The title is Jonah Goldberg’s. Apologies for forgetting who/what tipped me off to his recent speech. It wanders, but covers much interesting ground.

• On the 2012 election: Romney is a good man, but was a poor candidate from a poor field. His consultants’ disdain for ideas and making conservative arguments led to Romney often sounding like nothing more than a right-wing greeting card. This let Obama paint him (however wrongly) as a rich, greedy prude and to win voters on the basis of “who cares more about people like me”.
• On the 2016 election: It’s rare for a party to win a third term, and we can be sure the Democrats won’t do it with Vice President Biden. Meanwhile, the Republicans will have a stronger field.
• On the GOP’s long-term prospects: The GOP has the right ideas, the ideas that work, but a huge ‘persuasion problem’. Democrats are better at deploying the language of community – such as “government is the one thing we all belong to”, or Clinton’s remark on the politics of “you’re on your own” vs. the politics of “we’re all in it together”. This is a pity, because in real life, conservatives tend to be better involved in their families, communities and causes larger than themselves.

(more…)

Readers of this blog know that I have long been a fan of Jeb Bush, having favored the accomplished former Florida Governor as my candidate for 2012 at least since November 2010.

And while it is still too early to start planning for 2016, when you google that good man’s name, look at what comes up:

Our reader Kyle alerted me to an article that shows that Jeb understands an aspect of modern American conservatism that Mitt Romney failed to articulate.  ”Jeb Bush,” writes Mark Silva . . .

. . . the former Florida governor who based a political career on school reform, today called for a “restoration” of lost American values and economic mobility based on educational accountability.

With the gap between the impoverished and privileged in the U.S. widening, the solution lies in a regime of school and teacher evaluation, national standards and more “school choice” in alternatives such as charter schools, he said.

“We have these huge gaps in income,” Bush said at the start of a two-day Washington conference sponsored by his Foundation for Excellence in Education, “with people born into poverty who will stay in poverty.” He said: “This ideal of who we are as a nation — it’s going away, it’s leaving us,” adding: “There is one path that can change this course.”

Emphasis added.  Economic mobility, his belief that people born in poverty, reared in dependency, don’t have to stay in that condition and can rise about their circumstances.

It frustrated many Reagan-Kemp conservatives when, right after the Florida primary, Mitt Romney said because of the “safety net,” he wasn’t concerned about the very poor.

Reagan conservatives, however, have long been concerned about the poor because that safety net sometimes traps them in a cycle of dependency.   And we want to create the opportunities that will help them find the means to move up into a better economic situation. (more…)

“The president,” wrote Jennifer Rubin yesterday, “who ran with no agenda and is now a lame duck, has not distinguished himself by tackling tough problems.” His reelection campaign made his, as his campaign manager put it, the party of “the micro stuff“.

(Perhaps Mitt Romney would have won last week had he been better at articulating the bigger picture.)

WIth such a small ball focus, Obama doesn’t seem willing to address the big challenges facing our country, notably the coming insolvency of entitlements, out-of-control federal spending and the increasing burdens of the regulatory state.

Last Thursday, Glenn linked a piece suggesting he has no interest in tackling these problems:

The sound and fury will be over big fights on taxes and spending. They will look like replays of the last four years and not end up accomplishing much. The big changes to our economy will be the metastatic expansion of regulation, let by ACA, Dodd-Frank, and EPA. There will be no change on our long run problems: entitlements, deficits or fundamental reform of our chaotic tax system. 4 more years, $4 trillion more debt.

Why? I think this follows inevitably from the situation: normal (AFU). Nothing has changed. The President is a Democrat, now lame duck. The congress is Republican. The Senate is asleep. Congressional Republicans think the President is a socialist. The President thinks Congressional Republicans are neanderthals. The President cannot compromise on the centerpieces of his campaign.

Result: we certainly are not going to see big legislation. Anything new will happen by executive order or by regulation.

Read the whole thing. And this is what is truly sad.  We need real reform right now, big changes to address fiscal problems looming beyond the cliff.  We have a debt problem.  And a regulatory problem.  And yet now we have an administration committed to moving us in the opposite direction, writing ever more regulations and increasing the costs of compliance to job creators. (more…)

Four years ago, appearing on PJTV the night of the election, I said that Rush Limbaugh had then become the interim leader of the conservative movement. Roger Simon, as I recall, disagreed.

