One of the undeniable truths about Christine O’Donnell’s 2010 Delaware Senate campaign is that many Republicans wanted her to lose. Months before most Americans ever heard of O’Donnell, leading members of the GOP Establishment had invested their influence and prestige in attempting to ensure that nine-term Rep. Mike Castle would be the Republican nominee. Much as they had in Florida — where the state party chairman and the National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, had arranged an early endorsement for Charlie Crist – the Establishment lined up early behind Castle.
From the very outset of her 2010 campaign, O’Donnell found herself fighting off savage attacks from Republicans, including false accusations included in an opposition-research dossier distributed to reporters. With the support of Tea Party activists, O’Donnell scored an upset victory over Castle in the primary, but by then her reputation was badly damaged by the unrelenting assaults from the GOP Establishment. And talk about the need for “party unity” – which had been often heard from Establishment leaders when they had thought their liberal friend Castle would win the primary – was forgotten the moment O’Donnell emerged as the GOP nominee. Continue reading Troublemaker: Karl Rove vs. O’Donnell →
One day during the 2008 campaign, as Barack Obama read the foreboding news of the mounting economic and military catastrophes that W. was bequeathing his successor, he dryly remarked to aides: “Maybe I should throw the game.”
Rules of Lefty Punditry:
History began with George W. Bush.
Pre-history was golden, but W. killed it, for spite.
BHO has Olympian powers, except where the Stygian evil of W drags BHO down.
Sarah Palin gave her big speech in Indianola while I was at lunch today with Da Tech Guy. However, I got a sort of live feed on the event via a series of text messages from Tea Party activist Tiffiny Ruegner.
“No doubt she’s campaigning,” Tiffiny texted, and at the end: “Finished. Didn’t announce. . . . You’ll get the story in New Hampshire.”
The part elided (“…”) involved the suggestion that perhaps Palin did not announce her presidential candidacy at Indianola because of her displeasure with the bungled organizing of the rally. So Tiffiny’s theory is that Palin will announce Monday at the Manchester rally, and I pass that along as an interesting theory to consider.
Although this audience of like-minded conservatives passionately urged her to run, Palin during her 40-minute speech did not say whether she will seek the Republican nomination for president.
“The reality is we are governed by a permanent political class,” Palin said to applause from a rain-soaked audience in Indianola, “until we change that.”
The crowd at the Tea Party for America’s “Restoring America” event ate it up. She was interrupted during her speech to chants of “Run, Sarah, Run.”
Sarah Palin still isn’t a candidate, but in an aggressive bid to lay down her marker in the 2012 Republican presidential race, she delivered a speech here Saturday that was as confrontational toward the Republican establishment as it was aimed at President Obama.
Despite her high-profile endorsement of Rick Perry during his 2010 gubernatorial primary fight, Palin used thinly veiled language to leave little doubt that she sees the Texas governor and national front-runner for the Republican nomination as part of the problem.
“Some GOP candidates, they also raise mammoth amounts of cash,” Palin said. “We need to ask them, too: What, if anything, do their donors expect from their investments? We need to know this because our country can’t afford more trillion-dollar thank-you notes to campaign backers.”
Again and again, Palin urged her audience to confront “the permanent political class,” “crony capitalism” and “the good ol’ boys,” whom she said she took on as governor of Alaska.
The idea that Palin may enter the 2012 field because of her dissatisfaction with Perry’s campaign is intriguing, but I’ll save that for another post. For now, let’s consider Ace’s idea that Palin’s just jerking everybody around:
[A]fter the encouragement of interest, and the cultivation of speculation about what that “major announcement” might be, it was a very standard-issue and not-particularly-important or novel stump speech. Some might find this sort of coyness and games-playing “brilliant” or the like. I don’t.
Some may claim she “played a trick on the media.” Yes, the media. And everyone else too. . . .
Who’s being pranked here? The media in attendance were all paid to be there. Their travel arrangements were comped. They’ll get back their vacation day. And it was either covering this or covering Jon Huntsman. What about everyone else?
You can go read the whole thing. Ace seems to be more or less on the Perry bandwagon at this point, so a bit of Palin-vs.-Perry drama may be shaping up . . . But as I say, that’s another post.
The “paid to be there” factor was part of the reason I didn’t go to Indianola. If I had thought she was going to announce, I might have made the trip. But I’d already spent 10 days in Iowa, whereas I hadn’t been to New Hampshire yet, so this trip seemed to me the better bargain for the tip-jar hitters. It’s cheaper, because I can crash on Da Tech Guy‘s sofa and ride with him, rather than paying for a hotel room and renting a car.
Florida, on the other hand . . . but let’s not get ahead of the story.
Pete’s got me linked up. He’ll be my host for the next few days, so you probably want to go hit his tip jar for having to put up with me. Tomorrow: New Hampshire.
