The Other McCain

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

GOP Fundraising Numbers
UPDATE: Top Cain Iowa Staff Quit UPDATE: Cain Raises $2.4 Million, Spokeswoman Expresses Confidence

Posted on | July 1, 2011 | 29 Comments

Tim Pawlenty is the first of the major GOP candidates to report his second-quarter fundraising numbers: $4.2 million, which isn’t bad — more than a million a month — although less than the $4.5 million Ron Paul’s campaign is reporting for the second quarter.

Pawlenty supporters (including co-blogger Smitty) can take heart that their guy (a) was doing OK money-wise at a time when he wasn’t doing so good in the polls, and (b) reportedly kept his “burn rate” low by having a lot of people working without pay.

I haven’t heard anything yet from Herman Cain’s campaign about their second-quarter numbers, although I have reason to suspect their total will be substantially lower than Pawlenty’s, probably less than $3 million for the quarter, and Cain’s final cash-on-hand number for the quarter will also likely be lower than Pawlenty’s.

All we know of Mitt Romney’s second-quarter numbers is that his total will be “less than $20 million,” according to the Washington Post.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune notes that Michele Bachmann is no slouch at fundraising, having collected a record $13 million for her 2010 congressional campaign, but there’s no hint of how much she’s raised for her presidential bid so far.

Newt Gingrich might have raised more than his Tiffany’s bill. Or the cost of his Mediterranean cruise. But considering that practically his entire campaign staff quit, Newt’s payroll costs are quite low now.

Keep in mind that we won’t have official FEC second-quarter reports for another two weeks. Also keep in mind that John McCain’s campaign was practically bankrupt by this point in 2007, but he somehow managed to win the nomination anyway, damn it.

UPDATE: Don’t know what this means, but it is reported by Politico that two top Iowa staffers for Herman Cain’s campaign have resigned. This comes on the heels of the resignation of two other Cain staffers, including the campaign’s New Hampshire coordinator. Expect to hear more about this.

UPDATE II: Just got off the phone with Cain spokeswoman Ellen Carmichael, who says the campaign has experienced usual “growing pains” since Cain’s upset victory in the May 5 South Carolina debate. The campaign staff is actually growing, she said, and new hires will be announced soon.

“I’m excited . . . I’m actually more confident than I’ve ever been,” said Carmichael, who has worked for the candidate since last fall.

While some last-minute checks are still being tallied, Carmichael said Cain’s second quarter total will be more than $2.4 million, with contributions increasing sharply since the South Carolina debate. Importantly, she said, the campaign has zero debt. All bills and all vendors have been paid. I expect to have a campaign press release shortly.

UPDATE III: And here’s the press release:

Cain Previews First Financial Filings
(Stockbridge, GA) — Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain today released an overview of his first campaign finance report, in advance of the reporting deadline of July 15.
While many candidates started with significant funding prior to the official launch of their campaigns, Cain’s operations started with $0 and have raised more than $2.46 million. The campaign boasts $0 in campaign debt, which Cain believes is a testament to his business principles.
“I am pleased to announce that our campaign has absolutely no debt,” Cain said. “I believe our country is in serious economic trouble, with politicians in Washington spending more than they take in. In my career as a business executive, I employed sound economic principles of fiscal responsibility that I will maintain throughout my campaign. I hope to set an example to those in Washington who should be doing the same.”
Friends of Herman Cain has received contributions from more than 27,000 individuals who have donated amounts ranging between $1 and the Federal Elections Commission maximum of $2,500. Donors hail from all 50 states.
“We are immensely appreciative of the outpouring of generosity from so many supporters across the U.S.,” Cain said. “I am humbled by the trust so many have put in me and assure them I will never forget where I come from, what I stand for and what matters to us as Americans.”
On the heels of increasing poll numbers and positive fundraising, Cain plans to announce additional staff, both “on the ground” and at campaign headquarters, in the coming weeks.

UPDATE IV: The Iowa Republican on the two departing Cain staffers there:

Goff and Hall both worked on Fred Thompson’s presidential campaign in 2008 and Iowa Governor Terry Branstad’s campaign in 2010. Goff stated that she resigned because the Cain campaign refused to make a serious effort in Iowa, the home of the First-in-the-Nation caucuses.

What does “refused to make a serious effort” mean? Until we get further explanation, I’m going to take that to mean “wouldn’t spend as much money as we wanted.”

The blunt fact is that political campaigns cost money and, as the Cain press release says, his campaign started from $0 and went to $2.4 million in a very short time. And whereas other campaigns haven’t reported how much debt they have outstanding — e.g., unpaid vendors — Cain proudly proclaimed that his campaign has no debts at all.

