What a crock!

Norman Ornstein wrote an article, dated July 24, on the National Journal site entitled “The Unprecedented — and Contemptible — Attempts to Sabotage Obamacare” The main burden of the article is in the following excerpt:

When a law is enacted, representatives who opposed it have some choices (which are not mutually exclusive). They can try to repeal it, which is perfectly acceptable—unless it becomes an effort at grandstanding so overdone that it detracts from other basic responsibilities of governing. They can try to amend it to make it work better—not just perfectly acceptable but desirable, if the goal is to improve a cumbersome law to work better for the betterment of the society and its people. They can strive to make sure that the law does the most for Americans it is intended to serve, including their own constituents, while doing the least damage to the society and the economy. Or they can step aside and leave the burden of implementation to those who supported the law and got it enacted in the first place.

But to do everything possible to undercut and destroy its implementation—which in this case means finding ways to deny coverage to many who lack any health insurance; to keep millions who might be able to get better and cheaper coverage in the dark about their new options; to create disruption for the health providers who are trying to implement the law, including insurers, hospitals, and physicians; to threaten the even greater disruption via a government shutdown or breach of the debt limit in order to blackmail the president into abandoning the law; and to hope to benefit politically from all the resulting turmoil—is simply unacceptable, even contemptible. One might expect this kind of behavior from a few grenade-throwing firebrands. That the effort is spearheaded by the Republican leaders of the House and Senate—even if Speaker John Boehner is motivated by fear of his caucus, and McConnell and Cornyn by fear of Kentucky and Texas Republican activists—takes one's breath away.

What he seems to ignore is the fact that this law — enacted after the people of such a blue state as Massachusetts chose Scott Brown to the Senate primarily to prevent Obamacare from becoming law, by using a parliamentary maneuver to bypass the Senate's rules — is, in the mind of the Republicans who are trying to derail it, a terrible law that will ruin the economy (and, in fact, has already hurt it seriously). Why should anyone do otherwise than to sabotage it, given a President and Senate which will resist repeal? Suppose the shoe were on the other foot, Dr. Ornstein: there were a law on the books that you felt was seriously going to hurt the economy, and there was no way to patch it to eliminate its flaws. Would you simply acquiesce? These Republicans were elected for a reason, and that reason was that the voters trusted them to do right by the country. And, in their opinion — and that of the majority of the country, according to polls — the bill hurts the country, and it should be repealed, not strengthened.

If President Obama, or the Democrats in the Senate, had been willing to allow the repeal of Obamacare, and the construction of a new act, the Republicans would be remiss if they did not go along. But this is not the case, and sabotaging this act is the only course possible.

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.

More on "Likable" President Obama

I have long wondered why people considered Barack Obama as “more likable” than Mitt Romney. Obama's past includes the nasty business with Alice Palmer, as well as about every sort of nastiness one can imagine a Chicago machine politician to be capable of. Romney, by contrast, is a generous man who would close down his business to help an employee search for his daughter. So why anyone would consider Obama as the more likable of the two puzzled me. But this likability differential seems to be going away. Earlier today I read a post, dated Friday, by Matthew Continetti on a site called The Washington Free Beacon, entitled “The Jerk Store Called — Column: They’re running out of Obama-Biden.” It begins:

Remember when President Barack Obama was likable? Once upon a time the public viewed the incumbent more favorably than his challenger by large margins. These days Obama’s favorable and unfavorable ratings are similar to Mitt Romney’s. The televised debates have unveiled the current administration as alternately listless, manic, angry, soporific, rude, bullying, aloof, and thin-skinned. Americans who have just begun to tune into the election are seeing the president unmediated. They no longer are looking at him through the scrim of fawning press, majestic settings, and roaring crowds. And they are discovering that Obama is not so likable at all. He is actually something of a jerk.

Those who read coverage of the Obama administration closely will have known this for a long time: The president is cold, abstract, prickly, and insular. His brand of cerebral partisanship is better suited for liberal blogging than for leading the free world. He doesn’t enjoy interacting with strangers or even with associates outside his immediate clique. He has few close friends. He relies on about half a dozen senior advisers. His impromptu speech is given to cutting, sarcastic remarks.

