Month: August 2008

Sarah Palin

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Sarah Palin

I am so happy about this.

She is everything McCain is not:

* young
* female
* pro-life (vocally, unlike McCain, who is actually sound on his voting)
* pro-gun (vocally, she recently bagged a moose!)
* pro-oil drilling in ANWR
* has executive experience (not much, but more than Obama and Biden)
* against taxes, government spending, and the culture of boondoggles in Alaska

Also, critically important, she is probably the only person who can reconcile both the traditionalist conservatives and the libertarian conservatives, where both groups do not like McCain. Palin may be able to get them on board.

McCain is behind. He will probably lose. Ignore the polls. Look at Intrade. Look at the British oddsmakers. It is 2/1 for Obama and has been all along. The polls are noise around the signal. If McCain plays it safe, he loses for sure. He has to make high-risk, high-return plays. He has to throw Hail Mary passes. He needs put the board in play. This decision shows he understands that and is willing to act accordingly. You can’t play it safe when you are losing.

Still, I am shocked by this. I wanted it to be Palin. I saw no way he could win if he did not pick Palin. Two white guys in suits against Obama were going to lose, period. But I thought he would still do something “safer”, which would have doomed him. McCain is much bolder and much smarter than I gave him credit for.

In fact, as I think about it, this is the first moment when I have not been absolutely certain McCain would lose.

McCain is also showing, as he has generally, that he is very aggressive and confident, almost cocky. His congratulation message to Obama was classic. It showed class and it showed fearlessness, and a certain condescension to Obama. It reminds me of David Hackett Fischer’s depiction of the Backcountry selection process for leaders: Tanistry. The Border Scots selected a Thane based on age, strength and cunning, not mere seniority. McCain is a backcountryman by ancestry. They are wily and they are fighters. McCain already seems to be inside Obama’s OODA loop. Making this pick the day after the Donk convention, to steal the buzz, is tactically perfect.

Apparently Palin talks like a hick. She calls herself a “momma” unironically, instead of a mom or a mother. This will cause her to be mocked and jeered at in states the GOP is already going to lose. But it cannot hurt with blue collar voters in WV, OH, PA and MI, which are states Obama could lose.

Key moment: The Palin v. Biden debate. She has zero foreign policy experience. She will have a lot of homework to do.

According to Wikipedia “In 1984, Palin was second-place in the Miss Alaska beauty pageant”. I can believe it. The whole schtick of pretty-woman-with-dorky-glasses-and-hair-in-a-bun works for me. I think most adult heterosexual males would agree.

Finally, McCain is doing something very important for the GOP. If he loses, as he still probably will, and if Palin makes a good impression during the election, which she may, then we will be well-positioned to run a woman governor at the top of the ticket in 2112 against President Obama.

Obama’s “Brain”

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A brief sojurn into grubby electoral politics:

Recall from years ago, the enormous amount of press received by GOP strategist Karl Rove as George W. Bush’s political “Brain” ? A similar role with Barack Obama is played by Illinois Democratic political consultant David Axelrod, except that Axelrod keeps a far lower profile than Rove did and Axelrod has inifinitely better relationships with the working press, notably with the nominally Republican Chicago Tribune where Axelrod was formerly a political reporter and columnist. Axelrod is also tightly connected to Chicago’s all-powerful Democratic Party boss, Mayor Richard M. Daley, another longtime Axelrod client; and to Exelon/Com. Ed. , the politically powerful Illinois utility that contracts with Axelrod’s public relations firm and whose employees have been among the largest financial donors in Illinois to the Obama campaign.

What kind of campaign can we expect from Axelrod in the general election? Overtly positive themes and public posturing complemented by covertly delievered and mercilessly negative “stiletto” attacks against key people around John McCain that are not directly traceable to Axelrod. The model for this strategy is the previous Obama senatorial campaign in Illinois, where Obama’s two most formidible, centimillionaire, rivals, Democrat Blair Hull and Republican Jack Ryan were personally destroyed in the primaries when salacious details from their sealed divorce records were mysteriously leaked to the media, which then pressured for their full release, notably in the pages of the Chicago Tribune. Thus, ultimately permitting Obama to run against an out-of-state, clown candidate, religious conservative firebrand Alan Keyes, in the general election.

