The more I follow politics, the more I realize that the secret to electoral success is simple:  motivate your base while appealing to independent voters.

It is why social issues are not the winning ticket for the GOP.  They may motivate the base, but they won’t appeal to independent voters more concerned about bread-and-butter issues.

Obama did that in 2008.  He was able to motivate his party’s base by presenting himself as the antithesis of their bogeyman, the then-incumbent president of the United States.  Not just that, many on the left, aware of his radical associations and liberal voting record, were particularly excited by his candidacy.  In the fall campaign, he was able to appeal to independent voters by promising fiscal policies more restrained than those of the then-current team.  The mantra of “change” held together these constituencies with discordant concerns.

This past week in Massachusetts, Scott Brown appealed to the Republican base by opposing the big government initiatives put forward by the Obama Administration and championed by Democrats in Congress.  It just so happened that independents were also concerned by this vast expansion of government.  In this case, the issues which motivated Brown’s base also appealed to independent voters.

It’s not just Democrats who have much to learn from Brown’s victory.  Republicans can also take a lesson from his campaign.  If they wish to regain and retain the majority , they need to focus on that aspects of our platform which appeal to a broader segment of the population.  They did that in 1994 by drawing up the Contract with America which included those core conservative concerns which most resonated with independent voters.

In elections across the country–and not just in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Republicans are winning back those independent voters.  In “open revolt against an urban-centric regime“, suburban voters are returning to the GOP in droves.   And if the Democrats keep trying to pick out pockets and the Republicans stay out of people’s bedrooms (to borrow an idea from a recent post on Pajamas), then those voters with remain on the right and with the GOP.

Perhaps had the Democrats not taken too seriously all those glowing editorials and books about the 2008 election ushered in a new era of liberalism, telling us how their party would rule the next generation — and beyond, how conservatism was dead and Republicans a dying breed, they might have developed a different strategy on health care.  They saw the tea parties as either the products of corporate shenanigans or the last breath of the Reagan Revolution.  Instead, they represented the first awkward steps of a reinvigorated Reagan coalition.

In short, had Democrats not been so condescending to their critics, they might have been better prepared to answer their challenges.  So, when the president bemoaned today about the difficulty of passing health care reform, that he was “running headlong into special interests, and armies of lobbyists, and partisan politics that’s aimed at exploiting fears instead of getting things done“, you’ve gotta wonder why a candidate who ran so successfully against special interests in the fall of 2008 claims he was so ill-prepared to face an opposition that they supposedly ginned up.

That said, the president’s complaint just doesn’t wash.  Yes, there’s been a vocal opposition, but he has had unprecedented access to the media from whom he has received unprecedented amounts of glowing coverage.  He has had the means to get his message across and to answer his critics.

Can’t he recognize that that on health care at least, he’s lost.  The people just aren’t buying what he’s selling?

Imagining that because they’re so smart and have so rarely faced criticism save from those whose credibility they question, Democrats find it difficult to imagine, polls and election returns notwithstanding, that the people don’t like what they’re doing in Washington.  Maybe they need first measure Obama’s actions in office against his rhetoric on the campaign trail.  He’ll add more (much more) to the national debt in his first term than W did in both of his,* yet he ran against Bush’s government for living beyond its means while he promised a net spending cut.

The health care bill was negotiated behind closed doors while he had promised negotiations on C-SPAN.  It included payoffs to special interests when he ran against them in his campaign.  And yet, Obama still doesn’t get it.  He doesn’t understand that voters in Massachusetts were voicing not the rage that catapulted him into the White House, but a rage at what he’s being doing since he got there.

Charles Krauthammer helps explain why his (and other liberal’s awakening was so rude:

The reason both wings of American liberalism — congressional and mainstream media — were so surprised at the force of anti-Democratic sentiment is that they’d spent Obama’s first year either ignoring or disdaining the clear early signs of resistance: the tea-party movement of the spring and the town-hall meetings of the summer. With characteristic condescension, they contemptuously dismissed the protests as the mere excrescences of a redneck, retrograde, probably racist rabble.

It’s Krauthammer, read the whole thing.

