Like Rip Van Winkle

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After delivering The Final Wisdom on PA-12 yesterday afternoon, I took a nap and didn’t wake up until nearly midnight. I woke to discover a world of news had transpired:

OK, I made that last part up, but at least my ratings don’t suck as bad as Campbell Brown’s. Meanwhile, not content to let my Final Wisdom be the last word on PA-12, Jay Cost offers an excellent analysis at Real Clear Politics:

In 2004, George W. Bush won 255 congressional districts. PA-12 was not one of them. From 1994 to 2006, the Republicans held the United States House of Representatives, controlling as many as 232 seats. PA-12 was never one of them. . . .
And let’s not forget the Pennsylvania Senate primary. As I watched Sestak rise in the polls, and saw the flood of Senate primary advertising here in Western Pennsylvania, I knew that Mark Critz – the Democratic candidate in PA-12 – was being helped. The Sestak-Specter contest was driving up interest, and both candidates were putting out pro-Democratic messages. . . .
If the Massachusetts Senate race tantalized Republicans with the idea of boundless political opportunities, the PA-12 special election should remind them to keep their imaginations in check. . . .
And let’s not forget the view from 30,000 feet. Last night we saw two Democratic incumbent senators – Blanche Lincoln and Arlen Specter – mired in the mid-40s in their primaries. In PA-12, we find a candidate who positioned himself as an old time Democrat winning 53% of the vote in a union district where 62% of the voters were registered Democrats. How does this “contradict” “all the evidence” of a very good Republican year?

It’s very good, so please read the whole thing. As for me, I’m going back to sleep. When I wake up, Obama may have outlawed political blogging altogether . . .

Rand Paul Has Made A Fine Transition From Rock And Roll

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by Smitty

His early rockabilly days were certainly memorable:

Now that he’s on the November ballot for Kentucky Senator, he still remembers how to tell the opposition to “bring it on”, even if the “mike foxtrot” is delivered in parenthesis:

While empathizing with Stacy’s disappointment over PA-12, if the Tea Parties around the country take it in the proper “Don’t get cocky, kid” light, and double down on the intensity, then the loss won’t be catastrophic.

The cusp of Socialist Hell where the country currently resides was not a sudden arrival. One important lesson of the PA-12 defeat should be that quick fixes arrive on Golden Hover Ponies. PA-12, like California, has deeper problems that are going to take more time and effort to tackle. For Conservatives to divide, rather than rally about the “generally acceptable” candidate, is to hand the victory to the Left. Cut that noise out.

I’m generally favorable to Rand Paul. Lisa Grass is unimpressed with Paul’s stance on the American’s with Disabilities Act:
While it’s easy to empathize with individuals in wheelchairs, things like ADA cause me three worries:

  1. They end up favoring larger businesses who can make contributions to politicians, engaging in lawfare against smaller businesses. The argument “Think of the disadvantaged!” always comes up, and we should, as we’re likely to be among them one way or another one day. Yet the cost of conforming to more and more reams of legislation is destructive to the little businessman, who seems to get scant love, save that of the prison variety.
  2. The precedent is set that it’s OK for the Federal government to cruise at a fairly low legislative level. How is a wheelchair ramp an Interstate Commerce concern, exactly? Should the 10th Amendment matter here? To exactly what degree does the 14th Amendment impact the discussion?
  3. Are we blowing off market solutions? For a reasonable population size, would there not be a business case to take better care of ADA customers?

Rand promises to be an interesting character to watch. The Paul Cabal rides tall and all, but will it stall in the Fall or make the opposition crawl?

And yes, I realize Rand Paul is not Brian Setzer.

Axis Of Fedora Update: Stacy McCain Drained By PA-12 Reporting

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by Smitty

It really is a shame to see such a fine reporter and word-slinger laid so low. The frantic updates.

Only a pure vanilla pudding treatment can restore him from the brink
The miles. The pictures. The constant masculinity threat of using the barbie cam. The deadlines. The obnoxious creep co-blogger, always looking for some smart-alec angle.
They wear on a man, leaving tragic pieces of human wreckage held together by only a fedora in their wake.
Can Stacy be brought back from the brink, and restored to full vitality? Only the Good Lord knows, and his countenance, while merciful, does bear a hint of dubiousness. . .
Update: Belvedere has the ‘before’ shot.