Put him in front of an adoring and obsequious audience and he will be charming and suave. But the real Obama is revealed the second you remove the klieg lights. This isn’t a guy who will spend his post-presidency more or less running the Democratic Party, a la President Bill Clinton. Obama will spend his retirement as a solitary member of the irritable left, receiving honorary degrees, appearing on MSNBC, and scribbling for Salon.

After this overview, Continetti gets down to some specifics, writing:

The president’s unsociability is one of those obvious facts that are conveniently overlooked. Earlier this week Neera Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress, caused a mini-controversy when New York magazine quoted her saying, “Obama doesn’t call anyone, and he’s not close to almost anyone. It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people.” Tanden, who has worked for Obama, later “clarified” her remarks. What she meant to say, she tweeted, was that Obama “is a private person.” Note, however, that one can be a private person and still not “like people.” Tanden did not really take back her words. Nor should she. Her initial comments were factual and honest.

In some of his quotes, the source is only described, not named:

A “Democrat deeply familiar” with the Clinton-Obama relationship said pretty much the same thing to Ryan Lizza a few months ago: “Obama doesn’t really like very many people.” A Chicago Democratic donor told Jane Mayer this summer, “He’s not the kind of guy I would go out and have a beer with.” “One United States diplomat” told Helene Cooper of the New York Times in September that Obama is “not good with personal relationships; that’s not what interests him.”

And speaking of the New York Times,

That paper’s story on Valerie Jarrett, the president’s closest aide, describes Obama as “introverted” and his social circle as “small.” Michael Lewis’s profile of Obama shows a loner who broods over his decisions, spends time reading and writing and playing basketball with a tightly knit group, and says his biggest difficulty as president is “faking emotion.” His media puppets admit that the president is an emotionless “Spock.”

As a result, Continetti continues:

This combination of arrogance and detachment has been a political problem. Obama has paid a price whenever his unlikable personality has emerged in unscripted moments. There was his promise to meet with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea in the first year of his presidency. There was the time when he told Hillary Clinton that she was “likable enough.” There was his stubborn insistence to raise taxes on capital gains and dividends even though it would raise less revenue. There was his explanation that the white working class didn’t like him because “they cling to their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

There was his remark that the Cambridge police acted “stupidly” when they arrested a Harvard professor. There was his attack on Scott Brown for driving a pickup truck; his snide retort to John McCain that “the election’s over”; and his jibe that “shovel ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected” (which provoked laughter from his “jobs council”). This year we’ve heard Obama say “the private sector is doing fine,” that he’s “always struck by people who think, it must be because I was just so smart” that they’ve been successful, and that the attacks on our embassies across the Great Middle East were “bumps in the road” to Arab democracy. When Obama says what’s on his mind, his political team runs for the hills.

But it's only recently that Obama and Romney have had to get on a stage together in debate. And these debates seem to have finally called the people's attention to Obama's nasty streak, and even turned over some of his supporters:

The debates have made the president’s dilemma worse. Obama has not masked his prideful contempt for Romney. He “told friends that he respected Mr. Romney’s intellect,” the Times reported, “but had come to view his rival as a less formidable adversary as he learned more about him from reading research books and watching his campaign.” He went into the first debate in Denver thinking he would end the race on October 3.

But a huge audience watched as Romney dissected the last four years and Obama responded with a mix of condescension and apathy. The president seemed always to be smirking and looking down at his notes. He barely could mount a defense of his record. He returned again and again to his vision of a fair America. But this was not enough even for his most slavish supporters. Andrew Sullivan called him “effete.” Michael Tomasky asked, “Does Obama even want to win the election?”

Continetti continues, noting that not only Obama but Vice-President Biden is displaying that nasty streak:

The first debate inaugurated a shift in the race toward Romney that hasn’t abated. And the left drew exactly the wrong lesson from it. The left believed Obama had failed because he was insufficiently rude, and the Obama campaign seems to have agreed with them. But that meant Obama was trapped. He had to be more combative, but he also had to retain his likability. Doing both was not an option. Obama chose combat, in keeping with his long-run campaign strategy of maximizing turnout among Democratic Party client groups.

So we got a Joe Biden who spoke under his breath, interrupted Paul Ryan at every turn, raised his voice, gesticulated grandly, cackled during discussions of the Iranian nuclear program, and grinned so wildly that he looked like he was channeling Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of the Joker. We got an Obama who was more engaged but also came across as angry and heated and ready to challenge Romney to a duel. We got a Democratic ticket that, per Chris Matthews’s suggestion, looks like it is auditioning to replace the Cycle on MSNBC.