*UPDATE: Jax Dancer reminds me that instead of going for rhetorical parallelism, I should have been more specific:

from the day Mr. Obama took office last year to the end of the current fiscal year, according to the Office of Management and Budget, the debt held by the public will grow by $3.3 trillion. In 20 months, Mr. Obama will add as much debt as Mr. Bush ran up in eight years.

And as per ILC, I fixed the link above.

With the state facing bankruptcy, with voters having (just eight months ago) shown an aversion to tax hikes, even in San Francisco, a state Senator from that city, Jay Leno, er, sorry, thinking this story was a joke, I thought of another guy with the same last name, Mark Leno introduced a bill to create “a single-payer” health system which “would cost California an estimated $210 billion in its first year.”

And get this, Leno doesn’t know how we’re going to pay for this, so his “bill would create a commission to decide how to pay for the system, at a cost this year of more than $1 million.”  No, I’m not kidding you.  This is not material from the monologue of the other Leno.  It’s from an actual news article.

So, we’ve got a state facing a financial crisis.  A public turning against big-government initiatives, particularly on health care.  And a California Democrat introduces legislation to move full-speed ahead on such a boondoggle.  And Leno’s not alone:  ”The [California] Senate Appropriations Committee voted 6-3 along party lines, with Democrats in favor of the proposal, which will be considered by the full Senate next week.”

Maybe those Democrats are Rovian plants, voting this way in order to create a better atmosphere for Republicans in the Golden State.  After all, just such a strategy worked so well in Massachusetts.

Or maybe it’s something else. ”Old socialist habits,” writes Michelle Malkin, alerting us to this article, “die hard.”

One of the most obnoxious Democratic partisans in the Senate may draw a challenger this fall.  While even an optimistic like me thinks ol’ Chuckie Schumer (along with Hawai’i's Daniel Inouye and Vermont’s Patrick Leahy) remain the three safest incumbent Democrats, CNBC host and columnist Larry Kudlow is weighing a run, well, actually according to the Daily Caller, he’s declining to rule out a bid to unseat the big-spending New Yorker.

He did point out that “defeating Senator Schumer would be a noble cause.”  Yes, it would be.

There’s already a Draft Kudlow website.

(H/t Instapundit.)

Statist health care reform is headed where the goblins go.

According to Gallup, In U.S., Majority Favors Suspending Work on Healthcare Bill. Only 39% want to continue works. Guess that’s why the Politico reports that Democratic health care talks are collapsing:

Health care reform teetered on the brink of collapse Thursday as House and Senate leaders struggled to coalesce around a strategy to rescue the plan, in the face of growing pessimism among lawmakers that the president’s top priority can survive.

Althouse nails it:

I don’t think Americans really like to see aggressive economic experiments that displace the private sector. . . . It’s a crazy concoction that no one understands.

Via:  Instapundit.

Sorry, but I just can’t stop laughing about the fact that John Edwards was secretly screwing around on his wife, his mistress and the millions of doe-eyed liberals who thought he was the Second Coming of Robert Kennedy.

Aren’t you people just stupid?  ROFL.

You are the same people who think that Al Gore is a man of principle who truly wants to save the planet.   (Normal human beings already know that Al Gore is a snake oil salesman who is making hundreds of millions of dollars off the Global Warming Ponzi Scheme).

Once again, liberals’ love for Edwards show that they see the world as they wish it was — not as it truly is.

Oh and by the way — John Edwards is the most disgusting, slimeball of a politician in my lifetime.  He wins the Nobel Prize for Manwhoreness.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Well, anyone with one iota of “gaydar” could have figured that out on their own.  Just look around Hartsfield Airport if you are passing through.

Advocate: America’s Gayest Cities

According to The Advocate magazine, Atlanta rates as the nation’s gayest city, followed by Burlington, Vt., Iowa City, Bloomington and Madison, Wis. Don’t bother looking for San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles — those supposed gay meccas don’t even place in the rankings compiled by the nation’s oldest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender publication.

Though their research was admittedly unscientific, it’s not without merit. Correspondent Mike Albo awarded points based on same-sex households per capita, statewide marriage equality, gay elected officials, gay dating and “hookup” profiles per single male population, gay bars per capita, cruising spots per capita, and gay films in Netflix favorites.

