Typing through the tears...

We woke up this morning to find this heart-rending story of political gamesmanship, gamesmanship which has "cost" the United States Government the continuing "service" of Barney Frank. Poor Barney...

US Representative Barney Frank yesterday accused Beacon Hill lawmakers of drawing the new congressional map in a way that shortchanged him in favor of fellow congressmen Edward J. Markey and Stephen F. Lynch. Had they done otherwise, said Frank, he might have run again.

‘‘Markey and Lynch were protected, and the rest of us got what they didn’t want,’’ he said. Losing the chance to pick up some choice suburban towns for his district, Frank said, retirement became a more attractive option...On redistricting, Frank said he spoke with legislative leaders at the State House several weeks ago about the new lines for the Fourth Congressional District, to which he was first elected in 1980. They wanted him to take a reshaped district grounded in Southern Massachusetts, centered away from his base of Newton and Brookline. He rejected that idea, he said, but still ended up with a district that "unpleasantly surprised" him..."I talked to Ed Markey, and frankly I was a little disappointed there," said Frank. "I think Ed had some influence with them, but it was spent mostly on his own district.

"There was stuff that Eddie got that, if I could have shared some with Eddie, it would have been a better district."

I'm sorry, did I say "heart-rending"? I meant, of course, "heart-warming". And the tears are of laughter.

Oh, and what about Ed Markey's influence on the process? What was he looking for?

"My influence was to ask that all nine districts be Democratic districts, and independent analysts are concluding that all nine are safe Democratic seats," Markey said.

Yeah, I bet they are. No reason for Republicans in Massachusetts to have any shot at actual representation.



So let me talk, a little bit, about something that I found very discouraging in November of 2010. Some of you may remember my reaction to the elections, which produced such "great" results for Republicans nationwide. ("I'm sitting here in Massachusetts this morning, and "disappointed" doesn't even begin to describe how I'm feeling...") Well, in some ways, Republicans had a good decent night in Massachusetts, too. But not good enough to actually produce any electoral victories. There was a lot of enthusiasm among Massachusetts Republicans. There were a lot of votes. And there were a lot of losses.

Obviously, Massachusetts is a heavily Democratic state. But, it's also a heavily gerrymandered state. (As it's also the state where the GerryMander first got it's name, when Governor Elbridge Gerry signed a controversial redistricting plan in 1812, I suppose that's not inappropriate...)

And the current proposed map is no less contorted. No doubt they've managed to put together a plan in which all nine seats will go to the Democrats in 2012. Easy enough to do given the majority they've got, but there are certainly enough Republicans in the state for at least a couple of "fair" or competitive districts. If, you know, anyone were interested in something like that.

And what's the impact of all of the gerrymandering? Well, the more of it that gets done, the bigger the disparity between the minority party vote share and the minority party seat share. Here's a table showing what happened in 2010.

Massachusetts Republicans - 2010 Election

	% of vote	% of seats
Governor	41.59%	00.00%
US Representative	34.84%	00.00%
State Senate	31.42%	10.20%
State Representative	25.16%	20.30%

(While the Republican percentage varied from office to office, the Democratic percentage didn't change much, from 54% of the State Senate vote to about 58% for the Governor's race and the State and US House races. There were a lot of 3rd party votes and, particularly for the lower races, unopposed candidates where there were a great many blank ballots.)

Now, there's only one governor's office, so that's included mostly for informational purposes. On statewide races, the Republicans can, fairly often, come up with 35-40 percent of the vote, and, in the right circumstances, even win the Governorship. But it's interesting to note what happens in the rest of the categories. First off, in the state rep races, the districts are all small enough that there's not really a lot of room for extensive gerrymandering. In those races, the percentage of the Republican vote is fairly close to the percentage of the races that they won. (Pitiably small percentages, obviously.) In the State Senate races, where the effects of partisan districting really start to show up, the Republicans won 31% of the vote and only 10% of the seats. The Democrats won 90% of the seats with 54% of the vote. And in the US House races, where they can get very artistic, the Democrats beat the Republicans by 58%-35%, and took all ten (100%) of the seats in the process. So, despite the fact that the Republicans took 35% of the vote to the Democrats 58%, there continues to be no representation of Republican Massachusetts taxpayers in the United States House of Representatives. And the system is rigged to prevent them from getting any in the next election, either.

This is not new, of course. Nor is it particularly partisan - in places where Republicans control the process, no doubt there are similar effects.

