Category: Alaska

Some things make you want to gouge your eyes out:

Murkowski now has apparently insurmountable lead of 10,000+ votes

When I saw that at Hot Air Headlines, I knew that it was time to confront this ugly reality head-on.  That dreadful excuse for a human being has been re-elected, and we must ask ourselves, “Why?”

Let me remind you of a headline from Oct. 5:

Palin Backers Suspect Huckabee Loyalists on Joe Miller Staff Behind E-Mail Leak

Other observers will analyze this campaign in detail, but the essence of what seems to have happened is that somebody on Team Joe got the clever idea that what they needed to do was to “distance” their candidate from Sarah Palin.

This was a tragic miscalculation. In a two-way campaign against the Democrat Scott McAdams, perhaps, the Republican candidate might have wished to avoid being seen as a Palin proxy. But once Murkowski’s write-in campaign became a viable enterprise — a development that I certainly never expected — any attempt to “distance” Miller from Palin was clearly counter-productive. For Miller to offend the pro-Palin vote was to alienate the very voters who were essential to his election.

Whether there is any truth to the widespread suspicion that pro-Huckabee members of Team Joe were responsible for the Miller campaign’s blunders, the lesson in the end is the same: In politics, as folks say down home, it is always best to “dance with the one that brung ya.”

Is there any silver lining here, any cause for cheer? Not much, although some may take encouragement from the fact that the Democrat got just 23% of the vote. Still, we are left with the inescapable fact that some 40% of Alaskans cast write-in votes for an unprincipled pro-abortion pork-barrel Republican.

And John Cornyn, who congratulated her on her re-election, was unanimously re-elected chairman of the NRSC.

NOT ONE RED CENT!

UPDATE: “My precioussss.” The power-crazed bitch blames Jim DeMint for the NRSC’s blundering away the Senate majority — a majority which, as William Jacobson has pointed out, would have been utterly useless to accomplish anything meaningful in terms of advancing a conservative agenda.

Here you have the mile-deep taproot of my disagreement with those who claim that, by backing Miller, Ken Buck, Christine O’Donnell, et al., conservatives lost the oportunity for a GOP majority in the Senate. That this is supposed to be the sophisticated intellectual belief sticks in my craw for several reasons:

• A Republican majority in the Senate was always a longshot. Simply as an exercise in political math, it was hard to calculate a way for Republicans to get to 51 seats.
• Carly Fiorina. Hello? The establishmentarians got their dream candidate in California and what was the result? 43 percent. It is therefore difficult to credit the GOP Establishment with a monopoly on political wisdom.
• A 51-seat Senate majority isn’t too useful from a policy perspective. The supermajority requirement of 60 votes for cloture prevents the Senate Majority Leader from exercising the kind of all-or-nothing power enjoyed by the Speaker of the House. This was why the election of Scott Brown as the “41st vote” was so important, a fact that some of our sophisticated intellectual friends seem to have forgotten.

Under current circumstances, with Obama in the White House, a narrow Senate majority for Republicans is even more problematic than it was during the Bush years. This is another thing that seems to have slipped down the Memory Hole for our sophisticated friends. Throughout the Bush presidency, the administration always began its policy calculations with the question: How can we get 60 votes in the Senate for it?

The result was a tendency toward pre-emptive triangulation, where any legislation  Republicans wanted to get passed had to be loaded up with enough goodies for Democrats to get past the cloture hurdle. Much mischief in the way of GOP “brand damage” can be blamed on that tendency, because whatever the Bush administration did was labeled “Republican” and reflexively defended by conservatives.

(Hey, am I the only one who remembers when conservatives opposed federalization of airport security, until political geniuses in the Bush administration decided that Republicans must support federalization of airport security? Think about that, the next time you’re getting groped by TSA.)

A slender Republican Senate would be automatically compromised as a policy vehicle by the presence of GOP liberals like Snowe and Collins, and the addition of Mike Castle to the RINO Caucus would only aggravate that problem. You would have an ostensibly “Republican” Senate pre-ordained to sell out in a heartbeat to whatever Obama wanted, with GOP spokesmen compelled to go on TV and praise this awful legislation (as such compromises inevitably are) as a great idea.

Have conservatives learned nothing from their experiences when Bob Dole and Trent Lott were dealing with Clinton in the 1990s? My argument is not that there would have been no advantage to a 51-seat GOP majority, but rather that the disadvantages are obvious enough that it’s wrong for pundits to act so butt-hurt over the failure to achieve that majority.