Atlanta:  Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay.  Great food, too!  But Charlotte is still a better place to live! 

Oh and by the way — there are a LOT of cities in RED STATES on the list.  Including the #1 city being in one of the most Republican states in the USA.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

George Will nails it:

The essence of contemporary liberalism is the illiberal conviction that Americans, in their comprehensive incompetence, need minute supervision by government, which liberals believe exists to spare citizens the torture of thinking and choosing.

And I agree with his assessment of the Democrats’ persistence on health care:

In their joyless, tawdry slog toward passage of their increasingly ludicrous bill, Democrats now cling grimly to Robert Frost’s axiom that “the best way out is always through.” Their sole remaining reason for completing the damn thing is that they started it.

Just read the whole thing.

This week keeps on getting better and better.  First, citizens of Massachusetts, the only state to support ultra-liberal George McGovern in 1972, elect a Republican to serve out the remainder of Ted Kennedy’s term in Daniel Webster’s Senate seat.  In the wake of that election, we begin to see the crumbling of what seemed inevitable barely one month ago–the Democratic plan to increase government control over health care.  The Supreme Court (albeit by a slim margin) affirms the First Amendment, striking down parts of a campaign finance law which regulated the speech of corporations, labor unions and other private groups.

And Air America, filing bankruptcy, ceases “its live programming operations“.  Given the tilt of the MSM, guess there really wasn’t a market for their opinions.  Too bad Al Franken didn’t kick in some of his $21,066,834 campaign stash.  Instead of spending $17.37 for each vote he got (or borrowed), he might have kept his former colleagues on the air.  Not that anyone was listening.

Seems Al took in about one dollar for every American who listens to Rush Limbaugh’s show.

In response to a remark by Sam Seder, who, until last year, hosted programs on the now bankrupt network that, “Radio is a dying industry“,  Ann Althouse quipped, “Well, that‘s got to find its way into Rush Limbaugh’s “stack of stuff” for tomorrow.”

Michelle, however, warns us not to gloat too much:

They’re still swinging the Fairness Doctrine noose. When they can’t compete in the marketplace, the Left will use the power of government to squash their competitors.

I’m hoping that a Supreme Court which struck down major portions of a campaign finance law will strike down the “Fairness Doctrine” which would also serve to regulate speech.

UPDATE: Wonder if this would have been a better title, Guess Fairness Doctrine will come too late to save Air America.

The first candidate we endorsed in the 2010 election cycle, Matthew Berry, is on a tear against his Democratic opponent, Jim Moran, quite possibly one of the most corrupt men in Congress.

Old Dominion Watchdog, whose mission it is “to investigate and inform the public about waste, fraud, abuse, ethical questions and safety concerns involving the use of taxpayer dollars,” confirmed Matthew’s allegations against the 10-term Democrat.  ”[M]ore than 20 percent of Moran’s $396,952 in donations last year” came from “political action committees and lobbyists of companies to whom he’s directed earmarks”:

In total, Moran has received $82,700 total from these committees and individuals, according to Federal Election Commission reports. MobilVox, Inc. tops the list of donors, contributing $8,300 to Moran and receiving a $2 million earmark.

Berry is also correct that Moran requested earmarks for donors totaling more than $50 million. The largest earmark requests were $3 million each, requested for EM Solutions, Inc., Argon ST and DDL Omni Engineering. All of the earmarks given to donors of Moran were defense appropriations.

Despite these takings, Moran had the gall to criticize the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. The career politician claimed the decision would “allow corporations to drown out the voices of average Americans.”  And Berry was quick to call Moran’s rhetora smokescreen hiding his support of lobbyists and special interest:

Given that Jim Moran funds his campaigns in large part through donations from executives, political action committees and lobbyists of companies to which he directs earmarks, it takes true chutzpah for him to criticize the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on the grounds that it will allow corporations to drown out the voices of average Americans.

In Jim Moran’s office, corporations drowned out the voices of average Americans long ago. If Jim Moran were truly concerned about the corrupting influence of corporate money, he would immediately announce that he will stop requesting earmarks on behalf of his campaign contributors.

