The Rand Paul Round Robin

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Rather than continue extending my previous “Intellectual Terrorism” discussion of the Rand Paul civil-rights controversy, I’ll link some relevant stuff here. James Joyner at Outside the Beltway:

Doug Mataconis, Oliver Willis, and I were engaged in a brief Twitter back-and-forth on this one last night.  It’s a tougher question than it sounds, especially to a 20-something liberal.

Exactly so, given that most 20-somethings — liberal, conservative and otherwise — have been force-fed a distorted history of the civil-rights era.

The narrow question that Rand Paul was seeking to argue involves a libertarian critique of government intrusion into the private sector. From a libertarian perspective, it is wrong for government to require private-sector racial discrimination (as was the case under Jim Crow) and equally wrong for government to forbid private-sector racial discrimination (as in the 1964 Civil Rights Act).

Whatever your opinion in that specific context, it cannot be inferred from the libertarian argument that the person making that argument is an advocate of or apologist for racial discrimination.

An example I like to use when explaining this problem is the authentic Chinese restaurant. Owned by Chinese and staffed by Chinese, is this restaurant guilty of harmful “discrimination” because it does not employ Mexican cooks and Swedish waitresses? As absurd as this example may seem, yet it illustrates the fundamental logic of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which has been used to claim, inter alia, that Hooters is guilty of discrimination because it employees only waitresses, and not male waiters.

Dave Weigel, who spent a lot of time covering the Paulistas when he was at libertarian Reason magazine, is devoting extensive space to the controversy:

I can’t decide whether Paul has benefited or been hurt by the change of focus from the original story — whether his opposition to basically any federal intervention in business practices meant he opposed the Americans With Disabilities Act, opposed FDA regulation of food, etc. Instead, this has become a fairly tired “is candidate a racist or isn’t he?” story — one that Paul thinks he can deflect.

There should be no need to “deflect” an accusation for which no evidence exists, and yet Paul seems almost to be following the George Allen “Apology Tour” roadmap, issuing a statement that Weigel quotes:

I believe we should work to end all racism in American society and staunchly defend the inherent rights of every person. I have clearly stated in prior interviews that I abhor racial discrimination and would have worked to end segregation.

This kind of response cedes the premise of the liberal argument, namely that racism and discrimination are so pervasive and harmful as to constitute a persistent danger to the commonweal, thus requiring that everyone of good faith join the crusade to “end all racism in American society.”

From this crusading “anti-racist” mentality stems the kind of Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton idiocy that treats the violent dope-dealing gang-banger as less harmful to the black community than the possibility that state troopers might engage in “profiling” to arrest drug traffickers. Which is worse, that a law-abiding black citizen might incur a greater statistical risk of being pulled over on the Jersey Turnpike, or that scores of black kids are gunned down every year on the streets of Newark?

Of course, I’m not running for Senate — a political campaign is not generally a good place to debate such difficult questions — but I hate to see any conservative yield rhetorical ground unnecessarily. Hell’s bells, to any student of de Maistre,  the concept of “inherent rights” is itself suspect. If Rand Paul doesn’t watch his step, he’ll lose Paul Gottfried.

UPDATE: Erick Erickson steps up to clarify the facts, and ends by emphasizing the most important fact:

By the way, Rand Paul is kicking the Democrat’s butt.

Funny how the Left plays the race card whenever Democrats are losing. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

UPDATE II: If Melissa Clouthier already finds this argument “freaking annoying,” just wait. Next, the MSM will start playing the game of asking every Republican whether they agree or disagree with Rand Paul, to make him a litmus test, so that anyone who refuses to condemn Paul will be accused of favoring the repeal of civil rights.

Note that this game is never played against Democrats. The MSM didn’t accuse every Democrat who praised Ted Kennedy of being in favor of drowning campaign aides.

UPDATE III: Ta-Nahesi Coates declares that Rand Paul “is too ignorant to be embarrassed.” Paul is an eye surgeon and his father is an obstetrician, but whenever racial politics is debated, you can be sure that the conservative will be accused of ignorance. 

Sic semper hoc. Liberals believe that their own politics implies both moral and intellectual superiority, and thus the opponents of liberalism are always stupid and evil. And they have repeated this so often for so long, some people actually believe it.

Andrew Sullivan is inspired to offer an extremely limited defense of Rand Paul, which is about as helpful as you might expect.

UPDATE IV: Donald Douglas weighs in with an arguable assertion: “No doubt, racial equality wasn’t going to happen without the force of federal power.”

Well, (a) we are still a hell of a long way from “racial equality,” as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would be all too happy to inform you, and (b) there is reason to believe that the employment of federal power in this matter has actually harmed the cause of equality.

