Ballot Watch November 2009 - Page 2 - Big Big Forums

Jolie Rouge · 11-05-2009, 01:28 AM

The Main Lesson from Election Night:[i]
Fear Is Good, but the Party Is Where the Action Is

http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives...the-action-is/

Observing the results of last night’s elections, grassroots conservatives with national concerns should note with some pleasure that we’re well past the “first they laugh at you” phase, and well into the “then they fear you” phase. That transition required, and got, some anticipatory “and then you win”’s in the great purple Commonwealth of Virgina and the deep blue Garden State. Only in puny NY-23, a fraught race to replace the purploid Representative McHugh (a Republican who voted for Cap & Trade and joined the Obama Administration as Army Secretary), was there some minor disappointment – but nothing close to a real setback.
It always sounds hard-nosed and very Carville-Axelrod Machiavellian (apologies to Machiavelli) to treat winning as “the only thing,” but what’s true for sports and games and consultant job prospects isn’t true for our political life, where every game is equally a play in a larger game, yet every play a game in itself, and, more important, where the final scores are about people’s lives and fortunes, not just standings, bragging rights, and next year’s draft choices. So, Ed Morrissey is probably more than half right when he puts a good face on NY-23:

It’s never a best-case for the GOP when a Democrat wins, but by keeping Dede Scozzafava out of the seat, the GOP has the chance to win this seat back in a year with a better candidate — perhaps Hoffman, perhaps another Republican who shares core principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism. Dislodging an incumbent Republican would have been considerably more difficult, and a unified GOP should win this district — especially given the signals sent everywhere else to Democrats.[/quote]

If the Dems lose big next year and if winner Bill Owens is forced to walk the plank on unpopular positions, the Rs could get the seat right back, but I’m not convinced that this seat will necessarily be one of the easier ones to pick up. However, I’m even less convinced that it matters much in the grand scheme of things. Never heard of the district before, and I expect it will be at most a footnote next year: No offense, Watertownies – but you’re 3,000 miles from me.
Hoffman has said he wants to give it another try, and he should be a much better prepared candidate the next time around, but this time, for all the “Mr. Smith” talk, he was neither the most dynamic nor the most firmly grounded character ever to grab the attention of an insurgent political movement. He might be a smart, decent, brave, and unpretentious fellow (with a cool car collection!), but may have come across to NY-23 voters as a little bit more carpetbagger than tea… party hero, more Don Knotts (Barney Fife, not Mr. Limpet) than Jimmy Stewart. Next time around, he may just seem like more of a known quantity, and, for NY-23 voters, “one of us.” He may be slicker without seeming slick. He might be the perfect candidate, or close enough. Or maybe not…
By no means, however, can the loss be pinned solely on Mr. Hoffman, nor are the lessons to be drawn from it merely to be applied in and around the St. Lawrence Seaway. What’s clear from the closeness of the finish – ca. 49 -45 (and 6 to the nominal “Republican” who dropped out at the last minute and endorsed the Democrat), is that this election could have gone to the conservative if one of any of several further conditions had applied: If, in addition to capturing the imagination of conservatives nationally, and with or without a more articulate presentation and dynamic self-presentation, Hoffman had offered detailed knowledge of local concerns and/or had a more convincing, locally grounded positive message and/or had a unified and credible party organization behind him and/or hadn’t been knifed in the back in the last days by the “Republican” and/or hadn’t been forced to mount a come-from-behind, off-the-top-ballot-lines campaign in an off-year/early-voted special election… he likely would have won, and possibly would have won big.
As for movement conservatives still left with mixed feelings about what occurred, the lesson seems obvious, and is, I believe, already being absorbed: For the foreseeable future and on this side of the Apocalypse, the electoral action will remain in the R party of Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell – and Michael Steele and John Boehner and even Newt Gingrich – not in the fantasy 3rd Party of Glenn Beck’s musings or in the bloody shambles after a conservative night of the long knives. Big victories went to the unified party-movement – Virginia – not to the fractured party + movement in NY-23. For a Tea Party insurgency to start winning more often than spoiling, it would probably have to be around for a few years at least, not just a few months – and even then it would likely need a well-timed crack in the world or a civil war on the horizon to get the last bit of necessary oomph.
In the meantime, nationalizing a local election is always a tricky operation, and, for a political movement that in many ways is about re-asserting ground level, human scale control of our political life, there’s something contradictory about relying on national figures like Fred! and Sarah!, and the national rejection of the President’s or Speaker’s agenda, to empower (and finance) yourselves. We need both legs – the standing leg in the everyday lives and aspirations of voters, the kicking leg of issues that connect national and even global dangers and objectives to those voters. It’s the job of a party, though not just the party, to connect the two, and clearly the Republican Party still needs substantial legwork, at all levels.

