The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

PAULBOT-MANIA: Ron Paul Supporters Buy Victory in ‘Value Voters’ Straw Poll

Posted on | October 8, 2011 | 88 Comments

The question to be asked is not whether it is unfair for the Paul campaign to keep doing this, but why the rest of the GOP field can’t spend a few bucks to do it themselves. Dave Weigel at Slate reports:

He beat out seven other candidates and “undecided.” The full results, with 1,983 ballots cast:

Ron Paul – 36.9% (732)
Herman Cain – 22.5% (447)
Rick Santorum – 16.3% (323)
Rick Perry – 8.4% (167)
Michele Bachmann – 7.9% (157)
Mitt Romney – 4.4% (88)
Newt Gingrich – 2.7% (54)
Undecided – 0.7% (13)
Jon Huntsman – 0.1% (2)

In a post-vote press conference, FRC President Tony Perkins made sure to note that 600 people had bought tickets for Saturday only — a none-too-subtle hint that Paul’s supporters had over-represented themselves.
“Do the math,” said Perkins. “Ron Paul and his campaign are very well organized.”

What did 600 tickets cost the Paul campaign? And what would have been the publicity value if, for example, the Rick Perry campaign had paid for 1,000 of their supporters to attend the summit? Perry raised $17 million and he can’t afford to buy a straw poll? Your stupidity is not someone else’s fault. Beyond that, the story is:

A. Herman Cain continues his momentum; and
B. Santorum got twice as many votes as Bachmann.

This pretty much puts a fork into the Bachmann campaign. If she can’t beat Santorum in a straw poll at a national conference of social conservatives, Bachmann probably can’t beat Santorum in Iowa, either.

UPDATE: Jazz Shaw at Hot Air: “Ron Paul brings home the bouquet for best organizational skills at a conservative event .”

And by “organizational skills,” he means, the willingness to spend money on grassroots activism, i.e., offering free tickets for any Paul supporter who wanted to come vote for their guy.

UPDATE II: My buddy Joe Fein has shown how the Paulistas won — “stole” might be too strong a word — the California GOP straw poll.

Stipulate that the Paul campaign operates according to the “By Any Means Necessary” radical principle. Nevertheless, the point to which I wish to call the reader’s attention is this: The Paul campaign is smart to spend money on getting their supporters to events, and other campaigns are stupid in spending money to hire a bunch of staffers and consultants who don’t necessarily provide value-added to their efforts.

Suppose you are a college kid who might be willing to support a Republican presidential candidate. Now, suppose that you could actually get to meet that candidate, and get free travel to events where that candidate appears. OK, furthermore suppose that the campaign had a sort of Amway incentive deal where, if you were campus activist who could sign up a dozen of your college buddies to accept the same free-travel deal, you’d get a small commission for every warm body you delivered on the Republican candidate’s behalf.

Shouldn’t Republicans be able to understand how the Ron Paul campaign is using market incentives to build their movement?

Why, then, are most GOP presidential campaigns top-heavy affairs that spend ridiculous sums on “media consultants,” etc., rather than to use their money the way Ron Paul’s campaign uses their money?

Like I said: Your stupidity is not someone else’s fault.

Category: Election 2012, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul

#OccupyIowahawk

Posted on | October 8, 2011 | 28 Comments

During a long phone conversation with Dan Collins today, we talked about “Occupy Wall Street.” I mentioned that the only thing I’d written on the topic was a post praising the restraint of the NYPD in not opening fire on those useless motherf–king protesters.

They’re the kind of commie scum who give commie scum a bad name and my trademark “hypothetical atrocity” rhetoric was intended to signify nothing other than my bottomless well of contempt for such people. Therefore if I were the commander of the NYPD riot squad, my orders would be to open fire and shoot to kill. We’d make Kent State look like a Sunday school picnic. The brutality would be something more on the scale of Guernica, complete with Predator drone airstrikes.

