Via the NYT and CBS. Remarkable, unprecedented.

the Interior Boomtowns (none touches the Atlantic or Pacific coasts). Their population has grown 18% in six years. They’ve had considerable immigrant inflow, 4%, but with the exceptions of Dallas and Houston, this immigrant inflow has been dwarfed by a much larger domestic inflow–three million to 1.5 million overall.

Domestic inflow has been a whopping 19% in Las Vegas, 15% in the Inland Empire (California’s Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, where much of the outflow from Los Angeles has gone), 13% in Orlando and Charlotte, 12% in Phoenix, 10% in Tampa, 9% in Jacksonville. Domestic inflow was over 200,000 in the Inland Empire, Phoenix, Atlanta, Las Vegas and Orlando. These are economic dynamos that are driving much of America’s growth. There’s much less economic polarization here than in the Coastal Megalopolises, and a higher percentage of traditional families: Natural increase (the excess of births over deaths) in the Interior Boomtowns is 6%, well above the 4% in the Coastal Megalopolises.

The nation’s center of gravity is shifting: Dallas is now larger than San Francisco, Houston is now larger than Detroit, Atlanta is now larger than Boston, Charlotte is now larger than Milwaukee. State capitals that were just medium-sized cities dominated by government employees in the 1950s–Sacramento, Austin, Raleigh, Nashville, Richmond–are now booming centers of high-tech and other growing private-sector businesses. San Antonio has more domestic than immigrant inflow even though the border is only three hours’ drive away. The Interior Boomtowns generated 38% of the nation’s population growth in 2000-06. This is another political world from the Coastal Megalopolises: the Interior Boomtowns voted 56% for George W. Bush in 2004. Texas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Nevada–states dominated by Interior Boomtowns–are projected to pick up 10 House seats in the 2010 Census.

Barone again draws the conclusion that, on balance, these shifts favor the GOP, though the picture is complicated. This is a theme we have touched on from time to time, and the subject of our favorite political map, showing the intense (and, in our opinion, unhealthy) concentration of Democratic Party donors in the media centers of the United States and a few other places.

Mickey Kaus in an early morning post notes that one blogger predicts the Republicans will pick up 10 House seats and 10 electoral votes after the 2010 census…Mickey is right to suggest that not all the new districts will go Republican. Currently, Republicans seem solidly in control of the redistricting process, with the governorships and both houses of the legislatures in Texas, Florida, and Georgia. That could conceivably change by 2010. But the biggest population gains in those states are (with the exception of Austin’s Travis County) in heavily Republican areas.

Even so, the current districting plans in those states are so heavily tilted toward Republicans that even with Republicans in control, Democrats could wind up with a new seat or two in each (as they did in Arizona, where Republicans controlled the process in 2001-02 but could not do better than replacing a 5-1 Republican plan with a 6-2 Republican plan). Additional seats in Nevada and Utah would probably be Republican, but not reliably so in Nevada. An additional seat in North Carolina could go Democratic; Democrats controlled the districting process there in 2001-02 and are in a reasonably good position to do so again in 2011-12. Bottom line: The reapportionment after the 2010 census will be good news for Republicans, but not quite as good as Influence Peddler suggests.

We’ll just wait and see.

Republicans and conservatives, brace yourselves! Strategists and consultants of both parties now believe the House is lost and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi will become speaker. At best, Republicans will cling to control of the Senate by a single seat, two at most. For many election cycles, Republicans have been the boys of October, using paid media and superior campaign skills to make up lost ground and win in November. This year, they were the boys of September, rallying strongly until that fateful day, September 29, when the Mark Foley scandal erupted. October has been a disaster…

In every election from 1994 through 2004, Republicans were more enthusiastic than Democrats. That was a decade of Republican growth. This year Democrats are more excited. And it’s measurable. In 2002, 42% of Republicans said they were more enthusiastic than usual about the election. 38% of Democrats said the same. In 2006, the numbers have flipped. Republican enthusiasm has dipped to 39% and Democratic enthusiasm has jumped to 48%. Enthusiasm affects turnout. Gloomy voters are less inclined to vote.

We note the debate between Bruce Kesler and Captain Ed on the dire predictions for next month’s election. The Powerline guys are gloomy, and Paul even casts the impending triumph of Mordor as a bit of historical inevitability. On and on it goes. Only the irrepressible Hugh Hewitt remains entirely upbeat — if they bottled his hormones, Prozac and Zoloft would go out of business.

As for us, we care what happens, of course, but we question whether there has been any fundamental shift in the electorate since 2004, when John Kerry won by 6.5 million votes in the 100 largest, mostly declining counties, but lost by 10 million votes everywhere else. We question whether the exurbs — where George Bush won 97 of the 100 fastest growing counties — have suddenly turned blue.

We’re not enthusiastic, but we sure are going to vote, early and often. The election depends entirely on who actually turns out, and we shall see about that. No amount of MSM spin or blogosphere gloom could ever keep us from voting. If there is one thing that disturbs us about Fred Barnes’ conclusion that enthusiasm carries the day, it is this: the fate of the nation’s two great legislative bodies paradoxically depends on the least engaged, least motivated among us. Now that is pretty disturbing.

As Barone said, “These numbers would have been astonishing 50 years ago and surprising 20 years ago….Left-wing anti-Israel sentiment is not confined to a few odd corners of the academic world; it has become a mass constituency in the Democratic Party.”

We also recall Bill Kristol’s statement: “the Democratic party doesn’t really want to fight jihadism. It’s just too difficult.” Unfortunately, Mr. Kristol, it appears to be worse than that. Those Americans who are pro-Israel and pro-the-fight-against-jihadism may increasingly find, like Joe Lieberman, that they do not have a natural home in the Democratic Party.

The results are said to bode ill “for the party in power.” We’ll check back periodically and see if they seem to say the same thing as the election draws closer. For now, we note this: everything in the election of 2006 depends upon turnout, and therefore, no one knows anything whatsoever at this point. Mystery Pollster said:

[K]eep in mind that the turnout in these districts in 2004 was considerably greater (roughly 14 million) than in 2002 (roughly 9 million). This year’s turnout will likely be much closer to 2002 than 2004.

He may well be correct, but no one really knows at this point, do they? 9 million? 14 million? What number is correct? Republicans won 58% of the 9 million votes, and 55% of the 14 million votes in the swing districts. Now the hope for Democrats is that raw figures from those districts show less support for Republicans. But it all comes down to which party can turn out its voters, and here is where you see some loss of Democrat bravado regarding 2006.

The WaPo says that “[t]op Democrats are increasingly concerned that they lack an effective plan to turn out voters this fall.” (HT: Powerline) One big problem from Democrats this year is that their highly vaunted 2004 GOTV program was funded to the tune of $100 million by George Soros, and that money is missing in this election cycle. The Democrats’ GOTV effort in Ohio was one of their hoped-for secrets to victory in 2004, as we have previously discussed in praising that effort. It wasn’t that Democrats fell short in 2004; it was just that the Republicans did better.

Turnout is key to the election of 2006, and nobody knows how that will play out. The GOP has drooped in the polls, but the Democratic Party may come up short in GOTV efforts. Time will tell the tale. Our belief, for what’s it worth, is that the malaise with the Republican Party is kind of a low-intensity affair (except for the wingnut brigades), and that issues like Iraq are not likely to especially motivate mainstream Democratic voters in the general election. But we know nothing more than you do.

85 percent of frequent Wal-Mart shoppers voted for President Bush’s reelection in 2004 (and 88 percent of people who never shop there voted for Sen. John Kerry)

He makes much in the piece of the fact that now these voters are far less favorable to President Bush, but that seems far less important to us than the dramatic statistics of actual reported voting patterns.

Some of the GOP advantages are recent developments, such as the database called Voter Vault, which was used to precision in the San Diego County special election. The program allows ground-level party activists to track voters by personal hobbies, professional interests, geography — even by their favorite brands of toothpaste…

Republicans have moved well ahead of Democrats nationally in their ability to find previously unaffiliated voters or even wavering Democrats and to target them with specially tailored messages. Voter Vault, although it is a closely guarded GOP trade secret, is nevertheless easily accessible to on-the-ground campaign workers and operatives should they need to mobilize votes in a hurry.

One suburban African American woman in Ohio, for example, told us that though she tends to vote Democratic, she was deluged in 2004 with calls, e-mail messages and other forms of communication by Republicans who somehow knew that she was a mother with children in private schools, an active church attendee, an abortion opponent and a golfer.

But what about her toothpaste? We must find out about her toothpaste. The secret must be in the toothpaste.

Republicans very much want to pass an immigration bill as proof their party can govern. For that reason, there is no reason to expect Senate Democrats to compromise by passing something like the House bill. Nothing very different from it has any chance of being accepted by the House. So, safely assuming that the House-Senate conference fails to produce a compromise acceptable to both houses, when Congress returns to Washington after the Labor Day recess, the House may again pass essentially what it passed in December, just to enable Republicans to campaign on the basis of a clear and recent stance against exactly what Santorum’s ad stands against.

The cost of this, paid in the coin of lost support among Latinos, the nation’s largest and fastest-growing minority, may be reckoned later, for years. Remember this: Out West, feelings of all sorts about immigration policy are particularly intense, and if John Kerry had won a total of 127,014 more votes in New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado, states with burgeoning Latino populations, he would have carried those states and won the election. But for now, the minds of Republican candidates are concentrated on a shorter time horizon — the next 4 1/2 months.

Will’s logic may be correct. Illegal immigration might be a one-way-street issue. If you take the Krauthammer position (border control now, other issues humanely adjudicated next year), maybe the GOP loses Latino votes and Democrats win over the long term. But is it really that simple?

We’ve argued the point of view previously that the illegal immigration issue should be scored dynamically, not statically. There are perhaps significant numbers of votes to be gained from Democrats by taking a “border control first” position. Maybe that is an incorrect assumption; maybe it is not. But why do we never hear this argument mentioned by pundits who frame the issue as short-term GOP gain versus long-term GOP loss?

UPDATE

A pretty distinguished group says, “Trust, but verify” first.

Sixty-five months into Bush’s presidency, conservatives feel betrayed. After the “Bridge to Nowhere” transportation bill, the Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination and the Dubai Ports World deal, the immigration crisis was the tipping point for us. Indeed, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found last week that Republican disapproval of Bush’s presidency had increased from 16 percent to 30 percent in one month. It is largely the defection of conservatives that is driving the president’s poll numbers to new lows….

For all of conservatives’ patience, we’ve been rewarded with the botched Hurricane Katrina response, headed by an unqualified director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which proved that the government isn’t ready for the next disaster. We’ve been rewarded with an amnesty plan for illegal immigrants. We’ve been rewarded with a war in Iraq that drags on because of the failure to provide adequate resources at the beginning, and with exactly the sort of “nation-building” that Candidate Bush said he opposed.

But the dissatisfaction of conservatives goes well beyond particular policy prescriptions. Jed Babbin said it well:

Whatever Clinton said – and he said a lot, almost none of it making any sense or speaking any truth – we reflexively tore into him and his feckless policies. The Clinton era taught us that the faster and more accurate the reaction, the greater the chance of turning the political momentum in our direction. We trained our noses to detect the faintest odor of baloney and reduced our reaction time to the tenths of a second it takes to hit the speed dial on our cell phones.

George W. Bush was never a small government conservative, but we were willing to put up with the bad because it was outweighed by the good he was doing against terrorists. Our habit of cutting Mr. Bush a lot of slack was eroding under the burdens of hundreds of billions in pork and the lack of productive congressional action. It ended abruptly with his announcement of the Harriett Miers nomination to the Supreme Court. It took us less time to figure out why Miers was awful than it did the bloggers to determine that Dan Rather’s Texas Air National Guard documents were forgeries. By the time we were reading the White House’s advance excerpts of the Monday night speech -less than an hour before it was delivered – we’d already concluded that it was another Miers Moment. The reflexive conservative opposition to Clinton is now resurrecting itself and turning against President Bush.