Jolie Rouge · 11-05-2009, 09:22 AM

What Obama Is Up Against
by: Russ Baker
truthout News Analysis

The first anniversary of Barack Obama's historic election finds many of his supporters already grousing. Fair enough: Obama has been more vigorous in some areas than others. But one essential question goes unasked: How much can any president accomplish against the wishes of recalcitrant power centers within his own government?

We Americans harbor a quaint belief that a new president takes charge of a government that eagerly awaits his next command. Like an orchestra conductor or perhaps a football coach, he can inspire or bludgeon and get what he wants. But that's not how things work at the top, especially where "national security" is concerned. The Pentagon and CIA are powerful and independent fiefdoms characterized by entrenched agendas and constant intrigue. They are full of lifers, who see an elected president largely as an annoyance, and have ways of dealing with those who won't come to heel.

Compound that with the Bush-Cheney administration's aggressive seeding of its staunch loyalists throughout the bureaucracy, and you have a pretty tough situation.

Obama, then, has to contend not only with the big donors and corporate lobbies. His biggest problem resides right inside his "team." The internal battles between American presidents and their national security establishments are not much reported. But if it is an invisible game; it is also a devious and even deadly one. Our civilian leaders end up mirroring the chronically nervous chiefs of state of the fragile democracies to our south.

Those who do not kowtow to the spies and generals have had a bumpy ride. FDR and Truman both faced insubordination. Dwight Eisenhower, who had served as chief of staff of the US Army, left the White House warning darkly about the "military industrial complex." (He of all presidents had reasons to know.) John Kennedy was repeatedly countermanded and double-crossed by his own supposed subordinates. The Joint Chiefs baited him; Allen Dulles despised him (more so after JFK fired him over the Bay of Pigs fiasco), and Henry Cabot Lodge, his ambassador to South Vietnam, deliberately undermined Kennedy's agenda. Kennedy called the trigger-happy generals "mad" and spoke angrily to aides of "scattering the CIA to the wind." The evidence is growing that he suffered the consequences.

In the 1950s, the late Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, a high-ranking Pentagon official, was assigned by CIA Director Allen Dulles to help place Dulles's officers under military cover throughout the federal government. As a result, Dulles not only knew what was happening before the president did, but had essentially infiltrated every corner of the president's domain. One Nixon-era Republican Party official told me that in the early 1970s, there were intelligence officers everywhere, including the White House. Nixon was unaware of the true background of many of his trusted aides, particularly those who helped drive him from office. Remember Alexander Butterfield, the so-called "military liaison," who told Congress about the White House taping system? Years later, Butterfield admitted to CIA connections.

In December 1971, Nixon learned of a military spy ring, the so-called Moorer-Radford operation, that was piping White House documents back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Chiefs were wary of Secret negotiations the president and Henry Kissinger were conducting with America's enemies, including North Vietnam, China and the USSR, and decided to keep tabs on this intrusion upon their domain.

Jimmy Carter came into office as revelations of CIA abuses made headlines. He tried to dismantle the agency's dirty tricks office, but wound up instead a victim of it - and a one-term president.

Those who avoided problems - Johnson, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Jr. - were chief executives that made no problems for the Pentagon and intelligence chiefs. All embraced military and covert operations, expanded wars or launched their own. The agile Bill Clinton was a special case - no babe in the woods, he focused on domestic gains and pretty much steered clear of the hornets' nest.

As for the Bushes, their ascension represented a seizure of power by the national security state itself. Their family had profited from arms manufacturing for decades. The patriarch, Prescott Bush, monitored US assassination plots against foreign leaders as a senator; and records indicate that the elder George Bush had been a secret agency operative for decades before he became CIA director - and then, 12 years later, president.

