From Rasmussen (H/T):
Sixty-nine percent (69%) of Republican voters say Alaska Governor Sarah Palin helped John McCain’s bid for the presidency, even as news reports surface that some McCain staffers think she was a liability.
Only 20% of GOP voters say Palin hurt the party’s ticket, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Six percent (6%) say she had no impact, and five percent (5%) are undecided.
Ninety-one percent (91%) of Republicans have a favorable view of Palin, including 65% who say their view is Very Favorable. Only eight percent (8%) have an unfavorable view of her, including three percent (3%) Very Unfavorable.
When asked to choose among some of the GOP’s top names for their choice for the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, 64% say Palin. The next closest contenders are two former governors and unsuccessful challengers for the presidential nomination this year — Mike Huckabee of Arkansas with 12% support and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts with 11%.
Three other sitting governors — Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Charlie Crist of Florida and Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota — all pull low single-digit support.
A common theme I heard in the last several weeks is how many conservative leaning independents were turned off when McCain picked Palin. My view is that we need to see how Palin governs Alaska for the next 4 years, assuming she’s reelected. What say the rest of the paupers? (Tom, Jamie, please put down the hemlock. . .)
Hubbard posted this at 12:47 PM EST on Friday, November 7th, 2008 as Amer-I-Can!, I have seen the future. . .
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Barack Obama has picked Rahm Emanuel for White House Chief of Staff (H/T). The good: Emanuel is a free trader, a friend of Joe Lieberman, and fights regularly with Howard Dean. The bad: he’s a steely partisan of the Untouchables school (”He pulls a knife, you pull a gun; he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue”).
An old saw of politics is that personnel is policy. For example, Bush went from the smart and tough AG Ashcroft to the foolish and weak Alberto Gonzales. The White House Chief of Staff is effectively co-president, and Obama has picked a pitbull who’ll fight Congress, so Obama won’t be a rubberstamp for Pelosi or Dean. It seems like a smart choice. The danger is that Emanuel tends to leave bruises whenever he gets involved in an issue. If I recall correctly, he was the staffer who told someone that if Senator Moynihan (then chair of the Senate Finance Committee) got in their way, they’d roll over him. This turned a shrewd and powerful politician from an ally to a critic.
The right needs to get over Tuesday quickly. Obama’s choice tells us that he’s going to play hardball.
Hubbard posted this at 5:14 PM EST on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 as Politics, I have seen the future. . .
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Jonah Goldberg peers into a crystal ball and sees 2012 with President Obama:
Indeed, the overconfidence of Congressional Democrats posed another major challenge to the Obama presidency. During the 2008 election, Obama’s conservative critics had long complained that the then-freshman senator had little to no record of standing up the leftwing base of his party in part, they argued, because he himself was much more leftwing than he had let on.
Whatever the truth of that, what is not contested is that the Congressional Progressive Caucus — the largest partisan bloc in the Congress when Mr. Obama was elected — believed that the new president was “one of us” according to many sources contacted for this article.
The CPC, colloquially known as the “big swinging caucus” after an unfortunate joke by then-Republican Minority Leader John Boehner after a scandal involving Rep. Barney Frank (see side story), pushed Barack Obama on a wide array of fronts: they demanded very large cuts in the military budget, a sweeping government expansion into the role of healthcare, and in a move that experts agree caused the Wall Street Panic of 2010, they persuaded Mr. Obama to make the government’s partial ownership of the remaining “Big Five” banks permanent. Representatives Frank and Charlie Rangel argued that the stakes, bought by the Bush treasury department, in the banks provided, in Frank’s words, a “once in a lifetime opportunity to inject some social justice into the capitalist system.” Or as Senator Jesse Jackson Jr. said, “if we’ve got them by the b***s already, why let go?”
Enjoy.
Hubbard posted this at 10:04 AM EST on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 as There Is Only One God And Jonah Goldberg Is His Prophet, I have seen the future. . .
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Over at The American Spectator, Peter Ferrara bloviates on The End of Prosperity:
Just two weeks ago, a book on economic policy was released that will be a classic for the ages. Entitled The End of Prosperity, by Art Laffer, Steve Moore, and Peter J. Tanous, the book explains in full detail the economic disaster that will befall America if it takes a sharp left turn to neo-socialism under the leadership of the far left President Barack Obama, the ultraleft Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid with 60 liberal Democrat Senators, and their pal the ultraliberal Howard Dean heading the Democrat party.