The downside to the pay-as-you-go method is that, perhaps, you can’t hire all the staff, contractors, consultants and vendors that your Iowa director considers necessary to a “serious effort.” Another downside is that you might not have enough staff to make sure that all the i’s get dotted and all the t’s get crossed. Which is a possible explanation for something I reported at The American Spectator:

Some Cain supporters have complained privately of phone calls not being returned and other examples of sub-par staff performance by the campaign.

And when I say “complained privately,” I mean bitched like Hell about what these sources felt was sloppy or amateurish work. After listening to several accounts of such episodes, I told one source that Cain needs to bring in somebody to start kicking butts, the way Ike brought in Patton after Kasserine Pass.

But I am merely a neutral objective journalist, not a “strategist” or a “consultant,” so what do I know, right?

Anyway, when I called Ellen Carmichael late Friday and got her pep-talk response, I said, “Hey, no need to blow sunshine up my skirt.” Yet she assured me that, despite the bad headlines about these resignations, things really are looking good for the Cain campaign, but they’re a fledgling operation and can expect some rough spots in the road.

Well, OK. Every campaign looks chaotic at times. Y’all might remember last fall, when we kept seeing all these national “generic ballot” polls showing the GOP heading to a possible landslide in the mid-terms, but I was worried sick. Why? Because I’d been up-close-and-personal with several congressional campaigns and knew that they weren’t exactly models of ruthless machine-like efficiency.

Good Lord, some of the crazy stuff that was going on in those districts. I honestly thought Ann Marie Buerkle was doomed in NY-25, and wasn’t really confident that Morgan Griffith could win VA-9. But they both won and the GOP did indeed score a national landslide, so it just goes to show that a bit of bad news or sloppy staff work doesn’t necessarily portend an impending defeat.

It’s only July. Still more than six months until the Iowa caucuses, and we have no idea what’s going to happen in the meantime. There is no reason to panic and run around screaming, “All is lost! We’re all hopelessly doomed!” The Cain campaign has hit a few bumps in the past couple of weeks, but any talk of an “implosion” is premature, or perhaps completely mistaken.

However, a Patton at Kasserine Pass moment may be nearing, and some overdue butt-kicking could begin any day now.


Category: Election 2012, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Republicans, Tim Pawlenty

Thanks to Whoever Bought the Universal Network 3D Blu-Ray Disc Player

Posted on | July 1, 2011 | 19 Comments

Somebody got a sweet deal — only $499! — on that piece of high-end home video equipment via one of the Amazon links here, which earned me a sweet $20 commission through the Amazon Associates program.

This is the program Democrats destroyed for Californians with their stupid Internet tax, but apparently the Democrats who run Maryland’s government aren’t quite as stupid as California Democrats, so I’m still eligible for Amazon commissions.

From time to time, Instapundit feels obliged to remind his readers how the Amazon Associates program works, and I guess it bears repeating: You click the links, you buy some stuff, and Amazon pays me 4% commission. It’s simple, and if you buy enough stuff in one order, the shipping’s free.

Most people think of Amazon as a book seller — and hey, you can get Ann Coulter’s new book Demonic for just $15.65 — but they sell all kinds of stuff. They’ve got food, like delicious Old Wisconsin Beef Summer Sausage, a pack of 3 for $27.60. They’ve also got power tools like the Black & Decker BD12PSK 12-Volt Smart Select Drill for $41.99. And they even sell clothes, like the SpicySpot Sexy Micro Mini Thong Back Halter Top Bikini, a real bargain at $19.99.

These are just random selections, and should not be interpreted as recreational suggestions for your Fourth of July weekend. But whatever you buy, thanks for shopping through the Amazon Associates links here.

Category: Amazon, Blogging

Dude.

Posted on | July 1, 2011 | 46 Comments

Words fail:

The father of supermodel Linda Evangelista’s 4-year-old boy is none other than billionaire Frenchman Francois-Henri Pinault — who just happens to be the husband of actress Salma Hayek, The Post has learned. . . .
The Manhattan magistrate’s court action confirms that the two-timing Pinault — CEO of the $28 billion conglomerate that owns Gucci, Bottega Veneta and Yves St. Laurent — is the daddy to two 4-year-olds by different world-famous beauties.

So the dude is married to this:

And he was also gettin’ some of this action on the side:

I’m thinking of starting a new blog “The Other French Billionaire CEO,” because world-famous actresses and supermodels are obviously impressed by that kinda stuff.

All I need is for someone to hit the tip jar for $1 billion . . .

UPDATE: Arnold Schwarzenegger is not a French billionaire CEO.

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Someone on Twitter had a suggestion: “OK that’s it… tax the French Rich!” Advocates of “social justice” can see that Francois-Henri is getting far more than his fair share. And he probably flies a corporate jet, too.

Category: Celebrities

Is Equal Protection Unconstitutional?

