h/t:  Hot Air » Blog Archive » Video: NRSC hails Obama the Promise Keeper!

So, yeah, MC’s right – Palin endorsing McCain does “stink” – but only if you were hoping that she would lend her charisma exclusively to the cause of rigorously pure conservatism.

NOT MUCH DIFFERENCE ON POLICY

MC and I are not far apart on the most politically relevant points, even though this agreement leads us to different conclusions.  Before anyone reads the wrong things into these differences, however, there are some policy questions that need to be cleared up.

MC concedes that there’s little daylight between McCain and Palin on foreign policy, and he’s happy to set aside possible post-Campaign ’08 hard feelings (“her business”).  It’s on domestic policy that differences seem to arise, but I think MC partly mischaracterizes them, and otherwise exaggerates their importance:

1. Immigration: MC links to a recent FoxNews interview in which Palin unambiguously states her support for McCain’s current “position on immigration.”  Though inveterate McCain skeptics may be unwilling to credit a shift in his approach that’s as old as the ’08 campaign, we should be clear that what Palin is supporting is a “border security first” approach.  MC calls determining what Palin really means a “tough call.”  I disagree:  She says she supports McCain’s position.  If he diverges, he’ll presumably have to “answer to Sarah,” and, if she fails to call him out, it will harm her credibility.  That’s implied in any endorsement.
2. Global warming/Energy:  I believe MC misstates the differences between Palin and McCain on GW issues.  When MC claims that “McCain and Obama get along swimmingly” on Cap and Trade, he ignores the fact that McCain has been a fierce critic of Obama’s program from the day it was introduced.  McCain may, for instance, have been the first to dub it “Cap and Tax.”  MC also forgets the softer/squishier pre-ClimateGate remarks that Palin made over the course of years on Global Warming-based policy, clearly intended to make it easier for AGW believers to support her. Post-ClimateGate, she’s become much more vocal in her skepticism.  As for ANWR, differences on the subject are very old news.  They didn’t prevent Palin from running with McCain, and haven’t prevented her from recycling lines like “all of the above approach” and “drill, baby, drill” from her and McCain’s joint campaign ’08 platform.
3. Gay marriage:  McCain and Palin are both opponents.  They may differ on the wisdom of passing a “Defense of Marriage” amendment now, but even McCain, who opposed a constitutional amendment in 2004, has for years been saying that he would support it if the Defense of Marriage Act were overturned.  Does anyone see this secondary/tactical difference as likely to determine many elections this year – even a primary election on the GOP side?
4. Evolution:  In what election anywhere in America other than for school board are the particulars of beliefs on this issue of importance? McCain apparently believes in evolution + God.  Palin seems to believe in God + evolution.  MC:  “Some may say it’s a minor issue, but it’s seemed important to Sarah Palin.” She’s responded when others have brought the topic up, and she discussed her beliefs in her book.  Has anyone heard her bring it up on her own in any political context?

…and that’s about it from MC on policy, though at other points both he and other commenters have brought up other issues, especially (5)  Campaign Finance Reform (CFR).  I don’t recall and couldn’t find a detailed statement of Palin’s on McCain-Feingold, though I believe that, like Fred Thompson (who co-sponsored it in the Senate), she expressed support for the good intention of cleaning up politics (since the 19th Century a typical progressive focus, incidentally).  Palin had her own personal experience of campaigning for and helping to implement progressive-style political reforms – the Alaska ethics laws – that, despite good intentions, seemed to backfire on her. She may sympathize with McCain.  Anyway, with the Supreme Court having gutted McCain-Feingold legally, and with the Obama ’08 campaign having blown apart many of its presumptions, it’s hard to imagine a deader letter, or any reason why it should influence Palin’s decision-making on McCain vs Hayworth.

In sum, Palin and McCain are very close in one major area – foreign policy – and easily close enough for government work on the other issues MC points to.  Most important, they’re together on the major unifying conservative issues of the 2010 campaigns – debt, deficits, ObamaCare, DC elitism/corruption – issues on which McCain has been and remains a leading spokesperson.

Moreover, like Mitt Romney and others who have endorsed McCain, Palin wouldn’t need a personal bond, debt of gratitude, or perfect agreement to conclude that putting the Arizona Senate seat at risk, losing a” lion of the Senate,” creating or widening rifts within the party, and opening the Republicans to a “they’ve gone crazy with ideology” narrative would interfere with job #1:  Defeating Obamacrats.