Indeed, one of the insights of the book is that a major factor already tanking the stock market and leading foreign capital to flee America is the threat of the economic policies promised by Obama. Obama proposes increases in every major federal tax, on savers, investors, employers, small business, big business, and anyone who would start a business. Obama also promises to add additional federal spending of almost $1.5 trillion over the next four years, including a new global war on poverty in which Obama would tax Americans and send the money to the UN to spend worldwide (already introduced by Obama in legislation). That would be on top of all the spending increases already scheduled for our exploding entitlements and other programs. Obama also promises a massive increase in regulatory controls, even though government regulation is already estimated to cost America over $1 trillion per year, about $8,000 in lost output for every U.S. household. Then there is Obama’s attack on free trade and promises of protectionist trade policies that contributed so much to the Great Depression.
As the authors show, these retrograde economic policies are intellectually indefensible. They do not offer forward looking change, but would take us back to the policies of the disastrous 1970s and even worse 1930s.
The article, alas, is a massive burst of hyperventillation (whether the hysteria is Ferrara’s or the book under review is an open question). As a general rule, one need not take apocalyptic predictions seriously. Contra Rachel Carson, the Spring is not Silent; contra Jim Jones, one need not drink the Kool-Aid. There’s much not to like about a potential Obama administration, but predicting stagflation and another Great Depression? It’s possible but improbable—and when it doesn’t happen, the right’s good ideas will be discredited.
Economic conservatives should take heart for a few reasons. First, as Adam Smith once observed, “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” When a decently functioning nation (which America is, despite our occasional gripes) elects hacks, they have to work hard to seriously ruin it. For all his speeches, Obama hasn’t run anything; Pelosi lost control of her caucus in the bailout debacle; Reid is hamstrung by the Senate filibuster rules. The Founders tried to make it hard to pass legislation, and they succeeded. There’s no FDR-Rayburn combo waiting for us, nor is Obama a legislative genius as LBJ was. If anything, Obama is more like Jimmy Carter.
2008 is probably going to be a bad year for the right. But even if everything goes wrong, it won’t be the end of the world.
Hubbard posted this at 3:17 PM EDT on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 as Windbaggery, I have seen the future. . .
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Sarah Palin plainly beat Joe Biden. I recognized it as it happened. In Frank Luntz’s group, everybody but one was moved toward John McCain.
This is the greatest, most important vice presidential nomination ever. She will be president.
That is all.
Apollo posted this at 9:48 PM EDT on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 as Uncategorized, Audacity of Hype, I have seen the future. . .
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John McCain is an excellent example of a La Rochefoucauld maxim: Only great men are entitled to great flaws. Were the election held today, I would be voting for McCain because Obama is worse; it is unlikely but possible that I’ll change my mind. Much as I like Sarah Palin, she’ll only be the vice president; for all we know, President McCain will send her to the funerals of foreign dignitaries before the guest of honor is actually deceased. (Call that the Dan Quayle option.)
Russ seems to be feeling a strange new respect for McCain. I suspect it will only last should Obama win; should McCain win, we right-wingers will soon enough find reason to tear out hair by the fistful.
Some time ago, Andrew Ferguson summarized how McCain works:
McCain’s method in domestic matters no less than in foreign affairs is military: He surveys a set of facts, identifies a villain, fixes him with his steely gaze, and then goes after him. . . . More recently, he has championed a “patients’ bill of rights” to tighten regulations on the HMOs, insurance companies, and employers he considers to be stingy with health benefits. Pharmaceutical companies should be reined in, he’s said, because they’re the “bad guys.”
What’s unsettling is that you can never predict who the next bad guy will be. No consistent economic principles can be extracted from McCain’s grab bag of policy positions, and no amount of textbook baloney about the free market, deregulation, and limited government will deter him from bringing his malefactors to justice. McCain’s economics aren’t ideological but improvisational—a campaign with shifting fronts, running on indignation. And a very large number of voters, probably a majority, will find this approach appealing because they don’t buy all this textbook baloney about the free market and limited government either. When President McCain finds his villain and pursues him however he can, they will likely cheer their president and egg him on—unless, of course, he fixes his steely gaze on them.
What enemies will President McCain go after? Russia? China? Pakistan? Oil companies? Insurance companies? Mortgage lenders? Banks? In each of those cases, there’s plenty of things that should be changed—and plenty of problems that could be aggravated.
Obama, alas, is a go-along-to-get-along hack. He was a cog in Chicago’s Daley Machine, and he picked a cog in the Washington insiders circuit, Joe Biden, for his VP. Given how much fighting the next president is going to have to do—with Congress, with mortgage companies, with Islamofascists, with resurgent Russia, with conniving China—we are in a unusually bad time to have a presidential hack. McCain’s selection of Palin shows that he plans to pick fights, but will he pick the right fights?
So, as Buckley once prefered Eisenhower, I prefer McCain. I would love to be pleasantly surprised by President McCain, but suspect that we’ll have lots to criticize about him once he starts governing. For now, go McCain-Palin.
Hubbard posted this at 8:10 PM EDT on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 as The Past Is Never Dead--It Isn't Even Past, Audacity of Hype, I have seen the future. . .
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