The Political Lie Machine: Self-serving predictions

Contrary to an abundance of evidence, Hillary Clinton isn't running for president, or at least she won't be running.

That's according to some hackish journalist writing for the conservative Washington Times. Let's see what he says: She doesn't have the fire in the belly. She doesn't want to spend her golden years working 16 hours a day and sleeping in unfamiliar beds. He theorizes that there's a "hard blue flame" that drives the winners, and declares Hillary doesn't have it.

Excuse me, but did George Bush (either of them) have a hard blue flame? No, they didn't. They were candidates of convenience. It's a bunch of bullshit to think tremendous, unabridged ambition is required to become president.

Of course the article correctly claims Hillary has a mountain of negatives. This is true, but it's also true of every other candidate for president. Their opponents dearly wish that these negatives would disqualify the hated candidate. But it just doesn't seem to happen.  From reading Bernstein, I know the qualifications you need to win a nomination, but there's no clear list of what 1) disqualifies candidates, or 2) ensures you win the general election.

It used to be that a divorced candidate couldn't win high office, yet Reagan disproved that. It used to be that no woman or black or hispanic could win, but that obviously isn't true anymore. People want to believe that no one with such-and-such a black mark can win the presidency, and then they conveniently fill in the disqualifying event. But it just isn't so. Probably every single president has at some point been declared disqualified, and those predictions were wrong, wrong, wrong. This is just a particularly stupid example of the genre.

Image: washingtontimes.com

The Political Lie Machine: Funnier than usual

Poor John McCain. He must be feeling more picked on than usual. As for Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, this typical for her--she's a leadership hack, and an especially shameless one. I'm not sure why this tickled me. Perhaps it was the lie density. Here's the equation:

amplitude/column inches > 2000 ==> too funny

Sigh--I voted for the hack

Yesterday was the special election to fill the senate seat left vacant when John Kerry became Secretary of State. I voted for the hackish Democrat, Edward Markey, who is too old and too doctrinaire liberal. How does it get to this point?

First, too few Democrats ran for this plum seat. This is a change from 2009, when lots of Dems ran for the seat that the Republican Scott Brown ultimately won. Most of them looked like hacks--very typical lock-step liberals. Michael Capuano seemed different. He proudly supported some of the compromises he made--and I love a good pragmatist. However, it seems that Capuano didn't even want to run this time, and cleared the way for his fellow (though lesser) House colleague, Markey.

Markey, as I said above, is a liberal hack, but a reliable one. I wanted to like his opponent, Steven Lynch, but the guy, also a House member, doesn't know what he's doing. During one debate, Lynch accused Markey of "knowing policy, but not people" [paraphrase, exact quote not located]. Horrors-- Markey voted against some verbal declaration on yada yada, but that's terrible. In Lynch's mind, it's worse than voting against the bank bailout that salvaged the economy, as Lynch had done.

I generally want to vote for the more moderate candidate, but that doesn't extend to stupid.

It's a bit harder for me to vote for a Republican right now. We need them to prevent the Dems from going whole hog, but they'd do a lot of damage if they achieved the major share of power in federal government. They might send shocks into the fragile recovery with large budget cuts, they'd do away with the best chance for the uninsured to get medical coverage, they'd enact all kinds of harmful social measures about marriage and abortion...

I'll only vote for a Republican who'll vote against these bad GOP ideas. Gomez claims to be "a new kind of Republican" but he's not for healthcare for everyone. He wants states to figure it out on their own. What a fucking lame excuse. He'll flush away the only decent health plan to pass in the past 30 years on that basis, not offering an alternative, and seemingly not caring about the problem enough to dig into it. There's no way I'll support another Senate vote to repeal Obamacare without a decent replacement in the works.

So I'm stuck with the hack Markey.

Markey, barely changed from 1976

Image: wikipedia.org + Paint

Short: End the bad candidates

The GOP senators have decided that they have to get more involved in the primaries that pick the senatorial candidates. They don't want repeats on Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell, Todd Akin, and even Richard Mourdock. You can bet that every prospective candidate will be asked about rape, pregnancy, and abortion. They might have a couple chance to get to an acceptable formula, but otherwise they're out. Whether the GOP establishment, and that's what they'll be, can enforce this is another question.

The senators involved in this no-more-mistakes effort include Rob Portman, and the newly elected Ted Cruz, who is supposed to reach to Tea Party groups. Since the Tea Party has not exactly welcomed the gentle guidance from the establishment, we'll see how that goes.

By the way, according to Ted Cruz, Romney french-kissed Obama in the last debate. Oy vey.

Image: texasconservativerepublicannews.com

Reflections on the Warren/Brown contest

This election campaign could be filled with important issues, but it's been a disappointment, both nationally and in my state, Massachusetts. In the Warren/Brown contest, the biggest issue has been trying to figure out how wrong it was for Elizabeth Warren to list herself as part Native American. In no way can I understand why this is a major issue.

Maybe Scott Brown is pushing this issue, and he is, to play on class resentments. Now that's an issue with some meat on it. Elizabeth Warren represents a liberal/academic elite that supports higher taxes to fund ever more government programs. Personally, I'm not sure whether Warren in fact supports higher taxes, but I've met enough academics who do, so why should I check out her actual positions? That may not be my attitude, but I bet it's a common one.

 The Real Massachusetts

I realize the Massachusetts is supposed to be a true-blue state where these liberal views should win hands-down. However, Massachusetts actually has a lot of blue-collar workers. (All states do--they perform those important service jobs.) We often elect Republican governors, including from 1990 to 2006. We have a flat state income tax, not a progressive one.