However, a career in law-enforcement never appealed to me, so Andrew Sullivan is free to denounce the hypothetical massacre committed under the imaginary command of “what-if” NYPD Capt. Stacy McCain. Sully’s hysterical outrage over my jocular celebrations of satirical bloodshed would only serve to make us wonder if he ever had any sense of irony, or whether it was drummed out of him by his professors at Harvard.

So while the anarchist maggots infesting Lower Manhattan continue to fascinate bloggers like Weasel Zippers and Jammie Wearing Fool, I’ve been too busy trying to cover the 2012 GOP presidential race to pay much attention to the uproar, hubbub and brouhaha.

That’s when Dan told me about a real social injustice: After years of providing quality satire for a global readership of millions, Dave Burge’s total earnings from his world-famous Iowahawk blog have not yet reached $500. The 1% of wealthy corporate bloggers have hoarded all the PayPal contributions, while the 99% of proletarian satirists like Comrade Dave have been deprived of their fair share of bloggola.

When Dan told me this, I was astonished. “You’re kidding me — $500? Tucker Carlson spends more than that for lunch most weekdays. Hell, even Ace of Spades wouldn’t bother to do more than a snarky headline and a “meh” for less than $100 a day. Surely it can’t be true that Iowahawk’s total earnings for his ‘Beer Fund’ haven’t yet reached $500.”

But Dan insisted that, indeed, the oppressive forces of Corporate Blogging had conspired to deprive Burge of the Means of Satirical Production, and that high officials of the Obama administration were “all in on it,” conspiring with Halliburton, Goldman Sachs and Tabitha Hale to prevent readers from making “Beer Fund” donations.

So I went and gave Comrade Dave $20 for the revolutionary cause, and wondered what more I could do to call attention to the plight of downtrodden online humorists. And then it hit me: #OccupyIowahawk!

All we needed was a Twitter hashtag, some protest signs and maybe a gigantic papier-mâché puppet or two, and the world could no longer ignore the oppression of Dave Burge, the Rachel Corrie of the Blogsophere.

Click the image and contribute to the “Beer Fund” Iowahawk Legal Defense Fund. An Army of Photoshoppers™ will emerge in virtual civil disobedience to the System. We await adulatory coverage from Dylan Ratigan, Ed Schultz, Lawrence O’Donnell and the New York Times.

Category: #Occupy, Iowahawk

BLAME FLORIDA!

Posted on | October 8, 2011 | 24 Comments

It was reported yesterday (and I noted in passing) that Iowa Republicans have “tentatively” scheduled their presidential caucuses for Jan. 3, but what will Iowa do if New Hampshire goes thermonuclear?

New Hampshire Secretary of State William Gardner said today he may schedule the first-in-the nation primary as early as Dec. 6, marking the first time ever that New Hampshire voters would pick a presidential candidate in December.
“Any Tuesday in December would be a possibility, but that’s one of them,” Gardner said today, when asked about a Dec. 6 primary. “It’s not something I would do lightly. It would be done regrettably, but if it has to be done, we’re going to comply with our tradition and our state law.”
Gardner said that, from 1916 until 1972, New Hampshire held its primary in March. But he said it has been forced to move up the date in recent years, as other states have pushed up their primary dates to attract more attention from the candidates.
This year, the race for an early vote has been especially fierce. Florida has scheduled its primary for Jan. 31, South Carolina has chosen Jan. 21, and Nevada will hold its caucus on Jan. 14. Iowa has yet to schedule a date for its first-in-the-nation caucus.
Drew Ivers, a member of the GOP Central Committee in Iowa, said the panel met last night to discuss a date for that state’s caucuses, and is leaning toward Jan. 3, the same date it chose in 2008. He said if New Hampshire decides to hold its primary in December, it would certainly spark some consideration of a new date for Iowa. But he said Iowa Republicans last night expressed “a significant reluctance,” to move the caucuses into December, because they believe the state can have more of an impact by holding its caucus in the election year. . . .