Much of what the president said Monday made good sense. We need to control the border and – given the fact we’ve made too little progress in the past five years – it won’t be done over night. And we can’t throw ten or twelve million people out of our country, so we need to make sure that those who stay become Americans in the traditional sense, or are given some non-citizen status that serves our mutual purposes. If Mr. Bush had said that this year we’ll control our borders and next year deal with guest worker and citizenship issues, he’d have conservatives rallying around him. But he didn’t.

This is exactly correct. Bush’s five-point plan began (via Lou Dobbs): “First, the United States must secure its borders.” Then he proceeded to not do it — indeed he did precisely the opposite. Instead of taking effective steps to secure the border, he served up some warmed over mush about a few National Guardsmen and a bit of fencing. His insincerity was bold, incandescent, and sad.

Trust was the coin of the realm for Bush with the conservative base. They were willing to put up with a lot because they had faith in him as a person, often attributing his mistakes to bad advice or grand strategy or knowledge (particularly on war matters) that was confidential. Lose trust and those excuses get blown away like leaves in a fall storm. He has lost it.

Now the question is whether the GOP senators and congressmen themselves will get blown away like those leaves in the fall.

UPDATE

This immigration issue is of great consequence, and demands honest debate above all other considerations. Mark Helprin in the WaPo:”To what extent is economic advantage sufficient to justify the consequences of the evolving common-law marriage with the countries and cultures of Latin America?…it is a great question, to which the answer must be given by the whole people.” Mark Steyn in the Sun-Times: “In Europe, the political class sowed the seeds of massive social upheaval for the most short-sighted of reasons. If America’s political class wants to do the same, it could at least have the integrity to discuss the issue in honest terms.” That the President dissembled in such an important matter is a mistake of the first order.

UPDATE II

Kate O’Beirne:

A large number of House Republicans could support a well-regulated guest worker program, with a more secure border and a workable workplace enforcement program, but they have no confidence the president’s recent commitment to serious enforcement measures matches their own.

The list of the people who simply do not believe the President get longer and more serious when it includes “a large number of House Republicans.” Don’t blame us, folks, for merely noticing what is going on.

UPDATE III

We’ll take an opportunity to be ecumenical in our criticisms, though we perhaps too pick too easy a target when we name Harry Reid. His characteriztion of English as the national language being “racist” takes it place in his long line of intellectually and morally challenged statements, from Bush being a “loser” to the inability of Clarence Thomas to write and reason. Roger Simon covers the points we’d make very well. What an icky fellow Reid must be.

Here’s what the experts are saying, via AP:

“It’s a case of middle class flight, a flight for housing affordability,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “But it’s not just white middle class flight, it’s Hispanics and blacks, too.”…

Richard Florida, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, said smaller, wealthier households are replacing larger families in many big metropolitan areas. That drives up housing prices even as the population shrinks, chasing away even more members of the middle class. “Because they are bidding up prices, they are forcing some people out to the exurbs and the fringe,” Florida said. “Other people are forced to make moves in response to that. I don’t have any sense of this abating.”

We have previously cited Mr. Frey’s work which showed that the Sun Belt states are moving from a 4 vote edge in the electoral college in 1972 to a projected 146 vote edge by 2030. This latest report, and the comments by Professor Florida, seem to suggest that it is the younger, larger families that are leaving the big cities in droves, which is certainly consistent with George Bush’s winning 97 of the 100 fastest growing counties in the nation in 2004. Do these migration trends mean that the bluest areas will get even bluer, and the red areas redder?

UPDATE

Jayson at Polipundit supplied the following interesting information:

Here are the current partisan breakdowns of the latter three states’ respective U.S. House delegations:

California: Dems, 33-19.
New York: Dems, 19-10.
Illinois: Dems, 10-9.

On the other hand, here are the U.S. House delegations for the states to which people with jobs or job prospects and families have been moving in droves:

Florida: GOP, 18-7.
Arizona: GOP, 6-2.
Nevada: GOP, 2-1.

These data tend to confirm that red getting redder and blue getting bluer hypothesis, at least at first glance.

As for aid to Hamas, once they renounce, get rid of, and remove from children’s textbooks, this map, then maybe it would be appropriate to discuss aid (the pathetic gymnastics of EU diplomats notwithstanding).

“The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side”

We don’t care much one way or the other about Julian Bond, who has previously compared the GOP to the Taliban. But we wonder about the political calculation of his remarks. The GOP has come to control the House, the Senate, the Presidency, and the majority of governorships since 1994, meaning that a majority of Americans vote Republican. Bond’s comments may please his audience, but what is the point of insulting the majority of Americans? In what possible way can this be smart politics?

These critics often cite low figures on the Iraq war and the “right direction / wrong direction” question to buttress their views. In doing so, their become willful participants in their own self-delusion. Regarding the Iraq War, the critics fail to note that a substantial number of those dissatisfied with the War want America to use its full military might to lay waste the enemy and come home. According to a Rasmussen poll, 82% of Republicans and 52% of Democrats have wanted the US to use the same or greater force in fighting in Iraq. The critics should be even more careful in drawing any conclusions from the question about the country’s diection. As we reported in November 2004, the last CBS / NY Times poll prior to that election showed a full 55% of Americans who believed the country was on the wrong track, and they elected Bush at the very same moment.

This is a further problem with the polls. These popularity polls misrepresent reality in that there is not a contest of alternatives. Maybe the country is weary of George Bush, but weary enough to prefer Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Howard Dean or a MoveOn anti-war Democrat? We ask the question because Bush appears to be in campaign mode, if this speech at Kansas State is any indication. Bush’s position about the NSA reflects the majority and common sense view of the issue in America, but more than that, his plain speaking highlights the strange ways his opponents talk about the issue.

Let me talk about one other program — and then I promise to answer questions — something that you’ve been reading about in the news lately. It’s what I would call a terrorist surveillance program. After the enemy attacked us, and after I realized that we were not protected by oceans, I asked people that work for you — work for me, how best can we use information to protect the American people? You might remember there was hijackers here that had made calls outside the country to somebody else, prior to the September the 11th attacks. And I said, is there anything more we can do within the law, within the Constitution, to protect the American people. And they came back with a program, designed a program that I want to describe to you. And I want people here to clearly understand why I made the decision I made.

First, I made the decision to do the following things because there’s an enemy that still wants to harm the American people. What I’m talking about is the intercept of certain communications emanating between somebody inside the United States and outside the United States; and one of the numbers would be reasonably suspected to be an al Qaeda link or affiliate. In other words, we have ways to determine whether or not someone can be an al Qaeda affiliate or al Qaeda. And if they’re making a phone call in the United States, it seems like to me we want to know why.

This is a — I repeat to you, even though you hear words, “domestic spying,” these are not phone calls within the United States. It’s a phone call of an al Qaeda, known al Qaeda suspect, making a phone call into the United States. I’m mindful of your civil liberties, and so I had all kinds of lawyers review the process. We briefed members of the United States Congress, one of whom was Senator Pat Roberts, about this program. You know, it’s amazing, when people say to me, well, he was just breaking the law — if I wanted to break the law, why was I briefing Congress? (Laughter and applause.)

Federal courts have consistently ruled that a President has authority under the Constitution to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance against our enemies. Predecessors of mine have used that same constitutional authority. Recently there was a Supreme Court case called the Hamdi case. It ruled the authorization for the use of military force passed by the Congress in 2001 — in other words, Congress passed this piece of legislation. And the Court ruled, the Supreme Court ruled that it gave the President additional authority to use what it called “the fundamental incidents of waging war” against al Qaeda.

I’m not a lawyer, but I can tell you what it means. It means Congress gave me the authority to use necessary force to protect the American people, but it didn’t prescribe the tactics. It’s an — you’ve got the power to protect us, but we’re not going to tell you how. And one of the ways to protect the American people is to understand the intentions of the enemy. I told you it’s a different kind of war with a different kind of enemy. If they’re making phone calls into the United States, we need to know why…

We do, in fact, understand the George Bush isn’t running in 2008, and that speeches such as the one at Kansas State are, among other things, part of the continuing Bush/Rove strategy to nationalize midterm elections (Rove’s speech here). However, potential Republican candidates in 2008 would do well to remember that running away from core Bush positions is not necessarily a good strategy.

UPDATE

John McIntyre of RCP has some related thoughts. We’ll add one more point. It seems to us incredibly stupid for Democratic lawmakers to complain about the President doing “illegal” things with the NSA when the majority of people would choose to change the law (and the complaining lawmakers?) rather than the President’s actions.

We think, for example, that Morris’s riff about Americans’ being isolationist — based on ten year old polling data in a pre-9/11 world — is more provocative than correct. We have written that the more correct explanation of the Iraq polling data is that a good chunk of Americans would just as soon see us lay waste the country to destroy the enemy and provide a clear warning to the rest of the world, then come home. You can call that a kind of isolationism if you like.

Midterm elections are often and usually about local candidates and local issues, and fatigue with the status quo. 1994 and 2002 were notable exceptions where national issues were paramount. We don’t know what will be the case in 2006, because none of the real-world events of 2006 have happened yet. However, we continue to believe that a main feature of 2006 and 2008 will be the War of the New Media and MSM, now that the battle has been fully and openly joined by both sides.

The New Media has seen its power increase mightily over the last decade, but part of that is because the MSM have not taken the New Media particularly seriously. This has now changed. The MSM still write the elevator music for American society, and it has been a non-stop funeral dirge (see Thomas Lifson) for the last two years, on everything from the war to the economy to, well, everything. We do not think the Gang of 500 underestimate the New Media today in the same way that they did back in 1994, to their surprise and dismay back then. The MSM view everything in America as bad as long as Democrats are not in power, and provide a 24/7 bombardment of this propaganda as the background music of our daily lives; we are going to find out to what extent this relentless negativity can still influence the votes of the American people.

But don’t you feel it too — the exhaustion, the now mindless oppositionism? Dots unconnected; that’s a breach. Connect the dots and you’re impeached. There was Enron and al Qa Qaa, Cindy Sheehan and Joe Wilson, MoveOn warnings and global warming, NSA and CIA, phone call scanning and no war planning, museums flattened and oil profits fattened, Club Ghraib and Abu Gitmo, Roe v. Wade versus Roadside Bomb, planted military questions and Jordan’s targeting suggestions, 2000 of us and 100K of them, black churches burning and old people starving, Gore votes stolen and Ohio machines hidden, Swift Boats lying and Rather memos trying, anti-Hispanic and minorities must panic, no end to torture and no beginning to cloture, Katrina marauders and dike-blowing orders, Abramoff and DeLay ripoff, Murtha and Pelosi and Dean and Defeat, Durbin and Shumer and Ted and Retreat, MTV and WMD, vote or die and lie, lie, lie. There were Ashcroft and Bolton, Cheney molten, Rummy verboten. Today it’s Alito, the civil rights bandito. Tomorrow it’ll be something else.

Not only was everything the work of the stupidest, evilest genius ever, but every act of his — every thought, word, and deed — was worse than the last, was the end of the Republic, and would hunt down and kill every woman and minority, even worse than they were killed by the last evil plot of Chimpy. And when it didn’t happen, the wash-rinse-spin cycle was repeated for the next event or decision.

