Wednesday | March 12, 2008

Sleep with Whores, Wake Up Not Governor

Eliot Spitzer has spent over $80 grand on this Washington prostitution ring.  Given, as governor, and before that, as New York attorney general, he didn’t have call to be in DC all that often, even at $3500 a night (and we’ll leave aside what one might want at that price), that means that at least in recent years he saw a prostitute most of the time he was in DC.  Some people love visiting our nation’s capital:  There’s the National Gallery, the Smithsonian, the Lincoln Monument; for Eliot Spitzer, there was Kandi, and the rest of the gals.

Spitzer was a prosecutor, and by most accounts, a pretty good one.  Prosecutors don’t tend to have a lot of tolerance for the frailties of others, and by all accounts, he had less tolerance than most.  However, he appears to be exceedingly tolerant of his own human frailties.  There’s no reason anyone else should be.  He should go.  Yes, Republican Senator David Vitter of Louisiana was caught up in a similar scandal.  Yes, Senator Vitter is human garbage, and he should be made to resign.  But he comes from Louisiana; they have a long history of tolerance for hypocrisy and moral turpitude among their leaders.  And they don’t have the New York Post and the New York Daily News.  If they had papers like that, trust me:  Vitter would be gone.  And Spitzer should go.

UPDATE:  Sure enough, Spitzer did resign, and wrote a graceful conclusion to a long, largely successful, but graceless political career.
Posted by Balphagor at 06:56:28 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) |

Friday | March 07, 2008

Another Crook Batters GOP Hopes in US House

As if the Republicans don’t already have enough problems, the Republican National Congressional Committee treasurer ran off at the end of January with an as-yet-undetermined amount of the committee’s money.  He has been handling the RNCC’s money since 2003, and in all that time, all of the annual audits of the RNCC’s finances have been purely imaginary.  To make matters worse, he was also serving as the treasurer for the campaigns of any number of Republican Congressmen.  And then there’s the matter that Republicans have covered up their treasurer’s crime spree for over a month.  You have to wonder what impact this will have on donors, that past campaign donations may have gone to finance the early retirement of one crooked staffer.  The RNCC is already being out-fundraised by the Democrats for the first time in history.  This probably won’t help matters.
Posted by Balphagor at 13:05:01 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Ron Paul To Drop Out of Presidential Campaign?

Ron Paul has officially dropped out of the Republican race for President.  Actually, I suspect he's been trying to drop out since Tuesday evening, but this is the first he's been able to get a reporter, any reporter, to take his calls.  If any of the press had ever paid any attention to Representative Paul, maybe he would have run more of a race.  One thing is likely:  Given his prodigious (and effortless) fundraising, a candidate from the libertarian wing of the Republicans is dead certain to run in the next open Presidential race.

CORRECTION:  Ron Paul is only "hinting" he'll drop out of the Presidential race.  What he's waiting for at this point isn't entirely clear.  John McCain has already locked up the Republican nomination.  Perhaps Rep. Paul is just carrying on running for President of the United States until he can find another country he's eligible to run for President of.  Or maybe, just maybe, he's having a hard time getting used to the idea of going back to being an obscure Congressman than no one pays any attention to after the glory days of a campaign season where he was an obscure Presidential candidate who no one paid any attention to.
Posted by Balphagor at 09:06:52 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Wednesday | March 05, 2008

Contracted Primary Season a Cure for What Ails Democrats

I knew the "3 AM" ad was good, but had no idea what an effect it would have.  Clinton's victories last night certainly mean the Democratic race goes on, but it remains enormously unlikely Senator Clinton will catch Obama in delegates or the popular vote.  There are still questions about Obama's toughness:  As long as Obama can answer those (positively), he remains close to a lock for the Democratic nomination.  But the important issue to is to address the notion a long-drawn-out Democratic primary season will hurt the Democrats and help the Republicans.  

That's just crazy.  In state after state, this race has registered lots of new voters, has energized Democrats, and turned independents into Democrats.  As long as this contest goes on, it will continue to do so.  The two "core" Democratic constituencies--blacks and women--have a finalist representing them.  And with the, frankly, poisonous and racist attacks on immigration by Republicans, not just in the past year, but in the past four years, Hispanics are energized as well, and are trending Democrat after years of moving the other way.  