And Continetti concludes, as a result the election will turn on this loss of likability by the President:

Obama’s anti-Romney spirit may make for a more disagreeable and somewhat more interesting debate. Television ratings benefit. But how does it solve the weak economic recovery? How does it reassure voters looking for solutions on jobs, health care, the deficit, and energy? How does it improve the president’s image, or restore his poll numbers?

The cliché is that the more likable candidate usually wins the election. Morris Fiorina, one of my favorite political scientists, says that isn’t actually the case. Maybe. What we know for sure is what Washington has known all along: Obama doesn’t like people.

And increasingly, people don’t like him.

None of these characterizations of President Obama surprise me; it's just that it's taking so long for people to realize that Obama is what he clearly showed he was many years ago.

Yeah, blame the Republicans for everything!

There is a blog supported by MSNBC called “The Maddow Blog,”, and, as one might expect of anything named for Rachel Maddow, it spouts a hard-left propaganda line. On Friday, a post appeared on this blog by Steve Benen, which has the audacity to blame the Republicans in the House of Representatives for the poor employment figures that were released that morning.

You see, a year ago (specifically, a year ago yesterday) President Obama proposed a piece of legislation he called the American Jobs Act, supposed to create 2 million jobs. And the Republicans in the House turned it down.

So much is pathologically wrong with Mr. Benen's analysis. First of all, it took him until 2011 to put forth a jobs proposal. In January 2009, he took office. From the beginning of 2009 till the beginning of 2011, he had a Congress solidly controlled by Democrats. If he had put his “American Jobs Act” before that Congress, there was no way the Republicans could have prevented its passage. But of course, in that time he was otherwise occupied. He had to push “Obamacare” through. For this he needed every single Democrat in the Senate, and when Massachusetts voters told the world, by electing Scott Brown to the Senate, that this “Obamacare” monstrosity was not what they wanted — Massachusetts, the most Democratic state in the country! — they had to use parliamentary trickery to get it through. No time for jobs then.

Secondly, most of the time, a President with a Congress that has at least one house controlled by the opposite party will find a way to compromise and propose legislation that at least some members of both parties can accept. When the voters elected a Republican House in 2010, if Obama were like most past Presidents faced with that sort of opposition, he should have done that. But Barack Obama refuses to consider any ideas that the Republicans — or even the less radical among the Democrats! — could have signed on to. So of course, as he pushed “Obamacare” through the Congress, getting not a single Republican vote in the Senate and only one in the House, he tried to propose a “jobs” bill with no Republicans allowed any input. Could the Republicans be legitimately expected to merely roll over and play dead?

Of course, Mr. Benen claims that “Obama sought to shift the national conversation away from austerity and towards job creation, and presented a sensible plan, filled with ideas that have traditionally [emphasis mine] enjoyed bipartisan support.” But obviously, he never asked Speaker Boehner whether those ideas enjoyed bipartisan support in 2011. (Of course, this was the same President Obama who, in 2010, when he needed to call Speaker Boehner to congratulate him after the election, didn't even have his number and needed to ask someone else to dig it up! So much for inter-party consultation!) And even if some of those ideas enjoyed bipartisan support, others were probably poisonous.

When Mitt Romney was Governor of Massachusetts, he faced a legislature that had both houses controlled by the Democrats — by 85%-15% margins — so he didn't even have a veto threat! Yet he was able to get legislation through that legislature. Barack Obama has no idea what it takes to work with a Congress that he does not totally control. All he can do is lay blame — on his predecessor, on the members of the opposite party whose constituents elected them to express their views, not his, and on anyone else he can. He refuses to accept responsibility for the flawed performance of this country's economy — or anything else.

More about Elizabeth Warren's ancestry

This news, recently posted by Michael Patrick Leahy, about Elizabeth Warren, Democratic candidate to return Scott Brown's Senate seat to Democratic hands: Not only isn't she of American Indian origin, but one of her ancestors was involved in rounding up Indians and forcing them to move to Oklahoma:

For over a quarter of a century, Elizabeth Warren has described herself as a Native American. When recently asked to provide evidence of her ancestry, she pointed to an unsubstantiated claim on an 1894 Oklahoma Territory marriage license application by her great-great grand uncle William J. Crawford that his mother, O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford, Ms. Warren's great-great-great grandmother, was a Cherokee.