Here’s the crux of the matter: the relentless and mindless attack strategy serves to obscure real weak points of the GOP in the cloud of constant criticism, and it has prevented the Democrats from responding to the real “crime” of the GOP. The Republican crime is this, and it is specifically a crime of Karl Rove and George Bush: they have been plotting and executing the extermination of the Democratic Party. The GOP strategy has been clear and on display: keep the base, including the religious and the tax-cutters, fully committed; try to forge a broad majority on defense issues; attempt to use wedge issues to good effect, like the 2002 Iraq vote or remaking the judiciary in line with the large conservative plurality in the country; steal or inoculate against Democrat issues like Social Security, Medicare and Education; and collect just enough votes from minorities and the elderly to render impotent the New Deal / Great Society coalition. The Bush strategy is not some stealth deal to rip off the polity for temporary gain; it is rather the first majoritarian strategy that the GOP has had since McKinley.

The best Democrat strategy would be to appear: strong on defense, pro-religion, pro-growth, and always be for the little guy, each a 60% issue, not the 40% issues they have chosen. (Many issues could be framed costlessly in easy symbols: it would cost Democrats almost nothing to be pro-creche and pro-Commandments; Bill Clinton understood the uses of symbolism, to the dismay of Ricky Ray Rector.) But, tragically, that appears no longer possible for the Democratic Party, which is now the party of the intelligentsia and the super-rich. When your only winning educational demographics are high school dropouts and PhD’s, that should tell you something. When you have become the Party in which 5 people give $78 million and can thereby define a major portion of your message and media strategy, you risk being all spokes and no hub. The spokes have come to define the Democrat Party, not by a positive program, but by opposition to Republican policies, whether in defense, taxes, military affairs, religion, abortion, etc.

Oppositionism has come to define the Democratic Party. Whatever Republicans and Bush are for, they are against. And the saddest truth for Democrats, no matter what elections they manage to win, is this: oppositionism is one hallmark of a minority party.

UPDATE

No matter how low you sink, you can still go lower in the modern Left. Here’s a university professor proving it, be comparing Tookie Williams to Martin Luther King. (HT: Powerline)

UPDATE II

One open and important question is how powerful the MSM remain today in red-trending America. The New Media have been on the rise for well over a decade now, and have helped fuel the shift to the GOP. What are the limits to their market penetration, particularly now, since the MSM have shed their veneer of neutrality in favor of a more overt partisan stance on behalf of the Democratic Party? We just don’t know yet, though this is one of the serious issues in play for 2006 and 2008. Thomas Lifson at The American Thinker has some interesting reflections on matters related to these questions.

We do not want to write a review, but make only a couple of observations. First, the 400 page book devotes less than a dozen pages to the issues and election of 1994 (discussed here by us), in which power shifted dramatically, with 52 Democrat incumbents losing, and 73 Republican freshmen winning seats in the House of Representatives. We believe that understanding the New Media is important to understanding that election, and in this the book fails entirely. (Jacksonians and Walter Russell Mead do not make it into the book as well, but we don’t want to go off in that direction.)

Instead, let’s refer to the analysis of that election provided back then by Mother Jones(!):

[T]alk to the 73 Republican freshmen. They attribute their stunning victory to Rush Limbaugh, citing polls that show people who listen to talk radio 10 hours or more per week voted Republican 3-to-1.

Limbaugh is the national precinct captain for the Republican Party. And he works the precinct hard, five days a week, three hours a day. Like an electronic ward boss, Limbaugh explains the issues, offers the conservative GOP spin, rallies the faithful, and turns out the voters. It is a virtuoso performance, his harangue leavened by bursts of rock ‘n’ roll, bad-boy jokes, and moments of self-deprecating humor. It was no mistake that the Republican freshmen anointed Rush the “majority-maker” and inducted him as an honorary member of the 104th Congress at their orientation last December.

Another guy who started out in radio, Ronald Reagan, recognized Limbaugh’s importance back in 1992, when he declared Rush “the number one voice for conservatism in our country.” But the Democrats have been in denial. Before the Republican landslide last November, Democratic strategists shrugged off Limbaugh’s clout. “People who listen to the radio in the morning are normal people,” declared Clinton political adviser Paul Begala. “People who listen to Limbaugh in the afternoon are has-been, shut-in malcontents. I don’t pay much attention to right-wing, foam-at-the-mouth radio because they just talk to each other. It’s 20 million people telling each other how they hate Hillary.” It’s also 20 million voters, energized and mobilized by Mr. Limbaugh, as a chastened Begala discovered….. When it comes to defining their enemy, Democrats are stuck in a time warp.

For all their discussion of the grassroots nature of American conservatism, the authors of The Right Nation, Micklethwait and Wooldridge, also seem to be stuck in a time warp of sorts. They give no coverage to the vastly important 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, and give no mention whatsoever to talk radio other than a few mentions of Limbaugh. They commit the classic mistake of defining “dittohead” incorrectly (p. 112), and lump “Rush Limbaugh and the blondes at Fox News” together (p. 215). As for the blogosphere, it doesn’t exist. Andrew Sullivan gets a mention, but the Instapundit suffers the indignity of having his named misspelled (p. 164). It appears evident that the authors never bothered to listen to talk radio or use the blogosphere — hardly a good approach to getting a comprehensive understanding of the Right Nation. The final indignity is getting Scott Ott’s Axis of Weasels wrong (p. 216).

Perhaps we are being picky in expecting gentlemen who spend time discussing “the illusion of prelapsarian innocence” (p. 389) to venture into the lower precincts of the New Media. On the other hand, doing so may just have made Micklethwait and Wooldridge more than excellent observers of the American conservative scene — perhaps they would have become converts.

If Zarqawi is calling or emailing people in the United States from Iraq, should the US be surveilling these people ASAP, with or without FISA authorization or notification? Should the NSA intercept program be scuttled? Should the US cease using geiger counters in any locations in the US to detect rogue nuclear material?

We await the responses to these unasked questions, and the comments of the Democratic leadership on just what they would do. Or are these matters just like Iraq — ones where there is no unified Democratic Party position. In the words of Nancy Pelosi, “There is no one Democratic voice . . . and there is no one Democratic position.” These geiger counters are outrageous! This listening to Zarqawi’s phone calls is outrageous! What would we Democrats do? Um, er, Bush lied!, and he controls all the branches of government; it’s not up to us to have a plan. (HT: Powerline)

UPDATE

On second thought, the Democratic Party does have a unified official position, as we have previously said: Nag, nag, nag.

UPDATE II

A letter to the NY Post from a reader, via Hugh Hewitt:

I offer a proposal: The U.S. military will withdraw from Iraq, the Patriot Act will not be renewed and the United States will stop monitoring phone calls by potential terrorists. In return, if there is another terrorist attack on the United States, the Democratic Party will disband and contribute all of its assets to the families of victims, all Democratic senators and congressmen will resign and The New York Times will contribute $1 trillion to the fund for the families. Fair deal?

Richard Slawsky, Milford, Conn.

UPDATE III

Mickey Kaus: I wouldn’t be all that upset if the Feds ran every damn phone call through the Echelon-style NSA computers. Do you have a problem with that?

To put it in the simplest and starkest terms: in that early stage of the Revolutionary War, there was sound reason to fear that the British would succeed in routing Washington’s forces. In Iraq today, however, and in the Middle East as a whole, a successful outcome is staring us in the face. Clearly, then, the panic over Iraq—which expresses itself in increasingly frenzied calls for the withdrawal of our forces—cannot have been caused by the prospect of defeat. On the contrary, my twofold guess is that the real fear behind it is not that we are losing but that we are winning, and that what has catalyzed this fear into a genuine panic is the realization that the chances of pulling off the proverbial feat of snatching an American defeat from the jaws of victory are rapidly running out.

Whether Podhoretz is correct or not remains to be seen, though we suspect he is correct. His essay performed an additional service for us, because he quoted the famous and stirring words of Thomas Paine. In all our years on this earth, we have never once bothered to read anything by this fellow (shame on us), who seems to have lived his life like a fly-in-the-ointment, pebble-in-the-shoe kind of guy. Sometimes having a perspective like that is useful to seeing things clearly, and he seemed particularly acute to us discussing the panic that he saw in America a mere five months after the Declaration of Independence:

[P]anics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before. But their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered. In fact, they have the same effect on secret traitors, which an imaginary apparition would have upon a private murderer. They sift out the hidden thoughts of man, and hold them up in public to the world. Many a disguised Tory has lately shown his head…

“Their duration is always short.” That might be an interesting thing to test. And wouldn’t you know it, a test case has presented itself: the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate. Here’s what John Kerry said in December 2003, via Rick Richman:

I fear that in the run-up to the 2004 election, the administration is considering what is tantamount to a cut-and-run strategy. Their sudden embrace of accelerated Iraqification and American troop withdrawal dates, without adequate stability, is an invitation to failure. The hard work of rebuilding Iraq must not be dictated by the schedule of the next American election. I have called for the administration to transfer sovereignty, and they must transfer it to the Iraqi people as quickly as circumstances permit. But it would be a disaster and a disgraceful betrayal of principle to speed up the process simply to lay the groundwork for a politically expedient withdrawal of American troops.

Here is an AP account of what the man said yesterday at the CFR:

The United States needs to reduce its forces in Iraq by “at least 100,000″ by the end of 2006, sending a message to the Middle East that Americans are not interested in maintaining a permanent military presence in that country, Sen. John Kerry said Thursday. In a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations, the former Democratic presidential contender said the goal should be to have a force of 30,000 to 40,000 in Iraq by the end of next year….Thursday’s comments appear to be the first in which he has set a specific target for the end of 2006. “I believe you could get at least 100,000 out over that period of time,” he said during a question and answer session following his speech.

So if Paine is correct that the duration of panics is always short, we should see a reversal of Kerry’s position in the next year. On second thought, Kerry is a bad test case, since he might well change his position as early as today. Indeed, we will watch whether he walks away from that 100,000 figure he mentioned yesterday; we note that that number never appears in the written text of his speech.

UPDATE

The problem with Kerry is that we’ll never know what the reason for a flip-flop might be. Howard Dean is much the better test case. December 5 had the idea of victory “just plain wrong.” By yesterday that had morphed to the (hopefully) stonger-sounding “strategic redeployment.” Within a few days, we expect some focus-grouped new phrase that sounds even stronger, so that imperiled Democrats in close House races are comforted.

Dean’s reason for panic is genuine enough, at least. The Democratic Party is riven, with its anti-war and fund-raising heart in irreconcilable conflict with the needs of its House members from red-leaning districts. As Dean himself admitted: “The press wants to focus on the differences. The differences are pretty small, perhaps Senator Lieberman excepted.” But they are the differences that dare not speak their name.

To remind you of the seriousness of this problem in the Democratic Party, we return to a post we wrote in April. As Michael Barone noted, there are many House Democrats from strong Bush districts, while only a few Republicans from strong Kerry districts (this new GOP ad seems to underscore this point):

As for the House, we now know which presidential candidate carried each of the 435 congressional districts…..Bush carried 255 districts and John Kerry only 180. In all, 41 Democrats represent Bush districts and 18 Republicans represent Kerry districts. Eliminating the districts where the House member’s presidential candidate won 47 percent or more, we find only five Republicans in strong Kerry districts but 30 Democrats in strong Bush districts.

Which panic do you prefer? Dean’s panic over losing his job by not pandering to the big money, anti-war base? Or the panic of House Democrats from conservative red districts? No need to choose: you can have both.

UPDATE II

As predicted, Dean’s handlers and the focus groups at DNC central have patched the old boy up. Now the line is that we can win the war on terror, but Bush has screwed up Iraq. Yeah, that’ll work. That’ll fool the rubes! Yeah, great thinking! (via AP)

“We can and we must win the war on terror,” Dean told attendees at the Florida Democratic Party convention. “A smarter, more honest strategy that respects our troops and our military leaders is possible. And I believe our course is far more likely to defeat terror than the Bush administration’s failed policy in Iraq.”

Dean called for bringing home all 50,000 National Guard troops stationed in Iraq within six months, redeploying 20,000 troops from Iraq to Afghanistan and assigning several thousand anti-terror troops in countries around Iraq.