The election of Scott Brown in the special election in 2010 showed that our habit of electing Democrats to the Senate wasn't unbreakable. Brown won a clear victory over Martha Coakley, a decent Attorney General (in that she hasn't had a major embarrassing scandal), but a cold-fish as a campaigner and a typical, uninspiring liberal.

Pluses and Minuses

Elizabeth Warren has a better resume than Coakley as someone who understands financial issues and headed up the reform for consumer credit. However, her academic career and her talking points make her sound like another hack liberal. Nonetheless, I don't think she is. With her solid understanding of financial issues, she could be quite an asset in the Senate.

This isn't to say that Scott Brown doesn't have strong points too. He has been a swing vote on some issues, like the repeal of DADT. However, on other core issues like budget discipline (the sequester) and repealing Obamacare, Brown talks just like any other Republican. He's not a bridge to compromise on those weighty issues, so he's better than a typical GOP senator, but not by much.

So who has more appeal in Massachusetts? If it was a race of a garden-variety liberal against a truly independent moderate, I think the moderate would win. We don't have a majority of true liberals here--just 30.3% according to Gallup. However, Brown isn't as moderate in his votes as he pretends, and that may be his undoing.

The race may hinge on personality, not issues. If that's the case, Brown will win if Warren continues to sound like a hectoring liberal academic. But Brown's supporters better stop acting like spoiled frat boys with their mocking war whoops. I doubt that's the way to convince independents.

Campaign roundup:

• Warren issues
• Brown issues
• Warren assassination
• Stances on the budget and the defense cuts

Oust Nancy Pelosi

I'm no fan of Nancy Pelosi. This is what I've said before:

Her hand in the creation process of the stimulus and reviled health reform bills costs the Democratics a great deal of support ... [H]er egotism keeps her from stepping aside and giving the leadership to someone who could help Democrats rather than further blacken them.

Thinking about her, I realized something ironic. The GOP smears Obama with lies (he's radical, marxist, etc.), but Nancy Pelosi provides them with more than enough completely factual mud that they don't have to invent garbage to throw at her. Look at these headlines:

Republicans are the E. coli club.  (but she has a good point there)

Republican Jews are being exploited.

Todd Akin's views are doggie doo on GOP shoe.

Pelosi: I could have arrested Karl Rove, but we didn't.

Pass Health Reform so you can find out what's in it.

It's a terrible reflection on the House Dems that she is still their leader. Are the House Dems largely hacks? According to this Politico article, Pelosi draws substantial support from: California Dems, the progressive caucus, and women representatives.

She also has two other big advantages: she knows how to work the liberal money machine, and she's merciless to those who cross her. Fear and/or loyalty keep the House Dems in line and keep Pelosi in her leadership role.

So the House Dems won't depose her, nor is she moving on for the good of the party. This is another sign that Democrats can be the party of stupid. The most successful Democrat in the past 20 years, Bill Clinton, isn't the example Dems follow. Instead, it's Nancy Pelosi.

I hope the Dems don't regain the House, in this election or in any other election until they learn what it takes to become the majority and keep it. In other words, until they win on their merits. The last time they won, it was after 6 years of George Bush and his endless, expensive wars. If that's what it takes for Dems to win, I hope they keep losing. By the way, I feel differently about the Senate and the presidency, since there seem to be fewer hackish senators and candidates for president.

Pelosi with pearls and her biggest sponsor

Image: blogs.southflorida.com

Short: Patty Murray shows she's a hack

If the Harry Reid is smart (and I think he is), he's probably gotten Patty Murray to stop saying that the Dems are happy to go over the fiscal cliff because it will give them better leverage in 2013. It's not as dumb as the Teapublicans in the House proclaiming that they won't raise the debt ceiling, but it's in the same ballpark, and no senator should be there.

As an elected representative in a party that hopes to do OK in the next election, Murray shouldn't be saying that she's OK with people taking a major hit in their paychecks. You don't want to spite everyone to get leverage in a negotiation. The GOP was doing that last July over the debt ceiling, as it wasn't good for their favorability ratings. Did Murray somehow learn the lesson backwards?

Now I'll be looking for the signs that some of the Dems senators took her to the woodshed and made sure she learned the lesson right this time.

 Patty Murray needs a minder...

Image: huffingtonpost.com

NY9: Defeat of the hack

It's dangerous to write about a politics in a polity I don't have direct knowledge of. So I tread carefully into a discussion of NY9. Yesterday, the Republican candidate for the House seat won 54-46 over the Democrat in the heavily Democratic district. I won't say, as the RNC chairman did, that this election in Brooklyn and Queens "proves yet again that Obama is failing our country." Oh well, I guess that's what party chairman are paid to say. I haven't liked things coming out of the DNC chair's mouth either.

I have recent experience with unexpected special election upsets. In August 2009, Senator Edward Kennedy died, leaving his seat open. A party hack, Martha Coakley, won the Democratic nomination. Scott Brown, a moderate, won the Republican nomination. Brown got a lot of attention and support from national Tea Party groups, which have since labeled him a RINO.

So in the NY9 race, we have Weprin, a Democratic party hack who doesn't even live in the district. On the Republican side, we have Bob Turner, a conservative Catholic standard-issue Republican. I applaud NY9 for not electing the hack, and wish all other districts would elect the most sensible, moderate candidate.

Whoever picks the party's candidates, whether primary voters or party bosses, should consider this when making their choices. The election isn't going to be just a referendum on Obama. The next Congress will have a lot of work to do, but voters only get to choose from what is offered. Give them the best candidate you can, and try to decrease the deadlock in US government.