After researching her story, it is obvious that her "family lore" is just fiction.

As I pointed out in my article here on Sunday, no evidence supports this claim. O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford had no Cherokee heritage, was listed as "white" in the Census of 1860, and was most likely half Swedish and half English, Scottish, or German, or some combination thereof. (Note, the actual 1894 marriage license makes no claim of Cherokee ancestry.)

But the most stunning discovery about the life of O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford is that her husband, Ms. Warren's great-great-great grandfather, was apparently a member of the Tennessee Militia who rounded up Cherokees from their family homes in the Southeastern United States and herded them into government-built stockades in what was then called Ross’s Landing (now Chattanooga), Tennessee—the point of origin for the horrific Trail of Tears, which began in January, 1837.

This new information about Ms. Warren’s true heritage came as a direct result of a lead provided to me by William Jacobson over at Legal Insurrection, who in turn had received the information from one of his readers. Jacobson, who has questioned Warren's explanation for her law faculty listing, calls this discovery "the ultimate and cruelest irony" of the Warren Cherokee saga.

Jonathan Crawford, O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford’s husband and apparently Ms. Warren's great-great-great grandfather, served in the East Tennessee Mounted Infantry Volunteer Militia commanded by Brigadier General R. G. Dunlap from late 1835 to late 1836. While under Dunlap’s command he was a member of Major William Lauderdale’s Battalion, and Captain Richard E. Waterhouse’s Company.

These were the troops responsible for removing Cherokee families from homes they had lived in for generations in the three states that the Cherokee Nations had considered their homelands for centuries: Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

While these involuntary home removals were not characterized by widespread violence, the newly displaced Cherokee mothers, fathers, and children found an oppressive and sometimes brutal welcome when they finally arrived at the hastily constructed containment areas. An estimated 4,000 Cherokees were warehoused in Ross’s Landing stockades for months awaiting supplies and additional armed guards the Federal Government believed necessary to relocate them on foot to Oklahoma.

Jonathan Crawford most likely did not join the regular Army troops who "escorted" these Cherokees along the Trail of Tears. He did, however, serve once more with Major William Lauderdale's re-formed Batallion of Tennessee Mounted Infantry Volunteer Militia. This group fought the Seminole Indians in Florida during the Second Seminole War. Crawford arrived in Florida in November, 1837, and served there for six months until his unit was disbanded in Baton Rouge, Louisiana the following May. (Note: It was not uncommon in those days for militia formed to serve for a limited period of time under specific commanders would reform later under the same commanders.)

Jonathan Crawford's service as a Private in Captain Richard E. Waterhouse's Company of Major William Lauderdale's Battalion of Mounted Infantry in Brigadier General R. G. Dunlap's East Tennessee Mounted Infantry Volunteers is confirmed by his appearance in the muster roll of the Brigade, taken around June of 1836. (Note that this transcription of the muster roll incorrectly lists the date as 1832.)

His service a year later (1837) in Major William Lauderdale's Tennessee Volunteer Mounted Infantry (Five companies of volunteers, one of which was led by Captain Richard E. Waterhouse) is confirmed by his widow O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford’s 1851 pension application before the Bledsoe County, Tennessee commissioners

Meanwhile, William J. Crawford (Elizabeth Warren's great-great grandfather who would, fifty-seven years later, falsely claim that his mother was Cherokee in that now-infamous 1894 Oklahoma Territory marriage license application) was born in Bledsoe County, Tennessee in 1837. This was just a few months after his father apparently helped remove thousands of Cherokees from their homes and a few months before his father went off to fight Seminole Indians in Florida.

His father, Jonathan Crawford, Elizabeth Warren's great-great-great grandfather, died in Jackson County, Tennessee in 1841. His mother, O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford, died sometime between 1860 and 1870 - most likely in Bledsoe County, Tennessee.

Neither O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford, Jonathan Crawford, nor any of their seven other children, apparently ever claimed that O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford had Cherokee heritage.