There’s more at the link, but you see what kind of heinous madness has resulted from the villainous actions of Florida GOP leaders.

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Election 2012, Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire

Conventional Wisdom on Herman Cain

Posted on | October 8, 2011 | 25 Comments

Having covered the Herman Cain campaign since December 2010, I’ve had occasion to remark more than once that people underestimate him at their peril. The experts have said all along that there’s no way Herman can win. It’s possible they may keep right on saying that — chanting it like a mantra — until the votes are counted on Nov. 6, 2012, at which point the same TV talking heads who derogated Cain’s chances from the start will then be called on to provide their insightful analysis of how he did what they said with absolute certainty he could never do.

And then these pundits who were consistently wrong will be invited to speak at a major national conference. But I digress . . .

While I’ll later be posting photos, videos and more about our Friday covering Herman Cain and the Values Voter Summit (my 12-year-old son Jefferson accompanied me as my assistant), let me first share another writer’s article. She reports some key facts, but Molly Ball of The Atlantic draws an odd conclusion from those facts:

They admired Rick Santorum. They ate up Rick Perry. But it was Herman Cain who rocked the house at the Values Voter Summit.
Many other speakers got standing ovations, but only Cain provoked church-like shouts of “Yeah!” from the crowd. When Newt Gingrich came up to speak after Cain, a good portion of the crowd got up and wandered out of the giant ballroom at the Omni Shoreham Hotel here in Washington.
Think about that: the former speaker of the House of Representatives — himself once considered a rock star of the Republican base — thoroughly upstaged by a political novice mostly known as “the pizza guy.”
After the speeches, when Gingrich and Cain both held book signing sessions, the line for Cain stretched down a long hallway, then through the hotel’s large lobby to the door. The line for Gingrich was, shall we say, substantially shorter.
Based largely on a similarly rousing speech, Cain won the Florida P5 straw poll late last month, dealing Perry a stunning blow. Cain’s surge in recent polling — he’s rocketed into second behind Mitt Romney in some polls — is getting him billed as the next flavor of the month for a GOP base that’s having doubts about Perry.
The Cain surge has also provoked a round of media hand-wringing over whether, and how much, to “take him seriously” as a contender, or whether it was still safe to treat him primarily as a man trying to sell books and perhaps get himself a television show. . . .

You can read the whole thing, which then goes on to explain that Cain cannot possibly threaten Romney’s front-runner status because . . .

Well, she never says exactly why this can’t happen, but she’s a professional political journalist, whereas the hundreds of people who cheered Cain’s speech are merely Republican voters — and who cares what they think, right?

Category: Election 2012, Herman Cain

Memo From the National Affairs Desk to the Herman Cain Presidential Campaign

Posted on | October 8, 2011 | 23 Comments

To: Mark J. Block, J.D. Gordon
Re: U.S. Policy, South Pacific Region

The island republic of Vanuatu will, I think, play a key role in the Cain administration’s foreign policy vis-a-vis the South Pacific.

While the Republican Party Establishment has long ignored Vanuatu, my years of study of their culture, history, geography and economy have convinced me that this archipelago should be a vital linchpin of U.S. relations in the entire Hebrides/Solomon Islands region. A history of GOP indifference to Vanuatu has, however, enabled Democrats to portray Republicans as anti-Vanuatu, even though the policies of the Obama administration have had a devastating impact on the Vanuatuan economy. The natives have historically been pro-American in their sympathies, but the recent downturn of the island’s tourism industry — a direct consequence of policies enacted under Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner — have damaged U.S.-Vanuatu relations. An important diplomatic thrust of the Cain administration’s policy must therefore be to repair our standing with this traditional ally.

