RING, RING.

ME: Hello?

INTRUDER BY PHONE: “Hi, first I want to thank you for your previous contributions to Senator John McCain and for being such a strong supporter.”

ME:  HAHAHAHA.  Um, what?  I am NOT a supporter.

IBP: Oh, I sense frustrations, may I ask why you…

ME: IMMIGRATION!  DUH!

IBP:  Well, you will be happy to know that Senator McCain is working to…

ME:  DON’T CALL ME AGAIN.

CLICK.

I always thought a campaign promise was kind of like a candidate’s contract with the voters. He promises us he’ll do this to win our votes.  We vote for him expecting him to fulfill the obligations he agreed to in his bid for office. Ed Driscoll reminds us of this pledge Democratic candidate Barack Obama made on the campaign trail:

On Tuesday, “President Barack Obama said he is ‘agnostic’ about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit.”  Agnostic about a firm pledge made during his campaign?   That’s a pretty quick turnaround.

Guess he doesn’t have the guts to stand up to special interests and cut spending.

* (more…)

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)

In November 2008, Republican John McCain won 1,108,854 votes in Massachusetts, capturing 36% of the vote against Democrat Barack Obama who won 1,904,097 or 62% of the vote. With 97.6% of precincts voting, Scott Brown has 1,145,367 or 52% of the vote, Martha Coakley has 1,023,917 or 47% of the vote.

You can’t say we didn’t warn ‘em.  But, they just didn’t listen.   Two-thirds of Americans aged 18 to 29 pulled the lever for Barack Obama last fall whereas the Democrat won only a bare majority (50-49) among their elders, all voters over 30 (you know the ones Bill and Hillary’s generation told us not to trust).

And now they’re bearing the brunt of the sluggish economy.  Unemployment among young Americans has surged to a record high, with “more unemployed youths in America today than at any other time since World War II.”

Just desserts?

Caveat Emptor.  They got what they paid for.  They should have known better.  Or should they?

According to the Free Dictionary by Farlex (an online legal dictionary), the doctrine caveat emptor (Latin for “let the buy beware) applies to commercial transactions:

When a sale is subject to this warning the purchaser assumes the risk that the product might be either defective or unsuitable to his or her needs.

This rule is not designed to shield sellers who engage in Fraud or bad faith dealing by making false or misleading representations about the quality or condition of a particular product. It merely summarizes the concept that a purchaser must examine, judge, and test a product considered for purchase himself or herself.

Well, Obama did make a number of false and misleading representations in the campaign. So, maybe these desserts just aren’t just.  After all, these young’uns can attribute their bad choice to youth and inexperience.

Every time I review the 2008 presidential campaign, I remain amazed at how well John McCain did, given the political headwinds against which he and his party were sailing last fall.  To be sure, with the selection of Sarah Palin and the successful convention, he had built up a good head of steam heading out of St. Paul.  Problem was, his team hadn’t developed a strategy for confronting unexpected obstacles, nor for dealing with a hostile media.  Not just that, he never found a way to articulate a coherent economic message which become particularly important in the wake of the financial meltdown of mid-September (one of those aforementioned unexpected obstacles).

That meltdown and McCain’s showing came to mind again last night as I was reviewing various polls for posts I was working on at the time.  According to the NBC/Wall Street Journal survey, the percentage of Americans believing the country was “off on the wrong track” hit a high of 78 just two weeks before the election, with only one in eight voters thinking we were headed in the right direction.

Just look at this pollster.com average of polls to see how the gap between those thinking the country was on the wrong track and those who thought we were headed in the right direction expanded in the run-up to last fall’s balloting:

It just wasn’t a good place for the candidate of the incumbent party to find himself in an electoral contest where the candidate of the opposing party is outspending him while the media fawns all over said opposition candidate and trashes the Vice Presidential nominee of the incumbent party.

Just to serve as a reminder about the nature of Obama’s “mandate.”  It wasn’t so much the agenda of his party voters were rejecting, but that of the then-incumbent party that voters were rejecting.  Given where we were last fall–and the kind of campaign McCain ran–it’s simply amazing that he broke 40% of the vote, much less the nearly 46% he actually won.

Remember back in the 2008 presidential campaign when then-candidate Barack Obama promised a “net spending cut,” matching each increase in funding with a corresponding reduction?  Remember when he promised to rein in earmarks?