(tip of the headware to Vanderleun)

Ah, The Ted Kennedy Criteria

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by Smitty (h/t Terry Cowgill at Big Media)

Giving Dick Blumenthal the benefit of the doubt, he probably didn’t wake up one morning and say to himself “I wonder if I could score some favor with the Veteran crowd by having them on about my service record. . .” while he was shaving.

In general, these kinds of mis-statements creep in over time, like fibs over how much you enjoy the mother-in-law’s recipe for pig’s feet. After enough embellishment and time, the effort level of saying “Hey, I’ve got to clear the air on a point about my service record” seems too expensive.

Until the whole pile goes from innocuous to noxious.

How to fix this mess? Terry shows how:

How could he, in his own words at yesterday’s press conference, “misspeak” about his service “on a few occasions” and the news media let him get away with it? Most of those “occasions,” by the way, were gatherings of veterans’ groups.

Part of the answer can be found on a segment on Morning Joe on MSNBC. Co-host Mika Brzezinski, who worked as a TV journalist in Connecticut for six years in the 1990s, let slip an admission many skeptical media observers in this state have suspected ever since Blumenthal replaced Joe Lieberman in the AG’s office: she likes Blumenthal. Indeed, Brzezinski made it sound as if she and her husband, fellow TV reporter James Hoffer, were friends of Dick.

“After I read the [New York Times] article, I felt crushed for him,” Brzezinski confessed. “Because my husband and I had known him as reporters in Connecticut for years and years.” Brzezinski added that Blumenthal “has done a lot of really good work.”

Why would Brzezinski feel “crushed” and not something more — such as “shocked” or “outraged?” Because it’s pretty clear that Brzezinski, like dozens of other reporters in the Nutmeg State, thought Blumenthal was a man of integrity, a latter-day judicial saint dedicated to the betterment of his fellow Nutmeggers.

A friend of mine, and Ted Kennedy fan, personally focused on all of Ted’s “good” statesmanship, as though it were some form of public penance for “that unfortunate submarine adventure”.

When you have an older, liberal friend like that, you don’t ask them how it feels to have just rationalized their way through capital punishment. But let’s not go all Lefty-no-proportionality here: I’m not arguing that deceitful speech about past military service is tantamount to murder. What I am arguing is that, rather than note how a demonstrated looseness with facts might be merely the tip of a noteworthy iceberg of deceit, we’re going to hear a stream of exclusively positive accomplishments.

The narrative becomes that Blumenthal is a victim of excessive, cruel nitpicking. The Vietnam fibs were a victimless crime, no more heinous than reporting his weight from that time period, instead of confessing the additional stone that crept up on him. Oh, those pedantic Conservatives!

While the current Administration has raised application of the Ted Kennedy Criteria to an art form, Conservatives should not fall into this moral relativism game. It’s one thing to forgive indiscretions on an individual basis. It’s quite another to tolerate and tacitly approve of various forms of lying, cheating, and stealing. Of talent there is plenty, but integrity is precious.

Update: Jules Crittenden is trying to come up with a catchy verb for the Blumenthal treatment, since Swiftboating is somehow not working. If we can go with a noun, how about a Viet Prong?

Update II: Fred Thompson plays the ‘weasel’ card.

Update III: The ever-verbose Alan Colmes manages to enumerate a variety of things which Rand Paul is against. An equally meaningful, simpler statement would have been: “Rand Paul is for limited government.”

PA-12: The Final Wisdom

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HAGERSTOWN, Md.
Back home now, after driving 430 miles in 24 hours for the Election Day swing through Pennsylvania’s 12th District. Am I totally bummed out? Yeah, especially because I spent four hours sleeping in my car at the West Virginia Welcome Center on I-79 after staying until 3:30 a.m. at the post-election bull session.