Shortly after Scott Brown’s victory, Michelle Malkin warned establishment Republicans not to crow:

January 19 was an amazing day for grass-roots conservatism. But the Beltway GOP should be warned against unjustified triumphalism. They were late to the game. Activists still haven’t, and won’t, forget the massive amounts of money Washington, D.C. Republicans wasted on Dede Scozzafava. . . .

The GOP brand is still damaged. And instant exploitation of the Brown win — see the NRSC website here — isn’t going to help matters. As I’ve said for many years, the Republican Party needs to clean its own house before it demands that the Democrats clean theirs.

While I think Michelle is a bit harsh on the GOP, I do agree she’s onto something.  Still, while grassroots activists can win without the GOP, they can’t win by running against the GOP.  The party needs show that it’s learned from past defeats as have candidates in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts.  Other candidates can show they understand the unrest across the country by following my gal Carly’s lead and sign sign the Taxpayer Protection Pledge.

Now, it’s time to add a new pledge, let’s call it the “Tea Party Compact” where candidates for federal office sign an agreement not to support big-government solutions to various economic and social crises.  We would draft language on health care reform, cap and trade, the various Democratic stimuli/bailouts and regulatory reform.  Social issues would be taboo (for this compact), save perhaps a provision opposing federal funding of abortion.

And at the end perhaps a line, “If I break this compact, throw me out.”

Those who draft it must make the language clear so the compact does not preclude a signer from supporting real health care reform that would eliminate those regulations which reduce competition and drive up costs and provide for tort reform.  But, it also needs to be short, simple and sweet no more than 300 words.

The American Jewish World Service is holding Fundraiser for Haiti, Thursday, January 28, 8:00 to 11:00 p.m. at Coco De Ville, 755 N. La Cienega, West Hollywood, CA  Click this link for more information and to RSVP.

Members of AJWS’s staff will be on hand at the event to give up-to-date information on relief efforts and how you can help. The charge for admission is $20, all of which will go to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund.  And five percent of the bar’s proceeds between 8:00 to 11:00 p.m. will be donated to this cause.

There will be appetizers early in the evening and DJs will be spinning all night.

While gay leaders and activists are rending their garments and gnashing their teeth in the wake of Republican Scott Brown’s victory in John Kerry’s Massachusetts, in a fit of pique not seen since Brokeback Mountain failed to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, they’re missing one of the big stories of the race, perhaps the biggest for gay people.

Were these activists not so determined to bind their gay identity to their partisan loyalty, they might have realized that this Republican who once supported a referendum on a state constitutional amendment to enshrine the traditional definition of marriage in the state constitution, pretty much avoided gay issues on the campaign trail.

Indeed, when I did a few google searches to investigate the claims of gay left-wingers that Brown was anti-gay, I could find no evidence he harbored animus against homosexuals and only one time he addressed gay issues in the campaign.  And he wasn’t the one who raised the issue.  It came up in a meeting with editors of the Boston Herald. He said gay marriage was “settled law” in Massachusetts; “People have moved on.”  And so had he.

In his campaign, Scott Brown ignored gay issues to address the economic and national security concerns of his constituents.  If Republicans in other left-leaning jurisdictions wish to repeat his feat this fall, they would be wise to take heed.  Demonizing gays or harping on gay marriage is not the means to win election.

Focus on the idea, freedom, and the issues, reducing the size of government and providing for the common defense, which unite our party.

In today’s WSJ.com Political Diary, John Fund detects a painful ignorance of American history in John Kerry’s rhetoric:

Democrats, on the other hand, either ignored or ridiculed the Tea Party sentiment boiling up in [Masachusetts]. Take Senator John Kerry, who launched a fundraising appeal for Democrat Martha Coakley by warning that Mr. Brown’s “allies in the right wing dream of holding a ‘tea party’ in Kennedy country.” Huh? This galumphing failure to recognize the historical resonance of the words “tea party” is typical. Long before Massachusetts was “Kennedy country,” it was the home of the original Boston Tea Party, which every schoolchild used to know about.