Of course, as you know, I am strictly a neutral objective journalist, and my assignment to cover the 2012 campaign would prevent me serving in any sort of official advisory capacity for Mr. Cain. However, if the topic should come up in a debate (and my sources say Romney’s oppo-research team may be preparing to hit Mr. Cain as “soft on the Vanuatu issue”), don’t hesitate to ask me to send you my extensive collection of materials compiled during my decades-long research into this topic, vital to U.S. national security interests. In fact, I think if you will ask around among well-informed conservatives, they will agree that no one excels my expertise on this subject.

Given the many crises that currently affect the United States, I’m sure that our policy toward Vanuatu may not be a “front burner” issue at this early stage of the campaign. Perhaps when I come out to cover the debate in Las Vegas Oct. 18, we can get together and discuss this in more depth. As I say, journalistic ethics would forbid me providing policy advice to a campaign that I’m covering — if I gave you my complete Vanuatu files, the Bachmann and Santorum campaigns may even accuse me of unfair bias — but after a quarter-century in journalism, I’m ready to explore new career horizons. Diplomacy strikes me as the sort of field where my unique combination of skills and knowledge might be useful, and when this campaign is over, I may be willing to give it a try.

Therefore, if Mr. Cain should require my services as U.S.ambassador to Vanuatu, I wish to inform you in advance that I would be honored to accept such an appointment, and will strive to do all in my power to restore America’s reputation in the archipelago that I call “The Key to the South Pacific.” While it would be quite a sacrifice for my family to re-locate to the embassy in Vanuatu, this is a sacrifice I’m willing to make, considering the crucial nature of the assignment.

Please keep this memo on file, because I know how things can get lost in the shuffle during the post-election “transition” process and wouldn’t want you to forget my offer between now and Jan. 20, 2013. Looking forward to seeing you in Vegas.

Sincerely,
Robert Stacy McCain

P.S.: I hope you don’t mind my publishing this on my blog, in the interests of “transparency,” as they say.

UPDATE: Understanding the seriousness of the issues involved, I shared this message with Bert the Samoan Lawyer, who replied:

Clearly the consulate on Vanuatu will need a Legal Liaison. I am brushing up now on all things consular.
Let’s see: Four gallons of grapefruit juice; four quarts of vodka, a fifth of Blanton’s small-batch bourbon; a fifth of Lagavulin single-malt, Islay whiskey; a basket of limes, twelve tabs of mescaline . . .
How difficult will it be to ship the convertible? Does Vanuatu have roads?
No matter. It will “stimulate” the Vanuatu economy to engage in some infrastructure construction . . .

Indeed, my arrival in Vanuatu in January 2013 — accompanied, of course, by the newly-appointed Legal Liaison — will have an immediate and positive effect on the economy. To begin with, I’ll have to hire some native girls to perform the important work of bringing me mai-tais whilst I conduct important business in my beachside cabana . . .

Category: Election 2012, Fear. Loathing., Herman Cain, Vanuatu

#OccupyWallStreet As A Preview Of GOP 2012 Triumph

Posted on | October 7, 2011 | 20 Comments

by Smitty

Allahpundit:

The most ridiculous (and, if you’re sympathetic to them, tragic) thing about OWS is that they’re trying to mobilize the left against “the system” at the very moment the left is mobilizing to re-elect the guy who’s in charge of the system.

The system is simply over-centralized. DC’s answer to the #OWS crowd, along with the rest of Americans, should be that “the Man has left the beltway, take up your complaints with your state capital”. We cannot keep flogging this dead, bankrupt horse of Progressivism. We cannot even bring it back as a zombie horse and have it drag the cart some more. This is why transitioning off of federal entitlements, without throwing existing recipients under the bus, seems a more sensible approach.

Category: #Occupy, Progressivism

Heritage.Org On The Continuing Fight Against ObamaCare

Posted on | October 7, 2011 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

Via Heritage:

On Wednesday, Ken Hoagland, chairman of Restore America’s Voice Foundation, delivered the petitions of 1.6 million Americans demanding the repeal of Obamacare to legislators on Capitol Hill.