Furthermore — and I’m going to come right out and make this accusation as plain as possible — a lot of the people bitching and moaning about Ken Buck, Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle are really aiming at Sarah Palin, because they desperately don’t want her to be the GOP presidential nominee in 2012.

There, I’ve said it. And please, my sophisticated friends, stop pretending that the rest of us are too stupid to see what you’ve been up to, and also stop pretending that we are unaware of the potential downside of a Palin 2012 campaign.

And since this little update will probably spark a new round of flame-wars, let me go ahead and take it thermonuclear: Do you really think that Sarah Palin is so stupid or such an egotistical prima donna that she is unaware of the downside potential of a 2012 presidential campaign?

When Sarah Palin says she wants what’s good for America, good for the Republican Party and good for the conservative cause, I take her seriously. I think she is capable of weighing the positive and negative factors of a 2012 campaign and making rational decisions. I think she’s probably going to run — I fully expect her to be at the first debate at the Reagan Library this spring — but I also think that, if the primary campaign develops to her disadvantage, she’d drop out of the race and support the winner.

Therefore, my sophisticated friends, your attempts to pre-emptively undermining Palin by blaming her by proxy for the loss of a GOP Senate majority signals that you are afraid you can’t muster enough primary votes to stop her in 2012.

But we’re too stupid to see that, I suppose.

All through the 2010 campaign, I tried to discourage readers from the distracting temptation of looking forward to the 2012 presidential campaign. And what I’d like to do at this point is to ask that readers try to avoid that distraction even now.

Forget about the presidential campaign, and let’s focus on getting good conservative challengers to the 22 Democrat Senate incumbents who will be defending their seats in 2012. We might also think about primary challengers for any weak-kneed Republican Senators who would be an obstacle to a conservative agenda should we get a GOP Majority Leader in the next election.

Finally, I remind you of what a GOP operative said to me after that treacherous bastard John Cornyn endorsed Charlie Crist:

“All they care about is getting their chairmanships back, and they don’t care how they get there.”

They didn’t get there, did they? And don’t expect me to shed any tears over their failure.

“This is the worst sort of betrayal I’ve ever seen,” one source close to Sarah Palin said in describing the leak of an e-mail that Todd Palin sent to Joe Miller, the Alaska GOP Senate candidate.

The source noted that some of Miller’s campaign staff have connections to 2008 Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, and suggested that these staffers have been advising Miller to distance himself from Palin.

Based on information in a post by notorious Alaska anti-Palin blogger Jeanne Devon, one pro-Palin source in Alaska deduced that the leak could only have come from Miller’s staff — unless Miller himself leaked the e-mail.

UPDATE: Cubachi, Sissy Willis and other Palin supporters on Twitter had initially asked me to confirm that the e-mail is genuine — and obviously it is.

What was truly shocking, however, was to discover that some employee of the Miller campaign apparently thought it was a clever political strategy to leak this private communication to a liberal Democrat like Devon. Even if a Miller campaign staffer wished to embarrass Todd and Sarah Palin, why give an exclusive like this to a blogger who has made her career attacking Republicans?

But Miller’s staff has been “f–ing up everything” in recent weeks, said my source, pointing to a number of tactical and strategic blunders by the Republican campaign for which the Huckabee-connected staffers are believed to be responsible.

UPDATE II: In my haste to get this post online, I may have pulled the trigger too quickly — a hazard of the light-speed news cycle in the Internet age. 

A few words have been changed, so that no one draws the wrong conclusion.

There are a couple of stories behind this story, and my sources (I have more than one) are telling me to cool my jets until this unfortunate situation can be officially clarified. But the problem of divided loyalties within the Miller campaign staff — that some Huckabee supporters are “f–ing everything up” — is dead-on accurate. For several months, I’ve been concerned that the mid-term campaign might suffer because some Republicans are looking ahead to 2012.

Miller’s supporters in Alaska are learning the hard way why I say you can’t spell Huckabee without an “F.”

UPDATE III: Give credit to Dave Weigel (who is certainly no Palin fan) for pointing out the obvious:

It’s not news that Todd Palin is — what’s a nice word? — zealous in his defense of his wife.

Indeed, and as I suggested in my American Spectator article last month, the Palins have been burned so often by “disgruntled” sources and scoop-crazed journalists that I feel kind of guilty even having to do reporting about them.