Posted on | July 1, 2011 | 2 Comments

by Smitty (via Drudge)

Among the greater Progressive farces is the notion that raaaaacism is acceptable when carried out by the goverment.

A federal appeals court has struck down Michigan’s ban on the consideration of race and gender when enrolling students at public colleges and universities.

In a 2-1 decision Friday, the court said Michigan’s Proposal 2 is unconstitutional because it burdens minorities. It was approved by voters in 2006.

So, it’s a two-fer: the federal appeals court both upholds raaaaacism, and denies self-government to residents of Michigan. Brilliant!
 Is it time to develop some legal theory that says the Equal Protection clause means what a reasonable person may think: Affirmative Action is a pile of hooey?
Betcha a slurpee that the two empathy-mongers worried about the burden to minorites were Democrat appointees.

The people mostly threatened by meritocracy are:

  • The raaaaace baiters
  • Beaurocrats whose livelihood is spent doling out the patronage.
  • Scumbag politicians elected by patronage networks.

Haven’t the citizens of Michigan been sufficiently wrecked by Progressivism? The UAW? The abject idiocy of this kind of legal drivel?

One hopes that this policy of failure can continue to fail upward until the SCOTUS crushes it like the cockroach that it is.

And now, some beauty sleep.

Category: Uncategorized

Daily Beast Writer Claims Obama Is a Victim of Washington’s ‘Pundit Class’

Posted on | July 1, 2011 | 29 Comments

Whenever someone I never heard of before makes a preposterous claim, my first question is, “Who is this person?”

Michelle Goldberg is a senior contributing writer for The Daily Beast/Newsweek. She is the author of The New York Times bestseller Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World, winner of the 2008 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize. Goldberg’s work has appeared in Glamour, Rolling Stone, The Nation, New York magazine, The Guardian (UK) and The New Republic.

So she’s a “senior contributing writer” for media grand dame Tina Brown, a feminist with paranoid fantasies about Christian fundamentalists taking away her sacred Right to Choose, and an award-winning author who has written for a half-dozen other liberal outlets. Now that we know who she is, then, here’s her preposterous claim:

Here’s why Mark Halperin is a disgrace. It’s not because he used a mild obscenity to describe our president on Morning Joe, disrespectful as that was. Rather, it was the circumstances of the slur. Right now, the Republican Party is threatening to blow up the world economy unless Democrats agree to savage cuts in spending while refusing any of the revenue increases that all serious economists say are necessary to actually address the national debt. Obama, whose greatest fault in office has been a misplaced faith in the GOP’s capacity for reasonableness, went on television and chided the party for this stance. Apparently, this struck Halperin as unreasonable. His response embodies all that’s rotten and shallow about D.C.’s pundit class, which fetishizes bipartisanship even as it only demands it of one political party.

As Jonah Goldberg says, this is not a parody — an elite liberal journalist from Manhattan denouncing the “pundit class” as if she were a grassroots  populist outsider, you see.

Of course, there is no factual basis to her claim that Obama has been guilty of “a misplaced faith in the GOP’s capacity for reasonableness.” Remember that when Obama was elected, Nancy Pelosi had a seemingly permanent Democrat majority in the House of Representatives, while Harry Reid’s Democrat majority in the Senate was just a seat or two away from the 60 votes needed to crush any Republican opposition.

For the first two years, then, Obama had exactly two words for Republicans, and the second word was “you.”

Michelle Goldberg’s bizarre rant is helpful if only as an insight into the paranoid minds of liberal True Believers, who live in a dystopian nightmare world of their own imagining where even Time magazine writers are conspiring with Republicans to “blow up the world economy.”

(Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.)

UPDATE: Tim Graham at Newsbusters points out that Michelle Goldberg appeared on “progressive” Pacifica Radio this week to warn of the evil menace that is Michele Bachmann:

You know, she came out of the big fundamentalist—or the big evangelical upsurge of the 1970s; like many evangelicals, including Pat Robertson, was initially enamored of Jimmy Carter, who was the first modern born-again candidate. Like the movement as a whole, she shifted abruptly to the right in the run-up to Reagan’s election.
And she often talks about, in her speeches, what she calls a “Christian worldview,” which is a really important concept, I think, for people to understand, not just Michele Bachmann, but much of the modern right. It essentially holds that Christianity, or at least their version of Christianity, is a total ideology. It has all the answers, not just to theological questions, but to historical questions, scientific questions, economic questions. And so, you know, what I’ve tried to get across in writing and speaking about Michelle Bachmann is that she’s not stupid, you know? And she’s not Sarah Palin, in that she doesn’t—she’s articulate. She’s, I think, a little bit faster on her feet. She’s just incredibly steeped in a body of knowledge, that is not—she’s incredibly steeped in a corpus of facts that aren’t true facts. She’s incredibly steeped in the alternate reality of the movement that I called “Christian nationalism” in my first book.