Well, the Democratic Congress has now given him a chance to show that he is a man of his word.   In the first presidential debate on Sept. 26, 2008, “we need earmark reform . And when I’m president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely.”  And now the Democratic Congress is set to pass a budget-busting spending bill, stuffed with earmarks, more than 5,000 earmarks to be precise “totaling $3.9 billion“.

Will he, as promised, go line by line through this budget and eliminate those 5,000 earmarks?

And the bill with each of them is headed for his desk.  Just this morning, Senate Democrats defeated a GOP filibuster of a budget bill not just with a surfeit of earmarks, but also with a steep increase in spending:

The Democratic-controlled Senate on Saturday cleared away a Republican filibuster of a huge end-of-year spending bill that rewards most federal agencies with generous budget boosts.

The $1.1 trillion measure combines much of the year’s unfinished budget work – only a $626 billion Pentagon spending measure would remain – into a 1,000-plus-page spending bill that would give the Education Department, the State Department, the Department of Health and Human Services and others increases far exceeding inflation.

Emphasis added.  Far exceeding inflation?   ar exceeding inflation?  At a time, when the president has been reiterating his campaign promise to control deficits.  Well, here’s your chance, Mr. President, veto the bill and ask that Congress return with a cleaner bill, adjusting the increases to inflation and eliminating all earmarks.

Ever since I reviewed the “news” segments where Katie Couric accorded different treatment to the Democratic and Republican nominees for Vice President last fall, I have been wondering if the reason the CBSNews anchor chose to include the clip of Joe Biden telling us how Franklin Roosevelt went on television right after the market crash (you know the one that, in combination with increased government intervention in the economy precipitated the Great Depression) was because, like the misinformed Democrat, she too was ignorant of American history.

If she had known that back in 1929, presidents didn’t go on television and that, well, FDR wasn’t then president (the market crashed more than three years before that Democrat’s election and longer still before his inauguration), she would have certainly asked a followup. (Okay, okay she may well have done that, but just edited it out–so we have another argument for her to release the raw footage of her interview.) 

Given that her segment was very favorable to the Delaware Democrat, it seems she wouldn’t have included the bit where Biden demonstrates his ignorance of American history.  So, maybe she too is ignorant of American history.  She didn’t know he got his facts wrong.

And if she did not that he was wrong—and didn’t press him on that, well, then we have another piece of evidence of her incredible bias.  Any good reporter would have asked a politician to follow up on such a strange statement.

That is, if she knew it to be strange.

It’s not always a good idea to recommend a book of which you’ve read only the first 18 pages.  But, if the remaining 208 pages of Matthew Continetti’s The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star are as good as its Prologue, this could prove to be one of the best books on the 2008 presidential campaign.

On pages 13-15, in a section entitled “The Second Front” wherein he provides the background on John McCain’s selection of the then-Alaska Governor, Continetti offers perhaps the best short summary of the dynamics of last year’s election at the time when the then-presumptive Republican presidential nominee considered choosing a running mate.

A few pages earlier, he had given a brief background of Mrs. Palin, showing her to be the kind of politician who has long existed in the feminist imagination:  an independent woman who challenges a corrupt male establishment:

Throughout her professional life, Sarah Palin has challenged the dominant power structure and overturned the accepted, elite narrative of the ways things ought to be. . . . Her state establishment declared that Juneau ought to be run by a cozy network of Republican lawmakers and energy interests.  Palin didn’t think so.

If people studied the record of this accomplished woman before rushing to demonize her.  But, then again, if they hadn’t Continetti wouldn’t have been able to write this book.

He clearly knows his stuff, so I give the book a preliminary thumbs up.

FROM THE COMMENTS:   I wonder if many of our liberal readers will second DaveP’s motion “that we hold Barack Obama and his family to the Sarah Palin standard.”

One reason Obama did so well in last fall’s presidential election was that moderate voters believed him when he promised a “net spending cut.”  Many, once reliable Republican voters, no longer trusting the GOP on spending, agreed with the Democratic nominee that were “living beyond our means” and needed “to make some adjustments.”

While these voters may have trusted the newcomer to the national stage, many on the right, including yours truly, never believed him.  It wasn’t just his liberal voting record.  It was also his partisan pedigree.  Democrats have traditionally held onto power by turning on the federal spigot to pay off various interest groups.