“Strategic redeployment addresses a broader battle against global terrorist networks. We need to re-engage our allies and a military realignment of our troops will make our forces stronger and save American lives,” Dean said.

Expect further nuances and adjustments from the “reality based” Dean and DNC.

The programs to which that article makes reference were begun in 1994 under Saint Bill. They targeted: New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Baltimore. Only one of those cities – New Yawk – has shown any distinct improvement in the quality of its citizens’ lives. Not coincidentally, only one of those cities – New Yawk – has had fiscally-conservative and law & order Republicans running the show over the past 12 years.

Detroit, Philly and Baltimore not only have not improved they’ve regressed in many respects. And, no, you can’t blame that solely on GM and Ford. Last I checked Philly and Baltimore are not and never have been prime hubs of the U.S. auto industry. Yet both cities are paradigms of urban blight. Unlike New York City, Philly and Baltimore were run (into the ground) by Democrats over the time frame in question: Ed Rendell and John Street (Philly) and Tommy D’Alessandro, Jr. and Martin O’Malley (Baltimore)….

There’s not a chance the liberal media or liberal academia ever will make the raTHer-obvious connection between political voting patterns and blight, high crime rates, poorly-performing schools, widespread joblessness, and high unemployment rates.

There’s also no chance the liberal media/academia cartel ever will explain to the general public that the reason things always are so bleak in big Democrat cities in which liberal policies predominate – e.g., “living wages,” “rent control,” “gun control,” high sales taxes, racial quotas for public hiring and contracting, strict scrutiny of law enforcement by “citizens groups” – is because of those liberal policies themselves.

Leftism as public policy doesn’t work.

It never has worked.
Anywhere.

Polipundit adds to the mix by showing the infuriating positive correlation between tax cuts and accelerating economic growth. But dontcha understand? — Bush lied! he LIED!!

Pew has been using the same methodology for its study since at least 1993; you can see the summary here and the complete report here. Pew chose the same “opinion leader” types in 1993 that they did in 2005, despite the fact that some of those opinions have been in rather pronounced decline. It looks like they failed to note that a number of things changed in 1994, and that conservative thought and electoral success have been in somewhat of a bull market since then, as we have written. So we can perhaps pardon them for simply doing again what they have always done. A couple of quotes from Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which we cited in a previous piece, might be apt:

In a sense I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. (p. 150)….The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced….

Darwin, in a particularly perceptive passage at the end of his Origin of Species, wrote: “Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume…, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are shocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine….[B]ut I look with confidence to the future, — to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to look at both sides of the question with impartiality.”

And Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” (p. 151)

Of course we are talking about politics, not science, but it is surely true that most people keep believing and practicing the things they have always known; change is a difficult and slow process. We’ll conclude with a quote from Roger Simon which captures both the idea of stubborn allegiances and the possible momentousness of change when it happens. He was writing of the November 2004 election results:

The Democrats lost in the last election much more seriously than is commonly understood. A swing of three million votes is gigantic in our society where party allegiances are formed in childhood and reinforced by an omnipresent media. We can see the primitiveness of these allegiances in the remaining popularity of Howard Dean, a man who a very few years ago presented himself as a pro-gun centrist, jumping around like a re-upped version of Jerry Rubin to appeal to a segment of the Democratic Party that hasn’t changed one view about anything in thirty-five years. But… and here’s the crux… these people are not that exceptional. Few of us change our views over a lifetime.

Yet, three million did.

We started this piece with the intention to cut Pew some slack. It does not appear intentional that they cited as opinion leaders people who immediately raised red flags for conservative commentators. Pew simply applied the same methodology that they have for years to an opinion survey. However, we’ll cut them only limited slack. It is not unfair to ask a polling and public opinion organization to note when significant changes occur, and make appropriate adjustments to those who count as opinion leaders. After all, public opinion is their business.

We have had problems with Pew before (examples here and here), so we thought it might be interesting to take a look at the can of worms opened by John Hinderaker. There are plenty of problems, but we will only mention one, because we can only stand looking at this relentless assault on common sense for a limited time.

The chart below says that by a huge margin — 71/20 — regular Americans think that there should be restrictions on student visas in the interest of security. This is not surprising considering that the 9-11 terrorists came into the US on valid (though outlandish) visas, including student visas.

For the purposes of our inquiry today, we want to focus on only one tiny bit of the chart. You will notice that 72% of opinion leaders in the field of “security” oppose restrictions on student visas. Who are these fellows, we asked. Are they the same folks who are employing the ex-military people in Iraq? Are they heads of corporate security departments for nuclear utilities, petrochemical companies, or bio-tech firms? It seemed to us absurd that leaders in the security industries would oppose greater restrictions on student visas. But that is not at all who they are. It turns out that opinion leaders in the “security” field are not hands-on professionals, but 58 people affiliated with a think tank previously unknown to us, the International Institute for Strategic Studies. As Pew said:

Security
The Security sample was randomly selected from a list of American members of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

We have nothing whatsoever against the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Its governing Council includes some distinguished persons. Our objection is to Pew calling this group its “opinion leaders” in the field of security. What the IISS seems to do is to produce studies and hold yack sessions at high priced watering holes — sessions that notably include our enemies. Here’s one, courtesy of the IISS’s own website:

THE fight against terrorism in the region will top the agenda of the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ (IISS) second Gulf Dialogue next month. The three-day strategic defence conference will open at the Ritz-Carlton Bahrain Hotel and Spa on December 2.

Regional and International government officials at the ministerial level, including defence, interior and national security advisers, as well as scholars and academicians, will be taking part in the event. In addition to the GCC countries, the countries taking part are Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Singapore, France, Russia, the UK and the US. Joining them for the first time this year are China, India and Germany, according to sources…..

The keynote address will be by Crown Prince and BDF Commander-in-Chief Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa. Yemeni Interior Minister Major General Dr Rashad Mohammed Al Alimi and Iraqi National Security Adviser Dr Kassim Daoud will speak on challenges to counter-terrorism policy in the Gulf….. Saudi Foreign Affairs Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal, Kuwaiti National Security Bureau President Shaikh Sabah Khaled Al Hamad Al Sabah, French presidential adviser Maurice Gourdault-Montagne and Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Research Ali Reza Moayeri will discuss a new framework for regional security.

Yup, that’s the front lines for leaders in the “security” field, the Ritz Carlton in Bahrain, listening to an address from the Yemeni Interior minister.

Clearly, this Pew Survey is almost meaningless. If you choose liberal and internationalist organizations to find your opinion leaders, you have selected in advance a group guaranteed to give you liberal results. You might just as well ask this group its opinions on abortion, gun control, taxes, or gay marriage. Indeed, Pew should have asked questions of that nature to determine if those they selected were opinion leaders in any sense whatsoever — or merely a bunch of liberal elitists whose views did not match mainstream America on any issue at all. Hinderaker had a few suggestions for Pew to improve the objectivity of its “polling:”

It would be interesting to do a similar survey, but with a different selection of respondents. Military leaders, for example, could be officers who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Religious leaders could be chairmen or presidents of local congregations. “Leading” engineers could be those who have headed major engineering projects within the last twelve months. And so on. Admittedly, there probably isn’t any definition of leadership that would salvage academia or the press, but I think almost any academic group would be closer to the center than “officers of the most competitive schools.”

We concur, and wonder if anyone at Pew even considered that their sample of opinion leaders was dramatically skewed leftward. We are willing to bet that even such rudimentary self-awareness is lacking.

We believe we witnessed yesterday, in the debate and vote on the Murtha Iraq withdrawal concept, a telling moment in this shift in the American consensus. The vote against immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq was 403 – 3, virtually unanimous. You might ask yourself why there would be extreme and heated debate over a unanimous resolution, and that would be a good question. The answer is of course that those on the Left felt compelled to vote against something they profoundly agreed with. As always, the MSM are helpful in illuminating issues like this: both the WaPo and the NYT led their stories with the bitterness of the debate. The Post got around to mentioning the actual vote total in paragraph three; the NYT waited until paragraph six. To them the big story was the fight, not the vote; that suits their purposes and buttresses their self-esteem.

In our view, the big story is that the Left felt so powerless, they couldn’t vote their consciences on the number one issue they have been trumpeting non-stop for two years. Polipundit adressed Democrats on the Left this way: “Your leaders are true cowards. Not only do they want to cut and run from Iraq; they’re too cowardly to say so on the record. Even Senate Republicans have more spine than that.” Less spine than Senate Republicans — now that is a low blow indeed. But Congressional Democrats have not always been so spineless in going on the record with their anti-war sentiments. As Mel Laird put it in the most recent Foreign Affairs: “The truth about Vietnam that revisionist historians conveniently forget is that the United States had not lost when we withdrew in 1973. In fact, we grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory two years later when Congress cut off the funding for South Vietnam that had allowed it to continue to fight on its own.” In 1975 Congress was bold and proud in its anti-war convictions.

For all the wishing on the part of the Left and the MSM, 2005 is not the reincarnation of 1975, and we are not living in a rerun of the second term of the Nixon administration. Scootergate is not Watergate, and in the current play, Bob Woodward is a villain not a hero (as the Captain memorably has written). The true sentiments of the Left emerge from time to time in unvarnished form such as the Durbin incident, but for the most part the Left has to pretend that they like the military they actually despise. The fundamentally pro-military attitude of Americans (at least 74%, as we have written) has profound implications for the Left.

So what happens now? Our best guess is more of the same. We frankly would not be surprised if some Democrats, as early as the Sunday political programs, renew their calls for an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq, as if the vote had never taken place. The odds are that they would not even be sternly questioned about taking such a ridiculous position.

The Left is in a profound crisis, a crisis which they have as yet failed to recognize. They are living in a country in which they are outnumbered 3 to 2 by conservatives, and they refuse to consciously recognize that the liberal position is no longer the default position in American public opinion, even as they are forced to cast humiliating votes. The religion of the Left has failed to capture the hearts of America. Their religion has failed, but it’s all they have. Imagine a young man at a madrassa in Pakistan who wakes up one day to discover that he no longer believes the Koran to be literally true. He still carries on with lessons and prayers, perhaps all the louder and more fervently. The Left too has its playbook; it is all they have. So one should expect more of the same, perhaps louder and more fervently.

The Left is to politics as General Motors is to the auto industry. As we wrote last summer:

The Democratic Party has walked away from being the natural majority political party in the United States, with 60% of the adult population in 1964, to a 37% total in the 2004 election. This is a loss of market share of approximately 40%, an astounding amount equalled by other disasters like the self-destruction of General Motors over the same period of time. The Democratic Party has accomplished this feat by ceasing to appeal to the broad national security and cultural concerns of the American people in favor of kook leftism, reflexive anti-military sentiments, and the boutique social issues of various elites and interest groups.

If the Left had the courage of its convictions yesterday and had voted in numbers for the Murtha position, America — and the Left itself — would have been well served. Voting 180 degress away from your actual beliefs is guaranteed to produce anger and frustration, even rage. On top of this is the humiliation of knowing that your innermost convictions are no longer the default position of American public opinion. Honesty about this problem will not cure it, but there is no hope for a cure without the first step of honesty.

UPDATE

We join with Tom Bevan: “hats off to Cynthia A. McKinney of Georgia, Robert Wexler of Florida and Jose E. Serrano of New York for having the courage to vote what they really believe. And shame on those who didn’t.”

Dick Morris, tonight on O’Reilly, called for President Bush to address three big issues as a sure-fire method of turning around his polling numbers (even as we understand that 11/05 is not 11/06). We think two issues would do just fine, but our first two agree with Morris’s. We have previously called for an equivalent to the space program of the 1960′s for energy independence; the second issue is border control — building a fence along the border with Mexico, or something like it, would be great.