But is it good for anyone? Other than the politicians themselves, of course? It's not at all obvious to me that it is. Of course, since the people that benefit are the people that are doing it, it's not at all clear what mechanism could possibly force a change in the practice, either...

An early Christmas present...

...for the entire country. U.S. Rep. Barney Frank will not seek re-election

Longtime U.S. Rep. Barney Frank won’t be running for re-election in 2012 ending an often controversial but always outspoken tenure.

Frank, 71, has served in Congress since 1980. He will take questions about his decision to relinquish his seat at 1 p.m. today at Newton City Hall, his office told the Herald.

Earlier would have been better, of course, as Frank's fingerprints are all over the housing bubble that is largely responsible for the crash of 2008, but hey - better late than never. If there's one thing that the US body politic desperately needs, it's fewer and better Barney Franks...

Just a little revisionism...

I'm generally a fan of Stephen Moore at the Wall Street Journal, but I think part of his review of Bill Clinton's new book, has a ... convenient interpretation of some fairly recent history.

Bill Clinton ascended to the White House as a New Democrat, wisely repudiating what had been a quarter-century of big-government liberalism and embracing instead welfare reform, deficit reduction, spending restraint, a strong and noninflationary dollar, and free trade. One might thus expect "Back to Work" to be a sharp condemnation of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and, of course, Barack Obama for their abandonment of his centrist policies...But instead of offering Democrats a road map for a return to the center, "Back to Work" is an ode to big government.

Certainly, he claimed for himself the mantle of the "New Democrat" during the campaign, and certainly "welfare reform, deficit reduction, spending restraint, a strong and noninflationary dollar, and free trade" were all hallmarks of the period during which he was President.

But I take issue with the idea that he "ascended to the White House" on those issues. On the contrary, his first two years, with a Democrat-controlled House and Senate, was characterized by his attempt to pass the next great goal of the progressive left - National Health Care. Like Obamacare, Hillary-care was extremely unpopular with the voters, and cost the Democrats control of the Congress in the middle of the President's first term. Unlike Obamacare, Hillary-care was defeated.

The differences between Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, therefore, are not, as implied by Moore, differences in policy goals. One key difference is circumstance. Clinton, after the Democrats' 1994 drubbing at the polls, did not have to defend Hillary-care any further. Obamacare is the law of the land, and Obama's chained to it. The other big difference is that Clinton was more pragmatist than ideologue, more interested in maintaining the Presidency in 1996 than in furthering his agenda. Obama is more interested in the agenda. (Clinton was also a much better politician than Obama.)

Welfare reform wasn't a Clinton policy - it was a Republican policy to which Clinton acquiesced. The "deficit reduction and spending retraint" that Moore mentions came from the Republicans in the House of Representatives. To his credit, Clinton acquiesced. His "era of Big Government is over" speech came, not during his campaign, not during his first two years in office, but in the State of the Union address that followed the voters repudiation of his first two "big government" years in office.

But the idea that Clinton's policy goals differed significantly from those of Pelosi/Reid/Obama strikes me as revisionism. It's almost a Conservative version of the media/leftist trope of looking back with affection at the reviled conservatives of the past as a means of denigrating the current conservatives. It's not necessary. Clinton was a better, more pragmatic politician than Barack Obama, but the idea that he came into the White House with a substantially less "progressive," leftist ideology, is not accurate.

More civility from the left

I repeat myself here, but calls for "civil discourse" from Democrats and the media (OK, redundant) are "not a general principle, but a political weapon that the left can use to cudgel the right."

Well, here's more civil discourse from the left.

Teamsters President James Hoffa said there's been a war on workers.

"We've got a bunch of people there that don't want the president to succeed, and they're called the tea party," he said.

"Let's take these son of a bitches out and give America back to America where we belong," he said.

Of course, the President will take the earliest possible moment to encourage everyone to speak in a civil manner, to "make sure that we're talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds."

Ha ha ha...

Ok, what actually happened is that the President took the same stage and told everyone how happy he was to be there with the great labor leaders, and questioned whether Republicans in Congress "will put country before party" (which they would do, apparently, by passing whatever jobs bill the President puts forward.)

Why 2012, despite Barack Obama's fevered dreams, is not like 1996

More from that John Fund piece I quoted earlier:

President Obama has apparently decided to borrow some political plays from Bill Clinton, who after his party's defeat in the 1994 mid-term elections began running ads attacking Republican plans to reform Medicare. At the same time, Mr. Clinton focused on a series of granular policy initiatives—promoting school uniforms was one memorable example—that were politically safe and popular with independent voters. Mr. Obama appears to be following the same strategy—offering little in terms of policy substance, remaining disengaged in budget negotiations and waiting for Republicans to present a target for him to shoot at.

