bill, we will go through the same situation in a few months.

What this shows is that it's a great advantage to control the media. The Democrats could portray the Republicans as unwilling to compromise, despite it being that they were the ones unwilling to compromise. And the American public, according to polls, believed the Democrats' charges.

Where do we go from here? I don't know. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul were among the 18 Senators who refused to support the Senate bill. This means all three will have solid Tea Party credentials. But while, on this issue, the Tea Party had a lot of logic on its side — Obamacare is killing the economy and needs somehow to be derailed — the American public (which agrees that Obamascare is a bad thing, in poll after poll) does not want the Government shut down, or the debt limit increase threatened, or anything that might prevent the inexorable march forward of Obamacare. It's probably the media's fault, as I said. The media can't sell the public something as awful as Obamacare, but it can paint the GOP's attempts to stop it as so bad that the party is hurt. And that's really what the media want.

And I have no clue how to combat this.

Highlights of last week's convention

This past week, the Republican Party has met in Tampa, Florida, for their quadrennial convention. A lot of speeches were made, and I want to thank Tom Bowler for putting a lot of the more important ones on his blog, "Libertarian Leanings". (He did not put Chris Christie's speech on his blog, but I was able to find that one on Fox News' site.) I'm not going to quote all the speeches in ful, but I want to say what I think the most important points were.

Chris Christie has been criticized for making his speech more about himself than about Mitt Romney. But these criticisms have mostly come from Democrats who, I suppose, do not understand Republican ideas and ideals. Gov. Christie spoke of what he accomplished in the Governorship, not to brag about himself, but to show that Republican ideas can be implemented if the case can be made clear to the people, and the most important part of his speech was not where he spoke about his own background, nor when he spoke about Gov. Romney, but in between, where he distinguished between what the two parties' core beliefs are:

Our ideas are right for America and their ideas have failed America.

Let me be clear with the American people tonight. Here is what we believe as Republicans and what they believe as Democrats.

We believe in telling hardworking families the truth about our country's fiscal realities, telling them what they already know, the math of federal spending does not add up.

With $5 trillion in debt added over the last four years, we have no other option but to make the hard choices, cut federal spending and fundamentally reduce the size of this government.

Want to know what they believe? They believe that the American people [don't] want to hear the truth about the extent of our fiscal difficulties. They believe the American people need to be coddled by big government. They believe the American people are content to live the lie with them. They are wrong.

We believe in telling our seniors the truth about our overburdened entitlements. We know seniors not only want these programs to survive, but they just as badly want them secured for their grandchildren.

Our seniors are not children.

Here's what they believe. They believe seniors will always put themselves ahead of their grandchildren. And here's what they do. They prey on their vulnerabilities and scare them with misinformation for the single cynical purpose of winning the next election. Here is their plan. Whistling happy tune while driving us off a fiscal cliff as long as they are behind the wheel of power when we fall.

Now, we believe that the majority of teachers in America know our system must be reformed, to put students first so that America can compete, that teachers don't teach to become rich or famous. They teach because they love children.

We believe — we believe we should honor and reward the good ones, while doing what's best for our nation's future, demanding accountability, demanding higher standards, and demanding the best teacher in every classroom in America.

Get ready. Here is what they believe.

They believe the educational savages will only put themselves ahead of children, that self-interest will always trump common sense, they believe in pitting unions against teachers, educators against parents, lobbyists against children. They believe in teachers' unions. We believe in teachers.

We believe — we believe that, if we tell the people the truth, that they will act bigger than the pettiness we see in Washington, D.C. We believe it is possible to forge bipartisan compromise, and stand up for our conservative principles.

As readers of this blog know, I'm a big fan of Chris Christie. And his speech made me feel that as long as people like him are in the Republican Party, I am still happy to be in there too.