Yeah. Gotta worry about “Christian nationalism,” because that’s the real danger. Don’t be distracted by anything trivial, like an administration that’s added $5 trillion to the nation debt in the past two years.

Also, while it’s OK for Michelle Goldberg to demonize Bachmann with spooky warnings that a “Christian worldview . . . is a total ideology,” no fair pointing out that Goldberg’s own left-wing secular feminism is also “a total ideology.”

UPDATE II: Donald Douglas at American Power:

I own a copy of Goldberg’s book, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World. I read the first few chapters but had to put it down because I was getting nauseous at the literal campaign of death Goldberg advocates.

Hard-core pro-abortion fanatics are rare. Most people who are pro-choice are conscious that they are on the side of evil, but view abortion as a necessary evil — a bad thing that must be tolerated. It’s very rare to find someone who is emphatically in favor of abortion, and such people tend to be a special kind of crazy.

Michelle Goldberg is probably outraged that most abortion clinics will be closed Monday for the 4th of July.

Category: Barack Obama, Liberals, Media Bias

Newt’s Jewelry Industry Stimulus Plan

Posted on | July 1, 2011 | 9 Comments

“Employees of presidential candidate Newt Gingrich grew increasingly concerned in recent years about their boss’s purchases from luxury jeweler Tiffany & Co., worried that if he followed through on plans to run for president it could become a political liability. . . . Politico reported a month ago that Gingrich and his wife maintained a $250,000 to $500,000 personal credit line at Tiffany in 2005 and 2006 . . . The Gingrich campaign recently confirmed to The Post that Gingrich maintained a second Tiffany credit line for $1 million . . .”

Team Gingrich is playing this story all wrong.

Stop being so defensive. Start bragging about how you were stimulating the economy with deficit spending.

Hey, it worked for Obama . . .

Category: Election 2012, Newt Gingrich

Mika Brzezinski: ‘Hey, You Know What MSNBC Needs? More Obama Fans!’

Posted on | July 1, 2011 | 5 Comments

OK, she didn’t exactly say that: “We’re getting hit a lot lately for not bringing on people who speak on behalf of the White House and really stick up for the President.”

Joe Scarborough points out that they checked and — “Oh, my God” — their guests on Morning Joe are 10-to-1 Democrats, but they just don’t seem to be supporting Obama as much as they used to.

Category: Barack Obama, MSNBC

Old and Busted: Sippin’ Slurpees
New and Hot: Corporate Jets

Posted on | July 1, 2011 | 23 Comments

When President Obama accused Republicans of wanting to “compromise your kids’ safety so some corporate-jet owner can get a tax break,” Lachlan Markay of the Heritage Foundation pointed out that Obama’s massive 2009 stimulus included tax breaks for — wait for it — corporate jet owners. So the president was condemning Republicans for supporting his own policy.

This caused the White House and Media Matters to shriek that Heritage was just makin’ up stuff, but the facts are right there in a February 2009 Associated Press story.

So then the White House and Media Matters changed their claim: The Very Bad Tax Breaks the president was condemning were actually not the ones he’d signed into law, but some other tax breaks for which they could blame Republicans. All in all, it was a carnival of errors for the Left, and Mike Gonzalez at the Heritage Foundation was in the Gloat Zone last night:

We appreciate that folks at the White House are not having a good day. It started when a liberal commentator on their favorite network called the President a vulgarity, and it has not gotten better. The debt ceiling speech that liberal pundit Chris Matthews fantasized would turn the president into “Give ‘Em Hell, Barry” (Matthews’ words, not ours) has not exactly set the world on fire. Unemployment is still 9.1%, we are no closer to a deal to cut spending and pollster Rasmussen announced that only 21% of Americans strongly approve of the president’s performance, against 39% who strongly disapprove.
So what do you do if you’re a White House communicator? Well, you go after The Heritage Foundation, of course! Hopefully America will be distracted from economic incompetence.

What’s interesting to me in the whole fracas is this: Obama’s line about tax breaks for corporate jets wasn’t just something he improvised on the spur of the moment. He mentioned it six times during his press conference, so it was obviously a pre-planned talking point that his handlers had scripted. And as Rush Limbaugh said yesterday, “That’s all Obama’s got. All he has is class warfare.”

Evidently, the White House was planning to use this tax-breaks-for-corporate-jets line as their Secret Weapon to win the debate over the debt ceiling, and when it backfired on them, they had no Plan B, so they spent an entire day trying to salvage it.

It’s like that stupid car-in-the-ditch-and-Republicans-sipping-Slurpees line that Obama kept using during the mid-term election campaign. He kept saying it over and over again, like some kind of magic incantation, and what was the result? Republican landslide.


Category: Barack Obama, Budget, Taxes
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