One can understand the Obama White House leaping to this analogy, grasping at it like a drowning man clutching at a life preserver. But the differences between the two situations are different enough that the comparison doesn't really work.

1. Obamacare - Hillarycare was defeated, Obamacare passed. Bill Clinton didn't have a massive government program hanging over everyone's head, being fought over in the courts, causing costs to rise, and great difficulties for many, with benefits for few. Obamacare is a cudgel that the Republicans can, and will¹, use against Obama in 2012 that they did not have against Clinton in 1996.
2. The stimulus - Not only was the economy not terrible in 1996, it appeared to be better than it had been in 1992, that is, that "Clintonomics," however one wants to define that, was working. Obama is going to face re-election in an economy that's not only down, it will have been down significantly for his entire first term, with a massive increase to the debt that was supposed to have fixed it and in fact made it worse. (Even worse for him is that, in addition to making the economy worse, it appeared to make the economy worse. Politicians can get away with doing things that hurt the economy but appear to make it better or even things that help the economy while appearing to make it worse, but the stimulus failed on both counts.)
3. The deficit - The Federal budget deficit was a problem in 1994, and helped the Republicans get elected, but it was an addressable problem at that point. Social Security was still a net positive (shouldn't have been, but that's the way they used it) and things were close enough to in control that two years of a Republican Congress could get it headed in the right direction on a reasonable trajectory. It's an order of magnitude worse now, and the problems with entitlements are now 18 years further along and more intractable. And the public awareness of it, and concern about it, has multiplied over that stretch, as millions of people "took to the streets" at Tea Party rallies to fight against Leviathan in Washington.
4. Unemployment - Clinton took office as the Bush recovery was taking off, and it increased when the Republicans took over in 1994. When Americans went to the polls in November of 1994, the unemplyment rate was 5.4% and dropping. When they go to the polls in November of 2012, the optimistic projections are that it will be 7.7%.
5. The Congressional opposition - In 1994, the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. And they let it go to their heads. Newt Gingrich is a very smart guy, but he's bombastic and easily caricatured, and mis-read the extent of the "mandate" that the Republicans had. That's not the case this time. Boehner is a low-key adult. The leadership has idea men, but no bomb-throwers. And they have the historical perspective that wasn't available to Gingrich.
6. The Presidential opposition - Bill Clinton ran against Bob Dole. Whoever gets nominated in 2012 is not going to be Bob Dole.
7. The President - This is the big one. Bill Clinton was likable², with a passionate need to be liked, warm, friendly and hands on. Barack Obama is historic, aloof, cold, distant and detached. Bill Clinton understood that, regardless of what he would have liked to do, philosophically, with the Presidency, he was going to be better liked, and re-elected, if the American people were happy with the economy and the country's situation. Barack Obama is intent on re-making the country. Clinton's reluctance to do big things abroad caused problems down the road, but he was hands on, and managed to keep big negative things from happening. Obama has allowed the narrative to take hold that he's utterly clueless about what's going on.

It's easy to understand why the White House would look to the 1996 election as a model for their 2012 re-election campaign. But it's also easy to see that that's a model that is unlikely - extremely unlikely - to work...






¹ - This is the single biggest obstacle to a Romney presidency. And I'm a guy who likes Mitt, and thinks he may be just what we need in this situation. But if he doesn't completely disown Romneycare, "it was an experiment in the state, it was an attempt to do something, it failed miserably at the state level and is even worse at a national level," he'll never get out of the primaries.

² - Not by everyone. I can't stand him. But by enough. And he certainly qualifies for the label "likable."

"This is why the American people have thrown you out of power"

An interesting exchange on the floor of the house between Reps. Steve Buyer and Laura Richardson...

Buyer: "This is why the American people have thrown you out of power"

The Strategic Angle - Jim Geraghty on National Review Online

Excellent piece on the strategy and tactics of the Reid-Angle race by Jim Geraghty, who has been all over it on National Review Online.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, finds himself with only one remaining advantage: money.