Jesse Jackson's run for President in 1984 led to higher minority turnout which in turn led to Democrats going from the minority party in the US Senate to a 55-45 advantage in November of 1986.  These runs by Obama and Clinton will help build larger Democratic majorities in the US House and Senate...even if McCain should pull out a win.  All the people who voted in the Dem primaries are locked in for the general...they will not be voting Republican...which means the Democrats go into every closely contested state in November with a built-in advantage.
Posted by Balphagor at 10:23:00 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Tuesday | March 04, 2008

Texas-Sized Trouble for Republicans in the Texas General Election

The fierce campaign between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in Texas, while unlikely to affect the ultimate outcome, has produced huge crowds, and an energized electorate, in what has been the reddest of red states for the last thirty years.  Indeed, Obama has recently downscaled the size of his venues because his campaign is afraid he’s drawing too many people—potentially creating a “cult of personality” problem for himself.  Obama is the first candidate in living memory to worry about being too popular.  Few analysts take Democratic chances in the state seriously, but this year Texas is a trap for the McCain campaign:  They will have to spend money in Texas to be confident of victory, and if they don’t spend money in Texas, not only do they place all those electoral votes in potential jeopardy, but they badly damage Republican chances down-ticket in Texas.  The Democrats in Texas began to stage a comeback in 2006, largely because Republicans had artfully gerrymandered Congressional districts so they had a very narrow plurality of support in many districts, rather than huge majority support in fewer.  If the McCain campaign is missing in action in Texas, there’s going to be some Republicans in the state and federal legislatures who are in the midst of their final tour of duty.
Posted by Balphagor at 09:23:51 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Monday | March 03, 2008

The Crack Up

I don’t think it’s going to work, but I love the “3 AM” Clinton ad.  The gist of the ad is that it’s 3 a.m., your children are sleeping, and something bad is going on in the world…and who do you want in the White House to pick up the phone, Clinton or Obama?  The Clintons have obviously read their Fitzgerald.  Fitzgerald said, “In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning.”  You can find that quote in a book called, ominously for the Clintons, The Crack Up.  They understand that there are fears that awake at night that aren’t there in the light of day.  Their problem is two-fold:  They started running this ad way too late, when Democrats, if not independents and Republicans, have largely become willing, if not entirely comfortable, with the prospect of Obama taking that call.  But the main problem for the Clinton campaign is voting stations aren’t open at three o’clock in the morning.
Posted by Balphagor at 17:59:52 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

McCain's Liabilities Give Him the Edge

Early last year, John McCain was the front-runner for the Republican nomination.  His response?  He blew through close to $50 million in 6 months, and was presumed politically dead.  As an insurgent candidate, he out-campaigned, out-debated, and out-strategized his rivals, and climbed over the bodies of candidates with larges bases of support in the Republican party.  The non-scandal of his involvement with lobbyists (cue Casablanca:  “I’m shocked—shocked!—that there’s gambling” in this casino) has simultaneously solidified his base and made McCain definitively the underdog in the general election.  As a front-runner, McCain would be nearly certain to fumble the ball.  But no one in recent history has run better while the underdog.

Honestly, that’s got to be Senator Obama’s worst nightmare.  The candidate who’s raised the most money in history and has recently become the prohibitive favorite of the party that controls most of the House, the Senate, the governorships, and the state legislatures, may have a hard time portraying himself as an agent of change.  And Senator McCain, who has actually done more to change the culture of Washington than anyone else alive, can make a strong case that he is the right man to reform the country.  Normally, someone with over 25 years in office could not be an outsider or an underdog, but this election has conspired to make him so.  While the young, virile, attractive minority candidate is, amazingly, the defender of the status quo.