The bull session started in the lobby bar and ended on the sixth floor of the George Washington Hotel (which, I must remind you, is posh) where the young GOP campaign staffers anethetized their post-election pain with anodyne beverages. One of these young fellows bristled a little when he found out I’m a reporter, although I tried to explain I’m a friendly — as objective as Harry Carey calling a Cubs game. The hostility puzzled me, and then he explained that he’d been misquoted by the New Republic a few days earlier.

Well, Chris Burdick is a Great American — no matter what the New Republic says about him. Ever since the infamous Stephen Glass episode, it’s been good policy to take anything the New Republic says with a grain of salt, including John B. Judis’s election analysis that depicts PA-12 as a victory for The Vital Center:

Democrats can be pleased with the results of the May 18 elections. They won the only head-to-head contest with a Republican—a congressional election in Pennsylvania to fill the seat of the late John Murtha—by capturing the center in a fairly conservative district.

Which is utter hogwash — it was a victory for political inertia in a district that has been dominated by Democrats so long that the Republican Party at the county level has atrophied. And the Democrats didn’t win by “capturing the center” but by doing what they do best: Lying.

So fuck you, John B. Judis.

Hey, I’m feeling better already.

There is nothing worse that these “Big Picture” intellectual pundits who do nothing but pontificate about the cosmic significance of events they haven’t witnessed in places they’ve never been. Amy Crawford may be a vicious Marxist bull-dyke who misquotes Great Americans like Chris Burdick, but at least she was there, OK?

Until you’ve had a chili dog at Coney Island Lunch, don’t tell me about PA-12. Until you’ve been to the First Ward in Latrobe, until you’ve spent some time talking off-the-record to the locals, until you’ve taken a wrong turn and driven through the dilapidated south side of Johnstown — I missed Highway 271 and kept going south on Bedford Street — you don’t really know what you’re talking about.

Political Nostalgia and Economic Envy

The current political mantra of “jobs, jobs, jobs” has a different meaning in places where Democrats and their union-goon buddies have ruled the roost for so long. Whereas most conservatives hear “jobs” and think of innovative hard-working enterpreneurs attracting investment to create private-sector economic growth — you know, guys like Tim Burns — a lot of people in places like PA-12 hear “jobs” and think . . .

Well, they don’t really think at all.

Rather, the typical Democratic voter in PA-12 has some kind of visceral atavistic impulse to blame his problems on greedy rich Republicans — you know, guys like Tim Burns.

So those ridiculously false DCCC ads that accused Burns of wanting to “ship jobs overseas” were merely telling Democratic voters what they already believed. If you got laid off at the plant 10 years ago, and are still sitting around your run-down house on the south side of Johnstown waiting for the Good Old Days to come back, the Democrats will be only too happy to tell you that the Republican Party is the only thing that stands between you and that $22-an-hour job which doesn’t require education, skill or even sobriety.

Granted, the GOP has at times indulged in dumbed-down symbolic politics — “Vote Republican, or Gay Mexican Abortionists Will Burn Your Flag!” — but cultural conservatism doesn’t destroy communities the way economic liberalism does.

On the city square in Johnstown yesterday, I saw a monument to victims of the 1889 flood. But there was no monument to victims of the AFL-CIO: “In Loving Memory Of The Thousands Of Jobs Driven Away By Anti-Competitive Labor Policies.”

Until more Republicans in Pennsylvania can muster up the courage to start speaking some blunt truths about the source of their state’s economic malaise, Democrats will continue winning with idiotic assertions about greedy rich people who want to “ship jobs overseas.” Hell’s bells, what about shipping jobs to Alabama and Kentucky? Why are foreign companies like Honda and KIA building industrial plants in southern Appalachia, but not northern Appalachia?

Wake up and smell the AFL-CIO, Pennsylvania!

Trampling Out the Vintage

Who to blame for defeat in PA-12? Go ahead, blame me. I jinxed it. My family’s had a losing streak in Pennsylvania ever since my great-grandfather’s regiment got outflanked by the Iron Brigade on July 1, 1863. 

However, the finger-pointing and second-guessing will probably focus on more local scapegoats. Dave Weigel recounts some of the post-election analysis (see also here), but none mention the name of the Rob Gleason, who is chairman of both the Pennsylvania GOP and the Cambria County GOP. In the wee hours at the lobby bar of the (posh) George Washington Hotel, Gleason’s name was mentioned quite a few times by local grassroots Republicans — and not in a good way.