Pay attention to Rep. Steve King at 2:15, where he says, to paraphrase: We have very little experience undoing bad law. Once it’s on the books, it’s treated like the voice of the people. That’s why we have to be very determined to repeal this thing.

Lots of other good soundbites from other conservative Senators.

Category: Video

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Republican Ted Cruz, the ‘Marco Rubio of Texas’

Posted on | October 7, 2011 | 27 Comments

WASHINGTON, D.C.
When former Texas solicitor general spoke today at the FRC Values Voter Summit, as Cameron Joseph of The Hill says, the crowd went wild:

Former Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz might not be a household name, but the candidate for Senate was cheered heartily at the conservative Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C.
Working without notes and pacing the stage like a preacher, Cruz talked about defending “American values” and said liberals have “a reason to be worried” about the next election.
He got big laughs when he said that President Obama blaming the Tea Party for America’s credit downgrade was “a little bit like Charlie Sheen blaming [his problems] on the Betty Ford clinic.”
Cruz went on say that “our conservative values [are] under assault,” that Christians were being forced to participate in abortions and that the “gay rights agenda” is hurting Americans.

Cruz is truly a dynamic speaker, and his campaign for Senate has invoked inevitable comparisons to Tea Party hero Marco Rubio. Cruz was kind enough to grant me an exclusive interview this afternoon:

Once again, as I’m kind of in a hurry here, I’ll ask readers to provide a transcription in the comments, or at your own blog. Ted Cruz is obviously a guy we need to support.

UPDATE: Thanks to John Hitchcock for the transcript:

McCain: We’re here at the Values Voters Summit in Washington, DC, with Ted Cruz, former Solicitor-General of Texas. How are you today, Mr Cruz?
Cruz: Doing fantastic, Robert.
McCain: And I understand you’re running for Senate.
Cruz: I am, running for US Senate in Texas, and we have seen some incredible momentum and excitement. We’ve really seen Conservatives across the state of Texas and nationally uniting behind our campaign.
McCain: And as some people have compared you to Marco Rubio, as the “Marco Rubio of Texas,” you are yourself also Cuban.
Cruz: Well, that’s right. And that’s an incredibly kind comparison. Marco and I share a very similar personal story, which is that my dad is from Cuba, he was born there, he grew up there, and he was imprisoned and tortured in Cuba as a teenager when he was 17. And he fled Cuba, he came to the United States. When he was 18, he showed up in Austin. Had no money, didn’t speak English, had 100 dollars sewn into his underwear, and he went and got a job as a dishwasher making 50 cents an hour. And he worked 7 days a week and he paid his way through school at the University of Texas. And I’ll tell you, Robert, when I was a kid my dad used to say to me all the time, “when we faced depression in Cuba, I had a place to flee to. If we lose our freedom here, where do we go?” And there’s no question that better explains why it is I’m running for Senate than that question right there.
McCain: And so your website is?
Cruz: It’s tedcruz.org. Tedcruz.org and we’re also on FaceBook. We’ve got over 64,000 supporters on FaceBook nationwide. What we are doing is building a Conservative TEA Party Army all across Texas and all across the country. And we have seen tremendous support. Just this week, National Review magazine made the very generous decision to put our campaign on the cover of the magazine. And I’ll tell you, Robert, the last US Senate candidate who they put on the cover was Marco Rubio almost exactly two years ago. And it worked out pretty well the last time. I hope we see the same result here.
McCain: Alright, well good luck to you, Ted Cruz. That’s tedcruz.org.
Cruz: That’s it.
McCain: Alright, thank you.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

UPDATE II: The Lonely Conservative endorses Ted Cruz.

UPDATE III: The commenters provide an abundance of information, including a George Will column about Cruz.

Texas blogger Lawrence Person has been covering the GOP primary campaign between Cruz and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst.


Category: Election 2012, Senate, Texas
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