Which give John McCain the edge.  Because this is a “change election”, right?
Posted by Balphagor at 14:47:11 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Saturday | March 01, 2008

Two False Arguments

Every once in a while, I run into someone who thinks Barack Obama would be bad for the country as President.  They don’t target his policy prescriptions, or his seeming inability to work across the partisan divide.  No, they just attack him for inexperience.  The problem with that is that experience is an almost perfect predictor of failure in Presidencies.  Richard Nixon was a member of the House Un-American Activities Commission, and prided himself on his investigation of Alger Hiss.  Later, he trumped legitimate corruption charges against himself with the Checkers speech.  If past is prologue, he should have known better than anyone to conduct a Presidency above reproach.  That isn’t exactly what happened.  Woodrow Wilson literally wrote the book on the House of Representatives.  To this day, it remains one of the best analyses of what makes the House work, and how to interact with it.  You guessed it, his Presidency foundered over his failed relationship with Congress.  Herbert Hoover went over to the Soviet Union in the wake of World War I and their civil war, and he got food to all the people and helped the country recover from a series of hammer blows to their infrastructure.  As President, of course, he did nothing to alleviate the Great Depression, calling on charities to fix everything.  Time after time, America has had Presidents who were perfectly suited to the challenges they faced, and each of them failed disastrously.  On the other hand, you would have to go a long way before you’d find a man who was less qualified to preside over the Civil War than Abraham Lincoln, and he saved the country.

 

And then there's McCain.  The people who attack McCain inevitably frame Obama-McCain as the past versus the future.  Obviously, they think the younger person is the obvious standard-bearer of the future.  I am deeply afraid they’re right.  But if we want to believe the future will be better, then one has to place all our hopes on McCain as the future.  McCain has frequently rebelled against his party’s establishment and their (and his) self-interest simply because he thought it was the right thing to do.  McCain has an impressive record of working across party lines.  Since an early misstep, McCain has worked tirelessly to reduce the influence of money in elections.  Obama has tirelessly adhered to the party line; even on bipartisan issues, he has generally found a way to remain partisan.  One can search, fruitlessly, for any instance where Obama’s actions haven’t served his own interests and/or his party’s interests, sometimes at the expense of the country.  Obama has been absolutely orthodox in his political positions.  And for all his airs about reducing corruption and lobbyist influence, Obama’s campaign is a walking billboard for the power of money in politics.  If Obama is the future, all I can say is, go back.
Posted by Balphagor at 14:58:50 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) |

Friday | February 29, 2008

Is Obama Ready for Prime TIme?

Compared with the general election campaign, the Democratic primaries have resembled the preseason.  There is little difference between the policy prescriptions of Clinton and Obama; Senator Edwards’ lurch to the left led both leading candidates to adopt positions which were nearly carbon copies of Edwards’ own.  On defending his policy positions, and attacking those of his opponents, Senator Obama, who is now very nearly a prohibitive Democratic front-runner, remains largely untested.  The biggest fight between Obama and Senator Clinton has arisen over medical care, and on this issue, Obama’s campaign has been shamefully dishonest:  Obama has attacked Hillary for forcing people to pay for health care they can’t afford, when in fact the point of Senator Clinton’s proposal is that it offers subsidies that make health care affordable for those who couldn’t afford it before.  Obama acts as if Clinton would blight the lives of the very people she is working hardest to redeem.

The welter of half-truths the Obama camp summons to make that argument show that his campaign can go negative with the best (worst?) of them.  It also shows he’s not really ready to defend his own positions on their merits.  It may be that when he faces John McCain, he will be expected to do so.

Then again, maybe not.
Posted by Balphagor at 11:28:15 | Permanent Link | Comments (2) |

Santorum Critique of Obama

Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum has just written a column for The Philadelphia Inquirer on how Barack Obama is a left-wing ideologue with a feel-good image.  As Senator Santorum was a right-wing ideologue whose image was that his idea of a good time would be leading a lynch mob, this comes off as more than a little sour grapes.  Now that Senator Obama has shown how it’s done, you have to wonder if Santorum doesn’t wish he’d come off as a little less…cold, vicious, heartless, and needlessly cruel are the words, I guess, I was searching for.
Posted by Balphagor at 07:08:52 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |