Big Old Roundup

Items of note from the last couple weeks:

• 5 Myths About an Election of Mythic Proportions: 1. The Republican Party suffered a death blow; 2. A wave of black voters and young people was the key to Obama's victory; 3. Now that they control the White House and Congress, Democrats will usher in a new progressive era; 4. A Republican candidate could have won the presidency this year; 5. McCain made a huge mistake in picking Sarah Palin


• Ex-Lobbyists Have Key Obama Roles. The political hypocrisy continues. Is this the change people were hoping for?


• So far the Big Three bailout has been a no-go, which is a good thing. Some thoughts from Cato. And good arguments against bailing out the Big Three automakers: Here, and here (in the later, David Brooks (temporarily!) remembers he's a conservative).


• Kathleen Parker still hasn't remembered that she's a conservative.
 

• Russel Roberts, brilliant as always, argues the "credit crunch" is due to a lack of certainty, not a lack of liquidity. (Related - last Sunday on 60 minutes, Obama indicated he wanted to take an FDR-like "try things until it works" approach to the economy; that doesn't seem like it's going to help with the uncertainty - and it probably won't help generally.)


• The Washington Post discusses liberal bias. Howard Kurtz appropriately asks aren't media people supposed to resist this kind of hyperventilating?. Deborah Howell, WaPo Ombudsman, admits that "some of the conservatives' complaints about a liberal tilt are valid" and lists a slew of examples. I still don't think she fully gets it though - her article is titled "Remedying the Bias Perception," it should be titled "Remedying the Bias Problem." We're percieving it because it's real, Ms. Howell.


• The best use yet for TARP's 700 billion.


• Clintonite Rahm Emanuel. Clintonite (and lobbyist) Greg Craig. Clintonite John Podesta. Actual-Clinton Hillary Clinton. This "politics of the future" looks a lot like the politics of the past - say 1992 or so. As of 11/14, Politico points out "Thirty-one of the 47 people so far named to transition or staff posts have ties to the Clinton administration." (Smarmily: "Thanks!")


• With the Clinton pick - Some hope I can believe in for actually finishing the job in Iraq. Jonah Goldberg notes: "Obama's signature issue in the primaries was his "good judgment" to oppose the Iraq war. ... [Clinton] may have experience, he'd charge, but she lacked the wisdom to oppose the war. ... So now Barack Obama is going to appoint Hillary Clinton to be the chief architect of his foreign policy. Moreover, he picked Joe Biden to be his running mate and 'partner' in the White House explicitly because of his foreign policy experience and judgment. But wait: Joe Biden, too, supported the war".


• The Left remains extremely hard to parody. Their outrage de jour yesterday was once again Sarah Palin, this time because she had the audacity to do an interview at turkey farm, where turkey-farm-activities actually occur. I guess they never knew where animal-based food comes from? More from John Hinderaker at Powerline.


• The H. in Barack H. Obama continues, for me, to stand for hypocrite:
  "We need to focus on fixing and improving our public schools; not throwing our hands up and walking away from them.”


• For all the talk of The Right being broken, it might also be worth looking at what's happening on The Left.


• Obama the Question Mark Man

Hope, Change, and Rahm Emanuel

One of these three things is not like the others.



John Edwards likes to say there are "two Americas". I'd like to propose there are two Barack Obamas.

One is the "post-partisan" and "new politics" guy full of "hope" and "change."

The other is the partisan, far-left, cut-throat politician seen via his voting record, his policy proposals, and his campaign tactics.


A big question that now presents itself is which of these two he will turn out to be once in the White House.

I think we should all reserve final judgment until after he's sworn in and actually done some things, but the initial signs are troubling.


Obama has tapped Rahm Emanuel to be his chief of staff.

Emanuel is no post-partisan hope-and-change politician. He's a hyper-partisan, Washington-insider Democrat, famous for his foul-mouthed abrasive style.

For those looking for a new kind of politics, Rahm Emanuel is very much like a Democratic version of Karl Rove or Tom Delay.


Consider some anecdotes:

The best Rahm Emanuel story is not the one about the decomposing two-and-a-half-foot fish he sent to a pollster who displeased him. It is not about the time - the many times - that he hung up on political contributors in a Chicago mayor's race, saying he was embarrassed to accept their $5,000 checks because they were $25,000 kind of guys. No, the definitive Rahm Emanuel story takes place in Little Rock, Ark., in the heady days after Bill Clinton was first elected President.

It was there that Emanuel, then Clinton's chief fund-raiser, repaired with George Stephanopoulos, Mandy Grunwald and other aides to Doe's, the campaign hangout. Revenge was heavy in the air as the group discussed the enemies - Democrats, Republicans, members of the press - who wronged them during the 1992 campaign. Clifford Jackson, the ex-friend of the President and peddler of the Clinton draft-dodging stories, was high on the list. So was William Donald Schaefer, then the Governor of Maryland and a Democrat who endorsed George Bush. Nathan Landow, the fund-raiser who backed the candidacy of Paul Tsongas, made it, too.

Suddenly Emanuel grabbed his steak knife and, as those who were there remember it, shouted out the name of another enemy, lifted the knife, then brought it down with full force into the table.

- Elisabeth Bumiller, in the New York Times, 1997

[Chicago Democrats] captured the state Senate. This despite running a ticket made up of ward bosses' children and in-laws. I remember sitting on my couch in Chicago and thinking, "If the Democrats want to turn it around, they need to take some lessons from the machine around here. Chicago Democrats have no scruples. They treat political offices as feudal inheritances. They shake down contributors like a corrupt pope selling indulgences. They're sleazy, they're arrogant.

That night, on the northwest side, Rahm Emanuel was elected to Congress. A former Clinton whiz kid who'd gotten his start as a fundraiser for Mayor Richard M. Daley, Emanuel was connected -- in the three years after leaving the White House (where he'd helped push through NAFTA), he earned $16 million putting together Wall Street mergers. He was also zealously partisan. He had once owned a consulting business devoted to finding skeletons in Republican closets.

...

As head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he raised millions of dollars by browbeating donors and candidates with cellphone calls that invariably ended, "F*** you. I love you." Emanuel was so effective that not only did his party win back Congress, he was able to get a Chicago Tribune reporter to write a book giving him most of the credit. Naftali Bendavid, the Tribune's deputy Washington bureau chief, was given "insider access" to Emanuel's operation, expecting to write a newspaper article. When the Democrats triumphed, he expanded it into "The Thumpin': How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution."

...

Freed from the constraints of his stuffy newspaper, Bendavid is able to ratchet up the parental guidance rating from G to R, which is essential to any well-rounded profile of Emanuel. As they said about Buddy Hackett in Vegas, Emanuel works blue. "F***" is one of the most versatile words in English, but he seems to have discovered new grammatical and linguistic uses for it. Washington is "F***nutsville." A Republican congressman is a "knucklef***."

- Edward McClelland in Salon, May 2008

It's a beautiful Saturday afternoon in October, and, as Republican Representative Chris Shays drives between churches in his affluent Connecticut district, he is talking about the possibility of being knifed. "Rahm Emanuel--if I got a knife, it would be in my belly," he says, referring to the combative head of the Democratic Caucus. "With Nancy," he continues, alluding to the House speaker, "it would be in my back." He then goes on to tell a story about an encounter that took place two years ago at the House gym. At the time, Emanuel was head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which was targeting Shays--a Rockefeller Republican who represents a Democratic district--for defeat. In the gym's locker room, Shays approached Emanuel and said he was "really disappointed" that, with so many races to choose from, the DCCC had chosen to target him. Emanuel, Shays recalls, "put his hands on both shoulders, looked at me square in the eyes, and said, 'Look, with all due respect, from one friend to another, we're going to spend a f*****g three million dollars to defeat you.' That was his words. Verbatim."

- Suzy Khimm, in The New Republic, Nov. 2008

With that in mind, President-elect Obama had a shortlist of one when it came to choosing his White House Chief of Staff; Rahm Emanuel, a politician so ferocious that even his own mother calls him by his nickname of "Rahmbo".

If the Democratic Congressman accepts the job as Mr Obama's enforcer, Mr Emanuel, universally characterised as a foul-mouthed attack dog who can end the career of anyone who stands in his way, will serve as a perfect counterpoint to the sugar-coated Mr Obama.

Mr Emanuel, 48, who served as an aide to President Clinton, has proved in the past that he bows to no-one when it comes to getting the job done, as Tony Blair discovered when he visited the White House at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998.

As he prepared for a public appearance with the president, Mr Blair was warned by Mr Emanuel: "This is important. Don't **** it up."

- The Telegraph, Nov. 2008


What is more, this is a guy who, upon learning about the Mark Foley sex scandal of 2006 "shopped it around" to news outlets for political advantage rather then bring it up with the Ethics committee. [1] Then, when Emanuel learned that Foley's replacement, Tim Mahoney, was having a sex scandal of his own, he "work[ed] with Mahoney to keep the matter from hurting his re-election campaign" [2].

And then we have this from ABC News:

President-elect Barack Obama's newly appointed chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, served on the board of directors of the federal mortgage firm Freddie Mac at a time when scandal was brewing at the troubled agency and the board failed to spot "red flags," according to government reports reviewed by ABCNews.com.

According to a complaint later filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Freddie Mac, known formally as the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, misreported profits by billions of dollars in order to deceive investors between the years 2000 and 2002.

Emanuel was not named in the SEC complaint (click here to read) but the entire board was later accused by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) (click here to read) of having "failed in its duty to follow up on matters brought to its attention."

Washinton insider. Failed to stop corruption at Freddie Mac. Used one sex scandal for political gain, tried to cover up another. Plays abrasive, strong man, big money politics.

As David Keene puts it: "You might hire Rahm to blow up the bridge. I don't know if you’d hire him to build it."


Rahm Emanuel represents Washington at it's worst. This is not post-partisan. This is not change. This is not hope.

Election Postmortem

Well, at long last, the 2008 election has come and gone. It seemed like it was the campaign that would never end, and it is a bit of a relief to have it now behind us.

Obviously, as a conservative, I'm disappointed with the result of the presidential race. Which ever way it had turned out, it was clear conservatives would need to start the fight not long after the election. The difference was that we'd need to challenge McCain about 30% of the time and Obama about 70% of the time.

We can now, of course, return to our more natural state of criticizing (rather than supporting) Senator McCain.

Most right-leaning blogs have had the common courtesy of congratulating President-Elect Obama. I'm refraining to do so. I will firmly honor him as my President, as he was legitimately elected and I fully honor the office which he will hold. But I withhold my congratulations because I believe he fundamentally ran a less-than-honorable campaign that deserves rebuke, not praise. Congratulations are simply not in order when you unleash your supporters to do a character assassination in an attempt to silence a critic. This is America, we should be above thug-like campaigns.

I do wish our President-Elect the best. I hope is really is able to bring the country together and heal our political divides. I also hope he's granted the wisdom required to navigate our country's significant foreign policy challenges, and I wish him success in keeping our country safe and restoring our economy.

Realistically though, I doubt he'll have success with most of the above because I believe he'll pursue a far-left agenda that will alienate conservatives and fail to meet America's challenges. But I would be glad to be wrong. Perhaps he will govern as a moderate and/or perhaps my ideology is incorrect. I would rather be wrong and see my country prosper than vice-versa.

Finally, to the degree you hear pundits announcing the death of the GOP and conservatism, or speaking about a "mandate" to President-Elect Obama, don't bother listening to them.

Obama received only 2% more of the vote than President Bush in 2004. Bush mistakenly read his results as a "mandate" and tried to spend his "political capital" fixing social security, which promptly failed because 51-53% of the vote does not give you a strong "mandate."

Furthermore, according to exit polls 34% of Americans self identify as "conservative", the same percent as in 2004, and a full 12 points higher than those that self-identify as a "liberal."

Another thing to ignore the pundits ranting about is how this election had "record turn out." In fact, it did. But by a negligible amount. According to CNN right now, with 99% of precincts reporting, (and ignoring the about 1% of votes that went to 3rd parties in both 2004 and 2008), there have been about 122 million votes in 2008. In 2004 there were 121 million votes. I welcome one million new voters, but that's an increase of about 1% which doesn't even keep up with the rate of population growth.


A few final thoughts:

1. The polls - both exit and regular type - were pretty much dead on. This is a huge improvement from 2004.

2. The PUMA (pro-Hillary, anti-Obama) people made a lot of noise, but pretty clearly, didn't make much of an impact in the overall vote.

3. If I hear anyone moan about "why can't we just elect a 'moderate'" during the next four years, I may lose it. America - you had your chance and you made your choice. John McCain has a long history of being a moderate who works across party lines and only won the Republican nomination because of his support from independents. I suspect he will probably be the most centrist presidential candidate most will see in their lifetime. And, America, you decided against him.

4. The "Bradly Effect" is officially dead. We can all be glad about this. There are still pockets of racism in America to be confronted, but they are clearly growing more and more irrelevant.

5. I was quite glad to see the homosexual marriage bans all passed, and the losses in the House and Senate weren't quite as bad as I imagined they'd be.

6. A question: why don't we consider it racist to celebrate the fact Obama is our first black president? Wouldn't it be the actual fulfillment of King's dream to, in fact, ignore his skin color and instead judge solely on the "content of his character"? If McCain had won, we would be condemning anyone who was going around saying "Oh, thank God we elected a white man" and yet millions are saying the exact same, with only the race changed.

7. Finally, if you are a McCain supporting Evangelical in despair, allow me to encourage you. While we are here on Earth, being stewards and ambassadors, elections are important. But - I'm reminded of Michele McGinty's words to Thompson and Huckabee supporters at the end of their primary runs. Our hope comes not from an election, a president, or anything having to do with politics. Our hope is in Christ. Our God is much bigger than any of this, and He remains on the throne! In 1,000 years, we'll be in Heaven and probably laughing at how much we cared about the outcome of an election, if it's even worth our while to think about it at all. For those that believe, the most important "change" has already come!