It is fun to curse our leaders and throw stones at them, but we should realize that cursing politicians will not create answers where none exist. Sometimes, cursing politicians is a way of whistling in the dark; by grumbling about how stupid and inept they are, we reassure ourselves that answers really do exist and that if more competent people were in office our problems would all be solved.
I’m not sure that’s true. I do think our politicians are getting it wrong: too many on both sides of the Atlantic are trying to shore up the blue social model rather than thinking about how to move beyond it. But in fairness to them, what comes next is not so clear.
The economic impact of the internet has been to wreck the middle man, most recently, Borders.
By breaking the grip on communications enjoyed by the Ruling Class, the internet is exposing and claiming nanny states the world over.
Some are retreating into fascist religious expression, particularly the neighborhood from which I write.
In the West, the Ruling Class is so used to bribing the people of today with the wealth of tomorrow that they lack all courage to do what’s necessary. When a Perry states the obvoius, that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, it’s seen as some raging blasphemy. And it’s hardly a start.
Sorry, Paul Ryan: the Roadmap, while a noble effort to save Holy Progress, is mostly a fool’s errand. The Progressive Era is toast. What is called for is a top down scrub, and transition plan away from the centrally managed system, in favor of one that respects liberty and rewards initiative. Sure, the transition will have to respect the dupes who’ve been worshipping the Golden Calf of Progress the last century; folks under 50 (e.g. me) are going to have to step up and take a haircut. For all our Ruling Class has been pissing down our back and telling us it’s raining these years, the lying swine, they’ll find a surprising maturity in the American populace. You know, the common folk who ran the better part of a million people through the Mall last year and left it cleaner than they found it.
We’re going to have a painful few years, while we get through the trough on the economic sine curve. TANSTAAFL, though we’ve behaved as though Heinlein was wrong for quite a while. The crucial thing at this point is to locate and support the sober leadership necessary to get us off of the road to serfdom, and headed back toward our birthright of liberty.
Don’t know or care who that leader is. Cain? Perry? Bachmann? Palin? McCotter? Santorum? Who cares? As long as they are not a Ruling Class tool, it’s fine by me. Reducing the Presidency from a cheap personality cult and back to a simple, Constitutional executive is what matters. Leave the despair to the Ruling Class worms and their sycophants, say I.
UNION STATION, Washington, D.C.
My son-in-law dropped me off here about 1 a.m. My train leaves at 3:15 a.m. So I’ve got a few minutes to do a quick blog post before I board the train and head off to Worcester and thence to New Hampshire.
As former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin walked in the front door of The Machine Shed restaurant in Urbandale, Iowa, this evening, a reporter asked Palin what she thought about the current field of GOP presidential candidates.
“Happy with the field of candidates. I always think that there’s room for more, though, because spirited debate and more competition will allow an even better discourse and a more rigorous discourse that the public deserves,” Palin said.
So, yeah, she’s not ruling anything out. Just keepin’ everybody on their toes. You betcha.
This station is spooky in the wee hours. Dark and quiet. Here’s video:
The AmTrak ticket from Union Station in D.C. to Worcester, Mass., was $182. My son-in-law is coming to pick me up in a few minutes to take me to the station. Pete Da Tech Guy will pick me up Saturday afternoon in Worcester.
FreedomWorks, which had been participating in the Tea Party Express’s tour and had helped turn out activists at rallies during prior stops, decided it could no longer be affiliated with the tour, said Brendan Steinhauser, a lead organizer for FreedomWorks.
Instead, it began working with local New Hampshire tea party groups to organize a counter rally set for about the same time in the same park in Concord as Romney’s speech.
“We have to defend our brand against poseurs,” Steinhauser said.
What fun that should be, huh? And then Monday, there is a rally in Manchester, N.H., with Sarah Palin, fresh off the Saturday Tea Party Rally in Iowa where all the experts sure she’s not — repeat, not — going to announce her presidential candidacy. Will Palin do what the experts expect her to do Saturday? Well, first time for everything, I guess. But if she does announce in Iowa, we’ll be ready to cover her first campaign trip to New Hampshire. Speaking of women and controversy . . .
Mrs. Other McCain is kinda angry at me. You see, when I blogged Wednesday morning about my plans for a New Hampshire trip, I meant to tell her about. But then stuff kept happening on the blogosphere, and I got busy and forgot to mention it until this evening, after I’d already bought my train ticket.
Contributions to the “Help Make Mrs. Other McCain Happy” Fund would be deeply appreciated. She’s a wonderful wife, who has to put up with an awful lot. Now it’s time to pack up and get rolling — wish me luck!
There are two ways to get money: Honestly by hard work, or dishonestly through thievery and fraud. If you vote for politicians because they promise to give you money taken from taxpayers, you are practicing the politics of thievery.
Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?
Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.
Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.