Mark Critz carried Gleason’s Cambria County by a margin of more than 5,000 votes, 57% to 41%. If Gleason can’t even deliver his home county for the GOP in a key special election, why the hell would Pennsylvania Republicans put a loser like Gleason in charge of their statewide party operations?

If the Tea Party Patriots in Pennsylvania want to stage an uprising, let them unfurl their Gadsden Flags and take over the state GOP with the battle cry, “DUMP GLEASON!” Trust me, there are plenty of rank-and-file Republicans who would rally behind such a movement.

And so much for strategic goals, I suppose. Before joining the rank-and-file at the lobby-bar bull session, I first had to grapple with the Final Wisdom in my American Spectator column:

Clearly, Democrats did damage to Burns with a blizzard of TV and radio ads accusing the Republican of wanting to impose a 23-percent sales tax “on just about everything we buy” — a blatant distortion of Burns’ qualified support of the Fair Tax, a proposal that would eliminate the income tax and abolish the Internal Revenue Service. FactCheck.org called that accusation “misleading” and one Pittsburgh TV station pulled the Democrat ad from the air, but it continued running elsewhere — even during commercial breaks on local broadcasts of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show — right up until Election Day.
The effectiveness of that line of attack against Burns, however, should raise alarm bells for Republicans looking forward to November. How many GOP congressional challengers have endorsed the Fair Tax? Whatever their numbers, all of them can now expect to be hit with the same kind of attack. . . .

You can read the rest of that, and also read some of the cogent reader comments like these:

I fear the voters of PA-12 are going to learn good and hard that Murthanomics will not work for them without Murtha. His seniority and committee assignments are not transferable. . . . I anticipate the Department of Defense and the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee are going to rip out the rug from under Johnstown with gleeful, vengeful, abandon. . . .
I do not anticipate much joy at the next Cambria County Fair, no sir.

And:

It is a heavily and grotesquely gerrymandered Democratic district. And its demographic makeup is very old . . . [I]t was affected by the Great Depression into the 1950’s before it began to recover.. . . The young, talented and ambitious moved out long ago and are still leaving it. . . .
Pittsburgh has lost 1/2 its population in the last 30 years and it shows . . . They have been in decline for that long.

Anyway, I’m back home now. Upstairs, my kids are romping around and laughing. It’s a pleasant sound, but I’ll need need a few more hours of sleep to recover from this road trip. Thanks to everyone who hit the tip jar to make this coverage possible, and my apologies that the result was not the victory that we had expected. There were more than a few Tim Burns supporters crying last night, but I’m a neutral objective journalist and crying would be unethical.

And you know what a stickler I am about ethics.

UPDATE: Via Memeorandum, I see that second-hand wisdom is being offered today by Politico, Steve Benen, and many others who never ate at Coney Island Lunch. However, we must respect the great sage of American political analysis, Michael Barone:

In Pennsylvania 12, so far the state shows 77,410 votes cast in the Democratic primary for Congress and 43,614 in the Republican primary—43% of them for 2008 Republican nominee William Russell, who pointedly did not endorse special election Republican candidate Tim Burns. Thus the electorate in the 12th special election consisted of almost twice as many registered Democrats as registered Republicans. . . . [T]radition-minded Democrats who didn’t like Obama and never much liked Republicans . . . didn’t . . . feel compelled to vote in the Specter-Sestak primary . . . and they didn’t feel compelled to vote in the Pennsylvania 12 special between a Democrat who took care to distance himself from Nancy Pelosi but was still a Democrat and a Republican who was a businessman conspicuously not endorsed by the retired military officer who was the party’s candidate 18 months ago. Tim Burns needed these votes, and might have gotten them if they had felt obliged to vote, one way or the other, for president; but he couldn’t get them to the polls.

An interesting theory, but in terms of forward-looking strategy, Barone’s analysis is not as useful as my suggestion of dumping Pennsylvania GOP chairman Bob Gleason.