As recently as two weeks ago, Ms. Warren publicly claimed to have Native American ancestry. In Dorchester, Massachusetts on April 27 at the Bricklayers and Allied Craftsmen Apprentice Training Center she stated, “I am very proud of my Native American heritage.” Yet, decades after she first made this same claim, it now appears that it is without any foundation.

It is time for Ms. Warren to publicly acknowledge the truth of her ancestry. It is time for her to admit that she has no Native American heritage that she can prove; and it is time for her to acknowledge instead, that she is likely a direct descendant of a Tennessee Militiaman who apparently rounded up the ancestors of those who truly have Cherokee heritage, the first step in their forced removal from the Southeastern United States to Oklahoma over the long and tragic Trail of Tears.

Come clean, Ms. Warren!

The 1/32 Cherokee Elizabeth Warren

It is interesting that Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat trying to win back Edward Kennedy's old senate seat from Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts, apparently got her Harvard Law School professorship because she was part-American Indian. (The politically correct term is “Native American,” but I will not use that term: anyone born in this country, including myself, is a native American, and so that's a misuse of the English language.) As Michael Barone puts it:

When she was hired, Harvard Law had just denied tenure to a woman teacher and was being criticized for not having enough minorities and females on its faculty.

Of course, Harvard and Warren say her claim to minority status had nothing to do with her being hired. And if it did, no one is going to say so. Nothing to see here; just move on.

And it is funny, up until her hiring, Warren had listed herself in various directories as minority, but more recently she has not. well, it's true that she has some claim of American Indian ancestry:

a researcher at the New England Historic Genealogical Society found that in a transcript of an 1894 marriage application, Warren's great-great-great-grandmother listed herself as Cherokee… That makes Warren one-thirty-second Native American.

Of course, is that enough to make someone a “minority”? More to the point, should that tenuous a claim to minority status convey a preference in hiring? Apparently, Rutgers Newark Law School, where Elizabeth Warren got her law degree, is considered such a low-status school that Harvard Law would normally not hire a person with Warren's background as a faculty member. (I don't mean to put down Rutgers in general: I taught there, though not at the Newark campus, in the 1970s. I'm talking specifically about its law school.) Would a male applicant without racial minority status have been hired by Harvard Law if he had Warren's educational background? I suspect not. Barone's comments are justified:

…the Warren story illustrates the rottenness of our system of racial quotas and preferences. Although the people in charge of administering them deny this, just about everyone with eyes to see knows that you're more likely to be hired and promoted if you have checked one of the non-Asian minority boxes: black, Hispanic, Native American, Pacific Islander.

[…]

People who classify themselves as approved minorities get into schools and get jobs that they wouldn't if they classified themselves as white. Not surprisingly, some people, perhaps including Warren, game this system.

The original justification was that this would overcome the disadvantages that American blacks endured during decades of slavery and segregation. That made sense to many people at the time. Those disadvantages were real, and most Americans wanted to be fair.

But the extension of minority status to other groups and the perpetuation of racial preferences for nearly half a century since the abolition of legal segregation mean that there is increasingly little correlation between membership in the favored categories and genuine disadvantage.

A note worth pondering.

A good sign

The Republican Party supports a lot of things that I do as well, and that is one reason I remain a Republican, even though there are some things that Republicans tend to favor that appall me. For example, the fact that Michele Bachmann was, and Rick Santorum still is, considered a serious candidate for the Republican nomination, testifies that enough bigoted homophobes inhabit the Republican Party that the kind of appeal to that kind of hostility can work in the party. Closer to home, gay District of Columbia Councilman David Catania, originally elected as a Republican, found the party so uncomfortable a political home that he became an independent a few years ago. That this sort of thing exists in the Republican Party saddens me, as I feel some grief that the party I consider my political home can be charged with such an intolerant stance. And therefore, I was happy to read a posting in The Daily Beast (under David Frum's name, but by Ryan Prior) entitled “A Strong Republican for Congress… Who Just Happens to be Gay.” (The posting was made 3 days ago, but I just saw it today.)