Thomas Sowell has noted that black Americans made more economic progress in the 25 years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act than they did in the 25 years after its passage. It would be a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy to blame the Civil Rights Act for the world of miseries (e.g., the plague of drugs, crime, fatherlessness, unemployment and educational failure) that have afflicted black Americans since 1964. Nevertheless, we cannot say that federal civil-rights legislation proved to be a magical formula for Progress.

In this context, I’m reminded of my long-ago interview Marilyn Arrington, a leading educator in Atlanta who was in charge of the 1996 Olympic Youth Camp and who had been a SNCC activist during the sit-in era. When I asked her what went wrong in American race relations, Mrs. Arrington’s answer was memorable:

“It seems to me it was around 1965 or ‘66, when Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown and that crowd came in,” she said, referring to militants who captured the leadership of SNCC. “They kicked the white people out of the movement and started talking about ‘black power’ — everything was ‘whitey this’ and ‘whitey that.’ … It was never the same after that.”

The politics of blame, of scapegoating white America, escalated dramatically in the aftermath of passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, so that by the time of his death in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was rejected as too accommodationist by young radicals.

Revolutions have been going off the rails like this ever since Burke entered his famous criticism of the French Revolution. At the time of Burke’s Reflections, Danton was in the forefront of the Revolution. He subsequently supported the purge of the Girondists and advocated dictatorial power for the Committee of Public Safety. And Danton’s radicalism continued unti 1794, when he was sent to the guillotine by his fellow Jacobins, some of whom eventually followed him.

Likewise in Russia, the overthrow of the Czarist regime brought to power the provisional government of Kerensky, subsequently overthrown by the Bolsheviks. Trotsky, whose commanded the Red Army in the Russian civil war, was eventually purged and fled the Soviet Union, only to die at the hands of a Stalinist assassin. Quite nearly the entirety of the original Bolshevik leadership was ultimately executed during Stalin’s purges.

Should we then be surprised that the civil rights revolution went so quickly from “I have a dream” to “Black Power” and “burn, baby, burn”? Or should we be surprised that the self-appointed civil-rights leaders of 2010 are buffoons like Al Sharpton?

No, indeed. Nor is it surprising that any sincere attempt to answer the important question, “Where did we go wrong?” leads to angry accusations of racism. Those who have gained power by playing the race card will deny that we have “gone wrong” at all, even as they decry the problems of black America as evidence of racism — and the pernicious power of racism, of course, is an argument for yet more intervention in the name of civil rights.

Any reasonable, honest and well-informed person must eventually begin to question this pretzel logic. Yet as soon as you begin asking questions, you will be denounced as a racist. Ron Paul isn’t the only one caught in a Catch-22.

Rachel Maddow vs. Rand Paul: Intellectual Terrorism and ‘Civil Rights’

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Here’s the video:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

David Weigel has some interesting analysis:

So is Rand Paul a racist? No, and it’s irritating to watch his out-of-context quotes . . . splashed on the Web to make that point. Paul believes, as many conservatives believe, that the government should ban bias in all of its institutions but cannot intervene in the policies of private businesses.
Now, few conservatives would go as far as Paul. In an essay just this month on the thought of William F. Buckley, Lee Edwards criticized Buckley’s belief “that the federal enforcement of integration was worse than the temporary continuation of segregation.”
“As a result of National Review’s above-the-fray philosophizing,” wrote Edwards, “and Barry Goldwater’s vote, on constitutional grounds, against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the albatross of racism was hung around the neck of American conservatism and remained there for decades and even to the present.” . . .

David’s got the complete transcript of the Maddow/Paul interview. As much respect as I have for the great conservative historian Lee Edwards, I will risk “the albatross of racism” by siding with Buckley and Goldwater and — though Edwards doesn’t mention this — Ronald Reagan.

One of the rallying points of California conservatives in the early 1960s was opposition to the Rumford Fair Housing Act, a 1963 state law that banned racial discrimination in housing. Considering this an unjust and unnecessary intrusion on property rights — an attempt to mandate how people bought and sold their homes — conservatives supported Proposition 14, to overturn the new law. Proposition 14 passed with a  2-to-1 majority, although it was subsequently overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Reagan opposed the Rumford law and supported Proposition 14. Given that the 1964 Civil Rights Act incorporated the same kind of housing anti-discrimination measures as the Rumford law, it is therefore not surprising that Goldwater opposed the federal law — or that Reagan was Goldwater’s strongest advocate.