I'm also a fan of Condoleezza Rice. So I was interested in seeing her words. She is, of course, an expert on foreign policy. So it was no surprise that one of her main points was that:

Our friends and allies must be able to trust us. From Israel to Poland to the Philippines to Colombia and across the world — they must know that we are reliable and consistent and determined. And our adversaries must have no reason to doubt our resolve — because peace really does come through strength. Our military capability and technological advantage will be safe in Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s hands.

But in an election that mostly turns on economic matters and the sad Obama record in that department, her words in this area were also inspiring:

… most importantly, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan will rebuild the foundation of American strength — our economy — stimulating private sector led growth and small business entrepreneurship. When the world looks at us today they see an American government that cannot live within its means. They see a government that continues to borrow money, mortgaging the future of generations to come. The world knows that when a nation loses control of its finances, it eventually loses control of its destiny. That is not the America that has inspired others to follow our lead.

I have been less convinced of Marco Rubio as a spokesman for our party. But I like his response to Obams's “you didn't build that” speech:

Mitt Romney knows America's prosperity didn't happen because our government simply spent more. It happened because our people used their own money to open a business. And when they succeed, they hire more people, who then invest or spend their money in the economy, helping others start a business and create jobs.

And he certainly summarized the nature of the 2012 election in his words:

Our problem with President Obama isn't that he's a bad person. By all accounts, he too is a good husband, and a good father — and thanks to lots of practice, a pretty good golfer.

Our problem is he's a bad president.

And as someone whose parents escaped to this country from communist Cuba, his most telling point was his criticism of Obama's ideas on government as

…Ideas that people come to America to get away from. Ideas that threaten to make America more like the rest of the world, instead of helping the world become more like America.

The convention, of course, tried to show that the Republican Party is not just white males, packing the speaker's list with African Americans like Rice, Artur Davis (who went from seconding Obama's nomination four years ago to being a Republican convention speaker last week), and Mia Love (of whom I admit I'd never heard till last week), an African-American Congresswoman who is proud to identify as a Republican, and Hispanics like Rubio and Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico, who proclaimed:

I fear some of our leaders today have lost the courage to stand up. What we have now are politicians. They won't offer real plans, and only stand up when they want to blame someone else.

Which describes Obama to a T. All he can do is blame George W. Bush for everything wrong with our economy, even after 3½ years.

I have not discussed the two candidates' speeches. This will be put to another post.

Romney's VP choices

In yesterday's Washington Examiner was a short story from the Associated Press that stated:

Mitt Romney's vice presidential search has entered a new phase: auditions.

As his campaign evaluates potential running mates, Republicans with a possible shot at the No. 2 spot on the presidential ticket are starting to engage in unofficial public tryouts for the traditional vice presidential role of attack dog.

Democratic President Barack Obama is “the most ill-prepared person to assume the presidency in my lifetime,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie declared in a speech in Kentucky this week. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio told South Carolina Republicans that there hasn't been such a “divisive figure in modern American history” as Obama.

Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, speaking Tuesday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library — it's a favorite venue for Republicans seeking more attention — said Obama “wants to take us further in the wrong direction.” In an Alabama appearance this month, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal called Obama “the most incompetent president since Jimmy Carter.”

Not that any of them — or any of the others who may have landed a spot on Romney's list — are talking about becoming vice president. Nor are any of them acknowledging that they're trying out for the role or saying the Romney campaign has asked them to do so. Top Romney aides are sworn to secrecy, as are potential running mates and their staffs — an example of the Romney campaign's closely controlled, no-leaks culture.

Well, it's quite possible that they are auditioning for Romney's VP choice. But it could be that they are simply giving opinions they hold. (Jindal's comment that Obama was “the most incompetent president since Jimmy Carter” is about what I said a few days ago, and I certainly don't expect Mitt Romney to tap me for VP!) But any one of those four could be a good choice, if he is thinking of one of these for VP. So I'm certainly glad to hear their comments.

Libertarianism and isolationism

Some people who care deeply about freedom, and would be, on that account, termed libertarians, also seem to be fervent isolationists. I don't see the connection — in fact, as I said in an earlier post, I cannot see why freedom is good, but exporting it is bad. But we all know how much of an isolationist Ron Paul is, and he's one of the most extreme libertarians around. Today I saw another example.

