The Other McCain

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

Ace of Spades Interviews Ladd Ehlinger

Posted on | September 13, 2010 | 5 Comments

This is two weeks old, but I hadn’t seen it before, and it’s 31 flavors of pure awesomeness: One of my favorite people interviewing another one of my favorite people, and look at where Ladd lists his “top five Don’ts” for Republicans:

1) Stop concentrating on the sure wins.
2) Stop thinking a district is lost
3) Quit letting your campaign consultants run you.
4) It’s the ideology, stupid.
5) Have a damned sense of humor. Democrats win because pop-culture meme is, they are cool and fun.

Exactly right, and go read the whole thing right now. While Ladd deserves all credit for being Ladd, I take credit for being the first conservative blogger to discover America’s Greatest Living Film Maker (TM). He bought an ad on the blog, used Twitter to kick me in the knee, and thus was formed the McCain-Ehlinger Mutual Admiration Society.

Category: Ace of Spades, Culture, Ladd Ehlinger

Polls Are Not Predictions

Posted on | September 13, 2010 | 28 Comments

Paul Mirengoff of Powerline — a nice guy, whom I’ve met a few times — defends himself against Mark Levin’s criticism over the Delaware GOP Senate primary. Rather than to get into the middle of that, let me pull out a few phrases from Mirengoff’s post as illustrative of a more general dispute:

I then argued that, by supporting Christine O’Donnell in the Delaware Senate primary despite the likelihood (demonstrated by polls) that she would lose the general election, whereas her centrist opponent in the primary would likely win . . .
O’Donnell was routed when she ran for office in the past and currently is well behind the presumptive Democratic nominee in the polls. . . .
. . . polls, coupled with the state’s recent electoral history and O’Donnell’s prior poor showings, provide strong evidence that the O’Donnell is unlikely to win in November . . .
. . .my posts about the Delaware primary didn’t take a position adverse to O’Donnell until polls began to show her trailing the Democrat by double digits . . .

Other examples abound, but I think you see the point here: Mirengoff has allowed poll numbers to dominate his view of the Delaware primary and he is certainly not alone in doing so.

Yesterday afternoon, I returned to the Crystal City Sheraton after the 9/12 March and met an O’Donnell supporter who was almost frantic with distress. Someone on the Internet was trumpeting an outdated poll showing Christine trailing Mike Castle by 30 points. “We need to push back against this,” said the O’Donnell supporter.

Well, I had no time to blog at that point and thus couldn’t join the pushback effort. But a couple hours later, while I was working on my American Spectator column about the 9/12 March, the PPP poll went online:

It looks like there’s a real possibility of a major upset in the Delaware Senate primary on Tuesday night, with insurgent conservative Christine O’Donnell leading longtime Congressman and Governor Mike Castle 47-44. That 3 point lead is well within the poll’s margin of error. . . .
It’s clear that Castle’s popularity has taken a sharp turn in the wrong direction over the last month. . . .

Anti-O’Donnell readers must ponder this question: If the poll numbers in the GOP primary could shift so rapidly — if Castle could lose this much ground in the span of a month — why should we put faith in what polls tell us about the general election match-up against Democrat Chris Coons?

Paul Mirengoff has a lot of company among Republicans who have allowed this polls-as-predictions thinking to cloud their judgment about Delaware. This is an example of how the bandwagon mentality sometimes dominates political discourse. I’ve seen this type of argument used in policy discussions as well: “X percent of Americans believe global warming is a serious problem, therefore conservatives must propose policies to deal with global warming.”

Public opinion is a moving target, and the purpose of politics is not merely to react to public opinion, but to change public opinion. You will never win a fight if you walk away from the fight, and that’s what happens when you say to yourself, “Well, Delaware is a liberal state; there’s no point even trying to elect a real conservative there.”

Conservatives ought not succumb to the defeatist argument that we should retreat, ceding political terrain to our anatagonists, simply because they are strong and we are weak. When will we be stronger?

If Republicans can’t elect a conservative in Delaware this year, at what future point will such a victory be possible? In 2012? 2014? Ever?

Am I the only one who sees that this kind of helpless passivity toward the presumed liberalism of “Blue States” is a sure-fire formula for slow-motion political suicide?

Stand up and fight! WOLVERINES!