Seems the folks at Hillbuzz are learning a lesson familiar to those of us gays on the right side of the political aisle, that when you challenge the left-wing orthodoxy, you face the wrath of its self-proclaimed guardians.  Now they’re receiving threats worse that any of those we have yet faced.  According to that lesbian diva Cynthia Yockey:

The Daily Kos and Democratic Underground have outed Kevin Dujan as the owner of the blog, Hill Buzz. They are smearing him with the false charge that that he is a racist. They are urging their readers to destroy his career and attack him physically.

Now, we don’t always agree with the folks at Hillbuzz, but do support their spunk.  Gay, like us, they were big supports of a woman we have long derided, but, in the course of the 2008 campaign, came to appreciate for her tenacity, defying the prognosticators and keeping up her campaign even as the media were trying to bring her down.  Even with the media working against her, Hillary Clinton won the better part of the Democratic primaries in the concluding months of the race for her party’s nomination.

And Hillbuzz stood with her, even as she (and they) faced the wrath of the PC gays, eager to rally behind the choice of their party’s left-wing.

Unlike some Democrats, these folks didn’t fall into line once Mrs. Clinton conceded.  They continued to raise questions about the Democratic nominee.  And many of their questions and concerns have proven prescient in the past year.  They may, as most bloggers do, go over the top from time to time, but they do not merit the kind of abuse they have been taking in the wake of the Scott Brown campaign: (more…)

Pelosi: House lacks votes to pass Senate health

Supreme Court ruling a landmark for corporate political cash

UPDATE:  Ed Morrissey on the first headline above:  ”And now that the blinkers have begun to come off, Democrats realize that most people didn’t consider this a priority in the first place“:

it’s an ignominious defeat for Obama and Pelosi, whose radical approach and “I won” attitude finally caught up with them.  Even with massive majorities and a filibuster-proof caucus, they could not jam down a massive government intrusion into the private sector through Congress.  They overreached, and now they have been exposed as radicals in the middle of an election year.

Well, well, well, not even two weeks ago, I wondered if the GOP could flip the Senate this fall.  While I thought it unlikely, I said Republicans could make major gains if we recruited good candidates in states like Indian, New York, Washington and Wisconsin.

And guess what?  Larry Sabato is now saying the same thing:

A few months ago, even GOP leaders said that taking over the Senate was a pipe dream, and it is still not probable. But as some independents sour on the Democratic Party, the possibility for a GOP majority can no longer be dismissed out of hand. . . . .

Among the senators who could be endangered by a new wave of Republican entries are Evan Bayh (Indiana), Kirsten Gillibrand (New York), Patty Murray (Washington), and Russ Feingold (Wisconsin).

(H/t Jim Geraghty.)

UPDATE:  From Politico (via Glenn):

Several Democratic incumbents said later that none of the 19 Democratic seats up this year are safe — and that fundamental parts of the agenda need to be re-examined to win over voters back home.

“Every state is now in play,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who faces the toughest reelection battle of her career — most likely against wealthy Republican Carly Fiorina.

All 19?   Chuckie, too?

Wonder why they described my gal Carly as “wealthy.” Does DiFi get the same adjective?  And Carly earned her fortune, Feinstein married hers.

In the Senate, the Golden State is represented by two Jewish women, both Democrats, each originally serving jurisdictions in the Bay Area, but with entirely different temperaments.   Our senior Senator, Dianne Feinstein, shows respect for her more conservative colleagues and has worked with them to see 26 of the bills she has introduced (since first her first election in November 1992) enacted into law.  You can imagine her taking criticism, civilly offered from a constituent, without questioning his motives.

Our junior Senator, on the other hand, Barbara Boxer berates her ideological adversaries and has seen a total of three of the bills she introduced become law.  And she took office only two months after her colleague (Feinstein was elected to fill the remainder of the Senate seat Pete Wilson abandoned when he was elected Governor in 1990 and was sworn in soon after she ousted appointed incumbent John Seymour).

Mrs. Feinstein joins her Indiana and Virginia colleagues in reading the tea leaves in the wake of the Massachusetts special Senate election; she understands “the situation has changed dramatically“:

You see anger. People are worried. And when they’re worried they don’t want to take on a broad new responsibility, [like health reform] . . . .

I think we do go slower on health care. People do not understand it. it is so big it is beyond their comprehension. . . . (more…)