The Washington Examiner, as I have said in the past, is a conservative paper, not only in its own editorial policies, but in its choice of columnists. Almost all its columnists would be described as more conservative than I am. But two of the columnists, John Stossel and Gene Healy, are better described as libertarians than conservatives. (Healy is a vice-president at the Cato Institute, certainly a libertarian credential.) And today, Healy's column showed that, like Paul, he qualifies as an isolationist.

Today's Gene Healy column was entitled: “Is Rubio running for veep, or Globocop?” And in it he takes Sen. Marco Rubio to task for advocating what Healy terms a “neoconservative” foreign policy. (Read Healy's column: here.)

Perhaps I too am a “neoconservative.” (I'm not quite sure what that means!) But to me, helping people attain freedom, not just in the USA but all over the world, is a good thing. And there's where I part company with Gene Healy.

Romney-Ryan?

With Mitt Romney at over 600 delegates, nobody but Rick Santorum seriously doubts that he will be the GOP nominee for President this year. And so, people have been discussing a vice-presidential candidate. Since Congressman Paul Ryan strongly backed Romney and campaigned with him in Wisconsin (probably helping him win that state's primary earlier this week), his name has come up a lot in the discussions recently.

There are certainly good reasons for this. Unlike Marco Rubio, Ryan has not been pointedly taking himself out of the running. And unlike Sarah Palin on 2008, Ryan has a lot of experience: seven terms in the Congress, recently becoming essentially the GOP leader on budget issues in the House of Representatives. And Ryan and Romney certainly seem to get along well with each other.

One thing that might by some be taken as a negative is President Obama's repeated wailing about the “Romney-Ryan budget.” But, in a sense, that is not a big problem. President Obama will blame Ryan's budget ideas for every economy-related evil that liberals regularly attribute to conservatives, whether he is Romney's VP candidate or not! So making him the official VP candidate does nothing to focus Obama's criticisms any more sharply on him than otherwise.

Actually, the only real negative point I would have against picking Ryan is that Ryan's strength is the economic area, and so is Romney's — you usually want the VP to be strong in areas where the President is weak (Dick Cheney on foreign/defense policy, where George W. Bush had little experience, for example).

Well, Mitt Romney has a long time to think it over. It will be interesting to see who is his pick.

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.

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...

Mixed emotions

The results of Tuesday's elections leave me with mixed emotions. On the one hand, Nancy Pelosi gets to hand her gavel over to John Boehner, which is absolutely great, and the Republicans gained a significant number of seats in the Senate (though not a majority, but nobody really expected that) and a bunch of Governorships as well. These are the positives. But it seems that none of the specific elections I really cared about went right, except perhaps in Alaska where the results are not too clear yet.

In the State I live in, Maryland, it seems that Martin O'Malley won by a rather big margin over Bob Ehrlich. Certainly this was not a big surprise, but Ehrlich seemed to have a real chance, and so this result was a major disappointment. In California, there was an even bigger disappointment: both Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina seemed to have good chances to win, but neither one could pull it off. And in my original home state of New York, only one of the third party candidates got the 50,000 votes needed to keep his party on the ballot, and that was the Green Party candidate, the one I liked least. (The Libertarian, Warren Redlich, came very close: nearly 45,000, but close is not enough to do it. And the other third party candidates got no more that 20,000-30,000 each.)

Florida is another state I was looking at. That one was not too bad — I was very pleased to see the Democrat, Kendrick Meek, finish third! And while I would have preferred Charlie Crist to the actual winner, Marco Rubio, I think Rubio would be a reasonably good choice from what I've seen.

The worst of the results this Tuesday was in Nevada. I really thought that Harry Reid could be defeated. But this was not to be. Apparently, by nominating Sharron Angle, just like Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, The Tea Partiers threw away a good chance to help throw the Democratic rascals out!