Some have focused on JD Hayworth’s flaws as a candidate, but, in trying to justify Palin’s endorsement, you don’t need to destroy Hayworth unless you despise McCain.  Palin focused almost entirely on McCain’s positives in her endorsement statement, with only a glancing, implicit reference to Hayworth in her conclusion:

In 2008, I firmly believed that John McCain was the right man for America. Today, I know he’s the right man for Arizona. Your state deserves more than rhetoric; you deserve a leader with a real record of accomplishment. That’s why, on behalf of Sen. McCain, I’m asking for your vote. For the good of our entire country and the future of your state, please send John McCain back to the United States Senate.

Not to take her at her word requires you to deny the evidence that she actually is closer to McCain than anti-McCain conservatives want to acknowledge.

PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATISM vs PURE CONSERVATISM

I therefore both disagree and agree with MC’s conclusions.  I don’t think he’s justified his description of McCain and Palin as “at odds all over the place,” but I think he’s right to question whether Sarah Palin is a “strong conservative,” if by that he means a committed ideologue.  She clearly possesses many strongly conservative impulses and core beliefs, but her approach to politics is at least as pragmatic as it is ideological.  In that way, she’s an authentic conservative in an American mode, putting concrete results above any idle search for absolute political right and wrong.  Since I consider the combination of the two political impulses, under whatever names, to be both desirable and inevitable, I applaud SP’s having offered support and encouragement across the conservative spectrum, from Scott Brown to Doug Hoffman and maybe even Rand Paul.  It’s good for her and good for us.

In disagreeing with me strongly on this conclusion, MadisonConservative is far from alone on the right.  He’s probably closer to the majority view at HotAir (at least among those highly interested in immigration policy).  I welcome the continuing debate with him and those who agree with him.  As for those who don’t welcome the discussion, I wonder what they think HotAir is for – endless recitation of “true conservative” principles, all dissenters shamed and silenced?

Far as I can tell, it ain’t that kind of place, never has been, from the top down and the bottom up, and I’m happy with that, too.

[L]et’s keep it simple: S. 1 and H.R. 1 for the next session (and in 2013, since Obama will presumably be able to block repeal next year) should be the one sentence repeal bill. S. 2 and H.R. 2 should be some version of the perfectly good Republican substitute that was defeated this year.

So Republicans’ Contract with America should have two lead items: 1. Repealing Obamacare. 2. Passing their substitute reform package.

William Kristol – Keep It Simple, Republicans | The Weekly Standard.

Slublog – The Greenroom – Signs of Stage Two.

In the meantime, Fiorina and her wonderfully insane ad team have produced a follow-up, though sadly not a sequel, to “Demon Sheep,” this time completely focused on Carly vs Senator Ma’am, the latter rendered as a Zardoz-like hot air media balloon monster:

What Kilgore invites readers to contemplate is the type of alternate “what if” reality familiar to those who have “been watching the cult TV show ‘Lost.’” I have to confess, I am not one of them, and knowing that the show attracts great thinkers like Ed Kilgore, I have no deep regrets about spending my time otherwise. I am, at the same time, a huge fan of the Frank Capra Christmastime classic It’s a Wonderful Life, which addresses the same question, which reworded to fit the present situation is “How different would the U.S. be today if Barack Obama had not been elected president?”

“On a variety of fronts,” Kilgore writes, “the Obama administration is suffering from an inability to show Americans the parallel universe in which its past policies were not enacted.” I don’t what flavor of Kool-Aid Kilgore (I keep wanting to call him “Trout”) is drinking, but I think we already know what that wasteland would look like. Obama himself painted a vivid portrait of it in January of 2009, when he announced that a failure to pass his mammoth spending package would lead to unemployment levels above 8 percent. And we all know how well things have turned out since that bill was passed.

After some suitable Obama-esque talking points about jobs saved, Trout takes his what-if scenario to the next level, to ObamaCare:

Critics savage Obama for a health care plan that doesn’t do enough to limit costs. Obama responds that health care costs are going up anyway, without a plan. But it’s not easy to convince people that the status quo is riskier than a large and complicated series of changes in how Americans obtain health insurance.

Okay, this one is so simple that even a cave man could figure it out. (My apologies to Trout, who apparently can’t figure it out.) Obama’s plan for health care reform originally had two objectives:

1. To insure the then-47 million Americans without health insurance.
2. To lower (yes, lower; talk of deficit neutrality came later) the overall cost of health insurance.

If that sounds pie-in-the-sky it is because it is. You can’t possibly provide more of a good or service at a lower cost. Unless, of course, the government steps in as the seller of that good or service, in which case. . .