In retrospective, I may have had a point. Rush did give a great speech at the following CPAC (2009) challenging the new president and articulating the conservative vision. But, that talker is more a cheerleader and a motivator, than an actual leader. To be sure, he helps us deliver our message and encourages us.

Perhaps Rush came to mind at the time because, in the first eight years of this century, the conservative movement had become increasingly moribund. The Tea Party was not yet born. Few outside Florida had ever heard of Marco Rubio. Bobby Jindal hadn’t even completed his first year as Governor of Louisiana.

Two years later, a whole host of articulate conservatives would rise to the fore, with Bob McDonnell elected Governor of Virginia the following year, then several thoughtful Republicans including Rubio elected to the U.S. Senate, including Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, Rob Portman from Ohio and Pat Toomey from Pennsylvania.

Paul Ryan would soon take over the chairmanship of the House Budget Committee. The Tea Party would become even stronger. (more…)

With the help of David Leip’s Atlas of Presidential Elections, I have compiled the popular vote and percentage of the total vote the presidential candidate of the party which would govern for each of nine electoral “cycles” going from 1912 through 2008.  (Available below the jump.)

By electoral cycle, I mean a series of the three elections starting with the one which caused a shift in partisan control of the White House, i.e., in 1912, the partisan control shifted from Republican (William Howard Taft) to Democratic (Woodrow Wilson).  Sometimes, in the third election in the cycle, partisan control would switch back as it did in 1920, 1960, 1968, 2000 & 2008.  Other times, the incumbent party would retain the White House as happened in 1928, 1940 and 1988.

In each case, a distinct pattern emerges.  The party which comes to power in the first election will gain votes and increase its percentage of the vote in the second, then see a decline, sometimes substantial, in the third.

There are, however, only two exceptions.

In the second election in the 1920s cycle, 1924, Calvin Coolidge won fewer votes (and a smaller percentage of the vote) than he did his erstwhile running mate Warren G. Harding four years previously.  Four years later, Herbert Hoover would get more votes than either of his two partisan predecessors, but a lower percentage than did Harding.  That said, the pattern holds if we begin the cycle in 1924 and end it in 1932.  Increase from 1924 to 1928, decline in 1932.

In the 1990s cycle, Al Gore got more votes in 2000 than Bill Clinton had in 1992 or 1996, but, in the first two elections in that cycle, there had been a major third party candidate, Ross Perot.  The pattern does hold when you calculate the dominant party’s percentage of the two-party vote.

One minor exception:  In 1920 (third election of the 1910s cycle), Democrat James Cox got more votes than did Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and 1916, but that’s because 1920 was the first election when women were allowed to vote.

So, why I am sharing all this with you?  To show that there is historical pattern here which suggests that  Republicans stand in good stead for 2016.  No president, until this week, has ever won reelection with fewer votes than he had in his initial election.  And save for 1928*, his party has always seen a drop-off (usually quite significant) from the second to third election in the cycle.

Obama didn’t get that popular vote bump that Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson (running as Kennedy’s successor), Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush got.  His party is likely to see a further decline in 2016, though the example of Herbert Hoover in 1928 does provide some hope that they might break the pattern. (more…)

I’ve sequestered myself from news (and I miss Bret Baier already) since about 2200L Tuesday night, so please forgive me if I’m not breaking new ground here. If I’m not, and this happens, I may end up looking pretty damned prescient come 2016:

Given that there’s bound to be some nervousness (it existed before the election even) among Democrats that there isn’t any “bench” of candidates to take the helm after President Obama leaves office in 2017 (Biden-no, Reid-no, Pelosi-no, Clinton—you gotta say likely no), and

Given that he did so much to aggravate Republicans by what many saw as going beyond the customary magnanimous gratitude during a crisis and instead displayed what they considered way-overboard fawning obsequiousness toward the president on the eve of a national election, Chris Christie isn’t in any position to win a Republican primary…

Would it surprise anybody if he switched parties (likely before his re-election campaign for New Jersey Governor next year)? He’d pretty instantly become the heir-apparent to Obama, wouldn’t you think?

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HHQ)

*ps, Yes, I know…I was the guy who said he was going to turn a new leaf when it comes to politics and ideas. This shouldn’t be misconstrued as a divergence from that approach…just a theoretical academic exercise.

UPDATE: Aw, crap. I should really Google before I post. Well, great minds…