Nearly a half-century after that controversy, shall we retroactively pronounce Buckley, Reagan and Goldwater “racists”? And shall we impugn Rand Paul for “above-the-fray philosophizing” in daring to defend the policy stances taken by these icons of conservatism who are, after all, not alive to defend themselves?

Well, it’s still a free country, and you are free to throw Buckley, Reagan and Goldwater under the bus along with Rand Paul. I am equally free, however, to say that in discussing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 we must consider not only the direct effects of the law — the abolition of Jim Crow — but also its indirect effects.

Don’t conservatives believe that many problems in American society are unintended consequences of well-intentioned liberal legislation? What is the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 — heavily implicated in the mortgage crisis — except a logical extension of the Civil Rights Act’s effort to eliminate discrimination in housing?

All conservatives now recognize the harm done by the constant playing of the race card in political discourse. But we have also seen in the recent health-care debate how liberals likewise love to play the “reform” card: Support this specific law, or else you are “anti-reform.”

This is not new, and liberals were playing the same game with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so that everyone who opposed the bill was accused of being an apologist for Jim Crow. And Rand Paul is now being excoriated for being honest enough to say that this was unfair, that whatever the benefits of abolishing Jim Crow, there were unintended consequences to the 1964 law — consequences that were to some extent foreseen by Buckley, Goldwater and Reagan — that still merit critical discussion.

Maddow’s badgering of Rand Paul amounts to an attempt to render off-limits the controversies of the past, to require that everyone endorse a progressive conception of history. As Clifton says, Paul is being forced into a Catch-22:

If Paul says he fully supports how the feds forced the private sector to end segregation he loses libertarian street cred, but by only supporting the results of the Civil Rights Act and not the actual legislation, Paul gives the left room to paint him as a racist.

What is at work here is a sort of intellectual terrorism, not just an effort to portray Rand Paul as a bigot, but to wield the accusation of racism as a weapon to intimidate anyone who dares challenge the progressive worldview.

Here is where wise men must perceive the totalitarian implications of political correctness, the Orwellian “memory hole,” the demand for conformity of thought, Trotsky airbrushed from the old Bolshevik photos. This argument is not really about racism, and it is not merely about Rand Paul or a single Republican campaign in Kentucky. Rather, it is about defending intellectual freedom from the bullies of the Left who arrogate to themselves the authority to decide what people can or cannot say in public discourse.

Conservatives must resolve to stand united against this kind of bullying treatment — to denounce it as an intellectually dishonest enterprise — or they shall eventually find that there is no remainder of the American tradition worth conserving.

“[T]ruth is great and will prevail if left to herself . . . she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”
— Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786)

“Let the others turn away. . . . They fear being ridiculed by the intelligentsia and allow the abuses to continue. They fear the mob as an excuse to avoid action. These are the people who, afraid to risk their reputation for rational thought, avoid rational conclusions. They seek some middle ground where they risk nothing and others do their chores.”
— T.L. Davis, The Constitutionalist (2010)

UPDATE: One of the commenters evidently wants to get me into a fight with my friend Dan Riehl — an invitation I’m not going to accept. Dan was rightly concerned from the outset about the efforts of some conservative to use Rand Paul’s candidacy to undermine Mitch McConnell in the Senate. Point taken.

With friends on both sides of the Kentucky GOP primary, I did not take sides — thinking it best to let Kentuckians fight it out amongst themselves — and was surprised by Sarah Palin’s intervention. Having now crossed this bridge, however, conservatives must fight the fight we are in and not waste time  wishing we had met the enemy on some other field.

Dan’s I-told-you-so is valid, as is his comment that “Paul doesn’t have the good political sense to stop fighting” — or, as I would say, the sense to shift the fight onto more defensible terrain. If Paul or his supporters are “whining about principle,” to borrow Dan’s phrase, that’s not an effective political strategy.

Turn the enemy’s attack against him — rhetorical ju-jitsu. A static defense, a stubborn insistence that you are right, is not nearly so effective as the counterattack that shows your opponent is wrong.

Rachel Maddow and the Left in general are attempting to limit the scope of debate and define the terms to their own advantage, so that they get to decide who is or is not a “racist.” Americans are sick and tired of seeing accusations of racism tossed around willy-nilly like this, and if Rand Paul would confront this tactic head-on — exposing as invalid the rhetorical gamesmanship involved — he would emerge fromn the fight as a hero to many Kentucky voters, especially independents and conservative-leaning Democrats.

Rather than whining or acting defensively indignant (“How dare you call me a racist!”), focus the counterattack on the Left’s dishonest tactic of defining “racism” in a way that shuts off meaningful political debate and categorically stigmatizes conservatives.

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!

Posted on Comments

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.