And while I certainly appreciate that the President is finally considering a “domestic spending freeze” and will commend him should he succeeded in effecting it–should he freeze spending (adjusted from inflation) at the levels they were when he took office, I highly doubt he’ll get this done.  From one standpoint the move makes a lot of political sense; it would endear the Democrat to the independents who have been abandoning his party in droves.

But, in winning back independents in such a manner, he’d dispirit his base.  Heading into mid-term elections, Democrats can’t afford to antagonize those groups dependent on the largesse of and special treatment from the federal government.

Should Obama succeed in implementing such a freeze, I do hope he’ll apologize to his 2008 opponent for dismissing his plan to do just that.  When John McCain brought up the topic in the first debate last September, Obama quickly shot it down, “The problem with a spending freeze is you’re using a hatchet where you need a scalpel.”

Here’s hoping the President whips out that hatchet and that he doesn’t freeze into place the big budget boondoggles of his erstwhile Congressional colleagues.

In this morning’s Wall Street Journal, Matthew Continetti, author of the just released The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star, contends that that good woman’s various public appearances, including an interview with leading Obama cheerleader Oprah Winfrey, could “humanize” this charismatic Republican whom the media have portrayed as a polarizing harridan.

Yet, one wonders, if given a different media reaction to her sudden appearance last fall on the national political stage, she would have emerged as bright new force in politics as did another national political novice in 2008.  Like Barack Obama, she was new to the national scene and charismatic.  Yet, the media celebrated one and demonized the other.  Various news organizations dispatched entire teams to Alaska to dig around in her trash, yet ignored stories about Obama they could research by a few keystrokes and phone calls, you know, like say about how Mrs. Obama’s salary more than doubled soon after her husband won election to the Senate.  And let’s not forget that her husband secured a federal earmark for that employer.

That’s just one story the media didn’t investigate, well, actually they did, kind of.  They highlighted the errors in a chain e-mail account of Mrs. Obama’s professional situation, without probing the sudden increase in her salary nor wondering why such a high-salaried position was not filled when she resigned to become First Lady.

But, the media can’t let up with stories about (and invitations to) Sarah Palin’s ex-son-in-law-to-be (while ignoring the situations of and scandals surrounding various Obama relatives).  There seems to be a method to their madness, er, double standards, something Continetti caught in the prologue to his book.  It seems the media were acting at the behest of the Obama campaign.  Continetti quotes this from a November 5, 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal:

On his weekly strategy call with Democratic senators after the Republican convention in early September, Obama Chief of Staff Jim Messina began, “Let me walk you through this week’s events.” He was cut off by angry senators calling for a more aggressive response to the Republican running-mate pick: “Go after Palin.” “Define Palin.” “Make the race about Palin.” Mr. Messina was startled by the new nervousness in the party ranks.

After the American people responded favorably to Palin’s stirring speech to the GOP convention, Obama had been replaced as the new kid on the block.  The media which had so built him up, would help his campaign destroy her.

And yet the great irony is that while the media made one figure out to be a unifying figure and the other a polarizing force, it was that supposed polarizer who had actually accomplished more in elective office, governing as a pragmatist and building bridges across the partisan divide.  While that supposedly unifier, in 2007, ranked as the most liberal member of the United States Senate.

The farther away I get from the 2008 presidential election, the more amazed I am at how well John McCain did in the November balloting. Our anxieties about the economy were stoked by a media eager to portray the then-President as a failure and McCain the candidate of that man’s party couldn’t articulate a coherent economic message.

McCain’s campaign slogan had little to do with Americans’ (then-) current concerns.  He did nothing to calm our fears, did not clearly articulate a plan to improve things.

And in came Barack Obama, calm, cool, collected.  He tapped into our anxieties and promised change.

People trusted him to fix the economy and yet, while there are still signs of recovery, unemployment continues to climb with only one in eight American employers expected “to add to their workforce” in the fourth quarter this year.  While hiring expectations “are improving around the world,” 14% of domestic employers “expect a decline” in their workforce.