Negative political advertising is reliably effective, something known since the days of Murray Chotiner running Richard Nixon’s California races, but the information age imposes “blowback” costs when it is used too openly by a candidate. Axelrod’s long courtship of the media will permit similar “fingerprint free” attacks against the GOP to work unless McCain’s campaign is smart enough to start doing social network analysis of key media people crossreferenced with Obama Campaign functionaries and Axelrod associates.

It’s also noteworthy of how little escapes Axelrod’s attention. The conservative intellectual and writer, Dr. Stanley Kurtz, has been digging into the UIC archives on Senator Obama’s extensive political relationship with Dr. William Ayers, the 60’s radical and unrepentant ex-Weatherman terrorist, now a professor of Education at UIC where he is a leading advocate of politicizing teacher certification programs along Leftist lines (Ayers is the son of the late, prominent Chicago business leader, Thomas Ayers, former chairman/CEO of Commonwealth Edison and board member at he Chicago Tribune). Kurtz was invited to be a guest last night on Dr. Milt Rosenberg’s highbrow Extension720 WGN-AM radio show and discuss his research and Rosenberg’s switchboard and email system was instantly flooded and essentially shut down by an orchestrated wave of Obama supporters. While something of a local legend, Rosenberg’s radio show is, in the national media scheme of things, a fairly obscure program. Sort of a conservative NPR, except a lot smarter and writ small.

I would expect the ante be upped against Obama critics to include nuisance suits and worse if the fall campaign tightens.

UPDATE:

It appears that the Obama-Ayers-Annenberg story, which I expect will soon feature the infamous pic of Ayers trampling a U.S. flag in an alley, is making it on to the MSM radar. Michael Barone does a superb job as political anthropologist here, explaining the ” Chicago Way” to Americans in more normal communities:

Obama Needs to Explain His Ties to William Ayers

….Ayers was one of the original grantees of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school reform organization in the 1990s, and was cochairman of the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, one the two operational arms of the CAC. Obama, then not yet a state senator, became chairman of the CAC in 1995. Later in that year, the first organizing meeting for Obama’s state Senate campaign was held in Ayers’s apartment. Ayers later wrote a memoir, and an article about him appeared in the New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” Ayers is quoted as saying. “I feel we didn’t do enough.”

Ayers was a terrorist in the late 1960s and 1970s whose radical group set bombs at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol.

You might wonder what Obama was doing working with a character like this. And you might wonder how an unrepentant terrorist got a huge grant and cooperation from the Chicago public school system. You might wonder-if you don’t know Chicago. For this is a city with a civic culture in which politicians, in the words of a story often told by former congressman, federal judge, and Clinton White House counsel Abner Mikva, “don’t want nobody nobody sent.” That’s what Mikva remembers being told when he went to a Democratic ward headquarters to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, and it rings true. And it’s a civic culture in which there’s nobody better to send you than your parents.

Read the rest here.

Fantasy Energy

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Megan McArdle [h/t Instapundit] writes:

There’s a lot of optimism on both the center-left and the right that all we really need to do to tackle the problem of global warming/peak oil is throw a hell of a lot of money at the problem, and presto!…Yes, we found petroleum to replace whale oil.  This does not therefore mean, as night follows day, that we will find something to replace petroleum.  We will find something to replace petroleum if there is something that can replace petroleum.  There might not be.

Well, actually, there is always a new source of energy to replace any old energy source. It just might not be the energy source we fantasize about. 

Read more

Quote of the Day (Sort Of)

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Peggy Noonan in the WSJ:

…At Republican conventions they express sympathy for this woman, as they do for those who are entrepreneurial, who start businesses and create jobs and build things. Republicans have, that is, sympathy for taxpayers. But they don’t dwell all that much, or show much expressed sympathy for, the sick mother with the uninsured kids, and the soldier with the shot nerves.

Noonan misses the point. Republicans have as much sympathy for people who are sick, poor or troubled as anyone does. Where Republicans and Democrats differ is in their opinions about how best to help such people. Democrats tend to believe in direct government action as a remedy. Republicans tend to believe that government is often part of the problem, and that better remedies are available through private charity and by pursuing government policies that encourage personal responsibility and economic development.

Noonan is correct, however, that Democrats, particularly national politicians, tend to lack sympathy for entrepreneurs, particularly small-business people who in many areas are victimized by high tax rates and excessive regulation. Government action to reduce such burdens would boost productivity, and therefore wealth, jobs and tax receipts. But Democrats as a group tend to be indifferent or hostile to business people other than those in regulated industries who make large political contributions.