Our problem is that we simply do not understand why the White House does not get out front on these sure-fire issues. Energy independence — even if incompletely practical — is such a no-brainer with high gas prices that we are tempted to accuse the President’s advisers of being dangerously out of touch. But, gulp, we fear, maybe it is the President himself; after all, it is he who has insisted on really awful ideas about the border and guest workers. (And remember: Harriet Miers was his personal choice.) So we are worried.

UPDATE

We cruised the blogosphere briefly after writing this and noticed immediately that John Hinderaker has a similar piece in which he refers to the gutless wonders in the GOP, regarding ANWR and other issues.

Speaking of John Kerry, I have some news for you. On Friday, this last Friday night, I arranged to meet Senator Kerry at a fundraiser to give him a copy of my book. He told me he now thinks the election was stolen. He said he doesn’t believe that he is the person who can go out front on the issue, because of the sour grapes, you know, question. But he said he believes it was stolen. He says he argues about this with his Democratic colleagues on the Hill. He had just had a big fight with Christopher Dodd about it, because he said, you know, “There’s this stuff about the voting machines; they’re really questionable.” And Dodd was angry. “I don’t want to hear about it,” you know, “I looked into it. There’s nothing there.”

Only 80% of the respondents in this poll were registered voters, while 13% of the respondents reported that they were unemployed….

Look how far AP/Ipsos had to stray from reality to get a sample that dislikes George Bush in such numbers, larding its sample with unemployed non-voters. Yeah, that’s the future of the country.

As we have said, we believe that this kind of misleading polling does far more harm to Democrats than to Republicans. Hope is one of our most important human motivators. When Democrats see the awful Bush numbers pushed by these clowns in the polling world, they tend to believe them, since the low Bush numbers fuel their optimism. Unlike us, they are not going to spend a lot of time dissecting the internals. Hence, when the next election happens and their hopes are dashed again, they will wonder: what went wrong? They will not know that their own allies set them up for such disappointment, and therefore a correct diagnosis will be difficult.

Our one exception to this thesis is Republicans in the Senate; they often seem to believe any MSM nonsense aimed at weakening their resolve.

The image we have is of a two year old standing in a crib, shouting “Bush lied” at the top of his lungs while covering his ears with his hands.

These people have been losing elections and losing their control of government at every level for a decade, and it has driven them nuts. They live in a country which is 3 to 2 conservative over liberal and they can’t deal with it. They are losing their last lever of government power — the Supreme Court — in real time. This is what denial looks like. You’d be crazy too if it was happening to you.

UPDATE

As further evidence of the derangement of many Democrats, there is the fact that they based a strategy on their wish that the Fitzgerald investigation would be about Bush’s lies and would result in a media circus trial of Karl Rove. Harry Reid, as quoted in Human Events: The episode involving Libby and Wilson, summed up Reid, “is about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the President.” Is it rational to base an electoral strategy on the wish for a third party to do harm to your opponent? How nutty is that?

Imagine the world today if the MSM were conservative. We agree with Evan Thomas that the MSM have the power to portray reality to give one side in the ideological debate a minimum 5% up to a 15% boost. Their power, though diminshed, is still real. Imagine how red America might be if the 90/10 imbalance flipped the other way.

Yet we ought to think twice about what we wish for. The 90/10 liberal nature of America’s elite newsrooms reflects groupthink, which is lazy, self-satisfied, and really not thinking at all. The power of the conservative movement comes in part from its having to be on its toes. As TIME noted about Powerline last year:

How can a blog that caters to the right, the political majority who in fact run this country, make Republicans feel as if they’re part of a proud, persecuted minority? The villain here isn’t the political opposition. It’s the left-leaning Mainstream Media, a looming specter that is vilified so routinely on Power Line, it’s referred to in shorthand as the MSM.

On balance we think the country would be better off with a conservative consensus governing the MSM, but when we look at how enmired in a fantasy world are people like Pinch Sulzberger, it gives us pause.

Canned outrage, sitting on the shelf like Bon Vivant Vichyssoise.

CNN would have shown a very different Iwo Jima – bodies rotting on the beach, and probably no coverage of the flag-raising from Mount Suribachi. It is conventional wisdom now to praise the amazing accomplishment of June 6, 1944. But a few ex tempore editorial comments from Geraldo Rivera or Ted Koppel, reporting live from the bloody hedgerows where the Allied advance stalled not far from the D-Day beaches – a situation rife with intelligence failures, poor equipment and complete surprise at German tactics – might have forced a public outcry to withdraw the forces from the Normandy “debacle” before it became a “quagmire.”

We disagree, actually. In a war with the kinds of casualties of WWII (400,000+), or the Civil War (nearly a million killed or greviously wounded), or maybe even a repeat of Vietnam (58,000) today, the press would get locked up or shot for such seditious reporting. We are not far away from that level of backlash, in our opinion. David Gelernter has a somewhat related story here.)

Our American Pravda, the New York Times, is often much more subtle in its misreporting. We have written that, as with Pravda, you have to read what is left out of a story to understand what is going on. Via Michelle Malkin, we get a glimpse of the NYT’s appalling behavior this morning. Though it ran a piece of almost 5000 words on the 2000 war dead, what the newspaper leaves out shouts the paper’s bias to all who care to listen. Here’s a snippet regarding Cpl. Jeffrey Starr:

Sifting through Corporal Starr’s laptop computer after his death, his father found a letter to be delivered to the marine’s girlfriend. ”I kind of predicted this,” Corporal Starr wrote of his own death. ”A third time just seemed like I’m pushing my chances.”

Here’s the actual passage from the letter he wrote, supplied by his uncle to Malkin:

“Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I’m writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I’m pushing my chances. I don’t regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it’s not to me. I’m here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark.”

In the old days of the USSR, Pravda would airbrush a Kremlin figure out of a military parade in Red Square to show he is out of favor. In the USA, our American Pravda airbrushes out the patriotic sentiments of a fallen soldier to show that such dedication is out of favor at the New York Times. We believe that the American people have gotten very weary of these antics.

Not so uplifting is her piece today in the WSJ. She senses that there is something seriously wrong in the country, and that the elites in America — presumably conservatives as well as liberals — have lost their faith in our future:

Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they’re living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they’re going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley’s off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, “I got mine, you get yours.”

We’re not as pessimistic as Ms. Noonan. We think she may be witnessing the demise of an old “establishment.” As we have written, the Democratic Party had 60% market share in 1964; today that has fallen to 37%. Similarly, the MSM’s audience for evening news was 60 million a quarter century ago; today is is 27 million or so and still falling. With the passing of these majorities and dominant mind-sets, it seems to us inevitable that a lifeboat mentality would grip members of an elite whose time is fading.

Conservatives outnumber liberals 3 to 2, and have for quite a while now. Yet the MSM paradigm, and the institutional paradigms at the other entities cited by Noonan, have continued to be reliably liberal. By and large this will not change, or change only very slowly. Institutions retain their cultures for a long time, even in the face of decline, as we have written on many occasions. Similarly, most people don’t change; as we noted in a post about Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, they tend to just die out rather then alter their lifelong beliefs.

Conservatives outnumber liberals 3 to 2, but until today they really have not acted like they believed they are the majority, even though their bull market began with the rise of the New Media in 1988 and the election of 1994. That minority mindset appears to have changed. We agree with Rush Limbaugh that the Miers debate, which he refers to as a Conservative Crackdown, is a sign of strength, not weakness. Weakness seems to us to be largely on the side of the Left, and has been perhaps best shown in the utter hysteria of its mouthpiece, the MSM, over the last four years. From Enron to Halliburton, Abu Ghraib to Club Gitmo, Durbin to Kennedy, Bill Burkett to Cindy Sheehan, WMD to flushed Korans, al Qa Qaa to Rathergate, Richard Clarke to Joe Wilson, Katrina! to Valerie, the MSM has fired everything in its arsenal against a Republican president and congress, to little effect.

Well, that’s not quite true. The MSM, with its relentless negativity, has brought down the president’s polling numbers. But, as James Carville has noted, the Democrats have sunk as much or worse. The Left, with its allies in Hollywood and the MSM, has created a culture of gloom in America, and we think this is what Noonan is observing in particularly intense form in the Beltway.

When will the culture of gloom officially end? When someone with a mainstream conservative viewpoint like Rush Limbaugh anchors the CBS Evening News. When someone with a mainstream conservative viewpoint like Jonah Goldberg is editorial page editor of the New York Times. (We are not suggesting these actual men for these actual jobs.) Consider it this way: what Dan Rather or Gail Collins think of the “normal” and “non-controversial” outlook is the liberal outlook, on issues like defense, civil rights, abortion, etc; we conceive of a time when the normal and non-controversial outlook is that of mainstream conservatives like these gentlemen.

Unthinkable? Consider this: the current dominance of conservatives in numbers and in thought was unthinkable a mere 17 years ago, when the New Media began. The Old Establishment is passing, and a New Establishment surely will fill that vacuum.

Miers’ advocates, sensing the poverty of other possibilities, began by cynically calling her critics sexist snobs who disdain women with less than Ivy League degrees. Her advocates certainly know that her critics revere Margaret Thatcher almost as much as they revere the memory of the president who was educated at Eureka College.

Next, Miers’ advocates managed, remarkably, to organize injurious testimonials. Sensible people cringed when one of the former Texas Supreme Court justices summoned to the White House offered this reason for putting her on the nation’s highest tribunal: “I can vouch for her ability to analyze and to strategize.” Another said: “When we were on the lottery commission together, a lot of the problems that we had there were legal in nature. And she was just very, very insistent that we always get all the facts together.”

Miers’ advocates tried the incense defense: Miers is pious. But that is irrelevant to her aptitude for constitutional reasoning. The crude people who crudely invoked it probably were sending a crude signal to conservatives who, the invokers evidently believe, are so crudely obsessed with abortion that they have an anti-constitutional willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade with an unreasoned act of judicial willfulness as raw as the 1973 decision itself.

In their unseemly eagerness to assure Miers’ conservative detractors that she will reach the “right” results, her advocates betray complete incomprehension of this: Thoughtful conservatives’ highest aim is not to achieve this or that particular outcome concerning this or that controversy. Rather, their aim for the Supreme Court is to replace semi-legislative reasoning with genuine constitutional reasoning about the Constitution’s meaning as derived from close consideration of its text and structure. Such conservatives understand that how you get to a result is as important as the result. Indeed, in an important sense, the path the Supreme Court takes to the result often is the result.

I love being a conservative. We conservatives are proud of our philosophy. Unlike our liberal friends, who are constantly looking for new words to conceal their true beliefs and are in a perpetual state of reinvention, we conservatives are unapologetic about our ideals. We are confident in our principles and energetic about openly advancing them. We believe in individual liberty, limited government, capitalism, the rule of law, faith, a color-blind society and national security. We support school choice, enterprise zones, tax cuts, welfare reform, faith-based initiatives, political speech, homeowner rights and the war on terrorism. And at our core we embrace and celebrate the most magnificent governing document ever ratified by any nation–the U.S. Constitution. Along with the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes our God-given natural right to be free, it is the foundation on which our government is built and has enabled us to flourish as a people….

The real crackup has already occurred–on the left! The Democratic Party has been hijacked by 1960s retreads like Howard Dean; billionaire eccentrics like George Soros; and leftwing computer geeks like Moveon.org. It nominated John Kerry, a notorious Vietnam-era antiwar activist, as its presidential standard-bearer. Its major spokesmen are old extremists like Ted Kennedy and new propagandists like Michael Moore. Its great presidential hope is one of the most divisive figures in U.S. politics, Hillary Clinton. And its favorite son is an impeached, disbarred, held-in-contempt ex-president, Bill Clinton.