He’s a fossil in an anti-incumbent year, his job-approval and personal-favorability ratings are terrible, the state’s unemployment and housing troubles are probably the nation’s worst, and the next Nevadan to rave about Reid’s smooth charisma will be the first. For a long while, everyone in Nevada politics has known Reid had one shot at reelection: Define Angle early, destroy her reputation in an onslaught of negative ads, and eke out a victory in a low-turnout matchup.

“Reid gets it, but he thinks we’re going to play by the normal challenger playbook and sit on our cash,” says Jordan Gehrke, deputy campaign manager for Angle. “Republicans across America will be there to support us if we’re still in a competitive race after Labor Day. But that means they have to see us fighting back now, and so that’s what we’re doing.”

Read it all...

I have not yet decided what would give me more pleasure come November 3rd - a Republican controlled Senate that includes Harry Reid, or a Democrat controlled Senate that doesn't. Obviously, a Reidless Republican Senate is the best case, but given the choice between one or the other of the first two, it would be a tough choice to make.

Duh - how did this happen? Duh...

The logical end-result the the "soft bigotry of low expectations:"

Well-connected Democrats are complaining that the Obama political operation since the 2008 campaign has been more clumsy than clever.

Obama’s been rebuffed by would-have-been top-tier Senate candidates in states — North Carolina and Illinois — where Democrats now face an uphill fight this fall.

House Democrats lost a special election in the liberal Hawaii district Obama grew up in, and they have griped that the president didn't do more to help ease one of the candidates out.

And the White House failed to head off bitter Senate primaries for three Democratic-held Senate seats — in Arkansas, Colorado and Pennsylvania — that Republicans could snatch away this fall. Last fall, Obama vacillated on how much to help Democratic gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia — he worked hard in one case and kept his distance in another — and the party was routed in both instances.

One senior House Democrat said it is baffling "how one group of people can be so good at campaigning and so bad at politics" — a phrasing nearly identical to that of a second veteran House Democrat who expressed the same sentiment.

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand famously said that "contradictions do not exist. When you are faced with what you believe is a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong." I don't think that that's correct in every single possible situation, but I think it is here. The premise that's wrong is that the Obama campaign was "so good at campaigning." The fact is that he gaffed and blundered all over the campaign trail, all over God's creation, and was dragged across the finish line by the most biased mainstream press operation in history. A press corps that was enamored of every move he made.

There was no background checking, no pushback on the things he said that were clearly false, no attempt whatsoever to "vet" him as a potential chief executive. It was obvious from day one that he had done absolutely nothing in his life to qualify him for the position that he now holds, but the people who present the campaign story to the country weren't interested in that, either. The inability to speak off the cuff - ignored. The vacuousness of the rhetoric - ignored. The hard left voting record - ignored. The radical friends - ignored. The lack of any kind of managerial experience - ignored. The corrupt bargains for his housing and Michelle's job - ignored. The press had room in their dispatches for one Hero - Barack, the ONE - and one villain - Sarah Palin. And that was the storyline. He won the election not because he ran a great campaign, but because his campaign was, and was going to be, called great no matter what he did. He was the "Great Black Hope," and once he became a viable candidate, he was going to win regardless of what happened.

Blowing my own horn. Again...

In the run-up to the 2006 mid-term election, there were several instances of Republicans and/or conservatives criticizing the Republican majority in Congress, and going so far as to urge a vote against them, so as to "chasten them," the idea being that they'd repent their sins and take back the House in 2008 and operate in a more conservative fashion.

I disagreed.

The "throw the bums out" idea is an idea with significant appeal. But I think that the "teach the Republicans a lesson now and everything will be better when they come back in 2008" is wishful thinking at its most wishful. If I were absolutely convinced that a Democratic takeover in 2006 would inevitably lead to a stronger, chastened and more conservative Republican majority in 2008, I might agree with the "throw the bums out" sentiment. I'm nowhere near that sanguine.

...

I see no particular reason to expect a Democratic takeover, if it occurs, to be a transitory, 2-year event. If the people haven't seen enough from Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean and the party they lead to recognize their fundamental unseriousness yet, what is the wellspring of the belief that they'll recognize it two years from now?

I'm a voter whose top three concerns at the Federal level are 1) National Defense, 2) Taxes and 3) Judges. There's not one of those concerns that would be better served by a Democratic Congress than a Republican one.

I wonder how those "throw the bums out" 2006 voters feel this morning? I hope that they look at the headlines and, instead of asking how we got here, look in the mirrors.

Look, there were a lot of problems with the Republican Congress from 2000-2006. They fell far, FAR short of what we'd like to see from them. But there isn't a single, solitary aspect of government that has not been worsened by the change. I'm going to link this a dozen times between now and November. I was right.