In which case what? Can Ed Kilgore or his ilk point to a single government-run program that has worked better than its equivalent in the private sector? Kilgore echoes the White House’s lament over the “gargantuan premium increases” that one insurer, Anthem Blue Cross, will impose on its California policy holders. But if it’s true that the cost of health care is rising fast, it is equally true that legitimate measures for controlling its cost — specifically tort reform and premium portability — were summarily dismissed by Democrat leaders crazed with their own power.

I could go on — Kilgore does — but this has been rehashed so many times that nothing new can be added to the argument. The nightmare that was ObamaCare is blessedly in the rear view mirror and getting more distant and smaller all the time.

One what-if Kilgore doesn’t bother to explore is how different the reality of Iran’s incipient nuclear capability might be if Obama had admitted some time early in his first year that his comments about sitting down with Iran’s leaders without precondition had been naive. Even without making this confession, if he had begged off the fatuous idea of engagement and pressured his allies to squeeze Iran back then, we might not be talking now about the reality of Iran as a nuclear power.

In the end, maybe Ed Kilgore and his fellow what-iffers should spend less time worrying about what would have been and more contemplating what is likely to be come 2010 and again 2012. They had their chance. Time to turn control of the country back over to the adults.

The Lambinator

Jim Geraghty, one of the first to react to Carlyfornia’s instant classic “Demon Sheep” web ad, calling it “genius” and possibly “the Greatest Campaign Web Video of All Time,” has expanded on his thinking, which, like the ad itself, left many observers scratching their heads.

Geraghty provides a short review of the ad – stressing its strikingly bizarre juxtapositions of terminator werewolves in sheep’s clothing alongside conventional political messages, but if anything he under-plays the mini-movie’s aesthetic and narrative dislocations (an effect which he originally termed “psychedelic”). “Demon Sheep,” aka “FCINO: Fiscal Conservative in Name Only,” aka “#demonsheep:  OMG – have you seen this ad?” is the El Topo, the Putney Swope, the Andalusian Dog, the Videodrome of campaign ads, at once so hilarious and yet mind-bending that I can’t bring myself to watch it a second time – not for fear of the lambinator, but because my brain is still stuck in a regressive thought-loop in which a manically chomping sheep is intercut with images of Tom Campbell while a seethingly hostile narrator addresses the latter like the Saw -killer or maybe Hannibal Lecter probing for soul-searing represssed memories,  buried crimes, and moral terror.

Addressing the political tactical rationale for the ad, Geraghty stresses that it “instantly broke through a very noisy and crowded political environment, and got almost everyone who watched it to drop what they were doing and call their political junkie friends and say, ‘You have got to watch this.’” He believes that Fiorina had a purpose for the ad as rational as the ad itself is surreal:

Fiorina is behind, and she needs to shake up the race. After another day or two of mocking, it’s possible that this ad and the brouhaha will spur California media to look at Campbell’s record and see whether her criticisms are justified. And if that happens, then maybe he’ll lose some ground, and she’ll close the gap some. (On the other hand, the Chuck DeVore team has a DemonSheep.org site up already.)

This is a Hail Mary of an ad, which means there’s a very good chance that it won’t work. But a lot of the “traditional” advertised approaches wouldn’t have worked either, and would have just blended in with all the other ads in a busy election cycle. By comparison, ten years from now, if you hear the word, “demonsheep,” you will probably start giggling and know exactly what it was.

Since Geraghty has likely undergone numerous Demon Sheep viewings, some aberrations in judgment on his part are more than forgivable.  Whatever the explanation, though his analysis makes some sense, it’s overdrawn.

With the California primaries still five months away, this isn’t the time for a “Hail Mary,” unless it’s one of those time-running-out in the first half/might as well go for it/nothing on the line kind of things.  The polls taken since Tom Campbell jumped into the race show him with a 5- to 11-point lead over Fiorina, with Chuck DeVore’s numbers dropping into single digits, and with up to 40 -50% undecided.  In short, the race is still up for grabs, and Campbell’s entry appears to have put DeVore in a lot more trouble than Fiorina.  Incidentally, all three continue to poll close to “Senator Ma’am” Barbara Boxer, with Fiorina having come within 3 points in Rasmussen’s mid-January poll of likely voters.  In a post-Brown political universe, it’s long past time for Senate handicappers to start mentioning California as one of the “in-play” states.

Prior to Campbell’s entry into the race, Fiorina had been maintaining a steady but not overwhelming lead over DeVore, a favorite of grassroots hard right conservatives, and had been directing her fire almost exclusively at Boxer.  In such a volatile political environment and with the decision points still months away, it’s easy to over-interpret poll data, but Fiorina and her team may see the former DeVore vote as having rested on a free-floating ant-Carly or not-sold-on-Carly segment of the politically oriented electorate (no one else is paying attention yet).  Why else would the numbers shift so heavily to Campbell, a vanilla Republican whom committed DeVoreiacs would be unlikely ever to support?