He’s an interesting fellow, but we wish he’d be a little clearer on his positions.

“Based on your personal knowledge of her, if she had the opportunity, do you believe she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade?”

“Absolutely,” said Judge Kinkeade.

“I agree with that,” said Justice Hecht. “I concur.”

There will be serious consequences to that exchange according to Fund:

Some participants in the Oct. 3 conference call fear that they will be called to testify at Ms. Miers’s hearings. “If the call is as you describe it, an effort will be made to subpoena everyone on it,” a Judiciary Committee staffer told me. It is possible that a tape or notes of the call are already in the hands of committee staffers. “Some people were on speaker phones allowing other people to listen in, and others could have been on extensions,” one participant told me.

Should hearings begin on Nov. 7 as is now tentatively planned, they would likely turn into a spectacle. Mr. Specter has said he plans to press Ms. Miers “very hard” on whether Roe v. Wade is settled law. “She will have hearings like no nominee has ever had to sit through,” Chuck Todd, editor of the political tip sheet Hotline, told radio host John Batchelor. “One slipup on camera and she is toast.”

It is clear to us that Fund has a stake in the outcome of the Miers nomination, perhaps the desire to un-Bork the entire Supreme Court nominating and vetting process:

Harriet Miers is a “superstealth” nominee–a close friend of the president with no available paper trail who keeps her cards so close to her chest they might as well be plastered on it. If Ms. Miers is confirmed, it will reinforce the popular belief that the Supreme Court is more about political outcomes than the rule of law.

If he is successful, more power to him.

There has been a Great Sorting Out, with many people changing party identification, and the winners from this process have been the Republicans: Galston and Kamarck show that 38 percent of Republicans say they used to think of themselves as Democrats, while 22 percent–a substantially smaller number—of Democrats say they used to think of themselves as Republicans.

We are quite familiar with the many who, like us, have made the long voyage from liberal to conservative over the last few decades. But who are the 22% of Democrats who once thought of themselves as Republicans? To find out, we went to the source in the footnote of the Galston and Kamarck report, which is a Pew Center study called The 2005 Political Typology. Page 33 features this chart:

The chart is (unintentionally?) humorously titled: “Fewer Democrats Change Party over Lifetime.” But that’s misleading, isn’t it, given that Democrats have gone from 60% share of the electorate forty years ago to 37% last year, as we have documented. Rather, the title more properly might be “Democrats deserting party in droves.”

Still, who are the 22% of Democrats who were once Republicans? They are liberals. Liberal Republicans became liberal Democrats. We can see from the chart that they are predominantly liberal Republicans — 26% of Democrats who now call themselves liberal — who have switched sides, although when they did so is not clear. So a quarter of liberal Democrats were once liberal Republicans. You will forgive us for repeating this point over and over, but it seems kind of shocking to us that in a random group of liberal Democrats, one out of four will have been a Republican.

Who are these people, how old are they, and where do they live? Unfortunately, neither the Pew study nor Galston and Kamarck have any additional information on this. But here’s perhaps a useful shorthand way to think of this: the Rockefeller Republicans became the Rockefeller Democrats. The Heinzes became the Heinz-Kerrys.

Our guess is that the Pew chart understates the dynamism of the shift from Democrat to GOP. We would guess that the liberal Republicans who became liberal Democrats are on average a generation older than those making the more recent shift to the conservative and Republican side, and we also would be not at all surprised to see high concentrations of these folks in some of the declining Democratic strongholds of the Northeast. We’ll follow up with an email or two and tell you what we learn.

There’s plenty of room to stretch out on the bus. Of the hundreds of locally displaced and languishing citizens who “should have priority over imported workers to rebuild the city”, only three joined him in St. Louis. Two of the three speak only Spanish.

Oh, and by the way, it’s all part of Karl Rove’s super-secret and super-evil strategy:

Jackson said President Bush’s chief political strategist, Karl Rove, is overseeing reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, and that he and others in the White House are using Katrina to push their political agenda. He said black, Democratic-leaning voters have been radically dislocated and are being kept in “permanent exile.” “Karl Rove is a political reconstructionist” who wants to “change the character” of Louisiana politics from the mayor’s office to its congressional representation.

While Jackson’s Rovian analysis is screwy, his concern about the political impact of Katrina makes all the sense in the world.

[U]nderstand where I’m coming from. I just don’t think we can afford to take chances any more. Republicans keep winning elections, and keep getting erratic results on our Justices. For every Scalia, we get a Kennedy. For every Thomas, we get a Souter. We can’t continue going down this road.

That’s it, precisely. We can’t afford to take chances anymore with nominees unconstrained by their own well documented track record; the results of doing so have been abysmal. We can’t continue down that road. Republicans, and Democrats too, need to understand where the next Supreme Court nominee is coming from as a constitutional jurist. And Miers has been disturbingly weak in this regard.

Patterico says, “Unless something changes drastically, I will be opposing the Miers nomination.” We agree. There is absolutely no reason to be in any doubt of the judicial philosophy of a Republican nominee to the Supreme Court. There is no need for a guessing game. This is true whether the Gang of 14 are a problem, or the 5 weak (GOP) sisters in the Senate are a problem: what is the use of confirmability if you don’t know what you are confirming?

We have passed the point where it is useful to play guessing games. It is absurd to defend a nominee as conservative and reliable within Republican ranks if that is in fact an unknown, based on the track record. It is absurd to then pretend to the Senate Democrats that such a candidate “isn’t really that bad,” if in fact her views are unpalatable to them. It is, in gambling terms, a bet that Democrats should on balance accept, but why should a majority offer such a potential boon to the opposition? We do not need in this country some crazy meta-debate about a candidate whose real positions are unknown — in the long run, such sophistry is good neither for Democrats nor Republicans.

The issues of the clarity and definitiveness of a nominee’s views have been put on the table, once and for all, by this particular Bush nominee, and they are on the table to stay, whether Miers is confirmed or not. So why wait until next time to deal with these issues? In our opinion, there is no useful purpose served by shying away at this point. It is possible that President Bush will be successful in kicking the issue of clarity of judicial philosophy down the road to the next nominee, but there is now really no point to that demurral. The time of debate has arrived. Just look at all the debate (eg, Powerline has three opinions!).

We must say that we have some deep misgivings about any ambitious and talented man or woman who advances to the age of 60 without it being openly known where he stands on the critical issues of the day. Our suspicion only increases when that person has made it a point not to be pinned down throughout the last 20 years, as John Fund noted about Miers. Is life to be lived in the shadows until death? A Supreme Court justice is all about decisions; a candidate for Supreme Court justice who does not want to be defined by decisions — however appealing that is to the President’s chief of staff — is, in our view, likely to be an an unworthy candidate.

Finally, it may not be just the Washington culture, it may simply be true that on average men and women, or maybe judges, become more liberal as they proceed from middle to old age. We don’t know. As these justices with lifetime appointments serve often until well beyond 80, it surely makes sense that they be bound to pay heed to their own previously documented views.

We of course reserve our right to change our opinion.

What does this mean? Perhaps nothing at all. Giuliani is a micro-manager, which in our view is a very bad thing in a President, and he is not the Energizer Bunny for the social issues of many Christian Republicans. Rice has never run for office, and has not had a traditional personal life, both of which are problematic for a presidential run.

Yet the rest of the field in the Ruffini poll is far behind. What does this mean for 2008? Probably nothing. On the other hand, who knows? — interestingly, John McCain couldn’t run for dog catcher and get elected in the Ruffini poll. It sounds like fun to us — we’d be concerned, perhaps, if the Democrats had an engaging, Southern, moderate candidate. But they don’t, at least so far. So let fun be fun.

Respondents also disagreed widely on who is to blame for the problems in the city following the hurricane — 13% said Bush, 18% said federal agencies, 25% blamed state or local officials and 38% said no one is to blame. And 63% said they do not believe anyone at federal agencies responsible for handling emergencies should be fired as a result.

Somebody go tell Dan Balz and the WaPo. To a boar, everything smells like a truffle. To a Beltway journalist, everything smells like a political story:

When terrorists struck on Sept. 11, 2001, Americans came together in grief and resolve, rallying behind President Bush in an extraordinary show of national unity. But when Hurricane Katrina hit last week, the opposite occurred, with Americans dividing along sharply partisan lines in their judgment of the president’s and the federal government’s response.

The starkly different verdicts on Bush’s stewardship of the two biggest crises of his presidency underscore the deepening polarization of the electorate that has occurred on his watch. This gaping divide has left the president with no reservoir of good will among his political opponents at a critical moment of national need and has touched off a fresh debate about whether he could have done anything to prevent it.

Where to begin? The story is absolutely inconsistent with the polling results above, which seem to reflect common sense among the american people. Moreover, the 9-11 consensus is a myth. The 9-11 consensus was broken within a few weeks of 9-11. Here’s a CBS report from October 6, 2001, around the time that Tom Daschle launched a critique of Bush for not acting faster on Afghanistan (which war began 10/7/01):

When President Bush urged Americans after the Sept. 11 attacks to “go about their business” as usual, Congress, it seems, took his request literally. Within weeks, lawmakers and the Bush administration dispensed with their calls for harmony and were again sparring, this time over legislation proposed as a direct response to the terrorist attacks.

Congressional scholar Norm Ornstein thought the post-Sept. 11 cooperation between Congress and the White House would continue a little bit longer. The unity “ended earlier than expected,” Ornstein told CBSNews.com. “I thought it would last until at least mid-October.”…..

If you look at Enron, Abu Ghraib, Camp Gitmo, Camp Cindy, al Qa Qaa, Katrina, and a dozen other things, you come to an odd conclusion: to the MSM, the Democrats win every single fantasy election that take place in their newspapers between the real elections, which they continue to, um, lose with consistency.

Six years earlier Mary Landrieu eked out a 5,788 vote victory, much of her winning margin coming from stuffed ballot boxes lost and found in swamps. It was a grubby victory that stank of corruption, and a shamefully weak one for this daughter of a two-term Mayor of New Orleans whose Cajun last name carried statewide recognition and cache.

(Mary’s married name, which this “family values” Senator refuses to use, is Snellings.)…..

Before and after a recent televised debate with her Republican opponent in the December 7 runoff, Suzanne Terrell, the state’s election commissioner and year 2000 Louisiana presidential campaign chair for George W. Bush, Landrieu reportedly went into irrational fits of rage – at one point threatening her opponent with political extermination.

Snellings, whose brother, as you know, is Lieutenant Governor to the deplorable Blanco, is witnessing the dissolution of her family’s heriditary power base, and public exposure to the degree of corruption and incompetence endemic to Louisiana and New Orleans. Nothing about this story has been pretty or uplifting, save the generosity of the American people and the heroism of the American military.

George Bush carried Louisiana by 283,000 votes in 2004 (1,102K v. 820K), a handy 57/42 margin over John Kerry, establishing GOP predominance in national elections. Voter turnout was 63% of the total adult population, versus 58% for the United States as a whole. However, Louisiana has been much more Democrat at the state and local level. Blanco beat Bobby Jindal by 54,567 votes in 2003 (731K v. 676K). There were a number of reasons for Jindal’s defeat: a failure to respond to some last-minute TV ads, perhaps low turnout, and, as Charlie Cook noted, “minority candidates tend to ‘over-poll,’ meaning that they do better in polls than they do on Election Day.” Blanco did well statewide, carrying 52 of the 64 groups of parishes, but her margin of victory was in New Orleans.

In New Orleans, Blanco polled 92,746 votes to Jindal’s 43,005 — a lead, for the Democrat, of 49,741 votes, almost her entire margin of victory. As was noted at the time by Human Events: “Only two days before the run-off, a tracking poll by Verne Kennedy, dean of Louisiana pollsters, showed Jindal ahead 44% to 41%. But a strong turn out of 46% in the black community (in which Blanco took 91% of the vote) provided the margin Blanco needed for victory.”