Failure of Liberal Governance

There's a great editorial in the Wall Street Journal this morning about the failure of liberal policies.

The central contradiction in modern liberal politics is that Otto von Bismarck's entitlement state for cradle to grave financial security is no longer affordable. The model has reached the limit of its ability to tax private income and still allow enough economic growth to finance its transfer payments.

You can see this in bankrupt Greece, where government spends 52% of GDP; or in California and New York, where the government-employee unions have pushed tax rates to punishing levels and the states still can't pay their bills. Americans can see that this is where Mr. Obama's agenda is also taking Washington, and this is why they are rejecting it.

The instigation for the piece was the retirement of Evan Bayh, but that's not the focus. Instead, it addresses the fact that "for the fourth time since the 1960s, American voters in 2008 gave Democrats overwhelming control of both Congress and the White House...Yet once again, Democratic leaders have tried to govern the country from the left, only to find that their policies have hit a wall of practical and popular resistance." It's an excellent piece - read it all...

"Our guess is that it will take one more repudiation in November before Democrats relearn that you can't govern America successfully from the political left."

In 2011, there will be no elected Kennedy's from Hyannis in the Federal government

This is a very good thing...

Rep. Patrick Kennedy has decided not to seek re-election to Congress, saying his life is "taking a new direction" just months after the death of his father and mentor, Sen. Edward Kennedy.

The Rhode Island Democrat taped a message to be aired on the state's television stations Sunday night. The Associated Press viewed the message Thursday, ahead of the announcement.

"Now having spent two decades in politics, my life is taking a new direction, and I will not be a candidate for re-election this year," Kennedy says in the ad.

One of the greatest needs of the United States body politic has been for fewer and better Kennedys. In the absence of better, fewer works just fine.

And maybe it isn't too late for Patrick to go out and actually find himself a real life. God only knows how much damage was done to him as a person by his upbringing, but this might be the best thing that could happen to him...

Why is Senator Kirk not yet former Senator Kirk?

SusanAnne Hiller has an excellent question:

The Senate has voted on three pieces of legislation today that required 60 votes–to raise the debt ceiling to $14.3 trillion, to reduce the deficit by establishing five-year discretionary spending caps, and Ben Bernanke’s confirmation–all of which interim Senator Paul Kirk (D-MA) has voted on. In addition, there have been other Senate votes since Scott Brown was elected as Massachusetts senator that Kirk cast a vote.

The main question here is: why is former Senator Kirk still voting on these legislative pieces? According to Senate rules and precedent, Kirk’s term expired last Tuesday upon the election of Scott Brown.

My suspicion is that, if the Senate tried to vote on a cloture motion which was going to be a 60-40 partisan vote, so that the vote actually mattered, the Republicans would make noise and fight it. None of the votes that they've taken in the past week-and-a-half have been such that it would have made any difference which way Senator MA-Jr. voted.

I think it's a bad precedent, but it hasn't made a difference in anything, so it isn't something that would be necessarily productive to squawk about.

"Just stop it."

California Treasurer Bill Lockyer, testifying truth to power.



It won't have any effect, of course...

Lies and the lying liars who write them

Politics is obviously a profession in which a certain amount of dishonesty is accepted, as people "spin" events or policies, trying to always "frame" their own candidates and policies in the best possible light. But flat-out lying is generally frowned upon, as indefensible statements call all of the other ones into doubt.

In Politico this morning, Democratic pollster Mark Penn writes about the problems facing the Obama administration, and how 10% unemployment could act as a "tripwire" to politically damage the administration. The piece is filled to the brim with selective history and self-serving declarations. But there's as blatant a lie as you'll ever see in a political piece, and really destroys whatever credibility Penn thinks he's bringing.

The Republicans are now on record in opposition to any stimulus.

Please. The Republicans obviously are on record as opposed to the stimulus passed in February. As well they should be - it was a non-stimulating disaster, an economic destruction measure of biblical proportions. But the Republicans have supported any number of true "stimulus" policies, and would do so again if given the opportunity. To suggest that Republicans would not support a payroll tax reduction, or extension of the Bush tax cuts is to suggest nonsense. It's not a "political fib," it's not "spinning," it's a blatant lie.


(H/T: Chris Lynch)

Isn't that the truth...

"If you regulated politicians’ economic promises like businesses’ they’d all be in jail."