Gleason: He was for Arlen Specter
before he was against him.

Start printing the bumper stickers.

UPDATE II: Doug Brady offers an excellent analysis at Conservatives for Palin, pointing out that having the PA-12 special election concurrently with the primary in the predominantly Democratic district may have been decisive. And if Doug is right, then there is no weight behind  MSM’s crystal-ball claims of grand cosmic implications for November.

However, the Pennsylvania GOP still needs to dump Rob Gleason. If the Democrats hold a 2-to-1 registration on Gleason’s home turf, whose fault is that?

PREVIOUSLY:

Matthew Yglesias Asserts That Dale Peterson Is A Dessert Thief!

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by Smitty

OK, that is the literal value of Matthew Yglesias’s summary of Ben Smith on Peterson’s AgCom ad. Of course, Yglesias meant ‘takes the cake’ in a figurative sense.

Yglesias, an Ivy League graduate, and thus my intellectual superior goes on to opine (emphasis mine):

special interests (i.e., “thugs and criminals”) benefit from the fact that people generally don’t understand what it is that the Agriculture Commissioner does. The solution to this, however, isn’t to vote for Dale Peterson, it’s for Alabama to have fewer statewide elected officials. Right now, according to this list, a responsible citizen of Alabama is supposed to form separate opinions about a Governor, a Lieutenant Governor, and Attorney General, a Secretary of State, a Treasurer, a State Auditor, and an Agriculture Commissioner. That’s just way too many elections. It guarantees an uninformed electorate and special interest control.

Democracy should be about accountability, not holding lots of elections. Too many independently elected officials makes lines of responsibility murky and makes it impossible for citizens to monitor their agents.

  • Is Yglesias conflating electoral activity with government transparency?
  • How would a lower electoral frequency affect the problem?
  • What if the people voted on whether to have the office at all, and then what body to plant therein?
  • What if the people are smarter than Yglesias, and have no difficulty managing the slate?

Salon, the original source for this post, adds:

The first thing to note is that if that’s all citizens in Alabama had to do, that would be one thing — but of course in fact they also have to vote for U.S. senator, and U.S. House of Representatives, and the Alabama Legislature, and county government, and local government. At least. In many states (and I’m not going to look up Alabama), there are also elections for special districts, local and statewide ballot questions, and judicial elections.

The most obvious things to get rid of, in my opinion, are judicial elections, statewide ballot questions, and statewide elected officials other than governor. Do that, and have partisan elections for as many other things as possible, and the electorate will at least have a fighting chance — the remaining big challenge would be primary elections, which I’m OK with even though they present a puzzle for most voters.

Granted, most of my exposure to the minor candidates is the voter booklet, but the harm done is unclear. Are these Lefty geniuses worried that the Tea in the electorate may become more fully steeped?

What about the Federal Reserve? How has an un-elected cabal of bankers worked for us? It seems to have enabled theft on a grand scale, AFAICT.

The un-elected SCOTUS has also been a problem, since the doctrine of “Judicial deference” has turned them into the extra-Congressional Mental Gymnastics Committee, deriving fresh back-flips to justify Federal over-reach.

Maybe, in a RealityTV-cum-Constitution moment, we could vote one justice off the court every Presidential election! New blood! An assured pick for every president!

But then, to the chagrin of Yglesias, people would be burdened with caring about the SCOTUS, too.

We really should thank Matty boy for agitating to make our lives easier.

YouCut: The Auto-Economic-Circumcision Game The Whole Country Can Play

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by Smitty

The evening Whip-Down brings the details:

Today we announced the first YouCut winner, a proposal by Reps. Tom Price and Jim Jordan that would eliminate an unnecessary and duplicative, $2.5 billion welfare program. That proposal garnered over 81,000 votes out of more than 280,000 votes cast. Tomorrow, five new spending cut proposals will go up, and on Thursday, House Republicans will welcome their Democrat colleagues to join them in voting to consider the first wining cut. The question remains, are House Democrats be ready to listen to the American people, or are they not? Unlike the attorney general of Connecticut, the American people have been very clear.

Now, I respect Representative Cantor, but I really, really want to see more of a top-down approach to the question.