It seems that Richard Tisei, an openly gay Massachusetts state senator, is running for the GOP nomination for Congress in a district where the incumbent Democrat, Rep. John Tierney, just might lose because of his wife's possible involvement in a gambling scandal. And though Tisei has a primary to get through in September, he has the support of the most important Republicans in Massachusetts, especially popular Senator Scott Brown. While there have been two openly gay Republicans that have served in the House of Representatives, Steve Gunderson and Jim Kolbe, they were originally closeted and were involuntarily outed. If Tisei wins the nomination in the September primary and goes on to win the election in November, both of which seem likely, he becomes the first openly gay Republican elected to Congress. And that may send a message to gay Americans that they don't have to choose between being gay and being Republicans. Which is a very good thing.

There is absolutely no reason why there is any incompatibility between supporting conservative economic ideas and being gay. But gay people have felt that the GOP is hostile to them, and have flocked to the Democratic Party for that reason. I think that the election of Richard Tisei would be a great thing, not just because it may be a Republican takeover of a Democratic seat, but because it would place in the Congress the kind of Republican that is sorely needed: someone who does not share the “social” agenda of the Bachmanns and Santorums, but still hews to Republican ideas on the things that matter. Let's hope he wins.

Of course, I wonder how Michele Bachmann will take it, sitting in the same caucus with him!

A referendum on Obama?

Tuesday, a special election was held in New York City to fill the seat vacated by Anthony Weiner, the discredited member of the House of Representatives. And guess what? In a district with ¾ of its registered voters enrolled as Democrats, an area that has not had a Republican Representative since the days when Calvin Coolidge was President, the winner was Bob Turner, a 70-year-old retiree. Turner has never been elected to public office; his opponent was a sitting member of the New York State Assembly (lower house of the legislature). Turner ran, and lost to Weiner last year.

This is as big news as Scott Brown winning Ted Kennedy's Senate seat when Kennedy died. It means one thing: Voters, even in a strongly Democratic district spreading through two of New York City's five boroughs (it is mostly in Queens, with a piece in Brooklyn), are so fed up with President Barack Obama that they have elected a Republican to fill their seat in the House. Given that on the same day, six Democratic state legislators also won special elections, this had to be nothing less than a referendum on Obama.

Hopefully, this is the beginning of the end of the Obama administration.

Where has moderation gone?

When I was growing up (I'm in my late 60s now) both of our two political parties had liberals, conservatives, and moderates. It was common for votes in Congress to have large numbers of both Republicans and Democrats on both sides of the question. But in recent years, this is becoming less and less the case. Why?

Some people cite the McGovern-Fraser reforms of the Democrats' selection of delegates to their national conventions, or the rise of Presidential primaries as the near-exclusive mode of picking delegates (as opposed to political bosses and elected officials, who used to pick a lot of the delegates). But this only affects the choice of Presidential candidates, not the hundreds of members of the two houses of Congress or the thousands of members of the fifty State legislatures. So it cannot be that.

One thing that has had an effect is the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Certainly the Southern political situation has greatly changed because of that. African-American Southerners, newly able to exercise their votes, joined the Democratic Party, pulling it leftward, while former conservative Democrats have moved into the Republican Party, jettisoning a hatred of that party that went back to the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln, because the Democratic Party's Kennedy and Johnson were instrumental in pushing through those civil rights laws. (Examples of this abound. Strom Thurmond, the most obvious example, started political life as a Democrat, leading a revolt in 1948, but his States Rights Party still ran as the "true" Democratic Party in those Southern states where it won. By the end of his political career, he was very definitely a Republican. But the clearest example of this influx of conservative Democrats to the Republican party is probably little known. When I was in graduate school, the governor of Virginia was a Democrat named Mills Godwin. Governors of Virginia cannot be re-elected, but they can, it seems, run again after an interval out of office, so I was surprised to find out, years later and long after I had moved far away from Virginia, that the governor of Virginia was again Mills Godwin, but that he was now a Republican.) This has pulled the Republican Party rightward.

But this only affects the South. Most of the liberal-to-moderate Republicans were in the Northeast (and the few that still exist, like Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Scott Brown of Massachusetts, still are). Nothing has happened to Northeastern politics like the civil rights revolution in the South. African-Americans could, and did, vote in the Northeast. They even elected officials, like Representative Adam Clayton Powell of New York. I cannot see what has changed.

Perhaps, the association of particular issues with liberalism and conservatism has. Prohibition used to be a liberal issue, if you look at the past (though liberals like Franklin Roosevelt were also responsible for its repeal). Certainly religious fundamentalism used to go with economic liberalism (if you don't believe that, think of William Jennings Bryan, the most outstanding example of both.) That does seem to have some connection with it, but it cannot account for it all — for one thing, this is a much more recent phenomenon than Bryan.