My advice thus to the President, use his speech tonight to recall how he owed his electoral success to economic anxiety, choosing to put health care overhaul on the back burner and focus on the economy.  I mean, just imagine the speech,

Many of you have rallied this past month against radical reform of health care; I’ve heard your concerns.  I agree.  We need to slow this down, take some time to craft a solid program for reform.  Meanwhile, many Americans are losing their jobs, while others fear they could be the next to be laid off.   Let’s first fix the economy before we proceed to other necessary projects.  You elected me to fix the economy.  And that’s what I’m going to do.

Should he speak those words or something similar, he’d reverse his slide in the polls, would probably pick up a point or two (or half-dozen) and leave Republicans confused, confounded and sputtering.

My fellow partisans may declare victory in stalling Obamacare, but the President would have regained the initiative.

“Read my lips:  No New Taxes”

George H.W. Bush, August 18, 1988

” . . .what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.”

Barack H. Obama, October 15 2008

The former ran as Ronald Reagan’s heir, but governed as if he were Richard Nixon’s.  The latter sounded a lot like Bill Clinton on the fall campaign trail, but acted like LBJ when he entered the White House.  It was as if, once elected their campaign pledges no longer meant anything.  Of course, it didn’t take as long for Mr. Obama’s to expire as it did for those of the elder Mr. Bush.

Each seemed to interpret his election victory not as a vindication for his campaign rhetoric, crafted over a period of time with political advisers in order to appeal to the American people, but as a personal victory, allowing him to do what he thought best for the country.

It’s as if the rhetoric used to win election mean nothing, the person everything.  The messenger seems to think the only message he bore was himself.

I think the unfortunate Mr. Rex had a word for that.

Every now again, I have a brainstorm, an idea which just comes to me and it seems brilliant at the time.  If it comes to me when I’m driving, I try to remember it so I can scribble it down when I stop.  Occasionally by the time I stop, I find that the idea has dissipated and left barely a trace, if that.  There’s just the faint recollection of having had an idea.

Sometimes, when I do turn such ideas into blog posts, they generate more interest than pieces I have thought out–or otherwise worked on–for some time. Other times, no one pays them much attention.

I had such a thought yesterday as I was leaving San Francisco, an idea which I tacked onto the end of my last post so I could incorporate the notion into the title, but now, with the idea returning again–even though I haven’t scribbled it down, I’m thinking it deserves a post of its own.  Maybe I’m onto something.  Or maybe not.

Anyone who has spent any time in gay circles has met the man-hating lesbian, a subspecies of lesbian who seem to love women only because they hate men.  Most lesbians I’ve met have no problem with men as long as they don’t have to sleep with us.  Over the years, I’ve only occasionally met a gay man who didn’t like women.  Oh, I’ve heard stories about a few, but off hand, can only think of two.  Most of us not only like women, but seem to particularly delight in the company of strong women.

As I left San Francisco, it struck me how certain gay male bloggers who have led the attacks on Sarah Palin were equally shrill in their denunciations of Hillary Clinton when she was still running for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Back then, now over a year ago, I dismissed accusations against Hillary’s foes of misogyny as just sour groups. I mean, I opposed her because she was so far to the left. Couldn’t others also have principled objections to a female politician?

And yet with the intensity of attacks on Sarah Palin, I began to reconsider my past dismissal of the Clinton supporters’ complaint.   It wasn’t just Hillary Clinton–or Sarah Palin–they hated, but instead the very idea of a strong successful woman who commands the attention of men. (more…)

Back in February, I had meant to blog on Fred Tausch, a New Hampshire man who had donated substantial sums to the Obama campaign, but had launched an effort to stop that Democrat’s spendthrift “stimulus.” But,  given the haste with which Democrats moved the spending plan through Congress, I did not have time to blog on it before the legislation passed.

Well, Tausch is back in the news again and there is some speculation he may run for New Hampshire’s open Senate seat next fall.  In WSJ.com’s Political Diary (available by subscription), John Fund reports that he is staffing his S.T.E.W.A.R.D. (Stimulating The Economy Without Accumulating Record Debt) operation with veterans of Republican campaigns:

Erin Abell, STEWARD’s executive director, is a seasoned political hand who formerly worked for John McCain’s presidential campaign in the state. Two former aides of ex-Sen. John Sununu have signed aboard the Tausch efforts. Ditto a pair of veterans of last year’s Giuliani and Romney presidential campaigns.