To re-gain her lead, Fiorina may not need to win all of those voters back:  She just needs to push them away from Campbell.  Say whatever you want about “Demon Sheep” – Ace (of Ace of Spades) called it “over-the-top,” which is a bit like being called tall by Manute Bol – but it hammers home the messages that Campbell is not a fiscal conservative, and that he’s the furthest thing imaginable from an anti-establishment politician, even if it leaves everyone a little confused about other matters (like who the sheep are supposed to be, what the whole purity test intro was about, whom Sarah Connor would endorse…).  It strongly supports Fiorina’s credentials on the same two issues:  The only “mention” of her name in the body of the ad is visual, via rendering of her signed “no tax” pledge, and the ad itself is obviously anything but “establishment” even before you get to its verbal content. These messages should sink in both for direct viewers of the ad and for those who see it excerpted on news shows and elsewhere.

From Fiorina’s perspective, if the fiscal conservative message is critical to Kali Republicans, then they can be herded away from Tom Campbell.  Even if many move to DeVore in the short-term, she still stands to benefit in the 3-way calculus. The risk might be that she utterly collapses, as a laughingstock, but she has a large personal fortune and a long history to put against that threat – including the cancer-survivor status that made another recent Fiorina video also something of a hit (as aesthetically minimal as FCINO is polymorphously perverse).

Love her or, along with many voluble conservatives, hate her, there’s something about Carly Fiorina that sticks in your mind – she’s unpredictable, striking, and formidable. You almost feel sorry for whomever she was up against on her way to the top of Hewlett-Packard all those years ago.

As for DeVore, he’ s put up a funny, but rather cheap-looking web response in which his campaign attempts to piggyback on Demon Sheep (a difficult maneuver one might think).  In his straightforward talking-to-the-camera style, he decries “Hollywood glitz and meaningless slogans,” strangely taking aim at two of California’s most economically significant surviving industries.

I think he should have gone 3-D, or, if that’ s too expensive, blue – especially since Meg Whitman’s got normal totally covered for now:

Makes sense when you consider she’s looking like a shoo-in on the R side, and will be facing Governor Moonbeam himself. Then again, the morning after Demon Sheep… everything else seems completely sensible.

Long live the new flesh!

If I said that over at HotAir, I might get several Devoriaks banned from the site for obscenity and death threats, as the far right hostility to CF has been strong.

h/t:  There Are No Words. . . – Daniel Foster – The Corner on National Review Online.

…[M]ore than health care legislation is in trouble. I have not seen a party’s fortunes collapse so suddenly since Richard Nixon got caught up in the Watergate scandal and a president who carried 49 states was threatened with impeachment and removal from office.

The victory of a Democrat in the special election to fill Vice President Gerald Ford’s House seat in February 1974 was a clear indication that the bottom had fallen out for the Republican Party. Brown’s victory last week looks as if something similar has happened to the Democratic Party.

Many people ask me whether the Democrats are in as much trouble as they were in 1994. The numbers suggest they are in much deeper trouble, at least at this moment.

Michael Barone – “Democrats fall as fast as Nixon Republicans in 1974″ – Washington Examiner.

It is clear that the country is increasingly angry with the Obama-Pelosi-Reid team. But it is equally clear that Americans still distrust Republicans almost as much as they fear liberal Democrats . . . there has to be a lucid set of reforms both on the legislative process and on spending for the Republicans to be seen as truly reformed from the party that was defeated in 2006 and 2008.

So the question is whether a new Contract with America would provide the extra focus and extra energy needed to change the results of the 2010 elections from the expected Republican gains to a Republican majority that will deliver.

I believe there would be a lot of advantages in October to having a contract-centered campaign if the House Republicans can work their way to a serious, collective, positive commitment.

A contract in September would be a powerful unifier for all those who are tired of the corruption and waste of Washington and the alien views of the secular socialist coalition seeking to change America radically.

However, House Republicans should consider several issues cautiously before undertaking a contract-centered campaign. On the following pages, please read my modest proposal for how a new Contract with America could change the nation in 2010 and beyond.

Newt Gingrich – “A Call-to-Action for the Republican Party, 20110″

Among his main suggestions:  Don’t shoot your wad before September.  He may be right, as least insofar as publishing a Contract-like set of commitments for House candidates goes, but it’s not a reason to underestimate current levels of public discontent and even fear, or to use Newt’s terms, wait on turning the Rs from an “opposition party” to an “alternative party.”