I wish I knew. I'd love to see a revival of "Rockefeller Republicanism." It was Nelson Rockefeller (and Dwight Eisenhower) that made me choose to be a Republican. By contrast, people like Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, and Michele Bachmann make me ashamed to be one. But the absence of moderates in the Democratic Party makes it even more unattractive to me. So I'm really unhappy this year.

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.

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.

Don't kill the elephant!

A Rasmussen poll shows that Scott Brown is hugely popular in Massachusetts. But Olympia Snowe might lose a Republican primary, although she would win as an Independent next year in Maine. Of course, Lisa Murkowski had that very scenario in Alaska last year. The nomination of Christine O'Donnell in Delaware and Sharron Angle in Nevada last year gave those two Senate seats to the Democrats; polls showed that in both cases, a moderate Republican could have won. It would seem that conservative ideological purists are willing to sacrifice the Republican Party rather than defeat Democrats. Somehow this needs to be stopped.

It is eminently obvious that the way for the Republicans to win elections is to run moderate candidates, not ideological purist extremists. So don't let them kill the elephant!

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."

The latest on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"

It is unfortunate that "social conservatives" still are such a big force in the Republican Party. In yesterday's vote to repeal the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" rule in the military, there were 31 votes against, all of them Republicans. A shame. But the good news is that eight Republicans were courageous enough to vote "yes," and they included not just the four who have been the GOP's sources of moderation (Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska), and the newly elected Mark Kirk of Illinois, who had been described as a moderate in some articles I've read, but three more. Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio has been considered as a moderate by some people, and his support was, therefore, the least surprising of the three unexpected ones. Sens. John Ensign of Nevada and Richard Burr of North Carolina are not usually considered moderates, however. So they are particularly to be commended. Now all that remains is a signature in the White House, and presumably Pres. Obama, who has claimed to be for repeal, will sign it.

Judging people on one issue?

Dennis Sanders is a blogger who usually posts things with whom I agree. But about a week ago he posted a piece in which he accused John McCain of becoming Jesse Helms. And I have to say I think this is unfair. The thing is that Dennis Sanders is gay, makes no secret about this, and, I think, has made the mistake of judging McCain on his stand on the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" repeal. But McCain is a military man. He was a high-ranking Naval officer, and bears the name of his father and grandfather, both of whom were even higher-ranking Naval officers, and I think he views this issue from the vantage point of Naval tradition. Perhaps, considering that McCain's predecessor as an Arizona Senator, Barry Goldwater, took a more enlightened view of gay rights, McCain's position is unfortunate, but I think that it is understandable, though it would be a good thing if he could change it. But to make McCain into another Helms is totally unfair.

There is probably nobody among the 535 individuals who serve in the United States Congress with whom I agree on every issue (or, for that matter, with whom I disagree on every issue!) but there are issues that matter more to me than DADT. It's like the group of GOP senators (Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Scott Brown, and Lisa Murkowski) who want DADT repealed, but have had problems with the specific bill Harry Reid is pushing through the Senate. They want the right to get amendments considered, and Reid is barring the way. They should not be considered "anti-gay." McCain may be hostile to gay rights, but there is enough he is right on that I'm not going to condemn him in total just because I don't like what he is doing here.

We need them all!

Let's face it. With only two parties that have any chance of getting a share of power in the U. S. Government, the Republicans need all of the people who want to fit under the "big tent." We need our Sarah Palins, as well as our Lisa Murkowskis. And I hope that somehow this personal vendetta can be buried in the cause of a greater need — the need for the United States to have sanity restored, by the Republicans' working together to undo some of the damage which President Barack Obama has done to this nation. To prevent funds from going to implementation of the damages caused by the health care legislation that was forced in even after Massachusetts voters chose Scott Brown (which should have been a signal to Congress that they were going too far, too fast!), to fight all Obama initiatives that are not in the Nation's best interest, and ultimately, to get the White House back in 2012.