CHRISTINE O’DONNELL for U.S. SENATE

Category: Christine O'Donnell, Delaware, Election, Polls, Senate

Another Atlas Shrugged Moment

Posted on | September 13, 2010 | 16 Comments

While I was covering the rally in Washington yesterday, I spotted this poster in the crowd:

Recognizing the source of the phrase, I interviewed the lady with the sign, and that provided the lede for my latest column at The American Spectator:

Brianna Aubin stood in the front row of the rally on the West Lawn of the Capitol, holding aloft a sign hand-lettered in green: “Because my life is mine by right and will not be used to maintain a world that doesn’t know it.”
That slogan was paraphrased from a monologue spoken by Francisco d’Anconia in Ayn Rand’s classic libertarian novel Atlas Shrugged. “I read it in high school, but it wasn’t until the past year that I realized how accurate it was,” said Aubin, a 25-year-old who had traveled from Illinois to D.C. for the event.
Aubin was among the thousands who turned out for the second “9-12 Taxpayer March on Washington” organized by FreedomWorks. Liberal bloggers gloated that the attendance for Sunday’s event was significantly smaller than the previous year, but this year’s march came only two weeks after a crowd estimated at upwards of 300,000 showed up for Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” event at the Lincoln Memorial. . . .

Please read the whole thing. I’m pretty sure I was the only reporter at the rally who caught the Ayn Rand allusion in Brianna Aubin’s sign. But certainly Kate Zernike of the New York Times deserves credit for spotting the health-care allusion in this sign slogan:

“Down our throats on March 21st,” one sign said, “up yours on Nov. 2nd.”

Category: Tea Party

9/12dc Video Short Takes: Tabitha, Tito, P.J.

Posted on | September 12, 2010 | 30 Comments

by Smitty

Tabitha Hale at about 1:30 PM, cagily refusing to guess the attendance:

Tito ‘The Builder’ Munoz, legal immigrant and friend of this blog. Not to pick on the vaunted Barbie Cam (Stacy’s bubble-gum pink, metrosexual rig rumored to have been a gift from the goth twin Skippy), but the Panasonic just does a better job. Like a knob, I missed the first minute or two, but here is Tito’s rousing climax:

Finally, a classic P.J. O’Rourke line, suitable for most any occasion:

Category: Tabitha Hale

VIDEO: Ladd Ehlinger ‘Nancy Pelosi, Wicked Witch of the West’

Posted on | September 12, 2010 | 19 Comments

by Smitty

Ladd goes there, and gets his L. Frank Baum on:

Give us John Dennis, CA-8!

Category: California, Nancy Pelosi, Video

9/12 Video: Tito ‘The Builder’ Munoz

Posted on | September 12, 2010 | 36 Comments

The peroration of the best speech of the day:

Category: Tea Party, Video

9/12 DC Rally

Posted on | September 12, 2010 | 30 Comments

by Smitty

UPDATE 1530 ET: More photos by Stacy:

Andrew Breitbart talks to some of those black Tea Party activists the MSM say don’t exist.

Dave Weigel of Slate and Michael Moynihan of Reason magazine say, “We’re the media your mother warned you about.”

Sarah D. is another lovestruck Stephen Kruiser groupie.

UPDATE: Tito “The Builder” Munoz video.

Welcome, Instapundit readers!

[updated @1316] America’s youth speaks!

CAPITOL HILL–First strike crowd pan, at 11 AM, with a couple of hours to the rally.

Stacy is pacing about, muttering, erroneously in my opinion, that Beck’s Restoring Honor rally was ill-conceived and will hurt attendance. Rather a narrow view, that. The light mist falling is supposed to taper off around noon.

DaTechGuy just arrived, and reports a throng at the Washington Monument.

The good news about the Tea Parties is that there is no central coordination. The bad news about the Tea Parties is that the entropic influence of Erik Telford cannot be stopped.

Back at you at noon. Rain is abating, by the power of my pink Hawaiian print. The crowd down at the Washington monument is supposed to commence marching here. I predict a crowd size similar to the Kill the Bill Rally a couple of centuries ago in March.

1300 crowd pan:

Updates to follow.

Category: Tea Party

They Told Us There Was Going to Be a Huge Rally at the Mall in Washington . . .

Posted on | September 12, 2010 | 24 Comments

. . . so I said, “Quick, Smitty! Let’s go to the Mall!”

We didn’t find a huge rally, although Smitty enjoyed his Starbucks coffee and was impressed by the 70% discounts at the Aeropostale fall fashion sale.

However, as dedicated citizen-journalists, we were determined to keep hunting until we found the real story . . .

This kind of sexist exploitation of women — advertised for sale in their underwear! — deserves to be exposed as misogynistic patriarchal oppression. The management of Victoria’s Secret, however, asked our undercover investigative team to leave the store.

Having failed to find the “huge rally” at the mall, we checked our directions and discovered that the event we wanted to cover was actually the 9/12 Taxpayer March from the Washington Monument to the U.S. Capitol. Tabitha Hale explained that this is what they call the “mall” in Washington. 

Smitty’s just hoping they have an Aeropostale store . . .

Category: Tea Party
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