The question is not just so much, ‘Should we cut A or B’, but ‘WTF the Federal involvement in A and B in the first place?’

Something is, indeed, better than nothing. One strives not to be overly critical. But the bottom-up approach of piecemeal attacks on Federal over-reach and idiocy may not have more than a transient effect.

PA-12 LIVE Election Results; UPDATE: Democrat Wins; Burns Concedes

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WASHINGTON, Pa.
Election results online here.

11:30 p.m. ET: Well, everybody else has gone to drown their sorrows, but I’ve still got to hit a late deadline for The American Spectator. A defeat is always harder to report than a victory. Maybe when I get off deadline, I’ll feel better. If anyone feels an overwhelming urge to hit the tip jar — hey, don’t fight the feeling.

Part 1 of the concession speech:

Part II of the concession speech:

10:55 p.m. ET: The people who supported his campaign “will not give up, and they will not give in,” Burns said in his concession speech. Video to come shortly.

10:30 p.m. ET: With 74% of precincts reporting district-wide, it’s Critz 54%, Burns 43% and, looking at county-by-county results, I don’t see where Burns can make up the difference.

Critz wins. Just heard that Burns called Critz to concede. Expect Burns to make concession speech about 10:45 p.m. Will update.

10:16 p.m. ET: In Indiana County — where Tim Burns went to college at IUP — it’s Burns 57%, Critz 41% with 38% of precincts reporting. The music in the ballroom now: “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey.

10:14 p.m. ET: In rural Somerset County, 88% of precincts are reporting, dead even, Burns 49%, Critz 49%

10:07 p.m. ET: In Westmoreland County, only 14% of precincts reporting, Burns 50%, Critz 48% — three weeks ago, a campaign source said Westmoreland would be decisive. We continue watching . . .

9:55 p.m. ET: Just got off the phone with a source who is at the Fayette County Courthouse, which he says is now swarming with election lawyers watching eagle-eyed over the ballot-count after the report of double-voting. Meanwhile, Dave Weigel notes the potential for Libertarian candidate Demo Agoris to play spoiler if the race is, as my source says, “tight.”

9:45 p.m. ET: 11% of precincts now reporting — Critz 58%, Burns 39%, and 3% for the Libertarian candidate. Waiting for more numbers . . .

9:30 p.m. ET: With just 6% of precincts reporting, Critz 62%, Burns 38%, but Diana Irey said don’t worry about such early numbers. Based on previous experience, I’d say you won’t get a better idea of the result until 70% of precincts are reporting. We wait . . .

9:20 p.m. ET: Still waiting for more numbers. Meanwhile, more photos:

Tim’s father, Ed Burns, and Tim’s son, Brock Burns.

Brock Burns rocks the fedora.

9:10 p.m. ET: Diana Irey just got me some results. Five precincts reporting from a 3-to-1 Democrat area in the city of Washington, Critz 803 (55%), Burns 667 (45%). And this indicates . . .? “He’s gonna win,” Irey says — “he” meaning Burns, of course.

The music in the grand ballroom right now just hit Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Three Steps.” That’s a good omen.

8:55 p.m.: Now seriously hassling the sources: “Numbers! I want some %#&#ing numbers!” Until I get the numbers, what I can tell you is that all the Burns people who worked precincts today felt encouraged. One guy talked to a Democrat operative who was reportedly impressed with the GOP turnout. But that’s just anecdotal. I want some %#&#ing numbers!

8:50 p.m. ET: Just another completely random “man on the street” interview:

Meanwhile, that random kid’s dad gets interviewed:

8:30 p.m.: I’m currently hassling sources: “Numbers! I need numbers!”

8:10 p.m.: I was just showing the video of campaign HQ to Ed Burns — Tim’s dad — when he said, “Oh, there’s Tim. Gotta go.” Video inside the grand ballroom:

7:55 p.m. ET — Polls close at 8 p.m., and the dignitaries and media are already beginning to gather in the second-floor grand ballroom of the posh George Washington Hotel for what Republicans hope will be a victory celebration for Tim Burns in Pennsylvania”s 12th District.

EXPECT UPDATES . . .