I hope that Lisa Murkowski will choose to join the Republican caucus in January (I believe she has already indicated this intent). I hope that Mitch McConnell will welcome her, as the Democrats accepted Joe Lieberman after he made a similar (but easier, since he had a ballot line!) effort a few years ago. And I hope that somehow a way can be made to keep such diverse Senators as Jim DeMint, Murkowski, Rand Paul, and Scott Brown all happy. As the title says, we need them all in a single party!

Lisa Murkowski, The Republican Party’s Moderate Savior? (from "Death and Taxes" e-magazine)

Please read the article entitled "Lisa Murkowski, The Republican Party’s Moderate Savior?" which was posted in "Death and Taxes" magazine. Except that its title doesn't give enough credit to such other moderate voices in the U. S. Senate as Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Scott Brown, it comes close to my own point of view. So read it, and consider it as posted here.

More "ideological purism"?

It seems that Senator John McCain is facing a primary challenge from a former Congressman who has since become a conservative talk show host, J. D. Hayworth. One more case of "ideological purism." For Hayworth has been characterizing McCain as someone who campaigns as a conservative but legislates as a liberal. And of course, this implies that McCain isn't "conservative enough," whatever that means. Well, (to quote McCain in another context!) I have news for Hayworth and his ilk: McCain is, by general United States standards, a conservative. The American Conservative Union has given him ratings ranging from the 60s to the 80s, and while some people argue that makes him rather liberal compared with other Republicans, it is still on balance (compared with the US center) conservative.

The thing that bothers me is that the conservatives who want to get rid of people like McCain will, if they get their way, force the United States leftward. Because hard-right conservatives will drive the American voter into the Democratic fold. Even the conservatives' hero, Ronald Reagan, understood this. (See my earlier posting from June 25, 2009.) I had hoped that the recent success of our newest Senator, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, might teach them a lesson. Brown is a Senator because the Republicans, including the conservatives, were willing to back him, even though he was hardly a far-right conservative. If they had refused to back Brown, Massachusetts would have elected Martha Coakley, and Pres. Obama would have gotten his far-left program through the Senate.

John McCain deserves re-election. And if the Republicans reject him in favor of Hayworth, this risks giving the Democrats the seat, for Arizona, no matter how conservative a state they see it as, still can elect Democrats. (How about ex-Governor, now Obama's Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano?)

Let us honor Reagan by using Republicans' energy and money to fight Democrats, not defeat genuine conservative Republicans who may simply not be "conservative enough."

I was happy to hear people like the conservative broadcaster Mark Levin proudly endorsing Scott Brown for the Massachusetts Senate seat. But his endorsement of the Hayworth challenge to John McCain is a serious mistake.

What the GOP needs

It has come to my attention that when Scott Brown, the newly elected Senator from Massachusetts, was asked what kind of a Republican — conservative or liberal, for example — he was, he responded

I'm a Scott Brown Republican.

Well, I think that's what the GOP needs — not specifically Scott Brown Republicans, but Republicans who are themselves, not somebody else's idea of what a real Republican is.

We need Scott Brown Republicans, John McCain Republicans, and it's a shame we lost Arlen Specter to the other side because some ideological purists made it hard for him to remain in the GOP.

Don't get me wrong. We need the conservatives, too. But their own hero, Pres. Ronald Reagan, recognized that you can have an ideologically pure party, or you can have a majority party, but you can't have a party that is both.

That's why, for one thing, I'm unhapy that there are people who are challenging John McCain's re-election bid in Arizona. To them, McCain is insufficiently pure as a conservative. It's people like those challengers who will ensure that the Democrats control the U. S. government!

Now, let's come up with a new health care bill!

It looks as if Scott Brown's election has finally brought the juggernaut to a halt. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has admitted she can't get 218 votes to ram the Senate bill through the House, so any bill is going to need to get through both houses again, and Brown will join the other Republicans in a 59-41 vote, at least. And the message is finally getting to President Obama: He's not going to get a health care bill at all, unless they start from scratch and write a new bill that will get some Republican votes.

So let's proceed. The government (alias "public") option already had to go to get the vote of people like Sen. Joe Lieberman. Let's also scrub the mandate that requires people to buy health insurance or pay a fine. (If you have to make them buy health insurance, there must be something wrong with the pricing, the benefits, or both!) And recognize that the way to control costs is simply to get a handle on malpractice suits and the resulting defensive medicine -- we need meaningful tort reform!

That's a start, anyway; let's get going!