Obama seems to understand his narrow range of movement, and to be carefully picking his fights. He retained many of Bush's top military brass, and even Bush's Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who himself had served as a CIA director for Bush's father. He has trod very carefully with the spy agency, and has declined to aggressively investigate Bush administration wrongdoing on torture and wiretapping. Obama's campaign rhetoric about disengaging from Iraq seems a long time ago, and the war in Afghanistan is taking on the hues of permanency.

The old boys' network is very much in place, and it is hard at work to force Obama's hand, a la Vietnam. Witness the leaking of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's supposedly "confidential report" calling for escalation in Afghanistan. The leak was, not surprisingly, to the reliable Bob Woodward. The reporter was himself in Naval Intelligence shortly before he went to work at the Washington Post, where he soon built a career around leaks from the military and spy establishment. The White House was furious at the McChrystal release. But what could it do? Presidents come and go, and the security folks have ways to hasten the latter.

Covert alliances and payments to corrupt foreign allies continue, making creative diplomacy more difficult. In late October came a front-page story that the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, suspected of being a major figure in that country's opium trade, has been on the CIA's payroll for eight years. Anyone who finds this shocking should go back and read about the CIA and the drug trade in Southeast Asia.

Throughout its six-decade history, the CIA has resisted accountability, with even some of its own nonspook directors kept in the dark about the agency's most troubling activities. As for the public's elected representatives, Nancy Pelosi is the most recent in a long line of legislators to accuse the CIA of deliberately misleading Congressional overseers.

None of this is likely to change soon, and not without a huge fight. Half a century after Ike's famous admonition, conflict and intrigue remain the engine of our economy, and everyone from private equity firms to missile makers to car and truck manufacturers count on that to continue.

The homeland security industry, the most recent head to grow on this hydra, is now seeking permanency.

So Barack Obama is boxed in.

But so are the American people, and so, really, is democracy itself. Bringing this inconvenient truth out in the open is the essential first step toward taking back control of our government - and our future. For all the reasons laid out here, Obama will need help. He may, in the rote formulation, hold "the most powerful office in the world." However, the extent to which he controls the government he heads, is another matter.

Alternative title to this thread could have been "Conspiracies R Us" ?

Jolie Rouge · 11-05-2009, 10:11 AM

Krauthammer: So much for last year’s Democratic “realignment”
posted at 4:10 pm on November 4, 2009 by Allahpundit
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/11/0...c-realignment/

Via Greg Hengler http://townhall.com/blog/g/2201b99d-...e-39b359b3cc72 one of the more provocative takeaways from last night’s jumble. In fairness, the Reagan realignment of the 80s was no less real for having suffered big blue gains in the 1982 midterms, but it is strange to find Democrats getting utterly destroyed, especially among independents, in a newly “realigned” state just a year after The One made it part of his unicorn kingdom. For all the laughs conservatives have had over his narcissism, this year’s results actually underscore what a strong candidate he is: When you remove his personal charisma and Hopey/Changey sermonizing from the equation, you’re left with … Creigh Deeds, and even a Republican as nondescript as Bob McDonnell can put the boots to someone like that. To put it another way, for Democrats, The One really might be The One; and, alas for the national GOP, right now there’s no one on our side who quite measures up head to head. But at the local level, in state or House races? Why shouldn’t a guy like Christie be able to beat Corzine, even in a Democratic stronghold? Why shouldn’t, say, Carly Fiorina be able to beat Boxer? Their party’s littered with at least as many unappealing losers as ours is. Take Obama off the top of the ticket, toss running trillion-dollar deficits into the mix, and it’s anyone’s game.

For further thoughts, read James Pethokoukis on re-realignment http://blogs.reuters.com/james-petho...ns-to-unravel/ and Ace http://ace.mu.nu/archives/294385.php on ObamaCare. He asks a good question: If we’re now living in the Democratic paradise, where the silent majority’s itching for a glorious new health-care entitlement and purple states can be expected to break blue most of the time, why is the White House so eager to get cover for Blue Dogs by wooing RINOs in the Senate? Own the bill, Democrats. Bathe in its realignment glory.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jCOj...layer_embedded