UPDATE IV: Talk about earth-shattering news! I get linked by Allapundit about as often as Aaron Sorkin says nice things about Republicans. So let’s see what He Who Seldom Linketh has to say:

The big media takeaway, obviously, is Todd Palin allegedly demanding an endorsement from Joe Miller, which supposedly points to a Palin presidential run. The way the e-mail reads to me, though, is more as an accusation of ingratitude, not an expectation of official support. . . . Miller forwarded the alleged e-mail from Todd to a number of people (their addresses are blacked out), but it looks like they’re members of his staff — and presumably one of them is either the leaker or forwarded the e-mail on to someone who leaked it to the anti-Palin blogger. The question is . . . why? Even if there are Huckabee loyalists involved in the campaign who want to trip Palin up, why create a headache for Miller by doing this now? Wait until after election day.

OK, one point at a time:

• Is this e-mail a signal that Palin is running in 2012? — The obvious answer is, “Maybe.” The GOP has for decades picked its presidential nominees according to the It’s His Turn principle and — along with Huckabee and Mitt Romney — Governor Palin can make that claim in 2012. Earlier this week, I had a conversation with my 11-year-old son Jefferson, explaining how it is that people organize presidential campaigns. And I explained that at sometime around Thanksgiving (i.e., after the election) there will be meetings at which the prospects are evaluated: “OK, if we’re running, what do we need to do now? When do we form the exploratory committee?” et cetera.  Anyone with two eyes and a brain can see that Team Sarah is keeping that possibility in mind. The victories of Palin’s endorsees in GOP primaries certainly hasn’t diminished that prospect. But getting those endorsees — including Miller, Sharron Angle, Rand Paul and Christine O’Donnell — to the winner’s circle on Nov. 2 is clearly crucial.
• Did Todd Palin “demand” an endorsement from Miller? — Joe Miller was a Sarah Palin supporter before anybody outside Alaska ever heard of Sarah Palin. But, just as obviously, Todd Palin is foremost among Sarah Palin supporters, unless you expect Chuck and Sally Heath to throw Sarah under the bus. So the question expressed by the Todd-to-Joe e-mail could be best summarized in three words: “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?”
• Are there Huckabee loyalists on the Miller campaign staff? — It won’t take a clever person 10 minutes of Googling to figure this out. There are also Huckabee supporters who are volunteers and contributors to the Miller campaign.
• Did such a person leak that e-mail to “trip Palin up”? — That’s the big question, and you can imagine why some people would suspect that. There may be an innocent explanation, or perhaps somebody on the Miller staff is about to become a fresh unemployment statistic.

Now, I have never been a Mike Huckabee fan. He seems like a nice guy and is a very skilled communicator. But the two big strikes against him in my book are (a) he is too much of an open-borders softie, and (b) at a couple of points during the 2008 campaign, Huck made some atrocious class-warfare statements.

I have said that the best thing for Huckabee to do would be to spend two weeks in an intensive cram course on Austrian economics at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, disabusing himself of any inclination toward “social justice” concepts. The U.S. government is not the First Baptist Church soup kitchen, OK?

Given my profound doubts toward the Huck-for-President bandwagon, I harbor doubts about the political judgment of anyone who ever got aboard that bandwagon. So if ex-Huckabee people are “f–ing everything up” on the Miller campaign staff, I’m willing to attribute that to incompetence, rather than anti-Palin malice.

At any rate, thanks to Allahpundit for linking me. Did I mention that Wednesday is my birthday? Did y’all hit the tip yet?

UPDATE V: Ian Lazaran at Conservatives for Palin correctly observes that the e-mail destroys two favorite liberal anti-Palin memes, including this one:

That the Palins are not close. If they aren’t close, why is Todd sending out e-mails asking a candidate to endorse his wife?

Surely the Grassy Knoll theorists of Anti-Palindom will find some answer to that question which fits their Sarah-Is-Satan worldview. Some liberal bloggers are already trying to spin my reporting as if it somehow substantiates that worldview. It’s either (a) “If a pro-Palin journalist reports something, it must be false,” or (b) “If a journalist contradicts anti-Palin bloggers, he’s obviously evil.”

This is merely an extension of the problem I described in last month in “How to Write an Anti-Palin Hit Piece.” Once someone sets out in search of that “smoking gun” scandal — the silver bullet that will destroy Saran Palin — every new tidbit of information is evaluated from that perspective.