STEWARD has been running radio and TV ads, and funding studies which “highlight the dangers of runaway federal spending.”  With Tausch moving from Obama supporter to Administration critics, we see two things, first, that Republicans can win back votes they lost in recent years by returning to the fiscal principles which once defined the party and second, that Obama did so well last fall by tapping into independent voters’ frustration with a spendthrift GOP.

As the  first point will come to the fore as the campaigns for ’09 and ’10 heat up, I wish now to focus on the second.

When we criticize the President for his liberal agenda, his supporters (when not bashing Bush) will remind us that the Democrat had won election last fall and therefore was entitled to enact his agenda.  What they don’t tell you is the number of people like Tausch who took the Democratic candidate at his word that he would bring fiscal discipline to the our nation’s capital, given the Democrat’s repeated promise of a “net spending cut.”  Tausch reminds us that many backed Obama precisely because of such promises.

That is, the Democrat won a convincing majority last fall not by focusing on the big-spending, large government agenda which has defined his first five months in office, but by appealing to voters like Fred Tausch and promising to be a responsible, a prudent steward of our nation’s finance.

Of all John McCain’s mistakes in the 2008 general election campaign, perhaps the greatest was his initial assumption that his decades-long efforts to curry favor with the mainstream media would mean less biased coverage that they had traditionally afforded to Republican presidential nominees. If our party is ever to win back the White House and rebuild our majorities, while reaching out to the under-30 crowd who voted so overwhelmingly Democratic in the most recent election cycles, we have to confront the reality of media bias.

With ABC set to broadcast from inside the White House next week to promote the President’s health care plan, that bias has become increasingly clear.

And yet when asked about the absence of media criticism of his policies, the President harped on one, just one network that criticizes him:

I’ve got one television station [FoxNews] that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration . . . . Well, that’s a pretty big megaphone and you’d be hard-pressed if you watched the entire day to find a positive story about me on that front.

If he had bothered to watch FoxNews, he’d know that the network regularly includes Democrats (and their allies) defending his policies.  Funny that W never complained about MSNBC — its entire agenda was attacking his Administration.

Mary Katharine Ham took the President to task for dismissing the notion that the press has given him a free pass:

He called the idea that he’s gotten an easy ride from the press “very hard to swallow.” Delusional and totally graceless for a man who’s gotten the journalistic tongue bath he’s received from so many outlets (with the notable exceptions of a few in the White House press pool, who are great to watch).

Read the whole thing!  As she puts it, citing Newsweek‘s Evan Thomas, they’ve moved from seeing their job when Bush was in the White House as bashing the President to, now that their chosen Democrat is in charge, deifying the Chief Executive .

With the rise of the blogs, one would hope they would consider the opinions of a greater variety of bloggers of all political stripes, but instead, they are taking their cues increasingly from left-wing web-sites:

How many MSM reporters (Associated Press, NY Times, CBS News, etc.) ever read Hot Air or Instapundit? And how many of them sympathize?  The typical MSM reporter sympathizes with Media Matters, DKos and Crooks & Liars. The typical MSM reporter watches Olbermann every night. The typical MSM reporter thinks Letterman’s jokes about Palin are ROTFLMAO funny.

This from the increasingly indispensable R.S.McCain who would surely agree that we conservatives, we Republicans, have a problem with the media culture.  Had another McCain recognized that problem sooner, we might well be calling himself something other than Senator today.

The Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson was obviously on another planet last year.  He has JUST now discovered this amazing fact:

The Obama infatuation is a great unreported story of our time.  Has any recent president basked in so much favorable media coverage?

My snarkiness aside… Samuelson raises a lot of good points in his column.

On the whole, this is not healthy for America.

Our political system works best when a president faces checks on his power.  But the main checks on Obama are modest.  They come from congressional Democrats, who largely share his goals if not always his means. The leaderless and confused Republicans don’t provide effective opposition.   And the press — on domestic, if not foreign, policy — has so far largely abdicated its role as skeptical observer.

That is a pretty damning observation to be printed in the equally complicit Washington Post.   But the best part of his column?  The facts.

[A] study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism… concludes: “President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush during their first months in the White House.”

The study examined 1,261 stories by The Post, the New York Times, ABC, CBS and NBC, Newsweek magazine and the “NewsHour” on PBS. Favorable articles (42 percent) were double the unfavorable (20 percent), while the rest were “neutral” or “mixed.” Obama’s treatment contrasts sharply with coverage in the first two months of the Bush (22 percent of stories favorable) and Clinton (27 percent) presidencies.