It is easy, we suppose, to make too much of all this. Louisiana is a conservative state, as evidenced by the 57% margin for Bush and the 78% vote against gay marriage in a 2004 referendum. Blanco is something of a pebble in the road of GOP domination of the entire south, and Jindal was endorsed by our friend Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans. Further, the 2003 election Blanco won against Jindal had low turnout — 73% of that in the Bush/Kerry election. So the trends appear clear enough.

Yet governors control some of the pursestrings and patronage, and that perhaps means something special in Louisiana’s picaresque political history, in which Huey and Earl Long and Edwin Edwards were governors, famous for their corruption or eccentricity or both. (Side note: you know that Edwards is a Democrat because the CNN story of his indictment fails to mention his party affiliation.) We are well past the time where Governor Edwards boasted that he had to be found in bed “with a live boy or a dead girl” to lose an election.

An important part of what is going on in Louisiana politically is being hidden from public view, by both sides. Democrats see power slipping away, as some critical vote centers have disappeared, at least temporarily. (Whether generations past and housepets vote absentee remains to be seen.) Republicans see equivalent prospects for consolidating power. Let’s grant that both sides are equally interested in relief and reconstruction: do you think for one second they leave their political instincts and ruthlessness at the door? And recall further that New Orleans was critical to Mary Landrieu’s victory in 2002. She is up again in 2008, and Blanco in 2007. There is a lot of power and money at stake in Louisiana over the next three years. Might the GOP take the recommendation of National Review to hold their 2008 convention in New Orleans? We shall see.

UPDATE

In the course of his lovely tribute to New Orleans today on his radio program, Harry Shearer reminded us of the depth and pervasiveness of corruption in Louisiana. For example, the last three insurance commissioners of Louisiana are serving time in the same prison as former governor Edwin Edwards. And you will recall that in Edwards’ last gubernatorial campaign, against David Duke, his bumper stickers proclimed: “Vote for the Crook — It’s Important!”

UPDATE II

In response to a question we posed to him, Jayson Javitz of Polipundit was kind enough to email us the following:

Two other points: Jindal lost to Blanco in a run-off election. Those heavily favor Democrats, because they’re held on the first day of hunting season. So, many rural and suburban Republicans don’t vote — because they’re out in the sticks with their guns and Quayle calls. Whereas Democrats down there have nothing to do but to vote against the evil Republican. Also, that lingering Democrat control of the state offices down there also applies in places like Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina. A Democrat Presidential candidate would not be able to take those states if their lives depended on it. But even to this day those voters are apt to cast ballots for Democrats at the local and state-wide levels. FWIW, methinks it will take another 15 years to get past that phenomenon.

Any Militaristic Government which can murder 3,000 of it’s own citizen’s in cold blood, as the Bush Regime of Terror did in N.Y.C. on 9-11-2001, could then be looked upon as Criminally Insane enough to use a Nuclear Generated Tsunami as a Weapon of Choice.

By Chuck Bowden. HT: Tigerhawk

Notably, Mr. Reagan appointed to the High Court lawyers (Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy) less conservative than the young lawyers who worked for him at Justice and in the White House. But if Mr. Reagan did not have available to him a John Roberts to put on the court, a Reagan legacy is surely the pool of distinguished lawyers of conservative views who served him and in some cases as well his immediate predecessor and who are now of sufficient age to be considered for the Supreme Court.

Think of the leading figures of today’s conservative movement and the New Media. Who were their equivalents as accomplished professionals from 1975 -1985? It’s not an easy question, is it?

Joanie plucked gamely at the strings of her guitar, if not necessarily the heartstrings in the audience, and sang the anthems of the wrinkled unwashed from our most dissolute decade: “Song of Peace” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” She avoided what was arguably her greatest crowd-pleaser, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” an improbable tribute to the Confederacy. She clearly yearns for a reprise of the ’60s, when the war in Vietnam gave an exciting social life to the generation drugged on cheap sex and playing at make-believe revolution.

“This is huge,” she told the crowd of 200 or so spectators, wilting in the Texas heat and yearning only for a reprise of the air-conditioned comfort back at the motel. “In the first march I went to [during the war in Vietnam] there were 10 of us.”

Of course this is utter nonsense, and a further indication of how far these fools have fallen. Baez seems to have forgotten that there really were glory days for her career. Take the 1963 March on Washington, at which she was a headliner. The mid-point crowd estimate was 350,000; here’s an excerpt from a chronicle of that march:

The demonstrators gathered at the Washington Monument, where a stage had been set up for morning entertainment. Joan Baez [picture] opened the program with “Oh Freedom” and also led a rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” Other performers included Odetta; Josh White (Bayard Rustin had been his sideman thirty years earlier); the Albany Freedom Singers; Bob Dylan; and Peter, Paul and Mary, whose version of Dylan’s civil rights anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind” was then number two on the charts (after Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave”).

Before noon and ahead of schedule, impatient demonstrators began to march up Independence and Constitution Avenues to the Lincoln Memorial. The march leaders got word of this surprise development while lobbying on Capitol Hill, and they rushed to join the advancing throng. Enterprising march marshals opened a passageway for them so that they could be photographed arm in arm “leading” the march.

Press coverage was more extensive than for any previous political demonstration in U.S. history. A huge tent near the Lincoln Memorial held the march committee’s “News HQ.” The committee issued no fewer than 1,655 special press passes, augmenting the 1,220 members of the regular Washington press corps. News agencies sent large crews of reporters and photographers—some assigned to celebrities, others to everyday marchers, others to aerial coverage. Leading newspapers in many countries ran the march story on their front pages. It was also one of the first events to be broadcast live around the world, via the newly launched communications satellite Telstar. The three major television networks spent over three hundred thousand dollars (more than twice the march committee’s budget) to broadcast the event. CBS covered the rally “gavel to gavel,” from 1:30 to 4:30, canceling As the World Turns, Password, Art Linkletter’s House Party, To Tell the Truth, The Edge of Night, and Secret Storm.

No, Joanie Phonie, in 1963 or at any time during the sixties, you weren’t playing to 10 people or had an entourage that small. Joan Baez was 18 in 1959 when she performed at the first Newport Folk Festival, after receiving an invitation from Dylan. She played to a crowd estimated at 13,000 for that wonderful event. There were half a million people present when she played Woodstock a decade later.

Trying to pretend that 200 sad losers in a ditch in Texas is the beginning of something is just pathetic. It is, precisely, the end of something. It is a funeral for the sixties — that no one bothered to attend. (HT: Powerline)

Addendum

The fossilized remains of McGovern campaign chairman Gary Hart may be seen today in the Washington Post saying something like: “US out of Vietnam NOW! No negotiations! Smash ROTC! Off the pigs!” or some such. Sorry Senator and Joanie: the US may have its problems, but it has pretty well decided that you are not the solution.

• Conventional wisdom held that Republicans would raise much more money than Democrats, but that, too, was disproved. The Kerry campaign, the DNC and the Democratic 527 organizations spent $344 million on ads during the campaign. That was more than $55 million above what the pro-Bush forces spent. George Soros and the other wealthy contributors who were so instrumental in funding the Democratic 527s underwrote a TV campaign that “seethed with Bush hatred.” According to post-election surveys, however, the TV assault turned out not to be very persuasive overall. While the anti-Bush ads did connect with the Bush haters, “[a]n enduring problem for the Democratic Party,” Mr. Barone observed, could be the fact that “George W. Bush will not be on the ballot again.”

• Mr. Kerry won a 6.5-million majority in the 100 largest counties. More than 6 million of that majority was achieved in the 48 largest counties that had lost population since 2000 or grew by less than 3 percent. Democrats may not be able to increase their turnout by much in slow-growth or population-losing counties. Outside the 100 largest counties, Mr. Kerry lost by nearly 10 million votes. In addition, Mr. Bush won majorities in 97 of the nation’s 100 fastest-growing counties, where he achieved a popular-vote margin of 1.8 million, which was more than half of his national vote margin. This 1.8-million margin, while not as large as the one Mr. Kerry achieved in the 100 largest counties, is nonetheless “likely to increase over time, and can easily be increased even more by the kind of organizational effort mounted by the Bush campaign in 2004,” Mr. Barone argues.

We refer you once again to one of our favorite maps, illustrating Barone’s point just above. The blue spikes graphically display the high concentration of Kerry votes in the urban areas that Barone is discussing. Think of it: Kerry got a 6 million vote margin from areas that are stagnating or shrinking. This means nothing good for the GOP, of course, if the Democratic Party can broaden its appeal to the exurbs. That appears to us a a key question in a key battleground. The urban vote seems pretty much topped out for the Democratic Party, since, in our estimation, the dead and their housepets were already voting twice in 2004.

We aren’t upset at all. In fact, we are delighted. This ad doesn’t “expose” John Roberts. It exposes NARAL for what they are: radical, extreme, and deeply dishonest (see FactCheck.org’s review). NARAL is in the process of publicly discrediting itself, and making a laughingstock out of its next, over-the-top, set of accusations. This won’t hurt Roberts, and is wonderful news for the next Supreme Court nominee, and the next, and the next……….

UPDATE

The ad is doing a nice job at creating fissures within parts, at least, of the NARAL coalition, via NYT:

Within the larger liberal coalition of which Naral is a part, there was considerable uneasiness about the advertisement, although leaders of other groups generally refused to speak on the record. One who did, Frances Kissling, the longtime president of Catholics for a Free Choice, said she was “deeply upset and offended” by the advertisement, which she called “far too intemperate and far too personal.”

Ms. Kissling, who initiated the conversation with a reporter, said the ad “does step over the line into the kind of personal character attack we shouldn’t be engaging in.” She added: “As a pro-choice person, I don’t like being placed on the defensive by my leaders. Naral should pull it and move on.”

Walter Dellinger, a former acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration and longtime Naral supporter, sent a letter on Wednesday to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and its ranking Democrat, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, respectively. Mr. Dellinger said he had disagreed with Mr. Roberts’s argument in the Bray case but considered it unfair to give “the impression that Roberts is somehow associated with clinic bombers.” He added that “it would be regrettable if the only refutation of these assertions about Roberts came from groups opposed to abortion rights.”

From the LAT:

For two hours, members of the audience of blacks, whites and Latinos spoke with a vehemence usually reserved for the dinner table — or late-night talk radio shows. They publicly aired views that are often muttered in L.A. but not spoken out loud. Councilman Bernard C. Parks, who sat on the meeting’s panel, voiced the view of many in the city’s political elite: “We should not pit groups against each other. Why do we have to look at it as blacks lose, Hispanics win? No one wins in this city without a coalition.”

But the audience of about 80, almost evenly divided among the three groups, had already formed a coalition — of anger. People would heckle Parks for the rest of the evening. Terry Anderson, a radio host who has long opposed illegal immigration, was one of several panel members who blamed illegal immigrants for, in their opinion, stealing jobs from blacks and crowding schools and neighborhoods to unbearable limits. “We have been invaded; there’s no other word for it,” Anderson said. The audience clapped and cheered.

Debbie Hernandez, a white member of the audience, said: “Blacks are losing their middle-class status because of illegal aliens. I am willing to go to the streets with my brothers and sisters over this.” Sherrie Johnson, a resident of Torrance, told Parks, “You aren’t taking a stand for the right side of the argument. “I believe the purpose of going through the steps to become a citizen is because it protects the country,” she said…..

Members of the audience repeatedly asked one panel member, Richard Alonzo, a district superintendent in the Los Angeles Unified School District, to reveal the number of students in L.A. schools who are illegal immigrants or to find out. He said the district doesn’t collect that information.