Unlike George Bush and Bill Clinton, Obama received favorable coverage in both news columns and opinion pages. The nature of stories also changed. “Roughly twice as much of the coverage of Obama (44 percent) has concerned his personal and leadership qualities than was the case for Bush (22 percent) or Clinton (26 percent),” the report said. “Less of the coverage, meanwhile, has focused on his policy agenda.”

Very dangerous indeed.   But there are some signs of good news…..

Another Pew survey shows that since the election the numbers of both self-identified Republicans and Democrats have declined. “Independents” have increased, and “there has been no consistent movement away from conservatism, nor a shift toward liberalism.”

Samuelson concludes:

The press has become Obama’s silent ally and seems in a state of denial. But the story goes untold: Unsurprisingly, the study of all the favorable coverage received little coverage.

If not for the blogosphere and talk radio, many of the critical questions wouldn’t be asked at all.  And Democrats want to silence those outlets as well.   Stay tuned….

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

As I read yet again of Obama’s minions going door-to-door at the behest of Obama aides now working for the Democratic National Committee to press for passage of a spendthrift budget with trillion-dollar deficits, I note how this budget does not meet up with the fiscal responsibility the candidate preached in his campaign. As he himself said in the third presidential debate “what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.”

That’s right he said that throughout this campaign, he proposed a net spending cut. Now, some of his supporters might say, well, he didn’t realize how bad the economic situation was. Um, he repeated that message of fiscal responsibility after the election, promising to “scour the federal budget, line by line, and make meaningful cuts.”

And just after pushing through the spendthrift “stimulus,” he hosted a Fiscal Responsibility Summit at the White House.

He has been praised for his gift of rhetoric, that he, with a good speech in front of him, is a master of the spoken word.  Alas, that he uses those words to deceive.

UPDATE:  An illustration of Obama’s deception.  Here’s what one of his prominent supporters had to say recently:

In the midst of this bonfire of inanities, President Obama is pressing ahead with a $3.6 trillion budget, predicated on utterly unrealistic economic growth, even as the Congressional Budget Office is now projecting that this year’s deficit will soar past $1.8 trillion, 13 percent of the US economy. . . President Obama came to office proclaiming that he aims to solve problems, not hand them on to our children. Most presidents say that sort of thing. But now we are in very dire straits, and that being the case, he will be held to account. It’s your legacy, sir, and let’s not hear any more about ‘inheriting the crisis.

(H/t:  Jennifer Rubin)

Last week, I linked Jay Cost’s Weekly Standard piece where he urged “Republicans to use their principles creatively—to generate new and compelling solutions to public problems.”

Today, Glenn Reynolds identifies the reason my party has failed in recent years, “THE PROBLEM ISN’T REPUBLICAN PRINCIPLES — it’s unprincipled Republicans. ‘Because Republicans didn’t stick, we got stuck.’”

UPDATE:  In an excellent post showing how recent polling numbers show that while Democrats are doing worse, Republicans aren’t doing much better, Michael Barone offers what the GOP must do to take advantage of this potential reversal of political fortune:

That instability worked to Democrats’ advantage in 2006, 2007, and 2008. Now it seems to be working against them—I was going to write to Republicans’ advantage, but I think what we are seeing is more disillusionment toward Democrats than any positive feeling toward Republicans. In the short run, Republicans can benefit from this. In the longer run, they need to offer voters a better vision for the future, or they risk losing once again if there is a revival of enthusiasm among Democrats and warm feeling toward them among independents.

Read the whole thing.

At Disneyland, only one person, a woman working one of the rides, took note of my Ronald Reagan t-shirt.  (Well, at least she was the only one who acknowledged to me that she had taken note of it.)  She made an approving comment about the great man I chose to honor on this day.

I asked if she had backed the guy who lost the chance to take office today.  No, “we needed a change,” she said, but shared my warm feelings for the Gipper.

I found it hard to believe that someone who supported a man who faced a financial crisis by holding the line on federal spending could back a candidate who favors a vast increase in such spending, but there it was.

Yet, another sign that in a relatively ideology-free election, our new president had the right campaign slogan. People wanted change.  Let’s hope he delivers the right kind of change.