One questioner asked him for budget numbers, insisting they would prove that educating Latinos was more expensive than teaching other students. It’s a premise that Alonzo said was wrong. The numbers matter, Peterson said, because black students attend schools overcrowded by those who have no right to be there. Peterson, who moderated the discussion, is well known in the conservative media, appearing on Fox television talk shows as well as his own syndicated radio program.

“A lot of black boys and girls are dropping out, and it’s because their classes are overwhelmed with illegal Hispanics,” Peterson said. “Black children are mad about that; black parents are mad about that.”

As these citizens make clear, it’s not about race; it’s about Illegality. (HT: Polipundit)

Since those dark days, free trade has become an article of faith for Republicans, and an identifier among national Democrats of economic sophistication. Possibly the high point of Al Gore’s Vice Presidency was his debate on NAFTA with Ross Perot in November 1993 at the Kennedy School of Government, broadcast on “Larry King Live.” Though Harvard Professor emeritus John Kenneth Galbraith called the debate “a marvel of incoherence,” the faculty thought Gore won, and since that time Gore’s performance is remembered in epic terms. Blogs proclaim that Gore crushed or smoked Perot. The Washington Post noted that some sentiment was “lopsidedly against NAFTA until Vice President Gore debated Perot on ‘Larry King Live’” and CBS News has said that “Al Gore cleaned Ross Perot’s clock” in the debate.

That was then, this is now.

Even in 1993 a majority of Democratic legislators was anti-free-trade. 102 Democrats voted for NAFTA, which was a minority of the 255 Democrats in the House. But 102 is still a solid and large number. In 2005, only 15 Democrats supported CAFTA.

A large majority of Republicans supports free trade, just as Bill Clinton and Al Gore did. But now the Democratic Party, by its vote on CAFTA, has become almost unanimously anti-free-trade, its numbers even larger than its anti-military votes. Hillary Clinton voted against CAFTA, reminding us not only of the limited appeal of the Dick Gephardt’s of this world, but of her bad instincts or bad ideas.

The bombings and attempted bombings in London have brought home to the American public that we face implacable enemies unwilling to be appeased by even the most emollient diplomacy. Yet, mainstream media coverage of Iraq has been mostly negative. But mainstream media no longer have a monopoly; Americans have other sources in talk radio, Fox News and the blogosphere. Bush’s presidency is still regarded as illegitimate by perhaps 20 percent of the electorate. But among the rest, the attempt to delegitimize him seems to be collapsing.

Do the numbers assuming that the 20% who think Bush illegitimate are all Democrats. 37% of voters in the last election were Democrats. Therefore, a majority of Democrats — 54% — think Bush is illegitimate according to this scenario. We were about to say how surprisingly large this number is, but, looking at the kooky and juvenile antics of leading Democrats today, we are really not that surprised after all.

On Nov. 5, Lawrence O’Donnell, an MSNBC senior political analyst, said the following on “The McLaughlin Group”: “But the big problem the country now has, which is going to produce a serious discussion of secession over the next 20 years, is that the segment of the country that pays for the federal government is now being governed by the people who don’t pay for the federal government.

“Ninety percent of the red states are welfare client states of the federal government. They collect more from the federal government than they send in. New York and California, Connecticut, the states that are blue are all the states that are paying for the bulk of everything this government does … and the people in those states don’t like what this government is doing.”

Of course, as with most of what O’Donnell says, this is absolutely a wrong way to look at things. Meg Kreikemeier looks at the situation on a county by county basis. When you look at a map that we have previously displayed, it is amazing that O’Donnell got away with his canard for so long. It is pretty obvious in retrospect that the biggest Democratic strongholds in the big cities correlate pretty well with dependency on government:

Brad Joondeph, on the liberal website thinkprogress.org. Joondeph describes his experience as a summer associate at Hogan & Hartson 12 years ago, when John Roberts was his official “mentor.” He recalls of Roberts that “he could not have been nicer, more gracious, more encouraging. He offered mentoring advice to a snot-nosed, 24-year-old law student as if it were the most important part of his job.” Then Joondeph tells this anecdote:

“After returning to Stanford that fall, I was lucky enough to have my student note published in the Stanford Law Review. It was a rather presumptuous and self-righteous critique of the Supreme Court’s decision in Freeman v. Pitts, a school desegregation case from DeKalb County, Georgia. I argued that the Court was pulling the rug out from under Brown v. Board of Education by prematurely ending court-ordered desegregation remedies. As deputy solicitor general in the first Bush administration, Roberts had actually argued the Freeman case as amicus in support of the school district. I therefore (again, fairly presumptuously) sent him my note, in which I contended that, well, Roberts had been all wrong.

“A few weeks later, I received a two-page letter in response. Roberts wrote that the note was well researched and well written. (I was thrilled at the time, but I would now strongly disagree.) But he also offered a thoughtful critique of my analysis that was several paragraphs in length. This was more feedback than I had received from my professors in law school. “So I have nothing but a profound sense of respect for John Roberts: for his integrity, his intelligence, his humility, and his genuine human decency.

“All of that said, my best guess is that he would be a very conservative justice. And because he is so gifted and so decent a human being, he might become incredibly influential on the Court, moving it in ways that justices like Scalia and Thomas have been incapable. In short, he could ultimately be a progressive’s worst case scenario.”

The picture explained by Michelle Malkin and GOP Vixen.

Iowahawk, via LGF:

Make no mistake: no one should be fooled by the administration’s public relations efforts or ___JOHN ROBERTS___’s seemingly “moderate” appearance. ___JOHN ROBERTS___ has a record that suggests that ___HE___ would deny women the right to reproductive choice, stop important life-saving medical stem cell research by extending the Patriot Act to draft their unwanted fetuses, and turn these conscripted fetuses over to dangerous tax-supported ‘Creationist’ religious laboratories. The Supreme Court is a lifetime appointment, and America needs to know whether ___JOHN ROBERTS___ supports the GOP’s secret plan of a Rush Limbaugh Jesus army of unwanted, unquestioning fetus zombies who will be trained to urinate on the Korans of Guantanamo detainees.

John Tabin in the Spectator:

[H]e respects “vertical” stare decisis on abortion — the principle that lower courts must follow Supreme Court precedent. But that tells us nothing about his views on “horizontal” stare decisis, the idea that the Court should avoid overturning its own precedents. It is probable but not certain that, like Rehnquist, he would overturn Roe, for which many of the usual arguments for strong stare decisis do not apply; the Court’s abortion jurisprudence has certainly not promoted stability or predictability in the law. (On policy grounds, Roberts almost certainly opposes abortion; his wife was once Executive Vice President of Feminists for Life.)

Stuart Buck:

Justice Scalia said to a friend of mine that he and other Justices thought of John Roberts as far and away the best Supreme Court litigator in the country. I asked the friend why Justice Scalia said that, and (paraphrasing from my memory) the answer was something like this: “No matter how intense the questioning, Roberts is never flustered, and is always able to calmly answer any question whatsoever, while skillfully weaving in the substantive points that he wanted to make in the first place.”

And how about this as an indictment from the AP about Darth Roberts:

Roberts Has Backed Administration Policies

John G. Roberts has demonstrated strong backing for Bush administration policies, ruling against Geneva Conventions protections for detainees at Guantanamo Bay and in favor of keeping Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force records secret…..To liberals’ dismay, Roberts issued a dissent in a case involving the constitutionality of the Endangered Species Act. The group People for the American Way said Roberts’ dissent indicated he may be ready to join the ranks of right-wing conservative judges who seek to severely limit congressional authority to protect the environment.

Scary.

Roberts and Bush appear to be cut from the same cloth. Bush is a bottom-line president who cares more about results than the supporting reasons. Roberts is a career litigator used to winning cases, not advancing theories — by all accounts intelligent, but without a reputation for flights of abstraction. He is less creative than Michael McConnell, another name often mentioned for the Supreme Court, but also more predictable than someone like McConnell, less likely to change his mind about premises and so end up with different conclusions.

In other words, more a Rehnquist than a Scalia. The current chief justice is famous for taking law clerks’ opinion drafts and cutting out all the reasoning; Rehnquist opinions often state the facts, state the Court’s conclusion, and go home. (Not so different from the typical answer at a Bush press conference.) One can barely imagine Justice Scalia doing that — the reasoning is what drives him, what he lives for.

If a Justice Roberts ends up following one of those two judicial models, it seems pretty clear which one he will choose: his former boss’s.

One thing is for sure in the unlikely event that Roberts were not confirmed: the value of being summa at Harvard and managing editor of the Harvard Law Review would go to zero — at least for conservatives.

Now Judith Miller sits in jail because she won’t discuss her sources, and the New York Times wants to exploit the situation as much as possible. Sorry, but that’s Miller’s problem. The media created this issue by publishing Plame’s name — which never appears in Cooper’s notes. If the media wants the questions answered, then it will have to cooperate by uncovering its source(s) for the information. The only other way that this will ever come out is if the source admits to leaking the information, and short of torture, law enforcement agencies have no way to force that to happen. If the leaker keeps his or her mouth shut, no resolution will occur. That doesn’t indicate a cover-up, it demonstrates that we still can’t force people to testify against themselves. For those who can’t remember this, it’s in the Constitution, four amendments past the one that Miller and the Times claim as their prerogative to hide the wrongdoer — if in fact anyone can be cast as that.

The only people engaging in a cover-up are the media — the New York Times and Robert Novak. When they want this mystery solved, they’ll tell us who leaked the name. Until then, they’ll milk this for everything it’s worth to embarrass an administration they dislike.

The equivalent of the Rathergate memos is Cooper’s notes of his conversation with Rove — with this difference: the made-up Rathergate memos clumsily implicated George W. Bush in some questionable activity. The Cooper notes simply don’t say what the MSM lynch mob insist that they do.

There is almost nothing interesting about Wilson/Plame, aside from the new depths of degradation it reveals about the Old Media. Still, at this point we’d like to know Miller’s source for Plame’s name — it will only add to the farce if her source was a career Democrat at State or CIA.

Census Bureau projections show significant population shifts over the next three decades. The share of Americans living in the Northeast and Midwest will fall from 42 percent to 35 percent of the population, while the South and West will rise from 58 percent to 65 percent.

Brookings demographer William H. Frey did a similar exercise a few months ago which we reported here.

Consider that since 1992 the Republican presidential vote has averaged only 44 percent and the vote for Republican House candidates has averaged roughly 48 percent.

We hope you’d give a failing grade if one of your students tried this bunkum — using old statistics (including Perot!) to give the misleading impression that the GOP and conservatism have not been in the ascendency for the last dozen years. Here’s one of our pieces on the subject, using a business metaphor, which we like to do from time to time. Here’s another good one, and another.

Here’s our point: using the “44 percent” figure is inflicting more torture on numbers than has ever taken place at Club Gitmo. To us, that reveals a lack of confidence from our opponents. Good.

“To be meaningful, consultation should include who the president is really considering so we can give responsive and useful advice,” Kennedy said. Durbin said he “stressed the importance of finding a nominee in the political mainstream.” In a statement, the senator said he welcomed the White House effort “to reach out in a bipartisan manner and actively consult” with lawmakers from both parties.

We discussed the upcoming, weeks-long parade to the White House or Crawford here, and there are several reasons for it. We’d have a stream of maybe 12-15 leading jurists in for a chat, maybe a briefing before and a presser after and appearance of the Judge with the President for each one.

Make the opposition use its energy screaming that each judge was “outside the mainstream.” Get them to do to put out press releases 24/7 on each candidate and why s/he is a mortal threat to the survival of the nation, particularly minorities, women, the unarmed, the unkempt, and house pets.

15 would be a good number. 15 middle aged, lawyerly looking people, all MORTAL THREATS who are outside the mainstream. Perhaps 15 pictures would be worth 15 thousand words, and wear out and demoralize the competition as they struggle to new paroxysms of outrage with each one.